It's official — I can't make promises about when I'll update anymore or it will inevitably extend the time between updates (cue laughs). But in real talk, this year has been hard as shit, as I'm sure it's been for many of you. Hopefully, if anyone was waiting on this update, it will make your holiday a little brighter.
I was sitting on this one for nearly a year. Finally found some time this morning to put the cherry on top. Thank y'all. Hoping it won't be too soon until my next update. This story is about to become monstrous.
Sasuke must have known she would leave and Sakura knew he would track her. But if her recent epiphany was correct, the situation would be irreversible. Sasuke would be permanently involved.
The bakery was not empty this time. It was bustling. A pre-dinner time rush to grab the last few loaves and flaking pastries was in full operation. A man hopped from the stoop of the shop as Sakura approached, trailing past a line that hugged the front wall. He tore the edge of the baguette he held with his teeth and chewed loudly as he waddled past Sakura, the parchment wrapper crinkling in his hand. The windows were glowing orange like the inside of an oven and silhouetted the line of customers shuffling slowly forward in the queue. Sakura headed around back to avoid too much attention.
The alley carried noise toward her. Some of it was a simple miscellaneous rustling, polluting her concentration. Through it, she could pinpoint Yuri's gruff voice –– "how many? This one? Three of them? Just two? I'm giving you three, you'll want them," and the customers' polite, terse attempts to place their orders with Akami. They asked constantly if she understood what they said. Sakura imagined her dark red bun bobbing, strands knocking loose in a nervous rush to shove bread into paper bags and seal them with pretty twine knots.
She couldn't sense Sasuke nearby, but that meant next to nothing. She shoved the thought of him away. He would appear when he wanted to and she had to make up for what time was already lost.
Throwing up a subtle henge, just enough to tweak her features toward normalcy, she stepped through the back door and made her way behind the counter, plucking an apron from the doorway for good measure. She avoided Yuri and Akami's startled expressions at her appearance and focused on the lagoon of waiting customers. They didn't question her sudden presence; they pointed happily to bread and cookies, shoved yen into her waiting hands while fielding phone calls from their spouses at home.
When the crowd cleared, she fetched a broom from the back and busied herself with sweeping. Yuri counted money behind the counter and scowled.
"What's all this, then?" the old woman asked.
"Ninjas can be helpful, too. Not just pains." She kept her eyes glued to the accumulating pile of breadcrumbs and dirt by her feet. She dropped the henge, too, and chose not to wink at Yuri's momentary look of shock.
"Help is a pain, too. Means you're going to want something for giving it."
The cash register chirped as Yuri pushed the neat stacks of bills inside, jotting numbers down on a clipboard. Once she finished, she leaned on the glass display case, sizing the kunoichi up.
"I don't like you," the old woman said. "I've got no patience for people who beat around the bush."
Sakura stood up straight, the worn end of the broom pressing into her palm. "Is that why you set me up?"
Yuri didn't quite blanch, but she stayed quiet.
"Why cooperate and incriminate yourself when you could send me off to get killed? That's what you thought."
"He's never killed anybody," Yuri shot back, but then seemed unsure. Sakura raised an eyebrow.
"Whatever. If he has, it's none of my business. You're trouble and he's trouble –– that's all I know. So I sent you off to pester someone of your own kind," she turned to stalk off into the back room where Sakura could hear Akami kneading dough. "You wanted to know about Koto, anyways."
Sakura wasn't as fast as Sasuke, but she was fast enough to block the doorway with her body before Yuri could stroll through.
"What did you say?" Sakura asked calmly.
The old woman fumed. "Stupid, stupid ninja girl. You think you can come up in my shop and push me around?" Yuri raised her hand as if to strike Sakura, but the kunoichi blocked her and grabbed her wrist loosely.
"Why would the man who owns that cabin know anything about Koto?" Sakura asked, flexing her fingers around the old woman's wrist in warning.
"I don't know him –– okay! I don't know that lurking, weird idiot. Never met him. All I know is when Koto started messing around, getting in trouble, he would leave before we opened the shop and wouldn't come back until he knew we were busy prepping for the next morning. We paid to get him followed, a pretty penny for an old wretch like me, mind you, so don't say I never did nothing for the kid –– and they said he was always with that black-haired fellow."
Sakura stared, knowing there was more. Yuri rolled her eyes.
"Fine, okay! Fine. I met him once. He dropped Koto off and the kid's arms were bandaged up, his face all bruised. I may have followed him down the road and yelled at him a little." Her face blistered with agitation at the memory of it, and Sakura tried to mimic the image of him that was probably playing in Yuri's head –– a young boy, without the wolverine mask, quaking and bruised beside Sasuke, who wouldn't even look the child in the eye.
