NOTICE: I write Killer A as Killer Ei, because MS Word has spellcheck and it throws a fit whenever I try to use A as a noun instead of as an article adjective.
o.o.o.o.o
They do not go directly to Ame or Kumo. Instead, they go back to Kiri for a bit first.
"Why are you here?" Yagura demands, in the middle of signing some paperwork. Mei is in a hunter-nin mask in front of him, and there's a bloody head hanging from her hand, which is gripping the hair.
Mei wiggles the fingers of her other hand in Sakura's direction with a coy pose, and Sakura smirks.
"Sorry, Mei, we're heading up to Kumo after this." She does not, in fact, sound particularly sorry at all. "Can't stay long."
Sakura can't see Mei's face due to the mask, but she gets the distinct feeling that Mei is giving her a put-upon pout.
"Buuuuuut I came here for a reason!" Sakura smiles and turns to Yagura again. "Come to the Third Exams."
"No."
"But Yagu-chaaaaaaa—"
She cuts off the whine as she dodges a furiously thrown mug that proceeds to shatter against the wall behind her. She glances at the wall, and then back at Yagura. "That was rude."
"Don't call me that." Yagura says, instead of apologizing.
(Mei is laughing at them.)
"Oh, come on! Just come to the exams! You can leave a shadow clone, if you have to."
"And if it pops?"
"You have, like, at least three people that could do the administrative work of a Kage for you in the interim. Other Kage can manage!" Sakura insists.
"Other Kage aren't pulling together a broken village." Yagura shoots back.
(To the side, Mei is pinching Isobu's cheeks and cooing over him. Unlike Yagura, Isobu suffers the situation without complaint, just pouting a little at Mei, with his big blue eyes opened wide and lip wobbling.)
"…I could help—"
"No." Yagura looks sick at the very idea of it.
"Why not?"
"Because you're a disaster on two legs," he says, "And because I'm half convinced you'd organize an orgy instead of actually helping out."
Sakura doesn't really know how to respond to that, beyond, "I kinda max out at threesomes, y'know?"
"Get out of my office, Haruno."
(Mei promises to do what she can to set things up so she and Yagura are in Konoha for the exams. Given the fact that she's kind of caressing Sakura's ass as she says it, Sakura thinks she can guess why.)
(Five hundred years is a very long time to practice some very specific skills, after all. And Mei does so appreciate a hard worker.)
o.o.o.o.o
Sarutobi Hiruzen had the feeling that he was too old for this.
"You're sure she had super-strength, medical techniques, and a diamond seal on her forehead?" he asks the genin team again, because he knows the answer won't change, but there's still a vague sort of hope that it might.
"Yeah, jii-chan, we told you!" Naruto yells, and it's a little telling that his teammates don't try to berate him. They're probably just as annoyed as he is, by now.
Hiruzen puffs a little on his pipe. "Did either of them mention Senju Tsunade?"
Naruto frowns in that peculiar way he has when he's thinking very hard, where he ends up looking more like he's constipated than anything. Sakura seems to remember something, but Sasuke is the one to speak up. "He asked her at one point if she was using Tsunade's techniques."
"And?"
"She said 'amongst others,'" Sakura says with the odd stress that implies she's quoting directly from a past conversation. "Senju Tsunade was one of the other members of the Densetsu no Sannin, right?"
"Yes, she was. Still is, actually." Hiruzen laces his fingers together in front of his chin. "Were there any other names they mentioned?"
"No, but she talked about a mean old woman in her head." Naruto says, and when Sasuke scoffs, he frowns. "Hey, what's that for? She did!"
"She was clearly insane if she was hearing voices." Sasuke drawls, and Sakura… Sakura flinches.
(Hiruzen wonders about that.)
But Naruto's reaction is the most telling, because his frown goes from angry to contemplative. "I don't think so."
"What do you mean, Naruto?" Hiruzen encourages him to keep talking.
"Well…" Naruto seems to shrink in on himself. "She said the woman in her head tried to take over the world, but the crazy older Sakura stopped her, right? So, um… what if she's like…"
Naruto trails off, hands drifting down to wrap uncomfortably around his stomach, and he looks off to the side. His teammates look annoyed, at best, like they think he's just trying to suggest something stupid, but there's a sharpness in Kakashi's gaze.
