Ricochet
By Leanne Ash
Chapter 2
Sasuke Uchiha rolled back his shoulder as he wearily regarded the opening door to the training facility. It was late, but he couldn't seem to make himself do anything but workout even though the rest of the Hidden Leaf was likely asleep.
He had attempted, after being released from the wrath of the disciplinary staff, to fall asleep in the small apartment assigned to him in the dormitory, but something kept his overactive muscles twitching well into the night.
And so, as if to mock the efforts of those attempting to overexert him, he reentered the training sector of the Hidden Leaf and continued on like the day had never reached a pause, as if the staff telling him to fuck off for the night and get some sleep was a mere bathroom break that disrupted his concentration.
Sweat glistening from his shirtless form, he glared at the man approaching the weight machine he was currently making a mockery of.
"Sasuke," the man greeted dully.
"Kakashi," he mumbled with a nod.
Kakashi Hatake, like Tsunade, had been around the Hidden Leaf for quite some time. Silver haired and wise beyond his years, the man maintained his ninja persona even off hours; wearing a cloth around his neck that masked the bottom half of his face. He kept an eye concealed beneath a slouching forehead protector, explaining simply that he never felt the need to reveal his second sharingan unless absolutely necessary. He joked constantly that using both eyes gave him an unfair advantage against his opponents.
"You've been repeating this regime for the past three days, you know."
Sasuke pushed the machine back to its default setting and used a towel to wipe the sweat from his face.
Kakashi smirked. Before his five year absence, he had been the boy's training instructor since the first day Sasuke set foot into the underground black ops society. He predicted of course, that very little would have changed in Sasuke's personality and conversational abilities. Or lack there of. Like a HUGE lack there of.
"They make you train from morning till night to punish you. If you're coming in after hours on your own time they must not know what they're doing."
"They don't. Maybe the Hidden Leaf needs to be more selective of who they let in."
"This coming from the kid they just let in despite his abandonment issues."
Sasuke pushed damn black bangs from his face and regarded the man's relaxed confrontation as he leaned up against the opposite wall. He despised being called kid.
"Pissed off at me still for surpassing you so fast?"
The older man wasn't ruffled in the slightest. "You left because this place wasn't giving you power fast enough. Why come back here when you know there's nothing more to gain?"
The younger man's gaze dropped quickly to the ground.
"Unless... it's because you have nowhere else to go?"
Sasuke stood nonchalantly, wrapping the towel around his sweat glistening shoulders. "I know you read the transcript from the interrogation."
"I did," the older man shrugged. "You said you were tired of working under Orochimaru. You said you preferred the working environment at the Hidden Leaf. You said, oddly enough, quite a few times, that you were done."
Black eyes remained unflinching. "Yeah?"
"Done what?"
Annoyance crept over the boy's spine. His muscles tightened, as if a ridged body could keep the older man from prying into the torn-out pages of his less than open book.
"Done what, Sasuke?" Kakashi repeated.
He glared out his exasperation, knowing that what he was about to say was probably the most pathetic thing his previous mentor would ever hear, but after five years of complete and utter bullshit, it was what it was.
"Everything," he replied simply. "Every-fucking-thing you can think of. I'm done with it. I'm back to live out my life doing what I do best.
Until I die."
It wasn't the whole truth, but it was the truth nonetheless. It was the closest Sasuke could get within arm's reach of honesty without revealing too much about his past: there really was nothing for him anymore. Anywhere. He had completed what felt like his life's purpose before he was twenty years old, and now he was at a crossroads; where the light never stopped being red, but blinked green for everyone else.
"Nobody is ever done with everything."
Sasuke smirked.
"Then you wouldn't know what it feels like to be here, would you?"
The silver-haired man stared passively through his one exposed eye. Figuring they were done, Sasuke threw on a black shirt and prepared to exit the room. He was no where near done training, but he wasn't about to spend the night awkwardly chatting with someone he once accused of not being good enough to train him.
"See you around, Kakashi," he mumbled over his shoulder.
"Why did Sakura's sharingan bother you?"
