Title: Scar Tissue

Author: 8sword

Chapter: 4

Date: 2.21.10

Summary: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.

Author's Notes: Thanks for the reviews! Sorry about my stressing over the characterization. Since this is my first real Naruto fic, I want to make sure I don't want to wander into the Forest of Death that is OOC-ness.

Please note that I have finally posted a bio along with a link to my fic website.

If my Google searches serve correctly, ome-e, onna no ko, and gaki mean "you" (rudely), "girl," and "brat," respectively. Onegai means "please."

Disclaimer: Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.

"Whoah! Check it out! Uzumaki's in his office!" Kankurou caught himself on the doorjamb of Naruto's office that morning. "That's something you don't see every day."

"You would if you ever stayed past five," Naruto retorted, glancing up from his computer screen and flicking the other agent a quick grin meant to move him on his way.

Kankurou didn't take the hint. He stepped inside Naruto's closet of an office, his hands on his hips, and looked around. "Love what you've done with the place."

Naruto rolled his eyes, not looking away from the JPEGs Dr. Haruno's team had e-mailed him. He knew that his office was as bare as–well, as bare as Dr. Haruno's apartment.

"I haven't had time to move in yet. I've been busy."

"Yeah." Kankurou snorted and plopped into the chair in front of Naruto's desk. He leaned back, propping his feet on the cluttered desktop. "Heard you got saddled with Haruno."

This made Naruto look up. Kankurou had said, 'Haruno,' not 'Dr. Haruno.' As though he was familiar with her.

Or as though he was being derogatory, Naruto realized, taking in the other agent's twisted lip.

He straightened, his hand falling from the computer mouse. "You've worked with her?"

Kankurou leaned forward to take a book from Naruto's desk and flip through it. "Couple times. She kicks ass at what she does, but it's hell working with her. She always wants more."

For a stab of a second, Naruto thought that Kankurou meant "more" as in a relationship. His eyebrows flew up. "W-what?"

Kankurou, like any respectable red-blooded ANBU agent, didn't need the unspoken innuendo pointed out to him. He snickered.

"Nah, if it was like that, I wouldn't mind giving her more." He waggled his brows at Naruto. "But I mean the way she keeps jumping down your throat to find out what's going on with the case. The other agents who've worked with her had the same problem. She wants to know the suspects, what the people who knew the vics said, what we're doing–God, she's like a mad chihuahua, always yipping at you–"

He broke off, looking at Naruto's confused expression with a creased brow. "What, she hasn't done that to you?"

Naruto was frowning. Dr. Haruno hadn't done any of those things to him, which was making him wonder what he lacked that other agents had if she was treating him so differently.

Then he realized that really, he hadn't given Haruno a chance to do what Kankurou had just described. He'd kept her updated on almost every aspect of the case–called her with Nara's identity, taken her with him to check out his apartment and talk to his girlfriend–as soon as he discovered them.

"Nope," he told Kankurou, sitting back down to look at his computer screen again. "She doesn't need to. I keep her in the loop."

The other agent's eyes were slightly wide. "In the loop? Uzumaki, haven't you ever read the ANBU protocol manual?"

Naruto shrugged and grinned, trying to lighten the atmosphere. "Real men don't read directions."

"Shit," said Kankurou. "There's a line, man. Us here–" He drew a line in front of him with his finger, and then plucked a foot on one side, "–and civilians there." He pointed out the window.

Naruto thought that, from the way Kankurou was calling Haruno a civilian so dismissively, he probably hadn't seen–or been on the receiving end of–Haruno's Dragon Arm Twist, the way that Naruto had.

The realization made him feel strangely privileged.

But there was still the fact that if Director Danzou found out how much he had involved Dr. Haruno in the field investigation, he was going to get majorly chewed out–distinguished family background or not.

-

The more Sakura thought about it–and she did think about it, a lot, much more than Uzumaki deserved, she thought uncharitably–the angrier she got that he had just walked away after revealing that he was from Konoha-cho.

He had lied to her. And then just left, as though he didn't owe her an explanation!

Not that she cared, thought Sakura frigidly. Uzumaki wasn't the only one with a sob story. They all had them. His probably wasn't that tragic. After all, he had said that he had "moved away" from Konoha-cho. If his Japanese was so bad that he could barely speak it, then he probably hadn't lived in the district long enough to feel its full effects.

