Needed some of Sasori's perspective, the jerk. This is still technically completed but I might get another tickle in the future. They're a pretty darn dysfunctional couple though. Yikes.

Disclaimer: see part 1

Lust was exhausting, Sasori decided.

He had tried everything to expunge it from his life—porn, pills, retail therapy, violence—but nothing seemed to the do the trick now that Sakura had reintroduced it to his existence. Being an emotionless robot had been extremely restful previously. Like dying road flares emotions had fired in his mind only to fade to the background and if something inconvenient like remorse had cropped up and tried to assert itself there had been a pill or a fifth of vodka to kill it.

Sakura had sparked something in him that wasn't dying. Even Deidara didn't bring her up anymore because it had gone from amusing quirk to possible weakness and Deidara didn't need a weak man as his partner in their business. As a joke, Deidara had offered to stick a needle in her arm and ship her to a brothel overseas and Sasori had nearly strangled him right there on the carpet after they had exchanged blows. It at least reminded his partner that Sasori was plenty strong, but the burr in his brain named Sakura caused him some worry.

One year. A year with her name hovering in the back of Sasori's mind, uninvited. She was decency and goodness and a mean right hook. Sakura would have been the name of his long dead conscience. He had almost called her a hundred times in that past year but had tapped out the number only twice. The first time in winter when he wanted to see her, and the second time he almost called her to pick up the blond kid he knew was her friend. The number had been in the phone, his fingers entering it without him even noticing, but he couldn't press call. Half dead from fighting with the younger Uchiha, Sasori figured the blond kid would live until the ambulance arrived. Deidara and Sasori had dragged Sasuke back to Itachi and told him to ship his crazy brother somewhere farther away next time. The dumb kid always seemed to wander back to his old haunts, and it was putting them all at risk. Sasuke couldn't keep himself together enough to be a real asset, but Itachi wouldn't let them chuck him in an incinerator either.

The lone monitor in his computer room unaffiliated with his building showed him that Sakura was following the same schedules. The regularity of her life threw the strange sporadic nature of his into sharp contrast. Her living room and kitchen was all the camera had been set up to monitor, but it showed him plenty about her life. At first he thought this move would help him get sick of her faster, when he had delivered those groceries to her crappy apartment, but the past couple months he started to wonder if this was what hooked people to reality TV. When she wandered to the kitchen for a glass of water before bed in nothing but underwear and a sports bra it was the pinnacle of his day. Those nights when he missed that moment left him inevitably cranky.

No pictures. He couldn't risk it. No records of her anywhere besides the live feed in his private office. Her number was memorized, address too. When he wanted to know something about her, he looked it up himself. The phone he had used to call her that one time he had immediately destroyed. If it had been so easy to wipe her entirely from his mind he might have gone for that, because being around her wasn't doing anything for his work performance. Emotion was a liability, no matter how far away the object was.

The secrecy wasn't because he fooled himself into thinking she was unknown to the other members of the Akatsuki, but to diminish her importance. If she was perceived as an irregularly summoned booty call then they weren't likely to contact her unless one of them wanted to make a move against him that required a show of force. Sasori knew he had proved time and again that posturing like was pointless, mostly because he wasn't hungry to move up the ranks and he wasn't so insecure that he thought what he had gained would be stripped from him.

"No news. I suspect my mole has been compromised."

Pain looked as unhappy as always. Orochimaru had been a thorn in his side ever since defecting and taking his side business of meth production to an all-inclusive production and distribution model. That had been years ago, but the man refused to die no matter how many times they tried to root him out of their territory. Moving halfway across the country may have altered the immediacy of the economic threat, but they knew he had one beady eye on the Akatsuki empire and was waiting to see a weak spot he could strike at.

Twisting a snakebite piercing around with two fingers, Pain considered Sasori evenly. The piercings always struck Sasori as silly, probably born from the same impulse in Pain that drove Sasori at eighteen to get his scorpion tattoo. They had grown more numerous over time, too, having started with a simple eyebrow bar when they had first met then two bars, and moving down into nose, ears, lips, chin. Sometimes they changed place, old puckered holes showing where the healing hadn't quite completed, and Sasori wondered if that was Pain's addiction.

"Does your mole need to be disposed of?"

"Kabuto knows practically nothing. He was expendable, which is why I sent him in the first place. Orochimaru doesn't choose associates for their longevity, merely for their desperation." He took a sip of his drink, wondering why Pain only chose to meet in hotel bars that charged so damn much for their liquor. "…or fanaticism."

Konan, silent as always, stared at the window where 30 floors below them people walked around the sidewalks on their way to dinner or movies or whatever it was normal people did on a Friday night. She could just as easily have been staring at her reflection in the glass. Sasori felt like she was a puff of air or a figment of Pain's imagination right up until she slid a knife into someone, and even then he had had to see it twice before he really believed it. As usual she wore long sleeves, even on a hot summer day like today, to hide her track marks.

