Red

Epilogue

Start Over

The days became green.

Four months would never be enough to forget. For the wound to heal. For the scar to fade from angry red to ancient white.

But the rain had finally stopped falling. It wasn't something Sakura had ever really watched out for, and it surprised her when she noticed.

She'd been carrying a heap of invoices into the back-office when the display window of the shop floor had caught her gaze. There was sunshine, april and the colour of chicks in spring, sprouting through the glass. And it was not wet.

It was so unusual that Sakura put her invoices down on their spike and stepped outside, through the back door, into the small patio area where Yamato often enjoyed a mid-day smoke. He usually had to shelter underneath the lip of the back door to avoid his cigarette being smothered. She found him instead leaning against the brick wall, puffing gently away like a slowed-down steam engine and enjoying the light on his stubbled skin.

'When...'

Sakura felt stupid for asking. She could hear the distant chatter of two soldiers in the adjacent yard. She sought Yamato's face and his expression smiled at her.

'When did it stop raining?'

After their death, Sakura did not speak for three full weeks. She ate like an old machine, chewing and swallowing as a process but unintuitive and slow. The hospital understood that she wouldn't be turning in for a while.

The funeral was on a day when the rain still fell. They'd been outside. The clouds had cried innocent, diamond tears.

Sakura had not.

Her silence was easily sizeable enough to absorb every drop. A sponge of feelings unspeakable.

Nobody spoke to her on that dim, dismal day, where crystals dropped, riches and riches, onto a couple of simple, unguilded coffins. For Sakura was like a spider's web; strong, near-invisible, but only held together by the thinnest of threads and able to unravel, sticky and collapsing, at any point, should the wind blow too hard.

Yamato had been stumbling home from another drinking session on the other side of town one Tuesday evening when he'd seen her. The different her. The moving, storming her.

It was as though he was looking at someone who he knew had died. As though they'd been resurrected. As though pink had become fire.

She was stood outside the Hatake family bookshop, mucky old paint cans stacked on the ground beside her and paintbrushes gathered like babes in her elbow crooks. She wore an old, too-large pair of overalls and bits of dust were stuck to her skin.

Yamato frowned as he approached her.

The bookshop had taken a little damage the night the bombs fell. The interior was left untouched but the door and lovingly hand-carved sign over the entance been blasted and needed a lot of work.

Yamato could hear Sakura huffing as she dropped the paint brushes and stood, stretching her back and eyeing the front door to the shop. He did not need to announce his arrival.

'The way I see it,' she said without a single wobble, not bothering to turn and face the mildly stewing man behind her, 'we can either carry on moping, me in that damned apartment they've given us and you in that stinking pub, or we can get up and do something. And I for one am not prepared to give up on Father's shop just because he's not around to look after it anymore.'

Yamato inched an edge closer. Inspection told him that she'd already repaired the frame of the entrance to the shop and sanded it down.

He sighed.

'What do you need me to do?'

A paintbrush was thrust his way, handle pointed at his belly.

'Paint.'

Yamato wisely took the brush.

Wisely got to work.

Wisely did not comment on the tears he could see staining her face in the window of shop.

A few days later, the shop was up and running.

And a few days after that, Naruto came to visit her.

'Wow,' he'd whispered upon entering the rather dark book store. 'You're really running the place now, eh?'

'Of course I am,' she'd barked from beneath the till counter where she was picking up pieces of loose paper, clad in a simple grey tunic. 'There's nobody else to keep this place moving. What did you expect?'

Naruto hadn't spoken what he'd expected. He couldn't quite bring himself to say that he'd honestly thought he'd find her weeping, struggling, drowning - and that was no mark on her character, no, not at all - it was more that she had been orphaned, and lost so many people so close to her, and really hadn't had any time to come close to dealing with it. The look in her eyes was hard as she swept across shelves with rigorous efficiency. The way she moved, on the surface graceful and in control, was stiff and mechanical.

And Naruto realised with a definite physical sadness that this Sakura, the one drowning a storm beneath a still ocean surface, had lost too much.

