Chapter Ten:

Nobody could beat Tsukiyomi.

It was fact.

Sakura had heard it whispered between nurses as they left Sasuke's room after his encounter with Itachi after the failed invasion. It had been stated by Tsunade as she woke the Uchiha from his coma, the only person to even have a chance of waking him in the entire world.

Itachi had explained to her that his use of it on her was meant to be nonlethal; that, combined with his minimal chakra, had allowed her to wake each morning, stomach rolling uncomfortably.

But she no longer wished to view his youth like a movie.

Not when it was a tragedy that she knew the end of.

So she fought.

The guards had gotten sloppy about using cuffs on her and switched to chakra suppressants, injected into her before each interrogation session. What they didn't realize was that she was a medic, capable of hastening her metabolism with even just a tiny bit of chakra at her command. It was hardly enough to use to heal her, even before each session when the suppressants had worn off, but it was enough to help her attempt to fight Tsukiyomi.

As she threw herself against his genjutsu, Itachi watched silently, only occasionally forcing her to watch certain highlights of the interactions. Hating every moment of it, she listened as Itachi grew further isolated, even from Sasuke who she now knew he had adored, leaving only Shisui as his confidant.

She tried every trick that she could, every little nuance she had learned from studying with Orochimaru, even going so far as to try and raise her inner presence which had thrown out Ino during the preliminaries to the third round of the chuunin exams. All of them failed, but she wasn't going to be deterred.

Sharingan or not, Tsukiyomi was a genjutsu, which meant that there had to be a way to break it.

And thanks to Kumo, she had plenty of attempts.

The council had voted a week ago.

It was all very logical, Orochimaru knew. Their reasoning was sound, and even as he and the other Uzushio shinobi prepared for a war that they knew may come to them, depending on whether or not his apprentice broke under the merciless hands of the Kumo interrogators, he couldn't fully rationalize it.

Shiroyami Sakura and Uchiha Itachi, for all their value as shinobi of Uzushio, and all the risks of leaving them alive in the hands of Kumo's interrogators, were not to be retrieved. They were not to be rescued, they were not to be killed, their bodies were to be considered lost.

All very reasonable, all the best options available to them. If Orochimaru had bothered with probability outside of his foray into genetics, he would have been able to show that this outcome gave them the best odds.

Yet, there was something in him that could not accept the decision.

Very rarely did he choose to pursue a path that was completely unreasonable. He could probably count on both hands, maybe even one, the number of times he actively pursued that path, and nearly all of them had been prompted by Tsunade, Jiraiya, and Sarutobi.

(Seeking the Hokage's hat was one of them, but he could be forgiven a child's desperate wish for acknowledgement that turned into an adult's anger at always having to work three times as hard to get even a pittance of what others received from their fellows.)

(Killing Sarutobi was another, but that was a deep rage, an old hurt that still festered within, even as his arms were hale and whole now despite the sealing of his ninjutsu.)

Now, it seemed, he had another person to add to that list.

"You're going after her," Kabuto's voice said from the doorway, neither encouraging or judging. "Even against the council's wishes?"

Orochimaru picked up Kusanagi, sliding the sword in his sash. Going up against all of Kumo with nothing but taijutsu, kenjutsu, and genjutsu was suicidal, but he had slipped through the shadows long before many shinobi were born, and that was something that nobody could take from him. He could, and would, rescue his apprentice, the first who had actually sought him out instead of being placed with him or being handpicked for his own purposes. Shiroyami had come to him out of spite, seeking to rub her distaste for the Uchiha in the man's face, but she had stayed out of genuine interest. Somewhere in those weeks that had turned to months, she had come to respect and, dare he hope, appreciate him.

"You have a method of undoing the seals?" his former spy pressed, ignoring his non-answer. "I wasn't aware that you had come up with a counter."

