PF

by Lazydaily

F

2. Chapter 6

"We have a C-rank mission."

Sakura whoops with joy from behind him. The Sakura-clone before him smiles sheepishly and disappears. Kakashi turns to face Sakura, where she's hanging from a tree branch. She isn't even bothering to close it around the branch. She's just sticking it there with chakra, as she wiggles her body excitedly.

She's nine now (Kakashi might be a little gun-shy about putting his apprentice into the line of fire. A little.)

Gamami is on her head, now a full toad, but no bigger than she was as a tadpole, because—

Are you gonna get big?

I'm gonna be the biggest toad in Mount Myouboku!

Then… then I won't be able to summon you anymore.

Gamami is glaring at him, but that's fine. He's not convinced she's capable of any emotion but hate.

She spits a ball of oil at him, one that's literally twice her size, and he casually deflects it with a kunai.

"You have your own forehead protector now. Why do you keep trying to steal mine?"

"It's not right that you just keep walking around like you're a real ninja," Sakura says brightly, dropping to her feet. When he does not react to her satisfaction she continues—"Even though you're not." You know, in case he missed the implication.

"M'hmm," Kakashi agrees, walking backwards, away from the forest, picking up a rock as he passes it. He tosses it into the air, and Sakura obediently swaps with it, un-transforming smoothly to land on his upturned palm.

He drops his hand in an attempt to get her to fall on her face, but unfortunately that only worked the first ten times, and she safely replaces herself with a nearby leaf, landing lightly on her feet. Gamami jumps up behind her, catching the back of Sakura's dress in her little toad hands and crawling her way up to settle on Sakura's head once again.

"Before we leave," Kakashi says, "you have to catch me."

Sakura frowns. "I do that all the time!"

Kakashi smiles. "This time, I'm not gonna go easy on you."

She takes Gamami from her head and tosses her up to a branch above her, and while she's doing that he speeds through the seals for an earth jutsu, burying all the broken leaves around him, then follows it up with a wind jutsu, blowing all leaves away from him. He wraps his clothing in his own chakra, and then smiles brightly at her when she turns back to him.

She scowls.

"That's cheating!"

It's an object lesson. Eventually, she's going to have to fight in rock, or wind, where leaves and broken blades of grass are not so plentiful.

"What, you're giving up? I guess we can go back to D-ranks…"

This isn't as good of a threat as it should be, because Sakura is really unpleasantly good at catching that damn cat.

Catch me, she likes to yell, throwing herself into his arms, and then leaving him with an armful of screaming cat.

Sakura growls, pulling out a fistful of shuriken. She throws them at him, and he signs through a katon jutsu before belching a fireball at them.

One of the shuriken squeals and vanishes.

Sakura re-appears at the edge of his patch of dirt, and he waits, eyebrow raised. "I'm not even counter-attacking," he taunts. "Is that the best you can do? Any chuunin could do this."

He does not mention the small fact that she is in fact, a genin.

As Kakashi said, he's feeling a little overprotective.

Sakura frowns at him, tapping her foot. Gamami makes her way through the trees to her, and Sakura dips her head in invitation for Gamami to jump down.

"Wait," Sakura says, jabbing a finger at him. "No peeking."

Kakashi raises his hands in surrender but does not let down his guard. He fires off a preventative wind jutsu every minute or so.

Three minutes later, and he spins on instinct, Sakura vanishing into a leaf a moment before his fist would have connected with her side. As soon as his fist is passed Sakura is back, blooming back out of the leaf, her kunai slicing up at his headband. He backs away, and his kick misses as she poofs back into a leaf.

Before she can turn back, Kakashi hits the leaf with a wind jutsu—but that does nothing but whistle past it, as it tilts and angles just right. The jutsu ends, and Sakura is back, hands dipping into her weapon pouches and flinging handfuls of leaves all around them. He jabs forward, and she is a leaf again, but she's predictable, and he grabs the leaf in his hand.

But then she's behind him, her kunai going high but catching the knot of his forehead protector, loosening it enough to fall in his eyes. This time, he catches her with an elbow before she vanishes. He fires off another wind jutsu but it doesn't do anything more than spin the leaves all around him.

She appears at his side, throwing shuriken towards him, and as he catches them, he signs through a katon jutsu to get rid of these damn leaves, and a spitball of oil catches him right in the face.

As he desperately swallows back his katon jutsu to keep from setting himself on fire, a tiny hand closes around his forehead protector, and she's gone before his elbow can connect. Gamami smiles victoriously at him from in front of him as he wipes her incredibly disgusting oil from his face.

Sakura is bent over double when he turns to her, hands on her knees, chest heaving. She's not in danger of chakra exhaustion, but the trick with the spinning leaves took a chunk of her reserves.

He body-flickers to her, takes his forehead protector, and ties it back around his head before she realizes it's missing.

She blinks at her suddenly-empty hand, and then looks up at him.

He has spent the last year and a half building her up. It was easy because she's quite talented, and it was necessary, because she's civilian-born, and never really thought she'd be a ninja. She's going to leave the village with him. Maybe this is just a standard protection mission, but anything can happen outside the village walls.

He signs through a doton jutsu, and the dirt flips back over, revealing the grass he hid. He signs through a wind jutsu, and it drags in all the leaves he had blown away. He activates Obito's Sharingan.

He threads chakra through his whole body, strengthening his muscles, sharpening his senses.

"We're going to do this again," he informs her.

Sakura backs away from him, and he can hear her heartbeat increase, smell her fear.

She tries to tag a leaf behind him with her chakra, and he slaps it away.

She blinks, and backs a little further away.

The second time, he lets her tag succeed, and blocks the chakra string.

Sakura staggers at the blowback from her failed replacement jutsu.

Finally, he lets her do the swap, and catches the leaf she is transformed into between his thumb and forefinger. He closes his hand around it before she can do any replacement, and she explodes out of the leaf to find his kunai against her neck.

She's shaking.

"Do you want to keep trying?" he asks her. Sakura may be a little monster, but she's still just a genin. There are people she just can't beat, no matter how hard she tries.

He rests the point of his kunai against her belly button when she appears behind him.

He sidesteps Gamami's oil spitball, slaps down the flurry of shuriken she throws at him from the trees, sets the point of his kunai against her throat when she expands up from one of the shuriken.

He reaches into his side pocket, and pulls out a copy of Icha Icha.

It takes her an hour to quit. He doesn't use a single jutsu.

She's staring at him, red-faced and crying, and Gamami jumps on her head to glare at him.

"Can we—can we not go?"

Kakashi looks up from his book.

"If you can't get my forehead protector," he tells her, "we can't go."

Sakura retrieves Gamami from her head to hold her cradled in her hands.

"I—I can't get it." Gamami glares at Kakashi with murder in her eyes as Sakura rubs a finger along her back.

Kakashi puts his copy of icha-icha away, and de-activates Obito's Sharingan.

"Good," he says. "You pass."

She looks up at him.

"You're a strong genin, Sakura, but you're just a genin. I'm a jounin." He walks towards her, and crouches before her. "Sakura, if you meet a jounin like me when we're on this mission, do you think you could beat them?"

She hesitates, and then shakes her head.

"What should you do, if you meet a jounin like me on this mission?"

She hesitates.

"Run?"

"And what if beating that jounin was the only way to finish the mission?"

Sakura frowns, still rubbing at Gamami's head.

"Then I guess"—Sakura sniffs—"I guess I wouldn't be able to complete it."

