Standard disclaimer applies.
Sakura had been forced to keep secrets before. It wasn't something she wasn't accustomed to, having to lie perfectly to friends and those she cared for because it was ordered of her. And most of the time, she was okay with it.
She'd lie for Tsunade. She'd lie for Naruto, for Kakashi, for Ino. She'd kill for all of them—had killed for all of them, even at times they would never know about. The thing about courage was that sometimes courage was about being quiet. About listening to other shinobi in the hospital tell you of how you just didn't understand what they'd just done, the atrocities they'd committed in the name of the village. How staying in the white walls of the hospital protected her, how being the Hokage's apprentice saved her from suicide missions and doing things she would hate herself for.
So she'd smile and take it. It didn't matter that she'd undergone training with Tsunade that nearly broke her. It didn't matter that she could never speak about the times she'd had to play Kami and decide who lived and who died, who was more important to save in the hospital when a whole team of Anbu came in in critical condition. It didn't matter that she'd set diseases on small towns only to come in and cure it at the most opportune time for the Leaf Village to gain favor.
She wasn't like Naruto who wanted appreciation, who wanted everyone in the shinobi world to see him as useful, as important and powerful. Hers was a quiet kind of courage.
Keeping silent about her soulmate when she got back to the village wasn't as difficult as it should have been. She smiled and chatted with Ino over lunch like it was nothing. She healed Naruto and Kakashi after they trained.
She turned in the violet flower to Tsunade. The Hokage had looked at it for a bare minute before handing her a sealed scroll and dismissing Sakura, looking at her with relief. Sakura tried very hard not to think about what that meant.
And she wasn't all that surprised when she got back to her tiny apartment that she never really used to find a tiny replica of the violet flower sitting on her kitchen counter, carved out of wood and painted to perfection. When she saw it, Sakura just sighed, ran a chakra check over it for traps as well as the rest of her apartment for good measure, and moved it to sit on top of a bookcase in the living room.
She woke up the day after she returned from her mission before the sun was fully risen. She'd been given the mandatory day off after a mission (even though it was a useless mission), and so she made herself tea and sat down to do some reports.
She'd finished four reports, read over a new chapter in a book about poisons, and finished her pot of tea by the time morning for the rest of the Leaf Village came around. And she was brushing through her hair when one of her traps alerted her to a new chakra signature in her apartment.
Slamming her wooden hairbrush onto the sink so hard a crack appeared on the handle, Sakura tilted her head back and groaned.
When she walked out of her bathroom and into the living room, she was greeted by the sight of her soulmate stuck in a cacophony of ropes and wires tied around every part of his body, dangling from the ceiling by her window. The window that hadn't been open when she'd gone into the bathroom.
Sasori's red hair was in disarray and hanging in front of his amber eyes, which glared out at her. She just stared back, attempting to untangle her emotions. She wasn't quite sure if she was pissed or amused.
"Tea?" she finally offered.
His eyes narrowed and darted down to her empty cup sitting next to her pile of paperwork and books.
"I'm making a new pot anyways," she said, and walked towards the kitchen to do just that.
She spent the next ten minutes taking her sweet time in the kitchen, letting the water simmer and boil. She even made herself some toast and ate it while she waited, listening in amusement as her soulmate tried (and failed) to cut himself down from the ceiling. He really should have expected her to have multitudes of traps around her apartment. She'd learned from past mistakes, and using both Naruto and Kakashi as her personal Guinee pigs had its advantages. They should know better than to land on her windowsill and break into her house unannounced, but it did help her see where her traps were lacking when they managed to cut themselves out of them.
When she finally walked back with two steaming cups of tea in hand, Sasori was upside down with one foot caught in one of the wires hanging down, pointing straight up in the air. His glare could have boiled the tea.
She set his cup down on the coffee table. "Do you take sugar in your tea?"
He paused, considering. "Is that green tea?"
"Yes."
"Then no."
She nodded and sat down on the couch. She wondered if his pride was going to let him ask for her to let him down.
He sneered at her. "Aren't you going to cut me down?"
She licked her lips, now stinging from the scalding tea. "Oh, do you need help? I thought you were a part of the most dangerous terrorist organization to date."
