Watching You
By: Kuro Joou
Summary: When Haruno Sakura decided to train herself in the most brutal way possible, Uchiha Itachi could not look away. Not even if he wanted to.
Rating: T
Pairing/s: ItaSaku
Premise: Non-massacre AU
Notes: No Beta whatsoever.
Uchiha Itachi could not take his eyes off her.
She looked breath-taking, glorious even, as she concentrated minute amounts of her chakra into the tip of her pointer finger, where she balanced herself upside down on the tip of a kunai embedded in the soil.
His dark eyes saw her straining, one arm shot straight down to a finger point ending in a soft green glow of chakra which was the only thing that separated her from the sharp edge of the weapon. Her other hand was folded behind her back while she used her legs to keep balance.
The muscles in her outstretched arm bunched and flexed, beads of perspiration forming on her forehead and on her neck, all trickling down her chin.
As if the effort to keep the steady amount of chakra concentrated on a single point was not enough, she began to move her legs into various positions, which required her to exert more concentration in keeping herself balanced on the tip of her finger.
He recognized the Lotus position first, her legs slowly yet gracefully folding into the position as if she was sitting on the ground. She had taken off her sandals and shin guards prior to the exercise, and had strewn them about haphazardly around her.
This gave him the opportunity to see the lean, creamy expanse of her legs and the daintiness of her bare feet which continued to go through various leg positions, even going through a full split, which in turn made him stare at the juncture of her thighs, marveling at the way her muscles had flexed.
Among other things.
He had to physically shake himself to draw his eyes away from her backside and how the muscles on her inner thigh tightened.
He also had to stop himself from thinking what other things about her could be tight.
He could almost see himself, perched high in the foliage, in his ANBU uniform no less, granting the pink-haired medic a secret audience to her own personal training session. He had been doing this for such a long time already that the initial feeling of intrusiveness, of witnessing something completely private was already lost to him.
She had been at it for approximately six hours, and that, for Itachi was another feat in itself. He had always been hearing from Sasuke and other ANBU how her ability to control her chakra was unlike any other, including the Hokage, and what he saw not only confirmed these reports, but went above his expectations.
That not a single drop was wasted, that she could concentrate just the right amount on the tip of her finger to keep her balanced for hours…
Itachi was shaken from his admiration when a flash of green light blinded him for a moment, and he shielded his eyes for a moment, but the Sharingan had caught it all.
With a last burst of chakra, she pushed herself off the tip of the kunai tumbled gracelessly in a heap on the ground, her body curling in exhaustion. He could see how her chest rose in heavy breaths, and hear her panting.
She turned and lay flat on her back, a satisfied smile gracing her tired features. Her smile was the start of a full-blown bout of girly giggles, and the contrast of her soft laughter with the intensity of what she had just done struck him.
Strong and determined, innocent and vulnerable.
When he saw that she had fallen asleep in the soft afternoon sun, he jumped down from his perch and dropped to her side. After eyeing the kunai stuck in the ground, he bent down to yank it from the soil and brush some stray hairs from her face. His fingers ghosted over her temple, her cheek, her chin, and the pulse point on her throat.
Sakura. You train yourself admirably, and as hard as I did myself. Whatever your goal is, you will be magnificent. I cannot wait to see what you will become.
Just as his lips quirked into a small smirk, she stirred and moaned, her arm swatting at an invisible enemy. He quickly stood up and left, looking back once at her prone form on the ground
He wasn't ready for her to know that he watched her.
So for now, instead of taking her home himself, he sensed his brother's chakra, and headed in that direction.
Just to make sure she doesn't end up sleeping the night outside.
That night, when he sensed his brother sneaking in and smelled the scent of cherry blossoms in the air, he was finally able to settle down. He closed his eyes and drifted, his thoughts straying to her just as he fell asleep, and at a particular memory he enjoyed revisiting.
The first time he saw her, her face was wet with tears as she yanked her shoulder back into place.
He had been passing through the tall Konohagakure trees from a solo mission in Wind Country when he happened upon some soft sobbing accompanied by the blackest cursing he had ever heard come from a female vocabulary.
He paused, only in curiosity and concern, since he knew that he was too far into the village's surveillance perimeter for any unfriendly ninjas or assassins to be lurking about. He saw her small form kneeling on the ground, her back turned to him, while she massaged her right arm with her left hand, her palm creeping slowly up as she muttered to herself.
Itachi recognized her immediately as Haruno Sakura, the Hokage's apprentice and one of the persons-in-charge at the hospital in the village. However, she was, more importantly, his brother's team mate and his own medic.
She had treated him before for both minor and major injuried he had sustained from various missions, and he and her had come to talk about many things as her warm chakra would soothe his wounds and pains.
He considered her a highly-skilled medic-nin, but because of her slight and slender form as well as her chakra reserves, she was not very reliable on the battlefield outside of short bursts of inhuman strength. More often than not, he would see the three young male members of Team 7 surround her protectively, and always watching her out of the corner of their eyes, especially during training sessions at the Uchiha compound against his own relatives.
