Chapter 16: Childhood Toys
A sullen Bear rolled up to Hachiro's estate on horseback halfway between dawn and noon the next day, pulling with him the same rickety carriage they had arrived in. As the carriage creaked to a stop, Hachiro placed a cool hand on the back of Sakura's neck, as though she were cattle that he was ensuring wouldn't run.
The door to the carriage swung open. Sakura directly at the sun and wondered if the act would be able to blind her for the next few painful minutes.
"Hachiro-san, I trust Tomo-chan treated you well?"
Sakura scowled.
The hand on her neck tightened slightly. "Very," Hachiro said to Kakashi. "She exceeded expectations."
That distracted her, if for a moment. How effective had that genjutsu been exactly?
Hachiro's hand shifted from her neck to her chin, lifting her face to look up at him. "It's so rare to find a whore that obeys so well. I'm almost tempted to keep this one."
Nope. Bowing, Sakura pulled away with a shaky laugh and walked backwards the entire way until she was in the carriage.
"I'm so sorry," Snail said immediately, face tormented. "I can't believe that happened—"
"There's nothing to apologize for," Sakura said quickly.
Before she could explain, the door swung open again and Kakashi entered. She gritted her teeth as the man settled in beside her, the full side of his body flush against her own. The copy-nin surveyed the expressions of her team members.
"Who's been hanged?" he rasped disinterestedly, voice finally settling into its normal tone.
"Genjutsu," Sakura blurted, eyes wide. "I used a genjutsu."
Snail gaped for a bit, then grabbed Sakura's hands. "I'm so glad," she said fervently. "I couldn't sleep all night, just thinking…"
Not for the first time, Sakura was touched by Snail's warmth. It wasn't what one usually saw in ANBU.
Still, she was beginning to realize that for all the mythology surrounding ANBU members being heartless, soulless machines—especially in the lower ranks—it was just that: mythology. Sakura guessed now that, when it mattered, everyone just hid it well. After all, Raccoon had offered his water to her after her first truly awful mission, had tried to console her in his own quiet way. Even Bear, whom Sakura detested mightily, had exposed his humanity as much as his teammates had during the Kino mission. And one more, Sakura forced herself to acknowledge. For all his arrogance, his condescension, his seeming sheer disregard for the lives around him except for their capacity to enact violence—Kakashi had betrayed himself that day as well.
She leaned against the side of the carriage.
Trying to save Kino: that had been the first crack. Another: that he had come after her when she had been 'kidnapped' by Akane.
But then—everything he had said to her after killing Akane, while Akane's corpse was still warm.
She shifted in her seat, shoulders tightening. If she were the girl Kakashi imagined, someone who had never been given any reason, real reason, to change from the twelve year old she had once been... Perhaps, she would have been nothing more than that thirteen year old, simply aged a few more years and with a few more meaningless credentials. Possibly, she would have been lucky and found some legitimate path, though never on par with or the same as her teammates'.
It almost physically hurt her to admit it. But now that she could, Sakura assured herself, she could identify every reason for loathing Kakashi that was undeniably valid.
He had never given her genin self a reason to change. He had taken one look at her and declared her a lost cause, unworthy of his effort, when he couldn't have possibly known what she was capable of. And whatever his rationale had been, in that park that night it had almost cost her everything. Why had he never given her the chance he had Naruto? Sasuke, for god's sake, had been fucked up enough to leave Konoha and join Orochimaru. Had it been her personality? Her particular brand of ineptitude?
She huffed loudly and rested her head tiredly against the side of the carriage. Her timing was poor, however, as one of the wheels hit a rock on the road just then, jostling all of them. Sakura's head hit the edge of the door with a resounding thud.
"My bad," Bear called from outside, not sounding very apologetic at all.
"Did he do that before you could perform the genjutsu?" Snail demanded angrily. Belatedly, Sakura realized the other woman was speaking to her. At her confused expression, Snail reached out to brush a spot on the side of her neck that had been just revealed by her disrupted kimono.
"Yes," she settled with, voice a bit too tight, the entire while uncomfortably aware of the heat of the body pressed against her.
She rested her right back against the edge of the carriage and hoped for several other giant rocks on their path back to Konoha to concuss her memory out of her.
They stopped twice, primarily to feed the horse. Sakura took each break as a chance to escape the confines of the carriage and hope for a different arrangement upon her return. Unfortunately, Snail and Raccoon seemed determined to stay where they were.
Coming back from the second break—which had been rather unnecessary, they were quite close now—Sakura stared blankly for a moment at the open space left to her before settling into it stoically.
Sakura inhaled sharply. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she looked at him at last. She wasn't sure what she expected to find; Kakashi looked as unperturbed as ever. Here, she had been sitting and barely maintaining the pretense of normalcy, especially under Snail's questioning, and here he was—
Maybe, she wondered suddenly, face darkening, the copy-nin fucked all his teammates. Maybe this was all quite normal for him. Maybe Snail had blushed when he'd held her in front of Hachiro not just because of his proximity, but because of remembrance of something more.
What if this was some fucked up rite of passage, she contemplated icily. Was that why Bear and the others had been so nosy at the beginning of the mission about what had happened when they left the bar? Had this all happened to them too?
She wasn't aware she was glaring at him until mismatched eyes flicked in her direction, meeting hers and then narrowing at what they found.
Slightly, fractionally, Kakashi's right brow arched.
Sakura turned her gaze away, expression thunderous as she surveyed the window. The entire carriage was silent as they completed the last leg of their journey, except for the random curse from Bear.
They reached ANBU headquarters at sunset. Despite the cooling effect of night, the air was especially humid—it had probably rained during the day. Sakura's kimono was sticking to her slightly, and she shifted to create some separation.
"I'm out of here," Bear said, just as the carriage came to a full stop. They all heard the distinctive noise of shunshining.
"Ah, thank the gods," Snail said, nudging at Raccoon.
"I'm moving," he said good-naturedly, swinging open the door.
"See you, Crow. Taichou," Snail said cheerily. She took off at a hasty pace north of the headquarters, fanning herself.
Sakura, who had been waiting impatiently, anxiously, the entire time, moved quickly for the door.
Only to be stopped. Jaw tight, she lowered her gaze slowly to the cause. The pale, long fingers on the sleeve of her kimono were only slightly curled, holding her almost lazily.
Swallowing, she smoothed her expression into something suitably distant. "Taichou?"
The copy-nin's face scanned her face coolly.
She stared at him guilelessly. Just after the gap became uncomfortably long, she smiled sharply and said: "Oh, don't worry, just the usual pre-menstruation phenomenon."
If Kakashi had displayed then the usual squeamishness most men demonstrated whenever the topic of menstruation came up, her temper might have improved. To her dismay, he didn't even blink. Instead, his eyes glinted with what looked like mockery to Sakura.
She shifted her weight forward, resting her elbows combatively on her knees. "Did you want to know the details of my flow as well?" she pressed with a sweet smile, "In the past five months: heavy, regular, regular, light—"
"You're lying," Kakashi interrupted.
Sakura's lips twisted. "Excuse me?"
He stared at her for a long moment, head tilted back and lids slanted down. "You have a tell."
Her shoulders tightened. "Really?" she asked, voice as deadly as it was quiet. "And how would you know?"
Next thing she knew, she had left her side of the carriage and was pressed against Kakashi, her hands knotted in the collar of his black shirt.
"What are you playing at?" Sakura whispered coldly.
He lowered his head, and even though he was only a hand's span taller than her, it abruptly felt like more. "I could ask the same of you."
And suddenly, he was inhaling, dragging his nose from her hairline down her neck, until his gaze darted back up, barely restrained. "You walk in here, you sit next to me the entire time, smelling like that—"
"Like what?" Sakura demanded through clenched teeth.
His lips pressed hotly against her ear, electrifying even despite the mask. "Like my fingers weren't enough," he snarled.
Sakura reared back, something like fight or flight shrieking in the back of her mind. Fight won. She crowded him against his seat, tightening her hold on him. "Shut up," she raged, vicious. "Shut the fuck up."
He didn't seem to hear her. "What is it about you?" Kakashi demanded, eyes slitted. "You're not beautiful—" his gaze roved over her features with a sort of frustrated madness—"everything about you is unextraordinary—"
I could you kill you pretty well, Sakura was about to say. As you've seen, I could make you dead in some truly extraordinary ways—
"And yet," he drawled coldly. "And yet."
He cut himself off, eyes narrowing at her.
But she was smarter this time. Fumbling, Sakura's fingers found the handle to the door. She yanked it, stumbled out, and shunshined away.
Coward, the Voice whispered. And Sakura did what she usually did—that is, she ignored it.
When she received summons the next morning for Team Seven training, she threw the scroll straight into her trash bin.
She wouldn't, she decided coolly. She couldn't. Not today.
She strolled into her bathroom and went about her morning activities calmly: washed her face, brushed her teeth, patted ineffectually at her hair. It was a warm day. Nice. Her refrigerator was also near-empty. What better time to make a trip to the grocery store?
She made a quick list, taking stock of the contents of her pantry and refrigerator. Tomatoes, cucumber, cauliflower, egg…
As she went to grab her wallet, she finally paused. If she didn't show, she confronted at last, reluctantly—well, what would happen? She didn't have a note from a medic.
Sakura shrugged to herself. She could forge one.
But if the issue ever circulated to Tsunade? She frowned. The hospital records would not be on her side.
And worse, it dawned on her suddenly, if she didn't show—Kakashi the captain of Team Seven could have the perfect excuse. This was precisely the sort of opportunity he was probably waiting for. He would undoubtedly present this to Tsunade as evidence that 'Haruno Sakura' needed to be removed from active combat duty.
Ultimately, as though it were the eve of her execution, Sakura gravely made breakfast with the last of her supplies. Her food tasted like sawdust in her mouth. She chewed it slowly.
"Are you alright, dear?" her neighbor asked when she finally left. Mrs. Ito petted her white cat with long red-painted nails as she posed the question; the cat looked rather harassed by the contact.
Sakura blinked at her and nodded, leaving the complex without another word. As she walked, she noted the cloudiness of the sky. Although the sun had definitely peeked out when she had first woken, it seemed the weather had taken an unexpected turn.
Ironic, she thought sourly. Sakura tried to walk as slowly as possible, but reaching her destination was inevitable, if lamentable.
When she arrived at the training grounds, it was to an odd tableau.
Naruto, perched on a giant rock, crouched in a bizarre position as he surveyed another figure with suspicion. Sai stood beside the same rock with a rather sedate expression, looking as though his mind were miles away.
And the man in front of them, who gazed back at the two with exquisite blankness, was decidedly not Kakashi.
"Who are you?" Sakura asked.
"My question exactly!" Naruto trumpeted, lunging to his feet with a finger pointed in the stranger's direction.
Said stranger merely blinked. He had short, tufty brown hair the color of over-steeped sobacha and dark, glittering eyes. "Call me Yamato," he said without any aplomb.
Sakura rubbed her eyes tiredly, aware that they were ringed by black. At this point, she didn't even care who the strange man on Team Seven's training grounds was.
"Where is Kakashi-san?" Sai intoned, finally looking somewhat interested in the scene before him.
"He is otherwise occupied," Yamato explained—which explained, really, nothing at all. "Therefore, I will be your stand-in captain for the foreseeable future."
Foreseeable future? Sakura's mood brightened abruptly. It seemed the gods really did care; this was proof that miracles happened, if nothing else.
"Whaaat?" Naruto exclaimed, sputtering. "But—"
"Yamato-san, is it? Great," Sakura said, smiling sweetly, "I look forward to being under your care."
Yamato blinked, for a moment almost seeming touched, before his expression smoothed over. "Yes," he announced, clearing his throat, "I look forward to being under your care as well."
"Sa-ku-raaa," Naruto complained, jumping down from the boulder. "I was really sure he was going to teach me a kick ass jutsu this time!" He kicked up dirt onto her shin guards as he landed. Sakura glared at him.
"I think we can all agree that a brief change of leadership may benefit your immediate well-being, dickless," Sai said delicately. He sidled to Sakura's other side as he bowed.
Yamato inclined his head a bit belatedly. Something odd passed between them, a coded message Sakura couldn't read.
"Ah," Sai said softly. He looked uncharacteristically grim. "We have much in common."
"Sakura," Naruto muttered urgently into her ear, "I think he just—"
"Yes."
Short of looking at them directly, Sai couldn't have made it more obvious that this was a hint for them. What Sai couldn't tell them about himself, Yamato maybe could.
"The hokage has given us a mission," the older man continued, unblinking. "As you might recall, Kakashi-senpai killed the Akatsuki operative Sasori during your last team mission. Before doing so, he was able to extract critical information about Orochimaru. Another shinobi pursued this information."
Sakura straightened. Kakashi-senpai? That suggested that Yamato had been under Kakashi's command at some point, because the man was otherwise clearly older than Kakashi.
Naruto was unnaturally quiet beside her. Belatedly, she realized the name that Yamato had mentioned that would be of especial interest to him: Orochimaru.
"This shinobi was to go to Tenchi bridge in the Village Hidden in the Grass at high noon to meet a spy Sasori had planted as one of Orochimaru's subordinates. She did—" Yamato paused shortly, before continuing bluntly—"It was a trap. An altercation occurred. She did not survive. However, her summons were able to track Kabuto back to Orochimaru's hideout and convey their information."
"So our mission is?" Sai prompted calmly.
"To validate this information; not to engage."
Sakura frowned. "Tsunade-sama wants us," she began slowly, " to investigate the hideout of the man who killed the sandaime. The three of us. And you."
If she remembered anything from that day in the Forest of Death other than the bite with the curse mark, it was that Orochimaru had not only wanted Sasuke, but Naruto too.
And it was obvious, now, in retrospect why the copy-nin had been assigned the captain of Team Seven despite his unparalleled success in ANBU—he had been charged with guarding and training the last Uchiha in Konoha and its only jinchuruki, two of the village's most sought after and thus vulnerable individuals.
Why the hell would Tsunade suddenly want to dangle Naruto in front of Orochimaru, in his very own hideout, without Kakashi on the same mission?
Yamato was more observant than she had expected, because he asked quietly, "Is there a problem, Haruno-san?"
But nothing she said now was going to change anything. All she could hope was that the four of them were enough. She pasted a smile on her face. "Not at all."
There wasn't much to do other than to double-check their packs were mission ready before they left. As they ran, Yamato kept a slightly faster pace. This created some separation between himself and the three of them, which allowed them to talk openly.
"Orochimaru," Sai said slowly, expression blank. "That would be the person your former teammate defected for, yes?"
"Yes," Naruto affirmed moodily.
"We're meant to investigate, not engage," the dark-haired boy said slowly.
Sakura darted a look at Naruto from the corner of her eye. His lips were pursed, his blue eyes darker than usual.
"Naruto," she said, voice warning.
"He's—he'd be right there," he burst out. "It's been three years. Who knows what's happened during that time."
"Exactly."
Naruto spun on her, angry. "I don't get it, Sakura," he accused. "You begged me to bring him back. You made me promise. And now you seem so…like you don't even care."
"I grew up," she hissed, nostrils flaring. "I realized that I never should have asked you to make that promise and that you should never have agreed to it. I realized that if I wanted something, I should have damn well done it myself. And I realized that, in the end, what you or I possibly wanted then or want now doesn't matter in the least."
"Why not?"
"Because if Sasuke doesn't want to come back, what's the point?" Sakura said coolly. "What do you think will happen? You break all his bones, you drag him back to Konoha, and as soon he's healed, he tries to escape? Are you going to keep him locked up for his whole life?"
"Of course not," Naruto argued, face reddening. "That's why we have to convince him. Whether that happens before or after we bring him back to Konoha—that doesn't matter. Being home will change his mind."
"And if it doesn't, how long will you wait? Months? Years? His whole life?"
Naruto's brow furrowed. He turned suddenly to Sai. "You've been awful quiet. What do you think?"
Sai blinked, clearly not having expected to be consulted. He considered the question very seriously, answering only after some careful thought.
"I believe people are entitled to making their own mistakes," Sai said softly. "I believe that they must also face the consequences of those mistakes in order to learn from them. However, I believe also, as the saying goes, that no man is an island. It is, perhaps, the responsibility of friends to help each other recognize our own transgressions."
