Chapter 22: Divisive Reunion
Sakura ran in the direction of the hospital at the speed she once used to escape Itachi rather than catch him. She had no idea how seriously he took his role as an Akatsuki member, but she would not let Naruto become a victim of his charade. They may have parted as friends but, in this scenario, they could only meet as enemies.
As she skidded around the corner of the hospital's street, she spotted two black and red cloaked figures walking casually down the road. Recognizing the red cloud insignia, anger unlike anything she had felt in a long time flared in her belly. She wondered if Itachi had received her letter before coming here or if it was floating around neglected in the forest somewhere.
Taken by her rage, she shouted, "Hey, assholes! You wouldn't happen to be looking for the Kyuubi would you?" Even though she doubted that they would pause to respond, she began to crack her knuckles in agitation.
Much to her surprise, Kisame stopped to turn around and inspect the source of the insult while, not to her surprise, Itachi kept walking. It seemed that Kisame was much more prone to provocation than his partner.
He grinned with shark teeth. "I've always loved confrontational women." Itachi came to an abrupt halt.
Sakura snarled, "That's funny, because I've always hated men who hit on me when the closest they'll ever get to intimate contact is my fist shattering their skull." She thought she saw Itachi's ponytail swish—was he silencing a laugh? Sakura did not pause to ponder the impossible.
Kisame guffawed loudly. "There's that bite I love! If you're naturally this aggressive, I can only imagine what you're like when you smell blood in the water." He smiled proudly at his own shark pun; Sakura rolled her eyes.
"Kisame, we have more important things to do." Itachi did not turn around, but his voice held enough seriousness to convey what his facial expression might look like. He sounded nothing less than deadly.
His partner ignored him and began to reach for the handle of his massive sword. Sakura smiled a little—she had successfully distracted Kisame beyond Itachi's control.
The shark man cracked his neck. "We can do that later, Itachi. I wanna have some fun here first."
"Bring it on, pup," Sakura challenged with a beckoning nod. She shifted her weight into a fighting stance to back up her words.
Just as Kisame moved to bring his sword down from his back, Itachi appeared at the shark's side with his mangekyou sharingan glowing. The molecules in the air seemed to freeze in fear of what would happen next.
"Leader will be displeased if he finds out that we didn't complete our objective because you were distracted by some townswoman," Itachi reminded him scathingly. Sakura gritted her teeth—she was not about to let Itachi interrupt her successful interference.
Sakura cocked her head. "Don't worry, shark boy. I'm not just a townswoman; I'm the Hokage's apprentice. And I'll stop at nothing to fuck up your plans today."
"You hear that, Itachi? We might as well deal with her now if she's gonna tag along like a puppy the whole way," Kisame insisted. Sakura twitched at Kisame's comparison, but quickly decided that she was not going to give Itachi any more opportunities to dissuade him from her distractions.
From her research on Itachi, she remembered that Kisame's sword had chakra draining properties. As much as she yearned to go in with her fists up, she knew that staying at a distance would be her wisest course of action. Unfortunately, she had no projectiles on her, but no object was off-limits when it came to fighting the Akatsuki. Spying potential weapons at her feet, Sakura knelt down, ripped up a cobblestone from the street, and flung it at Kisame's face. Even as a grown adult, she felt like a bully trying to start a fight on the playground.
To her greatest pleasure, the cobblestone shattered upon impact. Kisame had not expected it and was unable to dodge in time—even playground tactics could work on Akatsuki members if the timing was right. Kisame wore an expression of mixed disbelief, embarrassment, and irritation.
Just as a celebratory smirk broke onto Sakura's face, she felt two unknown nin appear behind her. While she may not have recognized their chakra signals, she could surmise that they were sent by Danzo—which meant that they stood a strong chance of interrupting her interruption. As much as she wanted to stay cool about the Danzo situation, she had trouble maintaining her calm at the idea of a brief lifetime subjected to Ibiki's torture.
Itachi stepped forward. "Danzo's dogs, huh? You must be a problem child. It's refreshing to know that someone's stirring up trouble in my hometown," he said to Sakura. He played his part with such fluidity and convincingness. Then, he moved past her so quickly that she knew he had moved only by the air fluttering through her locks.
"You two: I have a message for Danzo. Tell him that if he moves forward with his intentions, the Hell I'll put him in will make the amaterasu seem chilly." The air seemed to warm up a few degrees to drive home his message. Sakura could not see his face, but she imagined that it was dead enough to belong in a graveyard.
