The More that Changes
The sun was a low blot on the horizon by the time the bags they brought to the market with them were full for a second time. Vendors were packing their stalls away, the gazes lingering on her sly and curious, and Sakura could only muse on how Aerloth was evidently known to those people. Yet she was now Aerloth and she didn’t have the first clue who any of them were beyond the products and produce they each sold. Was Aerloth supposed to know more than that? Sakura didn’t know, and she had the distinct impression she might never know.
It terrified her, a familiar nest of snakes coming to squirm in her stomach before the presence of her friend made the sensation abate ever so slightly.
“So, my dear Magpie,” he said, an arm settling across her shoulders in a strangely comforting grip. It wasn’t tight enough to restrain her, yet it wasn’t weak and limp either. If she cast her mind back years upon years… it was something Naruto had a habit of doing, and yet those days were long gone, along with everything else she had once known beneath different skies. That had ended the day she had managed to shatter her own chakra pathways, and yet there she was, still living and breathing in spite of it. “What made you buy gemstones – of everything you could possibly have bought?” he asked, glancing down at the small number of the entire handful she had bought. “You chose green to match your eyes, yes?” He looked at her, and all she could do was incline her head at that. “Yet you, of all people, chose to go for a variety of jewels this time around… I remember when we were both on the cusp of adulthood. You did enjoy having your fixations… diamond and labradorite were your favourite gemstones for a time.”
Sakura only hummed under her breath at that, brain soaking up as much freely given information about Aerloth as she could. About her, since she was Aerloth and it did her no good to constantly think of them as separate entities. It only made her feel that much more like an interloper, and that wasn’t something she particularly wanted to continue feeling like. “Come on,” she settled for, not daring to even attempt to reminisce about the past with him. “Dinner won’t cook itself,” she reminded, feeling his arm withdraw from her shoulders, and silently a part of her mourned the loss of contact.
“I can handle dinner tonight,” he answered, eyes lingering on her as they trudged back towards the path leading toward her house. “Today seems to have been a stressful day for you,” he said matter-of-factly, and Sakura barely repressed the shudder that wanted to roll down her spine at the infinitely knowing look in those blue eyes.
“I’m not stressed,” she said, stomach twisting itself into knots at the singular raised eyebrow that earnt her.
He looked at her plainly. “It may have taken me an inordinately long time to figure out, but that is only because you seem to have been in a perpetual state of stress since I’ve arrived here, Aerloth. For all that you used to call me dull-witted, I am no fool when it comes to these matters,” he remarked, and Sakura couldn’t help but feel sick at that. “You should go and do whatever it is that relaxes you these days when we return home,” he said, and the image of the forge came to her mind then. “I will ensure there is enough hot water for you to bathe, or at least so you have that option,” he added, and all Sakura could do was swallow thickly at that, even as her heart beat frantically inside her chest.
“Thank you,” she murmured – the only thing she could think to say in response to that as they wandered back towards the place she called home then and there.
A soft laugh cut through the air, and all Sakura could do was stare at him. “It is rather funny, though I suppose you don’t understand… just how many times you have thanked me since my arrival here,” her friend said, and she stiffened at that, continuing to trudge back up the path to the lonely home she owned all the while. “Before I came here, I could count the number of times you ever thanked me on one hand.”
Her teeth ground together. “What of it?” she bit out, fighting against the tide of panic swelling up within her. What would he do if he figured out she wasn’t quite Aerloth? What would he do if he uncovered the way her skin split and healed seamlessly in a matter of seconds? Her brows drew together in a frown, fear and worry swirling beneath her skin.
“You’ve changed, Aerloth,” he stated simply. “Is it wrong of me to want to know the impetus behind it all?” His hand shot out, grabbing her own hand before she could even think about running for the hills. “We might have our differences, and a somewhat tenuous history riddled with an Oath you tricked me into taking – and that’s not even mentioning everything you had me do and swore me to secrecy using that very Oath, but I do consider you a friend in spite of it all…”
“Was I truly that cruel to you?” she asked, the question slipping out before she could stop it, her heart sinking, even as she pushed herself onwards. Home was a balm of safety to her, and she knew, deep down, she needed it for whatever conversation was on the cusp of happening.
“Aerloth,” her friend spoke, blue eyes staring into her own and they cut deep. She tore her eyes away, scowling ever so slightly when a hand grasped at her chin, making it so she couldn’t look away from him and his searching eyes as they came to a stop on the trail. “What has happened to your memories?”
They were far enough out of town, and far away enough from the guards waiting outside her home, that the small forest was near silent around them. Birdsong was the only thing which broke that thick, heavy quiet, even as the familiar bite of tears in her own eyes came.
