To Build a Home
Chapter One
Stolen
"Shishou, how can you do this to me?" Sakura growled, her fist pressing to the side of her thigh, trying to reign in the impulse to smash the Hokage's desk in two that trembled through it.
Tsunade sat still behind her desk, her arms crossed under her chest, as two hazel eyes watched her back, harsh, harsher than Sakura had ever felt them because they spelled doom and, most of all, because they never wavered while they did it.
"There was little choice on my part, Sakura. The Heads of Clan are too many, my vote is drowned in the Council."
"You're Hokage, you can just tell them to fuck off!"
"No, I cannot. I may be Hokage but this isn't a tyranny, not after the Fourth War." Tsunade answered, voice stark, her temper still contained tightly under her skin. Her head slumped against her hands, a long pained sigh trembling past her lips. "I tried, Sakura, I really did, but there are some things even I can't fight."
Sakura's rage wavered at those words. When Tsunade lifted her eyes back to hers, the bitter harshness of before was only a cracking layer above the anguished look that loomed in her expression. Cold claws clamped around Sakura's chest and squeezed, the helplessness of those hazel eyes tearing through the last thread of her will to fight back.
This was Senju Tsunade, the Gondaime Hokage, the Slug Princess, her shishou, and never had Sakura seen helplessness in her eyes.
Any glimmer of hope faded away under the dark wave that crashed into her, as solid and unmovable as the certainty that helplessness. If Tsunade's unyielding will couldn't fight it, no one could.
Sakura took one small vacillating step towards the desk and it was only by pure luck that she didn't crumble into ash halfway through. Her fists rested on its cool surface, the touch of wood nothing but a whisper against her awareness, barely enough to support the shape of her cracking pieces and the last cord of sanity in her head.
Everything was spinning, the floor under her, her thoughts, her collapsing heart and her collapsing future. Her eyes closed as she tried to breathe through the vertigo but her lungs were only dark lead, caving into themselves, with no space for the air she desperately needed.
"Why did it have to be me, then…?" Her words were a silent rasp rising from her drowned chest. "There are women that wouldn't mind, but I have everything I ever worked for right in front of me… everything… and now the village is just going to rip it away? I'm the second best medic in Konoha and the second best kunoichi. Why me…?"
There was no arrogance in her words. Sakura had fought with all her strength for the ninja she was today, had fought through her silliness and her pettiness, had fought against the weakness in every one of her cells. The past decade of her life had been given to make her into who she was today and Sakura knew her worth now, she knew it because she had built it with her own flesh and blood. She was proud of it, proud that she could be useful to her village as a medic and a shinobi.
But it wasn't enough. It was never enough…
Was she never enough?
Sakura could already feel the insecurities lapping at the edge of her, voraciously waiting for a crack from where they could slither in and poison her as they had done before, ravaged her into the shallow shell of a lovesick teenage girl.
"No one is taking them from you, Sakura, you'll still work as the Head Medic of the Hospital and be on the mission roster."
And yet any power over her own life had been taken away with a simple order from the Council.
"As for why you, the Council wants to revive a clan, not build a factory of babies. The base of a clan is a family, you're the best option for that family. No one would bear that brat," Tsunade pointed with a flick of her head as her lips twisted in a sneer. "and you've already handled him for ten years… Now, if Guy was a woman…"
"Hokage-sama, please, this has traumatised me enough, no need to bring Guy into the mixture."
At the sound of Kakashi's drawled laidback voice, Sakura's fingers twitched, her knuckles white, nails biting into the skin of her palm. Whatever had smothered her before was supplanted by boiling rage, so incredibly acrid it burned like bile at the back of her throat.
The man had the nerve to take this as if it were a joke. Her life was being stolen away from her. The future she had fought for, a future full in strength, usefulness and ambition, and suddenly it was ripped away from her before she could even experience it.
Her body, the one she had honed and learnt to master since a little girl, perfected into a weapon of destruction with sacrifice and pain, was about to be thrown into the shredder of a baby-making factory.
Worst of all, her choice was gone, her freedom, her ownership over herself. Sakura was nothing but a puppet the Council could manipulate to their wishes.
And, of course, Hatake Kakashi was making jokes.
"Maybe if I kill you, then I won't be forced to marry you." Sakura growled over her shoulder.
His eyes crinkled in an infuriating smile. "You sound like a married woman already, Sakura."
