Chapter 11

Sakura woke slowly, consciousness an elusive state that she reached for through murky dreams and visions. Finally mustering up the energy to open her eyes, she found herself in a cave, a smokeless fire sending eerie shadows dancing on the walls. For the moment, she seemed to be alone, though she saw a pack lying by the fire and felt beneath herself a traveling futon she most definitely didn't own. Someone must have saved her from…the explosion, she remembered, caused by her own strangely fluctuating chakra.

Running a quick self-scan, Sakura found that the surplus chakra that had been crackling merrily through her veins for the past few days was gone, in its place a gnawing void in the center of her chest. As if bringing attention to it made it stir, Sakura nearly doubled over in pain as a ravenous hunger pulsed in her chest. Closer to her center than her stomach, it didn't seem to be for food or drink, yet gnawed at her soul with the emptiness of it. It robbed her of breath, threatened to take over—Inner! She called out desperately, and, feeling her stir, shoved the overwhelming sensation at her alternate ego before it took over.

What the—oh, Kami! Alright, let me try to deal with this, but—fuck, this is intense. Sugar, you better find a solution quick or else I'm not gonna be much help to you ever again.

Sakura sent a vague sense of apology at Inner for making her deal with the awful sensation, but she needed her wits about her. She'd been saved, or captured, by an unknown entity. She had a suspicion, based mostly on the vague recollection of green eyes beneath a sweep of magenta, but was wary in case that had been a dream. Or in case it wasn't.

In response to her apology, Inner sent back a grumbling acknowledgement that had an alarming note of strain running through it, and a mental door between them seemed to slam shut. The relief was instantaneous, though she could still feel echoes of that aching emptiness in the cavern of her soul. Chakra had carved a cave in her core like a spring of water. Short of filling it up again, Sakura didn't know how to make that new hunger go away—but neither did she know how to replenish what was lost. Chakra exhaustion didn't seem right, for she checked her reserves and found them at the same level as they'd been since Sakura had reached adulthood. Yet something was missing...She decided to shelve this problem for later. Right now, Sakura had faith in her alter ego; at least for a few days while she dealt with this.

Sitting up, Sakura checked over the rest of her body, noting with relief that aside from a couple tender blisters on her cheeks, forehead, and forearms from the blast and the scrape on her hip from the katana, she didn't have any injuries. The pink-haired medic didn't want to risk using her chakra and triggering another strange imbalance, so she decided to let them be.

She didn't hear the footsteps of the person who'd rescued her, so when the strange woman from the town entered the cave silently, Sakura's suspicions that she was a shinobi were confirmed. Upon seeing Sakura sitting up, the woman's eyebrows twitched briefly in surprise, before she gathered her face into unimpressed lines.

"What are you doing up—never mind that it shouldn't be possible—but you need rest!" With brisk energy, the woman walked over to Sakura's side and her hands glowed green. Sakura flinched back in distrust, and the woman seemed like she wanted to roll her eyes, if only the gesture wasn't too unrefined.

"Sit still, girl, and let me check you over. I didn't save you from that blast just to kill you now. Seems that hoping for some common sense was too much to wish for from my descendant."

Sakura's mouth was suddenly dry, and she stilled entirely, allowing the woman to run her hands over her body in a diagnostic jutsu.

"You…" Her voice was scratchy, and she had to clear her throat before continuing. "We're related?"

The woman gave her a look reminiscent of Tsunade's at a particularly dense intern.

"Well, deafness was certainly not a quality I passed on to you," She drawled, and now her tone uncomfortably reminded Sakura of Inner at her most sarcastic, "Surely you can see for yourself the physical markers, if you don't trust my word." She looked pointedly at the lightly singed strands of pink hair trailing over Sakura's shoulder.

"Well…I'm just surprised, because my parents never mentioned another female relative who was still alive," Sakura tentatively replied, wincing as a blister received a probing poke.

The older woman snorted, somehow making the action refined, and leaned back, apparently satisfied that Sakura wasn't about to keel over dead.

"Parents? I highly doubt either of them can be called that, considering you look remarkably like a grown-up version of my daughter's babe. Stolen in the middle of the night, though with the bloodline purges only having just finished, we thought someone had cottoned on and tried to eliminate us. We were only surprised that you were the only one killed. Amid the following escape...Well, Akane was killed shortly after and I didn't even consider you might be alive…" Her green eyes had a faraway look, and she seemed lost in the past as she trailed off. Then, with a visible effort, she focused back on Sakura and smiled tightly. "Clearly, I gave up on you for dead too soon, but it appears you grew up alright…as impossible as that seems."

