Second Time Around
By Frozzy

Chapter Four

The sky cried.

It cried fatty drops of rain that soaked through everything. The water crept through Sakura's clothes, skin and bones in a matter of minutes. The three of them looked as if they were wearing bodysuits instead of cloaks when they finally crossed the border to Waterfall in the late afternoon of the following day. The rain had started as a fine drizzle around midday. Since then it had gradually increased to the heavy fall of rain that it was now. It was the recipe for catching a cold. Despite how much people loved to romanticize the shinobi world, reality was that shinobi got sick just as easily as the farmer next door who had never executed a backflip in his life.

"I can't say I've missed this part," Sakura said to Naruto. The energetic bounce to Naruto's steps was a pain to look at. Even more of a pain than her soggy pink hair. She should have cut her hair pre-mission. She had let it grow a little past her shoulders in the time that she had worked at the hospital, but now she remembered why she had kept it short in her younger years. At the moment, her hair was clotting her eyes and obscuring her vision to a point where Kakashi, who was walking ahead of them, seemed to blend in with the air without even trying.

"The rain?" Naruto asked.

Sakura swept the pink curtain away from her eyes, so she could give her friend a flat stare. They were being assaulted by an endless stream of mud, water and drowned insects.

"Yes. The rain, Naruto."

He grinned and touched the tip of his nose with his thumb. "It's not that bad. We could have gotten a mission in Snow."

"Snow doesn't hammer your flesh off your face," Sakura answered and grimaced when she felt a new clammy spot on her back where her cloak could no longer withstand.

"You two keeping up back there?"

"Right behind ya," Naruto yelled up at Kakashi.

"So," the silver-haired man popped up behind them half a second later and made them both flinch. "I was thinking we should discuss what our next move will be."

"You have no plan?" Sakura asked and Kakashi's lone eye swept down to drift across her face.

"As captain I make the final decision." he said. "But I don't play dictator. I would like your input."

"What about the locals?" Naruto asked. "If what's-her-name lives around here permanently, there has to be rumors circulating among the villagers, right? Rumors that will lead us to the jewelry?"

"That's a lot of ground to cover even if we spread out to save time," Sakura said. "And we still wouldn't know where to start. Sasaki didn't exactly specify Sakamoto's or Fukuda's locations."

"There's a village not far from here. We can start our search there and work our way outward along the border until we find trace of the jewelry," Kakashi concluded.

"Works for me," Naruto said and raised his arms high above his head, stretching his back with a series of subdued yawns that had him accidentally eat rainwater before he figured out to lower his head and yawn into his chest instead.

Sakura turned to Kakashi. "How can you be sure that there's a village close by?"

"Carriage trails."

Sakura looked down and silently berated herself for not noticing it earlier. Despite the muddy surface of the road, there were clear thick ragged lines imbedded deep within the soil. So deep that water couldn't completely remove them, which meant that the trails could only have been made by wheels carrying heavy loads. Ergo carriage trails.

"It must be a trade route," she said. "It takes constant use for any trails to become this imbedded in the ground."

They stumbled upon the first village outpost half an hour later. An outpost meant that this village was larger in size than Okada village. The outpost was hidden behind the gnarled trunks of the trees that flanked the road. If the three of them hadn't picked up on the chakra signatures leaking out from the cluster of those trees, they would have walked right past the outpost without identifying themselves. Kakashi worked his charm on the person in charge of the outpost and they were granted access. Sakura didn't know if she should feel relieved or disturbed by the fact that the two men hadn't recognized three fellow shinobi. They had suppressed their chakra, sure, but it was more about posture and attitude than anything else.

Ten minutes after having passed the outpost, they came to a halt where the road curved into a hill. On top of that hill they had the perfect view of the grand bustling village that lay below.

"All right," Kakashi said and scratched his chin through the unforgiving material of his mask. "This is our assembly point. We meet back here in an hour. I won't waste time on explaining how important it is that we lay low for now. Understood? Go."

Sakura and Naruto took off simultaneously. Sakura took off towards North. Naruto picked West. They fell into the pattern that they had created after Sasuke's departure. It was the same pattern that he had never truly been invited back into.

The rain had finally given away to the sun, but after having wandered the northern streets of the village for half an hour with no result at all, Sakura had grudgingly come to the conclusion that the village and its villagers were all horribly ordinary.

"No, I'm not familiar with that name."

"Are you absolutely certain, ma'am?" Sakura asked.