"Another time," Sakura snapped. "When we have better reinforcements, then Naruto can make his case. We aren't prepared for that kind of mission. If we infiltrate now and Sasuke is deaf to what Naruto has to say, we're in the middle of enemy territory and vastly outnumbered."
"So you elect to abandon a former friend until then," Sai considered, voice devoid of judgement. He considered her with oddly penetrating eyes.
Sakura's mouth flattened.
"It doesn't matter," Naruto spoke up finally. His voice was hoarse. "The risks, the odds…As soon as any of that starts to matter, I violate my oath: the promise I made when I figured out what it means to be a ninja—what it means to me to be a ninja."
Sakura felt a headache coming. She had the sense that she didn't exactly have the moral higher ground here, certainly not in Naruto's book. But when she had seen so many men and women die, most by her own hand—when she had seen their final moments, their final regrets, their final words—how could she want anything other than to selfishly protect those whom she considered most precious to her, no matter the cost?
Perhaps, Sasuke had once been one of those individuals. Then, he had left and, demonstrably, not looked back since. That night in the park had changed everything for Sakura, too. Despite what she had deluded herself of before, she was no longer interested in persuading herself that she and Sasuke had ever shared a legitimate bond. Sakura and Sasuke had hardly been teammates, let alone friends.
In truth, Sasuke felt like—a toy from her childhood: one she had one-sidedly obsessed over and played with years ago, only now, she could hardly figure out what had drawn her to it in the first place. If anything, she could only see how immature she had been, to play with it.
It wasn't that she had an active desire to harm him, though she tried to best not to think about how she had once acted toward him and how he had once treated her. But if she had to choose between Sasuke and Naruto, she would choose Naruto.
Her gaze fell without thought on the black-haired boy to her left. She would choose Sai too.
"It's settled, then," Naruto announced gruffly.
It wasn't settled, but she felt that it would benefit her to leave that as a surprise for later. She didn't respond, turning her head the other way.
"You are very determined, dickless," Sai observed with his usual bluntness. But his tone was slightly off to Sakura's ears. "I suppose I must have been a considerably unsuitable replacement."
Naruto's head whipped around on his neck so quickly, she thought she heard a crack.
"You're a part of Team Seven, proper," he muttered gruffly. "Nothing changes that."
She caught Sai's gaze. He seemed, if plastic was malleable enough to allow such a thing, deeply conflicted. She faced ahead again, frowning, wishing she could know what was going on through his head.
Sakura, really, really wished she had known what was going through Sai's head three hours later, when they took a short water break in the final stretch to Orochimaru's hideout and, after, could no longer find him.
"I don't understand," Naruto said, waving his hands in demonstration, "He was right there. I looked away for one second and—"
"He's gone," Yamato murmured, eyes narrow as he gaze through the thicket of bushes.
Naruto's face was tight as he turned to their interim captain. "You know who Sai really is, don't you?"
The older man blinked, gazing somewhere above both their heads. Finally, he sighed. "I guessed as soon as I saw him—everyone had that look in Root. I suspect he is an active member that was assigned to your team with his own mission."
"What is Root?" Sakura pressed.
"An autonomous subdivision of ANBU with no oversight from either the hokage or the council. It was supposed to have officially disbanded years ago, but apparently its leader has still been operating underground in the time since."
"If what you're saying is true, how did Sai end up there?" Naruto demanded. "What's his mission?"
The ex-Root member gave Naruto a blank look. "I've never seen him in my life, not until today. I have no idea. I had no idea, even then, how people ended up in Root. It seemed to be something that a person…fell into. And by that point, it was already too late to leave."
Sakura's fingers shook. A subdivision of ANBU with no oversight? There would have been nothing to stop Sai from being sent on missions without the proper training or the necessary backup. ANBU as a whole was already notoriously bad at both those things. But without even the pretense of accountability—what would be allowed in Root?
"Who's the leader of Root?"
The Voice thrummed with frenetic energy inside her. Bloodthirst? it murmured greedily, It's been far too long.
Yamato stared at her hard, as though weighing the consequences of giving her this information. He seemed to decide in her favor, for after a brief pause, he admitted carefully: "Shimura Danzo."
"We need to go after Sai," Naruto said grimly. He locked gazes with Sakura, a question on his face that it infuriated her he asked.
"Of course," she answered angrily. She knotted her hair to keep it away from her face. She emptied her satchel of everything that could function as a weapon, and tied the satchel itself high up in the trees for safekeeping.
"If only we knew where he went," he muttered, gaze roving over the expanse of green.
"We do," Yamato remarked.
"He left tracks, idiot."
"What?" Naruto exclaimed. He looked around him skeptically. "Where?"
Sakura rolled her eyes. She grabbed his head and turned it in the right direction.
"If he left tracks," Naruto began. His voice lowered, gaze sharp. "Do you think he meant to?"
"I don't know." She straightened. "We'll have ask him when we find him."
Yamato wordlessly took off in the direction of the tracks. She and Naruto followed. Part of her wasn't even surprised when the location they reached was precisely that of Orochimaru's alleged hideout. Though why Sai was here was beyond her.
"We'll go in," Naruto said strongly. He turned his head to Sakura, though his eyes remained fixed ahead. "You can stay here and keep watch—"
"I'm going in," Sakura said shortly. She shifted, cracking her neck.
Yamato gave her an unreadable look. "Haruno, this will be more dangerous than almost any other mission you've been on," he informed her.
Sakura eyes widened briefly in shock. He'd seen her official file, she guessed, which admittedly didn't amount to much. "I should find it character-building, then," she muttered.
He gave her one final look and left it at that. The entrance to the hideout was exceptionally discreet to her own eyes, but Yamato made short work of whatever was hiding it. After that, it was almost laughably easy to enter.
Which suggested, Sakura considered, that its occupants were fairly certain no one would ever made it back out.
They were immediately confronted by a fork of three possible paths. The tunnels were so dimly lit, that it was impossible to see more than a meter ahead. They looked at each other in silent agreement before parting ways. Sakura took the middle path, a long winding tunnel that at times seemed almost to circle back. Every now and then, a door appeared.
Sometimes she heard a strange scratching or groaning behind them, as though they held back wild animals rather than humans—but the heartbeats she detected were human.
Her face was grim as she sprinted through the seemingly endless tunnel. She'd heard, of course, the circumstances of Orochimaru's defection from Konoha. He had been Tsunade's teammate. Before he had left, the pair of them had been the village's most promising candidates for medical and scientific advancement. Now, there was only Tsunade.
Despite what he had done, there was still a thread of regret in Tsunade's voice whenever she mentioned him. Perhaps, Sakura considered distractedly, what she felt for Orochimaru was similar to what Naruto felt for Sasuke.
Sakura reached another fork and skidded to a halt. Three paths again. She was about to turn to the left one, when the sound of an explosion rocked the ground beneath her feet. She blindly chose the tunnel she was closest to, fearing that the walls might start caving in. As she ran, she began to see brightening natural light ahead of her.
Each step she took, the bark brown color of the tunnel's walls became more and more visible until, at last, she burst through into open daylight.
The explosion she had heard had made a crater right at the center of the labyrinth of tunnels. At the middle stood Sai, only his profile visible to Sakura. But from his strained jaw and furrowed brows, as he looked somewhere up, he seemed almost—
Fearful.
Sakura was at his side in less than a second, moving quicker than she knew was supposed to be capable of and uncaring who saw. Sai had already started to turn his head, but she grabbed him by the collar and forced him the rest of the way.
"I thought Naruto was the trigger-happy idiot," she hissed. "If I'd known you were liable to run into here as well, please note that I would have given you the same exact speech too."
"Sakura-san," Sai said softly, dispassionately.
"So this is my replacement." Her hands loosened slightly on Sai's shirt. She knew that voice.
I bet he still has pretty, pretty blood, the Voice whispered.
For a long time, his farewell had become synonymous with her recollection of those men coming after her. Only now did the association slide fully into place. The last time she had seen her former teammate, she realized abruptly, had been hours before the first time the Voice had ever taken over her. Hours before the first time she had ever killed anyone.
Part of her, she found with some shock, had resentfully, childishly hoped to go her entire life never seeing Sasuke again.
Slowly, she lifted her gaze from Sai toward the sky until she found him, silhouetted by the sun.
"Sasuke," another voice identified, choked. On the opposite side of the crater, Naruto had just emerged. The wind rustled Sasuke's garments, disrupting the rope around his waist and the loose, white long-sleeved shirt he wore. The shirt only barely covered his front, revealing musculature that spoke of years of harsh training in the time he'd been gone.
Sakura watched them size each other up, Naruto's face contorted by grief, Sasuke's smooth with implacable calm. Just as before, they seemed to be suddenly in their own world, and no other person existed to them.
"Naruto, is it?" Sasuke said coolly, posing it like it was a guess. Sakura almost rolled her eyes.
Naruto recoiled like he'd been struck. He breathed rapidly. "You…back then…why didn't you kill me?"
She felt Sai stiffen beneath her hands. Blinking—belatedly realizing she was still holding him tightly—she let him go.
"A whim," Sasuke commented, voice distant as he looked at the horizon. "I didn't particularly care whether you were alive or dead. It made no difference to me."
Then his gaze lowered and sharpened. "But it seems you've come to make yourself an annoyance now. And pests? Those require exterminating."
In an instant, he had descended from his lofty position to stand immediately in front of Naruto, draping a longer, heavier arm over his shoulder.
"Tell me, Naruto, do you still want to be hokage after all these years?" Sasuke drawled, "Pity. You should have spent more time training instead of chasing after me. Because this time, at my whim, you will lose your life."
He drew out his katana slowly, precisely. She was about to move when Sai's hand fell on her shoulder.
"I'll go first," Sai said under his breath, dark eyes gleaming.
"No," Sakura said immediately. Her eyes narrowed. "Why?"
He gave a small smile. "You've hidden it well, Sakura-san. But small things betrayed you over these past few months. I think both you and I know why you should wait."
"I'm not sure—"
"The person most likely to land the final blow," Sai finished conversationally, "should take every measure to ensure they hold out until the end, yes?"
Sakura's mouth slackened. She was still gaping as Sai pulled from her grasp to shoot towards Naruto and Sasuke. He reached just in time, sliding behind Naruto with one hand latching onto Sasuke's wrist, the other hand swinging out with his tantō only to be stopped by Naruto himself.
All three figures froze for a moment, taking stock of their situation. Sasuke was the first to act, his hands coming together in a blur. Lightning crackled through the air. It was tightly controlled, quieter than she was used to; his comparative inexperience showed (Sakura had seen Kakashi use chidori in ways that begged suspension of disbelief), but he wielded it with concerning mastery nonetheless.
The lightning expanded, knocking Naruto first—and hard—then Sai. They flew a few meters back and landed hard, curling in on themselves.
Sasuke's katana hissed through the air as he spun it, adjusting his hold. He examined Naruto and then Sai. He moved towards Sai.
Sakura shunshined in front of Sai, picking up his fallen tantō in the same quick motion. The blade was shorter than she was used to, she considered as she looked down at it. No matter. A sharp edge was a sharp edge.
"I hate cleaning excess blood off my blade," he continued indifferently. "But if you think your standing in front of him will stop me, you're mistaken."
"Your last words to me were 'thank you,'" Sakura muttered, trying to keep an eye on Sai and Naruto's condition. "I wonder: where did all that gratitude go?"
Sasuke looked down at her, bored. "Do you even know what to do with that?"
His blood looks prettier by the second, the Voice cajoled.
"Leave her alone, Sasuke!" Naruto cried out from somewhere behind her. "Sakura, I can't get up yet. You have to—you need to—" Whatever he intended to say was cut off as he dissolved into violent coughing, eyes shut as he grimaced in pain.
She heard Sai groan into consciousness behind her, shifting on the ground. Sakura watched Sasuke closely, tantō held deceptively loosely in her hand.
"Go on then." The Voice purred in the back of her mind.
When Sasuke had said he didn't care—to her at least—he had truly meant it. His limbs shifted from utter stillness to stunning motion ruthlessly, his katana slashing downward to make what would surely be a killing blow.
The last thing she heard was Sai's quick inhalation, a sound of undeniable apprehension despite what he had told her earlier—and then Sakura's focus sharpened to nothing else but the oncoming figure.
She abandoned her improper position: shifted her weight, planted her feet, and brought her tantō up unblinking. Sasuke's blade drove into hers with ferocious force from above. A loud clang thundered through the crater, but her arms didn't buckle a millimeter. Sasuke's expression was still disinterested, but she could see that it was clearly a thin veneer now. His eyes flashed tellingly with something like annoyance and surprise.
Sakura leaned back and shifted her blade under Sasuke's to its flat side, causing his to slip. His mouth tightened as he shifted his stance to counteract his instability. She pivoted on her feet, about to strike, when she heard Yamato shout from behind her, running toward them.
Her gaze darted to Sai, and she made a split-second decision. She leaned back to grab him and then shunshined to Naruto, allowing Yamato to replace her. She healed the most debilitating of their injuries, all the while watching the fight closely. When wood emerged from Yamato's hands, her eyes widened. She'd never seen anything like it. Unfortunately, his makeshift dome didn't imprison Sasuke for long, and he sliced through the top, soaring through the air to land where he had started.
Yamato staggered back with a grimace, clutching where Sasuke's sword had pierced his chest.
"None of you are a match for me," Sasuke said coldly. His gaze flicked for a second to Sakura, expression stiff. "Luck will not sustain you."
But Sakura's attention was elsewhere now. "Can you stand?" she asked, helping Sai up.
"Yes," he exhaled, face paler than usual. "He took me by surprise. I'm still weak, however; I don't know how much use I'll be fighting."
She considered him for a second and then bared her teeth in a brash smile, like she would have beneath her ANBU mask to Snail or Bear. "That one up there?" she said lightly. "I can take him."
Sai straightened suddenly, eyes widening before narrowing. "And what about that one?"
Sakura followed his gaze. Standing beside Sasuke, seemingly from out of nowhere, was Orochimaru.
"Fuck," she said aloud. Yamato had been stabbed in the chest and was on the ground, Sai and Naruto were healed now but still weak. Which left her to handle both Sasuke and Orochimaru and also heal Yamato, before his injury worsened.
But then, unexpectedly, Yamato straightened, his face regaining some of its former color. "Apologies. I didn't want to do anything too rough to your former teammate in front of you, but I believe I have no choice but to get serious now."
Sakura's frown dissipated slightly. Sasuke looked down at them disinterestedly, his hands flowing through hand signs until his entire body was coated with rippling, white chakra.
"Serious?" Naruto asked, voice cracked. His attention was fixed on Sasuke, mouth downturned.
"I can't just let those who left the village in the same way as Orochimaru run loose," Yamato clarified calmly. He looked at them then, brow furrowing. "Don't look so concerned, Naruto. If Orochimaru himself is here, that means reinforcement is well on its way."
She arched an eyebrow. Reinforcement?—someone had been tracking Orochimaru, she pieced together. She had assumed that the sannin had emerged from inside the base, but that clearly wasn't the case. If Orochimaru had been aware of being tracked, then he had only to returned here due to a signal from someone on the base.
"What reinforcement?" Sai asked politely. As Naruto nodded vigorously in support of the question, the Voice suddenly became quite vocal in her mind.
Get your head out of the clouds, it seethed. Pay attention.
She stiffened, head finally snapping to the left. "No," she hissed, face reddening.
He's coming, the Voice murmured.
Lamentably, it was true. And now that she had noticed it, it felt like waiting for a tidal wave. His killing intent crackled through the air with such intensity, that his abrupt appearance in the crater—the dust settling like after-thought around him—was almost anti-climactic.
Nevertheless, there Kakashi stood, as arrogant and discomfiting (for her) as ever. The pale of his scarred arms gleamed under the sun—he was wearing his ANBU uniform. His face, however, was covered only by the black mask.
And Sakura's face had blossomed into a full-fledged vicious scowl. 'For the foreseeable future' her ass. Where had her reprieve gone? She had thought she had days, potentially weeks, free of him—
"You've been hunting me, copy-nin," Orochimaru said, voice as oily and silky as it had been the first time she'd heard it.