"That's right." He stands, and ruffles her hair until she slaps his hands away, and he has to bat away an oil spitball from Gamami. "It's important to know when to run away, Sakura. Almost no mission is worth dying for."

She looks up at him. "Almost?"

"You'll know which ones," Kakashi says.

"But not this one?" she confirms.

"Definitely not this one," Kakashi agrees with a laugh. They're going to be delivering a clothes shipment. The merchant and his two sons would be traveling with them, but rule number one of being a shinobi was not valuing the life of your client above the ryou they're paying you.

Sakura gives another sniff.

"But one day," she says. "One day I'm going to be strong enough, I don't ever have to run away."

"That's the goal," Kakashi agrees.

She nods, and Kakashi's gaze drops to the white fang hanging from a string hung loosely around her neck. He had worked his activation time of the hiraishin from three minutes to five seconds. It was better than nothing.

It still wasn't good.

The mission was a silk kimono delivery to the house of Imamura, ordered by the Shirai shipping house. The value of the cargo was valued at about thirty million ryou. If they left it behind, they'd get an earful from the treasurer, but no one else. Expensive, but expendable. If they left it and the clients behind, they'd get an earful from the Hokage and the Treasurer. Letting clients die was bad for business. But if Kakashi couldn't protect them, they had tried to pass off an S as a C, and deserved what they got, as far as everyone else was concerned.

Eight days out, two days back. Listed dangers by the client were bandits. The village's research also listed an outside danger of low-level Cloud shinobi paid by the House of Imamura. They were close to the border, and liked to order missions from both sides, trying to get the best deal. Nothing too concerning, but they could decide that they didn't want to pay the cost of the kimonos. That amount of money could hire a team of genin with a jounin instructor for four days, but only if they hid the fact the Shirais were hiring Konoha ninja of their own. On possible contact with Cloud nin, their instructions were to make diplomatic noises and inform the Cloud ninja they were being underpaid. If that didn't work, take the clients and flee. If that didn't work, leave the clients to die. See: passing an S rank off as a C. If that didn't work, Konoha had bigger problems, because Cloud has a jounin who could take out Konoha's fourth strongest jounin without leaving him an out to escape.

It was all fine print, and hopefully wouldn't come up. The order of the day was boring-ass C mission, which makes Tora look like a riveting afternoon.

Kakashi arrives at the mission starting point two hours late, because he's got a reputation to uphold. Sakura is already there, Gamami perched on her head (he's not convinced she ever sends that toad home), bellowing at the client about how it isn't her fault that Kakashi is the worst, and a fake ninja, and super gross. Also—

"You're gross! I hate you! You're not worth the money! Why are you so mean!"

Kakashi body-flickers behind her, and bops her on the back of the head with his copy of The Adventures of the Pirate Ninja, Volume 59. "Don't be rude to the clients," he says.

"They were rude first! They said I was just a little girl playing ninja and I'm—"

The older, and apparently less intelligent son interrupts her, saying "Come on, you really expect us to—"

He shuts up when his head jerks back from Sakura's hand in his hair as she perches on his shoulders. "Say it again," she hisses. "Come on—say it again."

Gamami snaps out her tongue as she falls, and catches on the hilts of one of Sakura's kunai to rocket her back over to Sakura, just in time for her to be sent spinning into the air as Sakura re-appears in front of Kakashi. Gamami hits the Konoha gate with a grumble and then leaps back towards Sakura.

"What the hell!" the stupid son declares, pointing at Sakura, who catches Gamami when she misses Sakura by about a foot before tossing Gamami up to her head. He looks expectantly at Kakashi. Hm, funny that now that Kakashi's the superior of someone he wants punished, he's treating Kakashi as a reasonable authority figure.

"Sakura, don't antagonize the clients, it's rude," he repeats, bopping her on the back of the head again.

Sakura grumbles and tries and fails to steal his book in retribution.

"And Kentarou," he says to the idiot, "word to the wise. Don't antagonize your protection detail. If they leave you to die, all they get is a reprimand."

That shuts him up real quick.

The father bows to Kakashi, grabbing the back of his son's head, and forcing him into a bow as well.

And with that incredibly smooth first meeting, they set off, both of them riding on the top of the caravan, Kakashi facing forward and Sakura facing back. As they set off, Kakashi summons his ninken and has them comb the area at a distance of about fifty feet. He'd like a nice, smooth first mission.

It's not a secret that he can summon ninken, but Sakura won't be able to summon anything but a newborn puppy for another two years, so he'd rather not remind her that he promised to add her to his contract.

"Gamami saw that!" Sakura bellows despite the fact they are five feet apart, if that. "When are you going to let me summon them?"

What was it adults always said to him when he was a kid, and he hated so much?

Oh, right.

"When you're older!" he shouts back. He feels like there was a second part. Oh— "And more responsible!"

He feels that refreshing wave of killing intent, and sighs with the satisfaction of a job well done.

He glances back over his shoulder, and finds Sakura humming while rocking back and forth, a line of pale pink circling her body as she fires tiny chakra flares out of each of her tenketsu in rapid succession. Really. Kakashi's pretty sure he deserved a lazier student.

On her head, Gamami glares at him with the fury of a thousand suns.

He wiggles his fingers at her in greeting and she belts an oil spitball three times her size at his head. He deflects it to the ground in front of the stupid son, and enjoys his horrified squawk when he steps in it.

Kakashi turns back to the road, and then burns two hiraishin seals on either side of him. He can't let his student show him up, now, can he?

They've almost stopped for lunch before Sakura has tired of what she calls her "Pink Ribbon" technique. (It's not a technique. It doesn't do anything.) "No jutsu," he calls out to her, and gets a farting noise in return. Sakura can practice the academy three for maybe three hours before her chakra reserves start running dangerously low. (She could theoretically run chakra flares for twenty-four hours straight without running through her reserves, so he doesn't stop her from doing that.)

Nothing happens that day. They stop for lunch in a clearing, where Kakashi and Sakura eat on the top of the caravan, and the civilians eat on the ground and nothing happens. When they stop for the night, and Kakashi changes out his ninken for new ninken, he and Sakura split the night watch, and nothing happens then, either.

So continues the glorious C. AKA: A C-rank mission which is appropriately ranked. Good money for no work at all.

Also the most boring kind of mission on the face of the planet. At least Tora puts up a fight.

On the third day, as nothing at all changes and nothing at all happens, Kakashi yawns, only to get punched in the back of the head for his trouble.

"I had to make sure you didn't fall asleep," Sakura explains.

Such a kind and caring student he has.

The next time he yawns, he grabs her and tosses her off the caravan when she tries to punch him.

He was hoping this would dissuade her, but it doesn't.

In fact, it only seems to encourage her, so he resigns himself to the head punches.

She loses interest after maybe the fifth time she punches him in the head and receives no response, audibly huffing as she settles back into her spot on the back of the caravan.

On the fourth day they see their first cherry blossom tree, and Kakashi cheerfully points out to Sakura, "Look, it's you!"

Fun fact:

It's just as fun to get a nine-year-old to release killing intent towards you as it is to get a seven-year-old to do it. The things Sakura's teaching him. Truly, he's growing as a person.

And it's then that his dogs detect a group of bandits approaching the caravan from seven o'clock (Sakura's half of the caravan). Seven of them, four standard civilian level, and three genin level. Without moving his head, he confirms the position of the civilians: the father (Ryouta) and older son (Kentarou) are out front, the younger son (Saburou) is off to the side at about 2 o'clock. The civilians are safe.

