Sakura held her head high, realising belatedly that she wasn't yet dead.
She recognised with a start that Madara's usually pristine black and white robes were half-splattered in crimson, and she drew back a step into the flames, her wide eyes taking in his image over and over to confirm it. She knew that tint, and when she glanced behind him, she saw the shards of glass through the flames – that wasn't blood on his robe, dripping off his wild mane. That was her poison, and Sakura swallowed as she felt the truth of it scorch her with pride: her aim had been true.
Sakura took in a sharp inhale of smoky air as she processed this. She guessed that her thrown glass had shattered against a nearby tree and backsplashed Madara rather than a direct hit, but it was better than nothing. She pulled out a kunai in a rush, the backs of her legs and arms hot from the proximity of the rising fire that encircled the clearing. Reminding herself to focus and breathe, Sakura's wide eyes dragged over Madara again, memorising with silent pride how the poison stained him, the liquid glinting in the flickering flame light. Think of a strategy to get out of this alive, she told herself, trying not to panic.
Madara's bladed stare narrowed upon Sakura before glancing at what dripped down his side. She could feel his ire from across the smoke-filled clearing as he wiped it off his robe, flicking it from his fingers into the flames. She smiled to herself – he had failed to kill her team yet again, and now he must be feeling the damage from her improvised single-use weapon.
He was not amused, and there was a murderous glint in his metallic eyes as he looked back over to Sakura. "Chakra-infused chemical weapons? You are desperate." Sakura stepped back as his mocking voice reverberated through the clearing, her heartbeat rising into a panicked tempo. "I had thought you pathetic before, but this is just boring. Haven't you something better in your arsenal, woman?"
Bile rose in Sakura's throat when she glanced backwards. The glow of victory she'd felt had begun to fade, revealing the frightening truth behind it: she was truly alone now, and directly in Madara's crosshairs. She was going to be killed.
Sakura felt the emptiness of where her team had been behind her with a sickening flip of her stomach, pressing a hand over her chest to quell her desperate heartbeat. She had always wanted to protect her team… but she had never wanted to die.
She jerked her head back to look at Madara. He had lifted a black-gloved palm, something forming in his hand, and she already knew how she would die, a repeat of when he had nearly killed her before – the black staff through her gut, with no Hundred Healings chakra left to save her this time. Sakura clenched her grip on her kunai. Damn it all… she'd gotten a hit on Madara, but what was it even worth? The stain on his side gave no semblance of being acidic, burning, or harming in any way; its remnants sunk through the robe's fabric in red-magenta like paint, and Madara appeared unbothered by it, like it was mere water.
Sakura took a defensive stance, glaring out at him with her blade readied. She would have to avoid that staff at all costs. Without her reserve of chakra to help her cheat death from lethal wounds, she had to be careful.
The flames burned higher around the clearing they stood in, the heat licking across her skin, and Sakura bit back a curse at the thought that she had very little room to dodge without hurling herself into a wall of fire. Death had never felt so imminent, and Sakura barely heard Madara's low mutter through the adrenaline roaring between her ears. "What's this?"
She didn't process his hesitation, only thinking of the additional seconds she had to make a plan for survival. Sakura readied her second kunai, feeling her fury rise in response to the fear she felt. She was no coward. She wasn't afraid of anyone, no matter their power, and she would die unafraid, fighting tooth and nail to her death. She lifted her head, her lips pulled back over a fierce grimace, her heart pounding with hate-fuelled determination.
Madara's face was shadowed behind his wild silver-white mane, the newly-formed staff gripped tightly in his hand. He was still for a moment, his arm raised where he had been readying a powerful throw. Sakura watched with disbelief as he tossed the staff aside; he glanced again at the red stain upon his side with a twitching expression, his voice louder this time, thundering across the burning clearing. "What is this?"
