Chapter Thirty Five
Everything went black…
I woke up to a throbbing pain in my head and I couldn't see a thing by any light, other than that of the moon. After feeling the darkened ground, which I was previously laying on, I discovered that I was in a forest and, judging on the position of the moon, it was around midnight. The moon itself offered a very dim light, since it was only a half moon tonight, but I didn't need sight to know that I wasn't alone.
A twig snapped to my right and I whipped my head quickly in the direction the sound had come from. Getting ready for an enemies attack, I reached to my right leg for a kunai. Nothing. My kunai holster had been removed from my leg while I was out. Since my kunai were gone, I tried to get a shuriken from my hip pouch, but soon found that that was too, gone from my reach. Even the knives, which I had precariously placed in random locations around my new ANBU uniform during the wait for the animal exam, were gone. That included the ones I had hidden in my belt, boots and the white, second-layer-ANBU-vest were gone. Now I was pissed.
"There's no point in trying to get a weapon." A voice from my left stated nonchalantly.
"Who are you?! What do you want?!" I questioned, not worried about my lack of weapons, and fully prepared to black-vine-whip my kidnapper's ass. I attempted to flex my fingers first and, after discovering that they still worked properly, I tested the rest of my movements subtly. This told me that I wasn't, in any way, shape or form, paralyzed.
"I mean you no harm little blossom." The man, as it sounded like a man, told me. His voice, however, only fuelled my need for escape. 'AND REVENGE! SHANNARO!'
I felt a hand place itself gently on my right cheek and froze. The hand felt… not human. It was more of a woody texture and… the joints moved like they had been nailed.
"S-Sasori?!" I confirmed to myself, while voicing my thoughts at the same time.
"Not just him Saku-chan, yeah!" Another voice, this one happier and more hyperactive, told me.
"D-Deidara!"
"Haha! Don't forget about us!" A gruffer voice called out from, no too far, behind me and Sasori.
"Hn." Said the second member of the 'us' the other man had mentioned.
"K-Kisame! Ita-Itachi!" I asked/stated, completely and utterly confused by their actions of kidnapping me. "What do you want?! Why did you kidnap me?!"
"We didn't." Itachi stated.
"What are you talking about?" I asked. "Where am I?"
"In a dream Saku-chan, yeah." Deidara told me.
"In… a… dream?"
"Yep. And now you have to face reality and kick that kidnapper's ass!" Kisame told me, my inner fully supporting the idea while little Saku-chan just wanted to kill something… or someone…
End Dream
I gently let my eyes flutter open and took in the surroundings of the 'camp' I had been captured in. The light of the fire was providing a torch of sorts for the night guard and allowing my eyes to wander. There were four tents, all surrounding the fire, and two guards. The sounds of men inside the tents caused my eyes to widen. 'Oh god.' 'What?' 'If it was just one person, then I could easily take them down, but…' 'There's too many of them.' 'Really?' 'Um…NO! They think that I will go down that easily and not put up a fight?! Not going to happen!' 'Hell yes!' 'SHANNARO!'
Grinning to myself, I tried to sit up and look further around my place of capture. This plan went down the tubes though, for, as soon as I attempted to push myself off of the ground, I discovered that I was tied at the wrists with chakra absorbing rope. 'Damn.'
"Oi! She's awake!" One of the guards called out to the residents of the tents. I turned to the guard and noticed that he was, in no way, good looking. He was tall and frighteningly thin, with buck teeth and googly brown eyes. His black hair was full of grease and lice and I mentally wondered if the other men looked anything like him.
"Hello there, girly." Greeted another man as he walked out of his tent and over to my location, now sat up cross-legged, in the dirt. He was better-looking than the other man, not that that was too difficult, but not as godly as some of the boys in Konoha or the Akatsuki. He had short blonde hair and swampy green eyes. He was over-muscled and quite intimidating. In fact, if I hadn't have spent the majority of the past four years with some of the most dangerous criminals of the ninja world I would have been really scared.
He reached down to touch my cheek, but I flinched away and snarled at him. This caused a round of laughter among the other men, but all was silent when the final tent, the only one no one had come out of, opened and a man with brown hair and cerulean blue eyes stepped out.
"I'd be careful around her if I were you. She killed an entire ANBU squad when she was six, all by herself. Imagine what she could do to you now." The man told them, making the others back off, but the muscle-head stayed put.
"This little cutie wouldn't hurt me!" He boasted, tapping me roughly on the cheek with his grimy hand to prove his point. 'May I?' 'Go for it.' 'Kill him little Saku-chan! Shannaro!'
Little Saku-chan took over for a second and debated what to do. In the end she settled for biting him, hard enough to draw blood, and descended back into my mind. Since she was the one who liked blood, not me, I had to spit the vile red substance from my mouth. It remained around my lips but that only made my scowl all the more affective.
"You little bitch!" He yelled and hit me across the face with his un-bitten hand. My head snapped to the side upon impact, but I remained sitting, and I prepared for another blow, but the only thing I felt was a gentle hand on my head. I looked up the arm of my saviour and found the familiar face of the brunette with the captivating blue eyes. Now that I looked closer I could tell two things. One, he was the man from the waiting room, Sai, and two, he wasn't as old as I had made him out to be. His age stretched to around the same age as Deidara, twenty three, down to my own age, twenty.
