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There are so many names for what they are, and yet there are none.
‘Fuckbuddies’ is the first she hears, and it’s Ino who asks. She considers the word—how it curls cold against her tongue, how it feels like sandpaper in her mind—and says “No. We’re not.”
Ino presses, as she always does, but none of the words fall into place in Sakura’s mind.
‘Polygamists’ is her father’s first, initial reaction—accompanied by a pained, uncomfortable expression that Sakura has never seen aimed at her before, and hopes to never see again. (They will come around, eventually, although they will not understand.) This word is too heavy. It sounds too much like ‘greed’ and tastes like over-steeped tea, bitter and old.
‘Sluts’ and ‘Whores’ make the usual rounds, but Sakura has spent years rebuking these words. She brushes them aside like cobwebs, thin and fragile and so transparent it’s as if they were never there.
‘Threesome lovers’ is Tsunade’s clunky conclusion, said with a smirk as Sakura blushed. But that’s a failure as well, because while it may loosely cover what happens beneath the sheets, it leaves no room for all the rest of it. She doesn’t know what ‘the rest of it’ is, but she knows that it’s big and solid and too much to be cast aside so casually.
She doesn’t think there are words. Because while this is hardly the first time this has happened in history, it’s the first time it’s happened with them, with years of promises and acts of desperation, and with fates so twisted and tangled they’ve woven themselves into a sturdy rope.
Sakura likes the way Naruto puts it, once, when he’s settled between the two of them and holding them down with careless arms and legs thrown wide.
“I think,” Naruto says, “If I was a bowl of ramen, I’d have three servings of pork.”
“I think you’re dumber than a bowl of ramen,” says Sasuke drowsily.
“No, but listen,” Naruto goes on, “One serving of pork is enough to fill you up, right? But I always order two, ‘cause it’s better that way, and ‘cause it’s not like I don’t have room for it anyway.”
“Because you’re a garbage disposal,” Sasuke grumbles.
“But I’ve got three,” Naruto keeps saying, “And no matter how much I love ramen, I wouldn’t be able to eat it all by myself, but I don’t wanna waste it either, because it’s ramen.”
“Hn.”
“But I can share it. And ramen tastes better when you’ve got someone to share it with, so I can just take my extra pork and give it to someone else, so it’ll fill them up too. That’s you guys.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sasuke asks.
Naruto sighs, shifting his legs, sliding over both of theirs, and stares up at the ceiling. “Maybe I was born with too much love. Like three servings of love. So I’m just sharing my two extra servings with you guys. ‘Cause otherwise I’d probably explode or puke or something.”
“You’re disgusting,” says Sasuke, and Naruto rolls away from Sakura to wrestle with him and call him names. But Sakura thinks, maybe beyond all the ramen metaphors... Maybe Naruto really was born with too much love. Maybe Sakura was, too.
And then maybe Sasuke wasn’t born with any at all, so Naruto and her split their three servings up and they each wind up with two, and there’s balance.
But love isn’t ramen, no matter what Naruto believes. Love is volatile and fragile and it’s so, so easy to give too much away, until there’s none left for yourself.
It scares her—terrifies her—because she knows what she feels for them is more than sex and more than affection. She loves them. With her entire being, she loves them. And she has ripped her own heart in two and given one half to each of these boys, entrusting them not to drop it, but to protect it. She has willingly given herself two liabilities instead of one, instead of keeping her heart locked safely away in her own ribcage to begin with. And it is terrifying, and it is illogical, and it is dangerous.
But it’s also Naruto’s sunshine-bright smiles on cloudy days; Sasuke’s reverent, careful touches when he thinks they’ve gone to sleep. It’s finding cup ramen stashed in the corners of her cupboards, behind the tapioca pudding she’s never touched. It’s bouquets of snapdragons offered in apology, picked by hands that had never known the language of flowers. It’s wrapping outstretched arms in neat, careful bandages to cover pale skin never touched by desperation. It’s learning to turn the bomb shelters left abandoned in her head after the war into graves to bury her nightmares.
It’s all those things, as well.
And in her mind rests a scale on which she places these things, weighing the sides against each other and seeking guidance. Only the scales are equal—balanced. So she waits, adding each of the pebbles of this relationship as they fall into her hands; waits to see which side will be the one to tip, to send everything tumbling down.
And she waits.
And she waits.