Queen of Air and Darkness

xiii. A trick laid down on us

When Sakura remembered the journey home through the forests, she would remember it as being breathless with joy. There had never been a time when she felt so at peace. In the mornings when she woke early to sneak out of Kakashi's tent, her sense of content was so powerful it was dizzying. She would collapse into her sleeping roll and laugh, desperate to pen a letter to Ino and tell her of her newfound good fortune.

But she couldn't. Kakashi had spoken true: they had both of their reputations to consider. It would not look good for her to return from the most important mission of her career, entangled with the knight in charge of the operation. And it would look even worse for Kakashi to have seduced the squire under his command.

After that first tryst in the river, she and Kakashi had agreed that it should not happen again. There was no future for them; they would be doomed to tragedy; it was inappropriate. A thousand facts had supported the decision, feeding their reasoning into one dreadful reasonable choice. Their shared adventure in the river would finish what they had started in Sunagakure and nothing more.

But then at dinner, Kakashi's grey piercing eye had met her own over the campfire. The intensity seemed to pierce her skin, sending shivers up her spine, and she had been unable to resist. Sakura found an excuse to visit his tent that evening and that had been that. His lips had been on hers before she could even close the tent flap, and she had been unable to resist tearing his shirt off and relishing in the lean muscle of his torso. (Had she wanted to discuss cartography? Strategy? Food supply management? The very topic that had formed the bones of her excuse was forgotten by the following morning.)

That too should have been the end of it. She should have been satisfied with the feel of his hands reaching through her travel-stained shirt, his fingers tweaking at her nipple, the delicious stretch of him within her. But Old Chiyo had been right about Sakura. She hungered.

After, they reached a new compromise. The talks had lasted hours into the night, with frequent interruptions in the form of stolen kisses and clever fingers tracing the inside of Sakura's thighs. On one side of the negotiation table sat their careers, on the other was every instinct in Sakura's body screaming for satisfaction.

And, like all compromises, it was not fully satisfactory for either party. They both knew this could not last, but they also knew that if they tried to resist the magnetic pull between them, it would end in failure. Accordingly, Sakura and Kakashi would give themselves until the end of their journey. Once they returned to the scrutiny of the castle, a relationship between a squire and a knight would be unacceptable. She knew there could be no future between them, deeply in her bones. But the forest would be a reprieve before the end.

And she accepted it. Or at least, she tried to. With every passing day, as they drew closer and closer to the city, Sakura's joy wilted. Her fantasies of slipping off into the woods and disappearing with Kakashi grew increasingly elaborate, swelling to include more stolen horses, cottages, herb gardens that Kakashi grudgingly attended for her sake. It was the kind of fantasy she had to cut off quickly before it meandered too far into the absurd and picturesque.

Her melancholy was usually chased away by Kakashi, when they slipped away to practice setting snares for rabbits, when he slipped into her tent in the late hours after his turn at watch, when he played with her hair as they slept wrapped in each other's limbs. But then their time would be shattered and reality would set back in.

By the time the streaming banners of Konoha's castle appeared on the horizon, Sakura's joy fully transformed into misery.

To prepare herself for their goodbye, Sakura had taken to riding at the back of the caravan with Kurenai. They had grown close over the journey, bonding in the way that only two women surrounded by men could. While Sakura did not dare share her secret relationship with Kakashi, it was comforting to feel like she had a friend.