Chapter Twelve
They run for hours, not saying a word to one another. Sakura is too furious to speak. Usually her anger is verbal and visceral, quick to come and quick to go, but not this time. Sasuke tried to get her thrown off this mission. He questioned her abilities in front of the Hokage, as if she were still some useless girl always in need of rescuing.
Sakura knows she isn't that child anymore, the burden of her squad. And she thought Sasuke knew that as well, that he appreciated her skills as a shinobi. Perhaps she has spent too many hours babysitting her genin and healing civilians' broken arms for him to remember the woman she was in the war, the fighter who saved his life. Or maybe the problem is that Sasuke is a man made almost entirely by his past, and when he looks at her he still sees that same foolish little girl who mooned over him. Who cared more about her long hair than becoming a strong kunoichi.
Now she runs in his wake—a few feet behind Sasuke because he's still faster than her, and it only makes her angrier that no matter how hard she trains, she'll never catch up.
The land beyond Konoha is wild with green life. Untamed forest between the Fire Country and its neighboring nations, interrupted only by a handful of farming towns and unnamed villages. They skirt around these places, keep going west and west and west until they hit the border. The sun sets, turning the darkening sky into a brilliant canvas of colors. Gold, orange, and the kind of deep red every shinobi knows well.
"We should find a place to make camp," Sasuke says. It's the first words he has spoken to her since they left Naruto's office.
She isn't tired. Sweaty, dirty, bug-bitten, but not tired.
Sakura shakes her head. "Let's keep moving. We can get there before midnight if we—"
"No." Sasuke says that one syllable so definitively. He's used to getting his way, used to doing what he wants without regard for others. Selfish, really, and she isn't in the mood to forgive his flaws tonight.
"I'm going," she says. "You can stay here or you can come with me." And then she turns away from him, turns west, and starts running again.
"Sakura!" She hears him come after her, feels his fingers close around her arm, forcing her to stop. He holds her firmly, but not hard enough to hurt, and when he grasps her shoulder with his other hand there's a strange gentleness to his touch. A delicacy at odds with his stony expression and the harshness of his voice. "You're not going anywhere without me," he says.
There's a change in his tone that stops Sakura from pulling away. She knows, somehow, that this isn't an order; it's a promise.
There's been an emptiness inside of her since their last night together, but for a moment, caught in his grasp, the ache of loss is dispelled. Without meaning to she leans into him, and before she can get a hold of herself Sasuke brings her closer, wraps his arms around her body. Sakura breathes in the familiar smell of him, the heady scent that she finds comforting, that wakes desire in her belly even here, even now.
She pushes against his chest, a silent request for him to let her go. At first his grip only tightens, and Sakura thinks he may keep holding on, but then he releases her, steps back.
"Are you scared?" he asks.
"This isn't my first mission like this, Sasuke."
He scowls. "Naruto sends you on this sort of assignment often?"
"No, Naruto never has before, but Tsunade-shishou gave me a few. I know she didn't like to, but she refused to treat me any differently than other kunoichi just because I was her apprentice."
Sakura remembers the first time. She'd been seventeen, the war only a few months over, and she was so nervous she nearly lost control of her transformation jutsu in front of her target.
"Let's go," she says, and they run together. Silent again, but the quiet between them is companionable now instead of resentful.
Tosogawa sits just twenty miles north of Amegakure, and by the time they reach the outskirts of the city Sasuke is soaked. Rain falls from a black sky, the steady downpour punctuated by a flash of lightning and roll of thunder. The surrounding woods are lush, dense, and there's plenty of cover from which to survey Tosogawa, to scout out the best entrance.
Sakura stops by an old maple tree, takes off her pack, and says, "I should change."
Sasuke gives his back to her. He tries not to listen to the sound of Sakura taking off her shirt, shorts, and shoes, but he hears it all the same, and the only thing he can think about is that she's naked not five feet from him. A minute later she tells him he can turn around, and when he does he finds that she changed more than her clothes. Long hair falls down her back, now brown instead of pink. Her lips are fuller, nose more delicate, cheekbones higher. She has also, he notices, made her forehead a shade smaller. Only her eyes are the same.
He suspects that, in addition to hiding her identity, her intention was to make herself more attractive, but in this she has failed. There's no fault in her jutsu; the problem is simply that Sakura is a strikingly beautiful woman, and any tampering with her looks can only render her less lovely than before.
