A/N: Um. Happy New Year? Allow me to help you celebrate with me waxing poetic about Sakura?
The next chapter will be mostly action, and all about Naruto and Sasuke and the epic amount of fail that they carry with them. I was so, so glad before tackling those two that I got to spend some time with Sakura. This is a chapter I have been wanting to write from the beginning. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much I enjoyed writing it?
Thank you so much, as always, for those of you that continue to stick with me. It is always, immensely appreciated!
I do not own Naruto, and am making zero money from this work.
Chapter Twelve
Foundations
Sakura
When Sai stopped by Sakura's house, to accompany her to the team meeting at Naruto's apartment, he found her hunched over a medical kit.
"What is that?" he asked, eyeing the fistfuls of supplies in Sakura's hands with cool curiosity.
"Specialized medical kit," Sakura explained, as she packed endless amounts of bandages and antiseptic and scrolls designed to force-stop chakra from bleeding out of the body entirely. "I call it the Team 7 Tragedy Pack. Thought I'd better drag it out, since we're about to go and tell Naruto that his best friend was involved in the death of his Sensei."
Sai nodded gravely. "I see. It's much larger than the standard-issue medical kit."
"Right," Sakura said, and shoved three rolls of gauze inside the kit with perhaps an inappropriate amount of force. "Because I only use it when Team 7 is assembled in its entirety, and Team 7 doesn't have standard-issue fuck-ups, you know?"
"I know," Sai agreed, sounding almost forlorn. "However, I don't understand."
"Don't understand what?" Sakura sat back on her heels to study the contents of her kit, and debated over adding the sedatives. Couldn't hurt, she eventually decided, and tossed them in. Her teammates were far more fun to be around when unconscious, after all. "If you've got questions, send them to me instead of asking your book. I think we've firmly established that the book is a terrible thing, Sai."
"This is a conflict between Naruto and Sasuke, correct?"
"Everything in the entire fucking universe is a conflict between Naruto and Sasuke," Sakura answered grimly and closed her kit hard enough to make the boxes and bottles of pills inside rattle. "Because somehow this is my life and Lady Tsunade has forbidden me from murdering them both for the crime of stupidity. But this is one of the larger conflicts, yes."
"And you're angry at Sasuke? For what he's done to Naruto."
"That is socially acceptable response in this situation," Sakura explained, and flipped the locks on the medical kit. "In case you were wondering what you should be feeling. Anger is good, because Naruto is the wronged party here, and so Naruto is the priority. He's done nothing in his life to deserve the way that Sasuke treats him."
Sai's face was blank and assessing. Which didn't bother Sakura at all, actually, because it meant that he wasn't pretending around her anymore.
"So you think Sasuke is the villain of this situation. You think that he should be punished for his actions?"
"Naruto has done nothing to deserve Sasuke's treatment," Sakura repeated firmly. "And Sasuke doesn't deserve Naruto at all. He should be punished for this, especially this, and Naruto should be the one to do it."
"I see," Sai said, and tipped his head to one side. "But then, might I ask who the kit is for, Sakura?"
Sakura felt her brow wrinkle. "What? I just told you."
"Naruto is the Nine Tails Jinchuriki. As such, he is capable of healing at an expedited rate. Sasuke Uchiha is currently blind and chakra-bound. I have no doubt that Sasuke would still be capable of some manner of destruction, if the two were to engage in an altercation, given the affinities listed in his files. However, in his current condition, it would be almost impossible for Sasuke to inflict enough damage to seriously challenge Naruto's advanced speed of healing."
Sai's eyes were very dark and calm, nothing accusatory in them. Only honest curiosity.
"I doubt that your medical supplies would be of any use to Naruto. And you've already said that you believe Sasuke is the villain, one deserving of Naruto's punishment." Sai gestured politely at the kit. "And so, I find myself confused as to who you've packed the kit for, Sakura."
Sakura's heart bounced upwards once, and then fell all the way into her stomach. Her suddenly sweaty hands slipped from the handle of the kit. She sat amidst an ocean of medical supplies and felt her brain blindly taking stock. Bandages that Naruto wouldn't need. Medications that Naruto couldn't take.
Who was she packing the kit for?
"I thought that Naruto was the priority," Sai said, as Sakura's gut contracted sharply. "I thought you were angry with Sasuke."
"He is," she murmured, over her own sudden spike of panicked disgust, sharp and sour on the back of her tongue. "I am."