Sakura resecured her sweaty grip upon her kunai, thanking fate that the useless poison was at least distracting him enough to give her a few more moments to gear up for the fight. She wanted to hope it was burning him, causing pain in some way, and she paled as Madara looked back to her, the hair falling back from his face enough that she could see the lethal glint of his Rinnegan eyes locking on to her.
Advancing upon Sakura in a sudden rush, Madara seized the front of her shirt, dragging her closer with a growl. "Tell me what it is you threw at me before I torture it out of you." His breath was hot against her face even through the heated smoky air.
Sakura stabbed at Madara, her kunai clattering to the ground as he easily blocked the blade with the back of one hand. She shoved at him, but he was unmoveable, causing her to rebound against his looming form. Madara blocked the other kunai Sakura tried to sink into him with his free hand, his grip on her collar unbreakable. He didn't so much as glance at her next attempt to stab him, knocking the blade from her grip – it skittered into the wall of flames.
"Damn it!" Sakura reached up and gripped Madara's wrists, shoving and struggling and fighting his grip on her as best as she could. She cursed as her struggle only succeeded in smearing a damp patch of the red poison from his robe across her own side, and she inhaled sharply, feeling it seep quickly through her shirt where it had rubbed off. Fear knotted in her stomach as she felt how the poison was seeping through her shirt and along her waist, stinging hot like a rash down her skin.
Sakura felt her heart rate double as the stain in her side deepened. She glanced downwards as she scrabbled at her shirt and skin, trying to wipe the poison away in a panic – she inhaled sharply as her face was jerked back up by gloved fingers. She avoided Madara's tunnelling gaze in time, preventing him from striking her with genjutsu, her focus fixed on his frown.
"Now that you are finished with your pointless struggle… answer my question." She could feel his imperious command rattle through her ribcage.
"I don't know," Sakura hissed, fighting back the oncoming frustrated tears. She forced her glare to remain on the tilt of Madara's flamelit mouth. "You won't get anything out of me. I don't know what this stuff really is."
"Look at me," he growled. Towering over her, his Rinnegan eyes glinted in the reddish moonlight, singeing her skin enough that she could feel the burn in her cheeks.
With his fists full of Sakura's collar, Madara effectively trapped Sakura against him, looming intimidatingly over her. She refused to give in, her hands tightening over his wrists. She watched his lips curl into a grimace as a background process in her mind assessed her condition. Out of chakra. Out of weapons. Can't escape. She blinked, sensing his impatience ticking away silently like the fuse on a bomb. This poison stings so much… it's sunk through my skin at this point. Is it why my blood feels like it's burning? Is it some kind of heat poison? Was it mislabeled? Her stare refocused on the curve of his mouth. Was he always attractive?
Sakura's expression reset, growing blank. Where had that thought come from? She scowled at herself, this time focusing on the side of Madara's jaw, annoyed at the derailment of her thoughts. She bit out her delayed reply in a growl of her own. "You'll just stun me with your visual genjutsu, or kill me with it. I'm not stupid enough to meet your eyes. You'll never get me to do it," she promised, "I'll never look you in the eye."
"But you are stupid enough to get your own poison upon yourself." She watched his lips quirk in a mocking smirk and exhaled quickly from the strange thoughts that sparked in response, a burn creeping along her cheeks she knew wasn't from the roaring fires around them. Get ahold of yourself, Sakura. She reformed her hateful expression, though her baleful glare felt less effective aimed at his mouth than at his searing stare.
Even as she tried to right her mind, she felt it tip over, a dizziness spinning around the edges of her thoughts, a tingling she knew was unnatural heating her pulse and curling in her stomach. Whatever the stain on her side did, it was getting worse, and Sakura was losing track of the odd sensations and thoughts rising through her like steam, clouding her focus.