The question halted him as effectively as a brick wall. Black eyes turned towards Kakashi with a scowl caged behind black bangs. He had almost forgotten. Irritation seeped up just as it had before, and it bothered him to be reminded.
He hadn't meant to react the way he did, but seeing that sinister red iris peering at him from the person he least expected to have ever qualified... The pinwheel spun to dissect him, peeling away to predict the next move. Its neighbor, a deep pristine emerald, remained intact despite the madness operating so close by. The contrast had been eerie: beauty, and the means to destroy. For the life of him he couldn't quite understand why the sight of her had him furious in an instant, and only after violently grabbing her did he begin to register what he was doing.
It had been a goddamn stupid move and he cursed at himself for such a spontaneous overreaction.
"I didn't know they were allowing girls to have the implant again," Sasuke murmured, forcing as much chauvinism into his tone as possible. "I don't need fucking females getting in my way out there."
Of course that wasn't it.
Male, female, he could care less who had it.
The point was she had it.
There was something about the sharingan that became your one-way ticket to a much darker place. A place that alienated you from yourself. A place that he currently resided. If you were strong, if you had the power of constant optimism on your side, like Naruto, you could tread the water for as long as it took and laugh at anyone's attempt to drag you down.
But not everyone was like Naruto.
Not everyone returned from a mission with the optimism that maybe doing what you did was for the greater good. That maybe, given the choice, you could opt to only end the lives of those who ruthlessly ended others, that your principals stemmed from the belief that killing one to save hundreds was worth it.
Instead, maybe you stopped caring who you had to destroy. Maybe, after a while, you enjoyed killing every single person that got in the way of your target when at first you would have avoided them. And maybe, just maybe, the sharingan embedded its power too far.
And suddenly, without you knowing, the switch has been flipped... and the lights turn off, and the clock stops ticking, and the shop is closed indefinitely – please try again later. You are but a former shell of a child that just wanted somewhere to call home.
He had seen it happen.
He had felt it happen.
This was not a life that was meant for people like Sakura.
Pure, chaste, Sakura Haruno.
If there was something Sasuke thought he could predict about returning to the Hidden Leaf, it was that Sakura would be waiting with her god awful love and devotion. It was that guarantee, though annoying and stomach-turning, that felt strangely comforting five years later as he slumped against the secret gates to the Hidden Leaf and casually lit a cigarette. He had clawed his way backwards through hell and found himself back where it all began.
Truth be told, he never really liked Sakura. She was Naruto's friend mostly, but at least someone would be happy he was back.
He had always thought she was too damn innocent and naïve to be part of the Hidden Leaf. And the hair... the hair was frustratingly stupid. It was pink, of all colors of the rainbow, it had to be pink. One of the first things they taught you about being a ninja was to remain unseen and unmemorable. Sakura's hair was a cotton candy beacon that was more trouble than it was worth and her existence seemed to mock everything he took seriously. Of course, after being observed during her first few years of schooling, the council and staff felt her intelligence was best suited for the operation's own personal hospital.
He remembered being secretly glad that she wouldn't be assigned any missions and therefor wouldn't get in his way if they were ever paired up.
Though he saw her less frequently in the hospital as injuries on the job became few and far apart, it was because of Naruto that the three of them spent time together as often as they did. Naruto and Sakura were good friends, just as Naruto and himself had been good friends. It was inevitable that the three of them usually hung out to eat or study outside of missions.
And this was annoying.
Sakura was annoying.
All she did was fawn over him and flirt like a maniac, passing unwanted emotions daily like an aggressive high-five. To the face. With a chair. Made of steel. This wasn't a far cry from the other girls in the Hidden Leaf that behaved the same way, but because of their constant close proximity, Sakura's actions were far more amplified. He would've found her pretty if she wasn't so goddamn flaky and irritating right in his ear drum. Without fail, he openly ignored her pitiful attempts to get his attention, resulting in glares from Naruto who reminded him to be nice to their pink haired parasite.
But the three of them had a strange camaraderie.
