Itachi leaned against the wall, melding with the shadows slowly engulfing the balcony atop the Hokage Tower. Through the sliding glass door, left slightly ajar, he listened to his quarry issue her challenge to the Hokage. So, this was why she had been sweating and bleeding all over the training grounds these past months. She hadn't been running from something, but towards something. It made perfect sense, in retrospective – that newfound boulder-smashing, earth-splitting determination of hers.

Haruno Sakura in the ANBU was an… interesting idea. But a bad one.

"Itachi."

A few moments after the office door clicked shut, Tsunade called out for him, softly, as if she had not enough strength left in her. Itachi stepped in and found her still at her desk, scribbling furiously in a small scroll. The bottle of sake she kept hidden from Shizune was out in the open and already empty.

"Your current assignment is at an end," Tsunade said without pausing or raising her eyes from the scroll.

Itachi was surprised only by the fact that she hadn't sent him to bring her another bottle of sake, since she was so determined to resolve this matter now. Meaning she had already made up her mind about it and she had only drunk the sake to be able to come to terms with her decision. Meaning he would not like what she had to say.

And he was right.

"I am assigning Haruno Sakura as your ANBU trainee."

Itachi thought he was well within bounds to speak his mind, given that Tsunade must have been too emotionally invested in this to see clearly. "ANBU will break her."

For the first time, Tsunade stopped writing and gazed up at him, a cutting edge in the amber of her eyes. "I'm counting on it," she said, and followed it with a sigh ripped from the bottom of her lungs. "That girl is an ill-set fracture."

Itachi had enough medical knowledge to understand her meaning. A broken bone, improperly or not at all set, healed wrong, leading to lifelong deformity. To prevent that, it had to be broken anew and reset correctly.

"And you are mistaken if you think this will be an easy task," Tsunade added. "Have you read Kakashi's report regarding Team 7's final mission?"

The mission in which his little brother had jumped in to save a teammate's life only to lose his own – Itachi had learned that report by heart. He merely nodded in reply.

"Then you know what she did," Tsunade said, lacing her fingers together. "You should also know that she doesn't remember doing it."

That piqued his curiosity. He reached into his mind to extract the information and mused over it, wondering which part she meant. The part Tsunade had mentioned in the autopsy report, which concluded that so much healing chakra had been poured into Sasuke's lifeless body that it had prevented decomposition from starting at the cellular level? Or the part where Haruno had slipped away from the remainder of her team and ran through over a dozen enemies, painting the walls with their innards and emerging without a single scratch?

Losing a teammate like that and then killing in cold blood, likely for the first time, were not uncommon grounds for dissociation, but to such an extent? Was this the fracture?

"I am resolute in this," Tsunade added, though that much was clear to Itachi. "However, there is something else I would like to ask you to do for me."

Itachi found her choice of words particularly strange, but remained quiet as she handed him the scroll she had been scribbling in. Her manicured fingers began rapping against the wooded desk. Reading through the scroll made his blood run slightly colder as comprehension settled in. He hadn't had one of these missions in a while and they had never involved a fellow Konoha shinobi.

"Just to be clear, you can refuse this one," Tsunade said when Itachi rolled up the scroll. "I am paying for it out of my own pocket, so I wouldn't necessarily mind."

Haruno Sakura had clearly had no idea what she would start by challenging her master. Itachi himself had not suspected Tsunade would wage an all-out war against her student to set her on the right track again. Yet she walked a fine line between deathly-efficient and downright cruel.

Accepting this second, likely off the record assignment would enable him to mitigate the damage caused by the first one. It made sense in the short term, as it gave him more control, but if it went on longer, it might cause complications. He could damage Haruno more than the ANBU ever could.

Still, a mission was a mission – he did not have to like it.

"I accept."

Tsunade expelled a breath in relief, her earlier bluff thus revealed. Then she drew in more air, greedily so, and stood up, slamming her hands against her desk. "Effective immediately, then. Dismissed!"

Itachi had a feeling Tsunade would drink herself into a stupor next, but it was not his place to deny her that, so he vanished without a trace from her office, rematerializing on the adjacent roof. In the time he had spent receiving his new orders, Haruno Sakura had likely made it back to her one-bedroom apartment, so he headed there without delay.

Surely enough, when he landed on the rooftop next to her apartment building, her windows were alight with a golden glow and Itachi could see her sitting at the table in her kitchen, staring into a cup, oblivious to the fact that her fate had been decided not ten minutes ago. She would not know it until tomorrow.

His trainee. He turned the word on all sides in his head and still, it seemed such a strange concept, so ill-fitted. After a considerable string of failures, he had not been placed in charge of trainees again, and with good reason – Tsunade had been wise enough to suspect no bright, new face could rise to his standards and she was correct. It was the same reason why he had been permitted to work alone after Kakashi had been pulled from Team Ro. For Tsunade to pick him as Haruno's ANBU captain meant she was setting the girl up for failure.

Itachi could not help but wonder, did Haruno have any idea what she was getting into? Or did she romanticize the notion of ANBU, like so many other trainees he had failed before her? The darker the shroud, the more intense the speculations, after all. And the ANBU did not lack in darkness.

Haruno stood up then.

Itachi averted his eyes as she removed her top while heading towards the bathroom to wash away the grime of a day's training. After that, he knew Haruno would head to bed, where she would attempt to sleep. Having watched her for so long, he had learned her habits, and whatever she had been like before Sasuke's death, Haruno was a creature of habit nowadays.

Not much unlike him. Sleep, train, work. Not much in between, except for meals – and those were only to ensure proper sustenance.

She emerged from the bathroom a while later, towel wrapped around her, wet hair in disarray, and she collapsed in bed like Itachi had predicted. He counted some minutes, reveling in the night's air, which still carried a cold nip to it.

Itachi wondered how he should go about planting the seed. Her misguided infatuation with his little brother, which had been no secret to anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen, seemed the best card for him to play. A girl's love for a boy, puppy love, so often innocent and blissfully oblivious. It had become a cage for Haruno long before Sasuke's death, he guessed. Entrapped by her own obsession, she had stagnated and withered without nourishment in the form of attention from his little brother.

His little brother, whom, Itachi long suspected, had had other proclivities. Had Haruno really not seen or chosen to turn a blind eye?

Her breathing slowed and deepened. Her chakra moved sluggishly, minute, irregular spikes indicating she was dreaming. If he approached her now, she was sleeping lightly enough to still wake up courtesy of her shinobi training, but there was no need for it. He merely pushed chakra into his eyes, gaining the depth of field granted by the sharingan. Sleeping targets were child's play.

Haruno may have been a genjutsu type, but it did not avail her.