Sakura bit down hard on her teeth as the slick fingers of Madara's other hand followed the curve of her jaw, tilting her face upwards. She felt the vivid sting of the poison sizzling down her cheek, and now Madara was smiling a killer's smile, his teeth gleaming in the firelight. "If the dosage of the poison you got on yourself wasn't enough before, now, you will certainly find out along with me." He shook slightly with a low, mocking laugh, and Sakura shivered bodily at the sound, unable to respond. She could not rip herself from being hyper-focused on the velvet timbre of his voice rather than the words he was saying, and her words were lost as her thoughts tore at each other, a war between illogical heat and panic.
Madara paused as Sakura's conflicted green eyes flicked up his face, trailing across his features. Drawn to his stare without reason, she could only stop herself at the last moment, ripping her glare back down to the curve of his frown with a flush about her face. He could have killed her if she'd met his eyes. She wanted to punch herself awake from her frazzled state. Where was her usual razor-sharp battle sense and focus? What was going on with the foreign things she felt? Why did it feel like someone else was trying to take over her mind?
Sakura shut her eyes, not trusting herself. Doing so made her so much more aware of his tall frame against hers, the scent of him on his clothes pine and smoke and warmth, the crackling aura of his power, and she panicked again, trying desperately to wrench herself out of his grip. The fabric of Sakura's shirt collar tore open, leaving a sheaf of fabric in Madara's hand as she stumbled backwards.
Sakura caught herself from falling into the flames, righting herself and swerving to glare indecisively at Madara. He stood regarding her with annoyance, the sheaf of fabric from her collar in his hand fluttering in the smoky wind.
She willed herself to move, to take advantage of his decision to mock her rather than immediately kill her. She should fight — but she could not break out of her spell, only able to gawp at him in her state of panic. What was this poison doing to her? And why hadn't he actually tried to kill her yet? In previous battles, even a moment's hesitation on her or her team's part had earned them severe wounds at minimum.
The flames around them were rising, and something seemed to click behind Madara's dangerous eyes. "Too afraid to run, yet too afraid to fight? And it is as if you have forgotten how to speak. I don't have the patience for this."
"Then kill me," Sakura hissed back, "You've had a hundred opportunities. You know you have, yet you draw this out for what, your entertainment?" She gripped her fists, steeling her pounding heart. "Or are you more affected by that poison than you're letting on?"
Sakura took a full step backwards at the way Madara's glare flashed in response. Her back seared hot from her proximity to the rising forest fire around the clearing. "What's your true aim here, woman?"
She remained silent as Madara rumbled, "I have allowed you to continue to live only to give me the entirety of the truth. Admit it now and I may kill you quickly in turn." A new staff materialised in Madara's hand, and he gripped it decisively, taking another step towards Sakura. "However… if you continue to waste my time, you will taste what it is to suffer. I do not give second chances."
"You can ask me, you can threaten me, but my answer's still the same." Sakura rubbed at the goosebumps rashing down her arms, blaming the flames for how her entire face was scarlet. "And what do you mean, what's my true aim? It was supposed to hurt you…" She eyed Madara's side, the red having dried into a dark bloodlike colour on the fabric of his robes.
As Madara scoffed at her reply, Sakura clenched her teeth. She tried harder to ignore the increasingly powerful pull in her gut that urged her towards him, the whispers in her ears from voiceless mouths reminding her that he was attractive. Surely I'm getting these thoughts because this is the longest I've been able to look at him, she thought, knowing that she had only ever had glimpses of Madara mid-battle before. Of course he's attractive, he's an Uchiha.
This idea comforted Sakura somewhat, shifting uncomfortably where she stood in a stance confused between defensiveness and offensiveness, until a thought occurred to her that had her interrupting whatever else he'd been about to mock her about. "The poison doesn't appear to damage you whatsoever anyway. I don't even understand what it's doing to me. Why do you even want to know? Is there some kind of effect persisting through your healing abilities?"