Even though Sakura's gushing had been annoying, and Naruto's constant attempts to get him to "stop being a douche" were a royal pain in the ass, they were the closest people he had to calling friends. While he would admit to absolutely no one that Naruto was indeed his best friend, he could also begrudgingly admit (to absolutely no one) that he considered Sakura more than just another fan girl. Despite the flirting and the constant barrage of over-the-top compliments, she had been someone he considered a trustworthy colleague. It was admittedly bizarre that he felt this way whilst not really liking her all at the same time.
However, there was no denying that in five years, Sakura Haruno had built herself into quite the mystery. It was obvious she had grown up. He hardly thought of her as being attractive when they were younger, but it was hard to ignore the fact that she was more than note-worthy at this age with that curvy, thin figure and ridiculously immaculate face. Puberty had clearly been her best friend growing up.
But that wasn't the mystery.
How – seriously, how - did she manage to shed her given role at the hospital and move up the ranks high enough to receive the sharingan? What made her want to start taking on missions? How well did she handle herself out there? How the hell could Naruto allow this to happen? She wasn't special. The operation could have killed her. She had done something so incredibly irresponsible and it stirred something unpleasant in the pit of his stomach.
All of these weird, frustrating thoughts pummeled their way to the forefront of his mind the moment he left Tsunade's office that day.
"If you say that out loud one more time it'll come back to kick you in the ass," Kakashi lectured darkly as Sasuke existed the room.
"Hn. Whatever."
The door slammed shut behind him.
There was really no reason to give a shit if Sakura had the sharingan. His mind was just bored. It was to be expected that he'd latch on to anything that was out of the ordinary as a means of mental survival. His life had been realigned to the tracks: a derailed train car, repaired and rejoined with the grand machine to carry on in the same scheduled direction. Anything, he concluded, that remotely surprised him, would garner his attention temporarily.
Sasuke made his way back to the dormitory, convinced that the subject of Sakura Haruno had already lost his interest.
"Surveillance is balls," Naruto sighed, tapping his knuckles against the car window.
Sasuke glared out the window silently, wishing the pelting rain was loud enough to drown out the annoying blonde sitting next to him.
Under Tsunade's orders, he was shadowing Naruto on every mission, no matter how low-risk and underwhelming. The had been hired by the Hyuuga Corporation to retrieve back a program allegedly stolen by the very man they were watching: Zaku Abumi, head of the Dosu Corporation. There was no going to the police; whatever was stolen was clandestine, and whatever it was was of none of their business. The Hyuuga Corporation had been forced to utilize the Hidden Leaf's underground services to retrieve back the device that was taken by their enemy. The companies were too well-known by the public to get their hands dirty and openly attacking each other was out of the question. The program, the client explained, had been placed on an unassuming USB stick that was heavily password encrypted. They needed it back before their rival company had a chance to crack the code.
It would be difficult to break into a building with reinforced security and blindly dig for an ordinary storage device.
But the challenge was half the fun, and Sasuke would have to get his kicks wherever he could.
First things first though it would seem: surveillance.
They needed to know Zaku like the back of their hand.
They had been following the man for almost a week and lucky for them, the man's schedule remained fairly predictable.
"He goes to the same strip club every night and then stumbles home. I think it's safe to say he doesn't return to his office. Ever."
"His bodyguard leaves to look outside and talk to the bouncer every forty to forty-five minutes," Sasuke noted. "But he's too fast. Gets it done in under a minute."
"Alley to the left," Naruto observed. "We could knock him out and hide the body behind those trash bins. Use that time to somehow pocket Zaku's key card."
"No. If he doesn't come back Zaku would know something's up."
"Like he'd notice."
"He'd notice. His bodyguard keeps looking at his watch like a bomb's about to go off. He knows he has to get back."
"Then how do you suppose we get the building key card without his bodyguard noticing, genius?"
"I'm thinking."
The blonde tapped his chin. "I think I've got an idea... I'll clear it with Tsunade first."
"What idea?"
"Not solid yet, but I might need Sakura in on this."
He snorted incredulously. "Why?"
"That's on the need-to-know, douchebag, and Tsunade says you aren't on the inside track yet. Technically, you shouldn't even be talking."
"Blow me, moron."
Naruto started the car. "I'm done for the night. Let's get some ramen."