Kakashi signals for his dogs to stay out of the fight and settles into wait. And by that, Kakashi means that he yawns, settles his head into his left hand while activating Obito's Sharingan, and works chakra through his stiff muscles with a roll of his shoulders.

"Bandits!" Sakura cries out, just a bit before they're visible through the trees. Not a great start. The civilians start running, and although they were safe at the front of the caravan, Kentarou has run back—straight into the path of the oncoming bandits.

Sakura doesn't wait for orders. He would rate that as… medium. He turns once she's jumped off the caravan, and watches her kick Kentarou back to the front of it. Before Kentarou has hit the ground, she has engaged the first of the bandits. She meets him head on as Gamami crashes into the tree above her, raining cherry blossom petals down all around them.

She doesn't bother to dodge the bandit's first swing, and it goes clean through her, dispelling her clone and leaving nothing but a cherry blossom fluttering in her wake.

She reappears behind him, drives her kunai into the back of his knee and then disperses when he flails in agony.

The remaining bandits have all caught up, and are glancing suspiciously at the cherry blossom leaves falling all around them.

She starts with the bandit furthest to the back, driving a fist into his solar plexus and then driving a kunai into his thigh. The bandits spin at the sound of their teammate's agonized cry, and find her waving bloody fingers at them in a girly wave.

Two of the bandits charge, their weapons passing cleanly through her, and now the bandit closest to the caravan falls, a blow to the ear and a kunai to the calf. The bandits turn towards her, but they hesitate before charging. She re-appears in the middle of them, taking out another two bandits with long slices along their thighs, leaving them on the ground and her standing in the middle of them. She waves again.

"Hi," she says, and then flicks her hands at the ground, like she's trying to get the blood off. "Gross."

Nobody notices that no blood hits the ground, and the two bandits that charge her pass through her, taking a crushing kick to the back and a knife to the thigh for their trouble.

The last bandit stands between Sakura and the caravan, and rather erroneously decides this gives him the upper hand. He spins to charge the caravan only to catch Sakura's fist to the face, and go crashing down to the ground.

Gamami shoots an oil spitball at Kakashi, and it turns momentarily into a cherry blossom petal before turning into, well, Sakura. She drops to the top of the caravan before him, and keeps her eyes focused on the scattered and groaning bandits.

"Is that all of them, Sensei?"

The one she kicked in the back takes that moment to get up and try to run, and Sakura vanishes to stab him in the leg before reappearing before Kakashi. One day, she's gonna have to learn to throw the damn things, but—

She had looked so much like his father.

"Yes, that's all of them," he says, dropping from the roof of the caravan.

"What are you going to do with them?" Sakura asks, not following him to the ground. Her eyes are on the forest around them, on the lookout for follow-up attacks, which is not actually necessary, but good practice regardless.

"I'll deal with them," Kakashi says, knocking each bandit out properly and then laying them all out by the side of the road. "You—"

He feels her switch with a petal behind him, and turns to face her as she expands out of it.

"You're going to kill them, aren't you?" she asks, voice low, so the clients won't hear. On the surface of the caravan, he can see Gamami's chakra, on lookout while Sakura stands before him.

"Yes."

"Because we have a standing order from the daimyou for bandit heads."

So she has been reading the bounty boards. "Yes."

She's silent for a moment, and Kakashi takes that moment to check in with his ninken. If there was a ninja team following them, this would be the ideal time to strike.

He gets an all clear back from the whole pack.

"They would have killed the Shirais if we hadn't been here, right?"

Bandits generally did worse than kill you, and if Kakashi recognizes the faces of these bandits, then they're worse than most, but Kakashi just nods.

"I—" The hand holding Sakura's still-bloody kunai shakes. "I'll do it, I should have just done it before."

Kakashi sets his hand on her shoulder, and she looks up at him.

"Go back to the caravan, Sakura."

Slowly, she nods.

Gamami fires off an oil spitball, and Sakura vanishes. He resists the urge to make a face at the oil spitball that replaces her.

From the top of the caravan, he hears Sakura ushering the civilians to the other side of it. Saburou doesn't understand, but his father and older brother do and they keep him out of sight.

Kakashi makes quick work of it, sealing away the heads for delivery at the House of Imamura, then using a quick doton jutsu to dispose of the bodies. He Hiraishins back to the top of the caravan, and signals for the caravan to move forward.

The silence between him and Sakura is heavy, but he doesn't break it.

Finally, she speaks.

"I like these flower petals," she says. He resists the urge to make a jab about her name. He gives her a quick glance over his shoulder, and finds her staring down at her palm, a small pile of cherry blossom petals cradled there. "I think I like them better than leaves." She glances back at him, Gamami scanning the area around them while she is distracted. "Is there… a way for me to fight with them? All the time?"

His father was particular about his leaves. He liked to use only leaves from the tree that grew at the center of the compound he built for the clan he thought he'd build. Twenty years of tending that tree with his own chakra infused his chakra into the petals, negating the need for him to tag them. The tree died when Kakashi was four, but his father used those leaves until the day he died.

(The day that the tree died was the first time Kakashi saw his father cry.)

"I have some ideas," Kakashi said, trying to recall where his father had kept the scroll he had written for the jutsu.

Sakura lifts her palm to her lips, and blows the flower petals out into the wind.

"Thanks," she says, voice still strained, a little too quiet. "I'd like that."

That night, after deploying his whole pack, and trading watches with Sakura, he marks the tree behind him and takes the Hiraishin back to his apartment. As he goes through his father's things, he wonders what the stupidest, and most ridiculous thing Minato ever used his S-class jutsu on was. He bets he used it to kiss Kushina good night when they were out on missions.

In a Hatake-blood seal he's never opened before, he finds five scrolls. One for each of the academy three (probably the most detailed treatise on the subject ever written). One for the Hidden in the Leaves technique. One for the White Light Chakra Sabre.

He looks down at all of them, and spends a moment being ashamed of himself. He had remembered he was Minato's heir, but he had forgotten he was also his father's. These techniques aren't really for him, but he never even bothered to learn them properly. He sighs and then gets over himself.

Sakura is waiting alone in potentially hostile land. He can have a pity party later.

The scroll he wants is the Hidden in the Leaves technique. He takes it and re-seals the others before returning to their campsite, only to find Sakura leaning over where he vanished, leaves falling all around them, eyes wide and bright and scared.

Kakashi really is just—the worst.

"I'm here," he says.

Her eyes snap to him, and her kai rips through the clearing like a physical thing, waking their clients. She does it twice more, just to be sure, and Saburou makes a sound not unlike a newborn faun. She then double-checks with her hand before sinking back to the ground with a sigh.

She doesn't even yell or scowl at him.

"I found a scroll for you," he says, to mollify her.

She turns to him, and it takes her a moment to register his words before her face lights up. Gamami, of course, does not allow herself to be distracted. She glares him with all the hate in Mount Myouboku, which doesn't sound like much—but now that he's met Gamami, he's starting to think that Mount Myouboku has a really unjustly squeaky clean reputation. He lets her get him with one of her oil spitballs, and then immediately regrets it.

Nothing he has ever done deserved this.

"Show me show me," she whisper-yells at him, as Gamami turns her attention back to the dark woods around them.

"You're on watch," he says to her.