(There's been something dangerous in Kakashi's eye since he ran into Orochimaru while trying to seal what he could of the Cursed Seal on Sasuke's shoulder, way down in the basement of the tower in the Forest of Death.)
"That's a dangerous claim, Naruto-kun." Hiruzen says after a few moments, but for someone to fight Orochimaru and win, it's not unreasonable to assume that they may be a jinchuuriki. Sasuke and Sakura seems shocked that he's taking Naruto's suggestion, as vague as it is to them, at all seriously.
"She called herself Deathless, right? And, um, those kinds of people heal faster, so if she got, like, the best healing…" Naruto keeps trying to argue his case, "and she said something about five hundred years, jii-chan!"
Hiruzen doesn't wince externally, but on the inside, he's wondering. It's possible that the woman is just a very powerful S-rank kunoichi who happened to be schizophrenic.
It's also possible that she has some ridiculously powerful entity like the bijuu sealed into her.
Or even both.
"And, um," Naruto's still talking? Oh. "She said that the lady in her head really hates the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter."
That is… strangely specific, Hiruzen thinks. His frown deepens in confusion.
"She said…" Sasuke starts, with a pinched look on his face as he struggles to remember the words. He's apparently decided that if the Hokage himself is taking Naruto seriously on this, then he might as well add details he'd considered extraneous as well. "She said, 'It's been five hundred years, get over it.'"
"But five hundred years of what?" Sakura mumbles, looking like she's asking herself more than anyone else. "She only looked about Kakashi-sensei's age."
"We could ask if any of the other genin encountered her." Kakashi finally says, breaking his silence. "We can't force the foreign ones to tell us anything, but it wouldn't be too hard to question whether they encountered anyone vastly above genin levels during the exams."
"We would risk alerting the other villages to gaps in our security." Hiruzen sighs. "Our best hope is simply that the other genin tell us of their own volition if they encountered this woman."
"If they haven't yet, they probably won't at all," Kakashi warns. The orange book as nowhere in sight.
"Unfortunate, but true." Hiruzen sighs. "Team Seven, you are dismissed. Kakashi, I'd like you to stay behind for now."
"I'll meet you in Training Ground Three," Kakashi tells his students as they file out.
"Bye, Jiji!"
Hiruzen fights the urge to slump down in his chair as the genin leave. Now he's going to have to be on the lookout for both his wayward student and the mystery woman for the rest of the exams, if not longer.
He's definitely too old for this job.
o.o.o.o.o
"Well, hot damn," Sakura mutters, "I forgot how attractive he was."
Isobu shoots her a look that says 'don't.'
"Relax, he's a complete asshole and never even tried to redeem himself." Sakura pats Isobu on the head, though she doesn't take her eyes off the man that has stalled out their road trip to Kumo by just standing in the middle of the road. "Granted, he didn't get much of a chance, but he considers mass murder a religious calling, and he's nothing if not devout."
Hidan hears her, somehow, and grins. "Damn right I do."
Sakura considers for a moment. "So, do you mind if we skip the whole 'attempted murder' thing? All three of us are immortal, so it would just be… such a massive waste of time."
"Yeah? You think?" Hidan hefts his scythe up over her shoulders, shifting his leather jacket and holy shit the abs on this man.
Sakura forcibly tears her attention from the admittedly delicious-looking muscles and shrugs. "I mean, we can fight, but I have more experience and I heal faster, so I'm not sure you'd have any fun."
"How much?"
"…I'm sorry?"
"How much fucking experience do you have?" He asks again, irritation coloring his tone, presumably because her slight delay in understanding what he was asking.
"Sorry, dude, but you're going to hate this: five hundred years." Sakura says, standing up where she is and using the windshield to keep herself upright.
"…Bullshit." He says, and wow, is that what he looks like when he's insulted but not screaming his head off? Weirdly attractive. Sakura is not comfortable with the level of attractiveness in this serial killer. "You don't even look like you're thirty yet!"
"Did I or did I not admit to being just as immortal as you?" Sakura demands. "And hey! Isobu's even older!"
Isobu gives a little wave at Hidan, and then goes back to… is that Cat's Cradle? It is. Huh.
Hidan stares at the two of them for a moment, eyes squinted up and suddenly much less pretty. He looks constipated, and that kind of thinking face is so Naruto that Sakura almost falls out of the car laughing.
She doesn't.
She does crack a smile, though.
"Give yourself a few more years to get better!" She tells him cheerily. "Maybe you'll actually be able to put up a fight by then!"
Hidan's face twists into a scowl and he spits, "The fuck did you say?"
Isobu groans and puts his head in his hands. He knows what's coming.
"Get better first, and then maybe I'll fight you. Right now, though…" Sakura says, and there's a flash of movement. She jumps out of the car to intercept Hidan before he can scratch her paint job with the wild flailing of the scythe in his hands.
"Right now, you don't even have a chance." Sakura hisses, and lets the full weight of her chakra and killing intent drop down on the area like a blanket. It's enough to kill a civilian. It's enough to kill a genin, even.
It's certainly not enough to kill Hidan, but that's not the point.
The point is intimidation. Sakura knows how to play her cards, and different people require different forms of intimidation. For Orochimaru, veiled hints at her speed and a demonstration of her strength was enough; he could make the connections on his own. For Hidan, who prefers not to think overly much in the heat of battle, she needs to showcase raw power and brutality, not skill.
(For Danzo, whom she hasn't yet visited, she needs pure skill. Sneaking in unnoticed, destroying seals, unveiling his stockpiled organs, and oh-so-many medical techniques… that is what Danzo respects.)
In a shinobi battle, raw power is chakra, and brutality is killing intent.
And Sakura has nearly endless quantities of both.
She grins, wide and maybe just a little unhinged, as she uses but a fraction of her strength to push Hidan back, back, back until he's pressed up against a tree, the bright red handle of his own scythe digging into his neck. There's sweat pouring down his face, and his pupils are blown wide. Good. That's an acceptable fear respo—
Sakura pauses as she registers a specific hormone that is absolutely not fear managing to make itself known to her sense of smell.
Sakura looks down.
She looks back up.
"Do you seriously have a boner right now?" She asks, almost incredulous. Sure, she's had her own share of arousal in the face of displays of intense power, but that was always with the knowledge that the person in question wasn't interested in hurting or killing her anyway.
Hidan at least has the decency to look a little embarrassed, even if it's an angry kind of mortification. "Shut the fuck up."
Sakura stares at him for a moment, open-mouthed. Normally, she'd press the issue of someone being attracted to her to see if she could get some fun for the night, but this is Hidan.
If there's one Akatsuki member she'd never fuck, it's…
Actually, the one she'd never fuck is Zetsu, for obvious reasons.
But Hidan is a close se—
Goddamn it, okay, he's tied for second with Kakuzu. They're both assholes and she'd need to think long and hard before even attempting that.
(Deidara is off the list of possibilities at all. So is Itachi. They're both still teenagers. Children, compared to her.)
"Right, so, I'm going to leave now." Sakura mutters, dropping the scythe into Hidan's fumbling hands and jumping back over to the car. She doesn't jump into the car, because that would damage it, but the twenty-foot leap is hardly impressive. She hears Hidan moving behind her, and turns just in time to see him shove a finger in her face.
Surprisingly, the finger is the lesser of two rude gestures, as Hidan is pointing at her face and scowling.
"You're the bitch that did weird shit to time, aren't you?
Sakura blinks twice, opens her mouth to answer, closes it when she can't think of anything to immediately say, and finally just settles with a flabbergasted, "How?"
"Jashin-sama told me to be on the lookout," Hidan says, his grip on his scythe tightening. He doesn't look like he's about to attack, though.
"Do you remember?" Sakura asks, wondering if maybe—
"No."
Ah. Never mind, then. "Well, I guess in that case, I'll just be going then."
It's one of the most awkward ways she's ever left a confrontation, and it only gets worse as they drive off.
"Oh dude, I totally missed out on a chance to call him a Jashinist fuckbucket."
Sakura can't believe she forgot.
