Hey all!
New three-shot for my current OTP, Sasori and Sakura also known as SasoSaku! (I THINK it will be a three-shot, anyways...I have a bad habit of turning one-shots into full-length stories...)
Trivia for returning readers: Did you know that Modus Operandi was meant to be a three-shot?
This is, as usual, a darkfic. It's a Modern Day AU, with a hint of Hospital AU in it. I really hope you enjoy it, but I've been told that it's pretty creepy. Please heed the warnings. :)
Warnings: Kidnapping, stalking, possible gore, possible non-sexual violence, possible dub-con/non-con. Possibly more to come as the story goes on - but there is also a chance of some of these not actually happenings, which is why I've added in 'possible' as a qualifier. That said, if one of those may affect you at all, of course I encourage to turn back and move on to a different story. There might be more triggers than added here just as there may be less. I don't know yet.
She glanced down at her doormat and sighed in frustration when she saw them.
Another note; another hand-carved wooden trinket. This time it was a ballerina, and Sakura had no idea how whoever the person who was sending her these things—she refused to call him or her a stalker because it would only make her afraid, something which she absolutely did not need her in her life right now—knew that she had been in ballet when she was in elementary school, nor how they knew she had won a martial arts tournament when she was fourteen, nor that she was fond of flower arranging because her best friend was a florist.
She didn't care to think about those things, but the little figurines that were left on her doorstep, always pinning down a note of "affection," were much too invasive. A wooden carving of her in her most-favored karate stance; a soccer ball perched on a grassy field; and now her in a pirouette, but the clothing was all wrong. She was scantily covered, and her breasts were too prominent albeit not much larger than they were in real life. The accuracy of the shaping of her body made her chest tight with anxiety, because she usually wore clothing that was comfortable and a little baggy—the perfect proportions that mimicked exactly what she looked like meant that it wasn't out of the question that this person had seen her naked.
After the first trinket—her posing in nurse's scrubs over a patient that wasn't present—that reflected her body type much too accurately had left her making sure her windows were curtained and locked tightly even when she was home.
Rolling her eyes with exasperation in an attempt to cover up deeper, darker emotions, she picked up her little "gifts" and brought them inside. She was sweaty and tired from a long day of work in Konoha General's ER, and all she wanted to do was take a shower and go to bed, but even though she tried to stall her ever-growing fear by not calling the maker of the notes and figurines what they were, she felt her heart pounding uncomfortably in her chest now that he or she had made themselves known to her yet again.
She opened an old shoebox stowed away under the coffee table and tossed the figurine inside, where it would stay to rot with all the others that had been given to her over the past month. As much as she would have liked to just throw them out, she was familiar enough with these types of predators—she had seen too many of their victims at her job—to dispose of any evidence. She knew that at some point this person would make their move, which was why she had invested in pepper spray on top of the karate skills she had maintained over the years, even if she didn't compete anymore.
With a heavy exhalation, she unfolded the note. The creases were even and folded meticulously, as if perfection wasn't just a goal, but a necessity, and she had seen it repeated in every note so far. She had mentally diagnosed the predator as probably having obsessive-compulsion traits. Wonderful.
All the notes up until now had been a sort of poem, ominous in their own right but also horrifically beautiful. She would skim over them, just in case there was anything that would help her identify this person, but there never was anything. She'd used the Internet to learn to dust for fingerprints, because although the police said they couldn't do anything without evidence of violence—and Sakura often asked herself what the point of law enforcement was if it could only act on the law if said violence had already taken place even though there was clear forewarning—she had wanted to see if she could gather evidence on her own so that when she was eventually assailed, she would be able to get the person locked behind bars promptly.
She had been upset to discover that the person probably wore gloves when writing the note, because there were no fingerprints at all despite having been folded by hand. After the first ten spotless figurines and notes, she had stopped bothering to make special accommodations when picking them up.
Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she unfolded the note, preparing herself for another eloquent poem with unmistakable innuendo. Instead, her jaw dropped in horror when she opened her eyes. In fine, disgusting detail, she had been drawn spread eagle on her bed—her bed—mouth parted in a moan, her fingers slipped between slickened folds, her other hand toying with a taut nipple. Every feature down to the slight unevenness in her left eyebrow that no makeup or waxing could fix and the small scar on her sternum from falling when she was ten were shown. In the picture, she was clearly flushed in ecstasy as she masturbated even though it blessedly wasn't in color, and it was so real it was almost like a memory.
It was signed 'Hiruko'. She knew with instant despair it would be too much to hope for that to be their real name.
The longer she stared at the hand-drawn picture, the faster her face flooded with burning heat. Had Hiruko-had she been seen 'taking care of herself'?
Her lips parted and the note fell to the floor as she scrambled for her cellphone.
It was one in the morning, but her best friend still picked up. "Whassup, Forehead?" Ino said groggily into the phone. "S'gotta be 'mportant…"
"Ino," Sakura said, and she herself was surprised when her voice cracked with a sob. "It's-it's the stalker. They-they drew a picture…" She felt a hot tears drip down her chin.
Ino was immediately alert. "What? Okay, start from the beginning."
"There's-there's not much to tell…I just came home after second shift and, you know how-how they leave notes? Well…there was a-was a figurine of me as a ballerina, a-and…the note was a picture-a picture of me-of me…" She was hardly coherent with the force of her shocked sobs.
She had been able to just blow it off until now. Even if it was inherently frightening, she had been able to tell herself that it would be okay. Even though she had acted in preparation for the worst-case scenario, she realized now that she had never been able to fully comprehend the horror of what this violation would feel like. Poetry, figurines of her doing innocent things like karate? She had been creeped out, but not totally worried. She had still called Konoha Police Department, but they had admitted they couldn't do much.
Now, though? Now she was well and truly terrified.
Ino paused. "Of you…what, Sakura?"
"Of me, you know!" Another bout of sobs wracked her body.
Ino was silent for a moment, and then inhaled sharply when Sakura's meaning finally dawned on her. "You need to talk to Sasuke's dad. Sakura, this has gone on long enough. I don't care what KPD says, you badger them until they at least give you a protective detail."
Sakura nodded through her tears. Even though it was what she would have done once she had calmed down enough to think straight, having Ino direct her was comforting all on its own. Since her parents had died, there wasn't really anyone to take charge other than the Surgeon General, Tsunade, but she was a busy woman.
"O-okay," she said quietly, sniffling as she wiped a few tears away. Unfortunately, more still followed.
Ino distracted her with comforting talk about the newest episode of their favorite drama, and goaded Sakura into scolding her for giving spoilers. By the end of the phone call, Sakura was level-headed enough to take a shower and go to bed, though her cheeks felt puffy and her eyes still unpleasantly damp.
Part of her didn't really want to undress at all, since 'Hiruko' obviously was somehow seeing her despite her precautions to keep prying eyes out, but she wasn't going to go into work tomorrow without being clean. She bid goodbye to Ino and then stepped into the hot spray of the shower.
Although she had been calmed, a few tears fell against her will as she washed. Somehow, she felt so dirty all of a sudden. As if that picture, just by existing, had tainted her. But it was all in her head, she knew that. Nothing had changed. She'd had boyfriends who had seen her naked before. Hell, Naruto, a fellow RN, had seen her naked before, and she hadn't felt guilty at all! There was nothing different about this.
Except that Hiruko was an unknown, and she had never willingly shown her body to him.
She finished cleaning in record time after that last thought, and dressed conservatively for bed, even though she usually only wore a large t-shirt and underwear. This time, she wore thick sweatpants to go with her usual ensemble, and as she crawled into bed, she double-checked that the curtains were drawn. She knew the windows were locked: she never unlocked them anymore.
She set her alarm for two the next afternoon so she would have plenty of time to run errands before her shift. Closing her eyes, Sakura begged her brain for good dreams, or, failing that, no dreams at all.
