Back again. A few months for an update is better than a few years, right?
I'm really trying to get the ball rolling on this thing. For a while, I was letting the story dictate the plot and show me where it wants to go, and now that I have an idea, I am trying to keep goals in mind for the next chapter. The one after this should be out in the next month. I'll be abroad throughout January, so I will try and post an update around the New Year before I leave.
Happy reading. Thanks for sticking around.
The panic set in when she collapsed onto the floor. He cut the strings loose with a swipe of his katana, and now Sakura crumpled in front of him in a dazed heap. She was stuck in limbo. He threw up a commonplace genjutsu and flexed his hands, unsure what to do with her body. He hovered there for the lesser half of an hour. Handling her sent shivers rippling through him. He could feel her, her heaviness, and he resisted shuddering as he hoisted her slack body into his arms experimentally, grimacing at the feeling of her right hand poking through a bundle of shattered chakra-leeching threads. He scowled. Those had been expensive.
Abandoning her on the bed felt intimate. The bathroom would make it too difficult to fight if it came to that – slippery surfaces. The kitchen – knives. Many knives. He settled for the low-lying floor cushions in the center of the living room and practically tossed her from his grasp. The reactive thump of her body was too loud for his liking as if the gravity of her presence was sending signals into the foundation of the house, encouraging it to crumble. Pink hair screamed against the milkiness of his home. He had designed every room to be clinical, clean, like a carved wooden cutting board on which he could dice onions, pry seeds from peppers, gut fish and wipe the blood away to reveal a surface with a constant potential for newness. She disrupted that, her pink hair falling loose from a braid, splaying over her gently rising chest and probably shedding all over his carpet. The thought made him quiver with frustration: even if he could get her to leave he would find remnants of her for weeks, embedded in crevices all over the house.
The colors of her fighting attire had grown more demure in contrast, he noticed. Grey slacks covered her muscular legs, an olive green flak jacket buttoned over a dusty red blouse with a high collar. The haruno symbol, its pure, infinite circle, was fashioned into a hair clip that pushed her hair away from her forehead, which she seemed to have grown into. But she had the same frozen expression of fear when his eyes drifted up to calculate the changes of her face. He pushed her eyelids closed with his fingertips before pivoting to break away from the sight of her. He couldn't think with those eyes gawking at him, relentlessly green and absorbing, provoking things he had buried and cast aside.
Why had she followed him? Why was she doing this? They were simple, useless questions. But why? Picking through her brain as she floated through the genjutsu he cast –– it was loosely invented, she was always so nostalgic for their childhood –– he could find no impressions of premeditation in the energy wrapping her mind like a shawl. There was only confusion, mild desperation, and bullheadedness.
He was uncertain of how much time he bought himself to think. Three years had passed since the last time he saw Sakura and much more since they had fought extensively. The Great Shinobi War had ended, the Ten-Tails defeated and sealed off, but his final clash with Naruto never came. Despite popular belief, Sasuke had no desire for a final showdown. With Itachi dead and his potential for revenge and redemption doomed from its origins, Sasuke wanted nothing more than total isolation. His anger lay with himself. The discovery of Itachi's sacrifice had paralyzed him with incredulity. He wanted to forget and be forgotten.
But now –– he glanced at Sakura again, her hands twitching –– it seemed even this new life goal would be destroyed.
Their scrap in the alley was child's play. She had invaded his home now, he reminded himself, trying to stir the fading darkness of his anger. She was violating him.
Binding her arms and legs outstretched with thick rope, he cast a ninjutsu to warp the floorboards over her wrists and ankles. The house itself was half a weapon, with chakra-infused paneling, stashed weapons, disguised traps. He kept them dusted, sharpened in case of an attack.
A hovering necklace of kunai levitated above her throat with another series of hand seals. Nervousness chewed at the back of his head but he brushed it away. He dispelled the genjutsu, poised to strike.
"Getting rusty," Sakura said. She peeled her eyes open but didn't flinch in her binds.
Sasuke bristled. He wasn't sure if she was referring to herself or to him, perhaps trying to bait him into something rash. He flexed his hands, twisting the rope over her own. She bit back a grimace.