It was like she was back there, chains wrapped tightly around her limbs, the heat of the furnace seeping through the walls of her grand cell that had kept her prisoner for years upon years. “Nature chakra truly is extraordinary, don’t you think?” She shuddered at the sound of the voice she could still remember to that very day. Even after that particular tormenter had passed, she still hadn’t been able to forget the sound of their voice. It haunted her, and somehow, Sakura didn’t think it would stop haunting her until the day she died.
“Aerloth.”
She remembered the bite of the scalpel, the thin, sharp knife sinking into skin and pulling apart her flesh to reveal sinew and bone. She remembered the colour of her blood, a vivid red in stark contrast with the pale white of bone. She remembered what her liver looked like, blood red and still warm as it laid on the metal slab of a table besides the one she had been strapped down to. Vivisection, that was what they had done to her on many occasions. That was what it had been called—
“Aerloth,” a familiar voice called, and Sakura could only blink as she returned to the present. She wasn’t there anymore – not that she truly had known where there was on the maps of the Elemental Nations – and she was safe from those gloved hands who had pried her apart and made her hurt. “Aerloth, are you with me now?” Sakura blinked again, brain taking a few moments to process the cream-coloured shirt that her face was pressed against.
“Huh?” she mumbled intelligently, feeling her heart rate soar again as she realised that she had seemingly spaced out.
An old memory surfaced, cutting her like a knife to the chest. “It’s called disassociation, Forehead.”
She breathed out harshly at that, fabric crumpling beneath her grip as she reached out with one hand and grabbed a hold of the soft and slightly scratchy fabric of her friend’s shirt. It was real, that sensation, and it helped to ground her as she stood there, feeling infinitely dazed and panicked.
“I will need to send word to your brothers,” her friend said, and any semblance of comfort she’d found was ripped away in the blink of an eye. “You cannot be left alone in Harlond as it is…” Blue eyes watched her, wariness and worry swirling in their depths. “You are acting like Faelion used to…”
“No.” The venom in her voice surprised even herself. “You can’t tell them. You can’t tell them anything!” She shook her head, ignoring the way his grip on her tightened. “I won’t let you – you can’t!” she demanded, remembering scalpel, blood, organ, and bone. She couldn’t let it happen again. She wouldn’t be able to live through it a second time. Those greedy hands delving deeper and deeper into her chest, even as her skin tried to knit itself back together…
She stopped that thought in its tracks, unwilling to tumble back down the rabbit hole of her past.
“Aerloth—Stop, you’ve made your point,” her friend said, even as something tugged in her chest, her free hand going to her heart then, as if prodding at her skin would help her understand that strange sensation. “It is foolish, I think, to deny the help your brothers would give, but if that is what milady commands, then so be it.” His lips pursed together, an expression of clear dissatisfaction on his face. “How are you going to function, should you have another episode when I am not here?”
She chewed on her lip, brain frantically ticking over for a solution—“What episode?” Denial, apparently, was her best friend there.
“The one you literally just had,” her friend said, taking one look at the mulish expression on her face and promptly pinching the bridge of his nose. “Aerloth. Aerloth, look at me – you cannot simply pretend nothing has happened. You are not well—”
“I’m fine,” she insisted, shoving gently at his chest until she had some room to herself.
“Then call me by my name, as you haven’t done for the entirety of my current stay here, and tell me what has made you so forgetful of Harlond’s markets in the summer of our youths,” he stated, blue eyes scorching as they met her green ones in a look which dared her to prove him wrong.
Yet she knew nothing of the summers previously spent in Harlond, and she didn’t have the first clue as to her supposed friend’s name. She tore her eyes away, scowling at the ground then and waiting for his judgement to come.
“Or can you not remember?” he asked, and all Sakura could do was grit her teeth and stare determinedly at the ground – as though enough menace behind her glare would make it swallow her up and no longer have to deal with the situation in front of her. Where had it all gone so wrong? She could only wonder. Why did he have to be so nosy? Yet something in her whispered that friends could be, unfortunately, quite nosy and irritating at times.
His hand closed around her own, gently nudging her back into motion as he led her further up the path and closer to the promise of safety. She could, perhaps, hide from him for a little while in her home there. He hardly knew her own habits as they were right then and there. Yet that was probably only a neon sign which proclaimed that there was something infinitely wrong with her.
“Meldir,” he stated then. “My name, that is – or at least what you and your brothers call me,” he explained, and Sakura blinked for what felt like the thousandth time, eyeing up the silvery hair which fluttered in the soft wind. Meldir was the name of her friend, she mused, letting herself be tugged back home.
Somehow, the name suited him well.