Kakashi's eyes crinkled in a savage smile. "You've been running."
"Are you okay?" Sai asked her, pointing to her trembling shoulders.
Sakura gave a humorless chuckle. "Nope," she grunted. "Now I actually do want to stab something, but the chance of that happening has become considerably less likely with him here."
"Because he doesn't leave leftovers," the other boy guessed, face questioning.
"Let's go with that."
Sasuke made a sudden motion forward, and Sakura's face grew grim. Kakashi's attention slid to his former student, eyebrow arching like an errant cat had tried to swat at him.
The last person she expected, however, acted to stop him. She blinked rapidly, wondering if she had imagined it. But when she opened her eyes again, Orochimaru's hand remained on Sasuke's wrist.
Sasuke's head turned slowly to face him, eyes unreadable.
"It would be…myopic of us to forget the Akatsuki," Orochimaru stated, amber eyes glinting. "Your former captain, you may not have heard, has made a name now as an Akatsuki-killer. With the Akatsuki out of the way, you must realize your revenge would become that much easier."
"I don't need his help," Sasuke said in a monotone.
"Of course not," Orochimaru said, bowing his head. His gaze lifted again, chiding. "But we will let the copy-nin do his job, because it is convenient for us."
Sasuke stared at him silently for a little. "That's a pathetic reason," he remarked. You are running, was what he didn't say but what everyone understood was being accused.
Orochimaru didn't award this with a response. He faced forward again, locking eyes with Kakashi, gaze narrowing. And then he snapped his fingers, and both he and his protégé's bodies became consumed by fire as they quickly disappeared.
"Sasuke!" Naruto roared, leaping forward. Kakashi coolly grabbed him by the back of his neck, holding him in place. He didn't seem very unconcerned that the person he had been tracking was vanishing before his eyes.
"Kakashi-senpai," Yamato said softly, bowing. Sakura was taken aback by the solemn deference in his regard.
"Tenzou," Kakashi acknowledged, gaze haughty as it then passed over the rest of them. It landed, finally, on Sai.
In an instant, the copy-nin towered over him, his shoulder just inches from Sakura, who also stood beside Sai.
"Someone looks guilty," Kakashi noted softly, sharingan glowing. "Doesn't he?"
Chapter 17: Pro Patria Mori
Sakura didn't mean to fall asleep. Dusk loomed in the horizon, and with it, Tsunade's decision about Sai. But no matter how much much she wondered how Sai was doing or how Naruto was holding up or what in the hell Kakashi was thinking, really, at any time—her body simply couldn't keep up.
She'd become a terrible sleeper over the last few years, prone to long periods of time without rest altogether. When her body did inevitably give into exhaustion, therefore, Sakura was somewhat used to closing her eyes and waking up only to find the moon peeking through her curtains once more.
That was, partly, why she woke up with the feeling of terror. Was it dusk yet? When she felt a breeze wash over her (she hadn't opened the window?) she tripped out of her bed and stumbled over, terrified of what she would find once she pulled open the curtain—
Perched on the ledge was a singular creature, almost as black as the expanse of sky behind it. If not for the unusual coloring of one of its eyes, she would have had trouble distinguishing it in the darkness.
"Not now," Sakura began, voice hoarse from lack of use. But she was too late. Before she knew it, she had already been transported to the discomfiting dream-illusion plane of Shisui's genjutsus.
For a moment, she stared at it, speechless with rage. She quickly broke out of her stupor.
"You," she stalked toward it, voice low and dangerous, "I've put up with your shit for years now, I've done almost everything you've wanted, sure, to some extent, because I started to see something in it for myself, but also because you made it very clear that you weren't interested in giving me much of a choice. I accepted that back then, but I'm stronger now—you made me that way—and you are going to listen to me, when I say that I don't have time for this—"
"We're hours from dusk," the crow interrupted calmly. "I can make months of time one minute in the real world. I have no interest in making you hate me, despite what you might believe. "
Sakura wrestled with what to say next. In the end, she demanded, "Well, why are you here?"
The crow turned its head until just its red eye gleamed at her, almost accusingly. "It's time."
It took a few moments for Sakura to understand. Her eyes caught on the sharingan and widened, a passerby viewing an impending collision.
"Why now?"
"Because you're ready."
Her face twisted at that. "Am I?" she challenged. "Or do you just need me to be?"
Shisui gazed indifferently at her.
"I don't understand how you can possibly believe I would trust you anymore," she muttered.
"And once again, I am shown that humans truly are the most ungrateful of living beings," was the creature's swift response. "I have given you every tool you possess now. I taught you to survive, when others would have left you groveling in the dirt. I taught you to become someone who would hunt those who would ever dare to harm you."
"And?" Sakura snapped, "Don't paint yourself as a selfless benefactor. The entire time, you've made countless demands. I've shed blood for you, and I still don't know why. All those missions, forcing me into ANBU, making me live with this—"
Illusions, scent distorters, disguises, lies, secrets: all manners of means used to make sure no one would ever know Sakura and Saori Mori were the same person. Sakura wouldn't be surprised if she spent the latter half of her life (assuming she hadn't lived past the half-mark already) spending the admitted small fortune she had made on therapists.
"Don't be naïve," Shisui snapped back. "Nothing is free in this world. Your anonymity was part of the price for your training. And of course, your training serves its own end."
"What end?" Sakura exclaimed, frustration taking over. "Why, of all people, me?"
The crow shifted its weight—in other circumstances, she would have read it as hesitance, perhaps even discomfort. Now, though, she saw only layers upon layers of deception, and that Shisui was likely delicately manufacturing a very superficial reveal.
"I needed someone who could use my sharingan to fight another with the sharingan. You had the chakra control and seemed...easily moldable. Of course, even I err now and again."
Sakura blinked dumbly. "You want me to fight Itachi?"
The crow was silent for a long pause, but Sakura read a lot in that silence about its estimation of her.
"Not Itachi," it revealed tonelessly. "Sasuke."
And that—well, that wasn't what she had expected. Though, given how bizarrely protective Shisui was of Itachi, and the fact that Sasuke wanted to avenge his clan…
"Itachi can't handle Sasuke himself?" Sakura asked doubtfully.
"Itachi doesn't want to handle Sasuke," Shisui cut her off brusquely. "Not in any way that ends with his survival, at least."
She squinted at it. "Not sure how you missed this, but: Itachi is part of the Akatsuki. I don't think he'll have any trouble—"
"Is today the day you want to cross me, Sakura?" the crow asked softly.
Sakura looked at it stoically. "To be perfectly honest, I don't mind the odds."
"Is today that day?"
Sakura didn't believe she needed a sharingan to confront Sasuke. Something else was at play here, something Shisui was still hiding. Eyes narrowed, she evaluated the crow.
"Fine," she said finally, softly. "Get on with it."
She wasn't quite sure what she expected. In the end, the ritual amounted to a small fire, copious provisions of blood, chanting, and a small seal placed at the space just beneath her rib cage. At first, nothing seemed to happen, and Sakura wondered if it all been a part of an elaborate prank, because the crow did seem to possess some an ill-informed sense of humor.
But then a searing, terrible pain suddenly split her head at the focal point her left eye socket. She stumbled back.
"If the fighting can be stopped, I'd like to stop it."
"Me too."
A solemn pact, made between one breeze and the next, beneath the yellow-green canopy of leaves.
She curled over her knees, eyes scrunched.
They were cousins, but somehow—until this moment—Shisui couldn't remember having really ever spoken to Itachi. Had not realized until today that the ally he had been searching for could possibly be his own blood. Well, it was no surprise it had taken so long to find him. Shisui had many, many cousins.
They didn't understand each other at first. At least, not beyond this one tenet they shared. Potentially, this was because of Itachi being so…odd. Naturally talented, yes, but glum too.
"What is the purpose of a shinobi?" Itachi asked him again and again. "What is the meaning of a village?"
It was the sole content of their first conversations. Itachi really wasn't verbose—precisely, Shisui guessed from the few remarks he did share, because he spent so much time thinking. And if his mood was somber, this was quickly revealed to be a result of so many of his cousin's thoughts being decidedly unhappy ones.
Shisui himself, of course, wasn't built for such sustained introspection; and, more pointedly, he was considerably better at concealing his own bouts of grimness with noncommittal smiles. Still, clan members began to mention their names as a pair, a scarce breath of pause between—a phenomenon that baffled him every time he observed it. Because no matter how outwardly comparable they were, there was no question as to how crucially they were dissimilar as well. Shisui was cognizant enough of himself to realize that his decisiveness at times veered into impulsiveness; his judgement, admittedly, was swift and unforgiving. But Itachi, especially as he grew older, was increasingly quiet and somber, reflecting and reevaluating in cycles.
There were other differences as well. The fact that no matter how much time Itachi time spent with his lofty philosophizing, his love for his family was as steadfast as the mountains surrounding Konoha. Shisui watched it all with confusion, and if he was being strictly honest with himself, not a little resentment. Since learning about the coup, Shisui had long-forsaken his clan. A quick, clean—and mostly unobserved—break. Itachi's persisting love—even knowing about the coup and resolving to prevent it—would be a profound weakness, Shisui guessed.
It wasn't a sudden progression, but slow, like the water trickling out of the spout in front of his house.
(Until, one day, the earth below started to bevel, to cave in and crumble.)
They spent time together. They talked. But the final blow was when he could see the way Itachi listened to him carefully, looked to him for guidance, as though Shisui were—
Shisui had no family. Not anymore. Except, maybe, for Itachi.
A blind man would have been able to tell that the care he had nurtured for Itachi was one his cousin really only returned similarly toward Sasuke. Still, Shisui didn't bother resenting him for it. Itachi would shoulder the world for his little brother, if that was what the universe required of him. And, possibly, Shisui would do the same for Itachi, simply because he had no one else left.
Sakura groaned, eyes fluttering. Blood began to seep from her closed eye.
Months passed, seasons came and went. Shisui grew wiser and harder.
He entered a state of self-imposed isolation, and Itachi—a bit baffled—let him. He couldn't help but hate himself a little during it. It was only because he had allowed himself to care so much, that he felt such a keen sense of loss after.
He began to share less and less. He began to tell Itachi "Don't worry, it'll be fine," even though Shisui knew better.
"Shisui," Sakura snarled the crow, "what…" Her throat closed on the words.
"Something didn't feel right, so I came back."
"I'm glad."
They were of a height then. It struck him keenly as he continued to speak: explained Danzo's involvement, the inevitability of the coup and what must happen to the Uchiha. He knew that, silently, Itachi was being broken down, piece by piece, by each word. But, now, it was beyond whatever Shisui wanted—it was necessary.
"They'll come after my left eye too." It was almost night, the oranges and blues of dusk so beautiful his heart hurt. Had he ever paid attention before? "I need you…to take it."
"Shisui." It was the first time Shisui had ever seen anything like anger on his cousin's face. He wished he would have had the time to see more.
(Who would have known they would end up here, years after they made a pact with beneath the yellow-green canopy of leaves, with Shisui's death the price of their clan's salvation?)
"You're the only one I can trust. Protect the village, and the Uchiha name as well."
"I will, but where will you—"
The wind rustled through the leaves, the edge of the cliff brushed against his heels, and his head exploded with pain as he removed his eye.
What he didn't say was "You'll be forced to walk down a long, dark path, one that's filled with pain and suffering, and you'll only have to take it because I was too weak."
"Don't worry, Itachi," Shisui smiled instead, softly, fiercely. "It will be fine."
And then he plunged off the cliff.
Sakura's eyes snapped open. The world was split in front of her. On one side, she seemed to peer through a dusty, near-opaque window. But the other: she saw with a clarity she could never have even conceived of before. It was as though she had been blind before and only now was seeing for the first time, color and texture little more than abstract concepts to her until this moment.
Her face was wet, she realized, wiping it. Blood. Then her gaze moved upwards. In place of the crow's left eye was an empty socket.
"Was that…even real?" she asked tonelessly. "Or just another one of your attempts at stringing me along."
The creature met her gaze without reservation.
"Is he really dead?" she asked softly, confused by the tight feeling in her chest. These…feelings, they weren't hers.
"Yes," Shisui said, blunt.
"And Itachi," she exhaled, hands tightening into fists at her side.
"Yes," he repeated again.
Even saying the name now inspired something in her that had not been there before—it was a foreign emotion, alien to her. And yet, its hold was compelling.
Sakura groaned and rubbed at her eyes furiously. "Is this going to stay here forever now," she demanded. "It hurts—"
"Already unbearable?" Shisui mocked. The crow, Sakura reflected, was nothing like its namesake. And yet—
"You saw these memories too," she realized abruptly. "Did you know—?"
"That this imprint would be tied to the eye when I accepted it? That something of the original Shisui's outlook, his sensitivity, his motivations could remain in what I considered then only to be an ownerless weapon?" the crow finished for her, curt. "No."
"And now you've infected me too," Sakura noted with a humorless smile. It soon fell flat.
Danzo.
"Something still doesn't make sense," she muttered. "How did someone like Itachi end up massacring his whole clan?"
"He was left with no other choice."
Something about the crow's words were fierce, impenetrable, though he was as unreadable as ever.
"But—"
"Enough," Shisui snapped at last. "No matter how much time we have, there is much to do. And you'll have to master the basics before you can get anywhere near the mangekyou sharingan."
When Sakura entered the real world again, she felt like she had aged far more than the time she had actually spent in the genjutsu—and even that had been months.
She was relieved, as well, that the world was blurrier around her and that her regular left eye was in its usual place. With a few hand signs—that was all the ritual now required—she could access Shisui's eye when she needed; and Sakura was determined to keep that time to as minimal as possible.
The streets of Konoha were mostly abandoned, the only sounds from birds and the few shopkeepers who were still closing up. She reached the door to Tsunade's office just as Naruto did. Once seeing the other, both paused.
As the sun set in the horizon, they shared a grim look. They entered.
The sight of Sai chained with ANBU guards on either side of him proved to be a little too much for Naruto.
"Look here, Tsunade-baa-chan," Naruto growled, "I know technically you're the hokage, but the way I see it—"
Sakura's voice rose sharply. "He was coerced. And he was sealed to prevent him from telling anyone—"
"And that's why he's only being suspended from active duty for the foreseeable future," Tsunade cut them both off irately, rubbing the bridge of her nose.
Sai straightened, blinking like a newborn chick: wondering and a bit lost.
"Come on, baa-chan," Naruto groaned, but his face was regaining its usual pallor now. "It's just Sai. He already went through T&I and everything."
"Well 'just Sai' was working for an organization that I thought was long-dead. So just Sai is going to make sure he keeps an extremely low profile until I can manage looking at him without getting a migraine from the requisite anger, understand?"
Her amber eyes narrowed on Naruto and Sakura. "And you two—keep an eye on him. That's an order."
Sakura examined the clock above the hokage's head, foot tapping rapidly. "Sure. But if Sai really is such a security risk, then why isn't our jounin captain here?"
Tsunade's lips curled humorlessly as she looked at Sakura. "If he were a security risk, Sai's throat would be slit and he'd be lying in a ditch somewhere at your captain's hands. As it stands, regardless of what Sai wants, the people previously in charge of him may attempt to make contact with him again when he is alone."
"Ah," Naruto remarked, brow clearing. "Well. See you later then!" It was clear his plan was to leave before Tsunade can change her mind.
"Make sure later isn't too soon, brat," Tsunade muttered. She swirled her cup and downed it in one go.
"Impressive," Sai reflected as the ANBU removed the chains from his wrists. Sakura couldn't quite stifle her laugh, and she quickly found her mentor's ill-tempered attention on her.
"Get out of here," the hokage snapped, "Give me some peace. Out!"
They high-tailed it out of the building before objects could be thrown in their direction. Once they were a few blocks away, they slowed down to a more moderate pace. Her gaze darted to Naruto, considering. Then, she recalled the near-level of toxicity in his apartment's air.
"You'll have to stay over at my place," Sakura sighed, resigned.
Sai nodded peaceably, but Naruto's eyes widened. "You're having a sleep-over," he exclaimed, hands flying out, "Without me?!"
