Chapter Eleven:
They stayed in Kumo for a week after the others arrived to rescue Sakura and Itachi.
Sakura spent most of that week confined to the hotel, resting and talking with whomever wasn't negotiating with the Raikage and his council. Itachi was her almost constant companion, but she felt wary of talking about what had passed between them in the realm Tsukiyomi had created.
It still felt unreal, being out of her cell. Multiple times a day, she caught herself attempting to release a genjutsu. She found herself touching everything around her, trying to memorize the textures and sensations for when reality returned and she was surrounded by cold, impersonal stone. Talking, actually using her vocal chords and speaking with another person, was even odder. Responding to questions that were asked, even more so.
The day they left Kumo, she joined the others in the Raikage's office, dressed in shinobi clothing that someone had picked out for her. It was simple, just a blue kimono shirt and black shinobi pants, along with standard black sandals, but her hitai-ite was tied around her forehead, Uzushio's spiral declaring her allegiance to the world.
She stood quietly just behind Orochimaru's left elbow, Kabuto next to her on his right. Sasori, Kisame, and Itachi stood even with Orochimaru, who was tucking the treaty in his weapons pouch.
"It has been a pleasure negotiating with you, Raikage-sama," he said smoothly, bowing politely. "We regret the unfortunate circumstances that brought us together more rapidly than we had expected, but I am glad we have been able to move past this and look towards the future."
With a roll of his eyes, the Raikage snorted. "So you learned something at the Sandaime's elbow after all," he muttered, and then his eyes fell on Sakura. "Kunoichi, you're the genin my interrogators have been telling me about?"
After a quick look at her shishou for permission, Sakura bowed as she murmured: "Hai, Raikage-sama."
"You're pretty tough for a genin. I'll be interested to see how your career progresses."
A few more pleasantries were exchanged, and then they were led out of the office and escorted to the gates by a man that looked a bit like the Raikage and two other Kumo-nin. None of them said anything until they reached the gate, where one of their escorts detached himself from the group and went to talk with the gate guards.
"Yo, it's going to be neat," the big man with sunglasses and a bandanna said, flashing them a big grin. "Got me another jinchuuriki to meet."
"Your Raikage was very generous in lending your experience with the biju to help train our jinchuuriki," Orochimaru said coolly. "We will send word when we are ready to begin his training."
"Best be off then," the man crowed as the other escort returned. "Just give me a shout when!"
Instead of answering, Orochimaru signaled them to take to the trees.
They were about a day's run from the coast, two days from Kumo at the pace they had taken to accommodate Sakura and Itachi's diminished fitness, when she finally asked the question that had been bothering her ever since they took her from the cell.
"I thought nobody would come."
Kabuto exchanged glances with Kisame before returning to starting the fire. Sasori stared flatly back at her, but it was fairly difficult to get any expression change from him. Only Orochimaru met her gaze squarely.
"We were ordered not to," he said, carefully inspecting the sword that had been hanging from his sash ever since Sakura had seen him in the cell. "You were declared lost in action. The citadel has been preparing for war."
"Everyone was afraid that they would torture the location out of me," Sakura said, fighting to keep her voice from quavering. "Weren't they?"
"It was accepted that they would," Sasori replied offhandedly as he adjusted one of his joints. "Genin, even prodigies, are rarely able to withstand determined interrogation for a week and a half, which was how long you had been gone when they confirmed that you were likely being held by Kumo."
Now did not seem to be an appropriate time to mention how close she had come to breaking, in those early days before she had resigned herself to being left to the mercy of Kumo's interrogators, before she had managed to cut her nerves and keep from feeling the pain they were inflicting.
"So, how did you get permission to leave?"
Kisame started whistling idly as he averted his eyes, Kabuto snickered, and Sasori remained unbothered. Orochimaru was finally the one to sigh and say: "We...decided to test the old adage about permission and forgiveness."
Sakura goggled at them. "You broke out of the citadel, just to rescue us?" she whispered incredulously. That they would want to rescue her, and Itachi, was puzzling, but understandable when viewed through the lens of Uzushio's current shortage of shinobi and shinobi in training, and the fact that she could have revealed their location to Kumo.
