CHAPTER 4
QUESTIONS
xXx
When they reached the gates, he used his teleportation jutsu to get them to his apartment without anyone seeing her. She looked around. "This isn't your old place." "Yeah, the landlord of the old place passed and the new one was more trouble than my rent was worth." She nodded in understanding. This place was smaller than his last one.
She saw a couch and went over and sat down. He followed. They sat on the couch in the quiet for what seemed like ages. Kakashi couldn't take it anymore. The silence was maddening. "I don't even know if you want to, but do you want to talk to me about what your life has been like since we last saw each other?" She glared at him, but then it was gone and replaced with what seemed to be sadness. He knew it was a bitter subject for her, but he wanted to know.
"Tell me about your life first." He figured it was fair enough. "Well, I was sent on the mission. It was only supposed to take two years, but things got a bit complicated. The men I was gathering Intel on were murdered. I thought it was over, but then I got information that the problem went higher than just the men I was investigating. So it took me another year to wrap it up. When I came back, you had been gone for two weeks. No one really wanted to talk about it. I wasn't sure what had happened, so I didn't dig any deeper into it. I had no idea that ... well ... the reason you were sent out. Since I came back, I did the usual missions that took one, maybe two weeks tops. Its been pretty much the same old boring story for me."
Sakura was quiet for a minute. "Since you showed me your face, after all these years, I guess I can share some of my secrets with you. Ask what you want to know and if I feel like answering, I will."
Kakashi thought for a moment, trying to carefully choose and word his questions.
"Were there any other reasons you stayed there besides the one you told me?"
"Like I said, I had nothing to come home to. Besides, I got pretty much anything I wanted there."
Kakashi thought about the numerous women she had been with. He wanted to ask her about it, but knew he shouldn't. Then an idea came to him.
"Is there someone special in your life that made you want to stay?"
"No. I haven't had a relationship there, well ... really to be honest, I have never had a relationship. My infatuation with Sasuke was the closest thing I have ever had to one."
Well, that didn't quite give him the answer he was looking for.
"So did you have any friends there?"
"I don't make friends easily anymore."
He felt awful. She was starting to sound like Sasuke. And she wasn't going into depth with her answers. He would have to ask the right question and word it perfectly for hi to get an answer he was looking for. He would just find something else to ask while he thought about how to word the right question.
"Do you have a job there?"
"I help out around my part of town as a medic. I get paid for it and my rent is free."
"What made you not want to come home to your friends?"
"After I killed the men who killed my parents, I had no need for anyone."
"What made you decide to come back with me?"
"You begged. The great Hatake Kakashi never begs." She said with a hint of a smile.
"Good to know." He said with a small laugh. "You know, if I weren't needed here so much, I might would move over there. The women are really something there. I bet Jiraya would have had a field day."
"I think he has been there before. Some of the women recognized the ... book." She paused as if she said something she wasn't supposed to.
"And how would they know ... about the book?" He said with a cheesy grin. She returned a sheepish smile.
"WAIT! Sakura Haruno owns a dirty little romance novel that she always pestered her sensei about reading?"
"Maybe."
"So what else should I know? Have I had any other bad influences on you?" He said with a playful grin on his face.
The mood in the apartment was lightening up. They were talking with smiles and each sentence said was done so with a smile on the face and a hint of teasing in the voice.
"Well, I may have learned a few tricks from you."
"Liiiiiike?"
"Are you invading my sex life?"
"I thought you didn't have one."
"I said I didn't have relationships. That doesn't mean I didn't have a sex life."
"Ohhhh, so it's the sex that keeping you there, huh? Are the guys real Casanova's over there?"
"I wouldn't know."
Kakashi sat there for a second, pretending to process her words in his mind. Then he faked a confused look.
"You ... are a ... lesbian?" He said with a bit of a smile.
"Leave it to you to have a smile on your face when asking a question like that."
"Welllll, are you, are you? huh huh huh? Did you learn how to seduce women from your old pervy sensei?"
"You sound like Jiraya! I don't know what I am. I don't sleep with men. But I am attracted to them. I do sleep with women and I am attracted to them too."