Vaguely, Orochimaru gestured to the corner he thought of as his desk, the place where his precious scrolls of notes were stored. He had worked out a counter a month or two ago after careful examination of the seals that adorned his skin and several discussions with jounin trained in Uzushio about seals. They were simple in their construction, but the full array that restricted him to the citadel and bound the bulk of his chakra was delicate and complicated.

It was a good thing he had always been good at fiddly work.

Kabuto unrolled one of the scrolls and hummed as Orochimaru tied back his hair with a strip of leather. While he let his hair fall loose for most of his life, it had always felt more practical to bind it up and out of the way. Normally, it was a bit of a shield, a way for him to hide from the glares of those he had stood shoulder to shoulder with, but now, in order to take his apprentice back, he needed Kumo to know that they had angered one of the sannin beyond what was wise.

"These will probably work," Kabuto said after a long moment of silence. "Let me know if you need me to ink them. We should probably do so right by the gates, so they don't have time to pursue us before we make a getaway."

Turning to face the silver-haired medic, Orochimaru raised an eyebrow. "We?"

"She's my best medic," Kabuto said with a shrug. "And if she's been interrogated for the last few weeks, having the only other medic on hand when you get her out might be useful."

"It took you this long to figure out the seals?" A flat voice asked from outside the window. "You're slipping, snake."

"Akasuna," the sannin acknowledged, putting aside Kabuto's surprising show of favor towards his apprentice. "What brings you here?"

"The same reason you're gearing up as if you're about to start a war," the puppet-master said dryly. "Your apprentice is...surprisingly tolerable."

"He's been teaching her poisons," Kabuto volunteered. "I figured out of all of us, he was best suited to teach botanically based poison."

"And you, Hoshigaki?" Orochimaru asked, sensing the former Kiri shinobi outside the window behind Sasori. "Are you somehow connected to Shiroyami?"

"Someone in this little group of missing-nin ought to remember that she's not the only one Kumo has right now," the tall man grumbled. "Uchiha's a pretty decent partner; I'd rather not have to find a new one."

This might actually work, Orochimaru realized, his head already whirling through possibilities, calculating different routes towards their single goal. For the first time in a long, long while, he was not alone in his goal.

Sakura had thought she was hardened against the story of the Uchiha Massacre.

Everyone whom she had come to know through Itachi's memories was going to die. Everyone, but Sasuke, though it might have been kinder, if he had been warped and twisted from a cheerful little boy into the teenager who had sought out Orochimaru before the man had been brought to his knees by the mere thought of a home.

Even Uchiha Shisui, perhaps the only Uchiha to be capable of matching Itachi, and even surpassing him.

She had wondered, lying in the cell, trying to sleep, how Itachi had managed it. How her genin-sensei, who had always been so calm and collected, had brought himself to kill the cousin who was almost like another brother.

Now she didn't need to wonder.

Throwing herself against the jutsu, she refused to watch the waters of the Nakano river flow steadily away, taking their burden with them. Desperately, she struggled to break Tsukiyomi's hold, not wanting to know another moment.

Because, she had been struggling to reconcile the facts with the Itachi she had come to know through her Tsukiyomi sessions. How could this man, who had been desperately working with the Hokage, who loved the village more than anything but Sasuke, come to destroy an entire clan in one night?

Watching the younger Itachi shatter as his sharingan spun and evolved into the now familiar pattern, she had her answer.

"The sharingan, at least the mangekyo, has the ability to flawlessly memorize moments," the older Itachi said as Sakura's form slumped to the ground, her paltry amount of chakra, scrounged from hastening her metabolism of the chakra inhibitors, gone. "Even now, as I activate the mangekyo, I see the river for a brief moment."

Numbly, she watched as Itachi returned to the Uchiha compound, returned to them knowing that his best friend was dead, dead by his own hands. She watched him splinter under the interrogation, under the hostility from both sides.

