Sakura woke flat on her stomach, her face embedded deeply into a pillow. It was a gentle progression to consciousness—for which she was grateful, because it didn't happen often like this. Usually, waking was more of a jarring process, thanks to the mother down the hall who was always screaming for her son to get up or 'goddammit, Shiki, you're going to be late again!' No screams now, however.

In fact, there wasn't much noise at all. Except, she realized gradually, a soft sibilant hiss—but metallic. Like metal sliding against metal.

Her gaze narrowed. Then, she shifted onto her forearms and swung her head around.

He stood at the opposite corner of the room, looking tall and hard against the dull cream of the walls. His hands worked coldly—as callous as they had been soft before—as he strapped on his armor. She shifted to a sitting position, her tousled hair settling against her neck a second later. Kakashi's head tilted in her direction, as he tightened the straps of his arm guard. His hands did not pause.

Air expelled from her in a sharp, furious burst. "Look at me."

When he did, his gaze was distant.

Her nails dug into the sheets around her.

Indifferently, he slid his hitai-ate into place. And Sakura was about to become deranged. She wanted—she needed to see what she had seen before. Because if the copy-nin could break down, it meant—it meant that no one could be alright when they had done, what she and all ANBU had done. It meant that it was okay to feel what she felt, to experience the constant—

But it seemed, in this moment, that it all could have very well been part of a fool's dream, born from nothing more than desperation.

"Don't." It was all she could manage: hoarse and livid.

The copy-nin's eyes were dark. A bird had landed silently on the window sill. There was no message attached to its leg. But, without one more glance her way—

His form flickered, and he disappeared out the window.

(The bird itself had been the message, Sakura would realize later, fists deep into the trunks of some unfortunate trees.)

It didn't take long after that for her to realize that Kakashi had decided to operate in the world like she didn't exist.

Sakura watched him like a hawk, so much so that she was nudged more than one time (by Bear of all people) for her stare becoming a little too much glower. But she glowered more. Because mission after mission—it was as though she had become a complete stranger to him.

And she hated stake outs. Those had basically been the last three Team Seven missions, which hadn't helped improve her mood. As it happened, they frequently gave her ample time and quiet to think about everything she didn't want to think about.

For once, the jarring contrast between ANBU missions and her other missions was—in a sense—welcome.

"You need to get new kunai," Hyena advised, examining the state of her blades as Sakura sheathed them.

She couldn't help her wince. "They are, uh, new."

"You get that much blood on them?" Bear observed, unholy glee on his face.

They all straightened as the metal door to the locker rooms swung open.

But it wasn't Kakashi. Instead, it was a familiar short, compact figure with silken, blood-red hair. Sakura's stomach soured at the sight of it. She was gladdened to realize that was all.

"The copy-nin's team, right?" said the boy who had made her eat dirt during rounds, an arrogance in his voice that was youthful enough to earn some forgiveness. His eyes scanned them, finding Sakura last. "And the one who took my place. Got here in the end, though—wish the circumstances could have been better, of course."

He bowed his head to them, but the movement was too cursory to demonstrate he truly understood what it meant to lose a team mate.

"Fuck, why are all the new ones babies," Bear groaned, adding to Sakura, "No offense."

Sakura shrugged it off, finishing sharpening her chokuto. She slid it into the sheath strapped on her back.

"Shut up, Bear," Hyena said calmly. She turned to Robin. "You read through the brief?"

"Yes ma'am," he drawled. "Man, this team gets all the big shots. Spread the wealth, you know? Let the rest of us earn a name. "

Snail laughed, though no one else did.

"Who did you get assigned, Robin?" she asked.

Despite the mask, it was easy to sense the way his face twisted into a frown. "Ran Osamu. Now Tsuruga Taiki—"

"—Is the copy-nin's assignment," Hyena said curtly.

Sakura listened in without really understanding. Neither name was familiar to her—nor was the name that she had been assigned as her target in the ambush.

"Of course," Robin said too quickly, eyes gleaming, "But have you heard the stories? Now that's a kenjutsu expert if you've ever heard of one."

The door swung open again, though only partially. This time it was Kakashi.

"It's time." The door shut again.

"Charming," Robin muttered next to her.

Sakura looked at him, wondering what she had been like to the others when she had first joined the ANBU team.

"You don't know the least of it," she remarked blandly.

They travelled more quickly than usual, and more grimly than they had in the past (for several reasons). Sakura didn't know who had retrieved the information necessary for the imminent ambush, but it had been communicated to them that the person had died for it.

By the time the moon was high in the sky, they were hidden in the trees. Tsuruga Taiki was a Sound shinobi, the captain of a squad much like Sakura's, and his squad's planned route was through this pass tonight.

