-"She was in front of him, the boy that had given her so much pain. But despite that, she couldn't just 'walk' away with the option to at least, try and get him to come to his senses. After all, she could at least be empathetic to his actions. He had had his fair share of pain too."-
Shikamaru and Neji had noticed their comrade's struggle; they jetted over to her direction, the prints of shoes in the ground, but only in the concealed area. They led nowhere.
"Damn-it," the Hyuga's byakugan was blazing in his eyes, searching the area, "I can't see anything."
Shikamaru didn't respond, instead studying the track marks. There had been two other's besides Sakura. "This isn't good." He finally stated more to himself than Neji who was still scanning.
"How can they not be visible?"
Shikamaru's head shook, his hands being pulled to his sides, fanning out his cloak, "I don't know."
Neji glanced towards him, "We should pick up and try to find her."
"I would agree, but, there are no tracks" He scaled the overhead, "…There isn't a branch missing snow." His eyes diverted back to the tracks, "It's as though no one was here, or they were, and then just…evaporated." Neji followed Shikamaru's eyes to the tracks, watching as he leaned down to closely examine what he could of them in the night, "The pattern of the shoes, what do they look like to you?"
Neji crouched down beside him, the byakugan fading as he studied the foreign print, "…The sound."
Shikamaru thought through the situation at hand. The prints did resemble that of the Sound's, but with a slight variation, the variation of the Hidden Sound. There were limited numbers of traveling hidden sound nin. Unless they tracks belonged to the only hidden sound nin they were aware of, "…Team Hebi."
Sakura's head ached; a feeling of blood rushing through her system blew white clouds of dizziness into her vision as she sat up, realizing that she had been laying in the snow. She panned her surroundings, realizing that she wasn't in the same part of the woods anymore. Until her eyes caught hold of a figure behind a tree. "Who are you?" her voice was stern and confident, despite her addled insides.
He peaked out behind the tree, a water canister swaying by his side as glimpses of his hooded silvery hair turned to her, "She's up you know."
She stood confused, he was calling out to someone else, and then she remembered there being more than one set of footsteps before she was knocked out. She felt a strong chakra suddenly come up behind her, shocking her senses.
"I know." That voice… her eyes widened with the heat of his breath so close, how is he so fast?
She spun around; the damp clusters of snow that had stuck to her cloak whirled off of her as she reached the familiar tenebrous eyes behind her. His hood was down, the same raven hair framing his now leaner face.
"Sakura-ka," he asked, even though stating it.
Her eyes slid to the other nin, walked closer as he pulled his hood down, revealing pale eyes, a few shades more blue than his hair. "So you do know her, huh?"
"She's a part of my past." His easily expressed explanation stung her ephemerally.
"Why did you-?" She backed up a step, her stance hardening.
"-That, would be his fault." Sasuke took his stony eyes off of her and glared toward the other nin.
He snickered almost caustically, "You, are the one who wanted to recruit a 'med-nin'." His arms crossed underneath the navy gray cloak draped over his shoulders, Sasuke shared the same kind. "All I did was go out and find you one. A friend of mine from 'out of town' sent me a message saying he saw a girl heal a woman who had been stabbed back in the outskirts of the Fire Country in less than a minute." Sakura thought back to the first day on the mission when they had passed through a desolate town, a woman had been attacked by a criminal. "So what do I do? Go find her. And what do you do? Get pissed." Sasuke snarled slightly, "She could probably heal Karin in a flash. You and she should thank me really."
"For what? Leading someone from Konoha…" he reached to her cloak collar, where the blue fabric of the hiat-te was sticking out, yanking it to show the other figure, "right to us?"
The pallid shinobi's smirk of achievement slid off his visage, "…Oh…Well how was I supposed to know?!"
With a heavy annoyance toward his careless handling of her steadily increasing, Sakura pushed Sasuke's arm from her neck allowing a faint amount of chakra to thrust it further, pulling the Konoha symbol loose and to the ground. She reached for it out of reflex, only to be stopped by Sasuke's hand, springing out and snatching her wrist. The action looked effortless to Sasuke, but tugged Sakura strongly enough to cause her to stumble."Suigetsu," Sasuke looked off into the distance as if sensing something, familiar with their chakra, Sakura sensed them too. "Grab one of the ropes in my pack and charge it with chakra."