"Oh yes, dear. I'm very good at remembering names and faces," the old lady assured her. She was twisting brown water out of a washing cloth. Sakura worried that her frail hands couldn't withstand the pressure, but the woman didn't seem to be in pain.

"Are you not terribly hot under that large hood?" the woman asked. "It's been raining, but the humidity is awful at this time of the year."

"I get sunburned easily," Sakura answered. It was only half a lie. She reached up to adjust the hood in a moment of self-consciousness. The rain had indeed given away to the sun and while the temperature had risen, Sakura knew better than to offer up anything that could help anyone identify her. In this case, her hair and her eyes. Kakashi had told them to lay low. The hood stayed where it was, despite the fact that a hood in sunny weather was just as obvious as her pink hair would have been. It was about picking the lesser of two evils. Sakura was pulled out of her reverie by a child's voice.

"Grandma? Who is that woman?"

The grandmother turned to Sakura with a friendly smile that displayed poor dental care.

"Well, what is your name, dear?"

"Hitomi," Sakura lied smoothly. "I should get going now. Thank you for your time, ma'am."

"You can try the blacksmith at the end of this road," the woman suggested. "He is our only one since his father died. He should know if anybody with that name lives around here."

From the moment that Sakura entered the suffocating heat of the blacksmith's workshop and laid eyes on the brute of a man occupying the messy space with his imposing presence, she knew that the conversation would be mostly one-sided. She would talk and the man would throw in a grunt or growl wherever he saw fit.

"Excuse me?"

"What can I do fer ya, lady?"

Surprisingly there was no grunt, but his accent was so thick that she wondered if he was a westerner. She quickly let go of that theory though. His features were unmistakably not western.

"Need a touch-up on somethin'? Or maybe a new weapon for ya brother?"

She didn't blame him for thinking that she wouldn't need one for herself. She was in disguise after all.

"No, it's nothing of that sort, sir."

The blacksmith put down his hammer and wiped his hands on his shirt. Grime was ingrained beneath his flaking nails and his hands were worn the way you saw it with most men in his profession. Although, if Sakura were to be honest, her hands weren't the epitome of femininity either. Handling a variety of different weapons ever since childhood did that to your skin, no matter what products Ino said you should use to minimize the calluses and tears.

"Do you have a minute to answer a question, sir?"

He shrugged his broad shoulders and scratched the black stubble on his jaw.

"Do you per chance know of a woman named Sakamoto Tora? I'm looking for a job, and I've been referred to her several times? She should live around here."

"Neva' heard of her," the blacksmith said.

Sakura was trained to be perceptive. She had been trained to never take her eyes off whoever she was facing and this time it was no different. That was why she noticed the flicker of recognition in the blacksmith's deep-set eyes. Then he turned his back on her. He had lied. He did indeed know Sakamoto. If anything, then simply by maybe. This was still a lead. Sakura had to follow up on it.

"Was tha' all?" the large man asked and picked up his hammer where he had put it down earlier.

Sakura took his clear dismissal as her cue to leave. But her planned exit was stalled when another man stepped into the dimly lit workshop. His steel blue eyes immediately zeroed in on her and nailed her feet to the ground. This man was no common stranger like the rest of the townsfolk. With the reality and the possible consequences of that thought, Sakura forced her feet to move.

She wormed her way past the blue eyed man with a soft: "Excuse me."

"Excuse me."

He watched the petite cloaked figure scurry out of the workshop. Something akin to mild interest flashed across his face at the weak spark of chakra he had felt sting his skin when she had passed him in her hurry.

"She was askin' fer yer lady boss," Ryota rumbled, noticing how Fukuda's gaze lingered on where the woman had disappeared off to.

"When don't they ask fer ma cousin?" Fukuda said and shrugged.

"This one sounded serious, I warn ya," the blacksmith said. "Real serious, that one."

"We're headin' out to fetch Sasaki tonight. I need weapons."

"That's a damn short notice."

"Well, what can ya give me on such a short notice?" Fukuda said and made sure that his tone was sinister enough to make the other man understand that he wasn't leaving the workshop empty-handed. He didn't care if he would be carrying the dimwitted blacksmith's head on a stick to battle, or a brand new sword in his right hand. He wasn't leaving empty-handed.

"Wadja want?"

"Shouldn't ya know my preferences by now?" Fukuda said and began to list every item that he needed.