They waited.

There was something about the moon and the light breeze that left her in a considerably reflective mood. Kakashi was—and she didn't think this to be a coincidence—positioned on the farthest possible tree from her out of all her teammates. Her anger grew, until she wondered suddenly what the point of all of it was.

Why did she care so much? She knew that it was a façade now; that a façade existed had become an undeniable truth, though confusion and incredulity had made her doubt herself initially. It couldn't, she thought heatedly, have anything to do with—with whatever else had happened. That had been a lapse of judgement and insignificant—

Look at me. The hoarse, livid demand he had made as she had climaxed curled into her ears, like he was behind her, right now. Sakura hissed at the sudden unwanted phantom sensation of those fingers inside her—the way they had been rough with her, possessive of her anatomy, and unconscionably greedy—

She strangled her rising arousal viciously.

Enough, she thought coldly. It was time she washed her hands off all this business. Pride or not, Sakura was going to find a new team. She didn't care how it happened; only that it needed to.

Newly resolved, her grip tightened on her hilt of her chokuto. Just in time, too, as six figures burst into the area beneath them.

Sakura spotted her target—a rail thin girl with purple hair—and launched off her branch. The sensation of free-fall was briefly peaceful, before her opponent recognized her approach and attacked.

As Sakura's hands shifted through multiple jutsus, she heard cries from other figures around her, now fighting as well. Sakura gritted her teeth and planted her feet, darting quick glances around to gauge the situation. Hyena and Bear were fighting as a pair against their targets, who had teamed up at the first notice of attack. Snail seemed to be holding up well, but Robin had only just engaged his target in combat.

Sakura heard a telling spark and returned her attention to her opponent, raising a wall of earth just in time to absorb the impact of the resulting explosion. She twisted to avoid the debris and caught a brief glimpse of Kakashi fighting what must have been Tsuruga Taiki.

A piercing bird cry rang from somewhere beyond in the trees, and Sakura watched sourly as the girl she was fighting shaped her fingers to amplify her own responding call. It was the last thing she did, because Sakura was there the next second, her blade sliding smoothly into her stomach and then up.

Unfortunately, it was too late, as proven minutes later when a second Sound squad broke through the trees to their precise location, moving with a swiftness and deadliness that matched the first—which meant that they were decidedly outnumbered now.

Sakura growled and flipped her blade, joining the fray anew. She guarded Bear and Hyena's backs, warding off two shinobi, but concernedly watched Snail, who fought farther away, as another shinobi approached. By his uniform, he was the captain of the second team.

A new figure crossed her vision in a black blur and cut the figure off, fists crackling with lightning. Unsurprised, Sakura looked back and saw Tsuruga Taiki bleeding and unconscious on the forest floor.

Show-off, she thought uncharitably.

Her attention returned to the man and woman in front of her. Sakura wasn't the most patient of fighters, and she wanted to end this quickly. A triumphant cry sounded through the air just as Sakura began a genjutsu—Robin, she identified in the back of her mind.

He saw her look and shrugged cockily. "On to the next one, I guess!"

She didn't pay it much mind, moving sinuously between the attacks of her opponents, which slowed as they increasingly fell prey to her illusion.

So pacifistic, the Voice grumbled.

It wasn't the most exciting of fights, Sakura allowed, but at least her uniform was clean. With luck, she wouldn't even have to wash it until after the next mission.

"Robin, don't—!" she heard Hyena cry, but she ignored it. It couldn't be too pressing, because none of the new shinobi were back there.

Death cries sounded a few meters ahead of her, and her eyes drifted to Kakashi again, unconsciously. His katana was speared through one shinobi's chest, and his other hand still crackled with electricity in the chest of another. Sakura would have turned her head away then, most likely scowling, if not for the expression on his face. She would have expected feral satisfaction—or even indifference—before the look on his face as his eyes went toward—

Sakura's gaze followed his and in an instant, the world stopped.

The scene in front of her presented as a still—a single frame of reality. Robin, on his knees, and his mask torn from his face; but it wasn't his face Sakura saw, but the flash of his hair.

Bright and unreal, like silk.

And Tsuruga Taiki stood above him, apparently not-so-dead, with his blade angled down to drive into—not Robin's—but Noriko's heart. Just like Sakura had done.

The slip from Sakura to the Voice was seamless in a way it had never been before. Sakura choked, paled, and the Voice trembled into life, sliding into her limbs with a fury.

And she was gone.

Eventually, because she had to, she returned.

And when she did, Sakura blinked and found a heart in her hands.

It was still pumping. With each pump, blood poured from it all down her front—as well as onto the ripped open chest of the man collapsed at her feet. And all she could do was watch dumbly.