'Need a hand with anything?' he asked as she stood, shaking dust out of her hair. She paused a moment.

Looked at him.

How small Naruto had felt, then, dwarfed by her silent loneliness and rage and despair.

How guilty.

'Just thought I'd, ya know, offer...' he'd stuttered with difficulty.

She'd huffed at him.

'Fine. The store room needs mopping. And the back office. Can you manage?'

Of course he'd manage.

He'd managed every single day since that conversation, dropping by at some time between one and three in the afternoon and placing himself at Sakura's disposal. Mopping, cleaning, alphabetising stock, joking with Yamato.

Naruto would manage absolutely anything if it meant he could support her. The girl he'd planned the future with long ago, both gazing into the river with faces too young, surely, to ever be aged.

Living in occupied Leaf was not easy. Business was crawling. Residents didn't know where they stood any more. Konoha was cufflinked with instant reparations and blamed for all of the problems in the world by everyone who did not live there (and a few who did). Guilt and confusion riddled the already wounded populace. But Sakura had learned from her Mother to be gutsy and from her Father to be clever, and she had always been a very quick student of circumstance. For her, living in post-war Konoha wasn't easy, but it wasn't difficult, either.

Once the Fourth's worm-rotten body had finally been discovered and taken by Allied forces, the occupation itself happened quickly. Within a single week of foreign, efficious-looking soldiers taking control, all Fang squads had been disbanded, guards discharged of their previous duties, and those who were still able to work were redeployed to assist on clean-up operations and community support tasks.

Life didn't change too much for most local citizens as a slow and limping rebuild began. There were new faces on the streets and new languages chattering around the buildings, and the uniforms guarding the corners changed, but the new soon became the norm and after the disbanding of Fang a routine of ordinariness settled back in.

Any work camps that hadn't been destroyed in the Fourth's final attempt to erase any evidence were condemned, the prisoners released, the gates pulled down by the Allies. The extent of what had happened - what the whole world had let happen - was soon hot news around the globe, and spread far and wide as though on the wings of vultures. Many surrounding countries opened their borders to any Reds (or any other 'social undesirables') who could not bring themselves to return to Konoha, but the take up was surprisingly small. Most of these people, leading officials soon realised, simply wanted to return to how it was before, and had been uprooted quite enough.

There was a problem in that. Of course.

You can't go back to a house that is no longer there.

You can't go back to a job that no longer exists.

You can't go back to a family that is dead and buried in a mass grave.

Sakura was one of the first.

In the whole village.

And she did it in style.

A huge, dirty bedsheet, pulled from the rubble of a house and a life dashed under the wheels of war. It smelled of a person she'd taught herself to forget and wait for simultaneously.

She painted it. In thick, bright letters.

Long ago, her Father had blessed her with some very wise and very loving words:

'Whatever you do, don't let the world around you know of your decision. Keep your thoughts to yourself. Keep your beliefs quiet. Don't change a thing. Do you understand?'

Sakura had looked at herself, really hard, as she'd pinned the bedsheet into the corners of the shop window. Pressed the letters, jagged and heartfelt, against the glass so there could be no mistake.

And after looking at herself, and then standing outside and examining at her handiwork through the windowpane, Sakura felt proud of herself for defying the words of her dead, beloved Father.

'REDS WELCOME HERE.'

She didn't mind disobeying his words. Because he'd disobeyed them himself. He might not have written a sign on a bedsheet, but he'd made it clear to those who mattered (and those who needed it) that Reds were always welcome in his house. He'd risked and received the lash for giving bread to a dying human, a societal criminal, a victimised old man. He'd hidden a fugitive in his basement at the risk of his own life.

Kakashi had always been a man of riddles. Of breaking rules, quietly and lovingly.

Sakura was a little different.

If she was going to break the rules, she did it in a loud way. She'd lost too much of herself to quietness and hidden secrets and lonely submission.

Kakashi defied the world in a deep, dank basement. With closed doors and windows. With whispered words of monsterised mutiny.