So it had been him, Sakura thought and lowered her body into a crouch. Sitting there, on the rooftop of the building situated directly across from the blacksmith's workshop, she watched Fukuda leave the blacksmith with a bag thrown carelessly over one shoulder.

It really was Fukuda Hisashi. And he was planning a trip to Okada village.

She couldn't go after the bastard alone. The list of what could go wrong was too big to ignore. She caught herself halfway into the act of clenching her fist and quickly forced her fingers to relax.

She had to let him go.

Later that evening, she sat with Kakashi and Naruto in the secluded corner of a tavern in town and discussed the next step in their plan.

Option one was shadowing Fukuda back to Okada village and stop him from freeing Sasaki.

Option two was continuing their search for the jewelry in the fashion that they were doing it now.

Option one sucked because they would have to eventually reveal their presence to Sakamoto's most trusted minion. Option two sucked because once Sasaki was brought back from Imagawa's unqualified care, he could identify the three of them to both to Sakamoto and to Fukuda.

"We need to start using a transformation jutsu to alter our appearances. Just hiding behind civilian gear won't work," Sakura said, rudely cutting off Kakashi who was in the middle of saying something that Sakura had completely spaced out on. She tugged at a lock of her hair as if to illustrate her point. They were too recognizable. Naruto moved to sit up straighter in his seat, his foot gliding down from where it had been braced against the edge of the table.

"Are we paying the blacksmith a second visit?" he asked.

"He's our only lead so far," Kakashi said and motioned for Naruto to scoot over.

"Don't have too much fun while I'm gone," he excused himself and wandered off towards the bathrooms in the back of the tavern. Sakura watched his tall figure disappear and only then noticed the look Naruto was giving her across the table.

"What?" she asked.

"I heard you talking with Kakashi-sensei last night."

"Naruto," she exclaimed. "You don't eavesdrop on private conversations."

"Private, eh?" he asked her with a shit-eating grin.

"Yes. What are you insinuating, anyway?"

"You're having private conversations with Kakashi-sensei," Naruto said, tapping his fingers against the table. "And Kakashi-sensei stripped for you at least four times last year. You guys are doing things rather backwards, huh?"

"It was his quarterly physical, Naruto," Sakura ground out. "He had to strip if I was to do a satisfactory examination."

"Satisfactory examination?"

"Yes. satisfactory examination."

"I bet his face was really satisfactory," Naruto said and put his elbow down on the table so he could rest his chin in his palm.

"Well, you wouldn't know, now would you?" Sakura said.

In fact, Kakashi's face hadn't been the kind that made you drop your jaw and eat dirt. It didn't hold the feminine beauty that Neji and Sasuke were blessed – or cursed – with. But it hadn't been the rugged kind like Kiba's and Shikamaru's either. Sakura had always known that Kakashi's nose had had a gentle slope to it, but that soft curve had been so much more pronounced once the mask had come off. And together with the sleek line of his jaw and chin, Sakura might have ogled the man's face for a good full minute. Then she had promptly stuck a needle into his arm and completely missed the vein she had been aiming for. The other nurses had teased her mercilessly about that. At the time she had been too embarrassed to apologize to Kakashi for it. Actually, she had never gotten around to apologize to him for it. Maybe that was why he had stopped talking to her? No, he didn't hold grudges like that. But it was his face. And he was strangely protective of his face. But no. No, he didn't hold grudges like that.

"Sakura?"

She blinked. "Yes?"

"You're zoning out," Naruto said.

"Sorry," Sakura apologized and reached across the table to flick his nose with her finger.

"Hey-"

"I can see you didn't trash the table," Kakashi said, returning from the bathrooms.

"We're past those years, sensei," Sakura joked weakly and watched Kakashi flop back down in the seat that he had abandoned minutes earlier. His eye caught hers and she turned her head to look out the grimy window. Kakashi rarely ever gave anybody the time of the day unless it benefitted him somehow. When he finally chose to give you his full attention, it tended to somewhat freak people out. Sakura was no exception. People like Kakashi and Sasuke didn't just look at you. They studied you like a pet in a zoo.

Wait.

Had Kakashi known that Naruto had been eavesdropping yesterday?

A wave of irritation rushed over her. Well, shit. It was no well-kept secret that the majority of women gravitated towards men that they could repair or fix somehow, but Sakura just had to have some sort of magnetic field around her body that attracted only the psychologically challenged men. Her future was destined to look horribly bleak on the love front. Not that she had expected differently. It wasn't a priority of hers. If she had really wanted it, she would have sought it out by now. She hadn't. She wrenched her eyes away from the window.

