Warnings: Swearing, Alcohol Use, Sensitive Themes
Please enjoy the chapter!
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Chapter 6: Garden of Eden
When they arrived at the hotel, their presence did not arouse any suspicion—even with Sasuke's conspicuous weapon. Any worry that its blade might have brought was easily remedied by their good looks and acting skills. The woman at the desk even commented on what a lovely couple they made.
As they opened the door to their room, Sakura took in the setting and froze.
"Uhhh…" she audibly hesitated.
The situation made sense, but that did not make her like it.
Sasuke snorted, "Quit stuttering—you can have the bed. I probably won't be sleeping much, anyway."
Sakura's shoulders dropped in relief.
Of course Sasuke would not sleep much. He probably would not find rest until he killed Itachi.
"I'm going to get some supplies from around the area tonight," he announced, "Is there anything you need?" Sasuke tried to hide it, but Sakura caught his eyes wandering to her back where she had been injured. Attentiveness was definitely a gift of the sharingan.
"Healing ointment and gauze. I already have some, but I'd rather save my supplies for when we're on the go. My wounds aren't bad enough to waste my quality materials on, anyway," Sakura explained as she walked toward the bed. She found herself yearning to collapse into the undisturbed blankets; they carefully wrapped the mattress like a present.
Sasuke inquired after assessing her appearance, "How long before you make a full recovery?"
Sakura contemplated for a moment before answering, "If I can get the supplies sometime tonight, I should be ready by late tomorrow afternoon." The wounds on her back may have been ugly, but they were simple to take care of in comparison to what she could have walked away with—if she was lucky enough to walk away at all at that point.
"So, you're not useless after all," he chuckled. Without waiting to hear her response, he disappeared out the door and shut it soundlessly behind him.
A hollow thud reverberated as Sakura's kunai sunk into the wood of the door, landing right where his head should have been. Sasuke was smart to have taken leave so quickly after his redundant provocation. Surely, the sound of the dagger making home in the door would give him something to smirk about as he walked through town tonight.
Shaking off Sasuke's petty insult, Sakura turned around and hurled herself at the bed without caring if her head hit the pillow. He could wake her when he returned.
Her labored breathing came to a halt as she saw him zip across the clearing. He was coming for her at long last. His determination shone so rigidly on his face that he was certainly going to kill her. And that was okay. She deserved it, after all. She would be able to rest more easily when her dues had been paid. He had every reason to hate her after—
Sakura woke with a startle to find her hand lazily swatting at whoever had the nerve to bother her at this hour. Whatever hour it was, it was too early.
"Sakura, I brought the things you requested along with some food."
"Ughhnn," she groaned. She hoped that her growl passed as coherent enough for him to stop pestering her. She heard footsteps cross the room and sighed a breath of relief at her success.
However, her comfort was short-lived. Without warning, sunlight flooded the room and invaded the lids of her eyes before she could shield herself from the sun's rident assault.
"Sakura, it's the afternoon," he chided with an audible smirk, "I never knew you were so lazy."
Her eyes snapped open as she forced herself to look alert; she would not appear lazy in front of anyone, but especially not in front of Sasuke. He hardly needed more fuel with which to berate her; she refused to allow him such pleasure.
"I'll still be ready to go by late this afternoon," Sakura stated icily. She would not be a burden. In fact, over the course of their time together, she found herself driven to showcase how much of a success she had become. She might have lacked titles to go with it, but she was skilled where and when it counted.
Blinking the urge to sleep from her eyes, Sakura took in the room around her—it was bright with orange sunlight glazing the plain walls and warm bed. As Sasuke gazed out the large window to her left, his face wore a serene lull of comfort and content. It was so peaceful that it made Sakura want to lower every inner shield that she had built over the past five years. But, the wisdom that came with knowing better was another thing she had acquired over that span of time.
His serenity was a deceptive lure used to weaken his enemies just before he bared his poisonous fangs. He was a volatile snake at his core.
Sakura broke their precarious silence. "Sasuke, I'll go patch myself up in the bathroom. Why don't you catch some sleep? I'd hate for you to hold us back from exhaustion down the road." She could have omitted the last line, but she knew that he would ignore her if she left it at a suggestion.
Without taking his eyes away from the window, Sasuke spoke, "You know I can't sleep. I won't be able to sleep until I see him close his eyes for good. And besides, haven't you heard? There's no rest for the wicked."
She silently agreed with him. Chances were that Sasuke would not know the meaning of restful sleep until the day he died. Sakura wondered if he secretly longed for that day—and she hoped that he did not actively seek it more than he let on. Not after what Naruto sacrificed in order for him to continue living.
Naruto. The two of them had always managed to make things more complex than they needed to be—anything from simple missions to the choices between life and death and murder. Now that Sasuke was back, all of the lines were blurred again.
"What was the last thing he said?" Sakura asked quietly before clarifying, "Naruto, I mean."
Sasuke chuckled. "He called me a bastard and his best friend. And then he dramatically insisted, 'This isn't the end.' Tch. Idiot." As usual, Sasuke thought he knew better when he did not.
"He may not have been the brightest, but he was the best friend any person could've ever hoped for," Sakura defended.
A weight was settling into the pit of her stomach and she did not like it. Talking about Naruto's final words and sacrifice awoke a sense of something that she had not felt to anyone in a long, long time: she felt indebted to Naruto. She was a guilty accomplice in what brought about the end of his liveliness. How would that alter the path that she had chosen up until this point?
