It wasn't a victory yet.

Sakura was doubled over, hands on her knees and breathing hard in staccato puffs that escaped her lungs as jagged little clouds. She watched Sasuke carefully from across the snowfield - even like this, he wasn't at all powerless, was he? Even like this, he was more dangerous than anyone she had ever met.

She'd blinded him. By placing pinpoint chakra shunts at the base of his optic nerves, she'd been able to divert all nerve signals and chakra away from the eyes - no signals could come in or out, afferent and efferent communication blocked.

Each time she had been able to touch him, she had placed another chakra block. It was something she had adapted from the Hyuugas, adjusted to suit someone without a byakugan, but someone with an intimate mastery of physiology. She couldn't see tenketsu, but she could navigate the nervous system like she was born to do it, easily and without thought. There was no need to stop the release of chakra if it couldn't go anywhere.

A blind snake is still a snake. At the last moment, he seemed to figure out that she had been working up to something, evidenced by the ten million watts of lightning he had hit her with, square in the chest. He had been a second too late - she had been able to activate the chakra blocks.

She took a deep breath. Sasuke was standing unnaturally still. He probably thought he was in some sort of stupid genjutsu. She let a small, cleansing wave of chakra roll through her muscles, relaxing the hyper-contracted sarcomeres that his lightning had caused to seize. Her hip ached slightly where he had cut her - although it had completely healed, it would probably bother her for the next day or so. Annoying.

No sense in delaying the inevitable, she thought. In this state, putting him under a genjutsu would be simple - he effectively had no rinnegan or sharingan, and with no ocular input, it would be easy for her to replace his sight with what she wanted him to see.

She could do worse. He didn't know that, maybe he never would, but she could have blocked his medulla oblongata and stopped his breathing. She could have lit all of his nerves on fire and made him feel pain unlike any he had known. She could have raised his blood pressure until his blood started to seep from his veins.

He probably thought he was in the middle of a stupid genjutsu, already. Might as well give it to him.

I just want to talk.

..

..

..

The blindness was a warm, cloying blackness that sat over his eyes like a wool blanket. It was deeper than just closing his eyes - a true sightlessness. He had no Sharingan, no Rinnegan- when he tried to force either one, he was met with resistance, like trying to push a sewing needle through thick rubber. He gave up on that quickly.

Is this some sort of stupid genjutsu? Sasuke thought, irritated.

Then, suddenly, the darkness receded all at once at a dizzying speed. He was standing exactly where he had been, in the snowfield, the Anbu base behind him, and Sakura in front of him - but they were alone. Ibiki was gone, Kou was gone, the crowd had melted away. The snow between them was soft and undisturbed, as if it had not been spattered with her blood and rent with his lightning only moments ago.

Ah. Now this was a genjutsu.

She was only a few feet from him, looking perfectly comfortable, her clothes clean and mended, arms crossed over her chest, hardness in her eyes.

It was a very clean illusion, stable and well-balanced. There was no distortion, no over-refinement but clearly no lack of attention to detail, either. Even the ambient noise was fine-tuned to recede into the background while still making itself present.

Dangerous. That was the only word for how seamlessly she had stitched this reality into his brain. A genjutsu like this was impossible to resect from the mind - if not for the simple, purposeful signs, the disappearing of the crowd and the smoothing of the snow, the gentle changes to her appearance, then he would have been completely unaware he was anywhere but in reality.

It was the sort of illusion a Uchiha would have been proud to claim as their own.

"This is where the fight would end for you," she said plainly, her voice startlingly clear. "There's no communication between your eyes and your brain. No chakra and no nerve signals. A few other things too, but to say would just be bragging at this point."

"How?" he asked, because that was all he could think to say.

"The how isn't so important," she said dismissively. "It wouldn't help you to know. You're blind until I don't want you to be. So for now, this is my victory."

"I could still blow us both up," Sasuke said, not entirely dismissing the idea.

"Are you fucking kidding me? It's not a fight to the death, Sasuke. It's a rookie evaluation."

"I can still fight blind."

"How do you know you have any senses left at all? Can you fight senseless?"

"Probably," Sasuke snapped.

"Well, don't," she snapped back. "You'll get your chance in a minute. I'll turn your eyes back on and dissolve my chakra and you can do some tricks for Ibiki before the evaluation officially ends and we can call it your win. Only a few seconds have passed. But I'm doing this because I want you to listen to me, not because I want to 'win'. I want to talk to you on my terms, for once."

We can call it your win. As if she was just planning to let him win, like a child.

"Get over yourself," Sasuke said harshly, his pride stinging just a little. "Jesus christ. This is not a good time to talk. It's the middle of my evaluation. If you have something to say, say it later."

"There's never going to be a good time to talk," she said angrily. "There's never a guaranteed later with you. And you're not going to listen to me if you have the choice to just walk away. Ask me how I know that, Sasuke. Fucking ask me."

"That was twelve years ago, Sakura."

"Well, pardon me if I'm still not all that thrilled about having been left unconscious on a bench twelve years ago," she hissed. "But you know it was more than just a one-time thing. And now, I was doing fine without you - finally doing fine after a decade of wishing you would just show up. And now you want to just waltz right back into everything like you own it? After everything you put me through?"

"How was I supposed to know you were in hiding? This isn't private property. It's a government base."

"You think I haven't been home in five years because I wanted people to know where I've been?"

"It's not like I knew you were here," Sasuke bristled. "Of all places, Sakura, I fucking promise you that this is not where I thought I would find you."

