Chapter XV: Hypocrisy

"Another plate please!"

"Coming right up!"

"Naruto! Stop freeloading! It's bad enough that we're endangering these people's lives," Sakura scolded.

"But we haven't eaten since the last village!" cried the fair-haired ninja as he rebelled by popping a piece of pork smothered with salty bean paste into his mouth.

"Sasuke-kun, can you—" Sakura had turned to who she hoped to be the most influential character in this situation only to see him stuffing a slice of tomato into a mouth already full of beef.

"..." Watching the last rational mind succumb to hunger, Sakura sipped her tea and quietly admitted defeat.

A tall, spry young man introduced as Takemori, laughed at the bickering ninjas as he brought another plate with a plethora raw meat, ready to be cooked. "It's alright! Yuko-nee would want to thank you guys properly for saving our family business. She'd be mad at us if we couldn't feed all of you at the very least."

Sakura slumped over the table, too exhausted to argue.

As soon as Kakashi had come for Sakura yesterday afternoon, a messenger frog from Naruto appeared, carrying the message of hunter-nins coming to investigate the battlefield. While the short time interval between the battle and the coming of the hunter-nins were far too coincidental, no questions were asked and no words were exchanged on that matter until they arrived at their destination: Lady Yuko's home.

A sudden downpour, both a blessing and curse, had ambushed the team as they left and had ceased abruptly as they arrived.

To Naruto and Shiro's unconditional delight, Yuko-san's family business was a prominent Korean grill in the village.

Had Sakura not felt like she would keel over any second, she would have wondered why a big business man such as Thompson-sama would care to bother such a relatively small restaurant. And though Sakura was suffering from terminal drowsiness despite her afternoon nap, she did not regret denying Kakashi and (to her surprise) Shiro's profuse offers to carry her. The adamant amount of concern the men had first given Sakura some irritancy which later transformed into suspicion.

When Sakura rose from her seat, the three men were entrenched in a furious warfare of chopsticks for the last piece of meat. It was Shiro who whipped out a fork with his free hand and stole away with the last morsel. Naruto cried foul play and Sasuke pretended not to care as he tilted his chair back and huffed.

"Ah-re? Sakura-chan?" Naruto noticed Sakura walking towards the back of the restaurant with several empty dishes. "Where are you going?"

"Dishes. Then to sleep."

As soon as Sakura disappeared into the kitchen where Takemori insisted that he would do the dishes and Sakura should retire for the night, Kakashi also stood to leave.

"Wait." Sasuke stopped his leader, straightening his chair and setting his feet on the floor. His eyes, however, were not focused on target.

"I want to talk to you."

"…Now?"

"Now." Sasuke arose and headed towards the back door, obviously expecting his addressee to follow suit. Naruto and Shiro watched the tense exchange and exit before the latter stuffed a fish cake into his mouth and motioned to the table.

"Eat leftovers."

"OK."

The pressure of the moment had lifted immediately in favor of food. For some, such complicated matters were better to be left unacknowledged.

————————————————

Both men faced each other as they leaned against the opposite walls between the restaurant and another building. Each emanated either an indifferent or lazy manner. The moon had come out tonight, and for once the rain had stopped.

"So, is it a nighttime interrogation, Sasuke-kun?"

"It was only after the party when you revealed that you and Sakura were married. Before that, you two never shared a room, nor expressed any actions of a relationship outside of a teammate and a leader, and on top of that, neither of you have in possession a ring on any finger." Sasuke began his analysis abruptly and also ended on a slightly awkward note. Relationships were not his forte, and discussing things like marriage was an uncomfortable ordeal, even if it was not his per se.

Kakashi rubbed his chin through his mask in either mock or real contemplation. Sasuke had stopped trying to guess a long time ago and decided that a post facto feeling of embarrassment would suffice in this situation.

"Haa…" Always the slow start. A long pause followed as the Kakashi stared into the night sky. Sasuke closed his eyes; a method of passing time he found to have some merit.

The moon was abnormally bright tonight, illuminating the streets
brighter than streetlamps and their paltry source of light.

"So you're saying that this whole thing's a setup?"

"…The whole situation just doesn't seem authentic."

Kakashi scratched his head. With the mission going anywhere but forward, there would be no use to keep up this now useless charade. Also, though there were advantages to the fake marriage, most of his reasons were purely for shock and entertainment value.

"'Authentic'…" However, all logical rationales aside, there was a paradoxical aspect to the previous statement. The word was not one that he would use to describe Sakura's current character.

"Sasuke, what would you classify as 'authentic'?" Kakashi posed a question that caught Sasuke off guard. The Uchiha's sharp mind spurred in to action. Underneath the underneath, even when the world was spiraling to a bitter end. It was the Kakashi thing to do.

"Children do become adults," Sasuke said with a smirk. Just because you've stopped growing up doesn't mean we can't. Especially Sakura.

"She always says she's busy, doesn't she?" If you haven't seen her grow up, then how are you so sure the Sakura we see is 'authentic'?

"Does she make time for you?" You could have been the reason why she had been avoiding us for so long.

Kakashi thought back, remembering the odd mishaps between the party and what he remembered of the sake incident. Technically speaking, it was he who inflicted this extended date on Sakura, but that wouldn't stop him from creating questionable innuendos.

"Usually at night. But we don't talk much." Take that statement however you want.

"..." Too much information.

Pushing himself off the wall, Kakashi turned to leave.

"Wait. You still haven't answered—"

"The world doesn't lose an axis once you're married, Sasuke." Kakashi stepped indoors and stopped, remembering a forgotten point.

"What is it?" Sasuke asked, noticing the pause.

Kakashi continued to walk into the store, letting the door slowly set itself back in to place.