That they would go against orders and risk losing their only safe place, their only home, for her sake…
It touched her heart.
"Here's hoping the peace treaty with Kumo is enough to make them forget that little detail," Kisame grunted, checking the wrappings on his sword. "I was just getting used to not being a missing-nin."
Kabuto snorted. "You'd miss your brats."
"No way," Kisame replied defensively. "That blond brat maybe, because he's going to be a goddam tank once he's fully trained, but being a teacher? Not on your life."
"That's practically a confession of attachment, coming from you Kisame," Itachi added from where he was helping Kabuto prepare that night's meal.
The sight of the citadel walls rising up in front of them nearly made Sakura cry.
They had used the river as a road to make best time on their return to Uzushio, getting them there around midafternoon. As they approached the gates, still empty, since as far as Sakura knew, they hadn't been able to get a shipment of wood into the citadel to build gates, she managed to compose herself.
A string of shinobi was strung out across the opening, and Sakura felt a tremor of nervousness slide through her. Her grandmother was there, along with the rest of the council and several other jounin. None of them looked particularly friendly; though strong disapproval seemed to be the worst that she saw.
"Orochimaru. Akasuna Sasori. Hoshigaki Kisame. Yakushi Kabuto." The eldest member of the council stepped forward, leaning on his walking stick. "You have broken your vows to the citadel."
"We have," Orochimaru acknowledged, kneeling on the stony walkway before the gates. "I cannot speak for the others, but I could not let my apprentice languish when there was something that I could do."
The others knelt, saying similar things, leaving Sakura and Itachi the only members of the returning party left standing. Feeling awkward, she looked for Naruto and the others of her generation, but they were absent.
"We have already extended you our trust once before, and you have broken it. What can you say in your defense that will allow us to extend it again?"
"Nothing," Orochimaru admitted, and Sakura knew there was nothing but raw honesty in her mentor's voice. "You would be right to turn us away. The council made its decision for the good of the citadel, and we gambled that decision on our own reading of the situation. But we brought back Uchiha Itachi and Shiroyami Sakura, and in the process, we negotiated a peace treaty with Kumogakure. It bears the Raikage's signature, and is in effect as soon as the council ratifies it."
At this news, Sakura saw interest on several of the council members faces. "Explain." The command came from her grandmother, who was looking at the snake sannin with suspiscion.
"We approached him, threatening an attack on Kumogakure if he would not agree to treaty negotiations and the release of two of our shinobi," Sasori said coolly. "Our reputations and abilities are well known. Faced with three S-ranked missing-nin, the Raikage felt it was in his best interest to at least hear our proposed terms."
"The short version of these terms?" Another of the council members was pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger as she spoke.
"Mutal non-aggression, mutual defense, sea trade agreements, and jinchuuriki training." Kabuto rattled off the list with ease. "If you would like, I could give you the treaty?"
Sakura watched her grandmother trade cautious looks with the rest of the council. "We convene in the council room in an hour. Understand that you are being allowed into the citadel simply so that we can discuss your actions. This is not a pardon; you may be asked to leave once we have heard your tale. Uchiha, Shiroyami, please report to the Head Medic at the hospital for a physical before reporting to the council room for a debriefing."
Bowing, Sakura, followed Itachi up the path into the citadel, drawing in a ragged breath as the sensation of home surrounded her. Civilians watched from the first and second circles as the pair made their way to the hospital, neither of them saying a word.
One of the civilian nurses met them there, looking flustered. "Uchiha-san, Shiroyami-san, how can I help you?"
"We've been sent for physicals," Sakura said smoothly. "I'll be in room 101, and Uchiha-sensei will be in room 102. The council would like to debrief us before the hour is up, so all haste would be preferred if at all possible."
Without another word, she guided Itachi towards the set of examination rooms lined up against the back wall of the mostly open first floor of the hospital. As she expected, they were mostly empty and without doors, but she gestured Itachi into his before taking a seat on the floor in hers.
The nurse was back in a moment, a clipboard in her hands. "I'll try to make this as quick as possible, Shiroyami-san," she fussed, reaching for Sakura's wrist. "Please bear with me."