After all, he was an ANBU agent now, and cho-hos didn't become ANBU agents.

They became the people that made ANBU agents necessary. The killed and the killers.

Pulling into the lab's parking lot, the first thing that Sakura saw was Uzumaki's SUV. She ground her teeth, and ground them harder when, as she strode up to the lab platform, buttoning up her lab coat, the first thing she saw was Uzumaki's face.

He was clambering down the platform steps, talking over his shoulder to an ANBU crime scene tech behind him.

"Excuse me," said Sakura sharply. He halted on the bottom step, eyes swinging to hers. "Did you just compromise my examination table?"

A hand touched Sakura's tense shoulder. "Dr. Haruno."

She turned to see Dr. Sarutobi stepping up beside her.

"Your examination table was compromised as soon as that foreign liver appeared in Nara's remains," he said, not releasing her shoulder. "Agent Uzumaki and his techs are investigating how it got there."

Sakura's eyes returned to the ANBU tech with his handful of evidence bags, watching Uzumaki point him toward the exit. "Remind me what we pay our security guards to do?"

"This case is an ANBU murder investigation, Dr. Haruno. Protocol required that we notify ANBU." Sarutobi rubbed his bristly chin. "And Agent Uzumaki was adamant that he be allowed to conduct the investigation."

Sakura met Uzumaki's eyes. He didn't even have the decency to look ashamed of himself for yesterday. "I bet."

She could feel the weight of Sarutobi's eyes on her for a moment longer, as though warning her to keep her claws in–the lab director was quite familiar with her animosity toward ANBU agents–before he cleared his throat.

"Well, Agent Uzumaki? Have you found anything so far?"

Uzumaki looked away from Sakura to Dr. Sarutobi. "Nothing seems like it was messed with. My people took prints, so we'd like to match them to the prints of anyone who has access to this platform to see if anyone was up here who wasn't supposed to. You have them on file?"

"Of course," said Dr. Sarutobi. "Please come with me."

He led Uzumaki across the glossy lab floor toward his office. Sakura watched them go, her face hard, before turning and swiping her card to make her way up the platform.

"Do you think they'll find anything?" asked Sai, who was sitting at his computer, apparently having watched the whole tableau.

"They better." Sakura snapped on two pairs of gloves. "If someone can just walk up here and plant a liver in a body without us being able to do anything about it, our lab evidence will be as useless in court cases as a bathing suit in Sand Country."

Sai smiled. "What an aesthetically pleasing comparison." He watched Sakura position the extendable arm of the autopsy table magnifying lens over the bones that Shino's ants had defleshed the day before. "Speaking of bathing suits, have you heard whether Dr. Sarutobi is going to fire Rin?"

Sakura glanced up from the lens, eyebrow raised. "I fail to see the relation between bathing suits and Rin."

"It would be pleasant to observe her in a bathing suit," said Sai. "She is visually appealing."

"So you do swing that way." Sakura returned her attention to the lens. "Shino and I were wondering."

"I will refrain from asking why Shino was interested in my sexuality." Sai connected the lens to his computer, bringing the magnified image of Nara's iliac crest onto his computer screen. "Suffice it to say that regardless of Rin's inadequacy in other areas..."

Sakura snorted at this.

"–she is very… I believe the term is, easy on the eyes." Sai's eyes unfocused for a moment, then blinked. "Unfortunately, it seems that she already has a boyfriend."

"I fail to see the misfortune of the situation," said Shino's quiet voice as he came up onto the platform. "The absence of a boyfriend would make not improve your chances with her."

Sai narrowed his eyes at the entomologist.

Sakura paid no attention to either of them. Her eyes were fixed on the computer screen without seeing it, her thoughts on the mystery liver.

Whoever had put the liver with Nara's remains must have been counting on Rin being the one to weigh the organs. Only someone of Rin's low skill level would fail to notice the liver didn't belong with the rest of the body. The only people who would know that Rin would be given the assignment of weighing organs were people who worked in the lab.

The culprit, then, was one of the people working with them. She glanced around briefly, taking in Sai's bent, glossy head, Shino's spiky hair, the heads of the people working at the other autopsy platforms.