"Does your body absorb nothing else?" Sasuke seethed. "We've eaten that shit every night this week."
"Consider it part of your punishment, for talking out your ass."
"What," Sasuke growled, "is your problem?"
Naruto took his time answering, checking over his shoulder before pulling their car out into traffic.
"Clearly you're the one with problems," the blonde grumbled finally. "If I can convince Tsunade to let Sakura help us you better keep that chauvinism crap to yourself."
He let his features remain placid as he leaned back nonchalantly into the passenger seat. Of course Naruto had asked him earlier why he had reacted so strongly to Sakura's sharingan. And of course, he fed him the same cock and bull statement he gave to Kakashi – the one that made him sound like a sexist shit starter.
"I know you don't think much of her for whatever reason, but she's one of my closest friends. She can handle herself, probably better than me sometimes, so if you say anything to cut her down I'll crack you in half."
"I wasn't going to," Sasuke snapped. "I just don't see why we need her in this case."
Naruto's blue eyes scrutinized him before returning back to the road. "Her skill set is... specialized. None of us can do what she does."
He shot the other boy a cryptic look. What the hell did 'specialized' mean? Could she shoot a crossbow blind-folded with her feet?
"What skill set?"
Naruto laughed coldy. "I doubt you care. It's too bad you don't know anything about her. Figure it out yourself if you really want to know."
If the blonde was trying to make him uninterested by forcing him to play twenty-questions, the tactic was succeeding. Naruto was right; if Sasuke really wanted to know something he'd figure it out himself. Otherwise, it didn't take much to deflate his curiosity.
"Whatever. Let's just get your stupid ramen."
He quickened his pace down the hall, well aware of the heels struggling to catch up to him.
"Sasuke!" the annoying voice called sweetly.
He knew he had brought this misery down on himself.
"What is it, Karin?"
It wasn't long before his presence at the Hidden Leaf transitioned from fear and contempt to lust and admiration within the hearts of the female population. He had hoped his reputation would've proceeded him, making him appear cold and violent in response to casual conversation, but his goddamn appearance once again was strong enough to overcome even the deadliest of rumors.
Karin, an attractive red head that probably arrived some time during his absence, was the first to begin approaching him in a manner he couldn't exactly turn down. He was a man after all, and he liked that she got straight to the point in offering herself for his personal needs.
"Anytime you want, Sasuke," she had whispered seductively. "I won't tell a soul."
The original arrangement had been simple: she'd smile and he'd nod. She'd show up at midnight and he'd pull her clothes off. She would ride him like an enraged hellcat until he pushed her aside. It was a fair enough deal at first, but he had begun indulging less and less as Karin became increasingly clingy during off-hours. Nothing in this world came free without grotesque consequences.
"I went to your room last night, but you didn't answer!"
"Sometimes that happens when I'm not there," he replied, doing nothing to hide his irritation.
"Well, it's been a few days since you've invited me over," she whined quietly. If she was hurt by his sarcasm, she didn't show it. Instead, Karin reached forward and tugged at the sleeve of his jacket. "I thought, maybeee..."
"Quit it," he growled with a quick recoil of his arm, "My nights are full. I'm doing surveillance work."
"You're doing missions again?" she squealed. "You never told me!"
"Ah," he pushed the courtyard doors open. "I'm going for a cigarette."
Karin didn't miss a beat. "I'll have one with you!"
He took a moment to analyze the situation. This crazy broad would follow him to the ends of the earth, unless...
He smirked coldly. "I can't stand girls who smoke."
She froze. Ruby brown eyes fell dejectedly and she seemed torn.
"Oh, y-yeah, ok..." she stuttered in confusion, "I actually don't-! I- I mean, actually I've never even ever-!"
The glass doors slammed shut before he could hear the rest of her insecure ramblings.
He surveyed his surroundings as he lit a cigarette. The courtyard was empty at this hour. It was mostly used by the younger students to study in during the day if the weather allowed. He remembered sitting at the far table, alone, studying when on more than one occasion Naruto would slam down his textbook and prattle on as if he wasn't being a giant, loud-mouthed machine built specifically to annoy him with a battery life that ran on infinite. Sakura usually followed close behind, sitting next to him at the table and rubber-necking his research material.
