Illusions of Innocence

Chapter Two – The Nightmare Realm

All that I'm wanted for,

Although I wanted more,

Lock the last open door,

My ghosts are gaining on me.

"Ugh..." Sakura groaned as she awoke, but it took a few seconds for anything to come back to her. Her first thoughts were that the last fortnight had been some sick, twisted nightmare her over-exhausted imagination had come up with. When I wake up, I'll be in my bed and... Sakura's thoughts were cut off abruptly as the pain hit her frail body.

Sakura's instinctive reaction was to sit bolt upright, but she reined the impulse in. She could feel that her ankle was broken, and so were a few of her ribs. The last thing she needed right now was to puncture a lung.

Thinking about "everything else" make Sakura's blood run cold. What if she was still there? What if she had only dreamt she'd escaped, or they'd recaptured her? She didn't want to open her eyes to find out, so terrified was she that they were still around, just waiting for her regain consciousness again. Although she could feel gauze over her stomach, and the bad wound just above her knee had been healed, her ribs and ankle had not been addressed and she was in the same clothes she had been in for the past two weeks or so.

Slowly, reluctantly, but knowing that it was now or never, Sakura opened her eyes, ignoring the way everything in her line of vision spun and distorted. Relief rushed through her entire body as she realised she did not recognise the room she was currently in. Then, she tensed. They could just have moved her to a different location. They could still be hiding, laying in wait for her, ready to come back even worse than before. If that was even possible.

Sakura didn't realise that she was shaking violently until a few minutes later. Even as she became aware of herself, she could not stop.

At that precise moment, the door creaked open. Sakura opened her mouth to scream, but her vocal chords were paralysed. She could hear her heart pounding, and the blood rushing wildly through her head. It blocked out all rational thought.

"What's up with her, un?" She heard a male voice call out, but neither the words nor the voice itself registered in her mind. Her breathing had become faster, and she took desperate gasps for air, willing herself to fight, to scream out, to be heard. She continued hyperventilating.

"Hey, hey!"

"Come on, un! Snap out of it!"

"She's not going to fucking die, is she?"

The voice blurred into one, the words cancelling each other out and becoming meaningless to her. Only one word stood out over the rest of them, spoken in a clear voice that radiated ice and authority.

"Sakura."

Slowly, her vision began to clear, and her breathing slowed, quietening at the same time. She stared at the four men in front of her, only one of whom was supposed to be alive. The one who had spoken was the one she had always feared the most – the subject of horror stories told to young children, the stuff of nightmares. Uchiha Itachi.

"A-am I d-dead?" Sakura managed to choke out after a few moments of confused thoughts.

"No." Itachi replied in his ice-cold voice. But you'll wish you were soon enough. Was it Sakura's overwrought emotions, her over-reacting imagination, or were those the words he implied? Although she was scared of facing a fresh ordeal at the hands of the worst criminal organisation in the shinobi lands, she couldn't bring herself to be as terrified by them as perhaps she should have been. Even the Akatsuki can't be as bad as the others, surely? Sakura thought to herself. If she had been in a better frame of mind, she might have thought: If the others were bad, what could Akatsuki do to me?

But her mind was exhausted. She was tired of everything, tired of her very life. She honestly didn't care at that moment if the Akatsuki wanted to kill her, just so long as they did it quickly. But if they wanted to kill her...

"Why – why have you started to heal me?" She asked, the thought coming to her suddenly.

"Konan can tell you about that." Again, it was the Uchiha who answered her. Was he their spokesman? Or was it that intimidating aura emanating from his very being that kept them quiet? Weak and tired as she was, Sakura could sense the dangerous energy of the mass-murderer, but that and even the knowledge of what he'd done in the past combined could not make her summon up the will to hate him.

She did hate him. She knew that as sure as she knew her eyes were green and her hair was pink. But right there, looking at him properly for the first time, she couldn't feel even an ounce of loathing towards him. I will, Sakura vowed. If I survive this, if I recover, I'll hate him so much he won't know what's hit him. It was strange how she could manage to think such a trivial thought as that, with the more serious ones jostling for top position inside her pounding head.

She tried to focus on the matter at hand. The matter of her survival. She didn't want to die anymore. She couldn't die. All that she had now was the knowledge of the sacrifice her team had made...and all for her. She couldn't waste that precious gift they'd given her. The gift of life.