She scowls at him, and that's more like it. She looks at him, looks at the scroll in his hand, and he can see her weighing how badly it would reflect on her as a ninja to try and steal a scroll from him during a mission. He sees her good sense win out, and she vanishes to reappear on the other side of the fire, to glare morosely at the dark. Gamami, with one final glare, accompanied by a my-eyes-are-on-you gesture, hops over to Sakura and settles on her hair. Sakura doesn't even wince anymore when Gamami grabs a handful of her hair to crawl her way up.

Kakashi settles back against the tree behind him, and he opens the scroll. He can't help but laugh at its length. He'd forgotten what his father had been like.

It isn't so bad to remember.

Sakura and Kakashi sit alone in a rather distressingly lavish room. To Sakura's right is a rather massive box of cherry blossoms. He'd told her they'd need some for the jutsu, and she'd just asked one of the lower nobles of the House of Imamura for some. The result:

This box.

Either Sakura was just that cute, ninjas were just that scary, or Sakura and Kakashi had made them just that much money.

One of those.

They got to the House of Imamura this morning with no further incident. Thirty million ryou safely changed hands, and the merchants working for the House of Imamura looked altogether too pleased with themselves, so Kakashi's pretty sure his clients just got ripped off.

Thankfully, they didn't pay him to stop that, just to keep them from getting killed. That job would have been way harder.

He hands Sakura the scroll, and laughs as she unrolls it all over the floor. She looks down at it with a faint sort of disbelief before she starts working her way through it. When she finishes it, she looks back up at him.

"This is the technique you promised to teach me."

She re-rolls it very carefully, and then sets it down between them.

"It is."

"I know most of it already. Or—I thought I did."

I mean.

Kakashi had also thought that.

He doesn't say that, though.

"This is one of the last pieces."

Sakura blinks.

"One of the last pieces?"

Kakashi just smiles enigmatically.

Slowly, she grins, wide and toothy. Gamami scowls from where she sits on the side table. She's a little bigger than before, probably to match Sakura's increased reserves. She also has a knife.

She's eyeing Kakashi in a very concerning way, her tiny hands kneading her knife.

Instead of going for his jugular, which she's been eyeing for the last five minutes, she sheathes her knife, swallows it, even though it's longer than she is, and leaps onto Sakura's head.

"You've gotten bigger," Sakura giggles as Gamami collides with her skull. She doesn't mention the knife. Kakashi feels like he would mention the knife. Then, looking at Kakashi, she says, "So… what do I do?"

Kakashi taps the secrecy seal he has taped to the wall, checking it's still functioning, and does his best enigmatic teacher smile.

"I don't know, Sakura. That's not my technique. What do you do?"

Sakura will never fight like he does. She'll need to learn techniques he doesn't know, and be better at them then he'll ever be.

This is a good place to start.

Sakura swallows.

"First, first I make an"—she pauses, stumbles over the new word—"an exemplar."

Kakashi keeps Obito's Sharingan covered, because although Imamura is allied territory, they also like to employ Cloud nin. He can't afford to spend the chakra that using Obito's Sharingan would requires.

She looks up at him, and he shrugs. Her face crinkles with a scowl for the barest hint of a moment before she nods to herself.

"Okay."

She leans over her box of cherry blossoms, and then carefully extracts one that is almost perfectly preserved. She cradles it in one hand and covers it with the other. She closes her eyes, and he's sure that if he was using his Sharingan he would see them glow with chakra.

Her hands start to smoke and she jerks in surprise. She opens her hand, and the cherry blossom she finds there is charred and ruined.

"Too much," Gamami says from her head, voice softer than he's ever heard it. "Pick me up, Sakura." Sakura picks her up, and Gamami remains completely still.

"You're filled with natural energy," Sakura whispers. "Are you okay?"

"Toads do this, and even if I screw up, I'll just go home," Gamami says.

"Gamami," Sakura whines.

"I'll be fine," Gamami says, voice hard.

After a moment, Sakura nods, and sets Gamami on the ground before her.

"Plants," Gamami says from where she sits frozen before Sakura, "they aren't like people. They can only have a little bit of chakra."

"I didn't put much in," Sakura says. "Not even half of what I have in my pinky."

"It's like your hair," Gamami says. "Think of it like your hair."

Sakura blinks, and her hair seems to buzz for a moment, lifting just a little from her scalp.

"Oh," she says softly. "I didn't know I had any in my hair."

"Humans," Gamami scoffs softly, and Sakura giggles.

Sakura pulls a strand out of her hair without hesitation, and holds it in front of her.

"It's losing its chakra," she says.

"The flowers will, too. They're dead now, just like your hair. You need to use your chakra to keep them alive."

Sakura nods, and clasps her hair between her hands.

Black smoke trickles out from between them, and Sakura frowns before pulling out another strand of her hair.

It takes her another three tries, before Gamami says "Like that," from where she sits like a statue before Sakura.

Sakura must have the same thought, because she presses a finger to Gamami to make sure she hasn't turned to stone.

She opens her hand and looks at the strand of her pink hair she finds there. She blows at it experimentally, and it goes directly into Kakashi's face.

She makes a face and giggles.

"Hidden in the Hair is actually kinda gross."

Gamami giggles back. "I like the cherry blossoms."

"Heheh," Sakura says, grinning, and Gamami grins back.

Sakura takes out a cherry blossom, and clasps it between her hands. A moment later, she opens her hand, and what lies there is like an artist's rendition of what a cherry blossom is, just a little too healthy, colors just a little too vibrant.

Exemplar, indeed.

"Oh no," Sakura says. "The actual first step was to make a contract."

She looks down at her beautiful little cherry blossom, then at Gamami, and then at Kakashi. Kakashi fails to resist the urge to snicker.

"You knew!"

He did. He's been copying people's jutsus for a long time. He knows how to read a scroll.

He draws a scroll out from behind his back and lays it out before her. It is about half filled with a storage seal, and about half empty.

Sakura tries to put down the cherry blossom, but it noticeably loses color when it loses contact with her skin, and she picks it back up. She looks between the cherry blossom and the contract, and then bites her lip.

If he had been teaching her, he would have said—just let it die and make a new one after you make your contract—but he isn't. He rests his chin on his hand and flips out his book, but doesn't even bother reading the words.

"Give it to me," Gamami says, when Sakura continues to waffle.

Sakura does so without an instant of hesitation, placing it before Gamami.

Sakura's mouth falls open as she feels… whatever it is Gamami is doing to her flower. He can feel something happening with his fairly pathetic chakra sense, but not much more than that.

"You can let it go now," Gamami says.

Sakura does, and the cherry blossom tips over, but doesn't lose any of its vaguely unsettling lustrousness.

"If natural energy is so useful for everything why doesn't anyone let me use it," she hisses at no one in particular.

"Because it kills people," Kakashi says, prepared to nip that idea straight in the bud.

"Gamami's using it—"

"Gamami can't die. You can."

Sakura turns to Gamami for support, and, much to Gamami's obvious dismay, she finds herself agreeing with Kakashi.

"If you need it, I can mould it for you," she says.

"Aww," Sakura says, and rubs Gamami's comically tiny head.

Gamami endures this for maybe ten seconds before saying—"Make your contract, it won't last forever."

Sakura turns to her contract, and then looks at Kakashi beseechingly.

"Blood ink?" she asks.

Kakashi unseals some ink, and places it in front of her.

"One or two drops should be sufficient."

Sakura does so. Then she rolls out the Hidden in the Leaves scroll out on one side of her, and carefully copies out the seal, a rectangular border that takes up most of the empty space, replacing the Konoha insignias with the kanji for cherry blossom. When she is done, the scroll now has a rectangular, dense seal array with a small empty area in the middle, then an empty column, and then the storage seal.