Sakura's head swam. The implications—her parents…not her parents? She wanted to deny it, but the older woman's familiar features, the remnants of a deep grief lurking in the shadows of her eyes, and Sakura's own memories of her parents…Her father, sometimes looking at her with distant contemplation before clearing his face and beckoning her for a hug and a treat…Her mother, always so demanding and strict, overly protective to the extreme as if Sakura might be snatched away at any moment….The calculation in their eyes throughout her early childhood, mellowing out into relieved disappointment as puberty came and went with hardly a splash…

Sakura blinked back tears. Every child had some suspicions that they'd been adopted, that they had real, somehow magical parents that would whisk them away to a new, exciting life. Every child, that is, except Sakura.

She knew her parents loved her—or rather, had grown to love her, as some of her earlier childhood memories had featured a distant coolness and a crippling sense of insecurity that stemmed from this unconsciously felt rejection.

But so desperate had been her need to belong, to be loved, that she'd violently rejected any such suspicions where another child would have hung onto them like scraps of proof that they weren't really related. Where everyone else said that her hair was unnatural, she firmly believed it was the logical combination of white-blonde and red hair. While the other children had their parent's unconditional love whereas she needed to work hard for every scrap of affection, this was ok: it just meant her parents were concerned about her future as a shinobi and wanted her to succeed. And when the stress of living up to those expectations she set for herself had splintered her personality in two, creating Inner as a way to suppress all unacceptable behavior, Sakura was happy: perhaps now, it would be easier to make her parents happy with her. That it had ultimately worked, and their ill-concealed relief at her incredible self-control had relaxed into unconditional affection and later, true love, had been proof enough for Sakura that the split was a good thing.

The sudden deep, irrefutable knowledge that they hadn't been her parents at all made Sakura sway where she sat, and the other woman's (her grandmother!) eyes sharpened on Sakura as her face drained of color.

Then her gaze softened. "You didn't know," the stranger guessed. It wasn't a question.

Sakura shook her head numbly.

The older woman sat down closer to the fire and reached into its heat, retrieving a pot of near-boiling water. As Sakura struggled to process the knowledge she'd been denying her whole life, the pink-haired lady unearthed a tea set from her pack and set about steeping the leaves and pouring with practiced ease. Her movements were sensual, graceful, and Sakura suddenly had an image of the woman in her younger days. Such poise combined with the beauty in her delicate bone structure and the exotic hair color must have had people scrambling for her attention. Even now, with her skin made fragile and lightly wrinkled, and the blue veins in her hands protruding with age, the woman was lovely. A flare of old insecurity rose up in Sakura for a moment, and she yearned fiercely for that poise, the graceful manner. The thought came that if this woman had raised her, she might have turned out far different than the battle-hardened assassin she was.

Once the tea was ready, the older woman passed a cup to Sakura, unaware of the medic's inner observation.

"Drink. It will help center you," She said, and took a long sip from her own cup.

Sakura stared numbly at the cup in her hands. Steam danced in light swirls atop the liquid, scattering as a gust of her breath disturbed the surface. She inhaled, and the scent of green tea and blended herbs grounded her. Tasting it tentatively, she was surprised to find it well-balanced and delicate, with foreign flavors mixing pleasantly on her tongue and leaving a faintly bittersweet aftertaste.

"This is good," She said after a minute of staring into the fire in silence, "What is it?"

"Oh, a bit of this and a bit of that," the woman deflected, "Suffice it to say that it has been helpful in controlling our family's…gift…for a few centuries now."

Sakura glanced back up at the woman speculatively, "That's the second time you mentioned something about our family…is there a bloodline?"

Her relative chuckled low in her throat, a languid and surprisingly throaty sound. "You could say that. It's not a kekkei genkai, nothing so obvious- but when it does present—" and here she glanced meaningfully at Sakura's hair—"it's more useful than most of them put together. More dangerous too," she added.

Sakura nodded. "I'm guessing I don't have it? I think I would have noticed it if I had some sort of strange power."

The woman gave her a perplexed stare. "Well, normally, I'd say no, despite the physical marker," and here she tapped her own tightly gathered pink bun. "It's impossible that you would have survived through puberty without being guided through it, and there's never been an account of it presenting late…"

She took another swallow of her tea, and off handedly continued, "However, based on what I have seen today I believe it is safe to say that you do, in fact, possess it."