Conversely, Kisame laughed at his partner's seriousness. "That's saying a lot. As someone who's witnessed it in action, I can say the amaterasu's fuckin' hot."
"We were given orders to attend to our mission and nothing else. You may be the Akatsuki, but you're nothing more than dirt to Danzo and you're not going to stop us from fulfilling our duties," one of the strangers countered.
As much as Sakura hated to have Kisame at her back, she turned around to face Danzo's henchmen. She knew that they were here for her and that she would have to get rid of them sooner than later.
"I have a second message for Danzo: tell him that he's nothing more than dirt to me and he won't stop me from fulfilling my duties. He can hunt me down all he wants, but I'll make him chase me to the edges of the Earth before he can put me in his prison," Sakura growled. Both of the nin wore animal masks and gave no indication of their skill levels—but, if Danzo had sent them, she suspected that they were not weaklings.
"You can tell him that yourself," the one on the left replied. In a flash, they both charged around Itachi and toward her from opposite sides.
They were fast, but Sakura saw them coming. By the time they arrived, Sakura sent out a punch with her right arm and a backwards kick with her left leg, both of which connected with their intended targets. Bones cracked and her opponents flew backwards until they ran into obstacles that halted their trajectory.
Sakura rolled her eyes and hissed, "That was insulting. If he thinks that people of your skill level can drag me into a prison cell that I'll never leave, he needs a serious reality check."
Itachi turned and began to walk past her. "I didn't know that they let chumps into the Special Forces now. Let's go, Kisame. There's nothing left to see here." Kisame nodded his head in agreement and they continued on their original path.
"I won't let you take the Kyuubi," Sakura reaffirmed. They continued walking without acknowledging her words.
Furrowing her brow, Sakura bypassed them to block their path with both of her arms extended outwards. "I repeat: I won't let you take the Kyuubi. You'll have to kill me to get to him."
Itachi said he would not kill her if they ever met again on the battlefield, but he warned her that Kisame might. Still, she meant her words.
Kisame grinned viciously. "Well, that won't be too hard. If you had a death wish, you should've just said so!"
Instead, Itachi appeared in front of her. Sakura took the brief opportunity to send him a look loaded with meaning beyond anything words could convey. However, Sakura should have known better: Itachi Uchiha took advantage of any eye contact—no matter how brief or meaningful—to draw his most troublesome opponents into genjutsu.
"Tsukuyomi."
His eyes drew her in with the force of an industrial fan and, once the world righted itself again, she found herself inside the familiar landscape of Itachi's color inverse world. But, just like the outside world, he stood only an arm's length away.
"Sakura."
"Did you get my message?" she asked afraid to hear the answer.
Itachi turned around and began to walk away. "We won't harm Naruto, Sakura."
"Did you get my message?" she persisted.
His voice became more distant the farther he walked. "I'm sorry to bring you back here. I promise it won't be like last time… Watch out for Danzo…" His voice faded away completely and he disappeared from sight.
As soon as he had faded away, raven feathers began to float down from the sky intermingled with scraps of paper. Sakura stood amidst the waterless rain and looked up at the sky.
The paper scraps had writing on them. As they floated by, she was able to catch some random words: "eyes," "empty lies"… Together, they sounded familiar. Sakura thought about it for a few moments—whatever that meant in the time-warp of the tsukuyomi—before she realized from whence the words came.
They were all snippets of the poem "Emeralds." Very suddenly, it occurred to Sakura that Itachi was the author of those poems—he had accidentally given her his journal instead of "Anatomy, Physiology, and Chakra" as he had intended. Standing here in Itachi's endless, barren landscape, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. "Emeralds" was not the last poem in a book; it just happened to be the most recent entry in a poetry journal. "Emeralds" did not simply feel personal as she originally thought—she was the woman in the poem.
Slowly, tears rolled down her face as she sank to the ground, which was now covered in raven feathers and paper bits. Sakura felt utterly drained and the feathers piled to form an appealing bed. So, she lied down, swam through her thick thoughts, and allowed herself to drift to sleep.
Authoress's Note:
Finally, the face of the poet is revealed. :)
Thank you for reading and a virtual thank-you cupcake to those who take the time to review.
I hope you all enjoyed the chapter!
A