But the who concerned her less than why. Why would someone interfere with an ANBU murder investigation? What was in the missing liver that they hadn't wanted its absence to be noticed?

"Dr. Haruno?"

Sakura forced her eyes back into focus, turning.

Dr. Sarutobi stood at the foot of the platform steps. "Agent Uzumaki is requesting your assistance."

Sakura looked past him, frowning toward his office, then back at Nara's remains. "I'm in the middle of examining the remains, Dr. Sarutobi."

Sarutobi looked at her. He did not speak. Then he crooked his finger at her, gesturing her to come down.

Sakura compressed her lips and stepped down off the platform, coming to standing in front of him.

He smiled at her tightly. "I have been very patient with you, Dr. Haruno. You know that I understand how irritating working with ANBU agents can be." His voice was low. "However, Agent Uzumaki has been nothing but accommodating and respectful so far. And even if he had not been, we, as a medico-legal laboratory funded by the federal government, are treading dangerous water right now. The security at our lab has somehow allowed the integrity of a federal murder case to be compromised. Do you understand how we might need to treat our ANBU agent with latex gloves, so to speak?"

Sakura's lips were still pressed together. She met Sarutobi's eyes, but with great effort and with a flush burning the back of her neck. Somehow, it was harder to meet Sarutobi's patient, unaccusing gaze than it had been to meet the burning glares ones of any of her drill sergeants.

She was being unprofessional, and she knew it. Realizing that she found Uzumaki attractive had shoved her off balance. Being attracted to him, whether he knew that she was or not, gave him power over her, a power that she didn't want anyone to have. And she had been clawing, kicking, and yowling against it like a cat being dragged to a bath. To her, her defense mechanism made sense, but to everyone else, she must seem like she was acting like a bratty grade schooler.

Looking up, she saw that Dr. Sarutobi was still watching her, waiting for a response.

Sakura cleared her throat. "Yes, sir. I understand."

Dr. Sarutobi seemed to wilt a little with relief. "Then please go talk to him. I've sent him to your office."

Sakura's eye twitched at the thought of the ANBU agent being in her office. But she said, "Yes, sir," and headed for the short hallway that separated the main forensic lab from the office area.

With several bone artifacts from digs she'd gone on during grad school and a hideous dark pink leather sofa that Human Resources had left there, Sakura's office was a little better decorated than her apartment. Sakura found herself wondering whether Uzumaki would notice.

The path of her thoughts made her jaw clench, tightening even further when she realized that Uzumaki was the only person she knew who had seen both her apartment and her office. Even Lee and Tenten hadn't seen both.

The front wall of her office was glass, looking out onto the hallway. Through it, she could see Uzumaki standing in front of her desk, fingering something on it.

When she strode inside, he snatched his hand away. The object clattered to her neat desktop, and she saw that it was one of the lacquered stress balls that Lee had given her for her birthday. They were custom-made, a deep green with pink cherry blossom petals painted across it, edged with thin gold.

She went to her desk, put her hand on top of the ball to stop it from rolling off the edge, and looked at Uzumaki.

He was rubbing the back of his neck, grinning sheepishly. "Sorry. I shouldn't have touched without asking."

Sakura put the ball back into its cushioned box with its fellow and sat down in her desk chair. "Dr. Sarutobi said you needed something?"

"Yeah." Uzumaki lowered himself into the chair before her desk. "I'm talking to Ms. Yamanaka again this afternoon. I thought you might help me translate?"

Sakura narrowed her eyes. "Considering that you speak Japanese yourself and that I could be doing much more useful work here at the lab, I don't see why you would need help with that, Agent Uzumaki."

Uzumaki blinked at her. He had been leaning forward, hands between his knees, the way he had when speaking to the Yamanaka girl the previous day. But now he sank back into the seat, shoulders hitting the back.

"Um," he said. "Okay. I just–well, I figured you were pretty eager to get out of the lab the other day, so…"

Sakura didn't say anything, and he trailed off.

"Alright," he said then, and seemed to gather himself, straightening up. He set his hands on her desk. He suddenly seemed so business-like that he actually seemed to belong in the ANBU suit he was wearing. "My other question was about this liver fiasco. Dr. Sarutobi said nothing like this has ever happened at the lab before."