Sakura pulled her arm toward her, trying to break free of him though having no luck. "Let. Go." She was as stern as she could be when looking into his powerful eyes.
"Don't even bother fighting." He wasn't even looking at her when he sent an acute pulse of the electricity he had mastered from the Chidori through her wrist. The reaction with her own natural electricity caused her knees to buckle. Her sense of touch was wickedly cruel and imbalanced, immobilizing her as Sasuke dropped her hand, the lack of structure leaving her stunned body to fall on its front. To Sasuke's well hidden surprise, she started to push up, her right hip on the ground with her thin legs fanned out loosely slowly held more weight as she extended her arm muscles.
She panted as a fiery expression manipulated the muscles in her face to a bitter glare, looking toward her former teammate with intense pain. Pain that he had left, pain that he had acted so disconnected to either her or Naruto, like they'd never met and protected one another, pain that he had dared to thrash her around like she would have let him years back, pain that she had even thought that she had liked him back then, and the most potent, pain that she had ever, met him. She silently focused on her left leg, preparing it with chakra while simultaneously going about the steady healing of the rest of her split-ended nerves. His scorn narrowed onto her eyes, for once letting himself become distracted by her chartreuse eyes.
Suigetsu simply stopped in the snow a couple of yards away, leaning on one leg for the presumed show that was about to go down. And he was right; Sakura shifted her foot so it dipped into the snow right before she put her best aim into the power packed kick. The snow thrust foreword, low in the air but eye level to the nukenin that it had been flung at. She made a decent shot too, the peripheral masses of snow grazed his cheek before his swift dance-like movement completely relocated him behind her ankles. Yet to her slight dissatisfaction, he showed no emotion, barely flinched.
Brushing away the cluster of wet beads that were residual from the snowy offence, he signaled to Suigetsu, who promptly tossed the rope that radiated chakra. His knee came down lightly on the curve of her back as his steps took him close enough. This pushed the drained med-nin back to the ground with a wince. Her hands being exposed, he collected them, wrapping a careful hand over them as the other coiled around the back of her neck; sweeping away the strands of pink hair that was deepened in tone with the moisture before speaking, "if you think what I did before hurt, then I suggest you do as I say. I might not be so gentile next time. Besides, I'm as aware as you are of the approaching chunnin."
"Is that what that chakra is…I can barely feel it."Suigetsu looked at Sasuke's firm grip on her neck, "Geez Sasuke," Suigetsu knelt down next to him, resting one knee in the snow as Sasuke released her neck and began tying the rope. "Don't be so rough to such a pretty girl." His first two fingers curled before reaching out and skimming the strands of hair cascading over her cold cheeks.
Sakura hesitated, taking a short breath before nipping at his hand with any energy she had left. It was as though the electricity Sasuke had pulsed through her worked on beating down it's host even after healing it. She would need more chakra in order to be able to self recover right then and there.
"Don't touch her." She was surprised at his remark of defense, though spoken in a dull tone.
The livid nin brushed the warning off and stood, "We'll, what are you going to do with her now? Since you're apparently not satisfied." scratching his head as Sasuke helped Sakura to find her footing, her knees were like those of a toddler, weak and hard to control. Speaking again before Sasuke had time to think and answer Suigetsu smirked, "We should just make it look like a bunch of bandits got to her. Erase her memory of us or something."
She crumpled her pastel brows, "You think I couldn't take on a couple of worthless bandits! I'm not some helpless gennin, I'm a chunnin level medical nin."
"No," Sasuke finally responded, glancing back to the woods with lustrously rouge eyes, "Who are you traveling with?"
She faltered, "N-…Nara Shikamaru and Hyuuga Neji."