"I gotta go back. I gotta go back and pick another fight so I can call him a—"
"Nee-chan, no."
o.o.o.o.o
Kumogakure is far more militarized than any other Hidden Village. In the ways that matter, at least. Kiri may have it beat in percentage-of-population, and Iwa may have it beat in terms of war-hungry culture, and Konoha may have a larger population, but when it comes down to it…
Kumo is a fucking scary place.
It's not that they're crude. It's not that they're focused on nothing but power. It's not that they do awful things to make stronger warriors.
Because they don't.
There's an underlying power in everyone and everything, though.
It's like… old money. They aren't flaunting their power, not really. They show off, but there's an air of ease to daily life. Of course they have this power. It's nothing strange.
Kumo's military strength isn't a boast so much as a fact of life that everyone simply accepts.
It's remarkably casual.
Which is, of course, why Sakura finds the highest point she can (the spire on the Raikage's office), cups her hands around her mouth, and shouts, "YO, I WANT TO FIGHT A JINCHUURIKI!"
Sakura isn't exactly one for much subtlety these days.
The parts of Kumo closest to her position quiet down as people turn to stare at her in disbelief.
Isobu is about three feet down from her, clinging to the roof with chakra, with his face buried in his hands. Sakura's pretty sure he wants no part in this. He's here anyway, because he's awesome.
The first high-level ninja that comes to her is not, sadly, one of the Jinchuuriki. Rather, it is the Raikage.
"'Sup?" Sakura asks, with an upward jerk of her chin that could, if one squinted, be read as a very casual nod.
"The hell are you doing on my roof?" Ei demands.
(Sakura knows that his name is, to Kumo, Killer A, but there's this strange dinging noise in the back of her head whenever she thinks of him as A, and so she mentally goes with Ei instead. The pronunciation is identical, so nobody really knows.)
(She still has no idea why she can't think of him as Killer A.)
"Well," Sakura taps a finger to her chin, pretending to think about it. "I want to see your Jinchuuriki, because reasons. The fastest way to do that is probably to call them out for a fight, so I got the highest point I could and started shouting."
The Raikage doesn't seem convinced. "And if they actually tried to fight you?"
"I'd… fight back? Have a little fun? I'm not sure what you want from me on this front." Sakura does, of course, know what he's angling for, but answering like an asshole is more fun.
This is the reasoning behind around half of Sakura's decisions, these days.
There's a tingling at the edge of her senses, and she turns with a wide grin to face Yugito. The woman herself is standing on another roof, a few buildings away, and Sakura has to look down to see her. She has a wary look on her face, and stands like she is, indeed, ready for a fight.
"Hi!" Sakura calls down to her, waving rapidly. "Hi, Yugito!"
Yugito looks from Sakura to the Raikage and back. "Hello. Do I know you?"
"…Nooooooooo?" Sakura tilts her head, "But Matatabi-chan does."
There's stiffening all around. Awww, Sakura made them nervous. How cute!
Sakura jumps off the roof of the Raikage's office and lands in front of Yugito. There's still about three meters between them, but Sakura closes the distance qui—
Her head isn't attached to her neck anymore.
She'd forgotten how fast Ei was.
Sakura keeps her head and eyes very still, and listens.
"You killed her." Yugito says, sounding severely unsurprised. "I could have handled it, Raikage-sama."
"Someone sneaks into a village like that, calls out two Jinchuuriki? They've either got a death wish or can back their claims up." Ei snorts. "Damn well wasn't going to risk losing you to some random outsider, and if she had a death wish… just took care of it faster."
"The kid doesn't look worried." Yugito points out. "Is… is that a Rubik's Cube?"
There's silence for a few seconds, and Sakura tries very, very hard to not burst out laughing, because Isobu may be one of the nice bijuu, but he's very much picked up on the habits that she and the others have.
It's so much fun to mess with people.
"Oi!" Ei calls. Sakura wonders if he's noticed that her neck isn't really bleeding as much as it should be. "Kid! I just killed your friend! Why the hell aren't you more bothered?"
"Sakura-nee-chan isn't dead." Isobu says.
"I took her head off!" Ei responds, sounding offended by the implication that he hasn't killed someone he set out to kill.
Isobu hesitates before continuing, clearly not too willing to say the relevant phrase. "That's step one. What about steps two through ten?"
Sakura is buying him all the ice cream after this.
"What?"