"Jewelry is overrated," he said before he disappeared from view and before the knob clicked in to place several seconds later.

————————————————

While the details of how killing Thompson-sama saved this quaint eatery were vague, there was no question that whatever this 'contract' Yuko-san had mentioned before the team was forced to flee was of the malicious sort. Basing several psychological assumptions of that fact, the team would be safe here for the time being.

Sakura groped about the blankets, spreading out the sheets on the floor in a drowsy daze. After putting up a good fight, Takemori-san had shooed Sakura away to the second floor where she found two guest rooms. They were a bit musty, but they had a window, several blankets, and access to a bathroom.

Sprawling contentedly across the thick blanket that served as a mattress, Sakura closed her eyes to enjoy a few minutes of silence before sounds of someone taking off their footwear and the door—her door—sliding open registered distantly in her mind.

"…Kakashi…" There really was no one else who would intrude so openly.

"…Ah," Kakashi replied. She pulled out two blankets, he noted. What increased his amusement was the distance between where he was to sleep and where Sakura was sleeping. The room was not large, but the edges of both blankets were touching opposite walls which left about two meters worth of an empty floor between them.

Sliding the door closed, Kakashi stole across a longer distance than he would have preferred towards his designated plot Sakura had assigned to him.

"Sensei…"

"Ah?" Sakura opened her eyes halfway after the sounds of rustling bed sheets ceased. It was just a thought, a question that she wanted answered even though the next morning she would probably forget his reply in the morning.

"Why are you so insistent on pretending to be married?" Kakashi slowly sat up from his blankets. 'Why'. 'Why' such a troublesome question and Copy Ninja Kakashi was wasn't the one who liked giving straight answers. Though that one-word remark was a vexing query, the number of creative answers he could use as an insufficient answer was infinite as his joy in creating them.

"Well, four men in one room isn't necessarily a sanitary practice." Kakashi heard Sakura give a silent chuckle.

"Sensei's such a glutton for punishment," Sakura mumbled hazily into her pillow.

"Hai, hai." Kakashi pulled his shirt over his head along with his mask. There was no way he would get any sleep tonight. The moon was too bright and the humidity was stifling.

Falling back on to the blanket, Kakashi whipped his shirt in to a corner and lied back down with a groan. Now that his blankets and his mind had quieted down to mingle with the night, he could hear the frogs croaking their scratchy warnings of another bout of rain that was to come in the near future.

"Sakura." His voice was too loud compared to the chorus of frogs coming from the open window.

"Un?" She sighed out. Sakura was sleepy and, in all likelihood, would not be awake after the next five minutes. Despite that, Kakashi contemplated on his next words.

Sakura had become remarkably similar to himself. His problem with withholding information from those close to him had not changed, and somehow this habit had rubbed off on the open and sincere Gennin Sakura. Though he wanted to rid her of this tendency, it was hypocritical of him to expect her to open up when he himself did not plan on revealing any more of himself.

She had broken down once in the mansion, accusing him of thinking she was weak. But that would only serve as leverage to make her even more careful. In other words, Sakura was reinforcing the walls she was building around her, and the only way he could get Sakura to come out of the fortress she had built so meticulously around her for the last several years was to leave his own behind.

But he wasn't sure how to leave. Not when he had been living within his own walls for too long.

"Sensei?" She was still awake. Kakashi threw aside his thoughts and the beginnings of a guilty conscious.

"…Nothing."

————————————————

The night sky began to darken as rain clouds rolled in once again. And with the darkness came four hooded figures donning stark whites masks that contrasted sharply against the dusky colors of their clothing.

"Even if these shinobi were D class criminals, there is no doubt that the two who did this are extremely talented —and
dangerous—jounin-level shinobi," A wooden mask decorated with jagged, lightning-esque lines running vertically down the whitewashed surface muffled the hunter's voice. Two hunter-nins looked over the carnage lined neatly lined in a wasted town plaza complete with a piece of cloth draped over each face. The winning team had cleaned up the place surprisingly well.

"According to witnesses, only two ninjas finished off a group comprised of thirty ninjas," said the other hunter with triangles
marking the top, bottom and sides of his mask.

"Could it be the recent missing-nins reported to be from Konoha?" the same shinobi mused to himself as a third shinobi flickered in to view.

"None of the shinobi here has any identification on them. We should remove their masks and—"

"No," the lightning-masked leader ordered. The third turned to the speaker in confusion.

"But how will we be able to identify them?" The triangle-masked hunter argued in confusion. The leader merely placed a tag on each of the cloth covered face.

"'You are not to confirm the identities of any casualties unless there is at least one man left alive. If no one is left alive, destroy the bodies.' That is a direct order from Raikage-sama."

"Raikage-sama!" Why would a Kage intervene with something as insignificant as identifying D or C Class criminals?

"Yes." Unrolling a scroll on the ground before the corpses, the lightning-masked hunter formed a string of seals and pounded his palms on the parchment. Immediately, the bodies became a part of a mass of white flames, sparing the onlookers the gruesome visuals of incineration.

Thirty seconds later, the flames that were burning so brightly were extinguished immediately, leaving nothing but a large black scar in the brick square. The lightning-masked hunter looked to the brightening sky in contemplation.

"Raikage-sama… What is he thinking?"

————————————————

Author's Notes:
I hate Chapter 14. I hate it with an unparalleled passion. But when I read my fanfic, I'm also not happy with the first four chapters, though I'm not sure how I would go about changing them.

Well... I didn't wait for my betas again... So it's possible that this chapter would go under heavy-duty fix-ups in a few days.

However, I felt guilty so I decided to update.

To J: I was under the delusion that vodka was stronger than sake. It's my fault and misunderstanding. And I still can't drink legally (though that doesn't seem to stop some people...)

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Fanartist