He was inwardly confounded that Naruto wasn't placed on such a mission. He swiped the curiosity from his mind, "Tell them," looking at her impassively while pulling the collar of her cloak so she was fully encountering his eyes as they faded back to their primordial hue, "to go back to Konoha. It's no use tracking me. If they get in my way, I will kill them." She felt a vile sickness to the words he so easily spoke, "That applies to you as well."
Was he leaving her name for last out of spite? Or because he thought so little of her that she wouldn't even be an obstacle…
"Hey, now I'm really starting to feel something coming, we need to hurry up man. Unless you want to fight 'em, which is fine with me too." Suigetsu shrugged before pulling the water canister to his lips.
Sakura reflected back on the surreal beginning of the whole scene as she pulled pieces of the encounter together…
"She could probably heal Karin in a flash. You and she should thank me really."
"She could probably heal Karin –"
Her training as a med-nin was to heal the injured, whether or not she liked them or didn't like them, knew them or didn't know them. It was her duty to take care of them, and especially when her energy was low, she had a inane yet laudable urge to heal who she could before she was out of it completely. It was then that she advanced her habitual reflexes to a more lucid place. Her mind raced as she realized that he was really standing in front of her. She was in front of him, the boy that had given her so much pain. But despite that, she couldn't just 'walk' away with the option to at least, try and get him to come to his senses. After all, she could at least be empathetic to his actions. He had had his fair share of pain too.
"I can help you. Who was hurt?" she spread her feet a bit, trying to balance, though slightly aware that Sasuke's stabilizing hand was what was holding her up.
"Our other team member" So he's forming a team now…She apprehended, "Karin, she's been poisoned or something." Suigetsu raised a brow at her interest as he leaked the information carelessly. "The vile of one of Orochimaru's experiments broke and cut her arm when we went to first get her and let the prisoners out."
"Suigetsu…" Sasuke's eyes glided to the shinobi; delivering prudence.
She paused, not really able to think straight, it was as though the neurons in her brain were sporadically igniting one another in a blurred haze "…I'll help you."
Sasuke's grip tightened as she limbered slightly to the side, "we can find a med-nin elsewhere."
She smirked with her staggered form, "Do you know how difficult it is to remove poison. It's a tedious and slow process that has to be done by one with proficiency and only after thorough training."
Sasuke hesitated, realizing that he would otherwise have to travel in order to find a med-nin advanced enough to perform an integral procedure. Karin might not have had that sort of time. "How would you expect your team to accept such abandonment?"
"I wouldn't be abandoning them Sasuke-kun," it was getting slightly easier to speak as she tapped into her chakra reserves she had built-up for just the kind of position she was in. "Abandoning is leaving with little word and disregard of the effect on people." She noted the lack of reaction in his expression, "I'll just go back, and I'll tell them that I'm going to help you. Not leave Konoha, just…help you."
"How am I to trust you to tell them that? You might just announce that you're joining with me to leak information back to the Leaf." He bore into her.
"Then go with me, that way you can hear every work that I say. You're the one that has a poisoned teammate."
Suigetsu took a step back and watched their interaction. Sasuke contemplated to himself for a moment before nodding and untying her constrained wrists. "Two things, one, you are with us to heal Karin. It by no means constitutes you as a member. Two-You don't try and make me return to Konoha."
She nodded lightly after taking in his conditions, "Let's hurry, if she's poisoned its best to remove it as quickly as possible. They headed in the direction of Shikamaru and Neji's chakra, Sakura trailing behind Sasuke, Suigetsu behind her. Sasuke observed that Sakura had made a speedy recovery from the electrical course of chakra that he had induced to her only ten minutes prior. Perhaps she had some worthy skills after all.
Rate please! I'd love to know my reader's opinions, suggestions or questions (of which the answers will be posted on my Homepage). They make me want to write.
Renovating the story is taking a while. I only had one more chapter after this one of the old version, but it was around 4000 words while this is 2500. So it might be a couple of days. This renovation is just more what I wanted, at first I had other ideas, but I've worked the most of it out.
I'll be up late tonight haha
Oh, and do you (anyone) think that it's Cannon enough? I'm trying, but any suggestion would help. Thank you.