"Ah. Forgive me, then, if I've failed to comprehend." Sai's empty smile finally made an appearance, and it did nothing to help the sudden heat beneath Sakura's skin, the sudden gallop of her heart and the way it hammered questions inside her ears. Hadn't she grown out of this? If Naruto was the priority (and he was, absolutely he was), then why was she spending so much time prepping for the needs of another? "I'm afraid I still don't have much familiarity with the experience of anger."
The kit slipped from Sakura's hands entirely. It popped open as it hit the floor, medical supplies spilling across the carpet like accusations.
"I suppose it must be difficult," Sai mused, as his eyes traced the materials meant for fixing someone other than Naruto. "I myself have trouble locating true anger underneath my own conditioned behaviors." Those black eyes returned to Sakura's, cool and calm and unbothered despite the fact that Sakura was working up a scream. "I wonder sometimes if I'll ever be able to really find it."
##
Sakura was quiet as she and Sai walked to Naruto's apartment. Not fair to Sai, perhaps, who had only pointed out a truth. But it was a truth that Sakura was having trouble acknowledging, and Sai never began conversation without first being engaged anyway.
And so the walk was quiet, and Sakura took the time to think. She thought and thought until her brain ached and finally wondered: what it was like, to experience a catastrophe without Sasuke fucking Uchiha at the center of it?
It must have happened before. Sasuke had been absent from their lives for years before this, and Sakura knew that there had been Sasuke-less disasters to deal with in that span of time. But those emergencies seemed duller somehow, faded and far away in her memory. Like summer rains, mild and easily forgotten. Who could remember such gentle troubles when faced with the raging hurricane that was Team 7?
Kakashi-Sensei was the lighting, of course. Bright and deadly sharp. Naruto was the wind, pulling and pushing and howling to be heard. Sakura was the rain, trying—always trying—to wash away the damage.
And Sasuke. Sasuke was the eye of the hurricane. The deceptive calm that carried the most destructive storms in its wake.
Sakura knew how to identify it by now. The taste of ozone on her tongue and the prickle of hair standing up on her arms and neck; both indicators that Team 7 was about to tear shit up yet a-fucking-gain. They were standing in the center of the storm. Waiting for the destruction to follow, except that this time, Sakura couldn't hear the approach of the howling wind. Naruto was silent. Quieter even than Sasuke's calm, and Sakura's entire body pulsed with the wrongness of it.
She couldn't rain hard enough to fix this particular hurt. But why—why—was she still trying with Sasuke?
"The Jiraya boy has died in battle," the lord toad had said, solemn and still in Lady Tsunade's office.
And Naruto had rocked backwards, stumbled back a step, like he was the one being pushed and pulled for once.
Ambushed, the lord toad had explained. His movements tracked, somehow, and his attempt at information-gathering met with a vicious attack. Naruto hadn't heard a word after 'died', Sakura had seen it in the frozen wideness of his eyes. But she had, she'd heard them, and she'd also seen Kakashi-Sensei's face.
Naruto might have lost his wind (temporarily, oh please be temporary) but the storm that Sakura was waiting for was there in Kakashi-Sensei's eyes. It was bad. Worse than Team 7 had ever seen before, bad enough to wreck them, maybe, and Sakura had felt fear dance down her spine.
"Tell me," she'd said, after the announcement and the code carved into the lord toad's back. Sakura had watched Naruto fling accusations at Lady Tsunade's shattered face, his fists clenched and his voice hollow, and looked for her own answers. "Tell me, Sensei."
"How do you send a spoken message without saying words?" Kakashi had whispered back. "How can you ensure that the recipient of your message will receive it even if you barely move your mouth?"
"I…what?"
"Have a bloodline limit that enables you to see everything with perfect clarity."
"Have a Sharingan," Sakura had whispered, and realization was a sick, slippery fist inside her stomach. "Sasuke."
"And Madara." The lighting had been there, sizzling inside Kakashi-Sensei's words. "He must have followed Sasuke to the Village."
And Sasuke had spoken to him. Whispered secrets out of the safe house, unable to see but somehow knowing that Madara would be there. Putting himself at the center again, making himself the axis that they all tilted around. Controlling the direction of their storm, when Sakura had sworn that he would never control anything about her, not ever again.
She should be angry with him. She should be furious. And she was—she was.
But she'd still packed the kit.
"What does it look like?" Sakura wondered. "Truly angry. What does that even look like?"
