Without A Doubt by lilmisssushi
A/N: This chapter really did come a lot more quickly than expected! It's amazing how addictive ffnet can be, and once you get hooked on writing, you'll never be able to go without it again. xD. Ooh, and a huge thank you to my lovely reviewers! You guys absolutely rule, and give me the strength to go on -insert big cheesy smile here-
And gosh! I'm sorry I keep changing the summary! But I've finally managed to settle on one I like lol.
Oh, and there are kind of spoilers in this chapter! If you know who Sai is though, then you should be safe. Trust me when I say that everything else you see comes from my delusional mindset :P
And 'shishou' equals 'teacher', much like 'sensei' okay.
Summary: For Sakura, being in love with Sasuke is a given. She's loved him through rejection and betrayal and everything in between, so why should she stop now?
For Neji, blaming everything on fate is the most tried-and-true method around. But throw in Haruno Sakura, and his extremely versatile excuse just doesn't seem to cut it anymore. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. (NejiSaku)(SasuNaru)
Disclaimer: Nope, still don't own.
Chapter 2: Emergence
To Sakura's surprise, she and Sai had come to a reluctant truce after many years of having to spend time in each other's gruesome company, and it eventually even led to an unspoken agreement of completely mutual understanding between the two. They formed a friendship of sorts, based on the requirements that Sai would keep his foul-mouthed self to a minimum while she was around, and she would refrain from planting one of her chakra-ised fists in his face more than was strictly necessary.
Needless to say, they became steadfast friends.
She didn't really know when their insistent arguing had merged into such playful bickering (as was the norm now), because one moment they were literally at each other's throats, and the next moment they were both collapsed on the ground, laughing breathlessly and using each other for support.
(Sai's laugh was still a little unnatural and forced-sounding, but Sakura could overlook it because she knew it was something she could definitely get used to.)
Then, in the following missions, they had discovered that their fighting styles could overlap and cover for each other, so it made perfect sense to start formally training together, whether Kakashi was there or not.
Sai really did make the perfect sparring partner, because he held no compunction against inflicting as much bodily pain upon her as was possible. For Sakura, he served as the perfect punching bag, because she theorized that she could always just heal him later, however many injuries she managed to cause in the name of 'training'.
She increased speed dramatically from so much experience fleeing away from his animals, while she also allowed him a chance to practice more of his taijutsu movements within a close-range combat style against her medic know-how.
(Once, she had tried to attack him while he was in the middle of drawing an offensive animal attack, and the result had not been pretty. His ink had somehow blown up in her face, causing her to land head-over-heels some distance away, while he threw a tantrum because she had managed to snap his favourite quill cleanly in half.
She had been blackmailed into paying for his meals for a whole week afterward, and by the end of it, she had vowed never to touch his precious drawing utensils ever again.)
It was truly a win-win situation, because as much as she hated to admit it, Lee and Naruto would have gone easy on her just because she was Sakura, their princess, but Sai gave her the chance to go all out, and know that he was doing the same in return. It was gratifying, to say the least, when she managed to drain his energy and get past his guarded-ness enough to get to know the real person lurking beneath his rather unpleasant exterior.
Truth was, she secretly enjoyed their verbal sparring, as much as she expected he did. It took quite a bit of intelligence to match her insults word-for-word and Sai did it with practiced ease. One couldn't survive on Sasuke's grunting and mono-syllabic answers (pitiful excuses for conversation that they were) alone, of course, and Naruto didn't even come into the equation. And Ino had finally managed to get herself hitched to the lazy bum also known as Shikamaru, so she had more than enough to worry about without Sakura adding to her troubles.
There was still Kakashi, but as much as Sakura loved him, that man was infuriating to talk at times, what with his enigmatic personality and constant looking 'underneath the underneath'. She had a feeling that Kakashi never really took her seriously, because, in his eyes, she would always remain his little girl, his first female genin student.
Sai and Sakura were in the middle of another one of their sparring sessions when Sakura decided to just surrender (she was exhausted), and jumped out of the tree she was hiding in. She flopped onto the muddy ground, spread-eagled, with her eyes closed, and waited for Sai to find her.
She didn't have to wait long.
He stalked quietly along the grass until he came to a stop right next to her left arm.
"Given up already? That's not like you," he said, his dark eyes skimming across her prone body for injuries.
