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the line on a spin take the angel's wings
-o-
Sakura was fourteen years old and she was being seduced.
Not in the way she imagined proper seduction went – not with heavy and lingering glances and secretive, burning touches – but with his words. Sai's teacher was pulling her towards him with knowledge and the tempting thought that he respected her enough to tell her information so many of her mentors had withheld from her. He made her insides flutter in the most unusual, satisfying manner.
In her childhood bedroom, alone in her home, Sakura was still trying to calm down after her brief encounter with Ken. Her body was buzzing with excitement, resentment, and a strange, wonderful cacophony of feelings. The tiredness that seemed to have possessed her for months on end was a distant memory and she could not contain her racing thoughts and how they made her pace about and fidget. For the first time in months, she felt like a kunoichi again, even if there were turmoil in her feelings, too.
It was good that she didn't have to write about her own reactions to her mark in her surveillance reports. Her duty was not to write a diary, but merely a regurgitation of facts.
Sakura would start, 'Ken broke the village-wide, age-restricted gag order when he told me the truth behind the circumstances of the Demon Fox container and the fact that one ostracized, abandoned, and ridiculed teammate and orphaned child, Uzumaki Naruto, was the Konoha village jinchuuriki. Thank you for the heads up and broadened perspective when I was on his team, by the way.'
Did that revelation and insubordination on Ken's part count as rhetoric?
She didn't think so...
More than that, what other secrets had she not been privy to? Especially ones that were, in her humble opinion, very pertinent to how she operated as a kunoichi.
She had been number one in written tests in her academy class and Sakura prided herself on knowing all the answers. But she hadn't known all the answers. She hadn't known all the questions she should have been asking.
For what reason had all the adults treated Naruto like a deplorable burden? Which was an attitude she had mimicked because that's just how children worked but oh how she now loathed herself for it.
Where was Sasuke's family? She had never noticed that incredible absence in her classmate's life and oh how she now loathed herself for it.
More questions that haunted the edge of her thoughts, intangible and too large and terrible a thing for her to tackle at the moment...Why was she a kunoichi? What did it really mean to serve the village? Who was she – what was she to her village leadership?
Sakura stopped her nervous movements, worrying a path between her furniture and piles of disorganized things, and tried to limit the scope of her spinning conjecturing to her current mission. She took a breath, released the tension in her body, and obtained for herself the terse objectivity Sai always held.
Sai. Sai and his sensei, Ken...
What a stretch of a coincidence for her mission concerning Ken to happen across her lap only after she had met Sai. Or rather, Sai had approached her. And then Ken had approached her and broken an oath to the village after she had accepted her mission…
Coincidence? No, Sakura determined, none of those things were incidental. There was something more happening around her.
Some sort of test, she posited. Perhaps she wasn't the first Ken had approached and for whom he had broken his village's oath.
Was what he had told her the truth?
She needed more information.
Late into the evening and Sakura put back on the gear she had finally managed to shed. She needed to shower, she could have used a clean set of clothing and a decent meal, a good night's rest. And yet -there would be time to sleep after a few hours in the library.
-o-
Sakura was sort of a poor researcher when finding the sources she needed was left to her as well. Reading and memorizing a textbook handed to her was perfectly fine, but taking the initiative to find materials on her own? She didn't have a very strong knack for that. The village was full of information and labyrinthine layers of secrets upon secrets. And she couldn't ask for anyone's help pointing her in the right direction, not unless she wanted everyone to know what she was doing.
So she had to be careful. She needed to work in plain sight while hiding her intentions like a well-trained operative. Not an easy task, she found, but she was getting better in her approach. Sakura had to go back further in the village time line to get a better understanding of more recent events – such as the death of the Fourth and the circumstances around the Demon Fox, such as the turbulence surrounding the Uchiha clan and village relations.
By the second week in her intermittent snooping she was found out.
The man approached her after she had left the Hokage Office Special Collections. His appearance had changed somewhat, disguised with genjutsu so that he looked her age, but Ken's voice was the same.
"Grab a coffee three blocks ahead, to the right, in the grocer's," Ken said, mumbling to her from where he shadowed her pace a step behind. "There's a back room where we can sit down."