"Of course," Sakura murmured, trying to keep herself focused. The stone walls of the hospital were nothing like the walls of Kumo's interrogation department, but it was hard to drive the images away from her mind. Carefully, she controlled her breathing, keeping her heart rate steady and her breathing even while the nurse made short, quick notes about her findings. WIth a kind smile, she told Sakura that she was finished, and that if she wished, she could wait here until she was finished with Uchiha-san.
Distractedly nodding, Sakura dug her fingers into her thighs, letting the sensation, the discomfort that was so different from the pain she had felt in Kumo's cells, ground her in reality. This was real. She was home, in Uzushio, and Kumo would not be coming after her. There would be no more visions of the horrors in her sensei's life, no further torture for information she refused to give. Sakura would not have to lie in her cell and attempt to think of foolproof ways to commit suicide before they managed to break her.
A shape filled the doorway, and Sakura flinched instinctively.
It was only Itachi, and he politely ignored how her heart rate and breathing had sped up noticeably. "If you are ready, Shiroyami?"
"Yeah," she said, pushing herself upright, moving her wrists more than she would have normally just to prove to herself that they were unbound, flaring her chakra lightly to prove that she was undrugged. "Let's get this over with."
The debriefing was fairly tame. Most of the first part, when they encountered the Kumo shinobi in Frost, went unquestioned, likely because it had already been reviewed when Ikeda and Shimizu brought word of their capture. Itachi spoke briefly on their transport to Kumo, and the short while in the cell when she had been asleep. And then it was her turn.
Standing, with her hands behind her back, staring at a point on the wall behind the council's heads, she recited the list of ways the Kumo shinobi had come up with to torture her. Devoid of as much emotion as she could, she described how they alternated between kindness and cruelty, offering her everything but her freedom in exchange for her breaking her silence. How they offered to trade her a proper shower for her name.
Sakura was proud of herself for not pausing, not letting her voice break as she described the rotation between elements, the day they tried hallucinogens, how each night they had dragged her before Itachi and made her look into the mangekyo sharingan.
Itachi interspersed some comments on his own captivity, how they had tried to get information from him during the first days until they realized that he bore a seal that prevented him from releasing any information that they would find useful. After that, his life was slowly passing hours, broken only by Sakura's own movements.
"What did you see in Tsukiyomi?" one of the council members asked curiously.
"Uchiha-sensei's childhood," Sakura stated flatly. Whether or not Itachi had told them the truth of the massacre, she would not spread the truth around without express permission from Itachi himself.
"And then the sannin Orochimaru and Hoshigaki arrived?" Sakura's grandmother prompted, breaking the stiff silence that had fallen after Sakura's curt answer.
"Hai. They entered the cell and Hoshigaki released me," Itachi answered. "Orochimaru went to Shiroyami, who attempted to dispel genjutsu and would not relax until I assured her that it was truly happening."
"How did you spend the remaining days in Kumo?"
"We were taken to a hotel and kept within the hotel's grounds. I was being treated for a respiratory infection that I had picked up during my incarceration, and Shiroyami was being treated for the aftereffects of her torture. On our last day, we were escorted to the Raikage's office for a brief audience before the Hachibi's jinchuuriki and two others escorted us to the gates."
"Thank you Uchiha, Shiroyami. We will debrief each of you more extensively, but there are other matters we need to attend to first. Consider yourself on leave until further notice, and restricted to the citadel."
Bowing, Sakura turned and trailed behind Itachi as he led the way out of the room. Her shishou and the rest of their rescuers were there, calmly waiting for their turn to be debriefed.
She paused in front of Orochimaru and bowed. "Thank you, shishou."
As he moved to enter the council room, he briefly rested a hand on her head. "I would not abandon my apprentice, not one who sought me out as you did."
Sweeping past her, he entered the room, Hoshigaki, Sasori, and Kabuto following behind him. One of the chuunin on duty closed the door, and Sakura was left in the outer chamber with Itachi.
All of the sudden, noise bubbled up from the stairwell, a familiar voice shouting to be heard over the rest: "You are not going to stop me from seeing her, or I'm going to bring this goddamn wall down around your ears, so help me-!"