Her pleas were rejected.
While she was deep asleep, her unlocked window slid open and a cloaked masculine form slipped in. It was a full moon, and the moonlight illuminated her pale face, making her appear angelic. A tan hand brushed a few tendrils of hair from her face, pulled up a chair, took out pen and paper, and began to draw.
The next evening, Sakura threw herself into her work so that she would have no time to think about anything. She planned to call Fugaku the next day, because she wasn't going to disturb him on a Sunday, and with nothing else to do about the matter, she tried to immerse herself so that her thoughts wouldn't wander in the wrong direction.
At around eight that evening, she was given a new patient—someone who had been exposed to mild but painful poison. It was her job to make sure he drank his charcoal and monitor his condition; since things weren't too busy that night (yet), they could spare her for an hour of constant monitoring to see how he reacted to the treatment. If his body couldn't fight the poison off itself, he would have to be admitted so that an antidote could be procured. Apparently, the poison had already been tested and there was nothing in their database that could identify it, much less counteract it. Sakura inwardly wondered how someone would come into contact with a unique poison that couldn't be treated with the standard antidotes the hospital kept on hand.
Running a hand through her hair and putting a smile on her face—not too cheery, as she didn't want to seem insensitive to the patient's state, but also enough to put him at ease and not make him more concerned than he probably already was—she knocked on the door, her chart tucked under her arm and her other hand holding a cup of medical charcoal. She waited for a few seconds for a reply, and when none came she quickly opened it completely, worried that he had passed out.
His eyes were closed and he was breathing shallowly. Quickly checking out the patient's name—Sasori—she hurried over to him and gently shook him. "Sasori?" she said, gently but loud enough to wake him up. "Sasori, are you alright?"
The man cracked open his eyes lazily, and she was momentarily taken aback by the strange honey coloring. They clashed with and at the same time complemented his blood-red hair, and Sakura wasn't immediately drawn to the thought that he had dyed it. After all, she herself had pink hair, and it was natural despite everyone else's denial and pestering her to 'tell the truth.'
He looked at her, eyes blank of emotion but strangely sharp, and said in a measured voice, "I'm fine."
Sakura blinked, momentarily at a loss at how calm he was in the face of being poisoned. She quickly recovered, however, and returned the smile to her face. "I'm glad. My name is Sakura—I'll be your nurse tonight."
Sasori nodded, watching her intently as she took a seat on the rolling stool by his bed.
"Dr. Hatake said that he wants you to be monitored for a little while, so I'm going to have to stay with you for that. On a scale from one to ten, how bad is your pain right now?"
"Seven."
He'd said it so dully and without inflection, and there seemed to be no indication of pain in his expression or body language, that for a moment Sakura thought he was lying. But she reminded herself that they'd tested the poison, so there definitely was some—maybe they had given him painkillers?
She checked his chart. No painkillers—of course not, they didn't know the interaction the morphine might have with the poison.
She made of note of his supposed pain and his odd reaction to it on the chart, then looked up and smiled as if nothing was wrong. "Well, here's some charcoal for you to drink—it should absorb some of what you've been exposed to and hopefully help clear it out of your system. First, though, I'm going to have to take your temperature and blood pressure."
Sasori nodded again, his blink slow and almost catlike as he took the charcoal while she did the compulsory tests. BP 141/90 – elevated, but not too worrisome yet. His temperature was high, though, 101.7 degrees, but he looked lucid enough and was not acting feverish from what she could see. Pulse was a normal 82 BPM.
After she motioned for him to drink the charcoal, she was just about to warn him of the nasty taste that made some react poorly when he chugged it down, not even a slight grimace of distaste for the thick black fluid that he was drinking so quickly.
Sakura was momentarily visibly surprised. She'd never seen someone drink charcoal without any kind of reaction—it had a very strong taste that was, in all ways, unpalatable, and so she could only think that he'd been exposed to it before. She was discreetly checking the history that had been taken upon intake when he set down the Styrofoam cup with a sense of finality.