Sakura defied it with a growling yell. With the bedsheet that harbored a rat.

With eyes that dared anyone to cross her.

After all. She was her Mother's child, too.

The book store was small but Sakura wanted to support as many customers as she could, and so she installed a small round table and two chairs in a particularly sunny spot where the day crept through the blanketed window. On days when Yamato could handle the regular customers she offered lessons in local lingo to the militia who were stationed in the town. She did not speak their language but she could teach them some of the basics of her own. With pictures cut out of her own profit she painted words into the mouths of the soldiers and they paid her although she never asked for it. Many hours of Sakura's week were spent teaching words over the smell of old books and fresh coffee. Twice a week in the evenings she ran an open house for Reds affected by the war and everything that came with it, who wanted to come meet, drink coffee (standing, packed in like matches in a box) and share their stories.

She supposed, secretly, that she hoped. Of course she did.

But being the girl with the words, either who gave them or heard them, suited her while she struggled into setting up a new life with Yamato and Naruto and the odd familiar face from her past. The scent of her Father's hard work calmed her soul somehow and she spent most of her time in the book store.

The ching of the till register.

The thwop of a book being dropped, pages spread, onto the floor.

The mewling pride of those who met in her evenings to share their little bite of history.

All of these were the stitches that Sakura quickly and effectively put in place.

To stop the stuffing from spilling out of her thinly sewn seams.

Hatake Kakashi was like a patchwork quilt.

Never would have guessed his daughter would be the same.

All those colours and materials and textures and hastily applied stitches.

Just waiting for a body to wrap itself around the fabric. For warmth.

And so the green days blossomed. Summer was on the verge of showing its face from behind the manufactured clouds of history.

The sky was particularly bright the day Naruto walked into the book store with a grin a little wider than usual and a surprise tucked under his jacket.

Naruto enters with a chime as the door opens and closes. Sakura is busy in the back and otherwise the book store is empty.

He can hear her shuffling around. Probably lifting a box of books too heavy for her. She doesn't care for asking for help these days. Naruto knows that.

Not sure if she has heard him, he calls out to her. 'Oy! Sakura! I'm here for my shift. What do you want me to do?'

A moment more shuffling and then a hand appears at the open entrance to the stock room.

'The history shelves.' The hand, dainty and starting to wear, points to a corner of the shop floor. 'They need dusting down. I didn't realise how bad they'd gotten. Do you mind?'

'Not at all!' His voice is buoyant and glowing. 'I suppose not too many people pick up the history books these days.'

'Yes,' comes her voice, and the hand is replaced by a head, with a busy, slightly harrassed expression and tired eyes. 'And if they did pick them up, I doubt they'd buy them, they're so covered in old dust and cobwebs. You can't really see it at the front, but at the back, where you can't really tell, it's a real mess. Underneath the underneath, and all.'

Naruto chuckles to himself as he grabs a dusting cloth from beneath the till counter. He knows his way around the shop very well now.

'Do you have any students today?' he questions as his eyes catch across the tiny learning area near the window. She doesn't reply straight away, but Naruto is used to that, too.

He begins work on the first of a couple of very dusty shelves. Sunlight is yawning into the shop from the four corners of the window, where the bedsheet still hangs.

Sakura comes out of the back. She looks like she needs dusting down too.

'No students today, no. I'm sort of glad - gives me chance to focus on the shop. I need to put in an order with the stockist but first I want to do a little review of what's been moving and what hasn't. No point in ordering stock that won't sell.'

'You could take a night off, Sakura.'

She throws him a withering glance. 'No. I've got too much to do.'

Naruto understands.

There is a warm, pleasant silence for a while as Naruto gets on with his dusting. He removes each book carefully, blowing the dust off the spine and wiping it over with the dust cloth, restoring a bit of health with each movement. He then stacks them in small piles, clearing a space on each shelf so he can clean right to the back. The smell of old dust is delicious, almost religious. It reminds him of times lost in the river.