She swirled around, her fist pulled back, ready to strike that infuriating face of his beyond the gates of the village, all the way to Kumo. Before she could break the distance, Tsunade held her elbow with her monstrous strength. Sakura twisted around in her locking hold, grunts tearing through her throat, curses thrown into the air, as she thrashed under her shishou's hold.
Sakura needed to break something or else she would break herself.
"This is disgusting. You do know how babies are made, don't you, Sensei? It's… It's…" Her voice failed, her throat tightened and she couldn't choke the word out, the terrifying word that she didn't want to acknowledge. "…rape."
Sakura fixed her gaze on the ground as the crude word weighed over the air of the Hokage office. Tsunade had backed away from her, the absence giving place to a cold breeze that made a shiver run down the length of her spine.
"Sakura," Kakashi called, his voice had the commanding bluntness she knew so well from his days as her teacher and team leader, but then it softened, almost sad. "we both know I'd never do that to you."
Sakura knew that. Kakashi had always protected her, saved her life so many times when she had been nothing but a useless, weak, shallow little girl. He had even saved her life when Sasuke had tried to kill her, when for a flicker of a moment there had been no hope and all Sakura had seen was the image of a chidori ripping through her heart and her dead body cold on the floor. Killed by the boy she had loved. Even in her stupid, immature recklessness, her sensei had protected her and now Sakura was accusing him of such a disgusting, violating thing.
It was so much worse than a fist and at least that she could heal, this vicious word slashed where her chakra couldn't reach and that was why she had said it.
Sakura lifted her head, but her eyes settled beside his face, something in her couldn't bear to look at him.
"But you do see how unfair this is, how disgusting." She shook her head and let out a raspy puff, as if that would release the tightness in her chest. "You're in the Council, why didn't you try to stop it?"
"Do you really think I didn't, Sakura? Tsunade and I are the reason why the verdict was delayed for a few years. This has been deliberated and voted for, and it's what Konoha asks of us. It's our duty to obey it."
"What happened to putting your teammates above a mission?"
With all the things those grey impassive eyes of his let out, Sakura hadn't expected the only thing to escape to be sorrow. Only for a second, a sudden bareness in his expression, revealing itself in a flash of lightning and disappearing with no remaining thunder. But it had been there and it devastated through her.
It was foreign and, in that second, she was watching someone different from her former sensei, someone fragile and human, someone she had met before in the war and later on a doom-stained battlefield. It had been so incredibly fleeting that she forgot he existed behind the mask and was reminded of him now.
Kakashi.
Even if he tried to hide it again, Sakura had seen him and now she would always search for his outline in the shinobi standing before her.
"I'm worse than scum."
With one his creased smiles and his typical wave, Kakashi disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
"Damn it…" Sakura whispered to the floor. Her stupid emotions and her cruel tongue had ruled over her. She had been so terrified the Council was yanking that mean useless girl back to the surface and now Sakura had done it herself.
"Sakura, Kakashi is also being forced to marry, his former student in fact."
She continued to stare at the dissipating smoke, the light falling from the window behind her making its grey swirls glimmer. Her muscles startled with a small twitch as Tsunade's hand fell onto her shoulder. She hadn't even felt her Shishou walk around the desk to stand beside her.
"I know this is too much to ask of both of you, but a lot of Konoha's powerful clans have died or are dying. The Uchiha were the final drop and the Council needed to take action. The Hatake clan is old and loyal, its white chakra valuable. The Council knows as well as you and I do that that brat would never make a family if not forced into it."
Tsunade's other hand held onto her shoulder and she shook her a little, trying to bring her out of the quiet stupor.
"Sakura, look at me." Her own eyes lifted to the gentle ones of her Shishou and again her chest squeezed at another rare treasured sight. "Strength isn't just about punching boulders and cracking the ground, it's also about thriving through adversity. I know you can thrive through this, Sakura. Even if they stole your choice from you, your life is still your own."
Her hand rose to the one on her shoulder and she squeezed Tsunade's own. Seeing that Sakura was slightly calmer, her golden eyes gleamed with a cheeky glint. "Besides, this doesn't mean you'll start pushing babies out. Once you two are married, the Council can't really go as far as forcing you on top of each other."
"Shishou…" Sakura whined through a grimace while trying to keep images down and unmaterialized in her mind.
"Come on, you've seen the brat's ass. It could have been worse."
Her skin burned in a fierce blush, spreading through her cheeks and down to her chest. "Shishou!"
"Now, go take a bath, relax, get drunk, get yourself a man for the night, anything, but out my office!" Tsunade said animatedly she turned Sakura around by her shoulders and pushed her forward.