"That's a good transformation," he says.
"Thanks."
Sasuke performs the seals for his own henge—dog, boar, ram—and focuses on taking the appearance of a fruit vendor he's seen on the streets of Konoha.
Sakura smiles softly, and even on her too-generous mouth the expression is still recognizably her. "I know Mr. Yaguchi," she says. "I buy you tomatoes from him. He's a nice man."
She wears a blue, cotton yukata, and there's a pair of geta on her feet. She could have transformed her clothes as well as her face, of course, but she's performing the bare minimum henge, no doubt so that she can reserve chakra and more easily maintain the jutsu.
"Ready?" she asks.
Sasuke nods, and they walk toward the city. Sakura's wooden sandals sink into the soft ground with every step, and she curses when one shoe gets stuck. She pulls her foot out of the mud, shakes the muck off, and keeps going.
Tosogawa is ugly and industrial, all protruding pipes, rusted signs, and steel buildings strung together by cables. A smaller, civilian version of Ame, just as rainy and just as bleak. According to the mission directive, the Golden Lotus is on Kinu Road at the very center of the city, so Sasuke and Sakura follow a wide lane that leads north. Despite the weather and the late hour, the streets are alive with people. There are whorehouses, pawn shops, and gambling dens. Metal bars cage the doors and windows of apartments. Women with painted faces stand on every other corner, smiling false smiles and beckoning to the men who pass by.
Sakura grasps his hand and says, "I hate this."
Sasuke doesn't much like it either, and the longer it takes to find the Golden Lotus the more he's tempted to take Sakura and return to Konoha, assignment be damned. He has never abandoned a mission before, but he doesn't want Sakura in this seedy city another minute.
They turn onto Kinu Road, and Sakura says, "There." She points to a sign with a flower painted on it, yellow against black. "That's it."
Sasuke lets go of her hand, then grips her arm. "Are you ready?" he asks.
She nods, and he leads her into the brothel.
Sakura's hair and clothes are drenched, and her feet are covered in mud. She's glad now that she put as much work into her face as she could, because the rest of her is a mess.
At least it's warm and dry inside the Golden Lotus, a welcome respite after the cold, driving rain outside.
A short man dressed all in black approaches. "What's this?" he asks.
"I have a new peach for your boss," Sasuke says.
The man in black looks her up and down. He has narrow, greedy eyes that linger on her breasts, where the wet fabric of her yukata clings. "Get Hamasaki. He'll want to see this one," he says to a young woman—no, a girl. Under her heavy makeup and scarlet kimono is a child of no more than fifteen.
Sakura does not like killing—it doesn't give her a rush or a high that she's heard some shinobi describe—but she thinks she may enjoy assassinating Hamasaki Haru.
The girl returns in five minutes with a tall, broad-shouldered man, as big as Jiraiya once stood. He isn't what Sakura was anticipating; she expected Hamasaki to be as ugly as his ventures, but instead he's young and handsome, with short black hair and long-lashed dark eyes. Under other circumstances she would have found him attractive, but knowing what he does to women, it's difficult to hide her disgust.
Hamasaki looks her over, half appraising and half lustful. Sakura lowers her head, trying to appear demure, but he grabs her chin and tilts her face up for better inspection. "Lovely," he says. "I've never seen eyes this color before."
Then he slips a hand inside her yukata and cups her breast. Without thinking, Sakura shoves him away. Hamasaki stumbles, straightens himself, and backhands her.
She reels, head spinning from the slap, and she has to focus to maintain her disguise. The transformation jutsu almost slips, but Sakura has near-perfect chakra control, and she manages to keep her false features in place.
Beside her, Sasuke stands completely still and silent, but she can feel his anger as surely as if he had shown it.
"So you're a fighter," Hamasaki says. "I don't like that. I prefer my women soft and willing."
Then perhaps you shouldn't rape them.
Hamasaki turns to Sasuke and asks, "Why give up a beauty like this?"
"I've had my fill of her," Sasuke says evenly. "And I need the money more than I need a whore."
Hamasaki nods. He asks her, "What's your name, sweetheart?"
"Yu," Sakura says.
"Too plain. We'll call you Mayuko." Hamasaki snaps his fingers, and the young girl in the red kimono walks over. "Take this one to the bath, she smells like she's been on the road. Don't paint her, though. I want her face bare."
The girl gives a shallow bow and says to Sakura, "Follow me."
