AN: This collection is officially revived! I've had the idea of a Summoner / Demon cat AU for Sasuke and Sakura for ages. I hope you enjoy!

Two hours remained until Sakura was cast out from her family forever.

It was hard not to weep with fright in the waning hope of twilight. But those were the rules, immutable with age: if she did not complete the sacred ritual before the sun rose fully over the mountain behind their home, then she was no true child of the Haruno clan. As it was, as it had always been. Eyes dry, the little girl waited with the patience of the desperate for a summoned demon to appear before her.

At this rate, she thought, a smelly old baboon would do.

Her father had almost returned before Sakura locked eyes with the cat. She grinned even as it yawned, her milk teeth round as the kitten's were sharp, two young beings not yet grown into their power.

"You're late," she whispered, gesturing to the crispness of dawn in the sky.

Stepping forward, she saw the inky blackness of the cat's fur as it puffed itself up to seem bigger than in truth. He was a shade so devoid of colour it drew her gaze irresistibly; a good sign, meaning that this was no mere bakeneko but a true cat of the mountains. Her father would be pleased.

"I am on time," the kitten replied, tongue darting out to lick the blood she had missed on one forepaw. It did not seem to be his. Hunting already - the wait had been worth it.

"Of course," she agreed smoothly. And because he could be nobody else- "...Sasuke."

Only one child her age had been born to the cat clan. The kitten showed off his fangs as she named him, and Sakura felt satisfaction as though she herself had brought down the beast.

Three years passed before her father deigned to meet him - Sakura was counting, even if Sasuke affected an air of disinterest - and on the night they were to dine together the mountain cat was nowhere to be seen. He could be maddeningly contrary, but this was beyond any of his normal antics.

"Sakura, child of my heart," her father said formally, "are you… quite sure that it was a true nekomata with whom you made contract?"

The Haruno lord's own familiar sat by him as always, leaning over her father's shoulder to fix Sakura with a gaze that was as bright as the hair on her head. The baboon-like demon had been with her father since before Sakura was born, as its father had been with Grandfather before him, and before him, stretching back through centuries of illustrious history. It was known that the

Haruno family and the baboons of the sacred spring had a special bond. But the women of her family made their own destinies, and so Sakura had been free to choose.

To choose Sasuke, who was currently conspicuously absent from this gathering of the land's most important rulers, leaving her red-faced as her cousins whispered behind their fans and her mother stroked her hair like a child.

"Yes, Honourable Father," she said eventually, toying with the fish that had been set in front of her. "A mountain cat spirit, black as pitch and strong as a boar, with claws sharper than the stones of the Hokage monument."

There was a pause. And then her father's familiar swung his large head to the paper door, where the moonlight filtered through the thin material except for the stark outline of twin tails that twitched in the wind.

"That was," Sasuke's voice was even as the line of Sakura's gaze, "a good enough introduction, I suppose."

Seven years, and then Sasuke could adopt human form. He did so with the disgust of a cat gone to water, his dark gaze not a bit less piercing for all it lacked a cat's dagger-thin pupils.

"You don't look human at all," Sakura observed, lacing their fingers together and marveling at the whiteness of his skin against hers. Sakura was pale; genteel girls were rarely caught in the sun, and the Haruno successor was known to avoid the daylight altogether. Sasuke was still paler, aside from the shaggy hair atop his head, which retained the pitch of his true form.

"Well, I'm not," Sasuke pointed out with his trademark coolness. But his skin next to hers was warm; so Sakura simply rolled her green eyes at him, and laughed when he frowned so magnificently it made his beautiful features look fierce.

They lay like that for a while, princess and familiar tangled with childish innocence under the thick canopy of the forest's edge. Sakura was old enough now that her mother no longer sent a nursemaid wherever she wandered; usually it was to the edge of Sasuke's domain, where she would find him already waiting for her from one of his many hunts. He refused to live in the compound proper.

And she could be sad, but her mother's own cat familiar roamed the lands so frequently she was rarely home. In a way, Sakura was lucky that Sasuke was usually only a walk away.

"You don't, either," said Sasuke eventually, rolling over to face her with his feline grace fully intact. "Look human."

Sakura huffed. But they didn't need words to communicate, so the nekomata simply continued,

"It is true. You don't look like your father. You don't look like your mother. So who do you look like, if not one of us?"

People often remarked on Sakura's uncommon beauty. She hated what it implied; that she was more valuable for the clan, a class of untouchable treasure.