"You can come along," Sai generously granted, nodding his head in self-affirmation. Sakura's mouth moved soundlessly for a few seconds, aghast yet again at the true failure of Sai's social skills, this time in offering her meager apartment up like it was his own.
But then her eyes landed on Naruto, and she grunted and gave up.
"Let's do takeout from Ichiraku's!"
They made their way over to the ramen place. Thankfully, given the late time, there wasn't much of a line ahead of them. Within twenty minutes, they were shouldering their way through Sakura's door with full cartons of ramen in their hands.
Her apartment was by no means big, but she had some open space near the foot of her futon where she planned to lay out two mission pallets she had. She started pulling out some extra pillows and quilts as Naruto and Sai began digging into their dinners.
"You know," Naruto slurped loudly, "your place looks a lot different from what I imagined."
"Really?" Sai responded. "What did you expect?"
"A lot more pink," Naruto confided.
Sakura was in the middle of rolling her eyes when Sai chose to chip in. "From what I've seen, Sakura seems to wear more red than pink," the black-haired boy said, forehead scrunching contemplatively. "That, for example."
Her head swiveled too late in the direction Sai pointed to. A lacy, more-sheer-than-solid-material bra in crimson red—and which clearly belonged to a much more blessed woman than Sakura—hung from the edge of her dresser.
Her hand twitched belatedly to remove it.
"A sleepover?" the blonde tried, face a little red. While the size discrepancy had clearly gone above Sai's head, it hadn't Naruto's, apparently. Great. The one time Naruto opted to be observant of the details.
Sakura felt her cheeks heat up a little despite herself. "Of a…sort."
Sai's head shifted slowly from her to Naruto, expression sage. "I think that was a euphemism for intimate relations—"
"I got that, Sai," Naruto said a little high-pitched, digging intently into his ramen. "Thanks!"
The conversation lapsed into a brief period of silence. Sakura dumped the quilts in her arms onto their respective pallets and then went to retrieve pillows.
"So you like girls?" Naruto spoke up again, clearing his throat and clearly making a concerted effort into looking as relaxed as possible. It didn't help that he leaned his chin into his hand, only for his elbow to slip against the lacquer surface of her coffee table.
"Yes." She dropped the pillows. They landed with twin thuds.
"Oh." Then, his face scrunched up in confusion. "Wait a minute, but you were crazy about the teme when we were—"
"I didn't say I liked them exclusively, idiot," she snapped, grabbing her own ramen with a little too much force. She settled down on an unoccupied side of her coffee table and began eating viciously.
"Oh." Naruto's expression took on an introspective look.
"I never liked anyone," Sai said primly. "Until Shikamaru, that is."
At this, their other teammate's calm fractured. "What? You and Shikamaru? Since when?"
"Around the same time as Yamanaka-san and Hyuuga-san, I believe."
"WHAT?! HINATA IS SEEING INO—!"
"Obviously not, dickless. The other Hyuuga close to our age."
Naruto exhaled a giant sigh of relief, fanning himself like an elderly civilian who had just been put through the paces climbing his own staircase. "You can't scare me like that, Sai. Like, Hinata is way more adventurous than I thought, but I don't think I could ever be on board with—"
"Too. Much. Information," Sakura grunted.
"Er, right."
Somehow, they managed to scarf down the rest of their ramen without any more outbursts or mishaps.
They spoke some more: inane, idle conversation, really. Sakura had some ice cream in her freezer that hadn't yet gone bad, so she grabbed that too and served it to them. Not long after, though, Naruto began to yawn loudly—wide, jaw-cracking yawns—and they started to settle down for sleep.
"Thank you. Both of you, for…" Sai paused for a while, as though he too weren't sure what to say. "Standing by me," he settled with finally.
Sakura, who had just stepped into her bathroom to change into a pair of sleep pants and a loose shirt, stilled. "You don't have to thank us," she said at last.
"Yeah," Naruto echoed, voice dark. "Don't. Or maybe wait until we've actually done something to make up for what happened to you."
Sakura stepped out from the bathroom, eyes narrowed. "Exactly."
Sai's dark eyes surveyed them carefully. "Are you going to kill him?"
"Um, well," Naruto said a little uncomfortably, "maybe that's—"
Sakura's gaze flicked to Sai. "The thought has crossed my mind," she commented calmly, eyes locked onto him. "Will someone like him stop unless he's dead?"
The boy shook his head slowly.
Sakura's lips twitched humorlessly, head tilting back.
"You can't," Naruto said lowly, standing up. "Planning someone's murder like that: that's a line you can't ever uncross. That's what the black ops are for. Not us."
"Until now, the black ops have done nothing," Sai observed, voice unprejudiced.
"Tsunade knows the truth now," he argued, "so they will."
And that was…probably true. But if that particular mission was deemed to be a particular classification, it might actually be passed to her team—and then, in some way, it could actually be Sakura's responsibility to kill Danzo.
Sai seemed to sense that there was more truth than exaggeration to her words. He looked at her solemnly, even as he stretched out along the pallet. He had, since joining their team, grown leaps and bounds in reading the people around him: she and Naruto especially. And, in equal turns, Sakura felt some measure of discomfort and some measure of relief in being seen.
"It's a non-issue now, anyway," she finished diplomatically. She walked to the opposite end of the room to grab a hair tie from her nightstand.
Naruto, for a moment, looked like he didn't want to let the issue go. But another yawn broke out—this time from Sai—and his shoulders slackened a little. Sighing, he shook his head and settled down onto the pallet.
Sakura moved towards her bed as well, but paused as she heard a scratching noise at the window. Her gaze landed on Shisui waiting impatiently at the window.
She exhaled, disbelieving. Sakura stalked toward the window and yanked it open. Again? She hoped her expression conveyed the monumentality of pain she would bring to it if it pulled anything now.
Giving her an unreadable glance, the crow turned away from her and offered up a scroll. Her throat tightened.
Red. Red scrolls were—
She snatched it blindly and unraveled it, fingers trembling.
"Sakura," Naruto mumbled tiredly. "What is it?"
"Just a message from the hospital. They have a shortage of medic-nins today, so they need me to come in." Pitch-perfect. Unfailingly even.
"Will it be all night?" Sai, this time.
"Probably," Sakura said, almost soundless.
"Feel free to take the bed," she added a second later.
She grabbed her ANBU mask, her back covering her actions, and left the apartment.
"No," Bear said blankly. "Just—no."
They all looked at Raccoon's dead body, swathed in ceremonial cloth and ornamentation, with disbelief.
"We just saw him," Snail whispered, eyes shining. "Just the other day."
"Yeah," Hyena said, tone formal and distant. But it only took one look at her face to realize that she was struggling too. Everyone liked Raccoon. Raccoon was likable. Even when it had been the last thing Sakura had wanted—being on this team—she had liked Raccoon.
"Fuck this," Sakura choked out.
The other ANBU members stiffened, looking almost hostile to her interjection. Unconsciously, her hands tightened at her sides. She could understand. She was too new: almost a voyeur here compared to them—to the grief they probably shared.
But then, unexpectedly, Bear grunted out an earnest: "Yeah."
Sakura stared at him, taken aback. Once she recovered, she could do nothing more than nod tightly.
"All it takes is one slip," Hyena remarked.
"Shut up," Bear growled, shoulders trembling. "Why was he even on this team, if he had…"
They all tensed.
It was custom as part of the ceremony to—at least here, in the privacy of the ANBU headquarters—commemorate the lives the fallen operatives had lived outside of the headquarters. A hollow attempt at softening what was objectively a shitty end, Sakura thought. Because there would be no recognition for any of them outside these walls; at least, not for what they had done as ANBU. Even in death, relatives and loved ones could become targets of revenge, and names and identities could be dangerous. Apparently Raccoon—calm, likable Raccoon—had left behind a two year old daughter, for whom he had been sole guardian.
"Piece of shit," Hyena managed, eyes scrunched.
Snail recoiled. Her hand tightened around the other woman's bicep. "You shouldn't—"
"No, that is some bullshit," the black-haired woman raged. "How the hell could he have been so irresponsible? What's going to happen to his kid?"
"He must have had his reasons," Snail said softly.
"Well, fuck his reasons!"
Sakura rocked onto her heels and then back forward again, blinking rapidly. All of them were wrapped and suffocated in the misery of this place, in each other's misery. She could see the others shifting as well, perhaps victims of the same discomfort.
"I need to be alone," Bear whispered.
"And I need to get out of here," hissed Hyena.
Snail nodded shakily, and Sakura offered no protest. The two nodded stiffly to them in farewell, before disappearing.
"Crow," the other woman said quietly, after an eternity of staring at Raccoon's unbreathing form. "I'm not sure if you've been in ANBU long enough on any one team before to grow close to someone like this, to…experience a team member's death that matters. What I can tell you, is that we all…manage only because we have our support mechanisms, whatever they are. And whatever works for you, it might not be what works for anyone else. But…if—if you need—"
"Thanks," Sakura interrupted, chest aching from the strain Snail was clearly going through—to try to be helpful, to be nice, even now. And she meant it. "I've got it handled."
That last part—that was the part she wasn't sure of.
"A bottle," Sakura demanded, seated perhaps ill-advisedly at an ill-reputed inn she had seen self-respecting individuals only skirt around during daylight hours. Probably contributing to its poor reputation, the inn was outfitted with a sizable bar. Another contributing factor: its clientele.
"You paying now or charging to a room?" the bartender asked, raising a brow.
"To my room," she grunted, writing the number down on the parchment handed to her.
She ignored the glances around her. She still wore Saori Mori's face along with sleep pants and a baggy shirt, clothes she had put on to go to sleep. She knew she made an odd visual ultimately, at odds with the inn's other occupants, who composed the non-shinobi half of Konoha's seedy underbelly: thugs and loan sharks and the like. Whatever.
"What's a nice girl like you doing here—"
"Thanks," Sakura bit out, grabbing the bottle from the bartender before he had actually made the motion to hand it to her. She twisted the cap loose and brought it to her lips, swallowing the burning liquid like it was water.
"Take it easy there, lady," a boy—younger than her—with a scar bisecting his eyebrow warned. An older woman stood beside him with a thin smile, watching indifferently.
"You his mom?" Sakura sneered, jerking the bottle at him.
Her smile widened. "If I am?"
She swung forward, the alcohol hitting her hard and burning through her veins, until her face was inches from the other woman's.
"That's fucked up," she spat.
A hand, from somewhere behind her, landed on her shoulder.
Sakura shook it off violently, eyes slitted. "Don't touch me."
A tall boulder of a man bumped into her from the right, and she honed in on him like a moth to a flame.
"Look at you," she sang, giggling, "you look like exactly like the kind of thing good people think goes bump in the night—" the smile fell from her face, and she craned upward with a ugly snarl—"want to go?"
"Hey," the bartender snapped, fingers connecting in front of her face. "I'm not having any of that here. Go back on up."
Sakura twisted violently, nostrils flaring. "What?"
"I said go the hell back on up," the man repeated, liking he was talking to a child. "I'm not having the authorities over here because a stupid girl tried to rebel and got murdered."
A bark of laughter burst out of her, sharp and animal. "Fine," Sakura allowed, "But I'm taking this—and this with me."
She grabbed her own bottle and her enraged neighbor's and made her way toward the rickety stairs, uncaring of the shouts behind her. The stairs curved ever so slightly—which made them a little tricky to navigate—but she reached the landing of her floor in less than five minutes. All in all: a win.
Glowering at nothing in particular, Sakura shoved the key into her door; after a bit of noisy scrabbling, the lock twisted finally, and she stumbled in.
There was already someone in the room.
In one instant, Sakura burned all the alcohol from her body and twisted in the direction of the foreign presence. Through the door-less, worn frame of the entrance to the tub, a lone, pale figure with silver-grey sat in bloodied water.
The blood drained from Sakura's face.
He turned, slowly, emotionlessly. His face, she saw, was covered in blood too—just like the uniform he still wore, which painted the water around him an ugly brown-red.
"Where were you?" Sakura whispered, ice-cold. Her lips felt bloodless too, numb. Why are you here now?
He stared at her, right through her, as though she had said nothing.
Anger lanced through her veins and she stalked forward, hands slamming into the sides of the tub.
"Where the fuck were you! When the rest of us were there—"
"They're dead," he said, eyes at last sharpening. His voice was a rasp, almost inaudible.
Sakura rocked back for the second time that night, this time more violently than the first. "What?"
"I killed them," he stated, now clinically. Simple. Factual.
She glanced downward, into the water. Blood of the ones who had killed Raccoon, then. Not just anyone's blood. She kneeled blankly, palming it.
And then she couldn't stop herself, couldn't stop the words and hated their pleading quality.
"How did it—how did it make you feel?" Did it help? she needed to know.
Did it feel good? the Voice wanted.
He twisted in one fluid, deadly motion to face her, and his gaze was cruel.
"Don't test me, shinobi," Kakashi snarled, each word like a knife.
Sakura grabbed him by his matted hair. Shinobi? She would have laughed, if she had had it within her now to find anything humorous.
"Don't even try it, asshole," she hissed, gaze boring into his. "Tell me the fucking truth."
She rested her forehead against his, and there was nothing but desperation and resentment in the act, that she needed him to say it.
"You came here," she rasped, accusing.
His sharingan spun, a dizzying endless loop of motion. And then…and then—
"Like suffocating."
And then he was gasping, trembling: full-body tremors shook through him, and all Sakura could do was watch. His hands sliced into the water and then drove toward his face, scrubbing desperately. And the entire time he was silent. Disconcertingly silent.
It took her a long time, longer than she would like to admit, to understand what she was seeing—that this was, perhaps, what lay beneath it all: an injured, self-loathing animal, at last cornered. An animal, Sakura could see, that was as liable to lash out, deadly and uncaring, as it was to curl in on itself, cowering from its own violence.
His breathing was erratic; his hands attempted to rend and also to cleanse and failed at both. For every portion of skin he cleaned of blood, he opened long, crimson lines elsewhere, until Sakura could no longer watch and stopped him.
He snarled and snapped, and Sakura held the straining pale muscle of his biceps effortlessly.
"Who are you," the copy-nin growled, surfacing at last. His eyes, when they met hers, possessed their sharp, predatory edge once more. "Who are you?"
Sakura's hands curled and then began to scrub, working to remove the blood from him as well.
"I don't know," she returned, angry and confused. Her hands passed over his skin, and each self-made wound she encountered, she closed.
He grabbed her wrist, lifting the inner part to his nose. "Your scent," he said darkly, his regular eye metallic in the flickering light, "Why do you wear distorters?"
Sakura's pulse stuttered.
"Why do you think? When there are trackers like you out there," she bit out, "I try my best to make your job as hard as possible whenever you decide to kill me."
"Am I going to have to kill you?" His lashes, long and dark, dripped water.
"You've threatened it more than once."
"And you've never believed it."
"And you pretended," she whispered, livid. "The perfect shinobi; the perfect weapon, blood-hungry and remorseless. You've pretended—and you've let us all believe it, when it never existed."
She shoved away from him before he could respond, before he could try to lie again. Even without words, all it would take was one condescending, uncaring look, one distant sneer. And she didn't care to see it. She made quick hand signs to summon of a blast of air that dried her in seconds. Moving to the bed, she yanked the thin comforter over herself and shut her eyes.
It was silent for so long, that she was almost certain that he had left. Possibly through the window, though she hadn't heard it open. That seemed to be his modus operandi. She didn't open her eyes to check.
An infinity passed, before she felt a brush of air near the side of the bed—as though there were someone standing beside it. She stiffened in response, debating how to react. But he moved with incomprehensible speed. A hand landed on the middle of her back, brief, so transitory it had to have been a blur to the eye, and with such terrifyingly controlled force that it was enough to displace her from the center of the bed to the side.
Another body—hard, compact—settled beside hers.
(Heat, some part of her noted, radiated from him like a furnace.)
"Seriously?" Sakura drew herself up onto her elbows, incensed. He didn't say anything. Just stared at her, eyes lidded. She watched him, lips thin.
Get out, she meant to say. "How long did you know him," was what came out instead. She paled in the dark.