Two women too old and plain to be prostitutes attend Sakura in the bath. They wash her hair, pour scented oils into the hot water, and scrub her back. It feels good after a long day of travel, and if she weren't so angry she might have enjoyed it. Peach, beauty, sweetheart, whore. She's tired of being referred to like an object instead of a person, and her cheek still stings from the blow Hamasaki dealt her.
They dress her in a green silk garment too small to be worn outside of a bedroom and serve her an innocent-looking cup of tea that Sakura hopes she won't have to drink.
"I'm not thirsty," she says.
One of the old women looks like a grandmother, and she gives Sakura a gentle smile. "Don't worry, dear, it's just jasmine," she says.
Sakura dislikes flower flavors, but she recognizes the scent because both her mother and Ino favor it. The tea does smell like jasmine and nothing more.
In Konoha she took an antidote that would counteract most poisons, same as she does before any dangerous mission. The women are looking at her strangely, and she doesn't want to raise suspicion, so Sakura takes one sip of the tea and hopes that if it's drugged her antidote will protect her.
The girl in red returns. She says, "Come with me, Mayuko," and leads Sakura up two flights of stairs. The top floor of the brothel has larger, grander rooms, and she delivers Sakura to the biggest and best-appointed of them all. She barely takes in the hardwood furniture and gilded mirrors. All she sees is the grand, four-poster bed, wide enough to sleep half a dozen people comfortably.
Once she's alone, Sakura performs a silencing jutsu, sealing the sound in the room so that no one can hear what's happening inside. This way, if her fight with Hamasaki goes south, his men won't come running upstairs to help him.
Then she sits and waits for her target—for so long that she grows tired, heavy-limbed and sluggish, and the feather bed beneath her tempts her to lie down. Maybe Sasuke was right and they should have made camp for the night. If she had listened to him, she could be sleeping right now. Just for a minute, she thinks, and Sakura lets herself slump down onto the soft counterpane.
She lies there, half-awake and half-asleep, so weary that she barely registers the sound of the door opening. She forces herself to sit up, but the room spins.
The tea. There must have been a sedative in it, something to take the fight out of her. She never should have drank it. She should have thrown it in the old woman's face. It takes what energy she has to preserve her transformation jutsu, to uphold her counterfeit appearance.
Hamasaki is here now and she doesn't have time to pull the sedative out of her body, the way she once pulled Sasori's poison out of Kankuro.
"You seem calmer now," he says. "Good."
He sits beside her on the bed and runs his fingers through her hair. The last time a man touched her this way it was Sasuke, but Sakura pushes that thought away. Hamasaki kisses her, and she tastes mint on his tongue, but she only feels this dully, as if she is far away. As if this is happening to some other woman.
But Sakura is a shinobi of Konoha before anything else, and as Hamasaki pushes her down and presses her to the bed, the only thing she's paying attention to is the tanto he has sheathed on his hip. She has to play along, distract him, and as much as she hates it, Sakura kisses him back, runs her hands across his chest and then under his shirt. When she grasps his thigh, Hamasaki breathes in sharply and closes his eyes.
Now.
Sakura snatches the tanto out of its holster and stabs him in the back. She aims for his left kidney, but she's still slowed from the drug and she knows she missed. Hamasaki shouts and rears away from her. Sakura lets her henge go—there's no need for a disguise now, her target will be dead in a minute—and focuses her chakra throughout her body, rejuvenating herself. Her strength won't be monstrous, not when she's fighting off the effects of a sedative, but she'll still be stronger than Hamasaki.
His eyes widen when he takes in her new appearance, and she can tell he recognizes her. Hamasaki scrambles off the bed and begins making hand seals for a jutsu Sakura doesn't know. She jumps away from him, but it doesn't matter, because a moment later the room fills with water. She's submerged before she can do anything, surrounded by a cold that shocks her. Sakura keeps her mouth closed, but there's something unnatural about this water that steals her breath. She gasps, chokes, as her lungs are flooded.
And then Hamasaki is there. For the second time in her life, Sakura feels the sharp pain of a blade sliding through the soft skin of her stomach.
Something is wrong. Sasuke hears no screams, nor the sound of jutsu wrecking the upper floor of the brothel, but he knows somehow that the mission has gone awry.
Hamasaki told him to wait in the common room, that he would pay him generously if the new peach pleased him well. Sasuke is sick of waiting, so he heads up the stairs, bypassing Hamasaki's men as if they aren't there.