"I wanted to know what the hell my own grandson was getting up to. Koto talked about him all the time, but he didn't even know his name. He just called him 'sensei.' He didn't say nothing to me when I ran after him and tried to clobber him over the head with my rolling pin. Didn't threaten me or anything, but I could tell he was evil. Who wouldn't be with eyes that black? I could tell he was a ninja, too, with that gaudy sword hanging off his hip. This is a civilian village –– you said it yourself –– and we don't need ninja kind around here. So yeah, I thought maybe I'd get lucky and you'd rip one another to shreds."
The old woman huffed, seeming worn and surprised and relieved, simultaneously, at the deft of her confessions. Yuri tried to yank her wrist from Sakura's grip and the kunoichi let her. Absentmindedly, she brushed extra flour from the front of her apron, grumbling.
It was Sakura's turn to blanch. She could tell Yuri was lying about some part of it from the way her eyes roamed, though she wasn't sure which. She didn't think it was the part about Koto and Sasuke, which was the part she most wished to be untrue.
"Did Koto ever say anything about him?" Sakura asked. Her voice dropped instinctively to almost a whisper.
"I told you what I know." Yuri sucked on her teeth and glared.
"If you're withholding information––"
"What are you gonna do? Blow up my store?" Yuri poked at a fading bruise on the inside of Sakura's left elbow. "I can tell he didn't take too kindly to you anyhow. Maybe I should let him know you've been sticking your nose around here. If I can't get rid of both of you, I could at least get rid of one. And he doesn't talk damn near as much."
Sakura chewed the inside of her cheek and glanced out the window before turning back to the old woman. It was astonishing, reviewing the information she'd gathered over the past few days, how much Yuri's demeanor had changed. She grew cruder with every interaction. It was obvious she was hiding details, but things were becoming more convoluted. It hurt her head to think about untangling the pile of strings that connected one suspicious person to another.
The old woman shoved her way past Sakura and signed to Akami, who turned around and jumped at the sight of them in the doorway. Akami kept glancing between her mother's dancing hands and Sakura, who looked suddenly gaunt as if she had seen a ghost. The young woman's face crumpled as her mother's explanation unfolded of what had occurred. Sakura wondered which part she was most upset about: her treatment of Yuri, Koto, or even Sasuke. Who knew how involved he had become with this family. The thought made her stomach roll, though she didn't give herself the chance to imagine why. At the sight of Akami's budding tears, she ducked out of the shop, tossing her dusty apron on the glass display case. The sky had settled into a cool evening, a slight breeze carrying the smell of the flowing river over her, the setting sun's last trickle of light blazing against the face of the looming clock tower.
So she had been wrong. About most of it. About almost all of it. Sasuke was part of the mission, even if she didn't want him to be. The most impossible person of interest. How was she supposed to interrogate him? Gleen any sort of information from his rotted, narcissistic, lethally-guarded head? A groan fell from her mouth as she slapped her forehead. How was she supposed to fend off the inevitable temper tantrum he had waiting for her when they found one another? Underneath the mounting concerns was one that made her a little breathless, too: that he had gone on to raise a criminal of his own. That he might know the severity of the situation and be sitting on it gleefully, if he was capable of feeling such a thing.
She watched the dirt path sprinkle dust onto her toes as she trudged back toward his home in the woods. The leaves cooed in the wind at her, whispering little harmonies. A loose leaf twirled down and landed by her foot. She thumbed its satin, green face as she walked.
It would be better to turn herself in than wait for him to find her, she told herself. It might help later in justifying her position to him, whatever it was going to be.
And what was it going to be? She had already lied. Admitting the truth would do her no good because it would only reassure Sasuke she could not be trusted. Involving him would be complicated, anyhow. He would be guilty and immediately suspicious that she would drag him back to Konoha for punishment. And she might have to, in that case, if he was truly guilty. She gulped –– if that was what her duty commanded.
No. It was better to keep him in the dark. To get close to the hunter without standing in the path of the arrow. But how was she supposed to get Sasuke to talk? To confess? The most silent person she had ever known was now her primary informant. She cursed and threw the green leaf to the ground in tattered shreds.
On the slow trek back toward the cottage, the most outlandish strategies entered her mind. She could try to capture him, torture him for information, give him a taste of his own medicine. She could call for reinforcements and risk an all-out battle. She could injure herself and return to Konoha and request Kakashi send someone else, anyone else.
She could befriend him. She could learn his secrets.
A dark, masochistic laugh cut through the quiet air. As if he would ever trust her enough to get that close. She couldn't even ask him how his day was when they were teammates without a surly glare in reply.