However, since he had also seen his own brother, the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki, a former member of ROOT and the Copy-Nin himself submit to her flashes of violence and reprimands, he knew there was more than meets the eye (and even the Sharingan) to this slip of a girl.
He was getting ready to approach her out of concern for her injury (he found it ironic that he felt indebted to her for all the times she'd healed him) when her mutterings had stopped him. Hearing her at that moment made him stop, the venom in her voice a palpable disdain.
"God damn fucking damn it stupid taijutsu sequence only for those with muscle fucking bastards perverts stupid moron sensei Uchiha idiot Naruto Sai this is gonna hurt I hate you all ah--!" she screamed at the very end, her soft tirade punctuated by the audible snap of bone on cartilage, and he was taken aback as she fell, still clutching the injured shoulder, her left palm glowing green as she panted from the exertion. Already, she was healing herself just as she had fixed her dislocated shoulder.
"I'll show them superfast taijutsu…I'll show them…Train with Lee…"
To say that he was surprised would be valid. But as he had seen the look of determination mixed with pain on her face, he could not help but admire her independence and the ferocity of her spirit as she knelt all alone in that secluded glen. Itachi did not think that he would ever be able to erase from his memory the sound of her joint snapping into place and her high guttural cry that was so feminine and feral at the same time.
It moved him in ways he did not understand.
But on a deep, unexplored level of his being, her actions drew him in, and for the first time in his life, he wanted to reach out and touch another person, no, Uchiha Itachi wanted to touch HER, as if she had an answer to a question he didn't know he was asking.
He had to deliberately stop himself from bursting through the bushes. He simply watched her for a few more moments, and as he saw her slowly getting up, he was sure that he didn't need to intervene and that she was able to get back on her own.
Itachi knew that his sudden arrival would only cause her to be flustered and even try to hide her pain and what exactly she was doing, so he opted to make a cursory check of her condition at best he could with the Sharingan before stepping back into the foliage and heading back to the village at twice the speed.
He wasn't rushing in the least, but the sight of a slight, slender girl fixing her own dislocated shoulder got his heart pumping. It wasn't the same as the rush of a heated battle or the adrenaline of a quick kill, no it wasn't that at all.
Itachi likened the feeling to the way his heart soared when he mastered his first jutsu.
Much later, he would have found out that watching Haruno Sakura was exhilarating.
After that, it was as if the gods had somehow set his path upon hers as well, and just at the moments when she would be training her hardest, screaming her loudest and in absolute pain.
And the same exhilaration mixed with fascination would hit him, leaving him breathless, his heart thundering in his chest.
He had seen her nursing a nasty splintered bone which protruded from her knee, which she forced down herself with a bloody bandage. Beside her, a large cherry tree had been felled, its trunk split in half. In this incident, he knew he had to intervene, so he picked her up and carried her to the hospital just as she fainted from the pain and chakra exhaustion.
She did everything so fast, without any hint of fear, of hesitation, as if the pain didn't consume her whole being, that her last chakra reserves flickered out before he could even call,
"Haruno—" she was out before she hit the ground.
When Tsunade-sama had asked him what had happened and why he was with her, he simply said, "I found her unconscious and there was lots of blood."
He offered the blonde the bandages Sakura had used to set her knee back into place.
In actuality, all Itachi had done was take her to the emergency bay for chakra exhaustion and anemia. Only the new, pink and baby-scented skin on her knee gave any indication that she had been injured.
She had healed her broken bone that completely before passing out.
There was also that one time when he found her just sitting in a Lotus position, in deep meditation for a few hours. He was passing by and when he went back, he still found her in the same position.
Peculiarly, he saw her end one of these meditation sessions once, at which she stood up and dusted herself off, stretched, and of all the things..
Unzipped her red shirt down the front and pulled her breast bindings low.
Not low enough for him to see everything…
But low enough for his mind to imagine the rest anyway.
Unbeknowst to the Uchiha, at that time, he used the power of the Sharingan to suppress a forthcoming blush that was about to tinge his cheeks.
A whoop of glee had broken him from the blush-suppressing Sharingan power. She bounced up and down for a moment or so then seemed to remember herself.
But not after Itachi saw her bound breasts jiggle in time with her jumping up and down with glee.
Again, his new power resurfaced.
She looked furtively around, adjusted her bindings and zipped her shirt up and squealed again, this time softer, and more to herself, a secret smile gracing her heart-shaped face. The next moment, she was gone in a swirl of smoke and cherry blossoms.
He had looked at the fallen petals a long time after she was gone.
It was during this time that he admitted to himself that she affected him…In ways no other person ever had.
End Chapter one
Author's Note:
Well, Sakura sure is up to something…teehee
Just some multi-chap drabble, the next one will be the end. Please submit a review if you have something to say about my work. ^_^