Sakura's brows knit. "Of course it hasn't! We're very careful with everything here." Her voice was defensive. "You can't even touch a set of remains without filling out a form to say what you touched and how many pairs of gloves you were wearing when you touched it."

A bit of the Uzumaki she was accustomed to peeked out from behind the brisk agent persona in the form of a grin tilting one side of his mouth.

But he continued, "And you're sure there wasn't a liver with Nara's remains when you performed the autopsy two days ago?"

Sakura glared at him. "Yes. We already had this conversation, yesterday."

"You know how you guys have to fill out forms about touching remains?" he said cheerfully. "Us ANBU have to fill out forms about questioning everyone involved in cases. So just grin and bear it with me, Haruno-san."

Her eyes widened a little at his use of the Japanese honorific. She had never heard it paired with her name. In Konoha-cho, she had always been ome-e, or onna no ko, or gaki.

It felt…strange.

"Can you think of any reasons someone would plant a liver in a set of remains?"

Sakura pushed away the distracting thoughts about her name, trying to recollect her thoughts. Slowly, she said, "Well, clearly, whoever it was didn't want us to realize the liver was missing."

Uzumaki's lips hitched up again. "No kidding, Dr. Obvious."

Sakura's eyes flashed. "Out!"

Uzumaki stood up, clearly fighting back a smile at her expense. "Maybe I'll just ask you the rest of my questions later," he said, inching toward the door.

"Maybe you will," said Sakura furiously, flushing. How dare he refer back to the fool she'd made out of herself because he'd lied to her about not knowing Japanese!

He paused in the doorway, fingers wrapped around the jamb. "Actually, I was going to talk to Ms. Yamanaka this afternoon. I would appreciate a translator – "

"OUT –" began Sakura.

And cut off as Dr. Sarutobi appeared in the doorway behind Uzumaki.

"Agent Uzumaki," he said politely to the agent, although his eyes were on Sakura's, warningly. "I hope Dr. Haruno is proving helpful? I know that she has promised me that she will give you every assistance you require."

Uzumaki's eyes flicked to Sakura's. He had his eyebrow cocked expectantly, a slight grin touching his lips again.

Sakura huffed and shot to her feet, coming around the desk. "Yes! Yes, I'm being helpful."

"Very helpful," agreed Uzumaki, ducking a nod at Dr. Sarutobi. "Thank you, sir."

"Very good," said Sarutobi, heading back out of the office.

When his footsteps had faded in the distance, Uzumaki turned, holding his arm out for Sakura.

She stalked past it to the door.

-

"I still don't see why I had to come," she said as they sat in lunch-time traffic fifteen minutes later. Uzumaki had the AC cranked up to full volume to combat the noon sunlight beating through the windshield and had an oldies radio station playing in the background, but the car still seemed to yawn with awkward silence. "You know Japanese." She paused here to shoot him an evil eye so that he would pick up on the fact that he should feel guilty for concealing this fact.

"And even if you didn't," she continued, "the almighty ANBU must have its own translators."

"Probably," said Uzumaki offhandedly, accelerating slightly as the light finally turned green. He glanced over at her. "But I thought you wanted to get out of the lab."

Her breath caught despite herself. She stared at his profile, heart beating hard. Did he know? He was ANBU; he could have looked at her record. But if he had, he wouldn't be helping her go into the field. He would have been very careful to make sure she stayed in the lab so he wouldn't get into trouble.

Wouldn't he?

A street sign outside the window caught her attention. "Hang on," she said. "I thought we were going to the ANBU building?" That was where ANBU agents usually interrogated people involved in murder investigation. And Yamanaka, despite her tears yesterday, was a suspect in Nara's murder. Significant others always were.

"To talk to Yamanaka?" Uzumaki glanced over at her. "How do you expect her to get there? No way does she have the money to waste on a cab. And you can't make a pregnant woman walk that far."

"Maybe she should have thought about that before she got pregnant," muttered Sakura, but it was a tired, knee-jerk response. She stared out the window at the increasingly shabby, familiar streets, and didn't notice the look that Uzumaki shot her.

-

"Tell me again why you need to talk to Yamanaka again?"

Naruto looked at Dr. Haruno as they walked away from the SUV. It was the first thing she had said since her bitter words on the drive to Konoha-cho. It occurred to him that perhaps, despite her nothing-can-touch-me attitude, she had been even more uncomfortable with their silence than he had.