His face could have been chiseled from stone.
"A year."
Sakura turned over onto her side, away from him. "Is that long?"
"Longer than most."
Sakura's lips curled. "How long do you give me?"
The distance between them disappeared. Abruptly, she felt the full force of his body against her, crushing her as though to punish her, weighing down on her as though he meant to be oppressive. She saw red and twisted, about to spit vitriol.
She would have done it too. Had she not then noticed it: his hands, and the way they curled around her ribcage carefully—softly.
And she realized then that his…hold had not been what she had thought it had been.
Chapter 18: In Contempt
Sakura woke flat on her stomach, her face embedded deeply into a pillow. It was a gentle progression to consciousness—for which she was grateful, because it didn't happen often like this. Usually, waking was more of a jarring process, thanks to the mother down the hall who was always screaming for her son to get up or 'goddammit, Shiki, you're going to be late again!'
No screams now, however.
In fact, there wasn't much noise at all. Except, she realized gradually, a soft sibilant hiss—but metallic. Like metal sliding against metal.
Her gaze narrowed. Then, she shifted onto her forearms and swung her head around.
He stood at the opposite corner of the room, looking tall and hard against the dull cream of the walls. His hands worked coldly—as callous as they had been soft before—as he strapped on his armor. She shifted to a sitting position, her tousled hair settling against her neck a second later. Kakashi's head tilted in her direction, as he tightened the straps of his arm guard. His hands did not pause.
Air expelled from her in a sharp, furious burst. "Look at me."
When he did, his gaze was distant.
Her nails dug into the sheets around her.
Indifferently, he slid his hitai-ate into place. And Sakura was about to become deranged. She wanted—she needed to see what she had seen before. Because if the copy-nin could break down, it meant—it meant that no one could be alright when they had done, what she and all ANBU had done. It meant that it was okay to feel what she felt, to experience the constant—
But it seemed, in this moment, that it all could have very well been part of a fool's dream, born from nothing more than desperation.
The copy-nin's eyes were dark. A bird had landed silently on the window sill. There was no message attached to its leg.
His form flickered, and he disappeared out the window.
(The bird itself had been the message, Sakura would realize later, fists deep into the trunks of some unfortunate trees.)
It didn't take long after that for her to realize that Kakashi had decided to operate in the world like she didn't exist.
Sakura watched him like a hawk, so much so that she was nudged more than one time (by Bear of all people) for her stare becoming a little too much glower. But she glowered more. Because mission after mission—it continued.
And she hated stake outs. Those had basically been the last three Team Seven missions, which hadn't helped improve her mood. As it happened, they frequently gave her ample time and quiet to think about everything she didn't want to think about.
For once, the jarring contrast between ANBU missions and her other missions was welcome.
"You need to get new kunai," Hyena advised, examining the state of her blades as Sakura sheathed them.
"They are new."
"You get that much blood on them?" Bear observed, unholy glee on his face.
They all straightened as the metal door to the locker rooms swung open.
But it wasn't Kakashi. Instead, it was a familiar short, compact figure with silken, blood-red hair. Sakura's stomach soured at the sight of it.
"The copy-nin's team, right?" said the boy who had made her eat dirt during rounds, an arrogance in his voice that was youthful enough to earn some forgiveness. His eyes scanned them, finding Sakura last. "And the one who took my place. Got here in the end, though—wish the circumstances could have been better, of course."
He bowed his head to them, but the movement was too cursory to be truly sympathetic.
"Why are all the new ones babies," Bear groaned, adding to Sakura, "No offense."
Sakura shrugged it off, finishing sharpening her chokuto. She slid it into the sheath strapped on her back.
"Shut up, Bear," Hyena said calmly. She turned to Robin. "You read through the brief?"
"Yes ma'am," he drawled. "Man, this team gets all the big shots. Spread the wealth, you know? Let the rest of us earn a name. "
Snail laughed, though no one else did.
"Who did you get assigned, Robin?" she asked.
Despite the mask, it was easy to sense the way his face twisted into a frown. "Ran Osamu. Now Tsuruga Taiki—"
"—is the copy-nin's assignment," Hyena said curtly.
Sakura listened in without really understanding. Neither name was familiar to her—nor was the name that she had been assigned as her target in the ambush.
"Of course," Robin said too quickly, eyes gleaming, "But have you heard the stories? Now that's a kenjutsu expert if you've ever heard of one."
The door swung open again, though only partially. This time it was Kakashi.
"It's time." The door shut again.
"Charming," Robin muttered next to her.
Sakura looked at him, wondering what she had been like to the others when she had first joined the ANBU team.
They traveled more quickly than usual and more grimly than they had in the past (for several reasons). Sakura didn't know who had retrieved the information necessary for the imminent ambush, but it had been communicated to them that the person had died for it.
By the time the moon was high in the sky, they were hidden in the trees. They waited.
There was something about the moon and the light breeze that left her in a considerably reflective mood. Kakashi was—and she didn't think this to be a coincidence—positioned on the farthest possible tree from her out of all her teammates. Her anger grew, until she wondered suddenly what the point of all of it was.
Why did she care so much? She knew that it was a façade now, though confusion and incredulity had made her doubt herself initially. It couldn't, she thought heatedly, have anything to do with—with whatever else had happened. That had been a lapse of judgement and insignificant—
Look at me. The hoarse, livid demand he had made curled into her ears, like he was behind her, right now. Sakura hissed, strangling her rising arousal viciously.
Enough, she thought coldly. It was time she washed her hands of all this business. Pride or not, Sakura was going to find a new team. She didn't care how it happened; only that it needed to.
Newly resolved, her grip tightened on her hilt of her chokuto. Just in time, too, as six figures burst into the area beneath them.
Sakura spotted her target—a rail thin girl with purple hair—and launched off her branch. The sensation of free-fall was briefly peaceful, before her opponent recognized her approach and attacked.
As Sakura's hands shifted through multiple jutsus, she darted quick glances around to gauge the situation. Hyena and Bear were fighting as a pair against their targets, who had teamed up at the first notice of attack-her teammates, thankfully, seemed to be having the upper hand. Robin rushed forward as she watched, engaging his target in combat.
Sakura heard a telling spark and returned her attention to her opponent, raising a wall of earth just in time to absorb the impact of the resulting blast. She twisted to avoid the debris and caught a brief glimpse of Kakashi fighting Tsuruga Taiki.
A piercing bird cry rang from somewhere beyond in the trees. Sakura watched sourly as the girl she was fighting shaped her fingers to amplify her own responding call. Sakura was there the next second, her blade sliding smoothly into her stomach and then up.
Unfortunately, it was too late, as proven minutes later when a second Sound squad broke through the trees to their precise location, moving with a swiftness and deadliness that matched the first—which meant that they were decidedly outnumbered now.
Sakura growled and flipped her blade, joining the fray anew. She guarded Bear and Hyena's backs, warding off two shinobi, but carefully watched Snail, who fought farther away. Another shinobi was approaching her and quickly. By his uniform, he was the captain of the second team.
Kakashi crossed her vision in a black blur to cut him off, fists crackling with lightning. Already knowing what she would see, Sakura looked back and Tsuruga Taiki bleeding and unconscious on the forest floor.
Show-off, she thought uncharitably.
She cracked her knuckles. Sakura wasn't the most patient of fighters as it was, and now, she felt incentivized to end this as quickly and impressively as possible. A swift, dizzying genjutsu, perhaps?
A triumphant cry sounded through the air, interrupting her thoughts. Robin lifted his mask partway to flash her a quick, cocky grin. His target was strewn along the ground, kunai drilled through every one of his vital organs. Blood seeped lazily into the ground.
"On to the next one, I guess?" he called out.
So messy. She turned her head away, fingers moving through a genjutsu.
Boring, the Voice grumbled.
It wasn't the most exciting of fights, Sakura allowed, but at least her uniform was clean. With luck, she wouldn't even have to wash it until after the next mission.
"Robin, don't—!" she heard Hyena cry. She had a sudden vision of him tilting the dead body so that the blood poured out more dramatically. Idiot, she thought.
Death cries sounded a few meters ahead of her, and her eyes drifted to Kakashi again, unconsciously. His katana was speared through one shinobi's chest, and his other hand still crackled with electricity in the chest of another. Sakura would have turned her head away then, most likely scowling, if not for the expression on his face. She would have expected cold satisfaction—or even indifference—before the look on his face as his eyes went toward—
Sakura's gaze followed his and in an instant, the world stopped.
The scene in front of her presented as a still—a single frame of reality. Robin, on his knees, and his mask torn from his face; but it wasn't his face Sakura saw, but the flash of his hair.
Bright and unreal, like silk.
And Tsuruga Taiki stood above him, apparently not-so-dead, with his blade angled down to drive into—not Robin's—but Noriko's heart. Just like Sakura had done.
The slip from Sakura to the Voice was seamless in a way it had never been before. Sakura choked, paled, and the Voice trembled into life, sliding into her limbs with a fury.
And she was gone.
When Sakura returned, she blinked and found a heart in her hands.
It was still pumping. And with each pump, blood poured from it all down her front—as well as onto the ripped open chest of the man collapsed at her feet. She stared dumbly.
She heard a few strangled noises from something beneath the body of the dead man. With a quick heave, the body was thrust off, and then Sakura saw it—the vermillion strands in that same exact fucking color—and the terror set in.
"Fuck, that's gross. Would you mind throwing that thing somewhere else, please? Like, sometime soon—"
Sakura's face contorted in grief and fury as she grasped the face beneath that hair punishingly between her hands. Why? Why had Noriko forced this guilt onto her? Why couldn't she have just walked away that day—
New hands, burning with heat and strong, locked onto her biceps, and Sakura snarled.
"Let go," were the words snapped harshly in her ear.
She lunged out of the hold —"Why did you ask me to do it?"—but the fiend caught her at the last possible moment, drawing her body forcefully close to his.
Sakura turned her crazed gaze to him at last. Kakashi's gaze was a study in restraint, revealing absolutely nothing. It was enough to jar her back to reality. She inhaled rapidly and then—wide-eyed—swung her head around again.
She could see Robin now, sputtering and scrabbling away, beneath the curtain of red hair. Robin, not Noriko. Beside him was Tsuruga Taiki, his heart dropped next to him like an afterthought. It was sickening—not the sight, because she had long become desensitized to that-but the lack of control. She hadn't commanded the Voice to do that. She had not allowed the Voice to take over.
Sakura crumpled, held from the ground only by Kakashi. The forest was silent around her. All the targets had been eliminated, and now it was just her teammates who stared at her. She didn't want to see their faces. She couldn't. She needed to leave. Now.
"Let go of me."
The fingers around her arms didn't twitch.
Terror pierced through Sakura. "You," she panted, bitter. "Let go of me—"
He didn't let go. Instead, she felt the air around the both of them vibrate as her body was disassembled and then reassembled. They had shunshined somewhere else, and by the looks of it, far from where they had previously been in the forest.
She realized the irony of their situation, distantly. She wasn't in the mood to be amused by it.
"Can't you fucking listen," Sakura spat. She spun and shoved him up against a tree. She wasn't gentle—but his expression did not change. She knew because she had ripped off his mask, baring his face to the world. Sakura wanted him angry, she wanted him to fight her, but all the while, he remained implacably calm.
But, some part of her noted with vicious satisfaction, he was finally looking at her.
"So I exist now?" she mocked. "You pretend for three weeks, but now, now that I've clearly lost it, you to start paying attention?"
A hand raised toward her face, and Sakura regarded it with livid warning. But it moved slowly, unfailingly slow, as it settled at the base of her neck. Sakura recoiled in confusion, and his fingers slid into the gaps of her hair.
And next thing she knew, she was shoving herself forward. Her lips met his—harshly, cruelly, at first. Her hands, dripping blood and clawed, acted to tear at him. But he bore it all unflinchingly…and Sakura could have screamed, except everything inside her fractured and then fell apart at this unexpected submission.
She was in pieces, rent into a thousand pieces by his sudden, terrible tenderness, derived not from what he did, but from what he did not do. Warmth surged through her, slow and heavy like the trickle of honey, and she fell into him, her fingers yearning now, stumbling, faltering, awkward because they no longer sought to destroy. Her hands, as they stroked artlessly at his face, left streaks of blood; she knew this, because she could feel the unnatural slick and glide. But he did not flinch. She licked his teeth, because she suddenly hungered for the way they glanced her lips every now and then, and he did not flinch.
In this moment, she realized, absent of everything else—of what he had been to her or what he could be—she... Because of the way he held her, because of the way he moved beneath her hands...
It was hateful. She loathed it. If she could have, she would have buried her fingers in her own chest just to rip the sentiment out.
But it persisted.
Don't leave, she almost said.
"Am I weak?" she forced out instead.
His eyes, as he looked at her, were incomprehensible.
"Or am I monstrous?"
His breath brushed her face, causing her jaw to slacken. "Are those the only options?" he asked, almost soundless.
"Are those yours?" she asked.
Something—an echo of many nights ago, before he had crawled into a bed beside her—flashed over his face.
He drew back, abruptly, cold. "We are not the same."
Sakura followed him, unrelenting. "Is there an award for the violence we've accomplished? Should we be applauded?"
Kakashi's face darkened further; both of his eyes could have been black.
She looked at him for a long moment, and then she turned her head. Just as she made the motion, she felt fingers curl around her neck once again. She stilled, chest tight-waiting.
"You know me outside of ANBU, don't you?" he said lowly. "Don't lie. Coyness doesn't suit you."
She stiffened as she realized the precise placement of the pads of his fingers. His fingers kept track of her pulse.
And, just like that, hatred returned, washing aside the...softness that had been plaguing her. Even now, the copy-nin was a predator: he had spotted weakness, hadn't he, and then gone for the jugular. How long had he been waiting? The swing from her previous bizarre calm to what followed was staggering. Fear pulsed through her—then anger, hot and heady, which was much better. "Should I kiss you instead?" she threatened, baring her teeth.
His eyes slanted down, surveying her coolly. But then, with something like softness again, he grasped her chin and his lips slid over hers, just briefly, an ephemeral contact that was gone too soon.
Sakura stared at him, disarmed.
"Your antagonism," he murmured, "It's always been personal. You wear scent distorters not just for anyone; you wear them for me."
She fought through the return of the molasses, struggled for vitriol. "Point of fact, then—I could be anyone. A man. A woman. Your next door neighbor."
The returning smile on his face was mean. "Besides the point. I've never wanted to want you."
She could have been offended by that, except that it would have been hypocritical. She leaned away, first, then pulled completely away.
"I told you not to be coy," he warned lowly, eyes tracking her motion.
Before he could reach her, she shunshined away.
Was he looking now? She leaned back onto her bed, glowering. The thought persisted.
Did he look at every face around him now and wonder if it was her? Not important. Because he would never look at Sakura of all people and wonder—of that, she was certain.
"What a mess," she said aloud. She repeated it, just to hear the sound of her demise out loud.
Lust, with difficulty, she had been able to tolerate. This…feeling that overwhlemed her now, however, was more and less somehow, but infinitely worse: contradictory and inestimable, simultaneously vicious and trembling. And it was foreign, like nothing she had ever felt before. She didn't know if she wanted to hurt Kakashi or consume him until no one could tell the difference between her and him. The hunger she felt was surely unconscionable.
But it had been born the moment he had held her in her madness, double-fold, triple-fold, to anything she had experienced before. Sakura didn't know how to reconcile it all to herself: that she hated, still, the man she had only ever known as 'Sakura,' but could feel this way—so decisively—about someone she had met as 'Saori Mori.' It was—
Contemptible.
"And you," she said, voice cool. "Don't think I've forgotten."
I was beginning to wonder if you'd gone senile, the Voice hissed. More and more, it seems like it.
"I won't lose control like that ever again. So appreciate the memory while it's still fresh."
But it will happen, the Voice corrected, sneering. Anytime it becomes too much, I'll be there, and that's when you won't be able to fight me. Sakura's first instinct was to lash out in retaliation, but she contemplated the words with careful restraint instead. It could never become 'too much' ever again.
The door to her apartment creaked open, interrupting her introspection.
"Just because you have a key now doesn't mean you can't knock, you know."