"I believe that makes you a 'bi-sexual'"
"So why don't you sleep with men? Are the boring lays over there? Do I need to move over there and teach them a few tricks?"
Sakura's mood changed. Suddenly she didn't seem to be having fun anymore. He knew something was wrong. He knew immediately that a man had done her wrong.
"Who was it and where do I find them?" He asked in a serious tone.
"They are already dead."
"You mean ..."
"Yes. The men I was tracking down. When I found them in the forest at their camp, there were so many of them. They held me down and no matter how much strength I used, I couldn't get away. Right as they were about to ... a vision flashed through my head of the ruins of my home, how my parents were dead. I told myself then that they were not taking another fucking thing from me. My strength multiplied. It was like Naruto, when the nine tails first started coming out. It just came out of nowhere. I killed the five that were around my body just from the chakra emanating from my body. Then I punched one man, he flew back and hit some other men so hard that the force broke their necks. There were maybe ten left. I don't remember how I killed them. Everything just kinda went dark, but as I started to come to, the scene was a massacre."
Kakashi was stunned at what she was telling him.
"They didn't actually get to ..."
"No, but it was close. Ever since then. I haven't been able to be intimate with a man. In fact, I never have been. I've tried, but I just couldn't do it."
Kakashi felt terrible. He should have been with her. He should have went on her journey with her to avenge her family.
"Sakura, I ... "
"Kakashi, like I said back at my place, I don't want your sympathy. I don't need it. I am fully capable of handling myself and I don't need help from anyone anymore. Maybe that's why I feel I don't need my friends"
She got up and walked down the hall to the bathroom. "But your friends need you." He said quietly. He got up and went to the kitchen to put some tea on the stove. He now understood why she was the was she was. He almost wished he didn't know, but he was grateful that she confided in him enough to tell him. He knew that no one had ever heard, or maybe will ever hear the secrets he knew.
After close to an hour later, she emerged from the bathroom. Her hair was wet and her clothes were changed, indicating she had taken a shower. "Tea?" He asked. She sat at his table. "Sure" He placed a steaming cup in front of her. She inhaled the scent and took a sip. "Thank You." "Your welcome." He stared at the floor, trying to think of something to say.
"So what's new with everyone? What's happened since I have been gone?"
"Well, Naruto and Sai are ANBU captains now. Hinata and Ino are medics at the hospital, oh and Ino and Shikamaru got married. So were Neji and Ten Ten. Hinata is a sensei now with a team of her own. That's all I can think of, really."
"And what about you? No more teams?" "Nah, you guys were a handful enough for me." She smiled at that. "Yeah I guess we were a bit of a pain. Naruto and Sasuke always fighting, me being a lovesick puppy. Naruto having the nine tails, Sasuke leaving ... and now its my turn to be the student being a pain in your ass."
He smiled. "Sakura, you never have been, nor will you ever be a pain in my ass. You have had a rough experience. More rough than most, but through it all, you have become more like your team. We are all family-less now. Naruto, who has never had a family, Sasuke who lost his at a young age, then his brother later, I never knew my mother and my father ... well, he has been gone since I was pretty young. That's why we have a family type bond. I couldn't save Sasuke and bring him back to our family, Naruto couldn't and you couldn't. We all tried. That's why I am trying so hard to bring you back. I don't want to lose another piece of my family."
Sakura was crying. "I'm sorry." He said. "No. Its not about Sasuke. You really feel that way? That the four of us are a family?" "Considering that none of us has a real one anymore, yes." "I figured when my parents died, my family was gone." She walked behind him and wrapped her arms around him in a hug. He wrapped his arms around hers, doing his best in his position to return the embrace.
"Thank You Kakashi. I'm really tired right now, so I think I am going to get some rest." She walked over to the couch and laid down. He was thrilled. He felt he really had a breakthrough with Sakura. A breakthrough he tried desperately for with Sasuke who was just too stubborn and full of hatred to let it happen. He didn't know if it was enough to bring her back home for good, but at least he had gotten this far.