On the second floor one man grabs him by the arm and says, "Boss told you to stay put."
Sasuke punches him in the face, almost hard enough to kill him, but not quite, and he falls to the floor, unconscious. He takes the katana strapped to the man's side and continues up the stairs. The sword is nowhere near as fine as his own, but it will do.
The third floor is too quiet. So silent that he can hear his own footsteps, the light tread of a ninja on hardwood.
Sasuke opens the middle door and freezing water pours out, spilling along the hallway and flowing down the stairs like a waterfall. He rushes into the bedroom, katana drawn—and then he sees her: Sakura, with her hands wrapped around Hamasaki's neck. She wrenches, once, to the right, and his head turns around on his shoulders. Sasuke can hear the sickening crack of bone breaking, and then the light of awareness goes out of Hamasaki's eyes. Sakura lets go, and the dead man falls to the floor limply, like a marionette with its strings cut.
He's seen Sakura the kunoichi, the healer, the teacher, the lover. But he's never seen Sakura the killer before, and Sasuke doesn't know quite how to place it.
For a moment she stands over the body, steady and cool, collected as any well-trained shinobi after a kill. But the moment ends and she stumbles. Sasuke rushes forward, catches her before she can hit the floor, and now he notices the blood. She has a wound, a deep one, and Sasuke doesn't have to be a medic-nin to know that she would never make it back to Konoha in this condition.
"Can you fix it?" he asks.
She nods, pulls up her silk nightdress, and puts her shaking hands over the gash. He watches as her skin slowly knits back together, and he tells himself that this is not like his dream. Sakura is alive and she's going to stay that way.
He hears footsteps on the stairs. Four men, maybe five.
"Stay here," Sasuke says. "Keep healing yourself. I'll take care of it."
He catches them at the top of the landing. They outnumber him, but these are thugs with knives, not shinobi of a hidden village. It's unfair, really, but fairness is not something a ninja concerns himself with. Sasuke moves through a kata he knows well, and the men fall, one by one. Nobody even manages to disrupt his transformation jutsu. He avoids giving mortal wounds where he can, but one stupid soul keeps coming back for more, and Sasuke has no choice but to cut off the hand that wields a kunai. The man hits the floor screaming, blood gushing from the stump of his right wrist.
Sasuke cleans his katana, sheaths it, and returns to Sakura.
She has transformed herself again—long hair, full mouth, softer body—and Sasuke is thankful that she has the energy for a henge. If she can maintain a jutsu like that, she can run.
"We need to go," he says.
"Right." Her voice is hoarse, she's drenched in blood and water, shivering, and she's white as a sheet, but there's a determination in Sakura's eyes that he knows well.
They pass the mangled men on the floor, most of them too weak to stir. Sakura stares at the man with a stump instead of a hand, but she doesn't comment on it. Just like he doesn't say anything about the dead man in the room behind them.
Patrons dandle prostitutes on their laps in the common room. They gape at Sasuke and Sakura, both bloodied all over, but no one moves to stop them. The girl in the red kimono keeps her head down, back pressed against the wall as if she hopes to disappear into the wallpaper. As they pass by her, Sasuke says, "If I were you, I'd get out of here. Now."
That isn't quite true, though. If Sasuke were her, he'd have killed Hamasaki long ago.
Outside, Tosogawa is just as ugly as it was at midnight, the driving rain still cold.
"Let's get out of here," Sakura says.
Sasuke follows her down Kinu Road, then onto Suzaku Street. South and east, toward Konoha. Toward home.
Author's Note: Hey everybody, I don't know about you but I'm still throwing a party over chapters 699 and 700. My OTP is canon and I could not be more ecstatic! Plus, little salad-chan is a cutie. Girl clearly has her mama's smarts and her daddy's attitude. ;)
Thank you so much to the people who continue to review, favorite, and follow this story! It's so exciting to see what readers have to say, so every bit of feedback is incredibly welcome. Hopefully this installment lived up to the hype, since I know a lot of people were looking forward to my take on a mission like this.
Once again, I must thank my fantastic betas, tall-girl-in-a-small-world and uchihasass, for editing this chapter and helping me clean it up. You lovely ladies are the best.
Just a heads up: In Times of Peace is coming to a close soon. Chapter Fifteen should be the last. I'm a little sad to see this story ending, but hopefully you all are enjoying reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.