Her eyess narrowed. Sai's suspension had been removed for a week now, but both Sai and Naruto had continued to inhabit her meager apartment like it was a free hotel.
"Fine," Naruto allowed, eyes narrowing, "but did you take a look at the scroll on the table like I asked?"
Sakura's mouth opened and closed. She hadn't.
"I did," Sai said, expression grim. "It's far trickier than the previous, but I believe with no less than five attempts, we shall be able to perfect it. It will require a lot of energy and fortitude of mind, however."
They were, of course, talking about the latest tonkatsu ramen recipe Naruto had found.
"I have full faith we'll continue to live up to expectations," Sai assured.
"And surpass," Naruto said, very serious. "We have to be ambitious, Sai."
Sakura grunted, standing now. "Both of you are tracking dirt all over the place. Why?"
Naruto scratched his cheek. "Well, you see, there was this bet with Tsunade—"
"We would rather not disclose the details," Sai interjected quickly.
"But we won," her blonde teammate finished, looking shifty now. "Ah…so."
"So what?"
"What Naruto is trying but failing to relay," Sai said calmly, "is that Tsunade has agreed to give us the next month to track Sasuke and bring him back."
Chapter 19: Birds of Prey
"Shopping."
Naruto blinked at her. "Ah…what? Did you hear me? Tsunade baa-chan finally said we can go after Sasuke."
"I need to go…" Sakura paused, stared blankly into space for a moment. "Shopping."
"For what?"
Sai was a little too astute, Sakura thought. She picked up her wallet and gave a firm two-fingered over her shoulder. She made sure to keep her pace casual—neither too slow nor too fast. When she had fully exited the apartment building, however, she shunshined into an alley a kilometer away that she knew would be abandoned.
She hadn't even fully corporealized before her fist was swinging. It landed with a satisfying crunch into the brick wall work, causing the neat hierarchal stacks to crumble in on themselves.
"Fuck," she whispered, the word swallowed by the sound of her small act of destruction. Couldn't she have one crisis at a time?
But Sasuke wasn't a crisis—Sasuke was like a seasonal cold that she couldn't get rid of. No matter how hard she tried to forget about him, he kept coming back. And now there was the added complication of Shisui, the crow's, expectations.
And the actual Shisui's as well.
Sakura cursed under her breath. The ritual for the sharingan had messed up everything. She wished she had known the outcome then and had decided to rebel against the crow that day after all.
Biceps straining against an invisible force, Sakura stood for one moment in utter stillness, before mustering the will to push off from the wall. Her fingers twitched lifelessly, and soon, her visage was that of Saori Mori's. She affixed her ANBU mask and rejoined the crowd on the streets.
It didn't take her long to find Kanami and Kane's. Operated by a brother and sister, the weapons shop was a veritable fortress, extending half a kilometer in total. It was the premiere source of weapons in the Hidden Village; in point of fact, every weapon cost enough to outvalue gold in its equivalent weight. While technically, any shinobi could purchase weapons from Kanami and Kane's, the cost was greatly subsidized for ANBU. Sakura couldn't afford weapons here as herself, but she could as Saori Mori.
As always, not long after stepping one foot inside, Kanami appeared with all the forewarning of a sudden apparition. Unsurprisingly, she looked just as she had her first visit. Sakura had been here many times over the past three years, and yet, she had never actually observed the aging process in the other woman. Her hair was pure white—from time, Sakura knew, because paintings on the wall showed her once with midnight black locks—but only a few lines on her face otherwise betrayed her.
"Crow-san," the handsome woman greeted, tilting her head down. Sakura returned the gesture.
"How can my sister and I help you today?" Sakura's gaze flicked to the left and found Kane. Like his sister, he too wore his hair long, but it still contained streaks of black.
"Just browsing," she muttered.
"Is there a particular section we can direct you toward?" Kane asked politely. To be fair, the shop was large enough with so many hidden rooms that, if she had to guess, very few shinobi in existence understood the whole layout.
"I'm looking for a katana," she said after a short pause.
Kanami's green gaze was penetrating. "You've never once purchased a long blade from us," the woman noted quietly, her infamous memory proving itself one more.
"I wasn't interested until now," she said shortly, hoping that would end the conversation.
It did. Without another word, the pair directed her through a seeming maze of rooms until they reached a large, red hall. Here, blades gleamed brilliantly against their crimson backdrop. Other individuals, most clothed in the characteristic black and grey of black ops forces, also roamed the displays.
"Call once you've made your choice," Kanami said softly. She disappeared with her brother, the slight smell of cinnamon left in the air after their departure.
Sakura turned on her heel. Stretching her hand out stiffly, she grabbed the first blade she found and spun it in her hand. It whistled through the air, catching the light like a flash of lightning. She flipped it, testing the feel of the handle. Too decorative, she decided. Carrying something so flashy in ANBU was a bad omen. She placed the katana back and stalked past its neighbors—each more extravagant than the last (were these for daimyos or actual shinobi?)—until she reached set of more understated set katanas.
Her gaze flicked impatiently over the row of blades, stopping only when she saw a slim, generally modest blade, which only stood out because of its unusual color: grey-black, like charcoal.
The Voice hummed impatiently in the back of her mind.
Slowly, she made her way to it. Her fingers wrapped around the simple handle, and she lifted the katana to test its swing. It seemed to sing through the air.
Delicious, the Voice moaned.
"Found it?"
"Fuck!" Sakura choked out, eyes flaring wide. She stopped herself just in time, the blade a scarce millimeter from the Kane's throat.
He raised a brow, giving the appearance that this tended to happen to him often.
"You would think, by now, that you and your sister would learn to stop appearing out of nowhere—"
"Or that you ANBU would learn to pay more attention to your surroundings," he responded evenly, scrawling out the price on a piece of parchment.
"We do," Sakura said sourly, "We just tend to swing first and ask questions after." She handed over the requested amount of money, unable to help the wave of gloom that swept over her at her now mostly empty pouch.
"Enjoy your purchase," he responded, his form starting to blur tellingly.
"Wait, Kane-san, I'm finally done! Here, I've got all the money pulled out…" A hand promptly dropped a blur of coins into the older man's open one just as he vanished.
The new masked face turned belatedly to look at Sakura. She blinked back.
"Oh," Tortoise said.
"I'm sorry," Sakura said, awkwardly clearing her throat as they leaned against a lamp post outside the weapons shop. "I hope… what I did that night didn't have any repercussions for you."
Tortoise stared at her silently for a moment. "None, actually," she said finally. "Which was surprising."
Sakura nodded in agreement. Neither of them had been punished—unlikely, all in all. Tortoise, of course, had truly done nothing. But Sakura…well, she had been outright insubordinate.
"Let's head into the forest. I have more to say, and we have no privacy here."
After a moment of consideration, Sakura followed her, until they were well masked by a thick spread of trees from the dirt paths of Konoha, at least visibly.
"There were no repercussions," Tortoise said lightly, "But that doesn't make what you did okay."
Sakura raised a brow.
"You didn't know we would both go unpunished when you did it," the other woman pointed out. "When you went after those ANBU captains."
"I didn't," Sakura acknowledged.
"And I asked you to stop."
"I did try," she attempted blandly.
"No, you didn't. Not really," Tortoise returned, "You clearly have a temper."
Her words, Sakura reflected somewhat apologetically, had no more effect on her than that of a stern teacher on a particularly uncaring, errant student.
"You didn't actually do anything," Sakura pointed out. "They can't demote you for getting frisky in a club, you know."
Tortoise was silent in response to that, which she took to mean she had won that point. Maybe, Sakura would have felt differently now if the stakes had been different. As it stood, however, nothing she had done could have harmed anything more than Tortoise's paranoid sensibilities. Which she had, in fact, initially attempted to appease.
The black-haired ANBU let out a huff of incredulous laughter. "You really are an asshole, aren't you?"
Sakura wasn't sure how to respond to that. Or if she was meant to. Purple eyes rested with some strange emotion on Sakura's face.
Tortoise gave another incredulous exhale. "It's still kind of hot."
Suddenly, she was pushing Sakura back against a tree. Sakura let it happen, mostly because she had not expected it at all—first Kane sneaking up on her, now this?—but when fingers brushed the bottom of her mask, her hand snapped up instinctively to shackle her wrist.
"It's all fake anyway, isn't it?" Tortoise breathed, pupils dilating. "Look, I'll do mine first."
True to her words, and without an iota of hesitation, one hand curled around the bottom of her mask and pulled up. Large purple eyes and arched brows were revealed above a soft, sensitive mouth.
"Now you." And Tortoise was pulling again, and this time Sakura's face—Saori Mori's fake face—met the cool air.
The other woman pressed forward eagerly, until soft, gently warm lips brushed Sakura's. She stayed like that for only a moment, though, before tilting her head so that their lips slotted more firmly together.
Sakura drew back a second later, blinking.
"Is something wrong?" Tortoise asked, a soft, seductive hunger in her voice.
"No. Or rather," she said, brow furrowing. Why had she pulled away? It hadn't been unpleasant.
"Shh," the ANBU murmured, leaning in again. As their tongues curled together, the shorter woman's body curled into hers, angling up so that her breasts brushed against her own. It felt nice. Very nice. But it still wasn't—
She pushed back, holding Tortoise back now by her hips, which were… Well, quite nice as well, actually. But there had been a reason she had moved away—
Sakura's breath caught in her throat and her head jerked to the side.
He stood there in full ANBU regalia—even with the porcelain mask, for once. Rather than limiting the force of his gaze, the red lining framing the openings for eyes made his all the more prominent, all the more potent.
Horror set in. She knew there must had been something like naked panic on her face. She had expected him to come after her, of course—but not like this, not so soon. She hadn't even thought about it when she had put on the disguise. So stupid.
Tortoise shifted, noticing him too, Her body was positioned just barely behind Sakura's now as she darted glances between the two of them. "Is he in one of those episodes of madness that everyone talks about?" the other woman whispered.
Sakura couldn't quite remove her gaze from Kakashi.
Tortoise's form stiffened against her. "Or," she said, voice returning to normal volume now, "is there—is there something between the two of you?"
She scowled and found her voice. "No—"
"Yes," Kakashi said, with something like savagery. "Leave."
Sakura stiffened as well, stance becoming more combative. Tortoise pressed more closely into her, her breath a nervous flutter against Sakura's neck. She felt Kakashi's eyes examine the motion.
"You wouldn't," Sakura said, voice soft and eyes hard.
Kakashi's eyes roved over her, filled warning.
"Crow," Tortoise began.
"You should probably leave," Sakura said calmly, eyes flicking to her.
The other woman nodded and began to move—only to halt again as she realized she wasn't being followed. Tortoise looked at her incredulously. "You're staying," she said, lips turning down.
She waited, but Sakura remained still, silent. With one final glance, with the air of something like accusation, Tortoise shunshined away.
Sakura's mouth tightened as she turned back. "You shouldn't have followed me."
"As I said before," Kakashi observed coolly, eyes darkening, "timidity doesn't suit you."
Air hissed out from between her teeth. "I think we can both acknowledge that this, whatever this is, is a terrible idea—"
The mask—both masks—slid off Kakashi's face, until she was staring directly at the harsh cruelty of his features, their heartless beauty. Her breath caught, and his eyes flashed knowingly.
"And yet it's going to happen," he was behind her now, his breath just brushing her ear, "isn't it?"
Sakura tensed. He was so close, but he wasn't actually touching her. The distance, precisely because it was so little, made her want to—
"You know it too," he whispered, voice simultaneously ravenous and livid, "or you wouldn't have pushed her away. Left us here, alone."
"That had nothing to do with you."
"I can smell it," he hissed, dragging his nose up the line of her neck.
Sakura cursed with feeling.
Kakashi laughed coldly. She could feel the planes of his chest against her shoulder blades, against the muscles and scars of her back. She had moved into him.
Very well, she thought reluctantly. There was no denying now how this was going to end.
She shifted, teeth bared. "Don't ask me questions I won't answer."
"Don't touch anyone else," he demanded. "Don't let them touch you." His hands manipulated her with unmistakable sadism, just shy of genuine pleasure.
"Don't," she choked out.
"Don't what," he breathed above her mouth, just millimeters away, holding himself back. Holding himself back from her, even as she strained to take him. Devour him. Have him.
"Don't be…" she strained for him, nostrils flaring with rage, "cruel."
His callous expression diminished. Perhaps, it was her words. Or maybe her voice, which betrayed more than she intended it to.
"Then don't drive me mad." And he kissed her.
Despite what some part of her, insidious and rebellious and against greater reason, had always contemplated, it was not hard and fast and punishing; nor, however, was it slow and sweet. Mostly, perhaps, because that would have required constancy and predictability, and neither of them were the sort to ascribe to such pillars.
If there were such pillars—pillars of fucking.
Mostly, indeed, she was incredulous that he fit in her: the entire, obscenely thick length of him—because of course, yes, the bastard was significantly larger than anything she had ever thought could comfortably fit. But she was arrogant, too, that she was strong enough then to take the full punishing, brunt of his thrusts and match him, overpower him at times, knot her hands in his silver mess of hair and make him kneel for her, until he flipped her over and drove into her from behind.
And then, also—even then, though she might never have imagined it, had never allowed it before—it was glorious.
She could do no more that pant, voice gone and thoughts in total disarray, as her fingers scrambled for purchase on some surface—any surface—to tide her through it all. But the bark beneath her fingers merely gave way until she was on the ground again, and he was still behind her, slower now, even more powerful, twisting his hips so that the molten length of him only just brushed that part inside of her, and she screamed at him, raged at him, cursed at him for more, and he held her through it all, the sound of his low breathing sounding like begging to her ears.
Her fingers touched him greedily, harshly enough—she knew—to leave bruises on his pale skin. And she was all the more glad for it, unconscionably pleased, because then anyone who ever saw him would know…
His thumb, calloused and rough and divine, kneaded the locus of nerves above where they were joined, and Sakura cried out.
"Kakashi," she spat out, like it was hateful.
He groaned against her mouth, and she locked her legs around him more strongly, forcing his hips into her, so that he was deeper in her than he had been before. His sharingan spun in a dizzying blur, as though memorizing her broken expression at the resulting bliss.
The sight of it inspired a burst of insanity.
"Bet no one's made you wrecked like this,"—mindless filth spilled from her mouth—"wish you could say my name, wish I could make you scream it for me—"
"Give it," he demanded.
"No questions," she warned, eyes flashing. Then, because it felt too good, her head fell back again.
Something like delighted dread washed over Sakura as he moved, transfixed and still seemingly resentful of this fact. As she watched, his hand drifted silkily lower, and then, a long, solitary finger slid inside her along his cock, spreading her impossibly wider. It was more than too much.
It burned like hell. Her nails sank into his arms as her whole body tensed in exquisite restraint.
Snarling-and it was a noise of defeat, this there was no doubt-he wrested her thighs apart, biceps flexing, as he thrust furiously into her. And this was infinitely worse and infinitely better, and she was against a tree for fuck's sake, her pants rucked down to her knees, her shirt torn and hanging desperately to her arms, his clothes no better, and she wanted to ruin him. Ruin him so thoroughly that she owned him, so that he would be hers, so that she could—
She didn't know who came first. But then he leaned into her, and that was no good, because they were on the ground now, and he was shuddering around her.
She felt him behind her, his breath caressing the side of her damp neck. Long, calloused fingers curled around her hip, helping him press his cock greedily into her, even though he had just come.
And it was just as Sakura realized she couldn't bear the thought of emptiness, that she realized the monumentality of the mistake she had made. She wrenched his hand from her and moved forward, forcing him to slip out of her—ignoring the feeling of his cock dragging against her walls, causing unintended spasms of pleasure—before she stood up.
She began adjusting her clothes, using minor jutsus to fix the damage done. Kakashi's eyes didn't leave her once, claiming her nakedness with presumptuous authority.
"This was a mistake," she told him.
She turned to leave. She didn't make it.
"Fuck," Sakura gritted out, fist colliding with the trunk of a tree. It cracked and split. She breathed heavily. "You won't thank me for this. I know I can't thank you."