"I wouldn't know," Sai reminded her politely.
Sakura felt apologies scramble across her tongue, sharp and sudden.
"Right. I'm sorry."
Sai turned to look at her, something blankly wondering about his gaze. "What for?"
"I…nothing. Just sorry."
"Ah." Sai was quiet for a moment, and then, "Thank you. Right? That's the appropriate response?"
"Right," Sakura said again, and closed her eyes to hide the way they were burning.
##
Naruto never did anything the way that she expected.
Really, she should have known that by now. How many years had she spent watching Naruto blast through the expectations of others with nothing but words and his apparent allergy to knowing when to quit? Hadn't he done the same to her? Danced around her preconceived notions in a whirlwind of terrible fashion choices and questionably obtained jutsus, until she'd looked up one day and realized that life inside that whirlwind was so much brighter than life outside had been.
Naruto was a hero, in spite of everybody planning for a monster. He shouted too loud for any kind of company, no matter how many people told him to shut the fuck up. He shook his ass at the idea of giving up (literally, there had been a literal ass shaking in front of a foreign dignitary once and it was one of the many ways he'd helped Sakura to die inside) when every iota of existence told him to lie back and let this one pass. He grinned in a way that made everyone from tiny ninja children to dignified Fire Nation gentry contemplate homicide until they just gave up and decided to change their ways instead.
Naruto existed now in the way that only a hero could; to claw and kick and force things to be different with blood and bone and effort. And he did it in spite of every single person having once told him that he couldn't.
And so, Sakura shouldn't have been surprised. She'd been expecting a showdown, once Kakashi had sat Naruto down and explained what Sasuke had done. She'd been expecting tears and screams and both of them bleeding, because that was the only way that Sasuke and Naruto really understood each other.
Sakura hadn't brought the medical kit. She'd kicked it beneath her bed at home, and left it there. But the knowledge that she'd packed it in the first place, that she'd packed it for Sasuke, burned beneath her skin. Especially when confronted with what she expected to be the ruined rage of Naruto's emotions.
But Naruto didn't blast a ninja-shaped hole in the nearest wall and go speeding towards Sasuke's house. He didn't break the chair that Kakashi had shoved him into, after being dragged into the kitchen of his tiny apartment by Kakashi and Sakura and Sai's insistent hands. He didn't do anything at all, except shudder once underneath the palms that Sakura and Kakashi had pressed against his shoulders.
"You're sure, Kakashi-Sensei?" he asked.
Sai, who'd been stationed by the door to try and stop the burst of fury that apparently wasn't going to come, tipped his head the barest bit. He was confused; Sakura could read it in the tiny wrinkles on his forehead.
"Sure that he was passing information," Kakashi said. "Naruto-,"
But Naruto looked up with a smile that all but ripped the guts from Sakura's stomach.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, Sensei."
And then he shrugged their hands away and rocked to his feet. Sai rippled a bit at the doorway; too graceful to hesitate in his movements to but also unable to ignore the terrible, terrible smile on Naruto's face.
"I'm going for a walk," Naruto explained to the room at large. "A solo walk. Like, I get that you guys want to bask in my awesome 24/7 but I am capable of doing some things alone, okay?"
It was exactly the right words, exactly what Naruto would have said, but somehow it twisted the fist curled around Sakura's insides even tighter.
"I have concerns about your mental stability," Sai informed Naruto gravely.
Naruto shrugged this away with upsettingly causal shoulders.
"You always have concerns about my mental stability, Sai."
"Yes," Sai agreed, without an ounce of shame. "But even more so at this moment. Grief and loss are powerful manipulators. They can force emotional behaviors that may be harmful to the one experiencing them. Or so I read."
Naruto put a heavy hand on Sai's arm. Sakura watched Sai fight not to flinch away from it, even though he'd stopped responding negatively to Naruto's causal expressions of buddy-love months ago.
"We're going to burn your book," Naruto said. "Have we established that? You, me, the biggest fucking bonfire I can build, and maybe a ritual dance around it while it burns."
"In the nude?"
Naruto made a strangled, wheezing sort of noise, before managing, "Why. Why would it be in the nude? Why is that your automatic assumption, Sai, what the actual fuck?"
"Some cultures-," Sai started, before Sakura cut across with, "No." Because it needed to be said, even in this stupidly awful situation, and Kakashi-Sensei sure as shit wasn't going to do it.