Sakura disappears into the store room again and Naruto happily gets on, working methodically through the manucripts and tomes, cleaning carefully and preciously. This shop is everything to Sakura. He takes joy in helping her where he can.

'Sakura,' he says quietly after a little while, 'do you remember us sitting by the river when we were kids?'

The usual pause hangs as Sakura finishes what she is doing in the back and then makes her way out to converse with him. Her expression is curious as she steps into the sunlight-cornered room.

'Yes.' Her hand rests lightly on her hip. 'Why?'

Naruto replaces some clean books onto a clean shelf. 'It was just... a nice time. Don't you think?'

Sakura takes a seat at the coffee table reserved for lessons. Her form is gracefully silhouetted in the light from behind the bedsheet.

She thinks about her answer before passing it to him gently.

'It was a beautiful time. It really was. And you know...'

She pauses. Scoffs at herself ever-so-slightly.

'Sometimes, I wish it could... all go back. To where it was.'

She doesn't look up at him, but simply watches the pooled patches of light splayed across the wood of the coffee table.

'It's unfair of me to think like that. I know. But...'

A sigh.

'I just think it, sometimes. Wish we could have another go at things... without ...'

Naruto smiles a companion's smile. Puts his dust cloth down and walks over to the table. Squints in the light.

'It's not a crime to want to start over. 'Specially when you've been through... and come out of the other side... Then again...'

He sits on the second of the two chairs, all that she can currently afford.

'... Coming out of the other side... That's good for a person, right? What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and...'

She snorts. Her pink bangs, too long, in need of a trim, rustle around her cheek bones.

'The other side... actually, I've found the other side to be quite a lonely place so far.'

Naruto's smile fades. Not hurt. Understanding.

She misreads it.

'Oh, no - Naruto, you've been amazing, you really have. You're such a help! But... there are holes that nobody can fill in.'

He nods. He is not stupid. Maybe he was, once. Not this day.

'I get it. You don't have to say.'

He can read what is in her eyes. And what is in her eyes is what is in her heart.

A shadow passes by the window. Naruto tenses for a moment, as though in remembrance of some urgent, forgotten fact.

'Uhh, Sakura, listen...' His voice is instantly over-apologetic, and she frowns at him, already on the defensive. 'I know you said you've got no students this afternoon, but I've actually got someone who wants to see you.'

She hurls a deep, Anko-scowl smack in his face.

'Naruto!' She stands up, body hackling all of a sudden. 'You should check with me first, you idiot!'

Raging, she tears away from him to the store-room entrance.

'I would have thought you'd know to ask me if I was free before just doling out my services. I'll do it, but you seriously need to consult me in future. There goes that stock review I had planned...'

Her sharp, irritated words continue to fill the shop as she disappears into the store room, burning over the ding of the door as it opens and closes again, slowly, a shuffling, awkward few seconds in between.

Naruto glances at the two visitors to the shop.

'Sorry,' he says with a shrug. 'I'll go get her.'

He approaches the store room, the sun warm on his back through the window.

'Sakura,' he calls, unable to keep a huge grin from his face. 'There's someone here to see you.'

'They can wait!' snaps her voice from the comparative gloom of the back.

'Not this time,' Naruto's smile is audible, golden in each breath. 'He has waited long enough. And so have you.'

Her irritated sigh exits the store room before her, and then she appears, eyes on her hands as she runs them over each other in an attempt to dispel any dust.

'Sorry to have kept you waiting, but I just-'

Sasuke.

He is standing in the book store.

He is leaning on a supportive Hinata.

He is skinny and angular.

He looks exhausted.

He is gazing at her with the apologetic wonder of someone who has seen the stars for the first time in his life.

Sasuke is standing in the book store.

And he is alive.

'No,' His mouth opens. His voice is a shadow. Sakura is completely still. 'I'm the one who has kept you waiting, Sakura.'

She watches. Waits for her thoughts to catch up with her heart, which is already blossoming and beating and beaming.

And bursting.

She runs to him. His support disappears.

They crash into each other, cling, and sink to their knees.

She cannot stop saying his name. And he cannot stop saying her name.