"Aarggh…I'm tired, Sai, and you're not helping any with your stupid animals attacking me every couple of seconds."
"That's why it's called training, ugly. The enemy isn't gonna be nice and let you rest whenever you feel tired, you know."
She didn't bother to reply, and instead tucked one of her arms snugly under her head.
Slightly annoyed at being so unceremoniously ignored, he nudged her side with one of his sandaled feet.
"Heeeey…I'm sore there, so leave me aloneee."
"Fine, but you owe me one." He complied, and retreated back a few steps so that he was leaning against the tree she was currently lying under, watching her as she scrunched up her face in thought and muttered something vindictive-sounding under her breath.
He was quiet for all of three minutes before he spoke again.
"Stop thinking so hard. It's painful to watch."
One thing that could be said about Sai, was that he was almost honest to a fault, and always presented an objective point of view, whether she wanted him to or not.
Sakura appreciated honesty, but the painful, brutal, unflinching variety that Sai presented was a little hard to swallow at times.
Luckily, she was quite resilient from all her experience dealing with mentally retarded, yet prodigal, extremely exasperating men. Having Hatake Kakashi as her sensei probably would have ensured that.
Also, she could tell that he was just concerned about her, and was showing it in his rather strange, stilted way. Blowing a strand of pink hair out of her face, she grudgingly sat up.
"Oh, it's noth-"
"Don't try that with me. I know there's something up or you'd be screaming your head off and trying to beat me into the ground right this moment. You never give up training time while you could be taking your sexual frustrations out on me under the guise of 'sparring'."
Sakura looked up at him in disbelief. "Hey…you knew all this time? No wait, wha-?"
He smirked in reply, "I'm not a highly acclaimed ANBU for nothing, you know. Now spill."
When Sakura stubbornly didn't reply, he took a wild guess (which turned out to be not-so-wild), and managed to intuitively hit the problem head-on.
"…Is it about the traitor?"
After five whole years of absence, Uchiha Sasuke had been forcefully dragged back to Konoha by Naruto (who had finally fulfilled his promise from so long ago), fighting tooth and nail all the while. And the moment Sakura had set eyes on his battered, broken body, she knew; she loved him more than ever.
She could still remember that day, the exact taste and the feel of it, when Naruto had arrived, back in hospital, almost hysterical, after a six-month long mission, towing a half-dead Uchiha and screaming for the Hokage, before collapsing into Sakura's waiting arms. With one look at his face, she immediately took action and rushed the both of them into the ICU, while desperately sending an urgent message via a nearby ANBU member to both her teachers.
It turned out that Naruto had been hunting Sasuke down for weeks, while unauthorized, after he caught a whiff of him in the air with his keen foxy senses. Sasuke was in turn hunting down his brother after having killed Orochimaru, and destroying the whole Sound compound along with everything inside it.
She remembered that Tsunade had been extremely surprised to discover that Sasuke had managed to get away from, much less kill, her former teammate, fellow Sennin and long-time arch-nemesis. She was just plain shocked when she found out that Sasuke had finally succeeded in avenging his family and killing the Akatsuki member, Uchiha Itachi, at great personal loss to himself, both mentally, physically, and emotionally.
And while Sakura had nursed Sasuke back to health (at her shishou's orders), it was strangely heart-wrenching to see him sleep peacefully in the hospital bed, black hair on white.
His plentiful injuries were the least of the damage, and even while his body slowly recovered, she didn't know if he ever would. When he finally woke up from his self-induced coma (Tsunade said that his body had just shut down for awhile in order to cope with all the shock), there was a look of such sadness in his face, such longing in his eyes, such sorrow in every guarded movement of his body, that Sakura could feel her own heart collapse in on itself, all over again.
It was strange how he always had that effect on her.
It was painful to see the idol of her adolescent years reduced to such a pitiful state, and for that reason, she had put her entire being into slowly coaxing him out of his shell, in the least intrusive way possible.
Slowly, she gained his trust (which really was no mean feat, considering the way she had behaved around him in their genin days), and was there for him, as a friend, for the whole eight months he spent in the hospital. Naruto and Kakashi always hung around, too, and she supposed that their familiar faces helped quicken the pace of his recovery.