"All the books," Naruto mourned. "We're going to have to burn all of the books, Sakura, because none of them are safe."
Naruto turned to smile at her as he said it. That empty, aching smile. Sakura caught the scream—but only just—and held it wriggling between her teeth.
"Naruto-,"
"Walk," Naruto repeated, kindly but also firm. "Solo walk, that is where I'm going. I won't be gone too long, okay?"
She wanted to tell him no. That it wasn't okay, how could it be okay, when he was smiling like that? She wanted to make him stay, or bully him into letting her go along. But Sakura was practical, even if she hated herself for it sometimes. Her head pointed out that Naruto would benefit from the space he so obviously needed, while the rest of her raged that he shouldn't be alone, he'd spent so much time alone and sad and why couldn't she make sure that he never was again?
Why couldn't she protect him from this?
But that was a stupid question, she reminded herself, as she watched Naruto slip around Sai and out the door. Such a stupid question, and just like wondering why Naruto never met expectations, she should have known better than to ask it.
Because really, there was no protecting Naruto and Sasuke from each other. And she couldn't do it, either. Not if she kept focusing on finding ways to fix Sasuke first.
##
Hours later, Kakashi found her on the training fields.
"There were reports," he said, leaning lazily against the nearest wooden post. "Reports coming in with phrases like 'excessive violence' and 'I think the training ground is crying'. I figured it could only be one of my children at fault."
"Isn't that the fucking truth," Sakura agreed, and blew sweat-soaked bangs out of her eyes. Her fists were aching beneath her leather gloves, her finger bones screaming from how many times they'd cracked against rock and dirt and wood. She was filthy from head to toe and trembling with the effort of a good workout, but didn't feel any better for it. "Where's Naruto?"
"Iruka-Sensei found him on his walk," Kakashi said, and Sakura nodded. It was good for Naruto, right now, to be with someone outside of their storm.
"I'm not the one you expected to find out here, am I, Sensei?"
"I don't see why not." Kakashi lifted one shoulder and let it fall again. "You've got as much capacity for destroying Leaf Village property as any of the boys."
"Capacity, sure." Sakura struck the wooden post again, hard enough that it rattled all the way to the ground. "I have that. I'm more worried about what I don't have."
"And what don't you have, Sakura?"
Sakura considered her Sensei as she shook the latest pain out of her knuckles. Kakashi-Sensei was smiling at her, one eye happily curved, but there was a hunch to his shoulders that Sakura was all too familiar with. Blows from fists and feet couldn't create that hurting, inward curl; only people could, people and the ways that Kakashi-Sensei believed that he'd failed them.
"Are you angry, Sensei?"
He blinked at her. "Angry at Sasuke?"
"Yes."
"Shouldn't I be?"
"You should." Sakura tipped her head forward and rested it against the wooden pole. "I should. But I don't know how to be angry at Sasuke. I know how to be angry with Sasuke, or angry about Sasuke. But not at him."
"You found angry in the years that they were gone, Sakura. I know you did."
"Yes." Sakura thought of shattered earth, of rock splitting apart beneath her hands and Lady Tsunade watching with understanding, knowing, approving eyes. "But this is…why can't I…," She searched for the words, couldn't find them, and so drew back and punched the pole again instead.
Kakashi nodded at the correctness of her form and said, "They don't just go away. You've tried very hard, Sakura, and so I really hate to break this to you. But feelings don't just go away."
"Are we talking about my feelings, Sensei?" Sakura said, almost amused and only the tiniest bit appalled. "About my sixteen-year-old female feelings?"
"Why not?" Kakashi eye-smiled at her again, a little bit more real this time. "They aren't any less valid just because you're young and also a girl."
Kindly, Sakura explained, "I know that my feelings are valid. But I also know that if I start talking about them in detail, you will run screaming for the nearest field."
"Mah, mah. I can do the feelings-thing!"
Sakura leveled her Sensei with most pitying of looks. "Screaming, Kakashi-Sensei. So much screaming, and then porn as a security blanket."
Kakashi-Sensei sputtered out a series of wounded vowel sounds, but didn't actually disagree.
Sakura turned back to her post and balled her fist up again.
"Anger doesn't always look the same," Kakashi said, before she could strike. "You're not like Naruto. Or me."
Sakura sucked a sharp breath between her teeth, and then ground them tight together to lock the sudden burning rush away.
"Because I was a stupid little girl who thought I was in love with him?"