It was then that Sakura asked possibly the most important question yet. "If I'm alive, then why aren't you dead?" Her voice was a little steadier, less of a drowsy tremor running through it this time. Itachi looked at her, and she met his eyes. She saw something behind the bleak crimson – a kind-of surprise masked by the lack of emotions. She remembered that she had been afraid to look at him that day they had met, almost three years ago now. Was he perhaps surprised that she had looked him in eye? She brushed that theory away as soon as it formed. What did it matter anyway? She was probably seeing things. She tried to concentrate, and wondered why it was so difficult to do so.

"Time will uncover the answers you seek, Sakura." Itachi said after a moment.

"What he means is that he can't be bothered telling you." Kisame put in, speaking directly to her for the first time. Itachi shot a glare at the blue-skinned man, who grinned back without a hint of remorse.

Sakura frowned. These criminals weren't quite what she'd expected. They probably didn't want to kill her, or they would have completed the task a long while ago. But if they weren't going to murder her, what did they want? Sakura felt that there was something her confused mind was missing out.

"Oh, Sakura, you're awake!"

Sakura turned her head to the feminine voice that greeted her like an old friend. It belonged to a woman of about five foot five with blue hair in a bun with a flower that appeared to be made from paper. Konan. Sakura managed to remember the woman's name from the Akatsuki roster she had read not so long ago. Her head was beginning to spin, and she honestly couldn't remember whether this Akatsuki was meant to be six feet under or not. Sakura tried to take a deep, calming breath, but ended up coughing.

Konan walked over to the couch Sakura lay on. "How much chakra do you have?" She asked in the same kind tone she'd used when addressing Sakura before. Sakura looked at her for a few seconds as she processed the question.

"Enough to maybe stand up and perhaps walk a few steps." She tried to be realistic. Konan nodded.

"Understandable, after all those injuries." She said, a hint of the same pain Itachi had seen the previous day on her features. It disappeared before Sakura could even register it as an emotion.

"I couldn't realistically walk though..." Sakura muttered, the medic in her taking over for a minute. "Not with my ankle fractured."

Again, Konan nodded. "No worries. Now, I'm sorry we didn't heal your ankle and your ribs, but unfortunately we don't really know that much medical jutsu. Zetsu said he'd bring a painkiller or two, though."

Sakura abruptly realised exactly why it was that she couldn't concentrate on things as she should have been – pain. The same excruciating agony was tearing through her body as it had the moment she had woken up, but it seemed that with the shock of meeting the Akatsuki, she had pushed it to the recesses of her mind. Now it was coming back with a vengeance, and it was only the thought of appearing weak in front of the Akatsuki that prevented her from crying out. As it was, a small hiss escaped her lips. It got Itachi staring at her again, his sharingan boring into the side of her head.

"Speaking of Zetsu," Konan said as though to herself, "Where is he?"

As if on cue, the door opened again. Stupid as she knew it was, Sakura still felt her heart spasm in fear of it being one of her torturers entering the room. That particular fear was soon dispelled as she set eyes on Zetsu. He was the man her team mate Naruto had called "spiky aloe man", or something to that effect, when they had come across him and Uchiha Madara on the hunt for Sasuke. He was the one who had informed Madara of Itachi's death. And yet Itachi was evidently as alive as the rest of them. It didn't make any sense to her whatsoever.

Zetsu was holding a clear plastic beaker half-filled with a murky blue-tinted liquid that Sakura identified as a herbal painkiller. Having never used it herself, she had no idea whether it worked, but she hoped to Kami above that it did. She doubted if the strongest painkiller known to shinobi would numb her mental anguish, but perhaps it would help her forget the stabbing feeling she had all over her body.

Zetsu handed the medicine over to Konan, averting his eyes from Sakura's form.

"I made it specially. So you'd best drink it all."

Sakura gaped at him. The way he'd spoken, his voice changing on the second sentence...it was like he was two completely different people. It unsettled her a little, and she found herself glad of the fact that it was Konan who came closer to pass her the plastic cup. As it exchanged hands, Sakura kept her hands well away from Konan. She didn't know what it was bothering her – or rather, she didn't want to know what it was bothering her – but she didn't want anyone to touch her. Even a woman.