"Uzumaki-san, you were warned about using seals-"
"My friend practically just returned from the dead and you're in my way. Do you want to test how much I care about warnings?"
"No need for your seals, Karin," Tenten's voice drifted up the stairs in the sudden lull in sound following the redhead's threat. "I'll just pin him to the wall."
"D'you think he'd stand a chance against a bunch of kage bunshin?" Naruto wondered loudly.
"Sounds like you had best get down there before we're short a chuunin," Itachi murmured with a slight chuckle. "I wouldn't put it past that group to actually carry through on some of these threats."
Flashing him a quick smile, Sakura darted down the stairs.
Busy arguing with the chuunin posted on the ground floor, preventing people from eavesdropping on the council debriefings, Karin had her hands on her hips and her furious face in the chuunin's flustered one, finger almost up his nose with how close it was to him as she lectured him. Naruto was directly behind her, normally sunny disposition gone, but it was Tenten, leaning against the wall and casually cleaning underneath her fingernails with a kunai who saw Sakura first.
Using Naruto's shoulders as a springboard, the brunette launched herself over the poor chuunin's head and almost bowled Sakura over as she wrapped her in a hug. Scuffling at the bottom of the stairs suggested that the chuunin guard had given up, because soon two other pairs of arms wrapped around her, the outpouring of affection practically smothering Sakura as she teetered on the stairs, relying on her chakra to keep her stable.
"Don't you ever do something like this again," Karin mumbled somewhere near Sakura's shoulder. "You don't get to go off and get yourself captured and marked as unrecoverable or I'm going to pester your shishou until he teaches me that resurrection jutsu and kill you myself."
"Seconded," Tenten agreed, drawing back slightly to study Sakura with suspiciously watery eyes.
"I'm not going to kill you myself," Naruto sniffed, hugging her tighter. "But I bet my mom would make sure you never got to rest."
Leaning into their hugs, Sakura felt something settle. She was home, and she was safe. Logically, she knew that there would be rough days ahead of her as she struggled to overcome the effects of weeks of torture on both her body and her mind, but she had her support network.
She could make it through this.
Sakura flung herself upright, throat hoarse as she gasped for breath. Strong hands pressed her back down, and she struggled to pull herself free, fighting wildly. Bucking and squirming, she almost slid free, but the hands caught her, changing to arms that pulled her against a human chest.
The shock of her skin brushing someone else's shook her from the blind panic, allowed her to think beyond the instinctive litany of danger-flee-not safe that had controlled her entire being. Stilling her movements, she twisted her head, blinking until the face of the person holding her resolved itself into recognizable features in the dim moonlight pouring in from the window.
"Sorry shishou," she murmured sheepishly. "I had another nightmare, I think."
"Obviously," he answered, but there was no real bite behind his words.
His arms loosened, allowing her to slip out of his restraining hold, likely to keep her from injuring either herself or him, and back into the rumpled bedroll she had vacated in the panic of waking. It was a nightly routine for them these days, waking in the middle of the night due to her nightmares. They were slowly ceasing, but not enough for her to consider returning to the room she had shared with Tenten and Karin.
"Show me," the snake sannin ordered, and Sakura obeyed, calling her chakra as she slid through the hand seals, focusing her entire will and imagination on what she was about to project.
Genjutsu had started to come instinctively to her now, after night after night of her shishou ordering her to show him what her night terrors had crafted for her. He usually waved her attempts off, but he had noted that she was making progress.
"I am not a Yamanaka, with the ability to reach into your mind and read your fears and secrets," he had told her, the first night since she had moved into his quarters, the second night she had been back in Uzushio. "Nor am I particularly equipped to deal with emotions and emotional responses to trauma. The Sandaime and my teammates often despaired of this, and I have gotten no more adept at comfort since I parted ways with them. But I can offer you what I know that may help ease your mind."
"You are getting better and shaping the target's emotions," he informed her as he brushed aside her genjutsu in the same manner as she had seen him brush aside cobwebs. "The emotional responses you were attempting to provoke were logical and within your reach. Most chuunin are not able to cast this level of genjutsu; though some may be able to withstand the sheer blatancy of it, especially if they have previously overcome similar circumstances. But remember how this feels, because you should be able to incorporate it into genjutsus where your targets are already snared."