She quickly returned to the present. "Would you like some water? I know it doesn't taste very good."
Sasori looked at her with a kind of detached curiosity, and when he asked the question, his tone was bland and it didn't sound like he particularly cared about her answer. But there was something in his eyes… "Have you been poisoned before? Or overdosed?"
Sakura blanched. "What? No-" She gaped for a moment. "Of course not! Why would you even ask that?"
"Those are primarily the reasons medicinal charcoal is imbibed," Sasori said, completely unruffled by her outburst. Sakura stared at him, uncomprehending at this sudden invasion of personal privacy, and then quickly regained her professionalism.
She knew she had a temper, and she wasn't going to get disciplinary action because a patient complained about it. But this Sasori's blunt invasiveness, especially with all that she had going on in her personal life—specifically the stalker—she was not feeling as forgiving as she might have normally.
"You're right about that," she said, taking a deep breath and then regaining her smile, even if it was mostly fake. "However, I will have to ask you to refrain from such personal comments, okay?" She tried to make her voice kind, but the way he was looking at her took Sakura she wasn't fooling anybody. His sharp eyes seemed to cut into her, and something about his gaze was so appraising, so keen, that on top of the previous night's events of that disgusting drawing that she could barely stand it right then.
"Okay?" she reiterated, hoping to distract him from his staring. She had dealt with rude patients before. She could handle this.
"Of course, Sakura," he said, and the way her name passed his lips made it sound dirty, somehow full of innuendo, and it sounded so strange to hear him say her name that she almost forgot that she had introduced herself with it.
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to calm her nerves. If this was how she was reacting to a patient who had done absolutely nothing wrong, then she needed to get it together. He was her first patient of the day after doing her paperwork, and if she was having this kind of reaction just because he was male—even though she didn't know, she felt it was rather probable that her stalker was a man—it might mean that she would need to beg off early that night. It would be too obvious if she asked to have another nurse switch out with her, so she would just have to keep her mind from going off on dangerous tangents.
Because Hiruko was the dangerous one, not Sasori. Sasori, who was in the ER because of poisoning.
Which led her to a topic of discussion that she hadn't seen mentioned in his file, and although she hadn't been told specifically to ask him about it, she didn't think it would hurt.
"So, do you know if this poisoning was intentional? Do you need to have the police contacted?"
Sasori had never taken his eyes off of her, even while she had been lost in her own thoughts. She warred with herself internally to stop reading into behaviors and finding things that weren't there.
"It was intentional," he replied. At that, there was the first sign of emotion: a slight smirk playing about the corners of his lips as though he had just told a mildly funny joke. Sakura didn't see what was so funny.
"Do you know who did it?" she pressed. "Because you can press char-"
"I do, and I won't." He was obviously impatient with this line of questioning, given his disinterest in allowing her to finish her sentence. Sakura frowned.
"If that's what you think is best," she murmured, and she couldn't hide the disapproval in her voice. Silence reigned and she looked at him appraisingly, albeit unobtrusively.
If she hadn't seen his temperature and blood pressure and didn't have the charts, she honestly wouldn't have thought there was anything wrong with him. However, science was her creed and she was disinclined to take subjective body language over hard data.
"You don't remember me, do you?" he suddenly asked out of nowhere.
Sakura glanced up, having barely heard the question, lost in her thoughts as she was. "Hmm?"
"I was here a month and a half ago," he said. He sounded less apathetic than he had before; in fact, there was an entirely new tone in his voice, but she couldn't identify it. "You were my nurse then, too."
Sakura blinked. She honestly didn't remember him at all—but she couldn't say that like that. Rarely were patients in the ER frequently enough to remember their nurses, even if they remembered the doctors, who were fewer and more memorable.
She frowned apologetically. "I'm sorry, I have so many patients coming in and out every day—well, you know how it is. I hope I took good care of you?"