Sasuke now scowled at the outside world. "I never asked for friends."
"Isn't it unfortunate that, over the course of wanton life, we don't always get what we want?" Sakura asked aloud. In a different time and place, this might have implied that she was his friend and he had to deal with it. However, in the present, she was only echoing the past in more ways than one.
Her words were so similar to his that she found her arm hairs standing on end. Perhaps Itachi had been right, after all. Sasuke would probably unhinge if he knew whose words she had used to berate him.
A darker side of her wanted to see what that would look like.
"All in due time," she reminded herself.
Sasuke scoffed, "Why wait to get what you want when you can just take it?" He said it like it was the most obvious discrepancy in the world.
"Because not all things can simply be taken, Sasuke."
When she was a child, she waited to receive Sasuke's love—that was something that could not be taken. Over time, this want faded into the background of her mind and eventually dissolved into her insanity's all-consuming abyss.
His love never came and here she was waiting to behold the tsukuyomi instead—she waited for yet another feeling that could not be taken. She sought to experience the death of reality in the form of more pain than the human mind could handle. Through death, she might remember what it was like to be alive again. She wanted to push herself over the edge just to see if she could survive the fall.
"Anything that can't be taken isn't worth wanting," Sasuke retorted.
Sakura had no will to provide a counterargument for this one and decided to leave him be. They would always be different; this was just one of many instances where that stark difference was underscored in their words more blatantly than usual.
Sakura's mellifluous laugh tinkled in the tense air. "Believe what you will—not that you wouldn't anyways. I may have changed a lot since we last met, but it seems that you haven't changed at all. Just as I expected." She waved her hand at him before he could get offended. "It's just who you are, Sasuke. I'm going to take care of my wounds. Why don't you catch that nap you were telling me about?"
A devious grin consumed Sakura's features at her own question. She tried to hide it, but she had never honed a strong poker-face. Scanning the room for an escape route, she noticed a sack on the nightstand next to her—it likely contained her food and supplies. With the celerity of a well-trained shinobi, she grabbed the sack and darted for the bathroom. As quickly as she arrived, she closed the door behind her.
Every part of her wanted to sit down for a moment and mull over their conversation, but she knew that she had a lot of work to get done in a short period of time. Sakura took a deep breath and resolved to finish her work as quickly as possible. Grateful that the sink was surrounded by a spacious counter, she spilled out the contents of the bag onto its surface.
Out tumbled an apple, a tin of healing ointment, a roll of body bandages, a container of lukewarm beef ramen, and chopsticks. Sakura lifted the apple and took a hearty bite without bothering to inspect its health—she had woken up hungry and she could not resist the temptation to feel its skin break beneath her ravenous teeth. It took only a few short moments for Sakura to devour the apple down to its core. Setting the core back down on the counter, she then ate the contents of the beef ramen until she felt sufficiently full.
Having fed herself, she began to remove all of her clothing in order to inspect her wounds in the mirror. Throughout her assessment, she found that Itachi had littered her body with bruises, scrapes, and shallow cuts. However, those wounds were inconsequential compared to what she found on her back: the poison from the kunai had killed all of the skin cells with which it had come into contact. Luckily, it seemed that her muscular tissue had been spared beyond the simple cutting power of the blades.
Sakura's eyes widened as she recognized the purpose of the poison's mechanism. If she ever wanted to doubt her own medical training, now was the time. However, Tsunade had told her about rare poisons that worked as this one did.
This poison killed the skin with the intent to infiltrate the body so that it would be delivered to the bloodstream even if the blade failed to cut deeply enough. Its purpose was to delve through to the subcutaneous tissues containing the blood vessels supplying the skin. Since it did not damage anything else, this poison was clearly meant for one purpose: to incapacitate the victim, but keep them alive and relatively unharmed. If she had allowed it to stay in her bloodstream, it probably would have done nothing more injurious than putting her to sleep.
"Why would he want to keep me alive?" Sakura quietly murmured to herself as she stared wide-eyed at the three purple gashes splashed across her back.
This discovery was to her advantage, but it still managed to put her every nerve on alert.
Attempting to shake off the settling anxiety, she reached both of her hands around her lower back and allowed them to glow with her green healing chakra. The cooling sensation eased her pain away and calmed some of her tension.
Itachi only leaves people alive when he has a purpose for them.
That line scratched through her head like a broken record over and over again as she spent the next two hours mending the ugly wounds that decorated her back. And then, it replayed for another hour after that while she carefully bandaged her torso. She did not want to reverse any of her hard work as they travelled over the upcoming days, so she was especially attentive to her wrapping technique.
As Sakura began to dress herself again, she had the unsettling sense that she was going to learn more about Itachi Uchiha than she had ever been interested in knowing. She knew that, sooner than later, she would find out why those daggers had been tipped with the intention to contain rather than the intention to kill.
Authoress's Note:
Hi, everybody! The poll regarding preferred weekly posting time is still up on my page, so please participate if you have any preference. :) The current consensus is Wednesdays, so I intend to post weekly on Wednesday evenings for now.
Also, I just realized that my line breaks weren't transferring properly from my Word documents and realized that some of my transitions probably made no sense in previous chapters due to this... My apologies! I'm working on fixing it now.
Thank you very much for reading!
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