She wanted to shake the elders and the Sandaime as they discussed destroying the entire Uchiha clan, even the children, in front of Itachi. How Danzo showed no shame in complaining that they had lost access to Shisui's sharingan, and its power to change the very minds of his opponents. There had been hope then, hope that the coup could be averted even if diplomatic talks failed.

The genjutsu ended just as Itachi was meeting Danzo in a secluded area, and she knew what was going to happen. There was no other way for it to progress, not with what she had seen thus far of Itachi's character, of the councilman's…

Shoving the vomit down, Sakura sat up, trembling as she dashed a lone tear away from her eyes as they locked on Itachi's, her sensei sitting placidly in his chains, and she knew now what was going on.

Sasuke...it was always about Sasuke. About protecting him, about giving him a way to be proud of his clan even though they would have been branded as traitors had Itachi not murdered them all. And everyone kept turning to a thirteen year old whose world was crumbling.

He met her gaze, eyes a dull black compared to the red and black she had grown accustomed to. There was no emotion in them but resignation.

Sakura had no hope that there would be a rescue for them. She had resigned herself to death by the hands of her interrogators one day when they pushed too hard, too fast. It was the price of being a shinobi, especially when she had sworn herself to a small village barely being resurrected. But her sensei, Uchiha Itachi who had been strong enough to kill his entire clan, was broken enough to accept his captivity as a punishment. A way of atoning.

You did nothing wrong, she wanted to tell him as she met his resigned eyes. They were wrong to ask it of you, wrong to make you place one loyalty above another…

When Itachi had begun showing her the lead up to the massacre, she had wondered why. Now, Sakura felt she had a fairly good guess. She would have to see the night of the massacre, see the inevitable meeting between Sasuke and Itachi, but she thought that she understood her sensei just a little bit better.

She was lying on the cold stone floor when the door opened, allowing bright light to shine through. Unbothered, Sakura stayed put. The guards would fetch her if it was time for her interrogation session, or the cold water of the suiton jutsus used to wash both them and the cell would crash down on her. There was no use fussing and fretting over whatever would happen.

A gentle hand touched her, and she flinched.

There had been no footsteps to announce someone's movement. While that was commonplace for shinobi, the guards didn't bother. Prisoners didn't have the ability to fight back, so what was the use of silencing your movements? Immediately, she tensed, afraid of what new tortures the interrogators might have dreamed up. She was holding on, but only because she had been able to dull her nerves, preventing her from feeling the pain they were inflicting until the moment before the medic started to heal the damage.

Much more, and she was afraid that she would break, despite her resolve.

The touch came again, the gentleness entirely foreign after the uncaring professionalism of the medics and the harsh cruelty of the interrogators. Warily, she opened her eyes, wondering if she dare dispel the genjutsu she was trapped in.

Her shishou was kneeling next to her, with something almost like concern in his eyes. "Shiroyami?" he murmured, and Sakura's heart froze.

They knew her name.

Slowly, she tried to control her breathing, not letting them show they had gotten to her. Unblinking she stared back at Orochimaru, keeping her emotions pushed down as far as she could. They may know her name, know her teacher, but they may not yet know about Uzushio.

"Did they do something to her mouth?" Orochimaru asked someone over his shoulder, in the direction of her sensei, but Sakura dared not trust this not to be an incredibly detailed genjutsu. Even Itachi's Tsukiyomi, as painful as it had been to watch the events of the massacre, was kinder than this.

(She resolved that if she survived Kumo's interrogators, she would remember this feeling for her genjutsus. Fear and pain might break something, but nothing was more destructive than hope.)

"You're safe, Shiroyami. We've come for you," the snake sannin continued, reaching down to touch her again, his cool fingers gentle against her bare skin, rough and sensitive after yesterday's raiton-based interrogation and days of captivity. "Can you talk?"

Slowly, she moved out from under Orochimaru's touch and turned her back on the door, lying almost on top of her hands as she suppressed her chakra in time with curling her fingers into the release seal. "Kai" she whispered, hoping that the interrogators wouldn't notice. "Kai."