Sasuke had been like that. He measured his words out like they were gold, too precious to be given to other people, but when he was the one being given the silent treatment, he couldn't stand it. He would find some way to nudge the other person into talking–usually Naruto and usually by some insult muttered under his breath.

The memory tugged Naruto's lips upward. His eyes refocused on Haruno and saw her eyeing him with suspicion-narrowed eyes.

"I see," she said. "This is more of a personal indulgence."

Naruto blinked at her. As she cocked an eyebrow, putting a hand on her hip, her meaning sank into him.

"What?" he exclaimed. "N-n – Haruno, no! Are you crazy?" His eyes swirled with the very inappropriateness of what she was insinuating. "She just lost her boyfriend!"

"Who she may or may not have murdered," said Haruno, turning her attention back to the tenement building they were approaching.

In the glaring noon day sun, her pale pink hair shone so light it looked almost colorless, like Yamanaka's. Naruto studied it, thinking of the pregnant young woman and the one walking in front of him.

Dr. Haruno spoke so unforgivingly of Yamanaka, like somehow she was offended by her. While he was willing to admit, despite how much his adoptive mother had drilled into him never to call a woman such a thing, that Haruno was a bit of a bitch, he had figured her to be a defensive bitch. Like the women he'd undergone ANBU training with, who were icy and hard-eyed because everyone doubted their rights to be in ANBU and they had something to prove. Dr. Haruno was one of the only females he'd seen in the lab; probably she had to jealousy guard her right to be there. Especially if all the ANBU agents she'd worked with had treated her as cavalierly as Kankurou seemed to have done.

Still, during basic training, Naruto had had a nightmare drill instructor, Anko, who was always an inch away from kicking the guys' asses while cheering on any female recruits. Dr. Haruno, he had expected, would be the same, would be sympathetic and protective of the Yamanaka girl, not act like she had some sort of personal vendetta against the woman…

Naruto looked again at the anthropologist's back as she led the way up the stairs of Yamanaka's tenement building. It was tensed, the knob at the base of her neck protruding slightly as she rolled her shoulder blades. Perspiration had glued a few pink strands of hair from her ponytail to the nape of her neck. They curled there, trembling slightly, as though they were as tense as Haruno herself.

He licked his lips. Then, as he tasted the sweat from his own upper lip, he realized what he had done and how closely he had been watching Haruno.

Quickly, he stepped past her on the landing to Yamanaka's door. He fixed his eyes on it and knocked once, twice, three times.

It only took a few seconds for Yamanaka to open the door. Her eyes were as red as they had been the day before, but this time they were lined thickly with dark eyeliner and green eye shadow. She wore strappy heels, a tight miniskirt, and a plunging top under a sequined vest that was tight but just bulky enough that, had Naruto not seen her the day before, he wouldn't have realized today she was pregnant.

The girl let them in without saying anything, although her eyes went combatively to Dr. Haruno next to Naruto. As soon as they were both inside, she closed the door and went to the cracked vanity mirror in the corner of the room, leaning close to apply lipstick.

She seemed as unaffected today as she had been affected the day before. Naruto watched her with a more observant eye, watching the way her hands shook as she applied the light pink lipstick. Were they shaking with grief, because she still couldn't believe what had happened to Nara? With exhaustion, because even though he was gone, she still had to find some way to make money to live? With fear, because she had had some part in her boyfriend's death and now an ANBU agent was interrogating her?

He didn't believe Yamanaka had truly played a part in Nara's murder. Or he didn't want to, rather. She could have been one of the little girls at the orphanage he lived at in Konoha-cho before he was adopted, and he couldn't imagine arresting any of them. But he knew this district changed people – the proof was in front of him, in the exotic dancer get-up Yamanaka was wearing. The girls at his orphanage hadn't been sex toys when he knew them, but it would be idiotic of him to think that they had all escaped that fate. That any of them had, really. There were only so many ways for girls in Konoha-cho to survive.

Naruto forced himself to think objectively. He'd never worked one himself, but he knew a few agents who had investigated homicides in which exotic dancers were victims or suspects. There was almost always some sort of love triangle. If Yamanaka had attracted the attention of another man, Nara might have discovered it and tried to exact retribution. Maybe the men had fought, and Nara had been killed. Maybe Yamanaka had helped, if she preferred the new man to Nara. There were numerous possibilities.