The two Akatsuki who'd been the quietest so far, Deidara and Hidan, she thought, watched her intently, although both pretended to look bored, Hidan putting on a better act than the blond missing-nin. Sakura was still acutely aware of Uchiha Itachi's presence, and as she drank the herbal remedy, she began to think a little more carefully about exactly who these people were, and what each one of the S-rank criminals in the room with her had done in the past, and would do in the future.

Perhaps the moment of overwhelming clarity should have come earlier, but as soon as she fully

realised the situation she was in, she felt salty tears slipping down her face into the empty beaker. Hidan, although standing a good few feet away from her, jumped back a step or two as though she had some sort of contagious disease. Deidara looked away from her hastily, as did Kisame. Zetsu hadn't really been looking at her in the first place, but Itachi's eyes stayed looking at a fixed point near her temple. Sakura was at once both aware and yet unaware of this, in any case as unable to halt her sobs at will as she had been able to cease her hyperventilating after she had awoken and first seen Deidara, Hidan, Kisame and Itachi, earlier.

Konan gave her a look that was both pitying and comforting at the same time, and ignoring Sakura's feeble attempt to cower away from the physical contact, brushed her pink hair back with one hand and fished out a tissue from her Akatsuki cloak, handing it to Sakura, who wiped her eyes roughly, but to avail: the waterfall wouldn't stop, and every time she got of one lot of tears, more came welling up and spilling over.

Halfway through this silent crying bout, Deidara and Hidan crept out of the room relatively unnoticed, pretending not to see Konan's dark look, or hear her grit her teeth in a way that suggested that while she didn't particularly need them hanging around, she didn't want them running away because they couldn't handle a few tears. The origami expert hoped dearly that there would be a good few more of these incidents – it would show that Sakura was healing not just physically, but emotionally too.

Zetsu followed Hidan and Deidara's lead a few moments after they'd disappeared, although he winced and almost changed his mind at Konan's near-growl. Sakura couldn't care less about who left. She would have preferred them all to leave, for it all to be a dream, but she had to face facts: this was as real as it got, and there was no going back now.

That was when Haruno Sakura decided that she had wiped her eyes dry for the last time: she wouldn't shed another single, solitary tear about her predicament or her previous ordeal. She didn't want to be weak, not anymore. Haven't I spent my whole life trying to be strong?I keep thinking I am, and then I prove myself wrong.

Looking Konan straight in the eyes, she asked her the question Itachi had told her the older kunoichi would answer for her.

"W-why have you started to heal me?" Her voice wasn't wavering through fear, but the after-effects of her crying fit. Konan mouth opened, and then closed again. She hesitated, looking to Itachi as if for approval, even though she was technically of a higher level in the Akatsuki than him. Sakura craned her neck to see his reaction, which was the faintest of shrugs. If she hadn't been purposely looking for movement on his part, she would have missed it. Konan gave a heavy sigh.

"We think, Sakura," She said carefully, obviously unsure of how to word what she wanted to say. "We think that you could be...useful to us."

Sakura didn't need to ask how. "You want information." She stated flatly. Konan nodded.

"Yes, that would be a great help to our cause. But we, that is to say, Leader and I," At the word 'Leader', Konan's voice became even softer than it had been before, leaving Sakura in no doubt that Konan and 'Leader' were very well-acquainted. Not that it troubled her at all. It was no business of hers. "We think, Sakura, based on what we know of you from information supplied to us by certain spies and also what we've read in the most recent bingo book -" Here, Sakura frowned. She was in a bingo book? She couldn't remember that. Surely not... She felt the room spin around her as she tried to recall the information. She could barely recollect what Konan had just said to her.

"We think you'd be a great asset, Sakura." Konan's simply-phrased words ran through Sakura's head with only the barest hint of the sentence registering. "So we were wondering..." Again, she pause, unsure of whether to say her next words or not. The room blurred around Sakura, and she struggled to make out and focus on Konan's face in the haze. "Would you consider joining Akatsuki?"

The proposal certainly came as a shock to Sakura, who had expected to be kept as a hostage at best, but she was in no fit state to comment. For one thing, she might have heard the woman wrong – her hearing felt disjointed and odd – and for another, she didn't think she could use the muscles necessary to open her mouth to respond to the offer.

A moment later, she realised her prayer to Kami had come true – that herbal painkilling stuff really was some good sh –

Konan sighed. She guessed that the answer to that question would have to wait. She looked up at Kisame and Itachi, only to find that they had disappeared. It was then, not for the first time, that Konan felt like curling up in a ball and crying her eyes out.