It was hard to tell if he thought back on these memories fondly. All he knew was that the courtyard was one of the few places he enjoyed at the Hidden Leaf currently because it became isolated at predictable times.
He registered the glass doors opening violently at the other end of the courtyard.
Sakura had pushed them open in what looked to be anger. Kiba Inuzuka followed close behind and appeared to be chasing after her as he opened the doors with just as much frustration.
Sasuke narrowed his eyes at this. He didn't know if the two of them were dating, but he didn't want to be stuck with front row tickets to a childish lovers spat. He would've ground out his cigarette prematurely and left but there was something about the way Kiba grabbed Sakura's arm to slow her down that didn't sit well with him.
He had never been close with Kiba growing up (and it looked like he had gone ahead and tattooed fangs on his face like a fucking idiot), but without knowing exactly what kind of person he was or what kind of fight they were having, Sasuke decided to stand his ground and keep an eye on them from his peripheral. Besides, he argued internally, he had gotten here first. Why should he leave just because of them?
Sakura pushed aside Kiba's arm - oddly enough, to Sasuke's immediate satisfaction - and continued seething at him with what he could tell was extremely forced control. The boy stepped back, arms in the air with mock surrender as he continued to argue back heatedly in his defense.
There was something about Sakura's face, Sasuke noted, and the gesturing of her hands that didn't look like her anger was about petty relationship crap, if any.
I'm sorry, Kiba mouthed a few times and continued on with some kind of explanation. She calmed down with a resigning sigh and nodded. His hand touched her shoulder but he appeared to be pulling away back towards the glass doors. He was in a hurry to get somewhere. Sakura nodded again and smiled weakly, ushering him away with her hand. He said sorry again and we'll talk later, rushing back through the doors they came through.
Sakura didn't watch Kiba leave. She stared off distantly in another direction, lost in some kind of internal panic as she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her black flared trench coat and lit her own. Her eyes reflected a strange, chaotic calm – a look he was accustomed to seeing on all sharingan users. A look he was familiar with.
She looked hot... almost, frustratingly so. How could she get anything done out there without getting noticed?
What is this so-called skill set of hers? Being a goddamn walking distraction? he thought sarcastically.
Sakura's long pink hair was swept up messily, revealing the sharp, but feminine bone structure of her annoyingly perfect facial features. At the very least she could have dyed that stupid strawberry garbage to give herself a more 'everyday quality'. He continued to scan her from his peripheral, also noticing her obvious problem with her own height deficiency: her black leather boots came with sharp six inch heels that looked to be composed of metal. She would die trying to run in those.
What business did she have out there? Really?
Sasuke rolled his eyes but kept them forward, noticing the slight turn of her head as she finally became aware of his presence through the corner of his eye.
Not very observant, he scoffed to himself.
She gazed at him only for a moment, breathing deeply on her cigarette before turning her body away.
They were far enough to quietly share the same area, but not close enough to feel the need for conversation.
But he knew her better than that.
She would be approaching him soon. He anticipated her onslaught of annoying questions; waiting for them to slice the air and break the awkward silence. This was the first time since his return they had been alone together and any minute now she'd bombard him the same way Naruto had, asking where he'd been and why he came back. Fuck. And why he had freaked out at her sharingon the way he did. He needed a better explanation or else she'd probably start crying right then and there in the middle of the courtyard.
The sound of grinding metal broke him from his thoughts as Sakura finished off her smoke with an elegant slide of her heel. Putting her hands into the pockets of her waistcoat, she headed back inside.
Without a single question.
Without a second look.
Author's note: Again, sorry for appalling spelling/grammar. I have NO business out here sometimes. Thanks so much for all the great feedback! I intended to have this chapter out a lot faster but things at work exploded and it was my birthday this past weekend (I'm 27! Got a tattoo to celebrate like some sassy rebellious teenager – cause why not). Now that Sasuke's introduction is somewhat out of the way (he's still a big ol' mystery though), I can get back to writing my badass Sakura. Stay tuned!