Sakura could tell that this broken Uchiha Sasuke was a changed person, but then again, so was she. She had grown up to be an intelligent, compassionate woman, and she hoped to God that Sasuke would finally give her a chance to heal all of him; mind, body, and soul included.
Sakura knew that she would have to take things extremely slow, but when it came down to it, she also knew that she would wait for him, for as long as it took.
Suddenly shaken out of her reverie when the insufferable Sai decided it would be amusing to repeatedly kick her ankle, she sighed in response to his question. "Why must I be destined to fall for all the cold, heartless ones?"
Sai laughed, and with an insight that she did not believe he possessed, he completely floored her by saying; "I think the Hyuuga would say that it was fate."
"..Heeey… Neji? Why the hell did you bring him up for? What's that supposed to mean?"
He smirked in reply, "It means whatever you want it to mean."
Sakura decided to let that one go and think about it later. Sai could be annoyingly cryptic at times. She supposed it went along with his retarded personality. Which reminded her…
"When are Neji and Naruto coming back from their mission anyway? It seems like ages since they left for that A-rank."
"Well, they're due back tomorrow, but that idiot's probably rushed ahead of the team so that he can go eat more of his beloved ramen."
Sakura laughed. "True. He's so predictable when it comes to food."
----
The next morning, Sakura was heading back into town with the intention of blackmailing her shishou into assigning her another shift at the hospital, when she decided to take a detour. Hoping to see Naruto, who, according to her imbecile of a teammate, was supposed to have come back from his ANBU mission that day, she walked towards the Ichiraku ramen stand (which was really no longer a stand-it had expanded into a decent-sized restaurant in recent years, also doubling as the main hang-out place for Naruto and their friends).
Sakura could not say what had caused her to turn around at that exact moment, but as her eyes caught sight of a silky brown mane of hair, and her senses suddenly tingled with a –startlingly- familiar chakra signature, it clicked.
Throwing caution to the winds, she made a running leap towards her target.
Hyuuga Neji was feeling grumpy. (Not that he wasn't already more or less irritable most of the time, but that day he was being more obvious about it than usual.)
Having been away from home for a couple of months, he had been looking forward to the mission's successful completion so that he could go home and brood in peace, but it seemed that the heavens were intent on working against him.
As he and his teammates had been travelling home that morning in the way that ninjas did, eager to be getting back after such a long and tiring mission, his mind had wandered off in the general direction of what could be waiting for him back in Konoha…
Certainly, the Hokage would probably insist he check into the hospital, because although the A-class mission had not been all that dangerous, he had still somehow gotten hurt when a rogue band of missing-nin had caused a minor skirmish and ambushed his team.
Even Neji had been caught in the rare position of being surprised, so none of his teammates had reacted quickly enough. As he pushed Naruto out of the way of an enemy's katana, the opponent managed to slash Neji's arm instead, but after Naruto realized what had happened,(with anger on his friend's behalf) he made quick work of the rest of the enemy nin with his insane amount of chakra and increased stamina. Their other two teammates had hardly needed to lift more than a finger to help.
Neji had to admit; Naruto was nothing if not protective of his loved ones.
Still, it left him with a pretty deep injury and an even more menacing demeanor to boot.
Neji decided to quicken the pace of tree-hopping so that he could have that long-awaited shower sooner, and his teammates gamely kept up even though they were probably even more tired than he. Naruto was being his usual insanely cheerful self, and had sped off into the distance while yelling something about how he couldn't wait to tell Sasuke and Sakura that he had 'kicked ass' and 'saved Neji' on 'yet another stupid mission'.
A small part of Neji's innermost heart (which he thought had been thoroughly beaten down and stuffed into the darkest recesses of his mind) twinged a little at the mention of a certain pink-haired girl's name…
But suddenly, as Neji lost a little concentration, the chakra in his feet wavered, and to his horror, he felt himself trip on a particularly brittle branch, which snapped under his weight and sent him plunging towards his impending death. And if that wasn't bad enough, a couple of leafy boughs managed to smack him in the face along the way, until he finally came to his senses. Throwing a kunai with wire attached around a thick-looking (and hopefully sturdy) tree trunk, he twisted his body and used the momentum to swing back to the front of the group, landing as coolly and calmly as if he had planned it all along. He had an image to uphold as the captain of his team, of course (but that didn't change the fact that he had, for a second there, been even the teensiest bit flustered). He was lucky Naruto had not seen his little accident – the idiot would have taken it at face value (for what it was) and would never have let Neji live it down.