And their names tumble together into the air, rolling and melting and crying.

'Please,' she breathes herself into his trembling form, instantly memorising every detail between her grasping fingertips. 'Please, Sasuke... never leave.'

His arms, so bony and still in such tender, painful recovery, possess her, pull her into him, trap her scent and her tears and her exhalations.

'I won't, Sakura. I won't. I will never let you go. I never did. I never could.'

They sob into each other, blindly, sharing each of their burdens with each embrace, each glance, each hitching, aching breath.

The war is over.

The rain has stopped.

Two ribbons of history tie themselves together with a wretched, loving embrace. They seal off a story, painstakingly forged in the warring embers of a blacksmith's flame, and gently poured into a diary, a novel, a fiction, a truth.

That's it.

The book closes.

On the back of the book is a blurb.

Short. A glimpse. A tiny, insignificant epilogue.

You are wearing an eye patch. Seeing into a future wrought and cast with the scars of humanity. Seeing a place, and a time, like your own.

There are two people, a little older now, not much changed. You watch them as they step off a crawling train together. The woman, rosy hair chopped into a short crop, pauses to help her companion limp down from the carriage to the platform.

A little, light rain. Nothing to get worried about. Don't start panicking now. It's over, remember.

They are at an old site. About eight years old. It is a labyrinth of corpse foundations and overgrown weeds. Nothing ever blossoms here. The site stretches for at least a mile, and the train line runs right through it, along restored copper rail-works given life and repair after the war.

Each year you watch them come here. With thousands of others. All stepping, tentatively, onto the platform and facing the ageing mirror of their past. This is not the only epilogue. There are millions of words.

You watch this particular couple with interest. They are close to your heart. He doesn't move with the youthful ease you'd associate with his frame but you know his story, so that is to be expected. She is patient, silent, as they walk slowly along a route scored into his mind.

They pause, momentarily, as they are joined by another. She is fitter, a bit healthier. Dark hair and survivor's eyes. The three of them move on together.

It is strange. Like you are watching a model graveyard from above, crawling with people as lifeless as the absent tombstones. Their movement is strangely sacred and you can only maintain a religious respect for their travels.

Eventually, they reach a point and the pink-haired companion is asked to stop. Quiet words and an awkwardness you'd have thought they'd have grown through. You've seen this journey before, though, so you know he always asks her to stop here. There are some parts of his life that he is unable to share with her. He kept her out all those years. He cannot let her in now. She will wait for him. She is patient.

The two dark-haired, red-eyed figures hobble on, and the female clutches hurriedly at the man's hand. He takes it, gladly, limping along at the best pace his damaged leg will allow.

They reach their destination after a few more minutes. It is a small clearing. You recognise it. There was once a towering fence hemming it in like caging fingers, and long ago a daring trio of foxes dug a hole underneath to try and steal some chickens.

The buildings that once forged a corner here are gone. Their roots remain, gun-metal and laden with yellowing leaves and strangled weeds. It smells, oddly, like the sea; moist, clinging sand wreathed in seaweed foam. In the centre of the space there are three simple sticks, unadorned, white wood. Their bases are plagued with choking vines from the past but the man nor the woman can bring themselves to remove them.

They simply stand there. Stare at the three white bones in the soil.

Ignore your shadow, feathers casting their silhouette on the wailing, gnashing teeth of the near past.

You have followed them all this time. It feels like your strange responsibility. They say death never leaves a person once they've seen it.

Time is just the same. Time melds to a soul and leaves its mark. Time heals. Time destroys.

Time waits.

Their clutched hands tighten and squeeze. You feel it.

After a voiceless hour, they turn and leave. The rain is falling a little harder now and their hair is sprinkled with it.

You follow them, letting your dark shadow reach out and stroke theirs, conjoined in the late afternoon air.

You are a part of them now.

You are a part of all of us.

And I am a part of you.

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Dedicated to my sister in everything but blood. Jane to my Lizzy.

Thank you, everybody, for reading.

Over and out. For the final time.

Sherby.