"Who says you weren't?" Kakashi said softly, and Sakura's spine snapped stiff and straight. Sensei hardly ever sounded like that. "Why does it make you stupid to care for someone else? It's not a weakness, Sakura. I knew a girl once, and she cared so much, and she was one of the strongest—"
Kakashi-Sensei stopped mid-word, and Sakura could barely breathe around his silence. Her teacher never talked about his team. Never, not since that very first bell test and him directing them towards the memorial stone. They were always there, Kakashi-Sensei's team, in the lessons that he taught and the things that he didn't say and the files Sakura had eventually seen after being apprenticed to Lady Tsunade. But he never spoke of them directly.
"Anyway," Kakashi-Sensei rallied, and offered the biggest smile in his repertoire. "We've already established this. Feelings—don't mean less just because you're young. So that's not what I'm trying to talk about. What I am trying to point out is that the foundations of your feelings are different from mine, and Naruto's." Kakashi-Sensei paused, considered. "Well. Definitely from mine. Maybe from Naruto's—didn't Sai say something about penises and homoerotic subtext?"
"Say it three times and he'll appear to expand upon the subject, I think," Sakura agreed, a tiny smile fighting to curve her lips.
"Right." Something in Kakashi-Sensei's shoulders relaxed at Sakura's smile. "But the foundation. If the foundation is different, can the thing being built on it really look the same?"
Sakura furrowed her brow at him, her fists held tight and ready before the pole.
Without dimming his smile even the tiniest bit, Kakashi elaborated with, "I've been battling the urge to slit Sasuke's throat since we left the Hokage's office."
This might have shocked Sakura once. Might have made her pale, or shake, or demand that Kakashi-Sensei didn't mean it, right?
Now she only nodded in understanding.
"And I'm sure there will be an epic battle, once Naruto gets over the shock," Kakashi continued. "One full of tears and screams and hopefully Sasuke's head up his own ass, right alongside the giant stick living there. Because that is how Naruto does angry." Kakashi tipped his head consideringly. "Sasuke, too, I suppose. He and Naruto are both explosions who exist to give me constant fucking headaches. But they aren't you, and there's other ways to show it. One way in particular, if I remember correctly, that always knocked Sasuke's knees out from under him."
Sakura's fists wavered. "What? Sensei, what?"
But Kakashi just crowed, "Something to think about, darling child of mine!" And then he ruffled Sakura's hair and vanished with a pop, because they'd been talking about feelings for five entire minutes, and Sakura suspected that he might be breaking out in hives.
Alone, Sakura stared at the training post and let Kakashi's words circle slowly through her head. Kakashi-Sensei's words were always a puzzle to be solved, and Sakura liked to think that she'd gotten better at doing so across the years.
Anger doesn't have to look the same.
Sasuke and Naruto are explosions.
But they aren't you, and it won't look the same.
"Oh," Sakura murmured. Deep, deep down inside her stomach—inside her self—something stirred and stretched. Something she'd hidden for far too long.
This time, when she let her fist fly, the training post cracked cleanly in half. The upper section fell to the grass with a sad and soggy thumping sound, and Sakura brushed the wood chips from her gloves.
"Oh," she said again.
This time, the smile that crossed her face wasn't tiny at all.
##
The rage was a very real thing, once Sakura finally found it. It moved beneath her skin and skittered up her throat like spiders snapping to defend their nests. She couldn't breathe around it—not this time, even after all the years she'd spent choking her own fury back for the sake of Sasuke's anger, or Naruto's, or anyone else that she'd been afraid would leave her behind had she refused to soften and smile.
Not this time. Not this fucking time.
It was her turn to be the center of the storm.
Only hours after Kakashi-Sensei and the training fields, she punched down the door to Sasuke's house hard enough to splinter wood and shake the stone foundations. The skin of her knuckles split open and wept red. There was no leather there to protect her hands. She'd left the gloves at home, purposefully left them prettily folded on the nightstand in her bedroom.
She'd had enough of hiding from the bloodstains that her hands had earned.
Sasuke was on his feet in the main entryway. Standing perfectly still and composed. His sightless eyes searched the room uselessly. He must not have been aware of the reaction—normally, Sasuke held himself above such obvious displays of disadvantage. But Sakura knew about the staggering loss of sense. She'd studied and spent hospital rotations watching battle blinded ninja try to force a response that they were no longer capable of. Sasuke was human; for all that he tried to be more. He was made of blood and bone and firing synapses, and it helped to look at him and see the proof of it.