"She's called Sakura the Deathless for a reason, you know."
Sakura takes that as her cue to start laughing. Making noise when you've been separated from your lungs is difficult, but she'd learned to deal a long time ago.
She'd also learned how to use chakra strings, because sometimes she didn't have anyone to help her get her head back to her body, and Sasori had been proof enough that you didn't really need your fingers to cast chakra strings.
Sakura uses them to flip her head over so she can actually see the Raikage and Yugito, and kicks her laughter up another notch on the 'evil villain with a successful plan' scale. She reaches out with chakra and latches onto her body, maneuvering it into a standing position and flinging her head through the air to reattach herself to her neck.
"Surprised?" She finally stops laughing and grins at the Raikage and Yugito. In the back of her head, she feels the niggling sensation of Gyuuki getting closer. Good, that means Bee's on his way in. "Let me just say this: you done goofed."
"How the hell are you not dead?" Ei demands.
"Fuck you, that's how."
She's making up for missing the opportunity to say Jashinist fuckbucket.
She's more than making up for it, actually. That's like… an entire exchange she managed to work in.
Even Isobu got in on the fun.
Sakura smiles a bit wider and tilts her head to the side. "You got blood all over my dress."
Ei's eyebrows furrow. "You attacked my ninja."
"Did not!" Sakura whines and stomps her foot, hands fisted childishly at her sides. "I just wanted to say hi to Matatabi!"
"Sir, I really don't think that—"
"And how the hell do you plan on doing that?" Ei asks Sakura, cutting Yugito off.
Sakura is very tempted to repeat her earlier answer, but acquiesces. "There are ways to remove the bijuu's psyche without removing the chakra. The bijuu gets some freedom and a human form, and the host gets to survive. Everyone wins!"
"And I'm just supposed to believe that?"
Sakura tilts her head quizzically. "Where did you think Isobu came from?"
She gestures back at the roof of the Raikage Tower, and the two Kumo nin she's been speaking with (as opposed to the several dozen that have slowly surrounded them since they started) turn to look at the small child they left behind.
Isobu looks up from his Rubik's cube for all of three seconds, and then goes back to it, ignoring everyone.
"Bullshit."
"You can always ask the bijuu your village has for confirmation." Sakura offers. "I know Bee has an open line of communication with Gyuuki."
Sakura gets the feeling that Ei wants to take her head off again, and is only refraining because he knows it won't work.
"Stop provoking them, Nee-chan." Isobu calls down. He still hasn't looked away from his cube. "You're making your job harder on yourself."
"But I didn't even do anything this time!" Sakura protests. "I actually offered up a solution that didn't even involve me removing bijuu with zero warning like I did you!"
This is the moment at which Bee crashes the party.
This is also the moment at which Sakura immediately reaches out and knocks him unconscious with a fist to the top of the head.
(He's a jinchuuriki. He'll be fine.)
(Probably.)
(…Dammit, fine, she'll fix his concussion as soon as she doesn't get attacked for it.)
"Before you do anything!" Sakura turns to Ei and holds her hands up in the air, trying to forestall more murder attempts. "He's completely fine, I just didn't want to put up with the rapping."
Ei seems to be turning red with anger. There's a twitch in his face.
"You know, I can't even blame her." Yugito mutters.
"See, she understands." Sakura says, gesturing at Yugito.
"I do," Yugito allows, "but you just knocked out your quickest way of confirming your story."
Sakura opens her mouth, closes it, and considers this.
"Well, fuck." Sakura looks down at Bee and frowned. "Hold on, I'm not going to wake him up, but I should probably fix that concussion."
"Concussion?" Ei demands, and Sakura gives him a funny look.
"Dude, any time someone goes down from blunt force trauma to the head, it's gonna be a concussion. If they don't wake up within a minute, it's a very bad one." Sakura kneels to put a glowing green hand to Bee's head, and this time, she's paying enough attention to Ei that she can sense him attack.
Clearly, he'd rather have a medic he actually trusts deal with the problem. Or just let Gyuuki deal with it, even.
Sakura still softly kicks him into the sky instead of letting him take her head off again. He won't be too hurt. Just some light bruising, maybe a broken rib. She can fix it. He's tough. He can deal.