Arriving back home was both a comfort and something stressful, if only because the cat had poked its head out of the bag. There was no longer the occasional uncomfortable quiet between them both, instead there were only concerned, awkward glances on Meldir’s side, and a longing to vanish into the ether on her own side.
“Go,” Meldir said, shooing her deeper into the house. “Relax. You clearly need to,” he murmured, and Sakura could feel his eyes on her back even as she ventured through corridors which she had become intimately familiar with by that point in time. “I will come and find you when dinner is ready,” he declared, and she estimated that she had a couple of hours at most before she would be back in his company.
Two hours at most to come up with an idea of what she was supposed to do from then on. She breathed in, closing her eyes and exhaling soundlessly as she pondered on just how long the skeletons buried in her closet would stay hidden there.
She wondered just how long it would be until Meldir realised that she also quite literally slept in the wardrobe. Unless he had already clocked the cushions, blankets, and duvets the morning prior when he had found her in one of her brothers’ rooms. She sighed, feet tracing a familiar path before she even realised it. She wondered then, what Meldir would inevitably think when he found her in the forge that everyone was so adamant that she was destroying any time it was brought up in conversation.
Yet that was something, perhaps, that future Sakura – future Aerloth – could worry and concern herself over. It wasn’t like her probably newfound interest in smithing could add any other clues as to just what had become of her. Meldir had already figured that her memories were patchy at best. What did one do when they lost their memories? Was it normal to have new interests after that? Sakura didn’t know, if only because she had never worked closely with anyone who had ever lost any memories. In fact, it had been a long time since she’d worked with anyone at all.
Maybe that was why she preferred the solitude of the forge when things became too much? Sakura could only ponder on the matter, part of her almost vibrating in eagerness to bury herself in the hard work of attempting to create a useable product. Yet then again, there was also solitude in the library, and she still preferred the forge. She preferred the sweltering heat which probably ought to have reminded of the days in her cell when the incinerator had been lit. Those days had been more and more frequent, the longer she had stayed there.
She closed her eyes, sighing deeply again as she shoved the memories of that place as far down as she could manage. Those days were behind her, after all, and it wasn’t like Meldir was going and alerting the guards to raise their pitchforks and drag her off to be tormented. Was he? Her heart beat in her chest, mind conjuring pictures of him speaking with the guards her brothers had assigned to her for the duration of her house arrest there.
Her feet stopped dragging her towards the forge, and Sakura turned around sharply, hurrying back through the corridors to reach the kitchen door where they had parted ways only a matter of minutes before. If he wasn’t in there, making dinner, then that meant… She swallowed thickly, wincing as the hinges creaked.
Silvery hair turned, almost seeming to gleam in the light of the kitchen. “Aerloth?” her friend called out questioningly, and all she could do was peak around the door, confirming that he was in the kitchen, seemingly part-way through the meal prep. There were no hurried whispers between him and the guards – rather, those guards were nowhere to be seen, as per usual. She had only spotted them when they had been on their way back from the market.
Almost instantly, she felt silly for assuming otherwise. He was her friend there, and friends didn’t sell out other friends. That fact held true, no matter what stars she resided under.
“Are you okay?” Meldir called, blue eyes darting between her half-hidden figure and the fish he was in the middle of gutting on the chopping board in front of him.
“I’m fine,” she stated, shutting the kitchen door with another creak and a sharp click. There had been no need for her to backtrack, it seemed. Sakura could only click her tongue at the thought that had occurred to her earlier, shaking her head as she made her way back towards the forge. A familiar heat seeped into her bones as she fired everything back up in the room she had grown to love. Red fires lit the room, a fine sheen on sweat glistening on her forehead as she went about the motions of creating a blade – not that she had yet to make a useable one that lasted the test of both sharpness and time.
Her eyes darted over to the empty barrel which had become something of a disposal bin for the times she inevitably made another failure of a blade. It had probably once contained mineral oil or the like, and Sakura could only muse on just who could have used that room before her. Or she could probably ask Meldir, and he’d know…
“Would you be proud?” she murmured, thinking then about the father she had long since outlived, and the father who she had once shared her pink hair with. Fingers wound through the brown hair she had then, the sensation grounding her while the colour only served to remind her of how everything had changed. “That I’m finally following in your footsteps?” She tilted her head, glancing at the little nook she had stowed away the gems she had bought at the market. She wondered how long it would take before she could create a masterpiece worthy of being encrusted with a jewel or two. Humming under her breath, she cast that thought aside, reaching for her hammer and slowly losing herself to the sound of metal meeting metal as she started smithing.
