Work Text:
Sakura had put off taking physics as long as she possibly could.
As a pre-med student, her interests were not even remotely aligned with physics. She had enjoyed chemistry. Chemistry made sense to her— the combination and degradation of different elements, pieces morphing and recombining, formulas to balance and hexagons to draw and redraw.
Physics, however, felt like a more austere and unforgiving kind of discipline. The way things moved, the forces that acted on them, the laws that dictated what happened and how in explicit mathematical terms that had little to do with human bodies—these were not things she cared to learn about.
Regardless of her feelings on the matter, she needed to take physics because both her university and her med school applications required it. She slouched into the big lecture hall that was only ever used for large introductory courses. Looking around herself, it became clear that she was going to be one of the oldest (and most jaded) students in the class. She supposed this is what happened when one put off general classes to their last year.
She watched a group of freshmen (she knew they were freshmen because they still looked put-together and excited to be awake at 10am) form tentative connections with one another. She felt a little wistful watching the scene unfold. Ino had come up to her in an introduction to philosophy class the first day of freshman year and introduced herself with no shame whatsoever.
Hey, she had said. I need friends and you look crabby. I think you could use someone like me in your life.
Then she had sat down in the seat next to Sakura, adjusted her skirt, and effortlessly established herself as a permanent fixture in Sakura’s life.
Sakura looked down at what she was wearing. Grey joggers, a flannel with several dubious stains, sneakers that were quite literally peeling apart. Clearly the magic of first days of school was long gone for her. A shame, because she would be stuck in school for many more years to come.
The lecture started and Sakura dutifully began to highlight parts of the syllabus that the teaching assistants had passed out. Two midterms, several large problem sets, and a few small projects that would have to be done in pairs. She scowled and resisted the urge to scribble on the paper, knowing she would regret it later. Sakura did not excel at group work.
They were fifteen minutes into the lecture when the large metal doors swung back open, echoing throughout the large auditorium with a god awful creaaaaak. Everyone swiveled in unison to look at the source of the noise.
A tall man with floppy silver hair stood in the doorway. At first Sakura thought he was one of the few unfortunate lost freshmen who hadn’t been able to locate the auditorium before class started, but then she noticed the fatigued slump in his shoulders and the unconcerned expression in his eyes. The lower half of his face was covered with a bandana and he held a paperback in his hands.
Clearly he was a senior like herself, and he was even more clearly unperturbed by the fact that hundreds of eyes were on him. He peered about himself, as though he had all the time in the world to select a prime seat. Sakura scowled. You should know better by now.
As if he had heard her thoughts, his grey eyes locked onto where she was sitting in the middle of the center aisle. He began to amble over and Sakura felt panic shoot through her. No, she thought firmly, I do not want them to think I’m associated with you. Turn around. I mean it.
Regardless of her wishes, the man shuffled through the seats to reach her and plunked himself down in the chair next to her. She ignored the faint scent of detergent and cologne that had wafted over with the movement and stared straight ahead. She was determined to convince the professor and everyone else in the room that she was in no shape or form familiar with this person.
The professor cleared his throat and went back to talking about late homework submissions. Sakura kept her eyes fixed on the large projected screen.
“Yo.”
“Shut up,” she hissed under her breath. “I’m not speaking with you.”
The man seemed surprised, though she refused to look at him to confirm it. “Well that wasn’t very neighborly.”
“We are not neighbors,” she gritted under her breath.
“We’re sitting next to each other,” he said cheerfully. “I think that makes us neighbors for the time being. Maybe even forever if I keep sitting next to you each day.”
That caught Sakura’s attention. Her head snapped to the side to give him a scathing look. She found his eyes already crinkled in a disconcerting smile. “I do not enjoy sitting next to late people who attract attention. You will not do this again.”
The bandana shifted and she could tell he was grinning under it. “We have to stick together, you know? These are the kinds of classes with group projects, and you’re the only person old enough here for me to tolerate.”
Sakura made an affronted sound. “I am not old.”
“You’re older than the people who didn’t wear what they slept in to class.”
She gaped. “You rude little shit!”
The professor cleared his throat again at the front of the room. Sakura hadn’t realized her voice was gradually rising in volume from a whisper to her regular speaking voice. She dipped her head contritely, eyes back on her syllabus. She contented herself with kicking the obnoxious man’s sneaker.
“Look,” he finally said. “Perhaps I extended my proposition inelegantly.”
“Inelegantly,” she muttered under her breath. “Why do you talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a walking thesaurus with bed head.”
“I’m an English major.”
Sakura thought she might scream. “Then why the hell are you here to ruin my physics class?”
“Thought it would be interesting.”
“You know there is a calculus prerequisite for this, right?”
“Wow. Interesting.”
Sakura turned to tell him off but stopped short when she saw what he was doing. He was reading. He was reading his very not-syllabus book in the middle of the lecture hall.
“What are you doing,” she hissed, half-hoping he would confirm that she was hallucinating.