He sighed. "We have a few more questions, Ms. Yamanaka."

To distract himself from the uneasiness roiling in his stomach, he listened to Dr. Haruno translate his words.

Her Japanese was as clipped and deliberate as it had been the day before, nothing like Yamanaka's faster speech or the soft cadence he could remember Mikoto-kaa-san's voice using. Haruno spoke it like she was reading off bone measurements, clinical and emotionless. She had probably learned it at a university out of a textbook. He wondered why she would have chosen to learn Japanese, instead of some other language, when she seemed to hate Konoha-cho so much, with her constant grimaces as they walked through the streets.

As she listened to Haruno's translation, Yamanaka's lips pressed tighter and tighter.

"I understand we upset you yesterday," Naruto pressed, noting her reluctance. "But these questions are very important."

As Haruno translated, the girl gave a sharp jerk of a nod. She put down her lipstick.

"You said the last time you saw him was about two weeks ago?"

"Yes," Yamanaka said in Japanese after a moment. "He was going to a job. He had started taking a lot of them, after I told him about the baby.

"And you're sure you don't know who he was working these jobs for?" Naruto pressed, repeating a question that she had evaded the day before.

The question upset her, that much was clear from the sudden tremor of her eyelids, but he needed to know. He repeated the question as she turned away. He made his voice unyielding.

Dr. Haruno translated perfectly, right down to his hard tone, but she made an addition to her translation. "If you don't tell us who he was working for, you will be arrested for obstruction of justice."'

Yamanaka's eyes went wide. Naruto barely managed to keep his own from doing the same.

The girl turned toward him. "Onegai," she whispered. "I have to live here. There's nowhere else for me to go if they find out I told you."

For the first time since they had entered the apartment, the vulnerability she had shown the day before was surfacing, her eyes filming over with tears.

Naruto steeled himself, barely hearing Haruno's emotionless translation. "We can protect you, Ms. Yamanaka, but we need to know."

She closed her eyes. Her hand went to her stomach, clenching in the fabric of the vest.

Then she stood up, going back to the mirror.

"Akimichi," she said in Japanese. "He worked for Akimichi-gumi." She lifted her tube of lipstick. "Now please leave."

-

"So she's already so eager to get back to work," Haruno said as they stepped out of the stagnant air of the tenement building into the equally thick humidity of the street. "Doesn't seem like Nara's death affected her much."

Naruto's hackles rose at her criticism. Had she not seen how emaciated Yamanaka was, how much she must need money to feed herself and the baby growing inside her?

He forced his anger down. Somehow, he managed to keep his voice steady instead and professional.

"I understand that I asked you to come help me, Dr. Haruno. But if you ever mistranslate my words the way you did today, there will be…" He struggled to keep his voice and words appropriate. "…consequences."

Haruno returned his serious stare. Then she looked away, lips compressed into a white-tinged line, and slid on a pair of sunglasses. The lenses were green, darkening her eyes to almost the same dark green as the pair of stress balls that he had been playing with on her desk.

He had been intrigued by them, noting the sakura petals painted across them and wondering if she knew that they were her namesakes. For all that Konoha-cho was looked down on by the rest of Fire Country, for several years, Japanese names had been all the rage throughout the country. Naruto had thought, perhaps with an unfair amount of bitterness, that her parents had probably named her without even having a clue what the word meant.

But now he found himself remembering the last time he had seen her lips pressed so tightly together that the skin around them turned white. It had been when he first met her a few days ago, as they lifted Nara's remains onto her examination table. He had thought that her expression had been because of the smell of decomposing flesh, but now he remembered how her deathly pale colleague had said something about the cho-ho who had found the remains.

He remembered how Sasuke, whenever they were around Uchiha family members, had seemed to turn to stone, his jaw clenched and his eyes like fire in his granite face.

Naruto stopped in the parking lot, a few feet away from his SUV.

"Dr. Haruno," he heard himself say.

She turned, arching a pink brow.

"Are you from Konoha-cho?"

A/N: Comments on what you think of Naruto's point of view and of Sakura and Naruto's interaction would definitely be welcomed.