Sakura started, nearly spurting tea out her nose, and coughing. The lady waited patiently for her to collect herself, though Sakura could swear she saw an amused glint in her eye that belied the timing of the comment. "Excuse me, but—what?"

"Well, where do you think those explosions came from? And that death-based gift certainly doesn't run in our family. Even if you had a primary water affinity, too, our chakra reserves are never large enough on their own to create as much mist as you did, girl."

Sakura startled. Why did that sound familiar? More than that, the statement tugged at a half-forgotten memory from the battle.

"So it was you who were the fourth signature that I sensed," Sakura breathed, that particular piece falling into place.

"Indeed. Having seen the startling likeness of my granddaughter, how could I not at least confirm that she had the continuation of our bloodline?" The old lady answered.

As a matter of fact, Sakura thought, looking at her closer, she didn't look old enough to be a grandmother. She had a few wrinkles, but looked no older than fifty at the most, not nearly old enough to have a nineteen year old granddaughter, unless she'd been a child with child.

"How old are you?" she asked suspiciously, before pressing a hand to her mouth in mortification. The older woman only raised an eyebrow at her social gaffe. "I'm so sorry, that was horribly rude of me," she hastily backtracked. "I only meant, you look far too young to be a grandmother…" Sakura awkwardly trailed off, beet red.

The older woman not-snorted that delicate huff of air again, and eyed Sakura speculatively. "Straighten up child, I'm not going to bite. No granddaughter of mine is going to be a meek little wallflower…and the answer to your question has to do with our bloodline. My own mother had a theory it had something to do with the vitality we take in, but she died before she could finish her research, and I was never the studious type."

She paused, seeming to straighten out her thoughts. "Ah, so much you've missed out on learning…Have I mentioned that I'm stunned that you're still alive and sane, girl?" She peered at Sakura, as if the younger girl would go raving mad at any moment. When that didn't happen and instead Sakura nodded in response, the woman continued.

"Well, the most common term for it—well, I say common but since we're the last of our kind that hardly applies anymore—is the bloodline theft bloodline. Whoever came up with that had a terrible sense of humor, but alas, it's what we are stuck with," she said drily.

Sakura was intrigued and a little horrified, "bloodline theft? One of the most notorious crimes in the ninja world!?"

"When it involves kidnapping children or forced pregnancy, sure," scoffed the older lady, "But not in our case. For one, it only presents in the women of the family, as far as we can tell. Which is unusual in and of itself. For another, it only presents after puberty. Can you guess what it involves yet?"

Sakura thought for a minute. For a bloodline to only present in women was not only rare, it was unprecedented as far as she knew. Kunoichi, aside from having some chakra control advantages to compensate for lesser physical strength, rarely had any difference in missions from their male counterparts. The only exception where they dominated was seduction missions. Stereotypical, but no less true. This thought collided with the second clue about puberty, and Sakura blushed violently, rejecting the thought even as it came.

Her newly discovered grandmother, who had been watching her face and following her thought process, chuckled in amusement at her look of mortification.

"Oh, don't be so embarrassed. From the look of things, you are most certainly not a virgin. But yes, you guessed correctly. The secret to our bloodline, the one to end all bloodlines—is good old-fashioned sex."

Hearing the word come from a poised older woman Sakura was beginning to acknowledge really was her grandmother sent another wave of burning heat across her cheeks, and Sakura buried her face in her knees. The older woman laughed again, and patted her shoulder.

"Cheer up dear, it's not so bad. In fact, it should be a joyful thing, because rather than activating upon things like mortal danger or murder like those silly Sharingan, ours is triggered by profound sexual bliss. Or in other words, when you reach a perfectly emotionally and physically vulnerable alignment with someone else, your biggest power comes into play. A bit of a double-edged sword, that, but in the end it makes us stronger and our lives richer."

The old woman spoke with such a matter-of-fact tone that Sakura's blush began to subside and she listened closely to the explanation. It was intriguing, even if she nearly choked when her grandmother called the Sharingan, the most powerful kekkei genkai in the world, silly.

"Alright," she said slowly, "So it activates via…sex." Here she blushed lightly, but valiantly continued, "But what does it actually do? You mentioned bloodline theft, but surely it's impossible to literally copy the skill from the DNA of another being? At least, not permanently…" Her scientific mind raced with the possibilities.

