...let us two go up into the bed so that, lying together, we may then have faith and trust in each other.
Early one morning, Orochimaru set off through the tunnels alone. It was not a common occurrence for him to tend to business without some combination of Kabuto, Sakura, and Karin in tow, but sometimes he would emotionally grow distant for a few days; they always knew this meant he was soon to head to the other wings by himself to be with his thoughts in private.
Typically, Sakura and Karin would take advantage of his absence by ganging up on Kabuto, convincing him to let them sleep in or slack off. He would not often relent, but had taken pity on them after a particularly grueling spar late one afternoon that'd left them all bruised and exhausted.
"Take the morning off," he'd said as he caught his breath. "I've more important things to tend to, anyway."
Sakura and Karin had lately been testing each other's boundaries. Karin had always been drawn to Sakura's chakra, but since the infusion of Hashirama cells and the successful application of the curse mark, Sakura caught her friend staring more often than not. Still they spent most nights staying up chatting and falling asleep in the comfort of each other's arms, and tonight was no different as they retired to their room.
"My hair is a mess," Sakura said, eyeing herself in the mirror of the adjoining bathroom. It was well past her shoulderblades, the ends split. "I haven't been keeping up with it."
"I can cut it for you," Karin suggested, sitting up from her spot laid out on the floor.
"Thanks, but uh, pass. Your wild-child look isn't really my style."
"Don't be a jerk," she said with a grin. "My hair looks like this because I suck at cutting it myself. I used to cut my mom's all the time, though!"
They hardly ever spoke of their families, and Sakura's interest began to pique as she stepped out of the bathroom. "Is your mom still around?"
"No," she said. "I know, I know: there's no proof her hair even looked good. But I promise it was!"
She laughed at this, bending to sit down on the floor. "Fine, fine, I believe you. Get a kunai or something. And tell me about your mom."
They sat there together, Karin knelt behind as she gathered Sakura's hair in her hands, combing through it with her fingers. "Mom was really nice. She'd like you! She was a medic, of course, and much better at it than me. Kabuto would have a field day. I was still pretty young when she died, so living on my own was hard. I was glad when Orochimaru took me in."
Sakura hummed as Karin took the blade's sharp edge to the middle of her hair. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine—what can ya do, y'know?" The kunai began to scrape along, chopping as it went. "What about your mom?"
Sakura had never said much about life in Konoha, and certainly nothing of her family. Not only was it difficult to think about them for too long, but speaking of them ran too many risks in her mind. It risked offending the many orphans and kidnapped children running around the other wings of the compound, it risked outing Sakura as soft, and it risked the safety of Konoha itself if Orochimaru were to suspect her as a double-agent, even if she wasn't in any official capacity.
But Karin was her friend, and she found herself eager to talk about it all. "Last I saw, Mom's still kicking. Dad, too, but they...well, I didn't have a problem with them. They could be overbearing, but...they loved me, and they were still alive. That's more than a lot of people have, I know. It's Leaf itself that made me leave."
Behind her, Karin was quiet as she severed the last strands of the bottom half of Sakura's hair. She felt as her friend angled the kunai and began to shape the cut. "Yeah?"
Sakura's heart felt heavy; the last thing she wanted was to upset her. "Yeah. Sasuke"—they'd talked enough about boys over the last year that they knew all of the important names from each other's lives—"was supposed to be the one who came here. Naruto beat the hell out of him and lugged him back, and they all...you should've seen them. It was horrible.
"Then I started wondering why Sasuke even wanted to leave, and it all just made too much sense. Konoha had never been a kind place to him." Or to Naruto, or to Kakashi, or to any of the boys on the retrieval squad.
"I guess all hidden villages are like that," Karin mused as she scooted around to face Sakura. She took her pink fringe in her hands and began trimming, pausing here or there to study Sakura's face with a slight blush on her own. "Mom died because Grass forced her to heal so many wounded. Chakra exhaustion. And they were perfectly happy to let it happen to me, too. I'm not even a Grass native!"
"I—" Damn. What kind of selfish idiot was Sakura? So many people had suffered more than she had in her comfortable life. "You probably think I'm so stupid, leaving a life like that behind."
"A life for yet another village that works people to death?" Karin had finished with Sakura's hair, but did not sit back. The blush on her face deepened. "I think you're even more of a hardass for chasing something you believe in. I really admire you!"
Something stirred in Sakura's heart. They stared at each other for another brief moment before Karin broke the eye contact and forced a smile.
"Besides, look at you now! You're so lucky," she said with a sigh, flopping down on her back. "You get to have both long and short hair whenever you want."
"Only you'd see the curse mark as a fashion statement."
Karin's laugh was short. "It's way more than that, I know, but still a plus that it makes you look like a total hottie. Your chakra gets...incredible, too."
"Yeah?"
"Oh, yeah," she stammered, looking away with that blush still on her face. "Sorry, I know that's so weird."
"Not really," Sakura said. It was nice, to finally have someone like her enough to compliment her and blush like a schoolgirl about it. "Especially compared to everything else going on around here. Is it weird to always be feeling everyone's energy like that?"
"Some people have disgusting chakra, like, you wouldn't even believe it. Not as weird as having random-ass people bite me, though."