"Your genjutsu never changes. You stick me back in the flower field from when we were both genin. Are you sure you're not the one who wants to go home?"
"They're your weaknesses," he said flatly. "Not mine."
"Right. Yours is assuming everything somehow involves you and sticking your nose into Konoha's business," she said.
"I told you to leave," he said.
She glared and the floorboards above her wrists cracked. Sasuke didn't move, but the ring of kunai surrounding her throat shot forward, almost touching her skin. She blew a wisp of pink hair from where it stuck to the edge of her mouth.
Sasuke knelt near her hips as the floorboards re-grew over the rope.
"Get away from me," she hissed. He ignored her and reached to untie her weapon belt.
"What are you doing?" she nearly growled.
"Being weak," he shot back, his Sharingan flashing.
She closed her eyes and turned away.
Deftly unhooking the belt and hopping back, he rummaged through until he found what he had searched for –– the scroll. Also as expected, the interior ink was disguised and made invisible. Sasuke quirked a brow. With a lift of a finger, one of the kunai drifted down to Sakura's exposed shoulder, tracing a tight, precise line into her skin to draw blood.
Sakura cursed at him and thrashed and the surrounding kunai inched closer to her throat, pressing little indentations into the skin. Sasuke swiped his thumb over the thin stream of blood and watched the ink of the scroll bloom.
But no message of criminals or goals, no portraits of a younger version of himself appeared. Only a single word, scrawled in a rough kanji that he instinctively recognized as Kakashi's, the familiarity of old, sarcastic apology notes for tardiness or absence scratching at a scar in his brain –– "Rest," it simply said, poised in the center of the scroll.
"What is this?" Sasuke asked.
"A scroll," she deadpanned.
He turned the script around. Sakura rolled her eyes.
"Shinobi blood is too common," she said.
Sasuke tossed the scroll aside. "Not if you're good."
Sakura arched a brow but pressed her mouth into a line.
"'Rest,'" Sasuke said. Even with his tone unshakably even, Sakura knew he meant to mock her.
"My mission has nothing to do with you," she repeated. Her face clenched in reluctant frustration. "Neither does my . . . adjournment."
Sasuke snorted. Sakura sank back, a little surprised. He almost seemed relaxed.
"A kunoichi on vacation." He strode toward her and crossed his arms. His Sharingan glinted in the streaming sun. "Alone," he added.
"I'll find the scroll," he said as if an afterthought. "The longer you withhold it from me, the worse it will be."
"Why care?" she asked. "Why not let me go?"
"Because even if your mission was not to find me, your duty is to report any and all extraordinary events to the Hokage," he said.
She simply stared.
Feeling satisfied, he crouched closer. He posed his elbows on his knees, clasping his fingers together in front of his nose.
"The scroll," he said.
Sakura leaned toward the kunai. They all pricked the initial layer of her skin and small beads of blood began to encircle their sharp points.
The edges of Sasuke's mouth crinkled slightly, frowning. He flash stepped away from her, moving to the back of the house. Sakura listened closely to his footsteps, trying to trace the direction. She heard a room door slide open roughly.
"Die then," he called. The door shifted back to close, the sound reverberating as if he had struck her across the face.
But Sakura smiled. Despite the years of flailing between progress and failure, there remained a constant in her knowledge as a kunoichi: men had egos. Egos were predictable.
She inched away from the half-moon of kunai and watched as they reciprocated, increasing the distance between themselves and her throat. A smirk fell over her lips.
It was not the first time Sasuke underestimated her. But it would be the last.
She expected the sword to the throat when she appeared at his bedroom door minutes later, knocking politely on the silky wood of the doorframe. He was livid, she knew, his eyes burning.
"I have a proposition for you," she said.
Sasuke's glare hardened. He pushed forward until Sakura's back hit the wall of the hallway across from his door. He avoided looking at the little pearls of dried blood embellishing her throat.
"You can see the scroll," she said, not flinching from her straight-spined stance. "See for yourself that my mission has nothing to do with you."
He grunted. "And then?"
"Then let me do my duty. I complete my mission, I go home."
His chin lowered, pressing closer.
She held his gaze. "No one needs to know."