Something unidentifiable flashed in his eyes, but she knew that whatever it was had been negative. She felt immensely guilty, but she wasn't going to lie. Patients who remembered you but you didn't remember would inevitably have details that you had probably forgotten just as much as their face, and eventually the lie would fall apart and both parties would be injured worse. It was better to be honest.
But Sasori responded without anger or disappointment in his voice. "Yes. It's hard, isn't it, working in such a fast-paced environment?"
Sakura shrugged. This was a line of questioning that shouldn't have too many potholes. "Well, I actually like it quite a lot. I'm one of those people who thrives under high stress, you know?" She laughed, a hint of good-natured self-deprecation in her voice.
Sasori only studied her closely, his face so strangely expressionless. She was starting to feel more than just vaguely uncomfortable beneath that stare. "You seem like the kind of person who would like peace and quiet," he commented.
"Well, I do," she replied. "But I'll get restless after too long. I'm an active person." Realizing that this was becoming too much about herself, she asked in return, "What about you?"
Sasori declined to answer, instead facing frontwards and closing his eyes.
Still not even the slightest showing of discomfort. A seven indeed, Sakura mused, recalling a few patients she had had in the past who had been clear hypochondriacs and had exaggerated their pain immensely. However, with Sasori, the science didn't lie. The elevated blood pressure was likely the only sign of the pain he was in that she was going to get.
Silence permeated the room and Sakura went back to the chart, making notes here and there. Time passed slowly, and every ten minutes or so she would ask him about his pain and if he was feeling any better. By the end of the hour, he was outwardly unchanged, but he said that he was feeling much better already.
"I'm going to take your vitals," she said, once again hooking him up to the blood pressure machine and then taking his temperature. Indeed, the fever was gone—he was a healthy 98.5. It seemed almost too good to be true.
Sasori was watching her again with that detached curiosity, but Sakura was no longer bothered.
"Are you feeling better?" she asked carefully once jotting down the numbers.
He looked at her for one long moment that felt like an eternity and then nodded.
"Good. Then I'm going to go talk with Dr. Hatake and see about getting you discharged." She smiled brightly at him, which elicited exactly zero response, and so with slight irritation she left the room and went to go find Kakashi.
She was relieved of duty for Sasori and, once free from what she realized now had been an incredibly oppressive atmosphere, she took a moment in the bathroom to lean against the cool mirror and breathe in and out deeply. Sakura wasn't sure what it was that was causing her to feel like she was, but she felt distinctly unsettled and she thought to herself that there was probably a reason she hadn't remembered Sasori—he was creepy in the worst of ways, and surely anybody who was exposed to him wouldn't want to remember the experience either. Unfortunately, though, she knew that even if she had forgotten the first time, she definitely wouldn't now. Not for a long while.
Ugh.
The rest of the night went smoothly enough with the exception of a heart attack victim, but it was enough that Sakura could put her first patient out of her mind. Just after twelve she was released to go home, and she walked up the stairs to her apartment with a feeling of dread in her stomach.
However, when she arrived, there were no new notes or figurines—in fact, it looked exactly as she had left it before she went to work that afternoon. Exhaling heavily in relief, she finally felt uplifted enough to maybe not just go straight to bed. She slid her key into the keyhole, twisted, and stepped inside. Once she had closed the door behind her, there was a sudden hissing of pressurized air.
Startled, she glanced up in the direction of the noise and saw a noxious purple gas being blown into her face. She inhaled to scream, already knowing immediately that this was her stalker making his move, but it only shocked her senses with the gas.
She choked and her knees gave out immediately. She could feel the effect of strong sedatives, as her eyes closed involuntarily and her muscle function was shot in rapid succession. She hit the floor hard and with what little was left of her strength, she scrabbled into her purse for her phone.
A booted foot crunched down on her purse and her hand. Sakura let out a strangled cry, more from the sight of her hand under the person's foot than actual pain. She couldn't feel anything…anything…any…thing…
With one last bleary glance at the owner of the foot and seeing blood red hair and honey-colored eyes, Sakura finally succumbed to the fumes.
I hope you liked! Please review, they mean so much to me! :D