Sakura looks over her work, checking back and forth with her new summoning contract and the copy in the Hidden in the Leaves scroll. When she's satisfied, she then, very carefully, very diligently, draws a horrible, terrible picture of a cherry blossom.

She looks at it, nods like she has produced the greatest work of art in the world, and then moves Gamami so she can view both the Hidden in the Leaves scroll and her new summoning scroll.

"I think that's all right," Sakura says. "What do you think, Gamami?"

"It looks right," Gamami says, kindly not commenting on Sakura's horrible drawing ability.

Sakura sets her unnervingly vibrant cherry blossom down upon her horrible rendition of a cherry blossom, lets a single drop of her blood fall on the flower and another fall upon the seal array, and then clasps her hands together.

The sharp, acrid taste of Sakura's chakra fills the air as she closes her eyes and whispers—

"I give myself freely without duress. Let my blood bind me and bind those who would summon me. Let no lies taint us and no deceptions deceive us. My blood is yours, and your blood is mine, let us be forever—" the chakra reaches a fever pitch and Sakura's eyes snap open as her body lifts itself partially off the ground. All around her is the blue glow of her chakra, and the pink glow of what can only be nature energy. "One," she declares, and it is like a clap of thunder through the universe. In its wake, the summoning scroll before her is remade, the jagged lines of her cherry blossom picture smoothing into picture perfection, every messy character in her seal array lengthening in calligraphic beauty, and a faint pink tinge spreading over the paper.

Sakura falls back to the ground, chest heaving.

She smiles at Gamami, and then at him.

"I did it," she declares. "I did it I did it!"

He looks pointedly at the cherry blossom that still lies on the summoning scroll, and Sakura hurriedly seals it away in the storage seal.

Seem like bullshit?

Here's the procedure:

Inanimate objects can't enter contracts. Obviously. But you can. So you take an inanimate object, infuse it with your chakra and blood so that as far as the universe is concerned, it is you, and then build a summoning contract with this particular part of yourself. You then seal those objects away in a storage seal, which conveniently places them in another dimension, which is where summoning jutsu can pull things from.

Voila, you can now summon an inanimate object. Why isn't everyone part of the kunai summoning contract? Fully infusing non-organic material with chakra is like trying to fill a crater with a bucket. If anyone's ever managed it, they kept it to themselves. (Also, it's a secret Senju technique, and how his father got ahold of it is a mystery for the ages.)

If you feel like this is total bullshit, you're totally right. It was, like everything truly bullshit in the world, originally created by Senju Tobirama. Kakashi's not sure if he's comforted or not that his father didn't come up with this out of whole cloth.

Sakura giggles and bounces, looks up at him, over at Gamami, back at him, and then bounces some more.

"I did it," she says.

"Did you?" Kakashi asks, twitching his nose, like he doesn't care. "How do you know?"

Sakura scowls at him, and then bites deeply into her thumb and starts scrawling her name on the one contract line in her tiny little summoning contract. She places her bloody handprint below her name and sucks in a breath as the magic of the summoning scroll washes through her. She then looks at the Hidden in the Leaves scroll, and works her way agonizingly slowly through five signs: Boar, Ram, Tiger, Boar, Snake. She holds her hand out, and the cherry blossom appears in her hand.

She doesn't even look winded. Summoning costs are based on mass, which means… well it means she can probably summon a whole lot of cherry blossoms.

She crushes it in her fist, opens her hand, and blows the resulting petals in Kakashi's face, but before they reach him, they vanish. Sakura goes through the five signs again, holds out her hand, and there's that same cherry blossom again, like it had never been broken.

She crushes it, blows it at him again, and this time, she doesn't cancel the jutsu, and he has time to see the bizarre and incorrect way they float before all somehow settling on his face.

She smiles innocently at him, and he's known her for too damn long to trust that innocent smile. Without cancelling her summoning jutsu, she then proceeds to enter every single damn cherry blossom and cherry blossom petal in that box into her summoning contract. She infuses them, gives them to Gamami to preserve them, and chants the spell of summoning on every last one of them.

He has to stop her, halfway through, when she's on her knees and pale. The look she gives him is so pathetic that he gives in, and gives her a chakra infusion. In return, she finally recalls the cherry blossom petals that are stuck to his face.

He gives her one more infusion, when she has just one petal left, because she gives him that same damn look.

Kakashi is weak.

When she's done, all that's left of the box of cherry blossoms is that single blackened flower. The one she burned with her first attempt, sitting sad and wilted next to her.

She looks at it consideringly, and then takes it gently into her hand, careful not to handle it roughly enough to break off any of its sad, black petals. She cups it in her hands and Kakashi gives in.

He activates Obito's Sharingan, and—he watches as she rebuilds the chakra network of the damn flower. Just like she had with her own chakra network, almost a year and a half ago.

As she infuses it with the right amount of chakra, this time, the color returns, and when she opens her hand, it's like it had never been burned.

By the First's Sage-damned trees.

She gives it to Gamami, and this time, he watches as the orange natural energy in Gamami weaves itself into the flower, integrating itself into perfect balance with Sakura's chakra, holding it stable and in place.

He watches as Sakura speaks for the once-dead cherry blossom, the pink natural energy that seems to prefer her swirling around her as the summoning contract takes hold of its own, and then gets sucked up into the scroll.

She seals that last cherry blossom away into her summoning contract, and then smiles.

He turns off Obito's Sharingan and settles back on his ass.

"Gamami," Sakura says as she rolls her summoning contract closed.

"Yeah?"

"Can you move?"

Sakura pokes her with a finger, and Gamami huffs out a laugh. "Of course I can move. I told you, it's what toads do."

She jumps up onto Sakura's face, and then crawls roughly up into her hair, and Sakura giggles, patting about her head until she finds Gamami and then rubbing her tiny head.

Gamami settles her head down on Sakura's pink hair and closes her eyes.

"Gamami," Sakura says, taking her scroll in her hand and holding it up to Gamami. "Can you take this back to Mount Myouboku for me? I think it would be safer there than it would be with me."

Gamami reaches out and grabs the scroll, despite it being about two or three times bigger than her.

"Are you sure?"

"I can always get it back if I need it, right?"

"I can always take it with me, but once something enters Mount Myouboku, it's tied to us. It's not an easy bond to break," Gamami says. "Are you sure?"

Sakura hesitates, and then nods. "I'm sure."

"Okay," Gamami says. "Send me back."

After a moment, Sakura does, dismissing Gamami without moving a muscle.

"Good job," Kakashi says to her. "You did it."

Sakaura grins at him, and then promptly collapses with exhaustion.

Whoops.

They're attacked the next day. Half a day after they leave.

Kakashi has his ninken out, but it doesn't matter. They're attackers are upon them before his dogs can tell him of their approach.

Three adults with Cloud forehead protectors, all with flak jackets, which means Jounin. A dark skinned man, a dark skinned woman, and a pale woman.

If Kakashi's Bingo Book knowledge is correct (and it's never been wrong before), they're Tsumetai (of the Lightning Web), Akai (of the Drunken Fist), and Kanashii (of the Sundered Earth).

Bloodline thieves.

They're after him.

Three on one, all with flee-on-sight orders from Rock and Mist. Kill-on-sight in Konoha. He has no chance.