She heard a few strangled noises from something beneath the body of the dead man. With a quick heave, the body was thrust off, and then Sakura saw it—the vermillion strands in that same exact fucking color—and the terror set in.

"Fuck, that's gross. Would you mind throwing that thing somewhere, I don't know, else, please? Like, sometime soon—"

Sakura's face contorted in grief and fury as she grasped the face beneath that hair punishingly between her hands. Why? Why had Noriko forced this guilt onto her? Why couldn't she have just walked away that day—

New hands, burning with heat and strong, locked onto her biceps, and Sakura snarled.

"Let go," a harsh, guttural voice in her ear.

She lunged out of the hold toward the red hair—"Why did you ask me to do it?"—but the man caught her at the last possible moment, drawing her body forcefully close to this.

Sakura turned her crazed gaze to him at last. Kakashi's gaze was a study in restraint, revealing absolutely nothing. It was enough to jar her back to reality. She inhaled rapidly and then—wide-eyed—swung her head around again.

She could see Robin now, sputtering and scrabbling away, beneath the curtain of red hair. Robin, not Noriko. Beside him was Tsuruga Taiki's dead body, his heart dropped next to him as unceremoniously as a fallen kunai.

It was sickening—not the sight, because she had long become desensitized to that, but the lack of control. She had not allowed the Voice to take over, but it had. If she could no longer stop it—

Sakura crumpled, held from the ground only by Kakashi. The forest was silent around her. All the targets had been eliminated, and now it was just her teammates who stared at her. She didn't want to see their faces. She couldn't. She needed to leave. Now.

"Let go of me."

The fingers around her arms didn't twitch.

Agony pierced through Sakura. "You," she panted, bitter. "Let go of me—"

He didn't let go. Instead, she felt the air around the both of them vibrate as her body was disassembled and then reassembled. They had shunshined somewhere else, and by the looks of it, far from where they had previously been in the forest.

She realized the irony of their situation, distantly. She wasn't in the mood to be amused by it.

"Can't you fucking listen," Sakura spat. She spun and shoved him up against a tree. She wasn't gentle—but his expression did not change. She knew because she had ripped off his mask, baring his face to the world. Sakura wanted him angry, she wanted him to fight her, but all the while, he remained implacably calm.

But, some part of her noted with vicious satisfaction, he was finally looking at her.

"So I exist now?" she mocked. "You pretend for three weeks that I'm nothing but air, but now, now that I've clearly lost it, the situation is dire enough for you to start paying attention?"

A hand raised toward her face, and Sakura regarded it with livid warning. But it moved slowly, unfailingly slow, as it settled at the base of her neck. Sakura recoiled in confusion, and his fingers slid into the gaps of her hair.

And next thing she knew, she was kissing him. Her lips met his—harshly, cruelly, at first. Her hands, dripping blood and clawed, acted to tear at him. But he bore it all unflinchingly…worse, gently. His hands cradled her, and Sakura could have screamed, except everything inside her fractured and then fell apart.

And she was in pieces, rent into a thousand pieces by his roughness, his stupidity, his sudden, terrible tenderness. Warmth surged through her, slow and heavy like the trickle of honey, and she fell into him, her fingers yearning now, stumbling, faltering, awkward because they no longer sought to destroy. Her hands, as they stroked artlessly at his face, left streaks of blood; she knew this, because she could feel the unnatural slick and glide. But he did not flinch. She licked his teeth, because she suddenly adored them, adored the way they glanced her lips every now and then, and he did not flinch.

In this moment, she realized, absent of everything else—of what he had been to her or what he could be—she... Because of the way he held her, because of the way he moved beneath her hands...

It was hateful. She loathed it. If she could have, she would have buried her fingers in her own chest just to rip the sentiment out.

But it persisted.

Don't leave, she almost said.

"Am I weak?" she forced out instead.

His eyes, as he looked at her, were incomprehensible.

"Or am I monstrous?"

His breath brushed her face, causing her jaw to slacken. "Is there any other option you've left yourself?"

"To be?"

"Not contemptible."

"Are you not contemptible?"

Something—an echo of many nights ago, before he had crawled into a bed beside her—flashed over his face.

"No," he said coldly.

"Then how can I be?"

He drew back, abruptly, harshly. "We are not the same."

Sakura followed him, unrelenting. "We're not. But I don't know any other ANBU my age who's split as much blood as I have. You can probably say the same. Is there an award for that? Should we be applauded?"

Kakashi's face darkened further; both of his eyes could have been black.

She looked at him for a long moment, and then she turned her head. Just as she made the motion, she felt fingers curl around her neck once again. She stilled, chest tight-waiting.