A memory sparked in Sakura's mind, and with a smirk she leaned over Karin. "You know, when I first saw you, you had a bite mark on your chest." She brought up her hand and pointed her index finger at the spot, hovering just over the fabric of her shirt. "I thought it was a hickey."
Beneath her, Karin's eyes were wide under her glasses. Sakura fought a laugh at just how cute she looked when caught off guard, sitting back to better admire her.
"Don't be stupid," Karin said, pursing her lips. "You know I've never done anything like that."
They'd had that discussion many times, about all of the missed opportunities they'd had with boys over the years. But Sakura, feeling awfully bold by Karin's compliments and reactions, felt her heart skip a beat as she asked the one thing she'd never before dared.
"Do you want to?"
The room was still for a long while, strangely so. But then it happened so fast that Sakura barely understood what had happened at all: Karin crashed into her, pressing their lips together so hard it was like she needed it to live. The force of this, her first kiss, took Sakura's breath away, and her eyes widened just like Karin's had time and time again before the redhead harshly pulled back.
"Sorry, um—oh, my God, I just..." Karin pushed her hands up under her glasses, burying her face in her palms. "I thought you'd never ask! If that's not what you meant, I'll leave! I'll never see you again if you don't want to! Oh, God, I just ruined this, didn't I?"
She prattled on nervously, and Sakura could only give a small smile as she reached out her arms and gently slid the glasses from her friend's face. Karin froze, parting her fingers to watch Sakura through them as she dropped the spectacles onto her lap and pried her hands from her eyes, but she looked down at the floor.
"That is what I meant," she assured gently. "I just didn't expect you to jump at me like that."
"I'm sorry," she said, bowing her head. "I've never been very subtle. I'm so stupid!"
"You're not!" Sakura said with a laugh. "But you're right, subtlety hasn't ever really been your strong suit."
"I'm sorry."
"I like it."
Her smile was small, their eyes meeting once more. "Yeah?"
"It's nice, to always know what you're thinking. I never have to guess with you." When she put her hand on her cheek, Karin brought her own hand up to hold it.
"I'm glad you came up and talked to me that day," she said, her lips ghosting over Sakura's curse seal. "I never told you before, but...I was really lonely."
Sakura's heart fluttered. "I was, too. I'm glad you socked me in the ribs."
They kissed again, softer and much more tenderly—after all, they had ample enough time left to uncover the depths, if any, of this new aspect of their relationship.
The girls woke so late the next morning that it may well have been noon. In their usual fashion, Sakura woke before Karin, and where she would normally give a gentle nudge to wake the other, this time she planted a kiss to her temple. She stirred with a sleepy groan and a smile just as Sakura swung her legs from the bed and made to splash water over her face.
She hadn't yet had the chance, well, busy as they were last night, to see what Karin had done to her hair. With the brush she'd brought with her from Konoha she smoothed the sleep-tousled locks to see a shoulder length cut, the edges so finely trimmed they were nearly straight. Her fringe was similarly cut straight across the expanse of her forehead, stopping just shy to show off her twin yin seals.
Well, shit, her inner voice said. Red didn't do a half-bad job.
And there, at the spot where her neck dipped into her shoulder, sat a bite mark like all the ones dotting Karin's body. She felt very smug about that. Satisfied, she left the bathroom to change into one of her tunics, but paused when she spied the other girl sitting straight as a board, her eyes wide.
"Hey," Sakura said. She tugged on her compression shorts and crossed the room to put her hand on her back. For her to be acting this way could only mean that she was feeling some incredibly out-of-place chakra. "What's happening?"
"We need to get Kabuto." When their eyes met, the fear Sakura saw shook her with unease. "Now."
"You get dressed," Sakura said, already halfway out the door. "Meet up when you're ready."
As it happened, the more important things that Four-eyes had going on also appeared to involve sleeping in. He sat in his chambers wrapped in a robe with his hair down, but to his credit, he wasted no time in getting ready and joining Sakura in the main hall upon her request.
"There's some insane chakra coming this way," Karin called before she'd even come into view. The anxiety in her voice was palpable, and she wrung her hands together nervously. "There's three people, but one of them is so overbearing I can barely see past it. It's pissed off, and...red."
Such a description sent in Sakura's mind flashes of Naruto's immense power and anger on that foggy bridge, and she swallowed hard.
"No need to panic," said Kabuto. "I've sent word to Orochimaru-sama, and we can fend off any intruders on our own in the meantime." His confidence did little to comfort Karin, but stirred enough motivation in Sakura. "Let's head topside; we want to be sure we give our guests a proper greeting, don't we?"
They emerged from the hideout, the midday sun bright in their eyes. Sakura could feel it now, too, the signatures fast approaching. They were familiar things, but with enough differences that she could not be sure of what she feared so deep down. And so alongside her two companions she waited, her stomach flipping this way and that and getting worse with each passing second.
Where she did her best to hide it, Karin was so upset that she shook. Sakura took her hand and squeezed, not letting go until the other girl made a small whimper—because the nin had finally arrived, landing with force some yards away from the outcropping.
There on the forest floor where first Sakura had first met Orochimaru and spent so many days training with him, Kabuto, and Karin, stood Kakashi, Sasuke, and Naruto.
Team 7, reunited at long last.