"But you will always know." Sasuke flipped the katana from her throat to her lips in an instant, pressing the flat edge of the blade against her mouth. Sakura could taste the metal, the clean iron of polish or blood or both. Despite her front, her stomach churned. He's so fast.
"We cannot trust one another," Sasuke said.
Sakura moved to speak, but his pressure on the katana increased, shoving the back of her head against the wall.
"You have leverage. I do not."
She stared. He looked back, hard, as if decrypting something hidden in the center of her being, somewhere far beneath the surface of her face. They stayed like that for some minutes.
"Where are you staying?" he asked, breaking the silence, almost gentle. He slid the katana to the side at an obscure angle, resting it between her jaw and left ear, his wrist angled toward the wall.
"Along the river bank on the west side of town, in a tree," she said. As if anticipating his next question, she added, "It's a nice tree. Very large."
His narrowed glare was enough for her to drop the sarcasm.
"The only motel is too close to my primary persons of interest," she confessed begrudgingly.
"The bakery," he said. She was almost surprised. She forgot he had been tracking her.
"You know them?"
"I did not say that." He glanced down the hallway as if someone was listening, then back to her. "The town is small, as you noticed. I know the woman who owns it. She is unfriendly."
"Two peas in a pod," she mumbled. Sasuke pressed the blade against her jaw.
"I kid," she said, scowling.
Sasuke mumbled something under his breath. 'Annoying,' if she had to guess.
"What business do you have with her?"
"Some band of thieves who robbed the local government of their money have been hitching rides to Iwa to trade cash for manpower. I have to speak to all of the local business owners about their financial correspondence with the government in order to verify the amount of money being stolen, as well as identify who the 'leak' is."
Sasuke's gaze narrowed as she spoke.
"Once I know who to target, I will intercept the group, disband them, and report home." Sakura made an effort not to swallow and keep her eyes forward.
"Rank?"
"B." With a puff, the scroll appeared in her hands. She held it out to Sasuke, glancing down from the arched position of her head and neck. Her eyebrow twitched as if daring him to check her statement for accuracy. He plucked it from her grasp.
He glanced back toward her with a veiled look. Something like a sneer glimmered underneath. "You lack negotiation skills. Perhaps that is why you never surpassed chūnin."
"A good jounin knows when to keep her cards close and when to fold," Sakura said, avoiding unnecessary emphasis on her rank. She held back the desire to reach out and smack the smug look off of his face. The less Sasuke thought she was capable of, the better.
It borderline offended her that he believed she was gullible enough to hand over the real mission scroll to a wanted nukenin, much less the most wanted nukenin in all of Leaf. She forged a copy of every scroll she received since the war ended and villages scrapped for one another for any piece of information capable of blackmail. Debts needed to be paid and no one had the funds. Leverage, as Sasuke mentioned, was everything.
Which was why she refused to give him any.
The phony scroll framed her mission as an intermediate espionage assignment. She was to spy on the town, track all movements of the looting band (who had been falsely reported as traveling back and forth between this small town and Iwa, smuggling supplies to their hometown forces), and prevent them from executing their next planned robbery on the nearest mercenary town in two months time. All information regarding Koto's identity, his odd parentage and uncooperative grandmother were absolved.
Sasuke read through the scroll quickly, making it vanish with a handful of signs on his free hand.
"You are lying," he said. Sakura didn't budge.
"If there were a group of criminals, I would be aware of them," he said.
"Interrogate me if it makes you feel better," she said.
"I already have. You are lying." In a moment, the katana is pulled back and thrust into the meat of her front deltoid. She let out a small gasp of pain, trying to reign in the shock.
He was testing her.
Setting her blazing green eyes forward, she leaned into the sword despite the pain. Sasuke remained steady as the distance between them shrank slightly.
"If I was lying you would have killed me already. No hesitation," she said. She bit through the sensation of her muscles shredding beneath the blade. She heard a faint chirping. Chidori was building in Sasuke's palm. Mental resolve was slipping from her like thawing ice.
"If I die here, then you'll have to start all over," she said, practically bursting. Sasuke's face twitched the faintest degree. She pressed on. "I won't tell them, but if you kill me, someone will find me, someone will figure out–"
"No one can trace your chakra if you are scattered ashes."