There was a strange melody to the sound of metal on metal; a faint hum which made her occasionally pause as if the quiet would let her hear that strange noise. Yet it was seemingly caused by her smithing, and all she could do was occasionally hum along to it as she worked.
She was only disturbed by the time she was sinking the blade into the oil to quench it, the door creaking – which meant it was another to add to her need-to-oil-the-hinges-of list – and a familiar face peering inside the forge. Meldir blinked, confusion surging across his face, quickly to be replaced by shock as she placed her completed blade down on the anvil it had originally been made on.
It was a far cry away from her first twisted, warped blade she had made, and yet she knew it was a far cry away from being anything close to the perfection she wanted. The blade was too dull, and it would crack and shatter within the first few swings. A brittle blade. Her father’s blades had never been made for blade clashing against blade though – more made for slicing through things without opposition, as opposed to blades from blacksmiths in the Land of Earth which were made with more toughness and less sharpness in mind. She closed her eyes then, amusement surging at the strange, little details she remembered from the life before that one as Aerloth.
“Aerloth,” Meldir called, watching her, curious and watchful as she left her imperfect work behind in the middle of the room. “Dinner is ready.”
She blinked softly, wiping her hands down on the apron she wore before hanging it up beside the door. There was only one set of clothes available to her, what with the fact all of the clothes which actually fit her were shut within a room whose walls reminded her just a bit too much of the colour of her own blood. She was hardly going to ruin that one set of clothing she had and liked wearing. “What did you end up making?” she asked, ignoring the questioning stare with what was becoming a practised ease.
“I could ask you the same,” Meldir answered, casting a glance back at the forge they were leaving behind in promise of dinner. “I did not know you had an interest in smithing,” he said, telling her something she had already long since worked out, if only thanks to everyone assuming she was destroying that place rather than simply using the materials and occasionally requiring a restock of goods.
“You saw it. It was a sword, though not a very good one, mind you,” she said, and there was almost a bounce to her step, if she briefly forgot about the fact that her friend knew of her apparent amnesia and was all too eager to tell her brothers of the matter. “I’ve told you what I made, so do you not think you ought to return the favour? Tell me what awaits us for dinner.”
“Fish pie with an assortment of potato wedges, and a side of those vegetables we picked up from the market,” he said, and Sakura only frowned at that – the name of the dish unfamiliar to her, and she could only wonder if she’d missed it in one of the recipe books or whether it was something of his own make. “You have a lot of potatoes, Aerloth, and I don’t particularly want them rotting sooner rather than later.”
“And we both seem to have a habit of making pie after pie,” she remarked, wondering then, just why it was so easy to fall into conversation with him. Or maybe she’d simply been starved for interactions with other people… Then again, she hadn’t exactly missed anyone in those first few weeks of being alone in that home.
“This one doesn’t have any pastry in it,” Meldir informed her, and soon her nose caught the scent of fish and cooked potato.
“Pity – that’s my favourite part,” she murmured, hurrying into the kitchen then, even as her stomach growled noisily.
Meldir snorted then, looking infinitely fond and amused in that instant. “Of course it would be,” he said, clicking his tongue. “I had thought we could dine in the dining room for once. I think we could both do with a change of scenery.”
“Does the scenery really matter when you’re going to be insistent on having such an awkward conversation about things which don’t matter?” she demanded, grabbing the plate and the portion he’d already dished out for her, taking it out of the room and abruptly pausing. “Which way is the dining room, then?” she asked, barely resisting the urge to flinch at the look he sent her way; infinitely knowing and ever so worried. It was a familiar look by that point.
Would Naruto or Sasuke have looked at her like that if they had been alive to understand just what had happened to her?
Sakura shook her head, casting the thought away like it had burnt her. It didn’t do to dwell on things which would never be… she reminded herself, allowing Meldir to lead the way then.
“So you’ve even forgotten the layout of this home of yours,” Meldir murmured, sounding infinitely sad. “No wonder your spirit has dimmed,” he said softly, and Sakura could only frown at that. “But that alone wouldn’t explain why you were fading so severely when we first met…”
Sakura blinked, her frown only deepening as Meldir opened the door to a room she might have stuck her head into once since waking up in her home there. “You mentioned that when you first arrived.”
Her friend froze a couple of steps into the dining room. “Aerloth,” he said plainly. “Please tell me you remember what fading is…”
“I don’t,” she stated, placing her plate down on the table with a loud clack. “Is it important?”
“Aerloth,” Meldir said, his face solemn, and Sakura had the vaguest impression that his next words were about to shake the foundations of her world. “Fading is the elven equivalent of death, even if it is not permanent in the sense that human death is.”
Sakura stared at him. “Oh,” she mumbled.