Warnings: Swearing, Alcohol Use, Sensitive Themes
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Chapter 4: Chase
Even though night was drawing near, the town was still bustling with life. Sakura watched the crowd from a bench to single out seedy characters and observe which direction they headed—the ugliest parts of town always had the best information. She had seen a series of work-worn men and women head to her right, so she figured that direction would be a safe bet.
As she walked, the alleyways became darker and the scent of alcohol penetrated the air—Sakura was definitely in the right place. The people she passed by looked tired, but tough, and many were probably ninja. Now that these fine folks led her to the right part of town, she had to determine which of these upstanding institutions was an information den where secrets could be exchanged over beer and hard liquor.
Sakura scanned the bars nearby. One stood out as the darkest—with its shoddy exterior, it was likely a place where bounty hunters and criminals passed time together.
Since she was still unsure if her name had a bounty attached to it, she debated whether she should wear her hood while inside or not. There were pros and cons to both scenarios.
After a few moments, Sakura quickly concluded that she should put her locks in the open at some point throughout the evening, but keep them under the hood until the time was right. The person who was searching for her identified her by her pink hair. Therefore, it would benefit Sakura if she displayed it as a test to whether or not he had people on the lookout for her. If the scenario arose in which people hunted her for Tsunade, she could handle the fight.
She strode toward the entrance, opened the rickety door with confidence, and walked inside of the crusty, dark bar. Sakura examined the crowd before deciding what to do next—it was filling up with all kinds of characters. From her quick analysis, it was clear that she had hit the jackpot. With a shit-eating grin on her face, she made her way to the bar to chat with the tender and buy a shot or two—Tsunade passed on more than one of her hobbies to her dedicated disciple.
"Hey, bartender. Two shots of vodka this way," Sakura requested in a falsely gruff voice. Her hood was still on, so she intended to play the mysterious stranger until she shrugged it off.
He slammed two shot glasses onto the counter in front of her and filled them to the brim. That was a sure sign of good character in Sakura's book. The more alcohol she had, the happier she was.
He leaned on the counter in front of her and remarked, "I haven't seen you around before."
Sakura downed her first shot with a slight grimace and then lifted her second only for it to disappear as quickly as her first—there was nothing quite like chasing hard liquor with more hard liquor. After years of practice, she had come to enjoy the alcohol's sickly burn.
"I'm normally skeptical of newbies, but I like the way you drink. Welcome to my bar. Is there anything I can get for you?" he inquired. This was her cue. Sakura took her hand out of her bag and held it out for a handshake—he would feel her money there and know that she meant nothing but business.
He grinned broadly as he shook her gloved hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you. I think you'll find what you're looking for in the back corner. There'll be a man sitting there in a cloak similar to your own who'll be able to help you out."
"It's been a real pleasure," she said in her deepest voice.
Sakura lifted herself from her barstool and found that the bar had filled up even more during her exchange. She would have to nudge a few people out of the way to make it to her destination—or so she thought. Instead, people naturally moved out of her path as she marched to the back of the room. With the respect she was receiving, she guessed that people had been paying close attention to her exchange with the bartender.
She found the cloaked figure she was looking for in the corner as the bartender had promised. People gave the person a wide breadth of space like they would for someone of high stature. Sakura liked that.
The person was sitting at a table with a vacant chair on the other side, so Sakura pulled it out and made herself comfortable.
"So, friend, what is it that you're looking for today?" the cloaked figure asked. She noted that the emphasis on friend was void of genuineness and that the voice seemed to belong to a male.
"I've heard a few rumors on which I'd like to follow up. A boy who wears the legendary sharingan has been seen around these parts, I hear?" she whispered roughly.
For the briefest moment, her information dealer froze—something about what she said had alarmed him. Sakura guessed that this was probably the result of Itachi terrorizing more of the locals while in pursuit of her.
The dealer leaned forward. "Huh. So you've heard. I think I've heard something similar. If we've both heard it, I suppose it has a better chance of being true, doesn't it?" He was playing dumb and Sakura was not one for petty games.
Now she was the one who leaned forward. Sakura hissed with no attempt to mask her voice, "Don't fuck with me, needle-dick. I expect you to tell me what I need to know and then I'll be happy to leave you to jerk your next doormat of a customer around."
He tensed further. "I would help if I could, but I honestly can't. Not this time." He was beginning to sound like a scared child.