He moved with lethal grace to a seated position on the forest floor, his elbows resting on his knees. His expression did not change.
"What was it?" she demanded, disgusted. "This body? This face? Artifice. You know that."
His mouth curled now—at last, a reaction. "It was a fuck," Kakashi said, suddenly distant. "Don't imagine it was more than that."
Her face twisted.
"Good. It won't happen again," she promised.
His eyes followed her as she left, and she pretended—to herself—that she didn't notice.
"You look like you didn't sleep at all," Naruto observed.
Sakura glared at him. It didn't appear to have any affect.
"New katana?" Sai remarked quietly. She shifted her glare to him as she swung it over her shoulder. They exited the door of her apartment.
"Wait, Sakura," the black-haired boy murmured as Naruto marched cheerily ahead of them, "I think you should…hold off."
"Hold off on what," she snapped.
"Your plans with Sasuke," Sai said bluntly. He squinted ahead, his gaze landing squarely on Naruto. "Perhaps…he's right. Perhaps there is a chance."
She paused, felt several expressions flash across her face. She settled on indifference. "There are no plans," Sakura said, "The new katana is just that. A new katana."
Sai's mouth twisted slightly. "I may not have been friends with you as long as Naruto," he said quietly, "but I think of all your acquaintances, I fare the best in identifying when you lie."
Sakura kept her face even. "What do you think I'm going to do, Sai?"
"Kill him," the other boy said without hesitation.
She looked away from him for a second, to the rising run. "Hm," she intoned.
Sai watched her closely, seeming paler than usual.
"And if I tried," she said softly, "would you fight me?"
She watched his features spasm, something remarkably—on anyone else, she would have identified it as such—like pain flashing across them.
Sakura was aruptly seized by a terrible urgency.
"You shouldn't," she whispered back, gripping his shoulder until he looked up at her again. "If that time ever comes, don't do anything to endanger your safety here."
"But—"
"But, of course," Sakura said, drawing back, "this is all in the hypothetical. A silly conversation, really."
He fell silent.
Eventually, as he always did, Naruto whined for them to walk faster. After a moment of inaction, they picked up their pace. They reached the outskirts of Konoha just as the sun was fully risen. Two figures met them there: Yamato, who seemed to have become a new addition to their team, looking somber and square-jawed. And beside him, the copy-nin.
And when Sakura stood in front of them, she bowed her head and gave each a polite greeting, she felt absolutely nothing.
Chapter 20: That they behold, and see not what they see?
It took Naruto twenty minutes to notice. His nose twitched like a squirrel's, before his eyes widened.
"Did Kakashi-sensei ditch us?"
Sai wasn't alone in turning to him with something like disgusted awe. Yamato in particular seemed to have a hard time finding words as they all flitted between the cedar trees. Sakura, sadly, was used to it by now.
"Dickless, he left us two minutes after we left Konoha."
"No way," Naruto scoffed. But he seemed then to reconsider his incredulity, past experience clearly passing through his mind. "Why?"
Now that was a better question—one Sakura had been too stubborn to ask. She turned her attention to Yamato who, feeling her gaze, seemed to straighten.
"He's tracking ahead of us," the older man said simply. "He'll join us at night."
Sai and Sakura exchanged a glance. "Ahead?" Sai pressed.
Yamato stared at the black-haired boy in a decidedly blank manner, which Sakura belatedly interpreted as calculation. "To take measure of the situation," he said slowly. "If it proves too dangerous, he will send one of his summons with the instruction to turn back."
"That was not part of the deal," Naruto growled, blue eyes flashing. "Tsunade baa-chan said we could go after Sasuke—"
"Not necessarily that you would be the ones to confront him," Yamato cut him off, as steadfast as the wood that sprouted from his palms. "Sasuke was last seen with Orochimaru, a known threat to Konoha and someone—pointedly—who has expressed concerning interest in you in the past. Our hokage may be a gambling woman, certainly more so than I can comfortably condone, but she is not foolhardy."
Sai coughed politely beside her. Sakura ignored him. "And what about Kakashi? You herd the rest of us back, and he deals with Orochimaru and Sasuke by himself?"
"That's certainly the way senpai prefers to do things," Yamato considered. "It's proven effective in the past."
Sakura scowled. He wasn't a god, Kakashi.
"Why do you call him senpai?" Her words lashed out with ill-disguised annoyance. "He's younger than you, isn't he? And you aren't on his ANBU team anymore."
"Oh? How did you know that?" His voice was sharper, now, just minutely.
Sakura regretted her words, thinking fast. "At Orochimaru's hideout…It looked like that the two of you hadn't seen each other in some time."
Yamato watched her silently for a few more, torturous seconds, before nodding. "It is true. I hadn't seen Kakashi-senpai for some years until then—" he paused, before continuing—"I suppose it's no secret that he is an ANBU captain. And I've already told you of my own involvement in Root and ANBU."
"Yes. And?" Naruto said sourly, his mind still clearly dwelling on the previous exchange.
"He, one could say," Yamato seemed to hesitate over wording, "facilitated my leaving of Root. Soon after that, he became my ANBU captain. He was even younger then, of course—most if not all his age were genin. Still, somehow, even then, he always seemed…untouchable. Light years beyond anyone I knew. He still seems that way to me, to this day."
Crescents formed on Sakura's palms where her fingernails pressed in.
"You're not wearing a dress," Naruto said abruptly. He looked at her with something like accusation, as though departure from normalcy was a crime. She had made a habit of wearing them to training. God knew they weren't getting any use elsewhere.
"It seemed a little impractical for a long term mission," she managed distractedly. "We have no idea what climates we'll be traveling in, and besides—"
"Sai didn't bother changing," Naruto countered. "And he has his whole stomach out."
"It's my best feature," Sai explained without blinking.
Yamato made an odd sound beside them.
"Don't be stupid, Sai," Sakura muttered. "That's obviously your face."
Naruto grunted in reluctant agreement.
"Truly," the ex-Root member sighed, shaking his face toward the sky.
When night came, it arrived with a welcome breeze that chilled the air. Sakura lifted the short, uneven hair from the back of her neck, luxuriating in the brief freedom this gave her damp skin. In the distance, she could hear Naruto's crowing voice intermixed with Sai's softer tones as they splashed themselves in the nearby stream, hidden by the trees. Her body thrummed with the prospect of her turn.
"You manage well."
Sakura turned quickly. She hadn't heard anyone approach.
"Your anger earlier was telling," Yamato revealed, looking a bit uncomfortable. "I realize that things must not have been…easy. That Kakashi-senpai must not have made them easy."
She blinked at him, at first disarmed.
"On the contrary," Sakura said, "learning from Kakashi has been exceptionally easy–" she kept her voice light—"he hardly ever teaches me anything."
The older man's face didn't change. He shifted his weight slightly, so that he leaned against the tree behind him.
"You've known him many years now, haven't you, Yamato-san," Sakura demanded as it suddenly occurred to her. "He was even your captain, one time."
She gave him time to respond. But he remained silent.
"I have ideas, of course," she continued, voice hardening. "That he's prejudiced against civilians. Or maybe—maybe it's women he has a problem with: silly girls, he's been thinking, better for them to stay at home and be daughters and wives than to play at shinobi—"
She had said it, not because she believed it, but because she had hoped it would provoke a response from him. It did.
"No," he said shortly. "He wouldn't have welcomed the sandaime's very own grandson any more than he welcomed you."
"Why?"
He watched her, face unusually hard, for what seemed like an eternity. Then, Yamato looked past her into the trees. "Could you even understand?" he questioned, wryly. "When you have a mother and a father and a home and everything that is alien to him—alien to most of the shinobi whose names go down in history. When only broken men and women seem to survive in this line of work."
Her mouth flattened. "So I was too coddled for him to teach? Too sheltered for him to even attempt it?"
Yamato's expression was unreadable. "Not at all. Anyone can be broken."
"Anyone can be broken," the man repeated. He turned to look at Sakura. "So should he have done that to you?"
"And well-adjusted people have no value in violent conflict," Sakura voiced incredulously. Never mind that as each day passed she increasingly seemed to be neither.
"From personal experience, when that conflict reaches certain stakes, it is a burden that they are ill-equipped to handle," Yamato said softly. A strange smile appeared on his face. "I suppose I've exposed myself too, now. Maybe I would have shunned you as well, but more gently. Maybe, for that reason, I would have succeeded."
He paused, then blinked rapidly, frowning. "Or perhaps, all this is what I think and not Kakashi-senpai at all. It's hard to know."
Sakura's frustrated exhale was drowned out by the noise of Naruto and Sai's return. The former stomped loudly, shaking the water out of his hair as he did so that it sprayed in every direction. She twisted slightly to avoid it.
"The stream is all yours, Sakura-san," Sai said, gazing first at Sakura then at Yamato. Afraid of what he might see, she turned and marched swiftly to the water.
She didn't bother folding her clothes, instead tossing them all onto the grass as she waded into the water. The cool temperature of the water was a pleasant surprise, retaining less heat from the day than she had expected. A full moon shone that night, rendering her reflection with unusual clarity.
She twisted to wash her back. The long stretch of irezumi reflected onto the water, colors astonishingly vivid.
Her gaze flicked away—only to return, her lips twisting.
It was, admittedly, odd. Sometimes, she went for long stretches forgetting that the tattoo existed entirely. Fitting, she supposed, because the decision had been a whim; when one treated one's body conscientiously as means of survival, what went on it often hardly seemed to matter. Most days, that was precisely how Sakura felt.
But then, other times, she could hardly stop thinking about the irezumi—trying to touch it, steal glances at it. This mark after all, unlike most every other on her body, was something she had ultimately chosen. And somehow, sometimes, that made all the difference.
(Sakura's alone. Not Saori Mori's. Not the Crow's or the ANBU's.)
She didn't know how long she stared at it, lost in thought. But she was abruptly forced back into reality as a familiar song of killing intent encroached their area of the forest. Sakura straightened and walked toward her clothes, roughly tugging them on after making the signs for a gust of wind to dry her body. Her hair, still wet, dampened her shirt—but she bore it stoically as she made her way back to their camp.
She found Sai and Yamato already sprawled on their pallets, the latter already snoring lightly. Sakura's eyes flicked through the trees, locating Kakashi quickly.
Sai caught the motion. "He's on first-watch."
"Naruto?"
The black-haired boy silently pointed to a hill just at the edge of their line of sight. Alone, crouched on the branches of the very top of a tree, was a figure distinctly clad in black and orange.
"You should talk to him."
"Why me?" she asked. Why did tonight's theme seem to be frustrating, uncomfortable conversation?
"Because only you could understand," Sai answered. "Sasuke was your teammate as well."
"As you know," she responded, "having known Sasuke—to whatever extent I did—I have a decidedly different opinion from Naruto's."
Sai looked at her, eyes narrowing slightly.
"Is it really so hard for you to understand, Sakura?" Sai wondered calmly. "Naruto's simultaneous frustration with the traitor and his…captivation?"
Sakura scoffed. "Yes, I'm not interested in making friends with anyone who's run me through—"
"You show it too," Sai said, softly.
"Excuse me?" The words emerged harsh and cold.
"I am admittedly a novice in this area, but—it seems to me often that you can't help yourself," the boy explained without inflection. "Most of the time you glare and, in those moments, I think it's because you hate him. But other times, it's different. The quality of your gaze, the way you stare at Kakashi-san…"
Sakura's stomach dropped to the floor.
He broke off, face twisting. "I'm…not sure quite how to categorize it. It requires more studying. But, indeed, based on these factors alone, an observer might conclude that you are just obsessed with the taichou as dickless is with the traitor—"
"You don't know what the hell you're talking about," Sakura spat out.
Sai inclined his head. "That may be true. Still. Talk to Naruto."
The manipulative little twit. At this point, Sakura was grateful for the chance to escape—exactly as he had no doubt intended. She let him have this victory and launched herself through the trees until she reached Naruto.
It was a tall tree—well-chosen, as it provided an excellent vantage point from which to observe the expanse of forest below. Not that Naruto seemed to notice. The blonde was slow to respond, even by his usual standards. When he did look up, it was with a grim expression. For a long time, they stared at each other in silence.
Realizing that this wouldn't be quick, Sakura heaved a sigh and settled onto the branch. A knot in the tree dug into her back, but she managed, for the most part, to ignore it. She stared steadfastly at Naruto instead.
Woodland creatures rustled through the wilderness, a cacophony of noise, but Naruto was silent. As another second passed, the unease within Sakura grew.
"Hey," she said loudly.
His distant gaze finally gained from focus. He looked paler than usual—but maybe that was the moonlight.
"You know," he said slowly, the words stilted, almost dazed, "sometimes…I think I may have forgotten what he was really like."
Sakura had been about to shift her weight, that knot a little too annoying after all. She paused now.
"Maybe I am chasing after something that doesn't exist," he whispered, "maybe I've just imagined it, and everyone's right, and I'm just…"
Sakura knew, in an abstract sort of way, she that should have been pleased by this. Instead, she felt discomfited.
"Well, you know what I think," she settled with.
But he waited—his head tilted to the side, listening, but not quite looking at her. As though she needed to say more. And she could have cursed out loud. "I don't know what to say, Naruto," she said, relenting despite herself, despite reason. "You know what I think, but we both know that you knew him best."
"Did I?" he asked with unusual cynicism. It tested her forced calm.
"You did," she snapped now. "And it was obviously reciprocated. Back then."
He exhaled sharply, rubbing his eyes. "I don't know what's real anymore. But…it used to feel like he was the only in the whole world who could understand," he said, voice rough.
She opened her mouth to speak again, but ultimately refrained. A myriad of expressions were passing over Naruto's vibrant features, and it was impossible to keep track of them.
"I don't know what's right, Sakura. But I feel—I feel like I owe it to that Sasuke to chase him to the ends of the earth, even if only the ghost of him exists. That's how I feel, and I can't change it."
Sakura met his burning gaze. "Naruto, did you—"
He read her face immediately, reddening slightly. "It's not like that. But it doesn't feel…any…less strong, okay? The way you feel about your hand or…or your foot…Sasuke was that. Looking at him was like like looking into the mirror, but everything I saw there was better. And it made me see, in myself, every failing, every flaw—but also that I was…that maybe I could be more than what everyone else saw..."
He broke off.
"Get some sleep," she muttered.
He shrugged. "Probably not going to happen tonight."
She could understand that. Some nights, Sakura was so wired she couldn't even keep her hands still, her fingers vibrating with frenetic energy like some part of her still thought she was in active combat. She wondered how long it would take for her limbs to rid themselves of those instincts. Probably never.
When we're dead, the Voice whispered.
Sakura stood up.
"Try," she insisted. She stepped off the tree.
The week passed in a blur of mind-numbing monotony. As the following week began, she realized that the second Sasuke retrieval mission had now become her longest mission with Team Seven. The realization arose, perhaps not unexpectedly, as a result of growing frustration with her situation. Long-conditioned by the Crow and ANBU missions to live by a certain standard of vigilance, it was hard to adjust her trigger-happy reflexes to the ordinary, the mundane, now surrounding her—certainly for such an extended amount of time. They passed through village after village, and maybe—possibly—Sakura was beginning to understand a little of why Kakashi grated so ruthlessly against the cadence of the quotidian.
Or—not. Definitely not. She took that thought back.
"Oi, oi," Naruto panted, eyes wide, "I think it's ready!"
Sai smacked his approaching hand away.
He and Yamato had been delegated the task of grilling the meat at the yakiniku restaurant they had stumbled upon—for good reason, because Naruto's impatience when hungry always led to undercooked or bland food and Sakura—
Well, apparently no one liked Sakura's cooking. She sipped her water indifferently.
Her gaze passed over the occupants of the small restaurant, mostly obligatorily. She didn't actually expect to find anything interesting.
"I'm heading to the restroom," Sai said with ostensible reluctance, darting a skeptical glance Naruto's way. "Don't fuck it up, dickless." Or else, he left unsaid.
Naruto eagerly grabbed the prongs, his stomach grumbling loudly as Sai departed. Sakura couldn't quite stop herself from salivating too.
"It's night time, and we're finally at a restaurant," Naruto pondered. "Why didn't Kakashi join us? It's meat."