There was no right answer. She had to fess up or buck up for the fight of her life. But the last idea still wiggled in the back of her mind like a loose plank of wood.
Espionage was espionage. There was no such thing as an uncrackable nut. And she out of anyone knew how to manipulate the brain and body, to leech what she needed from those who were more iron than flesh and blood. She had cracked Shikamaru into tearfully confessing his love for Temari before he fled to Suna to raise the orphaned child that was probably his own daughter, when years before he refused to acknowledge the little crying baby. She cracked Sai into becoming more human, or at least human-adjacent, shaking him of his Root upbringing. She had cracked Neji into loving her, however briefly, before he left her for TenTen and died on a bloody battlefield.
It was still a stupid notion. It was still just as likely to get her killed. But, as the outline of the cottage pressing into its cloaking waves of vines grew nearer, it was the only option that seemed to make sense.
Sakura approached him where he waited on the gently sloping grass behind the house, cross-legged on a worn tree stump he used to chop firewood. She held her hands up in surrender, waving a white flower, its stem wobbly and limp.
"I come in peace," she said, her voice carrying over the yard.
Sasuke was displeased. He made no effort in hiding it. Rampant, angry chakra was sparking the air around him, like air licked by lightning.
She stopped a few feet from him and threw the white flower in his direction. If he could be angrier, somehow, her nonchalance was propelling him in that direction. Everything was not a satire. Life was not a satire. If she hadn't learned this, he would teach her. Quickly.
"I have a question," he said, which seemed to miff her.
"Alright," she responded, pulling her hair into a rubber band. He could tell she wanted to say more.
"I've been thinking of how I will kill you." He paused to look at her although he could see her flashing annoyance in his periphery. "But first. What you said earlier."
"The part about peace? Or when you were reprimanding me for my 'kunoichi vacation?'"
"Forgetting." He straightened from his stooped slouch on the grass and turned to observe her fully. "How will you forget?"
She swallowed and crossed her arms, her hands hugging her elbows as if a chilly wind had passed. The night air was sticky and still.
"It's an old-school technique. Forbidden jutsu, mind-manipulation kind of old school." Sakura shrugged and studied the weeds curling against the underbelly of Sasuke's back patio, tendrils slipping through cracks like little fingers.
He watched her, guarded, encouraging her to continue.
"Tsunade-shishou taught it to me as a last ditch effort. In case I was captured."
He grunted and looked away.
"How does it work?" he asked, voice low.
"You know. Brain stuff?"
The kusanagi lay beside him. It glinted in the moonlight. Sasuke could see Sakura's heavy swallow. The pale shelf of her jaw clenched, her face turning to survey the backyard. He watched her spot the small piles of neatly stacked firewood, the humble garden. Cucumbers were peeking up from the still and coquettish where they bask beneath blooming yellow flowers, which were shutting under the rising moonlight. What she couldn't see: the greenhouse obscured beneath a sea of kudzu a quarter mile away, surrounded by finely lined rows of buried, sprouting seeds and plants and fruits. The lemon, nashi, and persimmon trees tucked into corners of the property. The bunker, untouched, that lay beneath them, full of hard metal weapons. Sasuke stared at the glow of her skin, at her absorbing eyes, and his fingers itched to touch them and make them bleed.
He grunted again. She turned back toward him, sighing.
"Even if I knew, I couldn't tell you, obviously," she said.
"But you will," Sasuke said. He brushed the handle of the kusanagi like caressing a lover. "You always find a way to tell me, despite yourself."
He heard her traipsing across the grass. His grip on the kusanagi tightened. Flashing, the blade was suddenly in the air, touching Sakura's throat as she stood only a few feet away. Slowly, with the blade following her, she sat directly across from him.
"Try me," she said. Sasuke raised his eyebrow just barely.
Sakura scoffed and leveled with him. The way her lips curled—too close to a sneer, for his comfort. Maybe she had changed more than he'd like to believe. Then again, he doubted it.
"You're so certain I'm hiding something. Try me. You'll see I have nothing to hide." Sakura leaned closer, the kusanagi tipping back toward Sasuke, without threat. "I know you're dying to."
"What is this?" Sasuke asked. He let his Sharingan flash.
"It's called 'facilitating trust.' I'm sure you're unfamiliar."
He hated this. The casualness. When had she become so brazen? In a second he'd have her knocked on her back, pinned, with the kusanagi slashed across her throat. But she knew this—she knew all of this. They were hardly unseasoned strangers. What was this game, this recklessness?
The genjutsu had been fruitless before, even if he wouldn't admit it out loud. If she were truly a jounin now, the prodigy of her own Sannin, it'd be a difficult barrier to break without making a substantial mess of things. He could kill her quietly, at the cost of learning nothing, living in the dark, hoping, uselessly, they wouldn't trace her back here. Luck was not a friendly god to him.