"I want the snake handled. You're being cautious recently. Don't let caution become hesitation."

"I know Orochimaru as well as anyone can know a schizophrenic sociopath. I'll get it handled."

Pain seemed impassive, his drink sitting untouched in front of him, condensation dripping down to soak the napkin below. "We've known each other a long time now. I'd hate to think you were losing your touch."

Without another word, he stood and left with Konan right behind him. She deposited an origami flower made of bar napkin next to her own barely touched orange juice. Sasori was left to wonder if he was going soft.

"I'd rig his bed with explosives. That would be a helluva way to go, eh?" Deidara, sensing that Sasori's meeting with Pain had been less than pleasing, had tried to cheer him up on the way back. However, Deidara's way of cheering someone up mostly consisted of offering up a menu of possible violent crimes, usually involving arson.

Sasori tried not to roll his eyes. Usually he had sunglasses on when Deidara chattered on in the car to prevent him from seeing that particular affectation, but it was night and Sasori wasn't up to the teasing should he put them on. It would go on for weeks because Deidara didn't know when to shut up.

"He's got a thing for little boys right? I bet we could pay a midget to poison him."

That actually got a snort from Sasori.

"We could go all ninja on him and attack him at his house."

"Compound."

"What?"

Sasori itched at the bridge of his nose. "Orochimaru has a compound, not a house. It would be impractical to attack him openly."

"Compound, eh? He cooking or starting a fuckin' cult? Either way it sounds smelly."

"I guess he didn't want to have to choose."

Sasori remembered those times he had to work in close proximity to Orochimaru, and smelly was indeed one of the words that came to mind. Body odor and chemical residue always preceded and followed that man.

"You're not going to be bitchy tomorrow are you?"

The eye roll was impossible to stop this time. "If you're referring to the fact that I missed my evening appointment, then you might want shut up and watch the road."

"You're not going to punch me while I'm driving." It was said with easy confidence, but Deidara was watching Sasori out of the corner of his eye. The man had been spoiling for a fight, and Sasori was thinking there was a dealer who had been skimming profits recently that Deidara could pay a visit to and get that aggression out. Sasori didn't fight for the fun of it. If there was nothing to be gained then what was the point?

Pain's words haunted Sasori in a way Deidara's taunts could never touch him. When Pain had folded him into the organization he had always sent orders and never bothered to follow up on them. The assumption had been that things would get done. This Orochimaru business was starting to take so long it smacked of incompetence. He needed a plan, but he wasn't sure yet how to get to Orochimaru in some way that the man's paranoid brain had not already anticipated. Evil was easy to plan around, crazy much less so.

He took the stairs for once, going two at a time up the back stairs that he really only used when he was disposing of something. Always down, never up. Maybe he needed some novelty in his life, maybe that's what Sakura actually was. Maybe if he just took the stairs once in a while he could forget all about her.

Without even thinking about it somehow he found himself staring at her monitor inside his office. The empty living room, with books spread all over the table and a takeout box with a pair of chopsticks sticking out the top. A jacket on the floor, next to the books and food, told him that she had probably crashed on the couch with some dinner to study and then gave it up. She might be out; she might have been one of those people headed to a normal Friday night that he had seen below the hotel.

She had left the light on, which wasn't like her. Then his eyes caught it and he inhaled sharply. The crumpled napkin on top of the books was not crumpled at all but in a beautiful flower shape. That rotten junkie bitch had even made sure the hotel's bar napkin insignia was clearly facing the camera. All the possibilities of this message began slotting themselves into place. Once he had cleared his head he picked up his phone and dialed Deidara's number.

"Jeez man, I'm not even half-way home yet."

"I need you to take a detour and pick up some smokes for me."

The line was silent for a bit, and then Deidara started to laugh. It had been a long time since they had discussed code words.

"Which store?" Sasori said it quickly. "Got it."

The line went dead. Sasori wondered, for once, if he had made the best decision. He knew he hadn't made the right one as a tiny voice screamed in his head in her aggravated tones, but he knew this would solve a few of his personal and professional difficulties at least.

He hoped she was at the movies, but he steeled himself for what might come as he shut the monitor off and went to the bathroom to medicate his mind into euphoric numbness.

"Can I stay with you tonight?" Sakura said it in such a small hopeless voice there was no person on the planet that could have refused her, no matter how callous.

"As long as you need to," Ino replied as they both watched the inferno that had once been Sakura's apartment building from the car.

"My books…" Sakura moaned as Ino pulled away. It was a really shitty summer, she decided.