Yamato looked abruptly grave, an oddly humorous contrast to his current task. His next words, however, removed the bizarre humor from the situation entirely. "He believes we're getting closer."
"To Sasuke?" she found herself asking. As though it needed clarifying.
"Are we actually close? It feels like we've been moving randomly," Naruto said skeptically. "North and north and north, then south, then west, now back east…"
"From what I understand from senpai," Yamato said carefully, "Sasuke is no longer with Orochimaru. It seems that your former teammate is currently tracking someone else—hence our somewhat circuitous route."
"No longer with Orochimaru," Sakura repeated blankly.
The meat was all but forgotten. Naruto's face grew increasingly red. "He's been—He left? Why?"
Yamato looked a bit shifty-eyed now. "It's hard to say—"
He was cut off by the muffled hiss of a kunai nailing neatly into the chunk of meat currently burning on their grill. Naruto grunted, and Sakura's panicked eyes found a kunai embedded in his shoulder.
Her nostrils flared, the Voice awakening with growing scent of blood. What the fuck?
As cries of pain and terror sounded all throughout the restaurant, Yamato moved without hesitation, grabbing the platter and upending the meat to shield them from the next volley. Sakura launched herself into a crouch on the table, fitting her body behind the large silver disk; she felt Naruto settle beside her.
An attack on the singular yakiniku restaurant they had chosen? How shitty exactly was their luck…
"The meat," Naruto mourned.
"Quiet," Yamato hushed, looking strained. He peered over the platter to examine the situation. His jaw tightened.
"What is it?" Sakura voiced, urgent. She shifted slightly as well and understood immediately. Her hands fisted at her sides.
"These shinobi have been garnering bit of a name for themselves. They use genjutsu to simulate invisibility," Yamato said grimly.
…the 'invisible' shinobi. Sakura would have given anything to have encountered in any other situation—even alone would have been preferable.
"If we don't manage this situation carefully," Yamato instructed, "this will become a slaughterhouse. Now, listen carefully, we know that they take shinobi and civilian bodies for experiment—"
"Sai," Naruto blurted, just as Sakura jerked in the direction of the bathroom. They all strained with their senses to find his chakra; in an emergency situation like this, he should have flared his chakra a few times intermittently, just enough for those attuned to it to find him.
She didn't detect anything.
"Likely, he has been captured," was the blunt conclusion relayed to them. Naruto made a low, wounded noise. Sakura snarled and shifted for the katana on her back, uncaring of Shisui's commands now—laying low was simply no longer an option.
But…kidnapped? Her mind worked quickly. The necessary course of action here was not to fight. The opposite, in fact. She dropped her katana to the ground.
Yamato blinked slowly at her. "Sakura, what are you—"
"I'll find him," Sakura hissed to Naruto, "stay safe."
She launched herself into the chaos.
Just as Yamato had predicted, their objective had been to grab and dart with as many still-living bodies as they could. This, she supposed, had saved her from considerable amounts of injury in the willful act of being kidnapped. She had only taken one kunai to her leg before she was deemed easy-pickings and struck over the head.
She winced now as they dragged her down a seeming labyrinth of prison cells, at least fifty miles from where the restaurant had been, still feeling the force of the blow. If she hadn't regained consciousness quickly enough, she wouldn't have had time to heal herself from the resulting concussion before they had put the chakra-dampening chains across her wrists. That had been luck and nothing else.
Getting captured—purposefully—was a just as inadvisable experience the second time as the first, she reflected with some private amusement.
"This one is a shinobi too," the man herding her growled.
She was unceremoniously tossed into a dank cell, lit only by a torch hanging almost out of sight in the corridor. She skidded on her knees, stopping her momentum with increased friction as she applied more pressure to her toes. Small divots appeared in the rocky ground beneath her until she stopped.
It took some time for her eyes to adjust to the new lighting. When they did, she found Sai almost immediately. Eyes closed, leaning against the back wall of the cell, a darkening bruise livid against the skin of his cheek, he sat there seemingly indifferent to the bodies around him in the same cell. She made a beeline for her teammate, ignoring the people she had to push out of the way. Some pushed back, threatening violence; she ignored them, dogged in her pursuit.
"Sai," she whispered, voice soft. She reached for his cheek.
His eyes snapped open, then widened. "Sakura."
He pushed away from the wall, grimacing. She frowned. "Where are you hurt?"
"Broken ribs, shoulder out of alignment," he recounted calmly. "Blow to the head as well—I think I'm concussed." His eyelids slid downward.
"No sleeping," she commanded. She slid in the small space between him and the corner, glaring out at the gazes that measured them, some frightened, some desperate, others clinical. She could imagine it wouldn't take long for them to turn on each other—the weakest would fall prey to the stronger, be the first served up when the guards came knocking.
Right now, Sai looked vulnerable, and the hawks circled.
"We…have no chakra," the boy beside her said blearily. He straightened. "How did you get captured? You were with Yamato-san and dickless—"
"I wasn't letting you get captured alone," Sakura muttered, shoulders tensing as her gaze darted over the cell. "Sounded like too much fun."
Sai made a small noise. She turned to look at him. She didn't think she'd ever seen him look so young.
"You don't have any chakra," he repeated, gaze sharpening. "There's no straightforward exit strategy here. You've only invited unnecessary torture—possible death—on to yourself. For what reason?"
Her chest ached and her head hurt. "You know why," she said simply, in a tone that brooked no argument.
His glance cut downwards. "It isn't worth—"
"Shut up," she growled.
A man, by a considerable margin the largest of the bunch, had emerged from the crowd. His gaze flicked over Sai, cataloguing his injuries. Sakura peered up at him indifferently. The man's eyes, dark and beetle-like, drifted to her.
"Don't do yourself a disservice here, girl," he said told her, voice smooth. "You're only going to become collateral damage if you try getting in the way—" his mouth curved into a cold smile—"Without him you'll last…well, longer. Maybe."
"Sakura," Sai said softly from behind her.
"Shut up," Sakura said again, softly now as well. She stood and cracked her neck, one quick snap to the left and then to the right. She eyed the men and women flanking her challenger with a raised brow.
The Voice cackled inside her. No jutsu, just fist and bone and blood and desperation…
Against her will, it goaded her, if just slightly.
"Hey Sai," she called out, "what would Naruto say? Something loud, stupid, and straight out of a mafia movie, right…Let's see…"
She smirked at her teammate. "Want to rumble?"
She could hear Sai's choked, incredulous laugh as she feinted, twisting to avoid the man's heavy fist. Using the same momentum, she kicked off the back wall and drove her elbow back, right into his solar plexus. She felt him buckle and then stumble back.
Sakura waited, fists drawn up, impatient. "Come on, old man," she groaned, "I'm going to fall asleep over here."
He snarled and charged toward her. She latched a hand onto his collar and yanked his head straight into her knee.
This isn't even interesting, the Voice grumbled.
He went down like a sack of potatoes.
The other shinobi in the cell watched in silence. Sakura sighed and then pushed her short, uneven hair back, uncaring that she had probably laced blood into the strands.
"This is going to be a slug fest, isn't it," she remarked.
Three of them came for her next.
Even though it was gross, even though she was well-versed in medical ninjutsu, she couldn't stop herself from picking at her split knuckles.
"You shouldn't," Sai spoke aloud.
She hadn't noticed him waking up. It was hard to tell what time of the day it was, but she reckoned he had slept at least the past five hours (once she had determined that he had managed to escape a concussion). Thankfully, he had finally regained some color.
Sakura became abruptly aware of herself, crouched and vibrating with ill-managed energy. The prison cell was getting to her: the dark, the absence of her chakra, and the fearful watchfulness of every other cellmate in here towards her. Each time she accidentally glanced at one of them, they flinched.
"Are you scared?" she asked.
"No," Sai answered easily. "Just resigned."
"Resigned to what?"
He shifted his weight. "Even with your abilities—without chakra, you cannot protect me for long if those rogue-nin choose me as their next subject. And given that we have no idea how long we'll be here..."
"The situation isn't that dire, Sai. We'll be out of here soon."
"What do you mean?"
"Obviously, Kakashi will be here soon."
Sai blinked at her. "He will?"
Sakura rolled her eyes. "Undoubtedly. He loves stealing the thunder when it comes to this sort of thing."
Sai's gaze suddenly seemed incredibly penetrating. She drew back a little, frowning.
"I really don't understand," the boy said lightly.
"Understand what?" she asked, picking at her split knuckles again.
"How your face can express so much resentment for him, when you still believe that he will…abandon the trail he's been pursuing for the past week, neglect the mission he has been assigned by the hokage, to pursue us—without any doubt."
Sakura felt adrift, not quite sure how to manage this accusation of inconsistency. "He told you himself, didn't he? His 'philosophy' that anyone who abandons their teammates is scum. Never mind that he's a walking catastrophe—"
"Yes, I've heard it," Sai said unflinchingly. "He's an instructor; it is his duty to propagate such lessons. Often, lessons can be ideals, compromised in the most strenuous of circumstances. This is one such circumstance. But, still, you believe he will follow through…unflinchingly."
"So?" Sakura returned, feeling defensive. "It's just one not-shitty thing he manages to remain faithful to. Don't make a huge deal out of it."
"In the work we operate in," Sai considered aloud, "how can it be as insignificant as you suggest?"
"If Naruto were here, he would be telling you the same exact thing," said Sakura shortly.
"Naruto is still naïve to the worst parts of what it means to be a shinobi. You are not. He isn't either."
She opened her mouth to retort with, but she was cut off by shouts from further down the corridor. She jolted in place, recognizing what those sounds meant. He had, as ever, impeccable timing, Sakura reflected sourly.
The other occupants of the cell began to shift restlessly, eyes flaring with alarm.
"Don't move," she barked, face still dark from her previous exchange with Sai. They froze immediately, crowding the back wall away from her. Sakura stared at them for a moment, unnerved by their immediate obedience, until she shook herself out of her momentary stupor.
She stretched out a hand. With difficulty, Sai pulled himself up. Sakura slung his arm over her shoulders and supported most of his weight.
"H-here, just here," they heard a voice cry out, accompanied by stumbling footsteps, "please, I'm begging you, don't hurt me—look, look they're right here, we haven't even touched them. Unharmed!"
A short, square jawed man appeared in front of their cell, panic wracking his frame so violently that only survival instinct seemed to keep him upright. A moment later, the copy-nin himself appeared in front of the cell, surveying the contents of their cell almost leisurely.
His entire demeanor of laziness was betrayed, however, by the savage gleam in his eyes. And then there was the blood that coated his uniform in broad, crude strokes, vermillion and telling. He had killed his way here—there had been no subterfuge. The Voice hissed within her, both livid at its perceived competition and reluctantly admiring. And Sakura…Well, Sakura stood there, face blank, trying to ignore Sai's words about why, when she had doubted almost everything else, she had not for one instant doubted this.
Kakashi's gaze passed over them. He paused at the livid bruise on Sai's face.
"I did not authorize that—!" the man tried to plead. Kakashi's blade slid clean through his throat; he didn't even bother looking as he killed him.
As one hand slid the blade back into its sheath, his other tensed to produce a familiar spark of lightning. When the high pitched chirping abated, Sakura looked over and found the bars of the cell all but melted. Kakashi stepped forward, one long leg followed by another, until he stood fully inside the cell with all of them. No one moved, but the temperature seemed to drop. Sakura's jaw clenched to the point of pain.
He grabbed Sai's chains first, fist tightening with chakra until they crumbled into small particles. Without pause, he moved to Sakura next. His fingertips just grazed the insides of her wrist, and her face went pale, her gaze flying up to the ceiling to hide what it might reveal.
"Injuries," Kakashi demanded, voice low and dangerous.
"Broken rib, shoulder out of alignment," Sai listed hastily, before adding tentatively, "possibly a fractured cheekbone."
She felt the weight of that gaze on her next. Her nostrils flared. "Nothing. Just a few scrapes and bruises. I can heal him now."
She didn't wait for permission. Hands flaring with green, she found Sai's injuries with business-like directness. The boy's frame quickly relaxed under her hands.
"Are Naruto and Yamato-san far?" Sai asked, sounding a bit drugged.
Kakashi's attention flicked over the other inmates of their cell. Like with Sakura—though in his case from fear of reputation alone—they shrunk back.
His mismatched gaze landed on Sai again, narrowing. "Close," he said shortly.
Sai nodded, hissing lightly as Sakura finished the last of her work. She stepped back after, discreetly trying to wipe the blood from her hair. Would he think it was her own? If Kakashi noticed it, he didn't show. He cast one final glance over the cell and left. Belatedly, Sai and Sakura followed.
Like the copy-nin had said, they did not have to travel far. The encampment was easy to spot from even a distance, the smoke from a live fire curling its way into the twilight sky. As they approached, Naruto burst through the trees. His strained face found Kakashi first, then moved left, settling on her and Sai. He careened into them a second later, his arms swinging out to engulf them both. Sakura returned the embrace halfheartedly, locating Yamato over his shoulder. He watched them carefully.
"You must be hungry," Yamato said, voice quiet. "Come."
Naruto and Sai shifted immediately, arms still slung around each other.
"I'll join you in a second," she said almost soundlessly. Sai's eyes narrowed as he looked back. Naruto waved an errant hand and continued to pull him away.
Yamato stayed, eyes wide. "Senpai," he started.
"Leave."
Sakura's lips turn downward. Yamato stared at them both, dark eyes unreadable. He looked at Sakura last, his expression changing slightly, before he obeyed.
Sakura watched his back, determinedly not looking at the figure opposite her. The last time the two of them had been alone— No. No. She couldn't think about it.
Blood rose in her cheeks. It was unfair. She resented the fact that she alone had to bear the burden of the truth; Kakashi remained in blissful, fucking ignorance. Anger was better, she realized. Anger, now, could save her.
"Was there something you wanted?" she said stiffly.
She peered up and found him watching her intently, sharingan spinning. "No injuries," the copy-nin said slowly.
She understood the point being made; Sai had had a list. Sakura controlled her expression with immense effort. "I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest."
His eyebrow arched just slightly, deadly. "You and I had a conversation," he said lowly.
She just barely flinched. "Yes," she said, voice slightly rough. "About what happens to shinobi like me. I recall."
She hadn't abandoned Sai. She had protected him, had tried to. Why did he misconstrue her every time? Sakura wished she could have raised the fisted hands at her sides and used them, to show him the weight she carried, could carry, had carried. She wanted him to—
To know the truth.
This time, she did flinch—fully. She scrambled to cover her slip, to distract herself from her nonsensical thoughts, shifting her gaze. Then her brain processed what she had been seeing, and her eyes returned.
The condescension was proclaimed loud and clear on his face as he looked at her.
"Why do you hate me?" she demanded.
She knew her face was red. Her heartbeat was thudding in her ears, and she was truly caught in that infernal state now, of want: wanting him to know her rage, her hatred, her lacerations—all of it.
With insufferable languidness, his head turned to look back at her.
Sakura exhaled sharply. It was too late to stop. "Why do you want me to fail?"
His eyes were unbearable. She couldn't stand them. In an instant, however, it all became worse. He removed the distance between them, until he was right in front of her. And then, his face was contorted as he looked down at her, terrifying in its savagery.
"The day you get someone killed," Kakashi said coldly, "you will understand what hatred means-what failure means. "
Sakura stared up at him, her face pale.
His face flashed with disgust, and she could have happily sunk a kunai in his chest. You don't see me, she wanted to snarl back at him. It was on the tip of her tongue, she could taste it, bloody and metallic: look at me, look at me, look at me—
Sakura's vision was overwhelmed by red. She didn't see him leave. But when she looked again, he was gone.
She laughed, at first disbelieving, then with cruelty.
"You stupid, stupid fool," she whispered to herself.
"Hey Sai," she called out, "what would Naruto say? Something loud, stupid, and straight out of a mafia movie, right…Let's see…"
She smirked at her teammate. "Want to rumble?"
She could hear Sai's choked, incredulous laugh as she feinted, twisting to avoid the man's heavy fist. Using the same momentum, she kicked off the back wall and drove her elbow back, right into his solar plexus. She felt him buckle and then stumble back.