"Run!" he bellows, and, to Sakura's credit, she does so without a moment of hesitation, as Kakashi ducks under Tsumetai's lightning web, and leaping up when the earth shatters under Kanashii's fist. Akai is taking a swig of alcohol—which is good for him, because it means she isn't drunk yet. Obito's Sharingan spins into existence, and chakra surges through his body. The world slows down, giving him a window to slice open Tsumetai's web and deep into his right arm and dash in the opposite direction from where Sakura is running.

Which is towards the House of Imamura, which isn't safe. They could have been the ones who tipped the Cloud off to his presence. "Not there, go home!" He makes a Lightning clone to take Kanashii's punch, and a Water clone to spray electrified water all over Tsumetai, and keeps running.

Right now, he has enough space for Hiraishin. Right now, and possibly never again.

But he can still see Sakura and there's no guarantee that one of these three doesn't have a sensing ability that would let them chase her down. He needs to lead them away.

Whether it was the right choice or not, the moment is gone, because Akai is right at his side, hands wild and unpredictable, even to the sharingan.

He takes a hit to the solar plexus he thought he'd blocked and one to the chin that was aimed at his nose.

He tries to strike back at her, but she slithers as much as she moves. He gets her with a kick, but she's slowed him down enough, and all three of them are on top of him.

"Thanks for getting rid of the kid," Kanashii says as she goes straight for the kill, like she's willing to punch right through Akai, which he hadn't been expecting. Akai sways backwards, towards Kanashii but right under her fist, and he can do nothing but block it, even as it breaks one arm and bruises the other.

"It's nothing personal," Tsumetai says, voice flat, his lightning web everywhere. Kakashi's got a second, which isn't enough for a Hiraishin, but it is enough for a—

The web closes on wood, and in the corner of his eye, Kakashi can see Sakura slowing.

"Don't you dare fucking stop," he shouts, to a full ninety degrees off her position. And then, in desperation. "Get Guy, don't you remember? He can save me!"

Sakura speeds up, blasting through the forest at body-flicker speeds.

Normal clone for Akai, but she hits him through it anyways. Electric clone for Kanashii, but she doesn't even twitch, and he's running again.

"Aw, that's sad," Kanashii says, the earth shattering under her feet as she launches herself forward. He can't lose both arms so he grits his teeth and takes it with the one she's already broken, breaking two ribs in the process. He's losing chakra fast. "She's going to blame herself for this for the rest of her life."

Just his luck he's facing two fucking people whose jutsu he can't copy. (Probably not a coincidence, now that he thinks about it—no way Cloud built this team without intending to eventually steal a sharingan.)

He dives, but Akai's there, tagging him as he goes, breaking the shoulder of his good arm, slowing him down, but he dives all the same, deep into the earth. Even as she hits him, he's twisting his chakra into the shape of the Hiraishin.

He's a dead man, he can't protect Sakura here, and she's still wearing his seal around her neck, he can find her—

Three seconds—he just needs them to hesitate for three fucking seconds.

He's twisting the last pieces into place when he can feel Tsumetai blasting a lightning jutsu through the earth, and he digs as fast as he fucking can, if he had his arms he could do this, but—

The lightning charges through him and his Hiraishin misfires, the blowback knocking out whatever parts of him the lightning didn't.

He wakes to that distinct feeling of being dead inside that only chakra-suppressing cuffs can induce. Also the feeling of being lightly barbequed that only being electrocuted can induce.

He keeps his eyes closed, his breathing steady. He was top of his class of pretending-to-still-be-unconscious in Anbu academy. Sounds like a joke, but it's not. It's saved his life three times.

It doesn't work this time.

"I know you're awake," Tsumetai says.

That doesn't actually mean anything. If you have someone knocked out, it's standard procedure to say I know you're awake every couple of minutes, and any time they twitch.

He gets kicked.

Okay, that does mean something. It's actually nicer than it seems, because it's a nice, efficient way to get everyone to stop pretending.

Kakashi groans, like it was the kick that woke him up, and opens his eyes.

"Cute," Akai says from beside him.

Kakashi tries.

He starts by taking stock of his body. His broken arm, ribs, and shoulder have been healed, which is a hell of a power play, he's gotta say. Doesn't say great things about his likelihood of getting out of these cuffs.

He tests his cuffs anyways. They're made of chakra-suppressing wood, which is… concerning. It doesn't keep for that long, which might mean they've stolen a mokuton user. That would be really bad—Konoha only has the one, so it could be a whole new bloodline. Maybe a lost Senju? Outside of Tsunade, they've been dead since the war, and there's no way that Cloud could keep a secret that long. Best case scenario is Cloud has somehow stolen some cuffs recently, but even that's not great—Konoha does not make them easy to steal.

"Did you find my student?" Kakashi asks, testing the standard chakra suppression exercises. Bad news: Chakra suppression wood is as good as you can get. He's got nothing. He winces as someone new comes into the cave, light flashing off a forehead protector, and tries out Obito's Sharingan while his eyes are clenched closed. No dice.

"We didn't look," Kanashii says from where she stands by the door, taking a swig from a water bottle and offering it to him. Nice touch, but he's not desperate enough to take water from an enemy yet.

He has no way of checking the veracity of the claim, but he can at least hope it's true. Having his student would be an easy way to keep him in line, if he was able to get free, and considering they're going to kill him no matter what, it's not like it would give him that much more reason to escape. And he's probably going to get tortured and his eye cut out. At least it's him, and not a real Uchiha. All they can do to him is steal his eye—there's no bloodline limit in the Hatake blood.

In a corner of the tent, Tsumetai looks mildly irritated. "Although we should have. Leaving witnesses is bad for business."

"They've already got us in the Bingo Book as bloodline thieves, what else are they gonna do?" Kanashii finishes off her water and lets out a hearty sigh.

"They have us as bloodline thieves operating in Lightning, not Fire," Tsumetai says, taking a bite off some jerky, and then scowling about it. That means a long, secret mission. No time to hunt, and too long to bring enough real food for the journey. Considering they had attacked in Fire territory, and had approached from further into Fire territory, that means no good things.

"We claim they were in Lightning, she claims we're in Fire. Three jounin against a what, genin?" she looks at him, and Kakashi gives her his best totally mystified expression, which she scoffs at. "Konoha doesn't do that, so chuunin, I guess? Besides, they're the ones that don't want war." She holds a hand out to Tsumetai, and makes a grabby motion. "Gimme some of that."

He tosses her a hunk of jerky, and she starts gnawing on it without much more relish than her comrade.

Akai has remained silent since she woke Kakashi up, leg resting concerningly close beside him. She's flushed, but not swaying, and her eyes are focused. Might mean she's sober, which could give him a few extra seconds. They were first entered into the Bingo Book—three years ago? But they don't seem close. It's possible he can drive a wedge here. It's dirty work they're doing, and maybe he could convince one of them to go traitor.

As he thinks that, he keeps his gaze carefully on the jerky that's Kanashii's gnawing on. He's never mastered getting your stomach to rumble on command, but you can generally sell I'm starving without it.

Tsumetai seems like the worst option. Even setting aside Kakashi's personal hatred for him because of his willingness to kill Sakura just to clear out witnesses, he also seems the most okay with what they're doing.

"We're civilized people, here," he says to Kakashi. "We're not gonna torture you, we don't want your damn secrets, we're just gonna take your eye—"

"And kill him," Kanashii interrupts, scowling.

"We can't just go around leaving witnesses."

"It's bad for business," she finishes mockingly.