"Ah, there's that analytical mindset. Skipped a generation in me but both my mother and yours had it," said the rose-haired lady approvingly. "You're close—we don't permanently steal their abilities, but rather siphon off any imbalances in their chakra to ourselves. I'm sure you noticed that your own chakra is naturally perfectly balanced—" Sakura nodded, and she continued,"—but for the vast majority of shinobi, especially powerful ones, that is not the case. So when we, to put it delicately, align, we balance out their own chakra while taking in the excess. The unexpected side effect that our shinobi ancestors discovered was that not only do we receive the overbalanced chakra, but also the affinities that lay within that chakra somehow remain isolated and intact during the transfer."

"So you can temporarily use the same affinity and gifts as the other shinobi, just until the borrowed chakra runs out," finished Sakura, excitedly. This was unprecedented!

"Indeed. Our own low, perfectly neutral reserves naturally adjust and, in the case of several competing chakra transfers, act as buffers."

The woman suddenly finished her drink in a last gulp and leaned forward towards Sakura, her expression serious. "Now, for the downside. It appears—" Here she cut herself off, looking around. Sakura too grew alert at the sudden movement, and gingerly extended her chakra sensing net.

…There! A chakra signature that was moving towards them quickly. Too quickly to be anything but a skilled shinobi. The older woman paled, and burst into action. She quickly tossed out the wet remains of the tea into the fire and packed the tea set into her bag, sealing up Sakura's futon and tossing that in there as well.

"It appears my enemy has caught up with me," she said wryly. "I must go, lest I alert them to your existence as well. That would be disastrous for all of us."

She looked over Sakura's face almost tenderly, hungrily memorizing every feature. Sakura did the same, grasping her hand and looking into dark green eyes shaped so like her own, the forehead almost as wide as Sakura's, a jaw more pronounced than her own and a pointier nose…But for those differences, it was her own face. How surreal, after all those years of longing for irrefutable proof of family, she would get it while on the run, from a stranger.

The woman spoke, urgently, even as the chakra signature was only two kilometers away. "Listen, my child, there is still so much you don't know, haven't been taught…above all, trust in your instincts, and when your body tells you to do something, you figure out a way to make it happen! Now, the most important downside of our gift—it unleashes a hunger within us, for more of that connection and chakra. Small minds would call this gift dark, devouring, immoral—but you must know, surely, that no weapon and no power in itself is truly evil. It all depends on how you use it. And grandchild, I sense a greater capacity for goodness in you than any of our line. But be careful! You mustn't deny the urges too long, else they will consume you! Above all," Here she pressed a firm kiss to Sakura's brow, "Have faith in yourself, as my granddaughter and the last of my line."

Gathering up a small bundle, she thrust it into Sakura's hands. "Here, the tea. It's been in our family for generations, use it sparingly—but it helps calm and control the urges. You'll understand in time."

She glanced over her shoulder, the chakra signature was nearly upon them. The old woman stood, the weight of her years visible in the set of her shoulders and the look in her eyes, if not on her deceptively youthful face.

Sakura swallowed past the sudden thickness in her throat and said, "Grandmother, perhaps I can help, surely two against one…"

"No, my child, with your bloodline untrained I'm afraid you'd be more a liability than anything," her grandmother dismissed firmly, but not unkindly. "Besides, you hardly have any chakra at all—and I'd far prefer it if this particular man didn't know another of my kind existed. He's not as much a danger to me, I'm not even sure he'd kill me if he could. But you—oh, I wouldn't trust him with you in a million years."

Sakura started to nod—then suddenly, the approaching chakra signature was close enough that she could discern the subtleties of it. And, surprisingly, recognize it.

"Jiraya-sama?" She breathed in surprise. Her grandmother's head whipped back at her sharply.

"You know him?"

Sakura was confused, "Yes, of course I do! He's my teammate's sensei…my shishou's teammate…"

At her words, the elder woman paled drastically, and closed her eyes against some inner blow. Then, bringing herself together, she exhaled a shaky breath and opened her eyes again.

"Konoha….should have figured," she laughed bitterly. "all this time, and I was the one being played."

She looked back at Sakura, who was staring at her in incomprehension. With sudden urgency, the woman stepped back towards the younger girl, clasping her hands.

"I suppose this changes little, in the end. Just know—don't trust your village. Their crimes go farther than I'd even dreamed… In the end, you are still my granddaughter. My last and only kin. Don't let anyone know you know me, or about our bloodline. Keep our secrets. Hoard your strength. And perhaps, one day, we will reunite for good….."