"Oh, for the love of—"
She rolled her eyes and released the traps with a few quick hand signs. He fell in a heap, only just managing to land on his hands and feet. Sakura was mildly impressed in his cat-like reflexes.
He blinked at her, slowly, and Sakura wondered if he was going to attack her. But he just rose to his feet and sat down on the couch next to her. Instead of going for his own untouched cup of tea on the table, he plucked her own right out of her hands before she could react and took a long sip from the exact spot her own lips had touched. His eyes never left hers.
She narrowed her eyes at him when he tried to hand it back to her with a smirk, and picked up his own untouched tea and took a sip of that instead.
Bastard.
"How old are you?" Sasori asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
She raised an eyebrow. "Twenty-one. You?"
His eyes gleamed. "Older."
She snorted. "Great, my soulmate's an old man."
"I prefer to think of it as having more life experience."
"Uh-huh. What are you doing here?"
"I told you the soulmate bond would require us to be together more often," he drawled. "I had you all to myself for more than three weeks. The bond won't be so lax in letting us be apart from now on."
"I haven't felt anything," she said.
"Liar."
But she wasn't. Sure, she knew the bond was there, had felt its presence pulling at her the moment she left her camp and Sasori behind. But it wasn't so bad that she couldn't push it to the back of her mind and pretend nothing was amiss.
She shrugged. Then eyed him as she drank her tea. "How much of you is human?" she asked after a moment of studying him.
She'd seen Kankuro's puppets before. She would have known they were puppets even without anyone telling her, but she never had suspected Sasori was a puppet when she first saw him in the cave.
He smirked at her. "Would you like to see for yourself?" And before she could scoff or tell him off, he was standing and shrugging out of his shirt, having left the Akatsuki robe behind. Most likely to better sneak into the village without attracting attention.
Sakura choked at the first reveal of smooth, pale skin. Unblemished and perfect, not a bruise or scrape in sight. She was painfully reminded of the red skin around her heart and the long, jagged scar along her abdomen. Her many smaller scars.
If it wasn't for the hole in his chest, Sakura could have almost made herself believe her soulmate was human.
Something must have shown on her face, because Sasori looked at her with a critical eye, almost apprehensive. A sharp contrast to his smugness when he first took off his shirt. He moved his arms left and right, turned slightly so she could see his back and what appeared to be muscle and bone move underneath skin.
She swallowed and fisted her hands. "What's it made from?" she asked.
Sasori tilted his head. "Me."
Her brow furrowed in confusion.
"It's my original body," Sasori explained. "My muscle, my tissue and skin."
"But not your heart," Sakura whispered, her own heart hammering in her chest.
"No, not my heart."
"How?"
"Lots of experiments beforehand. I was . . . obsessed with immortality after my parents died," he said, and Sakura was taken aback at this freely given information. Chiyo had told her about him, but this was something so much rawer.
"I wanted to find a way to bring them back, at first. I made puppets that looked just like them, and that got me thinking about if it would be possible to reconstruct a person after they died. To cheat death, if you will," he said. "But my parents' bodies were long gone. Instead I starting thinking about myself."
"You feared death," Sakura murmured.
Sasori paused, considering. "No," he slowly said. "I don't think so. I just wanted more time. To experiment, to gather knowledge."
Sakura could understand that. She remembered how she'd devoured every piece of information Tsunade had given her, how she'd been a model student in the academy. There was a kind of rush in discovering something new.
"Knowledge is power," she said.
He nodded sharply. "I found a way to use my own body and just made adjustments. Chakra infused muscle and bone, that kind of thing."
Sakura thought about the stories she'd heard about Kimimaro. How he could make bone grow out of his skin. "And your heart?"
"The only true way to be immortal is to hide your heart. I just made it believe that it was still beating inside my body when I separated it and hid it."
She shook her head. "I don't understand."
"Think of the chakra strings I use on my puppets, doll-face," Sasori explained. He ran one hand down his abdomen, and Sakura watched the motion with greedy eyes. "It's like I have chakra strings attached from my heart to my body so that they believe it's still one whole thing."