"You know me outside of ANBU, don't you?" he said softly. "Don't lie. Coyness doesn't suit you."

She stiffened as she realized the precise placement of the pads of his fingers. His fingers kept track of her pulse.

And, just like that, hatred returned, washing aside the...softness that had been plaguing her. Even now, the copy-nin was a predator: he had spotted weakness, hadn't he, and then gone for the jugular. How long had he been waiting? The swing from her previous bizarre calm to what followed was staggering. Fear pulsed through her—then anger, hot and heady, which was much better. "Should I kiss you instead?" she threatened, baring her teeth.

His eyes slanted down, surveying her coolly. But then, with something like softness again, he grasped her chin and his lips slid over hers, just briefly, an ephemeral contact that was gone too soon.

Sakura stared at him, disarmed.

"Your antagonism," he murmured, "It's always been personal. You wear scent distorters not just for anyone; you wear them for me."

She fought through the return of the molasses, struggled for vitriol. "Point of fact, then—I could be anyone. A man. A woman. Your next door neighbor."

The returning smile on his face was mean. "Besides the point. I've never wanted to want you."

She could have been offended by that, except that it would have been hypocritical. She leaned away, first, then pulled completely away.

"I told you not to be coy," he warned lowly, eyes tracking her motion.

Before he could reach her, she shunshined away.

Was he looking now? She leaned back onto her bed, glowering. The thought persisted.

Did he look at every face around him now and wonder if it was her? Not important. Because he would never look at Sakura of all people and wonder—of that, she was certain.

"What a mess," she said aloud. She repeated it, just to hear the sound of her demise out loud.

Lust, with difficulty, she had been able to tolerate. This…feeling was infinitely worse: contradictory and inestimable, simultaneously vicious and trembling. And it was foreign, like nothing she had ever felt before. She didn't know if she wanted to hurt Kakashi or consume him until no one could tell the difference between her and him. The hunger she felt was surely unconscionable.

But it had been born the moment he had held her in her madness, double-fold, triple-fold, to anything she had experienced before. Sakura didn't know how to reconcile it all to herself: that she hated, still, the man she had only ever known as 'Sakura,' but could feel this way—so decisively—about someone she had met as 'Saori Mori.' It was—

Contemptible.

"And you," she said, voice cool. "Don't think I've forgotten."

I was beginning to wonder if you'd gone senile, the Voice hissed. More and more, it seems like it.

"I won't lose control like that ever again. So appreciate the memory while it's still fresh."

But it will happen, the Voice corrected, sneering. Anytime it becomes too much, I'll be there, and that's when you won't be able to fight me. Sakura's first instinct was to lash out in retaliation, but she contemplated the words with careful restraint instead. It could never become 'too much' ever again.

The door to her apartment creaked open, interrupting her introspection.

"Just because you have a key now doesn't mean you can't knock, you know."

When Tsunade has said Sai needed to be watched closely, she had assumed she or Naruto would have a 'guest' over for just a few days. But he had been removed from suspension for a week now, and both Sai and Naruto had continued to inhabit her meager apartment like it was a free hotel.

"Fine," Naruto allowed, eyes narrowing, "but did you take a look at the scroll on the table like I asked?"

Sakura's mouth opened and closed, soundlessly. She hadn't.

"I did," Sai said, expression grim. "It's far trickier than the previous, but I believe with no less than five attempts, we shall be able to perfect it. It will require a lot of energy and fortitude of mind, however."

If there had been observing ears, she reflected, it would have sounded like they were talking about an important scroll, possibly related to battle strategy or a new jutsu—what usual team members discussed after missions. What they were talking about was the latest tonkatsu ramen recipe Naruto had found.

"I have full faith we'll continue to live up to expectations," Sai assured.

"And surpass," Naruto said, very serious. "We have to be ambitious, Sai."

Sakura grunted, standing now. "Both of you are tracking dirt all over the place. Why?"

Naruto scratched his cheek. "Well, you see, there was this bet with Tsunade—"

"We would rather not disclose the details," Sai interjected quickly.

"But we won," her blonde teammate finished, looking shifty now. "Ah…so."

"So what?"

"What Naruto is trying but failing to relay," Sai said calmly, "is that Tsunade has agreed to give us the next month to track Sasuke and bring him back."

Author's Note:

Hi! Hello! Hey there!

You can blame certain *cough* parts of this chapter on the song "Adore You" by, uh, Miley Cyrus. I have no shame. It gives me feels. Anyway-so, hope you're all doing well, and I truly hope you enjoyed the chapter! Thing are about to pick uuppppp :D :D :D As always, give me LOOVVEE pls via kudos & (gasp, even better) comments!

Ever awed and grateful that people actually read this fic,

madstoryteller999