It's too perfect. He doesn't trust it.

Akai, then? He doesn't look at her, keeps his eyes on Kanashii, now, moving away from her jerky. Apathy is an easy cover, but it's also genuine. No one can last three years as a bloodline thief hating it, but apathy is possible. She didn't speak in the attack, and hasn't spoken since he woke (except Cute, he supposes).

She kicked him when Tsumetai claimed he was awake. If Tsumetai really did know, that was a kindness.

She didn't start drinking until the fight started. Kanashii and Tsumetai were all in from the first blow, but not her. Kakashi doesn't look at her, keeps his eyes on Kanashii, then pointedly looks away. Doesn't turn his head, just jerks his eyes a little faster than normal, back to her jerky. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a twitch in Tsumetai's face. Not a smile, but possibly the rapidly suppressed beginnings of one.

It's not a hundred percent, but it's his best guess. If he's got a wedge, it's Akai.

Now, how to use it.

"We're in Cloud," Tsumetai says, and he snaps his gaze to Tsumetai, but keeps Akai solidly in his peripheral vision. "We've already reported in that we've got you. You escape, and if you kill any of us, A's gonna go looking for concessions." His smile is unpleasant, and Kanashii's face twitches a little. Corners of the eyes, corners of the lips—a smile. Akai presses her lips together, stretching her legs a little before her. Boredom, irritation? "And you know what A can do with those."

Hizashi's loss was a damn shame, but not a catastrophe. Konoha got more than it gave, and it wanted what it got, but he grimaces anyways, because that's what a red-blooded Leaf ninja is supposed to do.

Unfortunately for them, he's got ice in his veins. Anbu freezes all that heat out of you. Heat gets people killed.

Even if he gets out, he's going to have to kill at least one of them, maybe two, but if what Tsumetai is telling him is true—and the angle of the sun is substantially more oblique than yesterday, so signs point to yes—it's critical he gets a hostage. The Hokage can probably get something to work with a hostage—Cloud's full of bastards, but they aren't Mist. They don't consign their ninja to death when they can trade them out.

Tsumetai's got the smell of a true believer, which makes him a suicide risk, which could be catastrophic, particularly if it happens after a deal has been struck. If Kanashii's in it far enough to try and trick him, then she might be in it enough to pull the same shit. Regardless, if they're lying about the torture, then they might kill themselves just to avoid getting taken in. Hot-blooded nin are bad hostages.

They've got equal bounties, so hopefully Cloud values them all equally. Outside of a chance of a Kage relative—all they know is skin and hair color, of which only Akai matches. No letters so far.

Once again, all signs point to Akai. Funny how that works. If she gets him out of this, he'd prefer to let her go and steal one of her comrades, but it looks like there's no dice on that.

Best plan of action—kill Tsumetai and Kanashii, take Akai hostage.

He runs over everything Tenzou has ever told him. If they don't have their own mokuton, these are Tenzou's cuffs. They look not exactly as he remembers them, but he's been off Anbu for too long for differences to mean anything. If these are his, then there are actual physical keys, keyed with his chakra to prevent forgery, but otherwise purely mechanical construction. Mokuton's habit of eating chakra means chakra locks are out. That's good for him, because it means if he gets his hands on the key, he can use it.

Ideally he wouldn't have to, though. Did Tenzou's cuff's have any engineered weaknesses? Nothing Tenzou's told him. Anything that made him jumpy when they had someone in cuffs? That takes him longer, and in the meantime, Tsumetai and Kanashii have started chatting. Their postures are relaxed, and they lean into each other a bit. Lovers? Maybe, and if so, they're not estranged. He hasn't seen obvious sexual interest in him from either, so it's not a great avenue, but it's something to attend to. He doesn't have a lot of control here, but he can hopefully get his mask down when they feed him and can probably screw up his clothes to show a bit more skin. It's desperate, but if it gets him out of here alive, he couldn't care less, and if he dies, who gives a shit.

He returns to Tenzou, comes up with nothing. He stretches his arms, gaze on the food on the table, but puts his focus on the underside of the cuffs. Nothing. Just a keyhole on the outside. It's not in reach, but he could toss a key into it and use the table turn it. He should tell Tenzou about that—the inside would be much harder to access, if a bit more dangerous for the jailer to get at—but he'll just be thankful for it for now.

Now, how to—

A leaf blows into the cave.

Kakashi's blood freezes in his veins. He does his best not to react, and moves to hide whatever tenseness he can't conceal.

It's a rough, jagged thing—clearly a lightning tree leaf, but there's something just a little wrong with how it floats. It's probably nothing, but if it's not—

Well, if it's not, he has two options.

Option 1: He can signal for her to run. Small chance it will convince her, given she's already here against his orders. Larger chance it'll be noticed by his captors. Bad news all around.

Option 2: He prepares for her attack. Large chance it won't be her, which means he'll make several less than optimal moves to prepare for an attack that'll never come, but on the off chance it is her, he's can improve the odds of her attack substantially.

The choice is obvious.

He finishes his stretch, leaning him towards Akai, and licks his lips a bit, gets his voice down into the croaking register. "I"—he swallows—"I was a lot thirstier than I thought. Any chance—Any chance I can get some water?" Double duty: if you get someone to do a favor for you, they'll like you better (cognitive dissonance at its finest) and it will get her away from her jar of sake, which is lying by her side.

Reasonable chance of success, given that she was willing to wake him up instead of letting him just lay there pretending to be asleep.

Akai gives him a look, one eyebrow raised, before shrugging and pushing herself to her feet.

"Why do they always like you best?" Kanashii gripes.

The part of his brain that is not in panic-because-Sakura-is-here mode sticks on that. That's a bad sign, that means he's not the first to recognize Akai as the clearly weak link in the team.

"Us bloodline limit users just have a type, clearly," Kakashi croaks a little weakly, on automatic.

Success. This puts Akai closest to the cave opening. If he can trust Sakura's performance against the bandits, she likes to make a clone on one side, and then attack the other. Her best shot is on her first victim, before they know what she's doing. This would put her on Tsumetai, who is the most dangerous as a hostage, and is currently Kakashi's most likely bet for having the keys. Unfortunately, he's also the least dangerous to her. He likes his web too much, and if Kakashi could replace out of it, Sakura could without a doubt. Kanashii's the most dangerous, because Sakura's biggest weakness is her speed and frailty, both of which Kanashii can punish. That also means she's the most likely to be able to stop Sakura's initial attack, though.

He's got a shot at directing her attack in the moment of confusion when she enters so he needs to pick—

"So," Kakashi says to Tsumetai, still croaking, "you're the one who's got the keys, right?"

If Sakura's not coming he'll need to uplevel his persona to smartass, but he was probably going to get there eventually.

Tsumetai coughs out a laugh at his insolence, but he's got a twitch of surprise from Kanashii, which is all the confirmation he'll get.

He holds Tsumetai's gaze, eyes quirked into a smile, and, sure enough—

Sakura snaps into existence in the cave entrance. A woman with long pink hair, and a cloud forehead protector displayed proudly on her forehead. (Solid points for a minimal disguise—any Leaf face could be leaked, and her own face was already out. Most ninja don't start fights in transformation, and the Cloud forehead protector should give her seconds she doesn't deserve.)

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Okay.

All gazes turn to Sakura. Kakashi follows them, and in this moment in which no one is looking at him, he signals Tsumetai, shifts his stance to dive after him when he falls.