"Hai, shishou," Sakura said tiredly, leaning back against the wall. "Itachi-sensei noted that I had gotten better at timing my applications during combat scenarios."
"The problem with genjutsus," Orochimaru mused as he returned to the scrolls he had presumably set aside when her nightmare became evident, "is that they are difficult to test on your allies, and dangerous to test on your enemies. Ninjutsu leave visable signs of progress, and your allies likely will not begrudge you a few bruises from taijutsu practice. But genjutsu, due to its very nature, is almost taboo to cast on anyone but an enemy."
Sakura grimaced. "I only use area of effect ones on my teammates." They had sat down and worked out a list of acceptable and unacceptable genjutsus for team practices, which had been supremely awkward, since none of them had dared discuss what had happened on their last outside mission yet. She suspected that it would be something Itachi would make them face eventually, but her sensei seemed to be more focused on reclaiming their lost conditioning and stagnated skills for the time being.
"Have you considered what your specialty might be?" he inquired idly, picking up one of the scrolls. "Kabuto said that you had chosen to not pursue medical ninjutsus beyond what you have already learned, though you'll finish your studies in poisons with Sasori."
"My time in Kumo suggested one to me." It was something Sakura hadn't mentioned to anyone else, because they'd probably try to talk her out of it, but the idea continued to niggle away at her.
"Black ops?"
"How did you know?"
Orochimaru sighed lightly. "Most of the jounin are thinking about it, even if they haven't said anything. You lasted weeks in the hands of Kumo's interrogators with nothing but scraps of chakra, and managed to resist physical and mental torture without even giving up your name, and you're just a genin. In Konoha, ANBU would be scouting you after you passed your chuunin exams."
"My medical ninjutsu helped," Sakura pointed out, the same way she did whenever anyone mentioned how prodigious her feat had been. "And Itachi-sensei was as kind as he could have been with Tsukiyomi, under the circumstances."
"Even that opened up a number of interesting questions," the snake sannin countered. "Would training all vulnerable operatives in the basics of medical ninjutsu extend the amount of torture it would take for them to break? Would it be better, although it's a violation of their rights, to equip all shinobi with a seal preventing them from speaking under duress? You've become interesting to a number of people for a number of reasons."
"It's not just that I survived all that without opening my mouth," she said, preparing to spill the one secret she hadn't been able to tell to anyone else yet. "It's that I knew that nobody would come for me, and I accepted it without thinking. You can't always rescue black ops the way you should try to rescue regular squads. Sometimes you can't even claim the black ops member. Naruto wouldn't be able to do it. Tenten might, same with Suigetsu, but Juugo? Karin? They're too hopeful. They wouldn't be able to accept it and bounce back in a reasonable time frame."
"And it will be from your generation that the first black ops members are recruited from, even though we're small and will not need many," her shishou completed the thought with a nod. "You're at the top of most lists for recruitment."
"Teach me," Sakura asked, hands clenching on her knees as she refused to bow her head, even as she asked for yet another favor. "Teach me what I need to know to be able to live long enough to come home and how to make sure that it doesn't break me in the process."
"Just to be clear," he set down the scroll he was looking at and looked her straight in the eye. "You want to learn how to be an assassin?"
"So that none of my other yearmates will have to go through what I do."
"We start in the morning," her shishou replied, making no comment about her audacity to ask even more from him. "And I will be having a few words with Uchiha so that he understands what I will be teaching you."
"If you think that's necessary," Sakura said, releasing the breath that she had unconsciously been holding. "Thank you shishou."
"Don't thank me for this." His eyes were cold as they studied her. "Black ops is not a division to enter lightly. Training a genin with the express purpose of shaping her into black ops goes against many of the principles Konoha attempted to instill in me. There is a reason eyebrows were raised at Uchiha and Hatake's recruitment young, and perhaps they were right. For your sake…" he trailed off for a moment, hesitating, before he finally continued. "I hope that they do not recruit for black ops before you have had many years as a jounin."