"Go back to your tents, I'll deal with her." He commanded. All of the men did as they were told and the only ones left outside were me, him and the two guards. "Now why would you do something like that?" He mumbled, mostly to himself, and I snorted. He chuckled and knelt down to my level.
"Who are you?" He asked me softly. He smirked at me and I sent him a calculating look, wondering whether to bite him or humour him. I settled for the latter and sucked in a breath.
"Haruno Sakura." I told him. He grinned this time, in somewhat of a Naruto fashion, and I just continued to stare.
"Se, now we're getting somewhere. I was worried that you might actually bite me for a second." He informed me.
"…" I said nothing and didn't tell him of my previous plan to do exactly what he was afraid of. He noticed my silence and chuckled nervously.
"Well, okay then. My name is Neboutoshi Sai." He introduced himself. I snorted again, but then thought back to the owl walking out of the testing room.
"Are you… um… the… Owl?" I asked, refusing to say 'My handsome owl' encase he wasn't. He laughed and I gave him a questioning look, soon followed by a glare for laughing at me.
"Don't you mean your handsome owl?" He asked, still laughing. I gasped and just stared at him for a minuet. 'He can't be the same guy!' 'Cha! He's too young!' 'But he does look like my owl…'
"How do you…" I trailed off, thinking of the proper words to use in asking my question. He seemed to know what I was going to say anyway and raised his hand to stop me.
"My father. He was the mist ANBU that you saved from your wrath." He stated, saying the last bit with a small chuckle.
"Father?" I asked, suddenly feeling embarrassed at the fact that the man I had remembered, and have dreamed of, since I met him was a father. "I guess I can see the resemblance." I told him. He nodded and his face, if possible, became serious in an instant of his former laughter.
"He sent me here to become an ANBU and find you. The plan kind of cut in half when I found you at the animal exams. All I had to do then was knock you out, bring you here and ask you the question." He explained.
'The question?' 'Cha! He fell in love with me at first sight and now he wants to marry me! Shannaro! True love conquers all!' 'Unlikely to be that, baka.'
"Will you join the rebels in the war?" He asked in all seriousness. I couldn't help it this time. I exploded and me, inner and little Saku-chan all yelled at him at the same time.
"WHY IS EVERYTHING ABOUT A WAR?! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE THE ONE EVERYONE WANTS IN THEIR ARMY?! I'M A PERSON TOO YOU KNOW! I HATE THE WAR! I WANT NO PART IN IT AND I'M CERTINATLY NOT GOING TO JOIN YOU!!" I yelled, loosing my breath in the process.
"Well, that was interesting. My father did warn me about your possible temper tantrums, but I didn't think that you would scream at me." He stated, amazed by my outburst. "Sorry Sakura, but you can't leave here. Either you join us and I untie you, or you stay there and we can use you as a ransom for Konoha and the Akatsuki. They'll probably surrender if we threaten your life."
Sai got up and left. His choice of words made my think. "…we can use you as a ransom..." After all this time, after all of my training and hard work… I was still just the weak little girl you could use to make your own plans work. I was just a ransom. A disposable tool. I cringed at my own thoughts and stared at the trees, to awake from the sting of my cheek to let my eyelids drop for more than a blinking second.
Konoha probably weren't even worried by my disappearance. They must think that I'm on the run again. 'On the run…' 'It seems that we're not as strong as we thought…' 'What do you mean?' 'We're always on the run. Always trying to get away from something. I can't name one time where I didn't run when the going got tough.' 'Hehe. You know what they say. When the going gets tough, the tough get going!' 'That saying means that the tough go into action not run away.' 'Hey, I've got another saying for you!' 'What is it?' 'Roses are red, violets are blue. I don't think that anyone's dumber that you!' 'Mean!'
I sensed a presence behind me, but was unable to turn to see who it was. I simply presumed that it was Sai, back to bug me again about joining the 'rebels', but my mind was changed when I felt a sharp pain in my back. A kunai had been plunged into my skin, deep enough to hurt like hell, but shallow enough that it wouldn't leave a scar.
"I wouldn't want to scar that pretty skin of yours. Not that you don't have scars already from your job." Said the voice of the over-muscled man who had hit me earlier. I tensed visibly and immediately regretted biting him. His kunai ran along the skin of my back and in between my shoulder blades, trailing a cut with its movements.
He walked in front of me and smirked at the pained expression on my face. He held up the kunai again and hit me across the face with the hilt, knocking me onto the ground. I struggled for breath as he picked me up and placed me on my feet, only to hit me down again. He kicked me in the stomach, forcing me to spit out blood, and walked off, but not before warning me of something.
"Sai can't be around to protect you all the time girly. As soon as he leaves, you're in for hell." He hissed.
My eyes felt heavy and I drifted, once again, into the ever-present darkness which seemed to wait for me around every corner of my life.