His grey eyes darted up from the page. “I’m enjoying my book. What are you doing, Sakura?”
Her mind went blank. How could he possibly know her name? Was he some kind of stalker? As if he knew exactly what she was thinking for the second time that day, he pointed to her name that she had neatly printed at the top of her syllabus out of habit.
“Nice handwriting,” he observed. “You must be very studious. Another reason we would make excellent project partners.”
Sakura considered snatching his book from him and throwing it to the other side of the room but decided that would reflect more poorly on her than it would on him. She looked around herself, desperately searching for a way out of this situation.
What she saw was not comforting. All of the freshmen were surreptitiously adding each other on social media, the screens of their laptops lit up with new contact information while the professor droned on and on. Dammit, Sakura thought to herself. On the first day of class with a bunch of freshmen I had to befriend, I chose to show up looking like the witch that ate Hansel and Gretel.
“I’m your best option.”
Sakura turned and looked at the man. This was going to be absolute hell. Worst case scenario, she put his name on the top of the project when she was done with it. Either way, she would have met the partner requirement.
“And you are?”
“Kakashi.”
She studied him more closely. Oh no, she realized with a sinking sensation. He was hot.
“I’ll let you all go early now that we have finished with the syllabus. Be sure to select a project partner by the end of the week.”
The room erupted in a flurry of motion around them as people stood to leave. Yet Sakura continued to sit there, staring at Kakashi as he stared back, wondering why the universe hated her so much in particular.
“You’re good at this.”
“What,” she snapped, glancing up from the paper she had been using to sketch out a solution to a homework problem.
Kakashi shrugged, the collar of one of his slouchy sweaters shifting a bit to just barely reveal the sharp edge of his collarbone. After weeks of him sitting next to her in subdued silence and showing up to class on time—probably his version of a peace offering—she had gruffly extended an invitation to work together in the library. He had crinkled his eyes and said: Sakura, I would be delighted.
She had never regretted anything so quickly in her life.
“Typically these problems take me awhile. But they make sense to you immediately.”
It was an observation, not a question, and Sakura felt face grow warm at the compliment. “I guess. I’ve always had a knack for things with formulas.”
He propped his bandana-covered chin up on his hand and watched her. “It’s hard for you to deal with being complimented.”
Another annoyingly accurate non-question observation about her. Her face grew warmer. “Cut it out.”
His eyes crinkled with the ghost of a smile. “Okay, Sakura.”
Her name sounded oddly familiar in his mouth, and she refused to think about why that might be.
He showed up at her apartment for the meeting they had set to work on the project with a brown paper bag in his hands. She eyed it as she stood in the doorway and he held it up as though it were a lantern casting light.
“Food,” he said, extending it towards her. “For you.”
She stared and accepted it with numb fingers. “For me?”
He seemed amused by the repetition, as though it was a little game they were playing. He slipped past her into the apartment. “For you. You were hungry, right?”
Sakura wondered how he could have possibly known that as she followed him into her kitchen, where he was already sitting at the table as if he had sat there a thousand times before.
“Yeah,” she said, pulling a box of takeout from the bag. It smelled suspiciously like the fried rice she always got from the little restaurant on the corner. “I actually was hungry. How did you know?”
He smiled with what she had come to think of as his version of a smile—eyes crinkled, bandana shifting, head tilted slightly to the side. “I don’t know. Just had a feeling.”
She sat beside him at the table and somehow it felt like they had done this before. Somewhere, somehow, this annoying, attractive, forgetful, unconsciously thoughtful man had sat at a table like this with her before.
She wondered if he was thinking the same thing as he began to write neat lines of figures in his notebook. She was always thrown off by the way he approached problems. He had a deft and clever mind. His proofs and solutions were utterly idiosyncratic in the way that he layered simple definitions to make the answers disarmingly obvious. Yet still, he sat and read her versions with deep interest, saying they were clearer. She wasn’t sure that she believed him.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
She jumped in her seat and realized she had just sat there staring at him for the last several minutes. He glanced up at her from his paper, his eyes knowing.
“Yeah, I am.”
He just smiled and went back to writing. Sakura wondered, not for the first time, if he could really read her mind.
“I hate forces,” Sakura groaned from the floor, half covered in papers and study guides. Kakashi spared her a glance as he shuffled flashcards in one hand and held up his paperback book with the other.
“Which ones,” he asked dryly. “Applied force? Frictional force? Tension force? Spring force? The forces of good and evil?”
Sakura groaned and jabbed his ankle with her foot. “All of them. All of them are the worst.”
“They can’t all be the worst. That contradicts the definition of what it means to be the worst.”
Sakura propped herself up and regarded him through sleepy eyes. “You get philosophical when you’ve had too much wine.”
He just turned the page of his book and held the flashcards out to her. “What can I say? I’m a sophisticated soul.”
Sakura snickered. “Oh yeah. Icha Icha Sophisticated Slu—ow!”
He eyed her unrepentantly. “Say what you will about me, but the Icha Icha oeuvre is off limits.”