"Haruno," someone said from behind her left shoulder. ANBU—she hadn't even heard him enter the house. But that didn't matter right now.
It was only because she'd been staring right at him that she caught Sasuke's tiny twitch of surprise, folded into the lines between his brows and almost invisible beneath the black ink of the blinding seal. Surprise, because he hadn't expected Sakura to be the one to blast her way inside on a wave of blood and fury. Not Sakura, who softened and smiled and swallowed her own anger like vials of poison until spiders hatched beneath her skin.
The eye of the hurricane carried the most destructive storms in its wake. And fuck you, Sasuke Uchiha for thinking that Sakura couldn't be that, too.
"This is team business, ANBU-san. Please return to your post."
A member of the ANBU black ops wouldn't do something so obvious as shift from foot to foot, but Sakura could taste his uncertainty on the air. "Haruno, my orders are—,"
"ANBU-san. " Sakura tipped her head just enough to catch sight of a porcelain mask painted with red and black. "This is team business."
He didn't protest again. Instead, he exited the house as quickly as he'd entered it, and left Sakura and Sasuke alone with more than a doorway shattered in the space between them.
Sasuke wouldn't speak first. Even now, he wouldn't. And so Sakura took a deep breath and asked, "Did you know? When you were whispering to Madara, did you know what the end result would be?"
"Does it make a difference?" Sasuke shoulders were loose and relaxed. Even now he didn't view her as a threat, and she hated him for it.
"It does. It makes a difference. I need to know if I can find a way to forgive you for this, Sasuke. Someday very far from now."
"I never asked for your forgiveness."
"No. You never did." But he'd thanked her once. More than the blood and the death and the mistakes, those whispered words were what woke Sakura in the small hours of the morning, covered in sweat and forcing bile back down her throat. "But Naruto won't expect it. Even now, he won't expect that from you. But someone should hate you for the things you've done, Sasuke, even if it's just a little bit. So I'll do it, if Naruto can't."
Sasuke's smile was a tiny thing. The curve of it didn't even brush the black ink curling down his cheeks.
"That's a big burden to carry. You've always had such delicate shoulders, Sakura."
Sakura knew that once she would have flushed and stuttered over Sasuke commenting on any of her body parts. Her argument would have been carried away on a wave of embarrassed bliss. She swallowed the shame of that knowledge down now, and let the rage fly free instead.
Her swinging fist struck out. It stopped only inches from Sasuke's face. Not because she couldn't hit him—of course she could. Sasuke was bracing for it, even, his legs bent and his back straight. But that wasn't the point Sakura was trying to make.
The center of the storm was always calm, after all.
"My shoulders are strong enough," she said. Her fist had displaced the air around Sasuke's face, pushing back the hair above his startled, sightless eyes.
Close enough for him to feel the potential of her strength and understand that she'd chosen not to waste it on him.
One way in particular, Kakashi-Sensei had said. One way of being angry that Sasuke had never really understood.
"I don't think you ever really knew that, Sasuke."
She pulled her hand back slowly. Sasuke swayed forward the barest bit, following the promise of violence like it was the only one he really believed in. There was something slightly lost in the lines of his brow. Like he didn't know what to do when fists weren't involved.
She turned and left him like that, with an uncertainty on his face that was just for her. It tasted like triumph on her tongue, bright and electric underneath the rage and sorrow, as she picked her way across the shattered bits of wooden doorway.
Braced against the garden wall outside, Kakashi said, "I thought you were going to punch his brain loose."
"Which might have fixed the way it fucks everything up," Sakura agreed. "It's not my way. Not this time, not for this. Right, Kakashi-Sensei?"
Kakashi shrugged, but Sakura could see pride the curve of his eye, the tap of his fingers.
"Didn't fix anything," Sakura pointed out. "I don't have enough bandages in the world to fix this fucking mess of situation."
Kakashi hummed a little and said, "Fixed you, I think. Not all the way, but maybe a little bit. That's a start. A foundation. And you can build all kinds of things on a foundation, right?"
Sakura laughed a little. Tipped her head back to the sky.
"Right," she said, almost to herself. "Okay."
A/N: Because I needed to get this out, before the plot could go anywhere. Next up-Naruto's POV: Pein Pain, Go Away. Come back fucking never, alright? Happy Reading!