"You know, you probably shouldn't attack the Raikage if you want him to trust you." Yugito says, coming close enough to sit within easy talking distance, but not within easy kicking distance.
"He attacked first. Twice. The first time he even took my head off." Sakura gives Yugito an offended look. She doesn't actually care all that much about the decapitation thing, but she very much cares about being right.
He attacked her first, dammit.
"You asked for a fight."
"But not with him." Sakura whines.
Bee groans from beneath Sakura's hands, which have long-since lost their medical glow, and both women look down.
"Little pink hit me in the head, kinda shocked that I ain't dead."
Sakura feels her face spasm, and she pushes Bee and gets to her feet. "Well, my work here is done. I should probably leave."
"I don't think she likes the raps, Bee." Yugito says, and the smile on her face indicates that she's gotten to the point of being amused now.
"Still gotta ask, you know, what'd ya do with my big bro?" Bee levers himself up onto his elbows and sends Sakura a look.
"That's actually a good question." Yugito frowns. "He'd should have come back down in less than a minute."
Sakura looks off to the side and pouts, mumbling something.
"What?" Yugito and Bee glance at each other, and back to Sakura.
"He's fine, I just put a seal on him when I kicked him." Sakura admits. "Lowered gravity. He's fine, but he won't come back down for another three or four minutes."
Yugito and Bee are both giving her looks now.
"What? He kept interrupting me." Sakura huffs. "And yeah, I don't usually mind all that much if someone attacks me, but not in the middle of a medical procedure."
Sakura changed a lot over the course of five hundred years. Her opinions on the seriousness of medical practices had not.
"My bijuu says to trust you, so I guess it's all true." Bee finally sits up fully.
"Can I take him out of your seal?" Sakura asks, relieved that the delays and bullshit are seemingly over. "I won't take out the majority of his chakra, because that would kill you and Gyuuki wouldn't be happy with me if I did that, but I can remove his psyche and a few shadow clones-worth of chakra and give him a human form, no problem."
"How?" Yugito asks, seemingly torn between amazed (because it isn't exactly a common skill), accepting (because Gyuuki said Sakura was okay), and suspicious (because Sakura).
"Fuuinjutsu and a really long time to muck about." It's even true. This particular seal took her four years to develop. "He'll be able to return to you any time you want, by the way. I can create anchor seals so he can manifest elsewhere, but your body is where the mass of his chakra is situated, so it's the default zone."
"And it doesn't hu—"
"BEE! NII! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO DOING?"
The three of them look up to see Ei, who's slowly floating downwards, facing the ground with his arms crossed over his chest.
"I see what you meant about the lowered gravity." Yugito mutters.
"Don't be a fool, bro, Gyuuki says she's cool!" Bee gives his brother a thumbs up and a wide grin.
Sakura resigns herself to another half-hour of unamusing shouting.
(There's amusing shouting, and unamusing shouting. People being suspicious of her leads to the second kind.)
(This time it does indeed last half an hour until Ei finally relents to the argument of 'actual bijuu trust her to do shit without hurting them or their jinchuuriki and there's informed consent to the procedure from all involved parties.')
(Or rather, Bee wears him down with raps about it that don't quite make sense, and Sakura has a feeling that half of Ei's reason for agreeing is to make him shut up.)
(The other half is that Ei just trusts his brother.)
"Finally!" Sakura claps her hands and pastes a grin on her face. "Yugito, I'll take care of Matatabi first."
She pauses, considers, and then shouts over her shoulder. "ISOBU! I NEED SOME SPARE CLOTHES FOR THEM!"
Isobu puts away the book he's reading (when had he switched from the cube? Meh, whatever), and hops down from the roof. He only really goes to the nearest clothing store, but it's still enough for Yugito to raise an eyebrow.
"I assumed you'd put up a barrier seal to keep people from interfering."
"I did. But certain people can get through, because I said so." It's definitely a lot more complicated than that, but Sakura's starting to get bored of Kumo nin and wants to get the whole thing over with. "Anyway, here goes, might be a bit uncomfortable!"
"Wait, wha—"
Sakura's hand slams into Yugito's stomach and the seal imprints. As with Isobu, chakra flows out and briefly takes the form of a full-scale, translucent Matatabi. When it swirls down into itself to take human form, Sakura smiles.