"Good. He should be scared," Sakura thought wickedly.
She leaned back in her chair with a roll of her eyes. Sakura could not believe that the information dealer of the seediest den in town was such a flop. After a moment's contemplation about what to do next, she sighed with a smile.
"Gee, it's awfully warm in here with all of these tough guys filling up the room," she announced loudly, "I guess I'll just slip off my cloak for a bit."
As promised, Sakura stood up and let her hood fall down her back—the whole bar went silent. She took the moment to run her left hand through her hair.
Finally, a brave soul broke the silence with a shout of disbelief, "She's fuckin' crazy!"
That was all it took to set people in motion—chaos manifested in loud voices and nervous movements. However, as quick as they were to be rustled, they shut up even faster when Sakura's fist shattered the table she had been sitting at into pieces.
"Now, shut up and listen! A man with the sharingan passed through here—where can I find him?" she demanded with determined ferocity.
Her eyes scanned the crowd in a way that accused them each individually. Oddly enough, her angry demands had eased tense shoulders and quieted the panicked sheep. When her eyes landed on her destination, Sakura saw that her fun with the table had pushed even her information dealer out of his seat.
The cloaked man spoke nervously, "Just relax! There was no need to cause such a damn scene! Let's take this to the room in the back and I'll tell you what I fuckin' know, lady."
The way he talked to her—his tone and his word choices—grated on her nerves in a way that was dangerous for his health.
Sakura sent him a sideways glare and spat, "If you didn't hold so much precious information, I would rip out your throat and fry it for dinner. Don't mistake my compliance as weakness or even patience—you piss me off."
With that being clear, Sakura straightened up and smiled, "Now let's go have a pleasant chat like the good friends we are."
Everyone in the room was still staring at the exchange despite the fact that calm had completely replaced the strain from moments ago. This was an odd bar—most places would have been a total riot after that scenario had just played out in front of them.
The bizarre reaction made her wonder how much the people here knew about her. They knew enough about her opponent to know that she was "fuckin' crazy" to come so eagerly to his calling. Hopefully this knowledge meant that they would provide a plethora of useful information in exchange for her kindness—after all, it was very kind of her not to smash the entire bar to pieces instead of just the table.
"This way." The cloaked man walked past her toward a hallway that led further back into the bowels of the bar. If she had not been so confident in her abilities, this would have made her nervous. However, her life was worth too much to important people to be wasted—chances were that any bounty attached to her name would only pay off if she was captured alive.
They arrived at the end of the shady hallway and stopped in front of a closed door.
"Wait out here for a minute," the man said before opening the door a crack, squeezing himself inside, and closing the door behind him again.
Now her brow arched in bewilderment. What was going on in this place? Sakura would be damned if was going to wait out here for whatever he might come out with—or even worse, whoever he might come out with.
She was lifting her hand to reach for the doorknob just as it flung open and her information dealer barreled out. From beneath his cloak she spotted a pair of brown eyes gleaming with fear and a jaw slack from panting: he looked like a panicked animal running from a predator. That look set Sakura at immediate unease.
Before she had time to react, he pushed her inside of the dark room and slammed the door shut behind her. She heard a loud click and realized that she had just been locked inside.
Sakura chuckled heartily, "As if a wooden door could keep me in here. Too cute."
Just as she turned around to punch the door hard enough to send it into the next dimension, the room flickered with light and an alarming presence set off her radar. While her fight-or-flight instinct argued with itself over which route to take, she froze.
"Long time, no see," a male's voice stated. It rang in a familiar timbre. Had she been lucky enough to be thrown in the same room as Itachi? It seemed too good to be true.
Sakura rolled her eyes as she turned around with faux ease, "A few days isn't really that—…"
What she was seeing could not be reality—she was obviously hallucinating. It had been a long time since Sakura fought her way from the grips of madness brought on by her bereavement. Someone must have spiked her drink. She swore she ordered vodka, not absinthe.
"It has been a long time, but that's because you've been dead for many years now," Sakura snorted, "Even if you're not really here, seeing your smug face still makes me want to throw you around enough to collapse this shithole." She owed him more than a beating for what his selfishness had caused.
"Count to five. Hell, count to ten if you have to," she told herself, "He'll go away soon, just like he always did."
He was comfortably draped across a twin-sized bed with his back resting against the wall. The small bed looked too tiny for his lanky body. He smiled his usual snarky smile.
