Chapter 10: Dreaming

Sakura awoke with a shiver—it was cold everywhere except for the center of her chest. The cold had settled itself into the tips of her fingers and toes, and slowly crept up her limbs. But, her chest was warm and that was better than nothing.

As she attempted to adjust her head into a better waking position, a voice ordered, "Don't move."

She froze—had she been captured by enemy nin? What happened before she ended up wherever she was now?

"You have internal damage that needs immediate attention. My healing skills are weak, so if you move you'll interrupt my work."

"Itachi?" her voice cracked. Suddenly, the rush of memories from the past several days flowed through her conscious. Sasuke and Sakura had finally tracked down Itachi—with disastrous results. Did Sasuke ever get her message? She wondered. Maybe if he was around she would ask him.

"Yes," he confirmed.

The battle must not have turned out very well if Itachi was healing her.

Itachi was healing her.

With total disregard for his previous request, she sat up startled like a person waking from a nightmare. There was not a square inch of skin on her body that remained clean—blood, mud, and sickness made her unrecognizable. After a quick scan, it was clear that her chest had suffered the worst damage.

"What the hell happened to me?" she wondered aloud. Sakura realized her lungs were struggling to breathe.

Itachi glared at her, "You fought against my jutsu so hard that you succeeded—and consequently damaged your trachea. Luckily, I healed the worst of it before you woke up and interrupted the process. You'd think that medics would make better patients."

Sakura looked away in embarrassment. She knew he was right, but she was not privy to playing the patient when she could take care of herself.

Locking her stare with his, she stated, "I can take it from here. Thank you, though." She adopted self-dependency for the past five years and felt disinclined to change that now.

He offered no response, but did not move his gaze from hers. Unfazed by his absent reaction, Sakura assessed her resources: whatever pills remained in her pack and less than a third of her chakra reserves were available to heal her damaged trachea and array of minor wounds.

It looked like she would live to see tomorrow after all.

Her right hand glowed green as she brought it to her chest to better assess her workload. Although Itachi claimed he was weak at healing, the presence of recent mending showed that his work might have saved her life. Honing her focus, she began to fix the damage on a cellular level.

Sakura suppressed a grimace—being indebted to Itachi was not what she had hoped to gain from this ordeal. Confusingly, his actions were in total opposition to his goals. He should have let her die if he had not wanted her interfering with the mendacious tale he had constructed for his brother.

She asked in a quiet voice, "Why did you save my life? I'm surprised you didn't kill me for what I did." She knew it was a risk at the time, but it was a risk she had been willing to take if it would set the world right again.

"It would've been unnecessary and wasteful to let you die. It would've been a loss for Konoha," Itachi replied. She studied his expression for further clues, but found that the stoicism guarding his words also governed his face.

Sakura laughed and then flinched at the pain it caused. "You say that, but Konoha's citizens consider me inconsequential. The only living people who would be sorry are Tsunade and Kakashi—but maybe not even him. I'm a missing nin who's already held in poor regard by most."

Now she would have to repair the work she had undone with her laughter.

"Perceived value and actual value are two separate things."

Not believing his explanation, she countered, "But it would have made your life easier if you'd let me die. I'd be one less person who could expose your secrets."

"There's already been too much death surrounding the sins of my family. You were never intended to be among those numbers," he asserted and then explained, "Instead, I've decided on a different means in silencing you."

Sakura rolled her eyes—at least he was being honest now. His disregard for her determination was frustrating, even if it might be to her advantage in the future.

"Oh, really? And what's that?" she asked sardonically. If he thought that she would play the part of a well-behaved child, he was sorely mistaken.

His gaze fixed on hers so strongly that she had to fidget. "I'll abandon my mission with the Akatsuki and we'll disappear."

Her jaw hung like a swing from a tree. He could not be serious. Did he think she would go along with this?

"We'll disappear? This isn't an extended honeymoon, Itachi. I won't be 'disappearing' anywhere with you. Your brother deserves to know the truth and I'm going to make sure he gets to hear it," Sakura hissed in disbelief. She wondered if he knew how ridiculous he sounded.

Suddenly, all of the heat vacated the air as she waited for his response, taking the already frigid temperature from cold to colder. Two powerful people sat in such fierce opposition that even gaseous molecules did not want to sit between them. Alas, she would not waver on this topic; she meant every word with total resolve.

"I know that it's not a honeymoon, Sakura. It's a hostage situation."