With these fierce words, filled with some unnamed emotion, the older lady smoothed a hand over Sakura's rose-colored hair and stood.

Sakura sensed something new bubbling up within her grandmother's chakra, the flavor twisting and turning until it snapped into place once more. She gasped. Were she to only use her chakra sense, she would have sworn that it was Jiraya in front of her! Seized by sudden doubt that this had all been a trick, Sakura sprang to her feet—only to calm down as she caught the faintest undercurrent of her grandmother's own barely-familiar chakra beneath it. In fact, once she calmed a bit, the chakra signature in front of her more resembled that of a close relative of Jiraya- quite similar, but with some of the older lady's own flavor that she could not fully suppress.

The woman in question created three clones. Two she sent east, one south in Jiraya's direction, and for herself, suddenly masked her chakra almost entirely, leaving but a teasing tendril, and turned to the west. She gave one last long, searching look to Sakura's face, seeming to etch every plane of it in her memory, and for a moment, her eyes revealed a deep, barely-leashed pain— pain that was decades old, losses of daughter and grandchild and likely so much more- and now torn raw again with this too-brief meeting, hope a sharper knife than any. Having the unexpected promise of family dangled before her face before reality snatched it away was making Sakura's own eyes feel tight; she couldn't imagine what it must be like for the older woman. Her respect for her grandmother's inner strength suddenly rose tenfold, for not only did the woman's iron control keep her inner turmoil from the rest of her face, but she was ready act as decoy to draw the enemy away: and all for a granddaughter she had only just met. Sakura's heart ached to think of what it might have been like to have this fierce, graceful woman raise her.

"Take care of yourself, the last of my line. May your hunt be ever-fruitful, your protectors strong, and your legacy lasting." With those formal, almost ritual-sounding words, the rose-haired lady turned towards the west and, with a speed not quite rivaling Jiraya's own, loped gracefully into the woods.

In the distance, Sakura strained to sense Jiraya. After Konoha had fallen to Danzo's control, he had simply…not returned. Just kept sending messages with information back every once in a while, as if he were still the spymaster—and ignored all missives directing him to come back to Konoha. It drove Danzo crazy, but Jiraya was just that powerful and well-connected. The attitude did give all of the old crowd hope, however—if the resident spymaster, the Toad Sannin seemed to be irreverently biding his time, then perhaps there was hope for Konoha to be put to rights again.

As much as she felt an immediate impulse to go towards Jiraya, see a familiar face and seek refuge with him—her grandmother's warning was fresh in her mind. Perhaps…she should at least wait until she was sure she had herself under control before seeking him out. And getting caught in between the two was definitely not something she looked forward to.

Sakura's close attention to Jiraya's signature allowed her to recognize when he met with the first clone, which had been sent in his direction, and sense when he dispelled it. He then seemed to split into two—a shadow clone, Sakura thought—and sent the clone after her grandmother's own copies, while himself following her true trail. He didn't bother to suppress his chakra, and Sakura kept track of him until he was too far away to sense. She hoped that her savior would be alright. And that Jiraya would be as well. Kami, what a mess.

With a sudden pang, Sakura realized she didn't even know the name of the woman who had saved her, her own grandmother. Nor did she know her true family name, or anything at all really besides the vague knowledge of a bloodline she supposedly had and the instructions to 'obey her instincts', whatever that meant. All she had was that brief, cryptic explanation and the cloth bundle of tea in her arms.

Desperate to find some clue as to the mysterious relative who had exited her life as quickly as she'd entered it, Sakura untied the pack. Inside were tight bundles of tea, about thirty of them, bound with silken red string so densely that they might have been little mesh bags. Untying one of them, Sakura discovered the reason- aside from what seemed like a typical strand of green tea, there were small fine herbs, both light and dark, that crumbled away without the meshed string to hold them. Later, Sakura would analyze them for content and perhaps be able to recreate them. For now, she tore off a piece of her shirt from the bottom and poured the displaced tea mix in, tying it off with part of the string, cutting off the rest of the red length of it to analyze later. Her parents had been merchants, so Sakura would have a greater chance than most to figure out where the silk came from.