As the door was closing, Tsunade called from behind her desk. "And Sakura, I'm always here for you."
She smiled, a real smile. "I know. Thank you, Shishou."
Her sandals thudded against the genkan's stone floor as her hand snaked under her shirt to pull at her bindings. She let the bandages fall onto the floor with a sigh of relief now that there was at least one free thing in her life, her boobs.
Once in the kitchen Sakura opened the tab to get herself a glass of water, but stopped as her fingers wrapped around the edge of the counter and she leaned into the sink. The sense of injustice was prickling in her heart again, growing and there was nothing Sakura could do to stop the bitter and gnawing tang of it.
This time her anger didn't stir, she wanted anger, she needed anger. Anything that would quiet this suffocating anguish pasting into her lugs, a crusted dark thing, too heavy to carry, too smothering to breathe in.
"Why me…" Another broken whisper spoken into the cold emptiness of her apartment.
The tears that had been missing before stung behind her eyes, but she didn't want to cry. Sakura tried to keep them back, deep inside her, but they were merciless and she was too weak, her vision already a blurred mess. Her hand fell heavily onto the tab to close it and she turned around to slide against the cupboard.
Her bottom hit the cold tiled floor and she wrapped her arms around her legs, letting the treacherous tears fall onto her skin as she pressed her eyes to her knees.
Six years of dryness soaked faster than she could stop it.
One afternoon had crumbled everything she had built for the last decade of her life. That weak little girl was yanked forward and its power overwhelmed the grown woman Sakura had made herself to be. The fear for it always haunting around her heart and now it was materialised into reality in the shape of racking sobs, tears and so much burning weakness.
It didn't matter anymore, nothing mattered anymore. Sakura would cry until she was exhausted and her eyes were swollen shut, she would let the helplessness and the cruelty fall heavy onto shoulders, she would let herself crumble in the lonely secrecy of her kitchen floor, and then she would pick herself up.
If no one saw her, it was okay. Her weakness would still be tucked somewhere where no one could know it, no one could feel it but her. As long as others didn't know of it, Sakura could forget.
But not now, now she was twelve years old, a ball of sadness and pettiness on the floor as she cried for the shattered illusions she had called dreams.
It was even somewhat funny, a cruel prank of life, a humorous twist meant to entertain whatever was watching, whatever was commanding things. The little girl had wanted nothing but to marry, all her future measured into the shape of one lonely dark-eyed boy, erasing everything of her for that one person, and now Sakura was being forced into what she had always dreamed about.
Kakashi was as much a lonely dark-eyed man as Sasuke had been. The Council was erasing her as she had done before with her own childish useless hands.
She would have laughed, mad tearing laughs, if her stomach and lungs weren't busy with ugly and loud wet cries.
Sakura didn't know how long she stayed a crumbled mess on her kitchen floor, but when she raised her face from the dark corner of her arms, it was already night time.
With the help of the counter, she stood up, the crying fit having washed out some of that drowning anguish from her chest. A few sobs still stumbled into her throat from time to time, but her head had cleared and she could think.
Sakura needed to pull herself away from the situation, to put things into perspective and rearrange the messed pieces and slots of her life.
The Council's decisions made sense in a rational point of view. The village needed to revive almost dead clans, as the war seven years ago had stolen many of their ninja. With Sasuke dead and the sharingan lost, the reality of it had crashed into Konoha.
It was cruel that even dead Sasuke would find ways to torment her.
Her hand rose to her chest and rubbed the skin above her heart. Seven years later her grief had yet to settle into a quiet scarred ache.
Clans were built around the bonds between families, between blood and values. That gave them life and fruit to thrive. A series of artificially inseminated orphans would sustain the genetics but not the tradition and essence of a clan, the life that ignited them and their ninja way. Maybe in another village that would have been enough, but not in Konoha.
However, the rationality of the decisions did not mean they were humane. They could have gone forth with the shinobi that volunteered. Kakashi would never volunteer himself to be a husband and a father and that made the decision seem even crueller.
Sakura and Kakashi hadn't been the only ones chosen. She had known of this program for a couple of years now, had even helped deliver a baby of the Onikuma clan. The mother and father had seemed happy, their eyes tender and loving for their child, but also for each other. Naruto, from the Uzumaki and Namikaze clans, would have been suffering through the same fate if he wasn't already married to Hinata.
Never had the possibility of being chosen crossed her mind, not when she was civilian born. Not even Kakashi, even if he was the last of the Hatake, because he had always had little care for clan pride, but especially because he was Kakashi, chronically single Kakashi. He and marriage were two ideas that didn't fit together and yet the Council had decided to shove him into it either way.