He spoke the words so casually that she might have missed his meaning if she had been paying less attention. As she itched to make an escape, she found herself wishing that she had done more investigation of their environs than she had talking. She performed a quick scan of the vicinity—a dark motel room with closed shades—and decided that her trachea's current state would have to be good enough. Her brief investigation gave her what she needed: a clear view of the exit.

Buying time, Sakura joked, "You're abandoning your mission to hang out with me? That's so sweet of you! I'm really quite flattered."

She spotted her medical pack and cloak sitting atop a table near the wall closest to the door. While she could grab them on her way out, she found herself inclined to use the window instead. The objects were replaceable, but the time she would spend grabbing them was not and this was the time for cutting material losses.

"Run as fast and as far as you can, Sakura, but I will find you," Itachi warned. It seemed that her eye movements had given her away.

Sakura grinned broadly and exclaimed, "Let's test that theory!"

Leaping from the bed like a jungle cat, she kicked the window into flying shards and sent her body outward with its fragments. The gods looked upon her fondly when she found that they were on the second floor of the building and that their window faced a forest. The moment her feet hit the ground, she broke into a sprint faster than she had ever pushed herself before.

As the trees blurred into streams of green at her sides, Sakura assessed the situation. She had no cloak, no supplies, no money, less than a fourth of her total chakra, no weapons, an array of wounds, and a poorly healed trachea. She would have sighed if she had the available lungpower, but alas, her flight had consumed all of that.

No one needed a statistician to lay out the numerical probabilities for the outcome of this scenario—Sakura was totally fucked.


Finally, after hours of running, Sakura fell flat on her face. She felt pathetic, but recognized that the human body had limits that even willpower could not surpass.

When Itachi caught up to her, she noted with great satisfaction that he was panting.

"At least I made you work for it," she rasped. Even though her statement conceded some defeat, she suspected that this was only the first of many future skirmishes.

He let out a rumble that sounded remarkably similar to a stifled laugh and hoisted her limp body onto his shoulder. Sakura was displeased with the abrupt movement, but was too exhausted to protest. Plus, she had wrecked her trachea beyond comfortable speech again.

"You realize that this'll be an endless cycle, right?" she whispered. While the whisper added a dramatic effect to her words, she simply could not muster a louder voice at the moment.

Itachi offered no response beyond the sway of his walk.

He spoke aloud, "You need medical attention before you kill yourself with your haphazardness."

"You know that I planted the seed in his head, Itachi," her voice scraped the sides of her throat, "My childhood dreams are coming true in the ugliest way…" Sasuke would come looking for her in a strange role reversal from the years of Naruto and her scouring the countryside in search of him.

The world continued swaying as Itachi kept on walking. For a moment, the only sound was the crunch of his shoes meeting the ground with each step.

He hesitated. "You had childhood dreams?"

"Of course I did—everybody does. Unfortunately, mine were squandered on your little brother." She found herself grateful that the physical pain in her voice covered up her emotions.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

"Of course," he agreed. His answer sounded perfunctory, like the automatic response of someone whose thoughts were far away.

Itachi continued, "What are your dreams now?"

This question brought her to a halt. What were her dreams now? She had not considered something as whimsical as dreams in a long time. The past five years were full of definite ambitions, but dreams held a flavor that she had not tasted since childhood.

"I guess I haven't dreamt in a long time," she confessed. It felt strange saying it aloud.

In an effort to shift the focus, Sakura asked, "What about you?"

The silence that fell lasted much longer than was appropriate. It lasted so long that she began to wonder if he was going to answer the question at all.

"I was the heir to the Uchiha clan. I didn't have time to dream."

Such a raw statement sounded strange under the veil of his stony composure. Now it was Sakura's turn to remain silent. She could not imagine living a life in which societal constraints prevented her from dreaming. Even if misfortune crushed her propensity toward wishful thinking, at least no one told her how to live her life.

She whispered, "I'm sorry." It was so quiet that he might not have heard. But, Sakura was done talking for the day and she suspected that Itachi was done talking, too.

As Itachi's walking continued in silence, Sakura allowed the gentle swaying of his steps to slowly rock her to sleep.


Authoress's Note:

I apologize for the delay, but hopefully it was worth the wait! It's a lot shorter than last chapter, but alas, such is writing.

Thank you all for reading! And a special thanks to those who take the time to review-I really appreciate the feedback.

I hope you all enjoyed the chapter. :)

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