"Maybe I'm a cat," Sakura offered with a toothy smile, though it was tinged with annoyance. "Maybe these hands will grow claws and I'll have hair of lightest pink. Maybe I'll be able to hunt too."

Sasuke regarded her with the red eyes of his clan. "We can hunt now, if you wish."

Never take blood with a demon. The words rang in Sakura's ears, recited by all the adults around her until it was a nonsense rhyme, a warning softened into nothingness in her nursery. Never forget what we are, and what they are, and what lies in the space in-between.

Next to Sasuke's calm, catlike gaze in the familiar world of their forest, her answer was obvious.

Sakura was seventeen. Sasuke was close to the same, though he was taller than her now, and he no longer let her lie between his legs when they sat in the shade. He spent equal lengths of time as a cat and as a man, now, without needing to be coaxed with fish stolen from the kitchens.

They hunted together instead. At first, Sakura had been squeamish at the truth of it, an act of violence so unlike the stories told in the banquet hall by her family's fighters. But then… then, she discovered she was good at it. Quick with a bow and a sling alike, Sakura could run easily as fast as Sasuke in his human form, and pluck a bird faster even than his razor teeth would allow. Beneath her princess's skirts and her silken sleeves were legs of steel and arms that promised victory, and when she snuck back to her rooms as the mornings turned crimson it was with a heart that beat to the drum of glory.

"I think my mother suspects what I'm up to," she remarked to Sasuke one evening, watching as his eyes followed a dragonfly lazing on the summer wind.

The nekomata's expressions were familiar to her whatever he looked like, and she could read wry amusement in the twitching of whiskers as Sasuke lay in the grass.

"I'd say so," was all he commented, though she knew there was more to it.

Coaxing him with a hand that carefully stroked his fur in the way he liked but refused to admit, Sakura worked the demon's weak points until he rolled away in agitation, shifting flawlessly into human form with a displeased half-hiss.

"Enough," Sasuke pronounced. He sounded- not quite annoyed, but Sakura could not read the emotion behind his voice. "I think, nay, I'm certain your mother knows you come out at night, because she does too."

Sakura blinked in true surprise. Her mother - the picture of elegance, out in the dead of night, doing what the gods only knew? It was almost unthinkable, but Sasuke did not lie.

"You've seen her?" she whispered.

"Once." Sasuke nodded. "I got thrown by the scruff of my neck by Tsunade, and after that I've stayed well clear."

Tsunade was her mother's familiar; an enigmatic figure in Sakura's life, not quite an aunt, not quite a demon in the way her smooth fur comforted Sakura when she cried as a babe. Small wonder she'd chosen the cat clan as her choice of power. Both she and Sasuke had a healthy fear of the woman, far more than of her father's old Jiraiya. But to find out that her mother and Tsunade ventured into the night not unlike Sakura and Sasuke… it was a revelation hard to ignore.

"Whatever do they do?" Sakura mused, laying back on the grass. It was slightly wet, but these things had long since ceased to bother her. She couldn't imagine her mother's weak wrists hunting, so what did that leave?

Sasuke's face appeared above where she lay, the tip of his ponytail dangling over a shoulder until it tickled her chin.

"They cross lines," he said solemnly, and said nothing more, even when she pressed.

"Sasuke-" Sakura breathed in the twilight, drawing nearer until she stood so close to his hunt that she almost tripped on the twitching leg of the deer as it died. "What did you mean, that night? What lines have we still to cross?"

They had shared kills, licked wounds, whispered words of power to one another until Sasuke could walk under the sun and Sakura stroll into his village and none would sense anything amiss. Summoner and familiar, a boundary blurred more each year that they spent in each other's presence. Sakura did not mind; she knew Sasuke did not either. And yet… there was some final barrier between them, something that she knew nothing of.

She lay a hand on his arm, feeling the muscle twitch involuntarily against her skin. He was hot.

"Enough," Sasuke grunted, pulling back with his chin still bloodied from the kill, shifting until he stood on four legs. He was still faster than her that way. "There is but one line left, and you are yet a child before it."

That was blunt enough that even Sakura in her innocence could understand him. They regarded each other for a moment, green and red eyes meeting in the dark where they didn't need words.

She blushed.

And Sasuke, for the first time since he had been a kitten scarcely bigger than his twin tails, ran away from Sakura with all the speed of his demonhood.

Sakura was to be wed in the spring, an auspicious year when she would turn 22. A worthy match had been found at last for the Haruno princess, an onmyōji of some renown who was comfortable with her family's close friendship with the demons of the mountains. Her father's familiar, deigning to speak to Sakura for the first time in many years, hadn't even bothered to tell her her suitor's name.