Sakura had been caught in this freak show because she was the only woman he had a comfortable and somewhat deep connection with, which she was starting to take as a curse.
They could also have chosen a woman willing to marry the Hatake Kakashi, but he had a peculiar intense way of being for ones that didn't know him already. A difficult troubled marriage would have been sufficient with another man, but Kakashi was the next in line for the Hokage position, one that required so much of a person, that instability in other areas of their personal life were unwanted.
Not even their past as a sensei and student had deterred the Council. It was true that their bonds built as student and teacher had unravelled during the war and weaved themselves into new stronger ones of friendship between equals, but that past was still there, it was still the basis of their relationship and a point of strain in some parts of it.
With Kakashi, any woman would be a risk, but Sakura was the lesser one, she was the most reasonable and safest option.
A bitter desperate side of her supplied the idea that she could make his life miserable, driving him insane, and the Council would revoke their decision. It didn't hold any weight in her mind, it was an intrusion of the bickering teenager in her, brought back to life today, but even then she would never proposedly torment a friend for her own gain. Because Kakashi was a friend, and one of her closest ones in fact, and he was also a victim.
The outline of his pained eyes after she had thrown that cruel comment at him fluttered up to her mind and made her heart tremble. She had already hurt the man enough in her misplaced emotionally driven bitterness.
Always independent alone Hatake Kakashi was being forced into a marriage and fatherhood. At least Sakura had had that dream once, he probably had never even considered the possibility, most probably had already discarded it all together.
It wasn't the best of ideas to force people into being parents, least of all ninja. Kakashi, since she had known him, had always struggled at normal human connections, guarding himself under the masks of aloofness and porn-reading elite shinobi. But she knew that under all that façade was a caring present man when he made the effort. Kakashi was loyal and dutiful and wished most of all to protect the ones precious to him.
When the child came – Sakura shuddered at the thought and decided it was for the best to keep it as undeveloped in her mind as possible – she knew he would give all he could to do good for them.
It wasn't the worst, really. At least it was a friend and of all her men friends Kakashi wasn't the worst. He was a little on the older side with a few weird kinks and a strange enjoyment over infuriating her, but he was one of the people she trusted most.
They had that one fundamental things Sakura had always desired in marriage, trust. All that lacked was the romantic love part and the actual desire to share their lives together, which, unfortunately, was particularly essential.
And Tsunade had not lied, he had a great ass. Sakura wasn't blind, she had noticed he was an handsome man, with a lean muscled body, had gone through moments of being entirely too aware of it. He was even charming when he wanted to be. But there was a large abyss between that and being attracted to him enough to make babies.
Another shudder racked through her spine. She would keep that side of this… thing, whatever this thing was, an order, a mission, a curse, deep and hidden until it was absolutely necessary to confront it.
Overall, Kakashi was probably the best she could have ended with.
But her life…
It was relieving to know that the Council wouldn't take her out of the mission roster and the hospital to force her into having babies as soon as possible. Yet that wouldn't stop the devastating blow to her life and her future, one she had planned so caringly and proudly. Even what she had not planned and had always taken for granted, like dating and fucking a few hot guys before she settled down.
Her dreams for the Mental Health Children's Hospital were so distant now. They seemed like smoke in her fingers, fantasies of a delusional child.
It was the freedom robbed from her that unsettled her most, that seemed to gnaw deeper. To be used as a puppet with no will of her own, no choice and no voice.
Sakura put a stop into that line of thoughts and pulled a glass out of her cabinet. She was too mentally and emotionally exhausted to think of how she could piece back together the puzzle that was her life. Tomorrow, she told herself.
Now she would open that bottle of sake she had saved for a girls night and drink herself to sleep, maybe have that hot bath Tsunade had talked about.
Sakura was ready to settle down on her sofa when her eyes glanced over a misplaced thing on her coffee table. Her hand reached for it, expecting Ino's typical notes demanding she meet her at the bar, but the paper reacted to her chakra. It was sealed. Sakura turned it around, this time wary, and found a familiar sloppy scrawl.
I can help you get out, there is a whole world outside Konoha. Tonight, red bridge.
Your choice.
Heyy! I had this idea for a KakaSaku story that explores arranged marriages because why not?
I already have a few chapters planned, but nothing set in stone, so I'd love to hear what you think so far! Leave me a review, all kinds of criticism are invited.
I really hope you enjoy this story!