Sakura rolled her eyes and thumbed through the flashcards. Maybe she also had consumed too much wine, because she ended up tossing the flashcards to the side to watch Kakashi instead.
His silvery hair looked nearly white from where he was sitting next to the lamp. A few strands hung in his face, his eyes thoughtful as he turned a page.
“Kakashi,” she said, her mouth going dry. “Do you believe in forces?”
He gave her an amused look. “You mean I’ve been taking a fiction class and not physics all this time? None of the awful things we’ve spent months learning about are real?”
“Nooo,” Sakura sighed. “I mean like, forces. Forces in the universe or whatever. Do you believe in those?”
His eyes grew thoughtful and he closed his book. “Maybe,” he said quietly. “Do you?”
She stared at him, wondering if he was asking what she thought he was asking. “Maybe,” she echoed softly. “It would be nice to think some things happened for a reason.”
“I don’t think things really just happen.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I think we get intuitions. Senses of things. And it’s up to us whether or not we act on them.”
“Do you sense anything right now?”
He smiled. “I sense you getting distracted. And I sense you getting stressed tomorrow when you feel like you aren’t over-prepared enough for this final.”
Sakura cracked a small smile. “You’re right.” The charged moment was gone as she returned her focus to the flashcards. She couldn’t help but wonder if this had been a moment where she had been given a sense, and for better or for worse, she had decided not to act on it.
“Forces or no forces, everything is too complicated.”
Sakura agreed.
Sakura dragged herself into her TA’s office for the last time and handed him the printed final project that she and Kakashi had finished last week. It was done, in all of its miserable, mathy, human-unrelated glory. She scowled at it as the TA set it on top of a large stack. She wondered if she was upset with the project itself or the fact that its new absence from her life signified another absence.
“Kakashi’s name is on it, too,” Sakura said as she turned to leave, feeling oddly disgruntled and sentimental.
“That’s fine. It isn’t like it matters.”
Sakura stopped in her tracks and swiveled back around to look at the TA. “Wait, what do you mean?”
He glanced up from whatever he had been grading. “Oh, nothing. Kakashi isn’t actually in the course, so it isn’t like the grade will matter for him.”
Sakura had the distant feeling of the earth spiraling away from underneath her feet. “What do you mean he’s not in the class?”
The TA’s brow knit. “I thought you knew. He was just auditing it. You know, going to the lectures for fun? He didn’t actually have to do any assignments. He asked if he could be your partner and we said it was fine because there was an odd number of people in the class to begin with.”
“For fun,” Sakura repeated, a dull roaring in her ears.
“Yeah, he kind of just wandered in the first day and something kept him interested.”
“Thanks,” Sakura managed, turning around and walking out of the office before the TA could say anything else world-shattering.
Sakura banged on the door.
She knew Kakashi lived in this little building a few blocks from campus, but she had never been inside of it, and she had no idea which door was his. Still, she felt an odd tug that drew her to the door in the middle of the hallway of units. There was a wilting plant sitting outside of it and a couple stacks of coupon junk mail. It was probably more likely that this apartment belonged to someone who hadn’t been in the building in awhile, but she just felt—
The door swung open.
“Liar,” she snapped at him, satisfied that he was finally the one who looked utterly baffled.
“How did you—”
“You are a liar,” she said again, brushing past him and slipping into his apartment. “You weren’t in that class at all! You didn’t need me to be your partner! Why did you pester me that first day?”
He stood in the hallway, staring at her. He still seemed to be recovering from shock at her appearance and her accusations clearly weren’t helping. Sakura began to feel so frustrated that she thought that she might start crying.
“Why did you do it,” she said, more calmly this time. “I need to know.”
His eyes softened at the emotion in her face. She probably looked completely wild right now, having rushed over immediately from the TA’s office.
“You won’t believe me,” he said.
“Try me.”
He took in a long, slow breath. “I mean—I don’t have a good reason. Or any reason. I was just walking outside the building and I just got this, this—” he gestured wordlessly for a moment and then sighed. “I just had this feeling that I needed to go inside. And the same feeling told me to go into the lecture hall.”
“That’s why you stood there in the doorway looking around?”
He shrugged, something pained in his eyes. “I was looking for whatever had brought me in there. And then you were just sitting there, looking half-dead and like you would bite the head off of anyone who so much as breathed near you—”
“Hey—”
“And then I just sat down.”
“What about the things you said about knowing there would be group projects?”
He shrugged again. “I was just… trying to buy time.”
“And all the time you spent studying, and doing the homeworks and the projects?”
He gave her a small smile—a wry crinkling of his eyes. “Buying time.”
“Time for what?”
He stared at her wordlessly and before Sakura could stop herself she was moving forward, hands slipping under his bandana to feel the warmth along his jaw, closing her eyes and pressing her mouth against his. He responded instantly, his hands wrapping around her waist, tangling in her hair, and all she could think through the heat and the warmth was I’ve done this with you before. His hand pressed against her, pulling her closer in agreement.
We’ve done this before.