Sitting still as a statue and receiving the news with the proper amount of summoner's calm, Sakura thought bitterly on how the Haruno women were suffered to choose their own destinies, except for when it truly mattered.

At least she was not hearing her fate alone: the air of the compound was thick with demonkind, for though Sasuke had been as a ghost since their confrontation she could sense his presence, a comforting pressure that beat at her ears like a second heartbeat.

She wanted to scream, but her voice caught in her throat. Sasuke, she soon heard, had no such qualms, roaring until the maids cowered under the eaves.

"Will you do it?" he asked her later, snarling, waiting not at the edge of the forest as was his habit, but at the very base of the maple by her bedroom. "Will you marry?"

"No," Sakura replied. Not if it's not you, she thought, looking down at him as he swished his tails in real anger.

"Shall I burn the place to the ground?"

It was an offer made with utter sincerity, for Sasuke's powers as a nekomata were strong enough that he could call upon the sacred fires of the mountain itself. And though she felt little in the way of true kinship within the walls of the compound so too did she want the people of her lands to live well, to keep toeing the line between human and demon that she had so easily leapt across.

"No," she repeated, lingering in the alcove of her room, looking at the pristine tatami from her perch on the sill. Was there anything to take…? Sakura knew she would never return and it made her hesitate, looking from the rich tapestries to the wealth of gems on her dressing table. "Just… come away with me from here."

Not the plea of a distressed princess to her warrior; Sakura asked Sasuke like an equal, and he responded in kind, nodding with his big black head as he paced beneath the tree. They hadn't spoken in weeks, but they'd never needed words and she hit the ground running, keeping up with his cat form through sheer adrenaline alone.

"I don't want to live like my mother and Tsunade," she said later when they stopped, coming to a halt at a clearing further away than she'd ever been. It was in the very heart of the mountain, a place almost untouched by humans. Sakura felt at home. "Sneaking around, dreading being caught, worrying about appearances."

Beside her Sasuke was human again, leaning against a wise old tree while he regarded her with thoughtful red eyes. He stayed silent.

"I did some thinking, after…" Sakura continued, drifting off and gesturing vaguely between them. "And I realised what you were trying to say, what I was somewhat blind to in my ignorance."

"I see," was all he said. But she knew he did, because his expression turned from wary to hopeful in a way that made her insides twist.

"And I think we should forget about rules, and boundaries, and all the rest, and live in the space in-between."

She was chattering with nerves, Sakura knew, but it was suddenly very important to say all this to Sasuke, to explain herself with agitated words even as he crept closer to her, silent against the darkness of a moonless night.

He leaned in, close as sin until there was no space between them; and finally, finally, Sakura learned that Sasuke's lips were softer even than the velvet pads of his cat's feet.

One year, and Sakura did not run much anymore. She was simply too unwieldy these days, so great with child that when Tsunade and her mother had appeared for their monthly visit the former joked that she was sure to have an impressive litter of kittens.

Sasuke had spent the next few days disabusing his wife of the notion.

"Are you quite sure she won't be a… cat?" Sakura asked, trying and failing to keep the worry from her voice as she looked down at her swollen belly.

"She'll be our daughter," Sasuke replied evenly, maddeningly contrary as always. "And she'll be a human."

It was hard to keep the relief from her sigh. Having a shapeshifting demon child was all fine to Sakura, but birthing one - quite another story. Doubly so without many of the comforts she'd grown up with, for Sasuke and Sakura lived beyond the boundary these days, in the spaces where neither demon nor human walked often.

"Well, at least at first," Sasuke continued, and Sakura looked up to see a rare grin on his feline features. "I asked nicely."

Narrowing her eyes in pure love and exasperation, Sakura thought back to their own childhood, where Sasuke had quite freely bitten her in kittenish excitement. She still had the scars.

"You are lucky I love you both," she groaned, already tired.

Feeling rather than seeing Sasuke approach, Sakura leaned into the nekomata's warm side as he lay against her back, his cat form a comfort with its warmth in the early morning air.

"We are," he said, ever so softly. In the last year Sakura had found that Sasuke could be impossibly kind, when he wished, and with her he wished freely and often.

As the crispness of dawn rolled over the mountain - the other side from where she had crouched, alone and afraid - Sakura closed her eyes in pure bliss, for she had brought down the beast, and made a family with him besides.

I'd love to know your thoughts!