He was realizing now, in the face of persistence, how loose the leash had really become. How much slack he gave himself over the years, how much he had relaxed. It felt criminal to admit, even to himself, that he might really be harboring even a grain of panic and fear.
At the end of his sword, her face was bright, openly curious. She wanted this. Why did she want this?
"You will never earn my trust," Sasuke said evenly.
"It's never stopped me from trying before." She never missed a beat.
"Then try." He nudged the kusanagi's tip into the fold of her throat. "Let's start with the 'brain stuff.'"
"On one condition."
Sasuke snarled. "You are not in a position to negotiate."
"I need your help," Sakura said, quickly. She seemed to capitalize on his brief pause. "We both want the same thing. Me, out of here, and you, here. Both of us apart and oblivious to the other."
Reluctantly, he gave a small noise of acknowledgment.
"Then help me complete my mission." A smile was brewing on her face. She looked like a gumdrop, a sickly sweet doll with candied eyes. Bloodlust boiled inside of him. He pounced, grabbed her throat with his free hand and pinned her to the nearest tree ten yards away.
"You are deranged," he seethed, eyes pulsing and blood red. He could see the most minute twitches of her features. She was not scared. She had anticipated this. It only made him angrier.
"How do you lose here? You want to know what I'm up to. You want to track my every move. You want me gone, you want to guarantee your safety, you want your cake in your pocket and in your hand and in your mouth. You want nothing to do with me but want everything to do with getting rid of me." She panted against his chokehold, her hair fluttering above her parted mouth. Her teeth glinted with the same slick shine as the sword in his periphery. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "It's just a little recon, Sasuke. That's all it will take."
He slammed her head back onto the tree trunk and pitched closer, his mouth brushing her nose, eyes baring down. "You will never earn my trust."
"Then we do this every day, every night until we kill each other."
"You will lose."
"Maybe. But I haven't tried yet." Her eyes fleeted over his face. "Haven't noticed that yet, have you? I never attacked you. I never laid on a hand on you except in defense."
"You miscalculate threats. That is not my—"
Sakura laughed. "Tell yourself I'm stupid, Sasuke, instead of strategic. Whatever makes you feel better." She tipped her chin up, making his throat more available for his tightening hold. She added her own hand on top of his, doubling the pressure, and her touch stung in a way he didn't expect—unphysical, deeper, beneath his skin.
"Tell yourself I'm stupid and kill me and wonder what it was all about," she rasped beneath their gradually interlocking fingers. Sasuke could feel the tension on his face changing, tightening into something else. In the vastness of the backyard lit up in moonlight, he felt like the corners of the world were pressed against his back.
He crashed his forehead into hers as hard as he could. She went limp, once again, beneath his hands.
He locked the door from the inside and left through the window, ignoring Sakura's unconscious form on the unrolled sleeping mat he nicked from her pack. Every step he took away from the window, stalking around the perimeter of his cottage, made him feel sicker, lonelier, more foolish.
When she woke up, he knew she would find him. With the door locked from the inside, though, he could at least stop himself from killing her in a fit of frustration—or giving himself an extra five-second delay, at least. He could give himself time to think about the decision he'd only half made.
He didn't have to peek into the spare room to know how she appeared: a bruise coloring the majority of her throat, tattered clothes, covered in dirt, frozen and unconscious. Blood trickling from her eyebrow to her chin. Strawberry-pink hair cascading all over his floor, his things, infecting his life. She was a parasite. She was sucking the life out of him, sucking it away from him.
He stormed through the back door of his house, flash-stepping into his bathroom and white-knuckling the edge of his sink while a hot shower muddied the mirror with steam. He couldn't look at himself, anyhow, this weak creature he'd become. He'd seen too much of Sakura. He was getting weak, mawkish. That was the only explanation for why he let her live instead of slaying her as she dangled between his hands. His useless, useless hands.
And what to say. She would be out for a day at most, maybe two if he cast another genjutsu. The thought alone made him sag with exhaustion. The resounding click of the latch unlocking, the door sliding back to reveal her drowsy, satisfied stare, knowing she had gotten to him. She had gotten to him and he had let her live.
He looked up into the mirror, the hazy blackness of his outline. He wondered if he, too, was littered with blood and scratches. He wondered how she was already marking him, changing him, like poison.
But she would not feed on him without sacrificing something. There was more to give, he sensed, beneath her careful charade of brash nonchalance. Even if she weren't here for him, she would doubtlessly try and drag him back to that cursed place of leaves and familiarity.
He just needed to discover what she was really here for before then.
As always, reviews are appreciated.