Long blue hair of varying shades, dark tan skin, and mismatched eyes that make it obvious where Yugito's eyes gained their slightly inhuman shape. Body type slim and muscled, if rather short, with round breasts. A dancer's body, really.
And a Cheshire cat's smile.
"Matatabi!" Sakura says with a grin of her own. She darts forward to give the humanized cat demon a hug, ignoring the very obvious nudity.
"Hello, Sakura-chan." Matatabi greets her, hugging back. "It's nice to see you again."
"Nice to see you too!" Sakura says, and then drops her hands down a little so her thumbs rest just inside the dip of her hips. "We can have some fun later, right?"
"No problem." Matatabit purrs, her eyelids dropping just enough to be sultry in a particularly feline manner.
Yugito coughs loudly to draw their attention way. Apparently, she's gotten over what little negative effect the seal had and the shock of seeing her bijuu take human form. "Ignoring the kind of relationship you apparently have with my bijuu, shouldn't you do Gyuuki now?"
"Yeah, okay." Sakura disentangles herself from Matatabi, who lounges back and waits for events to finish. Ei and Bee are very conspicuously not looking in her direction, which is hilarious to Sakura, because the day Matatabi cares about people seeing her naked is the day Sakura convinces her that burnt orange isn't really her color.
(It isn't. Matatabi's really bad at pulling off burnt orange.)
"Anyway, you saw the process with Yugito and Tabi-chan, so just stand there and look pretty, okay?" Sakura says.
He gives her a thumbs up and a grin, and says, "I won't move a jot from this spot, and I'll make sure to look super hot!"
Sakura stares at him until his smile starts to fade. She shakes her head and comes over, seal building on her fingertips, and repeats the process.
Gyuuki is… definitely different from Matatabi.
For one thing, Gyuuki actually looks middle-aged. Isobu's a child in form, and Matatabi looks like she's in her mid-twenties, even if she's pretty short, but Gyuuki looks like the kind of man that would run a bar for retired shinobi, and possibly even be one of them. Forties or fifties, it isn't clear, but definitely past his mid-life crisis and still willing to fight you.
He's picked up a lot from Bee and previous Jinchuuriki, because his skin is the darkest of all the bijuu's human forms, even if it's a bit warmer in tone, and his hair is salt-and-pepper greying, instead of blond like most Kumo nin. His jaw is narrower than what Sakura knows of his many jinchuuriki, too, with higher cheekbones and a widely-flared nose.
And plenty of thin, nearly invisible scars all over. Sakura's not sure where they came from, but she knows better than to ask; a bijuu's human form is one of their choice, so if Gyuuki chooses to have scars, there is a good chance they mean something.
"Yo," Sakura says, waving to him instead of running over for a hug. Gyuuki's a lot less accepting of public displays of affection than Matatabi or Isobu, or just affection in general.
(Sex is not affection, but a way to work off stress.)
(Sakura doesn't really care about his stance on sex vs. affection so long as he and his partner, usually Sakura herself, are both consenting adults with full information on the situation.)
"Get me some damn pants." Gyuuki says before anything else. "And stop making eyes at Matatabi."
"If I wanted to make eyes, I'd be in a lab with ocular sample cells and a hell of a lot of regenerative medical techniques," Sakura informs him, crossing her arms and sticking her nose in the air.
"That's not what I meant and you know it."
Sakura lets her own eyes get wide and amazed. "Did I?"
"Stop fucking around, Deathless." Gyuuki grumbles, and Sakura can feel the amusement coming from Yugito, even if she isn't snickering the way Matatabi is.
"Fine," She relents, "But you should probably say goodbye to your Jinchuuriki for a bit. I've got errands to run and I already told them I expect y'all to come with me."
"Can't we spend a night here?" Matatabi asks, head tilted. "It's been a while since I've gone dancing."
Sakura thinks, for a moment, of just what kind of dancing Matatabi does, and considers how the night is likely to go.
"…actually, yeah. Let's go clubbing."
o.o.o.o.o
A/N: I'm not super happy with this chapter (the Hidan section ends awkwardly and the Kumo section dragged on forever and I can't write Bee's raps), but whatever.