The fabric that made up the pack itself was dark silk as well, a surprisingly luxurious material for a woman on the run. Upon closer inspection, the cloth was aged, permanently creased in places—but the weave was thick and tight enough that it would not tear easily. There were intricate patterns of deep olive green within the dark blue, almost purple fabric, rather like moonlit leaves against a night sky. Upon closer inspection, that was exactly what the design entailed: delicate outlines of thorny vines and round leaves tapering to sharp points. Not the leaves from a tree, but some wild flower or vine. Wild rose, perhaps, though there were no flowers in the dark fabric.

It was in the corner of the cloth, hidden beneath a worn crease, that Sakura found her first real clue: the monogrammed kanji for hamanashi, the beach pear—another name for the tenacious rose bush that grew along water. Rosa rugosa was the name Sakura knew it by, and she knew quite a lot. Found commonly in water country, though occurring in other countries as well, this rose flourished where little else did, along sand dunes and saltwater, in soil both tough and tender. But the true value of it lay in its small red fruit that came after the delicate pink bloom: while simply a delicious delicacy to civilians, to shinobi it was priceless because it balanced their chakra and was one of the few cures for chakra poisoning. What an apt symbol for her family, Sakura mused—for if the stylized kanji didn't point to it, the gold-green monogrammed rose bush within a pale pink circle certainly indicated a family crest.

Sakura herself had worn the Haruno crest—a simple white circle—all her life, and it had never called to her as this symbol did. She couldn't remember it consciously, but some part of her must have, for she felt a warmth of recognition as she stared at it. A part of her wanted to take it and wear it proudly upon her arm, without even fully understanding what it stood for—but another part, the sensible part that remembered her grandmother's warning, knew that it would attract more enemies and trouble than she could afford.

So it was with some regret that Sakura folded the fabric over again to hide the silken weave against itself, and bundled up the tea back into a tight pack. Looking around the cave, she experienced a moment of panic that her own pack wasn't there—while she had little inside it, the sealed scrolls she had on medicine were invaluable—and thought that it had been left behind, destroyed in the explosion. Then she felt the straps of it upon her shoulders, and realized that it's bulk had become so familiar that she hadn't noticed it weighing down her back. With all the distractions that had come her way since she'd woken, who could blame her?

Taking it off now, she found that it just barely had room to hold her grandmother's silken tea bundle. Sakura closed the mouth of her pack over it as best she could and got up, feeling strangely hollow. The day had thrown so many surprises at her that she was half expecting to go into shock, but shored up her willpower. She couldn't afford to be weak right now, not even—or especially not—after the revelations she'd had today.

The remainder of the red silk string she'd cut was left in her hand. On an impulse, Sakura used it to tie her hair back into a low ponytail, wrapping it around several times and then tying off the knot, so the loose ends flowed down with her own hair, two long strands of red amid her pink.

As Sakura stood in the mouth of the cave, the sun chose that moment to pierce through the dense foliage of the woods around her and cast a blinding ray of light into the cavern, warming the chill of the underground. She'd had all of dawn with her grandmother, and now the day was truly unfolding.

A final glance at the empty cave behind her showed the last embers of the dying fire made pale by the sunlight across them, just as the memory of her grandmother sitting against that fire, telling Sakura of their family history, was pale and almost unbelievable by the light of day. Yet Sakura felt the extra weight of the tea between her shoulder blades, felt the weight of the knowledge she'd learned heavy on her soul, the knowledge that her world as she knew it was turning into one lie after another. Above all, she felt the echoes of the gnawing hunger within her, escaping even Inner's iron grasp, urging her in one direction—north.

One thing her grandmother had said reverberated in her mind. Trust your instincts. So Sakura trusted in her last living kin, in her words, and in the tugging deep within her soul. She went north.

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A/N

Again, no smut in this, but necessary plot and character building. But more likely than not, next chapter will indeed have some sexytime. In response to one review- yes, Itachi will make an appearance somewhat soon and will be one of Sakura's partners- but not until some things with him are straightened out. He is one of the more complicated characters, and his relationship with Sakura will be one of the most complicated to sort through before they get their own bit of closeness. Same with Pein, and Madara, if I choose to include them fully. I haven't decided that yet. I suppose the story will tell, as this is the first time I'm more letting the story write itself than planning. This also means that you, dear reviewers, have some say in where it goes. Not promising that I'll change everything, or some of the more iron clad plot points I've thought of, but ideas and speculation are more than welcome. I may even use them:) And if there is a particularly sexy smut scene that you've been dying to see between Sakura and the Akatsuki, let me know! Perhaps your idea will spark my own inspiration and I will make it a reality.