Nothing seemed to change, and she despaired as she felt Orochimaru's touch again. This time, she took a moment to study him before turning her head aside. His seals were missing, when the clothes he was wearing should have bared the most of them to the world. It had to be a genjutsu, one she wasn't able to break.

Movement beyond Orochimaru's shoulder drew her attention, and she sucked in a breath as she saw Itachi being helped over to her by Hoshigaki Kisame. Her sensei's head turned towards her, and she flinched instinctively, expecting the red and black of the sharingan, but it was only the dull black of Itachi's natural eyes that met her own. He murmured something to Hoshigaki, and the pair turned towards her.

Scrabbling backwards, she shuffled herself away on hands and feet until the wall was at her back. Desperately, she reached for her chakra. This can't be real, she screamed into the silence of her own head. They can't be real.

Itachi let go of Hoshigaki, falling to his knees in front of her with a painful wish, two fingers extended to tap her forehead. "It's real," he said, voice cracked and broken from disuse. "They came for us. It's not a genjutsu."

"Sensei?" she whispered, hardly daring to believe him.

"We're going home, Shiroyami," Itachi murmured, resting his forehead against her shoulder. "Home to Uzushio." HIs words were muffled against her shoulder, and she looked to Orochimaru for confirmation.

"Your other senseis are here too," he said quietly. "They've been useful in convincing the Raikage to consider a treaty with the citadel. Kabuto will want to see you as soon as he can though."

"Chakra inhibitors," she mumbled, the first sentence she had spoken since the day she had woken up in the cell. Her mouth felt dry and stiff, the words clumsy on her tongue. "Raiton yesterday."

"I see," Orochimaru nodded to Hoshigaki before moving aside so that the bigger man could carefully pick Itachi up, half carrying him as the dark haired man slumped against his former partner. Sakura found herself being scooped up in the snake sannin's arms as he carried her out of the cell, bypassing the interrogators with a sneer as he headed down the hallway as if he knew where he was going.

"Rest," he advised, shifting her so that one hand could cover her eyes. "We're going to get you situated in a hotel, and then we'll see about patching you back up."

When she woke up again, she was tucked into a comfortable futon in what appeared to be a hotel.

Groggily, Sakura pushed herself upright, reveling in the softness of the covers around her and the light colors of the room itself. She was alone, which caused a momentary panic before she felt the chakra signatures on the other side of the door.

As it opened, she looked up, only to find Kabuto standing there, slight smile on his face. "If you hadn't survived this, I would have resurrected you to kill you myself," he informed her as he crossed the room to kneel next to her. "Don't move; I'd like to see how my healing held."

Obediently, she held still as he ran his hands, coated in green colored chakra, over her. As he withdrew, he had a satisfied look on his face. "Your nerves were starting to look a bit frayed. I did what I could for them, but you'll have to let them recover on their own. No disconnecting them for at least a week."

At her puzzled look, he smirked. "What, you thought I wouldn't be able to tell how you managed to withstand torture for this long?"

"Why…" she croaked, before slamming her mouth shut. There was no way she was going to be able to communicate until she had something to drink.

Reaching for a pitcher of water resting nearby, Kabuto poured a small amount into a cup and handed it carefully to her. "Not too much now. They did an...adequate job of keeping you from starvation and dehydration, but you'll need to slowly work your way up to proper meals. Do you feel up for a bath, or do you want to sleep more?"

Sakura wrinkled her nose. She was still in her prison scrubs, and the very mention of a bath was enough to drive all thoughts of sleep out of her mind. "Bath," she tried, and emboldened with her success, she tried again to voice her original question. "Why did you come?"

"Did you really think that we were going to just let you stay there?" Kabuto said, straightening up. "You have more allies than you think, and let's just say the Raikage was rather receptive to a trade treaty with the citadel when it was offered by a trio of S-ranked missing-nin. The bathroom is through the door on the left. Someone will be in the other room, but if you're in there for too long without making noise we'll come check on you."