Sakura recognised the confirmation in Madara's answering frown, and she almost laughed, gripping at her side and coughing up a lungful of smoke. So Madara hadn't tried to kill her yet because her poison was potent enough for him to feel it against his rapid cell-regeneration. He'd left her alive so far just to learn how and why, perhaps to find an antidote or a way to counter its chakra-infused effects. Even if it had little worth beyond causing mild pain… in the end, the little glass of mysterious stuff had still bought her team another day to live, and Sakura grinned hatefully as she finished, "I'm glad of it, you bastard. A present to remember me by."
Madara was briefly incredulous before his expression grew deadly. "I'll soon find out if this was a backwards sabotage or poorly-conceived little plot of yours," he thundered, "such a tactic would never have worked to kill me anyway. Don't worry…" Sakura took another fire-singed step back as he began to advance towards her. "Your death is forthcoming. I won't have mercy upon you simply because you're a woman." Madara gestured toward the shrinking clearing the two of them stood in with a deepening growl. "And not to mention… your teammates left you behind this time." His teeth flashed in the red moonlight. "Now, you will fall to me, your attempt a failure."
Sakura shivered bodily at Madara's words, her green eyes narrowed upon his face. His pupils flicked to her brightly coloured cheeks, dipping down to where the redness had spread to her bared collarbone and the pale cleavage hinting from her torn shirt.
She drew what she was sure was her final breath, intending to declare that she would fight him to her death.
In her declaration's stead, Sakura felt a thrum burning out from her stained side, a nearly irresistible compulsion overwhelming her. Surrender, her poisoned blood whispered, and she bit down on the urge, her brave words lost as true fear seized her heart and stabbed through it. Wheels turned in her head, but Sakura only felt the spinning, unable to recognise her own thoughts any longer. Now, when she beheld Madara, she felt not fear and hatred, but violent attraction.
Sakura panicked.
She broke into a run, diving into the flames in the opposite direction. She ignored the burns searing across her skin and the fire catching on her clothes, weaving through the smoke and blackened trees at a desperate speed. Her feet pounded through burning underbrush, the smoke stinging her eyes and filling her lungs. Behind her, more trees exploded with the heat and flames – a gust of wind pushed at Sakura's back as Madara set the rest of the forest afire in one powerful cloud the size of a city.
Gasping for air, Sakura tore at the still-damp part of her shirt where the poison malingered, throwing it into the fires as she dove past a crumbling vast tree. She dodged flaming branches and smouldering bits of embers, rolling through an ash-covered dead patch to avoid the wall of flame bursting again through the trees in a tsunami of fire. She covered her head as it flooded over her, leaving painful burns across all her exposed skin.
Sakura scrabbled to put out the flames clinging to her clothes – she rolled through the dirt and ash, slapping at her clothes, and let out a yelp as the earth dipped, sending her stumbling over a burrow of some kind. She dove into it, finding a suspiciously perfect round hole in the ground within its small refuge of cool ember-flecked soil.
The earth rumbled as chunks of ground broke around her in maws of rock and rising flames. Feeling how cement lined the hole, Sakura dove into it feet-first, just in time to avoid another flood of heat and fiery death rolling overhead. The burrow above her collapsed in flame as she tumbled downwards, further and further into blackness.
Sakura scrabbled against the increasingly smooth walls of the hole as she fell, tile and cement meeting her palms. With desperate clawing and kicking, she managed to slow her fall, her half-melted sandal soles scraping against the tiles' grooved textures. Every scrape of her burnt skin against the rough sides was agony, tearing at her flesh, but Sakura bit down hard on her teeth, knowing she couldn't let her voice carry out from the unexpected godsend that was this vertical tunnel.
She fell in a pile of limbs and shallow breaths against a cold floor, completely immersed in darkness. Sakura covered her mouth with both hands, coughing, her lungs raw from the smoke and ash she had breathed in. She only allowed herself a moment to heave in the stale, cold air of wherever she had landed before she forced herself to her feet, leaning heavily against a nearby wall, her swollen palm brushing over its surface and finding it textured in the same diamond-patterned grooves as the cement-lined hole above her. She nodded to herself, understanding from the little echoes of her movements that this was a kind of hallway, and she let out a ragged exhale of relief: never had she been so happy to encounter one of Orochimaru's hideouts.