Sakura blanched. She closed her eyes and exhaled shakily.
"I can guarantee you that I will forget," she said.
Sasuke's frustration only grew. "Enough of this–"
"I can forget," Sakura repeated, eyes flying open and searing into him. The diamond on her forehead seemed to pulse in violet desperation.
His silence encouraged her to elaborate.
"If I can guarantee you that I will not remember ever seeing you, will you let me complete this mission?" Sakura asked. Wetness trickled beneath her skirt, matting the cotton of her vest. Everything was becoming hazier and heavier and all very quickly. She dropped her voice to above a rasp. "Just let me go home, Sasuke."
The chidori dissipated but he didn't remove the sword from her shoulder.
Nodding once, harsh and sharp, he swiveled the hilt of his katana to obscure the line of sight between them. With a twist, he promised, "The moment you falter, I will kill you. And Naruto will be next."
Collapsing in a heap against the wall as he stalked away, she immediately clamored to apply pressure to her shoulder. He'd nicked a major artery and the blood was beginning to flow more profusely than Sakura anticipated. Sasuke was a precise fighter. The thought made her flush white, not that she had expected mercy – he had really prepared to kill her.
And maybe she took Tsunade-shishou's gambling lessons a little too close to heart.
In the dark hallway, the green orb of her healing chakra threw a ghastly light over the walls, mingling with the little threads of sunlight emerging from the opening to the living room. She counted the heartbeats pulsing under her fingertips. Healing herself had become something automatic, akin to deep stretching or training for endurance. An intersection of meditation and fighting. But the lack of blood made her concentration foggy, a rippling curtain of silk slipping over and out of her grasp. The sinews of her shoulder muscle reconnecting felt like restringing a cello, delicately repairing and securing and smoothing over. Each passed under the pad of her finger as if she was knocking a raindrop from a slip of paper. The precision threatened her with a tedious irritation, but she closed her eyes and tried to emulate the pull of gravity, tried to meld herself into the sturdy wood of the wall.
Across from her was the bedroom, the door still slightly ajar. The sheets were tidy and pulled flat. Blankets folded at the edge of the mattress. A sleek dresser, tidy white curtains tucked neatly in pleats and secured at the edge of the window's frame. It filled her tired mind with a simultaneous panic and relief: Sasuke hadn't suspected discovery. He wasn't hiding. All this time, the thought berated her as her energy suspended and collapsed, the blood hardening in a rusty stream down the slopes of her torso and sticking to the threads of her blouse, he had wandered through the streets uncovered, unknown, and without worry.
And what was worse? That they had missed him despite the years of searching, or that he had forgotten to be afraid of being found? Perhaps he never was. Sakura would muse at night about the prospect of finding him again slinking about, living beneath rocks like some sickly beetle. The first time she had seen him at Orochimaru's hideout so many years ago, the flash of the sunlight taking over her and then giving way to a newer, broader, stronger Sasuke . . . and later, during the war, when he fought briefly beside them. She had felt so vindicated. Their victory was so deserved. But then the Ten Tails vanished and so did he, out into the same tangled mysterious horizon from which he had appeared.
Was he hiding here, all this time, so close to home? Sakura scanned the floorboards and walls. The pale stains of the hardwood. The glossiness of the walls, as if freshly painted. Everything shimmering and new and clean. And her, dirty, bleeding on the floor.
The green orbs flickered and faded. The house fell quiet save for the sound of her own breathing brimming in her ears. She left the hallway tentatively, searching for something. Sasuke, or –– her stomach pitched as she rounded the corner into the living room –– some food. Soreness began spreading around the new heal, the buzz of the chidori-laced katana settling in the back of her mind like a nest of bees.
Sasuke was not here, but his clones were. One of them at each entry point, the front and back doors. Each sat with their legs folded across their lap, arms relaxed, eyes closed. It was as if they were meditating by default. Even if it were an alternate universe where she lacked chakra reading abilities, they were too obviously clones, participating in a behavior so uncharacteristically peaceful.