Spying and sleuthing and secret meetings with mysterious figures… The same excited, electric feeling from her last meeting with Ken returned. As accomplished as Sakura was being the Fifth's apprentice, learning powerful new techniques and training as a medic-nin, it wasn't the same sort of thrill as being on missions. And this mission in particular -as a solo operative stepping deep into intrigue- was completely new territory to Sakura.
Intrigue. Sakura should not have been as surprised as she was that the concept applied to the operations of her village. But she had a simple background, despite everything, and she was a blindly loyal person at times. Most of the time, maybe.
Finding a table in the grocery, throwing down her piles and bags of books and scrolls and general things she needed throughout her day, Sakura slipped into a calm facade as she bought a coffee. No cream, no sugar, stinging hot and to the rim of the travel mug. She didn't wince when it burned at her lips and tongue, down her throat. She sat by herself at the bar styled table and waited.
When Ken came over to her, he was the perfect image of an unassuming young man who had dropped by the store to pick up what could have been a small list of mixings for his mother's dinner. He flashed a disarming, cavalier smile.
"You've had your head books lately. I've been wondering if I would ever get a chance to talk you." Ken was an actor; his body language, and attitude matched that of a cocky teen's. "Kunoichi are so hard to pin down."
"That's sort of my job," Sakura said, surprising herself when she didn't stumble on the words and returned his playful tone. She wondered how her body wasn't visibly shaking from her jumping pulse. "But you might have my attention now."
"Do I?" Ken moved closer to her, placed a hand on the back of her seat and leaned down to speak to her. "You've barely seen anything yet, apprentice."
As he pulled away, he tucked a piece of paper into her shirt collar, letting her know it was there with a lingering trail of his fingers.
"Then I guess I'll be seeing more of you," Sakura said as coolly as she could. Internally she was shivering.
"You'll know where to find me," he returned. Then he was gone.
-o-
Kakashi was balancing on the back legs of his seat when Sakura's signal came.
It was their second meeting in the hidden room of the One-Eleventh Street Clinic and Sakura came through the door looking more harangued than the last time they had seen one another. Her hair was longer and hanging loose over her shoulders, circles prominent under her eyes, and her jawline was evident in the loss of its youthful softness.
It was a stark change given he had been out of the village and hadn't seen her in over a month.
She was still curt and closed off to him when they spoke. Time hadn't healed anything, it seemed.
"Here's the report," she said, placing the scroll down on the table where he sat. She was looking hard at a spot on the floor to the right of his foot.
"It's thinner than I thought it would be." Kakashi noticed. It wasn't meant to be admonishing, but Sakura took it as much.
"I included everything remotely relevant. His rhetoric isn't as evident as I expected."
Kakashi raised an eyebrow. "How many times have you met with him?"
She must have decided to be petulant, because she said, "that's in the scroll, too."
"Right." She was definitely still mad with him. More mad than before, he thought.
"Is that all? Am I dismissed?"
Sitting forward to set his chair flat on the ground, he shrugged his shoulders. "Only if there's nothing else you would like to say to me."
He watched her face closely, trying to spot a flash of something in her expression. He frowned, unable to spot anything giving away her thoughts. An empty canvas.
"There's nothing else."
She was holding something back, he was certain. Nonetheless, and not quite wanting to say it, Kakashi let her go. "We'll meet here same time tomorrow. You're dismissed."
He stopped her name on his lips and let her leave undisturbed.
It was against protocol, and Tsunade wouldn't be happy with it, but Kakashi tore into the scroll the moment the door was sealed. Her read her steady and neat handwriting and the crease between his eyes deepened as he moved further down the scroll.
"Shit," he breathed out, finishing his read-through.
Ken's method of turning Sakura was possibly the most successful approach once could have thought of – actually telling Sakura the truth of her teammates.
She knew about Naruto. She knew about Sasuke and Itachi. She knew about Akatsuki.
She was most definitely very mad with Kakashi for never having trusted her with more knowledge.
It wasn't in the scroll she provided, but he also suspected Sakura knew about her own positioning on Team Seven, the way her village had undervalued her and used her as an especially unwitting pawn from the very beginning.
Kakashi thought it would only be a matter of time before the allure of ANBU Root might draw her in.
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-o-