Onwards, she pushed herself, dragging herself along the freezing cold wall, ignoring the flaring pain in her arms and neck in favour of commanding her aching legs to go further. Madara was no fool; he would easily find her should she give up her escape so soon. She was not far enough away. She had to keep going, to persist through the pain. Deeper into this hideout was her one chance to get away, and she hoped Orochimaru hadn't left any active traps behind.
Though her skin rashed in goosebumps from the extreme ambient temperature change, the cold subterranean air was a relief on her burns. It kept her mind off the pain enough to urge herself deeper into the darkness, half-jogging and half-limping blindly forwards, recognising from the slight curving and turning of the wall she followed that she was leading her way through a very long and complex passageway of some kind.
The cold also seemed to clear Sakura's head just enough that a healthy dose of fear kept her pushing forwards, away from the carnage above and behind her rather than deeper into it. The remnants of the disaster that had been that encounter with Madara was the heat still churning in Sakura's stomach, and she had to keep dodging frighteningly potent thoughts that emerged from that smouldering, such as turn back… get closer… surrender, running on repeat no matter her efforts. Damn it all, she would ignore every suggestion her mind wrought at this rate or she would end up dead. The only thing Sakura trusted herself in doing while under the influence of this poison was self-healing once she got the chance.
Sakura paused as her supportive wall became a corner. Recognising through the blinding blackness that she was at crossing of hallways, she stood perfectly still, listening.
Silence heavier than a blanket of winter's snow surrounded her. It was the immaculate type of silence that lacked even background noise: no creaking, no whispering of air flow – just nothingness, absolute and eerie. With a pounding returning to her heart, Sakura decided to push forwards still, not trusting herself to avoid getting completely lost should she choose too complex a direction through what she knew must be a large and complicated layout of halls and rooms.
Feeling deep enough in the passageway to risk slowing down, Sakura ignited her palms with the spring-green of her healing chakra, slumping against the cool wall and running her hands over the burns on her face first. She closed her eyes, exhaling with the comforting knitting of her healing, the blistering skin mending and cooling; she felt a resentful gratefulness that she had enough chakra saved up to heal her wounds. She'd managed to avoid third-degree burns, though the wraps around her calves had burned off, and embers had eaten holes where the fabric of her joggers and already ruined shirt were scorched, flecked with gray bits of ash.
Sakura relaxed further as she healed away the burns down her neck and then along her arms, shifting down to work on her fire-licked calves as well.
She knelt against the wall with a sigh as she completed healing herself. However, she knew she still wasn't well. Sakura grimaced as her addled thoughts looped again in the background of her mind, the powerful urge to go back landside and seek out the one she knew was still out to kill her just as worryingly strong. All that was left, then, was ridding herself of the poison – something she needed more time to accomplish.
Her skin continued to tingle where the infused poison had touched her, and she pressed a palm to the stain, trying to heal it from the surface like she had with her burns. She didn't want to have to perform an extraction; it required the kind of focus and chakra she lacked right now.
Light flickered again to life in Sakura's palms as she began to thread her chakra carefully through the stain, spreading it beneath the surface of her skin to match the shape of the large patch of red and beginning the painstaking process of extraction, her teeth gritted in a concentrated expression of determination. It didn't matter if she was exhausted and trying to process all that had already happened. She would perform the damned extraction like her life depended on it.
As she worked, Sakura's face was flushed like she was running through the forest fire still, her blood burning almost painfully through her veins. What the hell was this poison? The fresh memories of Madara's face were aglow with thoughts that she was quick to swallow back, biting down hard as each image made her pulse spike like it was preparing to attack her.
Just like a genjutsu, Sakura assured herself, the bottle did say 'chakra-infused' and 'experimental', so I'm just going to blame all these bizarre feelings about Madara on that.