"Where is it we're sleeping tonight?" she asked. "I don't know if I've already asked?"

"I've booked us rooms across the street," Kakashi told her with a flick of his wrist that probably should have shown her in which direction the building lay. But if she was to believe that, it would have been located somewhere underneath their table.

An elderly man stepped up to their table.

"You're the ones that are looking for that Sakamoto bitch, aren't you?" he asked.

"And you are?" Kakashi asked, feigning disinterest and doing it wonderfully well.

"Try this," the man said and pulled out a small card from his breast pocket. He put the card down on the table in front of Sakura. She stared at the scarlet square of paper. The elderly man opened his mouth as if he wanted to say more, but in the last second he seemed to change his mind and left their table with a slight limp in his walk that for some reason piqued Sakura's interest. Pushing that thought aside, she picked up the card and studied it.

"What does it say?" Naruto asked with the subtlety of a rampaging horse. He stretched out his neck to get a better look at the card, and Sakura pushed him back in his seat.

"Peach… Parfait," she read aloud. "Peach Parfait."

The question mark displayed on Naruto's face matched the one on hers. "What's that?"

"How would I know?" she asked, shooting him an irritated look.

"It doesn't say more?" Kakashi broke into their dialogue.

"Nothing besides the name and a road number outside the village," Sakura said and handed him the card. She was very careful not to let her fingers brush his.

"I guess we're no longer paying the blacksmith a visit," he said and held up the card between two of his fingers, twisting it around as though it was a 3-dimensional art piece and Sakura and Naruto had failed to see its artistic potential.

"We'll do a day of surveillance," Kakashi said. "And then we'll figure out what to do after that."

"Fukuda won't be around tomorrow." Sakura said. "But in two days both he and Sasaki may be."

"We are hired by Imagawa to retrieve his stolen heirloom," Kakashi reminded both of them in a mild manner that betrayed the reprimand he was about to give them. "Our mission is not to prove Sakamoto and her acquaintances guilty of any other crime than this one."

She couldn't fall asleep. Her eyeballs were aching and it felt as though a rhino had smashed its flabby butt right down on her poor feet. And yet she was still awake. She changed position from her back to her stomach for what felt like the twentieth time in five minutes. Sakura suffered from frequent insomnia, but the problem usually didn't peak this badly during missions. Usually because missions tired you out and were the perfect cure to insomnia. This time, this was not the case.

"That's it," she said and sat up, hurling the thin covers off her body. She yanked on her old clothes that she had thrown to the floor earlier. Then she tiptoed out into the eerily silent corridor outside of her room.

Kakashi never slept. She didn't know how, but he just didn't.

She found his door within a matter of minutes and turned the doorknob, pushing the large piece of wood open with her shoulder.

"If I hadn't sensed it was you, you would be dead now," Kakashi said.

She rolled her eyes and closed the door behind her. "I vote for an enemy exchange if yours are nice enough to use the door."

Kakashi's comfortably slouched frame emerged from the adjacent bathroom and Sakura took in his disarrayed state with an irksome flutter to her chest. He had discarded his vest, which in and of itself wasn't all that uncommon, but it left him in the black shirt he wore underneath. And it was the black shirt that pissed Sakura off. It pissed her off, because the fabric looked as if it had been sculpted to fit the hard planes of his torso like spray-on skin. The headband was gone as well, she noticed, and his hair no longer stood up straight, but fell in heavy layers down the side of his head instead.

"Hot."

He blinked.

"It was hot," she said. "I couldn't fall asleep."

"So you decided to make sure you wouldn't be alone in your predicament?" he asked and crossed the room with lazy steps, walking past her where she still stood by the entrance.

"No," she dragged out the word, distracted by him parading around in the room. "I wanted to continue our talk, I guess."

He sat down on the edge of the bed. The colorful bedspread bunched up underneath him.

"Now?"

"Naruto is dead to the world. And I figured you wouldn't be asleep yet," she said. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, trapping herself within the illusion of private space. She didn't fully understand why she needed private space, but she felt infinitely better now that she had fooled herself into believing it was there.

"So, what was it that you wanted?" Kakashi asked and leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

"For you to answer the question I asked you back at Okada village," she said and finally dared to take a step closer to the bed.

"You can sit down," he offered.

"I know."

