A boulder tore through the air in their direction. Unblinking, Sakura shunshined in front of the rest. Tensing her arm, she swarmed chakra in her fist obliterated it into thousands of pieces.

A sixth sense made her drop to a crouch a second later. A hand landed roughly—impersonal and fleeting—between her shoulder blades. Gaze flicking up, she saw Kakashi hurtle over her.

He mowed through the right flank of the rogue-nin in seconds, brute muscle and taijutsu. Sakura stared blankly ahead as she took down the center, shoulders tight as she lashed out with fists and elbows into throats and eyes.

Not enough, the Voice roared, a starved beast.

A month had passed since she had careened through the glass into Tsunade's office with an S-Rank nin on her back, and in that time, this was all that they had managed to encounter. Even as part of Sakura might have trembled to do more, these rogue-nin, frankly, weren't shitty enough. Anything more would have been...gross overkill.

"So this is a chunin mission," Sai observed with something like polite disappointment.

It could be said that even their newly-won chunin designation was (decidedly) ill-fitting.

Her hair blew forward as Sasuke rushed by her and then curved toward the left flank, katana drawn in a tight angle against his body. Naruto and Sai followed suit—Naruto on the ground and Sai above, held aloft by a bird the latter had conjured.

"Should I—?!" the blonde slowed down, brows furrowed.

"Does this look like it's worth a nine tailed beast?" Sasuke snapped.

"Fine! Kage-bunshin then."

She rolled her eyes. Naruto quite literally alternated between three strategies in battle, and it was a wonder—in some ways—that he had made it this far.

Then again, as she saw a hundred doubles of the blonde emerge and overwhelm the remaining shinobi, it wasn't that much of a wonder after all.

Sasuke wiped his blade on the trunk of a tree, a mildly irritated look on his face.

"There's a stream southwest of here," she muttered after a pause.

Naruto gave her an encouraging thumbs up. Sasuke gave no indication of having heard and turned to sheathe his katana.

Kakashi approached them with a cool gaze. He came to a standstill a meter in front of them, backlit by the sun.

"There are three types of choking," the copy-nin said with lazy derision. "The first, as we all know, the literal. The second kind, when you fail to perform because of fear, Naruto, you fortunately haven't repeated since that mission in the Land Of Waves. The third? That's when you lose precious seconds deciding what the fuck to do. Doesn't matter how much chakra you have; those few seconds are the difference between living and someone just quick enough or just lucky enough slitting your throat."

Naruto's expression grew grim. "I'm not—"

"You're a missile with no finesse," Kakashi said coldly. "You weren't built for close combat. You might fare well on an open field, one-on-one, with a similarly flashy opponent, but if I locked you in a room with any one of the other people on this team, let's just say I wouldn't bet on you."

The copy-nin's gaze snapped to Sai next with savage interest. "You're not nearly as aggressive as you should be, long-range."

Sai nodded, unperturbed. "Subterfuge and close-combat make the majority of my field experience—I will address the deficiency."

Kakashi's head cocked to the side then to survey Sasuke. "As for you—a little slow without the sharingan, aren't you," he said slowly, with something like private mocking amusement, "Haruno and I cleared through more than twice the bodies you did. Naruto might have done as much, if he hadn't wasted those seconds."

Haruno. She scoffed internally. Sasuke received this all without any expression.

Kakashi's gaze flicked over all of them. "Retrieve your weapons. We're heading out."

The Uchiha's head raised suddenly, eyes narrowed. "And what about her? Nothing?"

The copy-nin's eyebrow arched. Sakura had minimal difficulty keeping her expression placid as Kakashi's eyes coolly cut to her. She had had practice the entire month to adjust to abruptly not being ignored.

"Nothing," he said indifferently, "because she didn't make any stupid mistakes." He launched himself into the trees.

"Sasuke," Naruto growled. "What the—"

"How did you know?" Sasuke asked coolly, head turning suddenly to examine her. "In that precise moment, to drop to the ground? He didn't say anything or make any signals."

Leaves crackled on the forest floor as Sai came to stand next to her. Sakura's stoic expression hid her perturbation.

"Never mind that Naruto and I were also there next to you. He calculated his jump with complete confidence that you would be prepared for it."

There was, of course, no good way to explain this. In the hours she had spent on Kakashi's ANBU squad, one learned quickly to adapt to the movements of the others as easily as breathing. More pointedly, Kakashi and she—both on the aggressive, confrontational end of the spectrum—usually led the first attack, just as they had now. She couldn't exactly say that.

"They discussed it while you were taking a piss earlier," Sai said blandly.

Naruto—who had not observed any such plan—fortunately did not say anything to contradict him. His lips tightened slightly, however, and his gaze locked with Sakura's. It promised a long conversation later.

Sai gave her a long look as well that she didn't feel like reading into.

Eventually, they followed Kakashi into the trees.

They returned to the village just as the sun set. Sakura went straight home and stood under the scalding rain of her shower head for what felt like hours.

By the time she left her place, she had long resolved to blame her lateness on their team's delayed return (and not the long shower she had leisurely strolled home to take).

"Table for two…under the name Ino."

The host, looking oddly strained, led her inside. "Your dinner partner has arrived, ma'am—"

"You're dripping," the blonde said distastefully as she looked Sakura up and down. "At an establishment of this caliber, forehead, they might just make you pay for carpet damage."

That would explain the strained expression. Sakura gave Ino a bland look, before tying her hair up into a tight knot. Strands shorter than the rest fell out seconds later.

"Did you cut your hair with garden shears?" Ino asked with interest. "I have a cousin who does that—too into flowers, we've always thought. No one knows how to tell him, though…It just makes for very awkward family gatherings."

Not for the first time, Sakura felt an abrupt sense of grief for the way in which she had been maneuvered into these weekly dinners. Still, as it turned out: almost anything was better than Ino banging on her door for hours on end because Sakura had 'forgotten.'

"It's lost pigment too," Ino said factually, sipping at her wine. "Too much time in the sun, I rather think. Never too late to go medic-nin, you know."

Sakura reached for her water. She started chugging it diligently.

"Not that you have the temperament for it anymore," Ino acknowledged after a pause, blue eyes assessing her.

That was the other problem with these dinners. Sakura didn't give a fuck about the petty criticisms; they were nothing more than a front, unimportant distraction. It was the persisting examination—the fact that Ino had only grown sharper eyed and more cunning in the years they had been estranged. T&I had had no small part in cultivating those qualities, Sakura could imagine.

"What is this place?" Sakura asked blandly, flipping through the menu. "Never heard of it."

Ino gave a cough-laugh. "Never been wine-and-dined, have you, Sakura?"

Sakura's eyes lifted belatedly from the menu to survey the restaurant's clientele. Everywhere she looked, she found extremely well-dressed individuals—another explanation for the host's demeanor as he had escorted Sakura in—with immediately telling bashful looks on their faces.

The restaurant seemed to subsist primarily on amorous couples.

"And why on earth did you decide we meet here?" Sakura asked dryly.

"Oh, just killing two birds with one stone," Ino said easily, closing her menu and signaling the waiter with a delicate flick of red nails. "One could even say I'm still technically on the clock."

The waiter eagerly rushed toward their table.

"You'd be surprised how helpful it is to know who's fucking who in the village," Ino said without an ounce as shame. The waiter reddened. "Comes in handy during interrogation. Nothing like threatening to reveal an affair to make a hardened shinobi—"

"I'll have the sukiyaki," Sakura cut in smoothly.

"Ah," Ino said, apparently noticing the waiter for the first time. She gave a beatific smile. "Sashimi, please. And I'll have ponzu on the side."

"Excellent. I will direct these orders towards the chef right away," he said, bowing low. He left with a slightly dazed smile.

Ino turned back to Sakura with raised eyebrows.

"So?" she demanded. "On a mission with the team, were you?"

Sakura nodded perfunctorily. "And your team," she asked swiftly. "Been on any missions with them recently?"

"Don't think I don't know what you're doing," Ino said with a small smile. She cupped her chin in her hand. "But—yes. We usually take on something once every week. The rest of the time, I devote to being old Morino's dearest dogsbody."

Sakura's lips quirked infinitesimally at the poisonous look on the blonde's face. A flash of familiar blonde crossed her peripheral.

Ino followed her gaze and gave a low whistle. "Would you look at that," she said, a jeer on her face.

Sakura rubbed tiredly at the bridge of her nose. Perfect. Of all the places for Naruto to choose for a date night with Hinata on this particular night, it had to be here.

"Have you ever seen him out of that atrocious jumpsuit before?"

She cursed Ino's loud voice as the pair suddenly turned to them, wide-eyed. Hinata smiled shyly once the shock passed and gave a small wave.

Naruto's blue eyes seeming unusually bright. He turned to a waiter next to them and then pointed to Sakura and Ino's table. "We'll join them."

Sakura stood. "No," she said a little too forcefully. She gentled her tone a second later. "No. We shouldn't interrupt the two of you—"

"Nonsense," Hinata said softly. She had made eye contact with Naruto and something passed silently between them. "We insist."

A pair of servers quickly and seamlessly assembled an extra table and joined it to theirs. Hinata took off her coat, revealing a gossamer-thin yukata as deep as the color of red wine. Sakura heard Naruto choke on his own saliva.

A server swiftly delivered a small plate of wagyu beef to the table, courtesy of the chef.

Naruto cleared his throat loudly. "You look…good," he said roughly, brushing at his closely shorn hair.

"You too," Hinata returned, cheeks pink.

Sakura sawed noisily through the meat. Ino smacked her across the arm.

"So," Naruto announced, turning his gaze to them. "I haven't seen the two of you like this in a long time."

"The gossip hasn't been scandalous enough until now," Ino said with a sniff.

"Don't listen to her," she sighed tiredly. She straightened a second later. "Really Ino and I shouldn't be ruining your night. It's not too late to—"

"I think I should probably be apologizing ahead of time for ruining your and Ino's night, actually," Naruto said with uncharacteristic graveness. He looked up from his folded napkin a second later, eyebrows raised.

Sakura let out an incredulous huff of air, then leaned back. "Really?" she asked curtly.

"Really," Naruto said with a firm smile.

"Now?" In front of them, she meant.

"Sai keeps covering for you," he explained simply, crossing his arms.

Sakura glowered at him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hinata attempt to draw Ino politely into their own side-conversation.

"So?"

Sakura averted her gaze.

"Did you think I would react badly?" he continued intently. "If I knew…that you weren't."

He stopped.

"Weak?" she finished for him, tone flat.

It was odd, to hear him admit it, even implicitly; in the near-decade she had known him, he had never alluded to anything like it, even though for most of that time, it had actually been true.

"It wasn't like that," she said lowly. "I didn't choose Sai as a confidante. I never really told him anything."

"He noticed it on his own," Naruto summarized, like he had heard this before. His gaze lowered. "I keep wondering about that: the fact that I didn't. Sai's asked me about it too, that maybe I was…seeing something that didn't exist, because some part of me wanted to keep seeing it."

"No," Sakura said bluntly, and she meant it. "How were you supposed to notice something that I was actively hiding? Sai probably doesn't even realize that he had an advantage. He had no preconceptions about me. Not to mention he's much more adept at uncovering secrets than you."

"And why were you actively hiding it?" Naruto pressed.

Her fingers tightened around her napkin. "That," she said forcefully, "I can't tell."

His eyes bore stubbornly into hers.

"Hokage's orders," Sakura said through unmoving lips, wary of anyone who might be watching. Naruto's eyes narrowed. "Maybe someday, when you're hokage, you can ask me. Maybe, then, I'll be able to tell you."

He struggled for a moment, features shifting between frustration and resignation. Eventually, he nodded.

"So," Ino said slyly, "can I stop pretending now to not be eavesdropping?"

"Ino," Hinata cajoled gently.

The blonde girl rolled her eyes. "Don't pretend you weren't trying to listening too."

With remarkable timing, a waitress placed Sakura and Ino's food on the table with a flourish.

"But I want to hear the really juicy stuff now," Ino said with frightening intensity. She grabbed Sakura and Naruto's hands. "Tell me."

"About…what?"

"Sasuke, of course!" she cried out triumphantly.

Sakura cracked her neck loudly.

"He's pretty much the same as ever," Naruto said dismissively. "Just as arrogant and lame. More so, really, now that he's back."

"I don't care about his personality," Ino sighed, examining her nails. "I haven't gotten to see him yet. How does he look?"

He squinted.

"Taller," Sakura said boredly.

"I, ah, crossed him in the hospital before he went in for his medical examinations to be cleared for active duty," Hinata said, looking very hard at the tablecloth. "He seems to be—very healthy."

Ino smiled knowingly. "A fine specimen for medical study, was he?"

Naruto was red-faced. "What's so good about that idiot? He has hair that looks like a duck's ass. He is a duck's ass."

The conversation lapsed into silence. Sakura speared a cube of meat and brought it to her mouth.

"By the way," Hinata said abruptly, turning to face Ino, "I just wanted to congratulate you and Neji, personally, as well as relay our clan's gratitude as well. My father is very pleased."

At the very least, Sakura would reflect later, the dinner had been well worth it just to see the way Ino's face paled with mortification in that moment.

The next day found Sakura making a midday trip to the grocery store. All the non-perishables she had stocked up on before the 'Second Sasuke Retrieval Mission' had run out that morning. Well, that was almost true. More to the point, she was sick of living off of dried noodles and nuts.

Her mouth watered as she stepped into the store. She could probably kill now for a piping, hot cup of mugicha tea. She went straight for the tea aisle. Crouching low, thrusting her hand blindly toward the back of the bottom shelf, she rustled around until she triumphantly pulled out what seemed to be the last bag—

"Haruno Sakura."

Sakura's smug gaze snapped from the tea leaves to the man standing in the middle of the aisle. She paused.

She had known she had had a lot of explaining to do to the people around her. All she had been doing this past month, for the most part, was explaining. But not at a grocery store at 7 am while she was starving. Not to this particular person.

She blinked, but he was still there. Lo and behold, not a cruel figment of her imagination.

The light lines on Itachi's face were all the more prominent under the fluorescent lighting of the grocery store. He looked very much like he had recently been retrieved forcibly from the brink of death. He also held a crate of tomatoes.

She stood up reluctantly.

"Should you be out right now?" She searched around for a nurse-caretaker in their vicinity.

He gave her a small, distant smile. "Apparently I've been recovering at an astonishing rate."

Sakura's mouth opened and then shut. (He didn't look it.)

What she was supposed to do then, of course, was to make discrete arrangements for a suitably private area and a mutually convenient time for them to meet. Because, clearly, they were long overdue a conversation.

"Do I need to be worried?" she muttered instead, in the narrow, otherwise deserted, aisle of a grocery store.

Itachi's face revealed, frustratingly, very little. Instead, he gave her that same, placid look. Sakura started to wish fervently that she could read his mind. It took her an instant to realize that it was a sentiment she had felt before and keenly. Not her, she corrected after a second. An imprint of Shisui, the man.

"Most of the time," the man said calmly, unblinking, "I feel nothing."

Sakura paused, examining him through narrow eyes.

"Other times, however, there is" Itachi disclosed evenly, "anger."

Something about the way he said it—as though it were utterly foreign to him—made her a bit unnerved.

"Not that this is a conversation for a grocery store," she said genially. "But are you threatening me?"

"Am I?" he said finally, with something like clinical curiosity.

The smile left Sakura's face.

"I'm not pretending I was your savior," she said roughly. "I've not been expecting gratitude."

"You weren't," Itachi agreed. His voice held an edge right now. "You likely would not find it."

Sakura turned her face away, shoulders tight. It was absurd. What was there to regret about survival? Without her and the crow's interference, Itachi had been slated for a cruel, untimely death. And yet, she acknowledged uncomfortably, maybe-to him-there was something undeniably cruel about what she had done. That she had intervened as she had and possibly robbed him of…the freedom to choose—to follow through with a plan he had set for himself, that he had lived for, for years.

"Sasuke," she said shortly, changing the subject abruptly. "He's living with you?"

Something shifted in his face, subtly. "Yes."

"The tomatoes are for him, I'm guessing."

"…yes," he repeated again, monotonously. His eyes followed her.

"Legacy of an unfortunate preoccupation when I was younger," Sakura explained shortly. "If I recall, he liked them sliced into even quarters."

His gaze flickered.

She scowled at nothing in particular, not sure why she had admitted to that.

"When I'm not around," the older Uchiha said indifferently, looking somewhere past her, gaze unreadable, "watch him."

She stared at him for a moment, mouth agape. "Me," she said, sounding a little strangled. She dropped the bag of tea leaves into her basket. God, she needed to leave before this conversation had any more surprising twists. "Right. Okay."

His words sank in a second later. She looked at him sharply. Something of that old Shisui surged in her, pained and panicked. When I'm not around—

She bared her teeth in a nasty smile. "But if you're ever out of the picture, for any reason, I might just forget that promise. Might just let my hand slip, if you catch my drift."

"You're not," Itachi observed after a pause, "an exceptionally good liar."

Sakura shrugged insouciantly. "I've managed so far. Makes one wonder, doesn't it?"

She gave a little wave and calmly completed the rest of her grocery list. When she exited the store, she spotted—as she had predicted—a small, stout man waiting on a bench in medic-nin robes. Sakura passed seamlessly through the crowd to the other side of the street.

She rested her bags on the bench and pulled out the bottle of milk she had just purchased, taking a quick sip. The older man looked up from her book, the thin moustache above his lips shivering slightly with a passing breeze.

"If he isn't already," Sakura said, smiling into the street and nodding politely at an old Academy teacher, "put him on suicide watch."

She dropped the bottle back in as she picked up her shopping bags and then made her way home.

She didn't sleep particularly well that night. In fact, she barely slept at all.

She found herself tossing and turning, eyes wide open the entire time. There wasn't one particular thought—it was all of them. She couldn't seem to quiet her mind. It had become possessed of something entirely out of her control.

A strange fear beckoned Sakura…but, perhaps, not unexpected. Maybe, even, a long time coming. She had more downtime than ever, without ANBU: more free time, more energy—more time to reflect.

It was corrosive.

How far away was she, some unsightly, shivering part of her whispered. How far away were the people who had been around her in ANBU? (Him) How many bodies? How much blood? In ounces or in quarts?

For the first time in a very long time, she wished she were…closer. To her parents, maybe. To someone. She wished (in that irrational, unmitigated way that can only happen in the privacy of one's own thoughts) that there was someone who would come now, if she asked, and could lie to her, if she needed, and that she would believe them. Could believe them.

She leaned back in her bed and forced her eyes shut, even though sleep wouldn't come for hours, and even then, not for long.

This continued for the next few nights.

The universe, it seemed, had a knack of holding Sakura to her promises, with very little consideration or regard for her altogether.

It took less than a week.

"Be still, Sasuke," Sakura hissed, her fist landing with unbridled strength in the midsection of a tall woman with bright, white hair. She felt her ribcage compress beneath her knuckles, felt them cave in, and then shatter.

Not wasting a spare second, she shunshined through the swarm of sound shinobi in the narrow cave. Their team had been split as soon as they had been ambushed—she and Sasuke were only in one of many in a network of caves the sound shinobi now populated like bees in a hive.

Sakura bared her teeth in frustration as she brought a chakra lit hand to the wound on Sasuke's leg.

"Get off me—"

"Don't move," she snarled. She forced her fingers into the wound, past the exposed muscle and bone to the artery that had been all but shredded.

"They must've been tracking us for days," Sasuke exhaled, face contorted in rage, "Kabuto, that sniveling, worthless—he must have found out my chakra was sealed."

Despite whatever he was capable of at his peak, she acknowledged sourly, an utterly chakra-less Sasuke had been a more than achievable target in the middle of this small army of shinobi.

Just one lucky shinobi with enough medical knowledge to make a crude, surgical incision was all that had been necessary.

"Stop moving," she ordered. "This injury will kill you in the next minute unless I hold the frayed ends of your artery together exactly like this."

A heavyset man wielding a chakra-lit spear emerged at the forefront of the clamoring pack heading straight for them. Sakura watched him with careful anticipation, timing her crouch for the precise moment he was in arm's reach. She lashed her foot out with chakra-induced strength, sending the lower half of his leg snapping in the opposite direction of his femur.

She caught the sword of the next sound shinobi on the shoulder guard of her flak jacket. Her hand latched in the same motion onto the front of the woman's face. She squeezed, until she felt the consciousness leave beneath her hands, shoved her back a second later.

Her gaze flicked up in annoyance to survey the rest. They had been biding their time as their comrades attacked, would attack in the next few seconds. To keep her right hand still, she had to keep the entire right side of her body stationary; that meant no twisting or rotating. That left her with one hand and one leg, all on the left.

Which wasn't sustainable, Sakura realized with thin lips.

As the first woman moved, body beginning to blur in the telling signs of shunshin, Sakura made a split-second decision. Her left hand burrowed into the floor of the cave with thunderous strength. The resulting sound was deafening, like a clap of thunder.

And then the entire cavernous structure around them began collapsing.

The rock fell like rainfall: at first, slow and unpredictable. Then, suddenly, faster and blurring. She saw a boulder as big as a horse drop directly on the man mid-shunshin to them, crushing him to death instantly.

Sakura gritted her teeth and raised her left forearm, muscle tensed in preparation as the rest came down on them, chakra-lit fingers still wrapped tightly around the artery in Sasuke's thigh.

The first boulder was nothing. Her arm didn't shift a millimeter. The second and the third, directly on top of that, were similarly insignificant. It was the fourth that made her left foot shift back slightly. Then the next few came, and her arm buckled toward her head a centimeter before she steeled herself, gritted her teeth, and forced her forearm back up.

Ten seconds—ten infinite, torturous seconds—passed until everything stilled. By then, it felt like she was holding up a mountain, her forearm just scarce millimeters above the crown of her head. Beneath her forearm, until the boulder right above her gave out, she and Sasuke were shielded from the rest.

Agonizing pain seared through her body with the effort it took. She panted rapidly.

"What did you do?" she heard Sasuke hiss in the utter darkness.

She could have let him die, some part of her realized dully. Could have just let him bleed to death as she took on the rest of the sound shinobi. It wouldn't have even been hard, she mourned. She was exceptionally good at the killing aspect of her job. The saving part, apparently, not so much.

(She hadn't thought, when she had made that first choice—even the next—that she would be putting herself on the chopping block with him. And yet here she was, risking her life for Sasuke. Almost entirely unintentionally.)

Fuck.

She felt the artery finally finish knitting together at the exact time her left arm buckled. Sasuke gave a hoarse roar of pain as she wrenched her other hand out of his leg and brought it up to support the piles of rock above them.

He shifted immediately, brushing her leg. "Try…to…minimize movement," she strangled out to him.

"This was your plan to save us?"

Ungrateful bastard.

"You can't hold that forever."

She knew.

"A minute, if at all."

"Sasuke, even if we're both about to die now," Sakura whispered hoarsely, "you're well on your way to convincing me to strangle you in the fraction of a second I'd have before those rocks crush us."

Silence met her words.

Then, tonelessly: "Save your breath."

Alluding to their diminishing oxygen supplies issue, she understood glumly. Her legs bent against her will, her feet sinking well into what remained of the cave floor. She could feel the muscles in her forearms tearing, the skin there scraped raw.

She let out a coarse, ugly cry as her shoulders started to tremble violently.

"Sakura," was all Sasuke said. She didn't have the brain power to analyze the way he said it.

Her eyes stung with frustration, because she could feel it. It felt like fighting the ocean. There was no way she could win. There was only the time until she gave in.

(The muscle in her right forearm tore just as she heard it.)

That shrill, sing-song battle cry, like the chirping of the birds.

She blinked dazedly in the darkness, trying to understand. There was a low, guttural rumbling sound growing louder and closer, like something was coming straight toward them.

Until that split second the boulder above her shattered, she didn't even realize that her load had begun to lighten. It went from everything, abruptly, to nothing—too quick even for her to luxuriate in the change. Dust and debris from the decimate rock filled the air. Her panting breaths turned ragged.

Sakura looked up and encountered then—what seemed for one, irrational second—the face of divine rage itself. The face above her was luminous (a consequence of the raikiri, she would later rationalize), sharper and harder by the starkness of the darkness around them.

She inhaled, soundlessly—and then the blood rushed back into her brain.

"Sakura! Sasuke!" she heard Naruto cry. He careened down from somewhere higher, kicking off one boulder onto another until he reached them. His gaze flitted between her and Sasuke.

Sakura knew she looked far worse than Sasuke at the moment. She wasn't surprised when Naruto moved like a bullet straight toward her.

"Don't touch her." Kakashi caught him viciously by the collar and swung him a few meters away.

As Naruto stared in confusion, Sai touched ground beside him, silent and pale. His dark eyes seemed larger than usual.

"What's broken?" the man inches from her demanded, eyes roving over her body.

Sakura opened her mouth and tasted blood. Her nose had bled. She hadn't even noticed.

"His femoral artery," she wheezed, trying to sound firm. "I knitted it together, but the hold is tenuous at best—"

"Not him," the copy-nin snarled. She saw black spots and blinked slowly. A hand came into view, snapping harshly. "Look at me. Talk."

"My arms…the muscles. They're torn. My triceps too. I think I dislocated both shoulders"—she shifted experimentally, and held back a scream of pain—"my left knee too."

Blessed green chakra crossed the field of her vision, and then it was supplied directly to her body. A dopey smile crossed Sakura's face. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Sai helping lift Sasuke gingerly onto Naruto's back.

"Feels nice," Sakura commented, eyes barely open.

The muscle in her arms finished knitting together. Muscle was always easier than veins and arteries.

"Nice," she sighed again.

The skin on her forearms sealed.

"Should she be conscious for this?" she heard Sai murmur.

Hands grasped her thigh and her calf firmly, then moved quickly, aligning her knee back into place. Sakura swore viciously, forcibly ripped from the happy place she had been before.

Her eyes widened in horror. "Don't you dare," she managed to get out.

He slid her shoulders back into place in lightning quick succession.

"You absolute worthless piece of trash fucker," she choked out.

But he had already turned to face the rest of their team. "Full speed back to Konoha," he commanded abruptly, voice returned seamlessly to its usual indifference. Sakura wondered if she had imagined there being anything different before. "I'll take Sasuke. His current condition will require more finesse than you two are capable of giving."

Sai brushed her shoulder with his own. "So," he said almost soundlessly, "how does one go in less than a month from trying to kill Uchiha Sasuke to almost dying to save him?"

Author's Note:

two updates? in (basically) a week? i'm a new woman.

Lol, in all seriousness though, hope you enjoyed this chapter! We have a small time skip, a Team Seven that is somehow miraculously functioning if not particularly well, a still very fucked-up Kakashi who is (in a strange turn of events) actually acknowledging Sakura's strength, Sakura (accidentally?) risking her life to save Sasuke, and a lot of repression of emotion on all sides. Delicious.

Also, just to comment on last chapter's comments (hehe): I've been kind of surprised by the general hate/anger in the comments-not really against Kakashi, because I find that legitimately well-deserved-but against Naruto? It kind of drove me to write very noticeable parts of this chapter *cough* *cough* as you might have seen. Let me know what you think!

About everything. Let me know. Please. I LOVE your long comments so so so soooo much.

They also make me update faster? :o :o :o

(See? It worked for the last chapter)

Shameless, I KNOW. Ok bye.

P.S. To address something in case it raises in any questions, I've kind operated via the understanding that Kakashi would have copied rudimentary medical ninjutsu using his sharingan, like how to heal torn muscles/skin (but not, for example, how to reconnect a severed artery).

P.P.S. Also I have ZERO medical knowledge so I apologize for anything batshit crazy in this chapter