When she was finished scrubbing her skin of every last bit of prison grime, Sakura lowered herself into the warm bath with a sigh. It was so wonderful just to be warm and clean that she would never take it for granted again.

She's pruny and pink all over by the time the water starts to cool and she gets reluctantly out, but her towel's been strategically placed by the heater, so it's warm and fluffy as she wraps it around herself and heads to stand in front of the mirror.

Living in Uzushio was probably the best way to lose weight while still maintaining proper nutrient intake and preventing devastating calorie deficits. While they never went hungry, and always had enough to eat, they never had more. There were no sweets, no little extras to nibble on without thinking. Her excess fat had slowly faded away, replaced by muscle gained from long days of rebuilding, and then days of rebuilding and training. Some of that had withered now, muscle tone lost to her weeks of captivity, a victim of life in a prison cell, much like how her previously tanned skin had turned porcelain white without hours of working in the sun to maintain it.

Sakura catalogued the changes mentally, starting from her toes and rising to the top of her head, counting hollows that weren't there before, even as she skipped her eyes, afraid of what they might reveal. This still didn't feel real, even though she had felt Kabuto's chakra scanning her system, run the water in her shower so hot that it was almost scalding, just to prove to herself that it wasn't a genjutsu.

Leaning in closer to the mirror, she studied the roots of her hair. Somehow...they almost looked blonde. Like, Ino blonde, not Naruto blond, or the pink they had always been. Startled, she poked cautiously at the hairs.

They felt like hair. Looked like hair, felt like hair, smelled like the shampoo she had just used…

But now she was blonde.

Unsettled, she picked up the comb and began to work the snarls out of her hair. Kabuto might know, or Orochimaru. There had to be something about this documented in medical or scientific literature.

When she emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in the warm yukata that had been laid out for her, Kabuto was waiting. Giving her an approving nod, he gestured to the only other door in the room, which was standing open now.

The adjacent room seemed to be more of a common area, with a low table in the center, and a couch up against the wall. Hoshigaki and Itachi were seated around the table, which had food already set out on it. Itachi motioned for her to join them, and she slowly made her way over, brow furrowing as he coughed heavily into the sleeve of his yukata.

"I'm fine Shiroyami," Itachi murmured as the coughs subsided. "Don't fret."

"You will be fine," Kabuto corrected grouchily as he took his own seat. "Left untreated, that simple cough would have become a respiratory illness that could have killed you. Your lungs are vulnerable, Uchiha. Nothing that would keep you from active duty, so long as you seek proper medical attention when you have a respiratory infection."

Sakura was about to protest the irritableness of his tone when she remembered Kimimaro, whose slow journey towards death had begun with a respiratory illness. She couldn't blame Kabuto for being a little overly sensitive, since Kimimaro's death should have theoretically been preventable.

Itachi only nodded his head gracefully and picked up his chopsticks. Following his example, Sakura looked at the choices in front of her.

Invalid food, she thought with a grimace, but helped herself to a few of the dishes. All of it made specifically for systems recovering from low calorie intake. None of it was particularly appetizing, but she didn't fancy spending the rest of her day hugging the toilet bowl as her stomach reminded her why this diet was necessary.

Kabuto snickered, and she shifted so she could elbow him in the ribs before pasting a smile on her face and heaping his dish with a serving of rice porridge.

It still didn't feel real, being able to sit and converse freely like this, or at least as freely as shinobi ever did outside of their homes, but Sakura felt like she could get used to it, could remember how to live life outside a prison cell. Kumo had held her captive and tortured her for less than a month, but it had seemed like a year. Experiences like that left a mark, no matter how hard you tried to forget them.

But, she thought, looking around the table. I have my senseis, my shishou, and my friends waiting for me back home. I can get through this.