All in all, it had not been a good morning.
Which brought him back to the present. How had he gotten so distracted as to let himself (an ANBU captain, the elitist of the elite) slip? And how had Naruto managed to drag him halfway across town (after their arrival and delivery of the formal mission report to Tsunade-sama, of course) to eat ramen at the Ichiraku, while also conning him into paying for it all? How indeed, when he should have, by rights, gone home the instant he had stepped back through those gates?
Neji sighed as he made his way out of the restaurant and into the busy street outside. His hot shower was long overdue.
A flurry of pink was all he saw before something (or someone) abruptly launched itself at his back, clinging on for dear life.
Smooth arms wrapped themselves around his neck, and his assailant just hung there until he heard a rather familiar high-pitched voice squeal into his ear.
"Nejiiiiiiiiiii, when did you get back?"
The only thing that kept Hyuuga Neji from immediately throwing...whatever it was off his back and repeatedly stabbing it with a kunai, was the fact that a) he didn't have the energy, having just returned from his extensive mission and b) he recognized the scent that instantly overwhelmed his senses with an inviting mixture of jasmine, fresh air and dirt.
Oh yeah, it would have to be Haruno Sakura.
Sakura blinked a little at her own audacity. What in the world had possessed her to initiate such intimate contact with the Hyuuga? Especially after he had just spent months away on an ANBU mission? She could just as easily have found herself dead before she even knew what was happening - one tended to be rather fidgety and anxious after being gone for so long. It just so happened that Hyuuga Neji was calmer than most.
Suddenly, she realized that he was deliberately keeping still (and doing a great impression of the statue right behind them), which she took as a good sign to proceed- he probably wouldn't be forcibly removing her arms from her body any time soon, not unless he was in a really bad mood.
Laughing a little at the absurdity of the situation (which she herself had instigated), she lightly swung her legs and tapped the back of his knees. No response. She shifted up his body a little until she could rest her elbows on his shoulders (it was more comfortable), and felt him stiffen just a fraction- she supposed that he wanted her to get off but was too polite (read: well-bred) to tell her so.
"Just now," he replied, finally answering her question from before. "Naruto dragged me to Ichiraku right after the mission. You know how he is, once he gets it in his head that he wants something, he won't take no for an answer."
She laughed, "Still, you should at least have told him that you needed a shower, 'cause you really do. You look like hell and you smell even worse. He probably would have agreed."
She laughed again as he turned around to glower at her.
"Didn't remember asking for your opinion, woman. And if I remember correctly, you're the one who jumped on me."
"Oh, so it's 'woman' now?" she teased, delighted that he was taking the bait. "What happened to the good old days when you would beg me to heal your pitiful ass?"
"I don't beg," he replied blandly, and she reached around to smack him playfully on the arm.
Out of the corner of her eye, she suddenly saw him wince -almost imperceptibly- but with her trained medic-nin eye, she caught it, and realizing he was probably hurt somewhere but was too arrogant to say anything, immediately leapt off.
"What, injured again, Hyuuga? You're losing your touch," she smirked, successfully managing to cover up the tiny niggling worry in her voice and replacing it with her usual witty repartee- it was a comfortable pattern for the two, since they had become friends so long ago, which she immediately fell back into.
"Seems like you make a habit out of hurting yourself."
He rolled his eyes. "Only so we can have these moments together," he shot back.
She smiled. She had missed his sorry ass after he had left for such a long mission. She had been left without his strangely comforting presence and steady shoulder to lean on for far too long.
"Well, better come with me then. I was heading to the hospital anyway."
He grunted his assent, and dutifully followed her as she bounced down the street. Tsunade-sama would have his hide if she caught wind of him defying his medic-nin's direct orders, after all.
It seemed like his hot shower could wait.
-end chapter 2-
I'm gonna be introducing more characters one by one, and hopefully by the end you would have met everyone in the rookie 9, plus Gai's team of course. And this chapter actually had some NejiSaku action! Huzzah! (Although it was kinda mild hehe. But don't worry, I have major plans for those two lol snickers) Feedback is greatly appreciated! And thank you again for reading.