Settling into a crouch, Sakura leaned back against the grooved stone wall, hunching with focus as she tried to hurry the meticulous process of pulling poison from her bloodstream. As she did so, she tried to convince her thoughts back to sanity. There are no other men in the world for me but Sasuke, Sakura told herself as her sweating palms pressed harder into her crimson-stained skin. She had absolutely no interest in Madara beyond escaping or defeating him, absolutely no interest, no matter what jutsu or poison influence I'm under.
Feeling somewhat reassured, Sakura took the moment to try and analyse her situation instead of just panicking while she coaxed the potent poison from her bloodstream. She was certain that she had gotten away at this point, though it was still of utmost urgency that she cure her acute poisoning. Orochimaru's hideouts were not only deep underground, but highly convoluted, usually consisting of many tangled tunnels, dead-ends, and vacuous rooms. Even if Madara had had an intimate knowledge of the upper landscape before, he had decimated it now, rendering previous terrain knowledge useless – wiping away the location of that exit tunnel.
Sakura nodded to herself. She'd done well in escaping. She was grateful again that her thrown genjutsu-poison had distracted Madara enough that she'd gotten away alive. She knew that she would have been near-instantly dead at his hands without it, left to crumble into cinders in that little forest clearing.
With this in mind, she exhaled in a puff, feeling a little less guilty about her intensely heated thoughts about Madara. She could tolerate the unnatural attraction the poison had struck her with in exchange for her life and her escape… as long as she could still pull it from her system.
Sakura closed her eyes with heightened focus as she felt the poison finally begin to respond to her chakra, slowly pulling toward her palms through her veins. She tilted her head back against the stone, letting herself feel a little more soothed. She could relax.
She lifted her other hand upon recalling Madara's mocking caress down her cheek, swiping at her face and realising she'd already rubbed off what little poison he had drawn down her skin when she had rolled through dirt in the forest fire earlier.
Her brows twitched together, the return of her guilt pinching between them. What had those sensations been as she'd recognised that Madara was attractive? She didn't even know she was capable of seeing him that way. She had truly lost her mind to feel like that towards her great enemy.
In her guilt, Sakura tried to reassociate what she had thought and desired for Madara with Sasuke instead, but found that his image in her mind was thin and wavering, her history of old feelings for him paling in comparison. Her comfortable and worn images of what love is were dissipating in the tainted rushing of her blood.
This is not love. Sakura shuddered, stamping the words through the muddled warmth in her head, feeling tingles dance down her back and through her limbs. She redirected her thoughts towards what she recalled of the poison's label in a new kind of panic. What had it said again? She hadn't heard of a poison like this before in all of her medical studies. Who had made such a thing? How long would it affect her? Why was it messing with her feelings now instead of just her body?
It didn't matter. She had to extract it before it was too late. Sakura winced, the dull light around her palm flickering as she tried to maintain both her focus and remove the potion with its stain at once. She had to pull herself out of this heated mindset in case Madara found her again; it was getting worse, the intensity of her poisoned instincts deepening even without his proximity now. She could trust herself less and less the more the unshakeable physical and unexpectedly emotional desires flooded through her.
Sakura's eyes snapped open upon feeling the entire hallway shudder with her.
There was a slight hissing of sand and dust falling from above, a single second for her to look up – a vast boom shook the tall stone walls. A shockwave of power rippled through the ground and made the earth tremble once more before cracking and splitting in thousands of lines that spiderwebbed in all directions. There was a thundering groan of the world surrounding Sakura before it exploded outwards.
Shards and boulders and broken hunks of stone flew past her like shrapnel – waterfalls of falling sand and dirt collapsing, spilling through fractured earth in a flare of red-silver light. At the apex of it all descended a black-gloved fist, followed by rippling robes and two piercing metallic eyes, already spearing directly through Sakura like he had seen her through the miles of earth below.