Sakura approached the one lounging near the back door, adjacent to the kitchen. It's eyes snapped open, oddly discolored, to her dismay, with one Rinnegan and one Mangekyou Sharingan.
"You are not permitted to leave," they said in unison. The one by the back door was far enough away to suffer a slight auditory lag.
Sakura rolled her eyes. "As if clones could stop me," she muttered.
"I will return for you within the day," they said, then shut their eyes once more.
"And what am I supposed to do? Sit here and paint my nails?"
The clones did not reply. She took another experimental step forward and groaned when their eyes flashed open once more.
"You are not permitted to leave," they repeated.
She stormed into the kitchen. She rummaged. She threw a bit of a tantrum, if she were being honest with herself, and took out her frustrations on a bowl of plump tomatoes bordering into overripeness, and a filet of some white fish that Sasuke appeared to have caught and cleaned a day or two before. The knife dropped through the skin with luscious ease. She julienned the fruit, mostly because she was fantasizing that the slices were his fingers, but she would settle for the smaller pieces.
Stooping to grab a pan from a lower cabinet, she went to work with sauteing, the air of the house filling with the light fragrance of caramelizing skin, the velveteen depth of umami from a splash of sesame oil, soy sauce, lemon. There was rice left, still granular and chewy, in the pot from what she assumed was his morning breakfast. She tossed it in. For some reason, when reaching to the clean side of the sink to grab a recently cleaned dish, she grew warm as if blushing.
Settling into one of the stools lined up along the kitchen island. There were three, she noticed with a wrinkle of her nose bridge. Curious, she thought.
She tried not to get swept up in the domesticity of it. Only an hour ago he had her pinned against the wooden slats of his hallway. Now she was grilling his fish, eating his tomatoes. Glancing at her surroundings, the plainness, she attempted to ignore the clones and focused instead of the meal. On its simplicity and flavor. The tomatoes tasted fresh. Deceptively fresh. If he had a garden . . .?
A chopstick slipped from her grasp and clamored onto the plate.
She hated this.
She threw the other chopstick toward the clone at the back door, watching it ruffle the choppy hair falling over the false Sasuke's right ear. The chopstick planted into the door. The clone's eyes snapped open, scanning.
"You are not permitted to leave," they both said.
"Who's got the skills of a chunin now," she muttered to herself. "Better guard dogs than clones." But she drifted off, stabbing the fish with her sole chopstick, watching the flesh flake into bits.
A rage brewed in her stomach. She shoved the plate to the side, her appetite lost. Trapping her. That was the grand plan. To trap her in a cage and tap on the glass and watch her squirm like a little mouse.
A storm cloud seemed to pass over her, merging with her disposition. Snakes ate mice.
Leaving a mess in the sink just to give Sasuke another thing to blister over, she stalked back toward the hallway. She tore through the bedroom as best as she could without disrupting the frail order of Sasuke's things. She rummaged through each dresser, each shelf and slit between furniture and wall. Uncertain of what she was searching for but sure it was there, nonetheless.
Sakura believed in signs. She wasn't religious, but signs, coincidences, patterns that bled across different facets of life: these she clung to. The three stools by the kitchen island felt heavy-handed, she would admit, but the house reeked of unfinished business in the little time she had stepped inside. The whole town did. She should have known from the wave of nostalgia that cascaded over her that first day in the forest as she let the river flow through the threads of her clothes. She shouldn't have shrugged the instinct away.
She should have stabbed him in the street. She should have grabbed him by the face and made him bleed from every orifice, made him scream the way she had in her nightmares in which he punished her endlessly, caught in the Infinite Tsukuyomi, spinning eternally down a tunnel of teeth and black blood and Naruto's begging echoing all around her like a sonic wave. She should have been ruthless in the way he always said she could never be, would never be capable of.
She should have hugged him. She should have apologized and left the village and renounced her mission and made herself small, of service.
She should have never come.
Then –– a realization hit her like a punch to the stomach.
She soared into the living room and let her kunai fly on reflex. The clones, caught off guard, vanished easily. Their last words were lost to the wind as she raced out of the house and back toward town, all the while her head pounding, berating her.
She should have known better.
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Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed.