drink/wink; mistake/unmake
rating: m
genre: romance/humour
pairing: inosaku
POV: Sakura
warnings: mild swearing, implication of underage sex (between two consenting minors)
prompt: for Naruto Femslash Week 2017, Day 4: Partners in Crime/Betrayal
word count: 1,363
one night only/just the rest of our lives/i'd burn the world wholly/just to keep you alive
"Well," starts a familiar voice much too loudly for the way Sakura's head is pounding and her mouth tastes like death and sunlight is streaming violently through the suddenly open curtains, "this isn't quite what I was expecting to find when I came looking for my wayward student."
The brilliant flash of the camera is blinding and Sakura groans as her stomach rebels for the pain.
"What the fuck, shishō?" Sakura mutters, her voice scraped thin.
Tsunade-shishō cackles. "Watch your fucking mouth, kiddo. I'm not the one currently getting caught after a wild night spent drinking."
Sakura attempts to squint at her teacher and Hokage, but her eyes slam right back shut at the still too bright light now filling her bedroom. Or, well, like, the corner of her crappy shoebox apartment that doubles for a bedroom/office/floor closet.
"Aaaargmpphssspshhhuuugh?" a different familiar voice slurs out.
Sakura frowns, her eyes still closed, and pats around on her bed.
"Fuck off," Ino snarls when Sakura's hand smacks her on the face.
Or, at least, that's what Sakura assumes she meant to snarl given the pure venom shot through the smashed up jumble of sounds, like the rumble of the earth in the moment after Sakura forces her chakra through her hand and down, hairline splinters racing outward before everything shatters.
"What the fuck?" Sakura demands again, her voice louder now, enough to make her wince at her own volume.
"Put some clothes on, you two," Tsunade-shishō orders. "I'm going to go get myself a drink."
Sakura blanches.
A drink.
Oh no.
"Ino," she hisses, "did we seriously steal sake from the Hokage last night and get drunk?"
The previous evening is starting to come back to her now.
Ino pinches Sakura's hip, making her squirm. Then Ino buries her face deeper into Sakura's hip.
"No, idiot, we got drunk and then we stole the sake."
Sakura says a few prayers.
At least—and this is by no means going to save them, but Sakura is at peace knowing her life could be ending more painfully than it surely will once she and Ino drag themselves out of bed and into her crappy kitchen to face off with the Godaime Hokage—they aren't the ones who managed to miss the drunk chūnin who broke into the Hokage's residence and made off with a crate full of high-end sake from a thankful merchant client for a job well done.
"We're dead," Sakura manages feebly.
Ino grunts. "I think I'm already dead."
They lie together in mutual suffering for a moment.
"I'm waiting," Tsunade-shishō's voice singsongs.
Sakura is sitting up and throwing herself out of bed on reflex at that too pleased sound, adrenaline screaming through her veins because they are so dead, so dead, Ino making a distressed sound and reaching for her, before she can think.
And then she clutches her head and doubles over, trying not to heave.
It's understandable then, really, that it takes Sakura so long to realize that she's completely naked.
And that she's got hickeys peppering her breasts, her stomach, and the inside of her thighs.
Sakura's head whips around and stares at the equally nude Ino scowling on her war zone of a bed, sheets pushed down around her knees from Sakura's mad scramble to standing.
The last few memories from the previous night's multiple adventures come crashing through Sakura's mind.
Oh.
So that's what Ino tastes like with sake on her lips, starlight in her hair as she sprawls across Sakura's sheets with Sakura's fingers pressed into her and curses on her tongue.
Sakura looks to her crappy kitchen—little more than a hotplate and a mini fridge and a scrounged up kitchen table she bribed Chōji and Kiba to help her move with food—where Tsunade-shishō is drinking tea of all things and watching them with a sly smile that has too many teeth to be comforting and then back to the other surprise blonde in her apartment who is now curiously examining the bloodied crescent moons pressed into her shoulder blades.
Sakura looks to the window and seriously considers bolting.