"You didn't have to come here if it makes you uncomfortable," he continued and the soft sarcasm was not lost on her. In fact, it only served to make her regret entering the room in the first place. This Kakashi was different from the one yesterday night, but she couldn't pinpoint what it was that made him so different. He was the same person. But he was also more persons at the same time.

"I'm not uncomfortable. Give me some credit," she said.

He gave her a blank stare instead, one that picked up her nerves from around the room and injected them straight back into her stomach.

"You knew what Sasuke wanted in a woman," he said, running his fingers along the masked contour of his jaw and chin. "And you also knew what Naruto want."

She hated that her next question came out with an undertone of anticipation to it, because what was there to anticipate?

"What are you hinting at?" she asked.

"I think I am no exception to that rule. You know what I want, so why do you ask?"

There was a long pause where the air in between the two of them seemed to flicker and buzz with expectancy. Expectancy of how Sakura would formulate her response. Sakura was caught. But she had done this herself. She wouldn't run away from it. She had asked for it by coming here.

"If I hadn't stepped inside my apartment that night, but if I had asked you a second time," she began, her voice surprisingly steady considering what she was about to bring up. "Would you have answered my question?"

"What question was that?"

"You know," Sakura said.

"Refresh my memory, please," Kakashi asked. Sakura wondered if she was secretly a masochist. Why else would she subject herself to this?

"I asked you if you had ever thought about sleeping with me," she said. Her voice only cracked once, but otherwise came out strong and clear. Kakashi nodded and scratched his knee with idle fingers that drew Sakura's attention like a moth to a flame.

"And," she continued. "If I had asked you a second time, would you have answered that question?"

Kakashi sighed from his spot on the bed. "I'm a man, Sakura. What do you expect me to answer when an attractive woman, drunk or not, asks me if I have thought about sleeping with her?"

Sakura was beyond the point of embarrassment. She just wanted answers.

"I expect you to give an answer," she said. "Obviously."

Kakashi stood up from the lumpy mattress. His impressive frame made Sakura swallow an extra time. He wasted valuable time on cording his fingers through the thick mane of silver hair on top of his head, and she tried not to notice how the muscles of his arm flexed with the movement and made her mouth water.

"Tell me, why am I being made out to be the one at fault here?" Kakashi asked.

"I wasn't aware that any of us were at fault," Sakura said, her cheeks hot and her stomach a twitching mess. "I just thought we should talk this through. As adults."

"You want to talk this through as adults?" Kakashi asked, his voice taking on a slightly incredulous tone.

"Yes?"

She had meant to sound firm, but it came out as a question instead. A childlike question. This was not going well.

"All right," Kakashi said and Sakura instantly knew that she had made a fatal mistake somewhere in their awkward conversation. Kakashi did not back down. He manipulated you. He twisted your words and he lied, but he did not yield. Not unless it served a purpose. His purpose.

"I have thought about it, yes," he said. "And that night I wanted to slam you up against the door of your apartment, tear off that tiny obscene dress of yours, and ram myself into you like there was no tomorrow."

Intellectually, Sakura knew that he was trying to scare her off.

"You don't ask someone if they want to fuck you, Sakura, unless you are prepared to face the consequences of it. Most men don't listen to boundaries and limitations in a situation like the one you put yourself into."

"And I should feel grateful that you did?" Sakura asked, coming back to her senses. Her voice was hot with repressed anger that matched her flaming cheeks perfectly. She knew what she had asked Kakashi that night. It had played little role in the matter that alcohol had been circulating her blood stream at the time. She had wanted him to fuck her. Vulgarity be damned. Sakura was no virgin and Kakashi hadn't been her teacher for a long time. Truth be told, he had never really been her teacher, choosing instead to focus on his male students and not his sole female student. Sakura didn't blame him. He had related better to Naruto and Sasuke. It was understandable. After all, Naruto and Sasuke had never been kids. Sakura had been a kid, but a part of her male teammates had always been more grownup than her. It was this part that Kakashi had seen and grasped onto. And Sakura, not boasting one such grownup part in her kid's body, had watched this happen from the sidelines, not fully understanding what was happening at the time. Nowadays, she understood.

"You are deliberately misunderstanding me," Kakashi said.

"And you are stalling, because you-"

"Sakura," Kakashi said and Sakura's mouth snapped shut. "You've overstayed your welcome. Go back to your room and get some sleep. We have an early day tomorrow."

It was an order. Sakura had to follow it. She left, hearing the click of the lock after her departure.