Sakura doesn't react. "I heard you had captured Hatake Kakashi," she says, relaxed, not holding her hands up, but not holding them threateningly either.

"Who are you?" Kanashii asks, and her speaking first is bad for him. If she's the leader, then she has the keys. Which means her surprise would have been that he mistook Tsumetai for the leader. Fuck.

Sakura's still got the best chance to kill Tsumetai, even if the chance he has the keys has dropped. Kakashi just has to pray Kanashii's surprise was that he pegged Tsumetai for the keys despite his subordinate role.

"Haruno Sakura," Sakura says, opening her hand up to revealing a cherry blossom. "He killed my parents, and—" She crushes it, and then blows a stream of cherry blossom petals into the room—way more than she could have been holding. "I came to pay my respects."

The moment she gives her cover, he sets his face into it, a mild sort of disdain ninjas like to hold when someone comes after them for vengeance on a job.

"I don't know about you," Akai says, turning to look at Kakashi, and then at the bottle of sake she's half a cave away from. "But I've never heard"—Akai surges into Sakura, hand plowing straight through her, right as Sakura appears behind Tsumetai and drives her kunai into the gap between his spine and his skull—"of a Haruno Sakura."

Kakashi dives for Tsumetai, breaks open the first storage seal he comes across with Tsumetai's conveniently available blood. Nothing.

Sakura still stands above him, her hand under her kunai, catching the blood and hiding the fact that it's illusionary.

Kanashii throws a kunai through Sakura's clone, and Kakashi grabs it and tosses it through Akai's sake bottle before she can go for it. This puts Akai's focus on him but Kanashii doesn't even glance in his direction, her eyes blazing as they rove over the flower petals in front of her, all dancing, none falling. The difference there points to him being right about the dynamics of this team.

Normally, Kakashi would enjoy being right, but he's been through half of Tsumetai's storage seals without hitting the keys, which means he might have been wrong about the only damn thing that mattered.

Sakura appears behind Kanashii, just barely slips back into a flower petal before Kanashii cleaves her in half with a strike that has the cave walls shaking. Sakura is using a henge to look like an adult, which means whatever compassion Kanashii maybe had towards children is gone. Sakura makes an aborted attempt on Akai, but takes a hit for the attempt, sending her tumbling out of the cave before vanishing again.

The fact that Akai is letting him continue to go through Tsumetai's seals means nothing but bad things for him, but he doesn't stop.

This is the worst possible team setup for Sakura. She's strongest against genjutsu, fine against ninjutsu, but against straight taijutsu, she's all but helpless.

They've hit a standstill. Sakura is smart enough not to try the same thing twice. He showed her what Jounin-level taijutsu could do to her, and she's seen two examples in her adversaries.

He gets through the last of Tsumetai's seals and all of his pockets, and he's shit out of luck. Kanashii is wearing skin tight clothes, not a pocket in sight, nothing to pickpocket while she's distracted.

Tsumetai knew he was awake, which means there's a solid chance he was the sensor on the team. That means that Sakura might just be able to get away if she runs.

That's bad for him, but—

Kanashii twists her hands through a jutsu, has to be something to clear the cherry blossoms, he knows what it is what is it—

"Fire!" he shouts, and oil shoots at Kanashii from the ceiling. A moment later, Akai has slammed into the roof, and Kakashi feels the wave of chakra that is a summon unsummoning through death. She'll be fine, by the bullshit of the summoning jutsu—it's them they need to worry about.

Kanashii doesn't stop her Katon jutsu in time and Kakashi raises his hands to his face just before the explosion tears through the cave.

Sakura doesn't let the moment go the waste, and appears before Kanashii, driving her kunai up through her chin. She doesn't get away soon enough, though, and receives a fist to the side for her trouble, and Kakashi can hear her bones break. She's gone before Kanashii's fist crashes down into the place she's fallen. Kanashii drags the bloody kunai from her chin, skin glowing green because fucking. Fuck.

Sakura appears behind her, and Kanashii's fist cleaves her straight in half. Akai tumbles down from the ceiling, dazed by the explosion, and Kakashi makes sure to be there so that she lands on a nice hard surface. Her head cracks against his cuffs and cracks his cuffs against his non-chakra-reinforced legs, which hurts like a motherfucker, but then he grabs her from behind, and keeps solid pressure on her carotid artery to put her under without killing her. Before him, Kanashii is swinging wildly at clones, while taking kunai to her neck and back for her trouble, but the green swirl of her chakra isn't abating. Kakashi gets the feeling this is what fighting Tsunade feels like, and he does not enjoy the feeling. Thankfully, she isn't enough in control of her faculties to realize she should be targeting him, too blazingly focused on Sakura.

"Come out you little shit," she bellows. "I will rip you limb—"

She dispels a Sakura clone with an elbow, and takes a kunai to the back, which she tears out and flings at one of the petals.

She then starts snatching the petals one by one out of the air.

They have a minute, maybe less.

Come on come on how does he get out of this, he can't reach her, Sakura can't transform, but—

(Part of him remembers when Sakura damn near ripped his Icha-Icha out of the storage seal in his pants.)

"Sakura, kai!"

A kai rips through him, and it is a physically painful thing. With all of his chakra locked inside of his body, none of it can respond to the assault.

Kanashii staggers, eyes blinking, but it's not enough. The seals in the cave hold.

But Sakura has never been one to do things halfway, so she just keeps on doing it over and over until, finally—

Every seal in the cave breaks open. His ears pop as the pressure changes, the storage seals on Kanashii's upper arms and lower arms pour onto the ground.

Kanashii turns to him, as if she's just realized he was there, and suddenly Kakashi is out of the cave and tumbling to the ground. Kanashii roars from inside the cave, flying out towards him with murder in her eyes, and then Kakashi is back inside of it. And there, on the mess on the ground, is a wooden key. He scrambles for it as fast he can as he hears Kanashii crash through the trees. He tosses it into the air, catches it in the lock—Kanashii hits the ground, is speeding towards them—slams the key into the table, and turns.

He drives a chidori through Kanashii's heart the moment she passes back into the cave. He follows her down, charges a chidori in his left hand, and drives that through her skull. She stops moving, but her wounds do not stop glowing green. First's Fucking Trees, what the fuck. "Sakura," he yells, "cut off her head!"

Sakura is expanding from a pebble by his side a moment later, body shaking and pale, clear signs of oncoming chakra exhaustion, but she does as she's told, hacking through Kanashii's neck until Kakashi can take her head and pitch it as far away as he can. The cavity where her heart used to be is still glowing faintly green, which means a) Cloud's got some fucking monsters of their own and b) he's still under a time limit. He body-flickers back into the cave and has a moment of hesitation when he looks down at the chakra restraints. If he puts them on Kanashii, he could probably kill her.

If she catches up to him, he's fucked. However, the fewer of A's shinobi they kill, the better bargaining position they've got. He can't take her as a hostage, putting the cuffs on her would kill her, and if she wakes up, he's not convinced he can fight her off with only a third of his chakra left, while protecting Sakura and Akai.

There was no reason for her to have held back when they were chasing him, which means—

He's faster than she is.

Decision made, he sweeps up the six scrolls scattered across the floor of the cave, seals them away into the now-empty storage seals in his pants, slaps the chakra restraints on Akai, who he hopes to the Sage is still breathing, and tosses her over his shoulder. He gives the cave one last once-over. He was obviously here, nothing can hide that, but he's not missing anything. He body-flickers back out, catches Sakura as she crumples to the ground, and dashes South.