"You're the puppeteer to your own puppet body," Sakura realized.
"Exactly."
"So the rest of you is . . . real? Human?"
He smirked at her and lifted his hand to the waistband of his pants.
She cursed under her breath and threw his shirt at his face.
"I'm going to Suna."
Sasori cracked open his eyes below her, having at some point weaseled away the distance between them until she could comfortably have a book in one hand and still run her fingers through his red hair with her other hand, his head resting on her lap. His eyes had been closed and she found herself rubbing the spot over her heart when she looked down at him. He was like a cat, she thought. Moving into her space simply because he wanted attention and a lap to lie on. A slow and languid creature.
She was letting him lie on her because it made the soulmate bond positively hum in approval. It was . . . pleasant. And while she wasn't going to be falling into his lap anytime soon, letting him lean on her like this when he initiated it was alright. She could deal with that. It could quiet her mind for a little while.
His heavy lashes nearly brushed his cheeks. It irritated her that he was so much prettier than she was. She tugged lightly on a chunk of hair in retribution.
"Why?" he drawled, giving no indication he was planning on moving.
"Mission."
He grunted and closed his eyes again. "I'd forgotten what it's like to be at the beck and call of a village," he mumbled.
"Oh, yes. So much better than being at the beck and call of the Akatsuki."
Sasori made an unimpressed sound. "What's the mission?"
She scoffed. "I'm not telling you that."
"Why?"
She scoffed again.
Sasori sighed heavily. "I already told you I'm no danger to you, doll-face."
"But you are to my village." And Naruto.
"I'm coming with you."
Her eyebrows shot up. "In case you've forgotten, you and your partner literally just kidnapped Gaara and nearly killed him. Oh, and you also destroyed a good portion of the village. Going back there? Yeah, not the best idea."
"Are you always this sarcastic or am I just lucky?"
She rolled her eyes. "You need to go soon, too. Someone is undoubtedly going to be knocking on my window sooner rather than later, and I'd rather not give them a heart attack when they see you."
He cracked open his eyes again. "Window?"
She sighed, and it was one of those sighs that could only be borne from long suffering and repeated arguments no one listened to. "No one seems to appreciate the use of a door."
Sasori's face twisted into someone vaguely resembling a sneer. "It's your day off. You just got back from a mission."
"Oh, yeah," she drawled. "Because the mission was just so exhausting."
He ignored her. "This is exactly why I defected." He sniffed daintily.
"Anyways," she said, looking back at her book about rare and deadly poisons. "I'm leaving tomorrow. And no, you're not going into Suna with me."
"I'll walk you there," he said, and it was like he was telling her he was going to walk her to her front door after going out to get dinner.
She didn't look down at him even as she felt his eyes on her face. "Am I meeting your partner?"
"Interested, doll-face?" Sasori asked, and there was something heavy and deadly in his voice.
A smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "Might as well meet him sooner rather than later. I get the feeling you two are a package deal."
"Well, in that case, yeah," a voice spoke from her window, left open ever since Sasori got caught in her trap. "It's nice to finally meet Sasori-danna's soulmate. Gotta say, you're much hotter than I was expecting, yeah."
Sakura looked up long enough to watch another one of her traps spring into place at the unidentified chakra signature the second Deidara put one foot in her living room. And then he was strung high in the air, blubbering and screaming something about his hair and the wires tangled in it.
Sakura silently thanked whatever intuition had made her put up silencing seals around her apartment. She'd surely be getting complaints from the neighbors about noise control otherwise.
Sasori mumbled something that sounded like "Brat," and promptly went back to his catnap on her lap. Sakura watched the other Akatsuki member struggle a moment longer and made a hand sign to release one of the other traps, releasing a sleeping jutsu, and returned to her book.
She'd deal with them both after she finished this chapter.
Author's Note: Chapters will likely be slow going and short for a bit. School is killing me, guys. Also, this story is just being difficult. I don't know why.
Please REVIEW! Updates will be quicker if you guys tell me what you're liking/what you're not a fan of. Tell me where you want this story to go. Communication is key, and I do like to know what you guys want to see in future chapters. It's interesting for me.