"I should be dead. But our dear friend was unselfish to his very last moment; he gave what was left of his life to save mine just in time," he laughed a little, "It was so like him to go and save me. An idiot to the very end."
Sakura's vision clouded with red at this point; she experienced plenty of hallucinations like this years ago, but this one was provoking her to the point of mindless anger. Counting definitely was not working.
In a flash, she was on the bed over her imagined friend of days long since passed. Each of her hands sprawled at the sides of his head, which rested comfortably against the wooden wall. Her fingers scratched with fury into its surface and she longed to launch one of her knees straddling his waist into his jaw. Her lips were drawn back into a feral snarl.
"Shut up," she commanded.
He stated with a surprised smile, "So it did make you stronger."
With a growl, Sakura determined that she was going to twist his neck right off of his shoulders. Just as she slackened her arms to choke him to oblivion, she found herself pushed backwards onto the bed.
Now she was the one being straddled. His hair hung down from gravity's pull and tickled her face. This was the most bizarre hallucination she had ever experienced. Anything that held enough power to blur the lines between fantasy and reality was ferly, though.
Not wasting a second, Sakura lifted her knee right into his gut. As a result, he promptly crumpled over onto her—she had knocked the air from his lungs. After a moment of recovery, he straightened himself, but did not shift his position.
His voice was winded when he urged, "Sakura, I'm me. I'm real," his brow furrowed, "I've been looking for you." She could feel his breath on her face.
"You fucker," she spat. In response, his eyes flashed red with the tell-tale swirling of the sharingan.
He may have had the sharingan, but he did not have tsukuyomi—he did not have what she sought. That was fine, though, because he was nothing more than an illusion, anyway.
He rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Sakura. What can I do to get you to understand that I'm alive and real in this very room with you right now?" He was losing his patience—even in her hallucinations, he was so like himself. That was how they had always been.
Sakura was a bit bemused, though. Years of training fought off these illusions until they had stopped. So why was she experiencing one now? What could have triggered a psychological relapse?
"You would have to do something absurd and out of character, because whenever I imagine you like this, you're always the same as your true self—a berating, irritable, and self-loving asshole. You are you. My hallucinations are frustratingly realistic," she explained from a clinical disposition as if she were not the one hallucinating.
Still, his face hovered above hers. His brow furrowed in concentration as if he was contemplating what to do next. Sakura laughed—he really did look like a grown-up version of his old self. It was odd, but it was wonderful. He was delightfully handsome as a grown man. If he had actually lived to see that age, her life might have turned out differently.
"OK," was all he said before he did something that was, indeed, very out of character.
He leaned close to Sakura's face, allowed his eyelids to droop, and gently placed his lips on her own. His skin was soft and hot enough that she almost thought it was real as his lips connected to hers. It lasted for only a brief moment before he parted.
Sakura was stunned silent.
"Did that qualify as out of character?" he asked with a smug smirk.
Time passed as she lied there with her thoughts strewn about in utter disarray. His hover did not falter.
He stared blankly. "I assumed you'd died when you didn't show up to stop us. You were always saving us from ourselves."
When Sakura did not respond, he continued, "But then I heard whispers about a pink-haired girl causing a ruckus in rogue territory—and well, in rogue territory, causing a stir is quite a feat. My interest was piqued. After further inquiry, I discovered that this woman had devastated the earth and faced black fire without so much as a quiver.
"You fought him and lived."
She laughed in a way that sounded close to hysterics. "I suppose I did, didn't I? I lived. Isn't that wild? Me? Living? It's so strange sounding that I'm actually unconvinced," Sakura cackled some more, "Because you know what? I feel very, very dead."
Deciding that she was finished with their current position, Sakura drew her knees to her chest, positioned the bottoms of her feet against his abdomen, and sent him flying into the wall as she straightened out her legs. In a flash, Sakura was standing with her right hand around his neck, pinning him to the wall into which she had flung him. Her hand tightened and her eyes flamed.
"You've changed," he stated. His voice would have sounded sad if she had not known better.
Sakura responded with gelid emptiness, "It's funny how much can change in five years. It's even funnier when those five years are spent blindly fumbling in an attempt to find purpose after losing the two most important people in your life. It could have been the punchline to a comedian's greatest joke."
She spoke of jokes, but her voice held no humor.
"Now tell me, Sasuke. How are you still alive and where the fuck have you been?"
Authoress's Note:
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Thank you very much for reading!
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