A quick, two-page drabble inspired by reading paws-bells' fic fiesta (which I reread today because an artist on deviantART linked that fic as inspiration for one of her pieces), I heeded the call of the muse to write this down. Took me probably the better part of an hour, but it was surprisingly easy to get onto paper. Hopefully you enjoy this fic, I had fun writing it. It's got implied-semi-ish-romance in there...but it's a pretty introspective piece, I think. Hence the Romance/General label.
Enjoy! Who doesn't like a little ItaSaku to brighten their weekend?
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto and therefore aren't making any money off of this, etc, but if I DID own Naruto, my version would be AWESOME! Trust me on this, one of my best guyfriends and I rewrote how the ending should go (not the direction Kishimoto's going at all) and it was amazingly epic AND we brought some people back from the dead XD. You know who I'm talking about.
Lines
They were deep, obvious, painful. They reminded her of sleepless nights and too much stress, and she didn't doubt that one or the other was the problem here. He would not be passed out on the couch, even located within the Akatsuki headquarters as it was, otherwise.
Letting down his guard like this was not something Uchiha Itachi did, ever.
It was a perfect moment to attempt an escape (if she felt like getting hauled back to the base by Kisame in a few hours, and in need of a few days' worth of recuperation from his chakra draining sword) or seek some sort of revenge on him for her kidnapping (which he admittedly had had nothing to do with, seeing as how he and his partner had been in Iwa at the time of her capture), but she was stopped by those lines that marred the patrician elegance of his features.
As deeply ingrained as her medic training was at this point, something in her rebelled at the thought of inflicting harm on someone who already seemed to be under duress.
So, with a sigh and a small, rueful shake of her head to express the vexation she was feeling for her own, silly weakness, she slid silently to his prone form and gently touched a fingertip to each temple.
A part of her was amazed that he didn't leap up to pin her to the floor with a barrage of kunai, but that he didn't spoke volumes for the state of his body, if not his mind, and a tiny frown furrowed her brow.
With no more than a thought, she sent a precise thread of chakra through his temples.
The procedure felt like nothing; it was a surprisingly delicate one that modulated the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain for maximum relaxation during sleep, most often used as therapy for shinobi who suffered chronic nightmares after their missions, but Sakura had used it so many times since she'd first learned it five years ago that it came to her almost as easily as breathing did. A modification taken from an interrogation jutsu, it involved none of its parent technique's image-projection or invasiveness.
For that, Sakura was rather thankful. She had no desire to see into Itachi's head; she knew the kinds of missions Akatsuki members went on. She had occasionally been called on to deal with the aftermath, and it had never been a bed of roses.
But she couldn't deny being fascinated by his reaction.
She had never noticed how tightly wound Itachi was until the moment she saw the perpetual line between his brows melting away. His features relaxed, tension leaving his body as he seemed to…to mold into the couch cushions. Almost as if he was cuddling.
Uchiha Itachi.
Cuddling.
He shifted, just a little to the right to get more comfortable, and then he sighed.
It wasn't more than a soft exhale, a warm puff of breath. But the quiet noise encompassed contentment, relaxation, and a sense of safety so poignant that Sakura felt her eyes widening in surprise.
In mere minutes, the deep-cut lines on his face softened and smoothed, leaving only a faint trace of their existence behind.
And still she couldn't pull away, almost mesmerized as she gazed into the face of her captor.
She could see the boy he'd once been.
Smooth facial features, made for his naturally taciturn expressions, seemed to highlight his high cheekbones, the ebony hue of his hair only accenting his pallor. If she let herself imagine, she could easily envision his eyes sliding open to reveal warm, obsidian orbs that mimicked dark stone only in color. His lips seemed perfectly fashioned to smile quick, little half-smiles that made the receiver feel special in secret, receiving a gaze that was endlessly fleeting, a look between clandestine lovers.
She was still there, a couple of minutes later, when he woke. Even as those dark lashes trembled and his crimson-dipped eyes slid open, she had not managed to pull away.
She had been too fascinated, watching him transition from sleep to consciousness so slowly; so unlike the nuke-nin she was accustomed to, who was aware of every surrounding before he opened his eyes.
Onyx-flecked garnets perused emerald orbs as the fog of sleep slowly lifted, each passing second bringing more clarity to his eyes.
But when he had come awake enough to have taken stock of his position several times over, he did nothing.
He was letting her decide, passive in spite of the fact that, if she so chose, she could kill him easily.
His eyes didn't betray any surprise when she retreated, though Sakura couldn't understand her own motivations.
She had held Itachi's life in her hands; literally between her fingertips. A single pulse of chakra and he would have been merely a pale, lifeless thing to be discarded as she fled the organization's hideout. She could have taken down at least one Akatsuki, avenged the deaths of the Uchiha clan members, saved some hunter-nin a world of trouble somewhere down the line. It wouldn't even have taken a flick of a finger.
So why hadn't she?
Itachi sat up, his clothes a gentle rustle of fabric on fabric, as she turned to go. But he didn't try to stop her, and for that she was glad.
She wasn't certain how she'd have reacted if he'd tried.
It wasn't until she reached the door that he spoke.
"Thank you."
She paused, but didn't turn around, at the sound of his voice.
'Don't be.'
'It just happened.'
'I didn't do it for you.'
All those responses and more jumped to her lips, but she clamped them down, merely giving the Uchiha a nod before disappearing back down the hall to her room.
A gesture, so thoughtlessly made, had changed things between them. With a touch, those barriers she'd put up had been shaken. And she had no one but herself to blame for the outcome.
The lines that had been so carefully drawn between them, boxes to cage them so that kidnapping and incarceration would mean nothing but more enmity on either side, had blurred and smudged.
A hand had rubbed them out.
The same ones that smoothed out the lines of his face.
OWARI
In case anyone was interested in the back story...
Sakura, as is rather typical in canon-ish ItaSaku fics, gets kidnapped by the Akatsuki as their medic or whatever. At some point in time, Itachi goes off on a rather tough mission (mentally draining as we know Itachi can get in and out of a battle without getting a scratch on him) and comes back to promptly pass out on the couch. During this time, the base is mostly empty and Kisame has gone off to a nearby bar for some well-deserved (in his opinion) alcohol.
Sakura, left free to wander the base as all important doors are locked and the place cannot be left unless you want to be hauled home by an irritable Kisame (who gets alerted every time someone makes an unauthorized exit of the base), discovers said unconscious Uchiha.
This could probably work quite well for the beginning of a long chapter fic involving the slow and subtle romance between a 21-year-old Sakura and 26-year-old Itachi, but I don't feel so inclined. I rather like where this ended, hence the big, capital letters spelling out "END" in Japanese ^^
Please do leave the muse a line though, she preens when people feed her cookies (and then she cracks the whip and makes me write more). I'd also love to hear if you guys enjoyed this fic at all, introspective as it was ^^
Aria, out.