"If you jump out that window, Haruno Sakura, I will sic my ANBU on you to drag you back through the streets," Tsunade-shishō warns.
Sakura pushes her chakra out, scanning for any familiar signatures at the edge of her limited range. She matches the signatures to her knowledge of the ANBU duty roster and considers it; she could probably outrun Bear, but Crane is a tricky motherfucker.
Sakura's about to try her luck when—
"If you leave me alone to deal with this, Forehead, I will tell Lee your favourite flower and promise to give him discounts for the rest of his life," Ino hisses at her.
Sakura takes a breath, ready to—
"And I will tell your mother that you could have married the Daimyo's nephew but you refused."
Sakura stops.
"You wouldn't dare," she says.
Ino raises an eyebrow. "Wouldn't I, though?"
Sakura could always go missing nin. Tsunade-shishō probably wouldn't let anyone kill her for it.
Probably.
Maybe.
"If you book it out of the Village," Ino says, "then I won't go on a second date with you."
Sakura's mind skips a beat and falls on its face.
She blinks.
She opens her mouth.
She closes her mouth.
She blinks again.
"Was last night a date?" Sakura asks.
Ino rolls her eyes aggressively.
"If you two don't put some clothes on and get over here," Tsunade-shishō warns, "I'm taking another picture for more blackmail."
Sakura picks up a shirt and pulls it over her head.
It's purple and doesn't quite cover the line of hickeys down her abdomen and is obviously Ino's. Sakura pulls on a pair of underwear too, and decides that that's good enough.
Ino just wraps herself in a sheet and glides to Sakura's ramshackle kitchen table like a queen.
"I like your spunk, Yamanaka," Tsunade-shishō compliments.
Ino smiles.
Sakura slumps into the seat next to her, not an inch of grace in her.
"Now then," Tsunade-shishō continues, "I think a late morning spar should make for a nice start to your morning. Meet me at our usual training field in fifteen minutes. Don't bother changing into anything fancy; it's just going to get ruined."
Tsunade-shishō smiles broadly at them and saunters out of Sakura's front door.
Sakura sets her head down on the table.
"My ANBU will make sure you get there safely," Tsunade-shishō trills as she shuts the door behind her.
"Well," Ino says, "that wasn't so bad."
Sakura lifts her head up to stare blankly at Ino.
"If we run now, we might make it to the Village limits before they notice we're fleeing."
"Sakura—"
"Ino, I want to actually live to get to our second date."
Ino pauses. "I mean, she isn't going to hurt us that badly? It's just a sparring match?"
Sakura stares at her some more. "Yup, that's it, we're going. Quick! How many kunai do you have on you?"
.
.
.
Ino kisses her bruises better much, much, much later when they're bundled up into hospital beds.
"I tried to warn you," Sakura mutters.
"Shut up," Ino commands as she presses another soft kiss to Sakura's knuckles, "you have broken ribs, you shouldn't be talking."
"Should have ran when we had the chance," Sakura continues on, undeterred. "Would have been romantic. Lovers on the run."
"We would have been dead," Ino reminds her.
"Well, yeah, eventually. But, I mean, we'd maybe get, like, a movie about our lives out of it," Sakura muses.
Ino's head whips up, blue eyes flashing, and she grabs Sakura by the jaw, pulling her in close.
"When I'm done with you," Ino tells her, promise and honey dripping from every syllable, "the world will never be the same."
Sakura blinks and then, slowly, nods.
Ino's fingers make the her bruises cheek ache but she doesn't pull away.
Sakura believes her.
She'd follow Ino as she burned the world down.
(Sakura has hands for healing and hands for breaking. Ino touches her, and she is unmade.)
needy author's note, feel free to skip:
i love to hear from my readers about what's working for them, what kind of oneshots they'd like to see more of, prompts, etc. i'm probably going to be drowning in ks stuff for august, but come september i know i'll want to slip back into writing some more inosaku. (the world could use more of these two girls.)
if you're enjoying these oneshots, i'd love it if you were to drop me a line. thx, maus xx