"But you did, didn't you?" she snapped. "I didn't want to be found. This was my chance at my own... My own something, my own story, my own choices, where I wasn't just the shitty teammate of two gods who couldn't be bothered to check in on the collateral damage that they were leaving behind while saving the world!"

"I don't know what you have it in your head that I came here to do, but it had nothing to do with you. Nothing ever has," he snapped in return, only telling half of the truth.

"Wherever you are, whenever you have come back into my life, it has always ruined everything. I got away, Sasuke. Don't you dare take that from me."

"I'm not taking anything from you! Maybe it's time you stop obsessing over what I do and just finally move on with your life!" Sasuke shouted.

She was silent for a moment - and in that moment, the world became unsettled, the ground became unsteady, the air thickened and decomposed, the sky became a dark and disturbed ocean. His throat closed and his joints locked and his skin burned, and an unnatural terror began to run through him like ice. The look in her eyes was as unrestrained and agitated as he had ever seen.

And then it disappeared as quickly as it began, and her illusion returned to a sunny, peaceful, empty landscape of snow and trees and her calm, hard face. He breathed freely, his throat perfectly uninhibited.

"I got out of your way like you always wanted me to," she said, her voice stony. "So now you get out of mine."

Sasuke glanced around, unsure of what had just happened. "What, you want me to just fucking leave?"

"Absolutely."

"No."

"No?"

"No."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"It's your show," he snapped. "Why would I have anything else to say to you?"

Another long silence hung between them.

"Why indeed?" she asked softly, and she took another step closer to him, and another, until the distance between them could have been measured in moments and not years.

So close he could smell her - wood smoke and soft leather, something floral, something that made him miss… the unknown, a time and a place, a glacial hiraeth that stretched out in front of him, unending.

She reached out for him, and he was frozen in place, not entirely by choice but not entirely involuntary, either, and her fingers landed softly on his cheek. Her thumb traced from his ear to his jaw, stopping to rest at the corner of his mouth.

And then she plunged her arm into his chest, spine-deep, his sternum cracking sickly - the pain was unbearable, breathtaking, crushing. Warm blood spurted up his throat, salty and metallic, burning his tongue and dripping down his lips. A premonition flickered at the edges of his receding vision - a woman's pleading scream, burning rubble, the end of a war and the start of a heartsickness that would last an age, and Sakura on her knees with Sasuke's arm thrust into her ribcage, a cruel genjutsu that he remembered as if it were yesterday.

"You are so annoying," she murmured in his ear.

And then it all dissolved, like sugar into warm water, and the illusion was gone, and she was standing across the snowfield from him, doubled over and breathing heavily, watching him closely, with a faint smirk on her face.

Sasuke was vaguely aware of Ibiki shouting at him as he lunged for her, black fire on his fingertips, chakra pulsing freely behind his eyes, no longer sealed away. She was taken by surprise, responding at the last moment with a wave of her arm, a glossy wall of chakra appearing, a gossamer shield that deflected the black flames. There was a stifled alarm in her eyes as she stumbled backward to evade him, something he took great satisfaction from.

A tremendous pressure in the back of her neck told her that he was trying to put her under a genjutsu - it was blocked by pinpoint chakra shunts she had placed at the base of her amygdala and hippocampus years ago to deflect an enemy attempt to get into her head. But it was stronger than any genjutsu anyone had tried to put her under in the last five years. Stronger by a crushing order of magnitude.

Too far, she thought, wincing. I went too far. It hadn't been meant to go that way - she just wanted to say what she was thinking, but he made her so goddamn angry. But her anger had never been designed to match his. She continued to dodge him, but most of the time just barely - and twice not at all.

He's just toying with me.

He was so much stronger than he'd been five years ago that it made her heart ache - this was the definition of unattainable, something she would never have no matter how long she worked. He was still holding back, and if he wasn't she wouldn't stand a chance.

Unless…

"Enough!" Ibiki roared, appearing between them, vice grips on each of their arms, pushing Sakura away hard enough that she fell to the ground.

Sasuke shook his head, as if dispelling a fly buzzing around his ears. For a moment he felt like swatting Ibiki away - no. Remember where you are.

"Don't you dare," Ibiki growled - momentarily, Sasuke was shocked that his own intentions were so easily readable. But then he realized that Ibiki was not talking to him.

"I wasn't," Sakura said petulantly.

"You were," he said harshly. "You should be ashamed."

"I'll decide what's worth my shame," she snipped. "Not you."

For a moment, they were silent - Ibiki's grip tightened painfully and unconsciously on Sasuke's arm as Sakura's green eyes stared up at him, a wordless challenge.

"Both of you, get to my office. Now," Ibiki barked, releasing Sasuke's arm. Sasuke wondered if he would ever regain feeling in the limb again.

"Yes, commander," Sakura said obediently, standing and brushing the snow from her clothes and walking past Sasuke as if he was never there in the first place.

Sasuke stared after the pair in disbelief for a moment before setting off after them. He didn't bother catching up - he didn't particularly feel like talking to either one of them. He trailed behind them at a distance.

Don't you dare, Ibiki had said. Don't you dare what?

Once inside, Ibiki sat behind his desk, motioning for Sakura and Sasuke to sit in the chairs across from him. Sasuke glanced at her - If Sakura was wondering what was going on, she didn't show it; her face was hard, stony, unreadable as she sat.

"The two of you are going to need to get over whatever personal business you've got left to sort out," Ibiki said, crossing his arms over his chest as he settled into his chair. "And do it quickly."

"What's this about?" Sakura said. "I have a lot of work to do, Morino, so spit it out."

Since when do you talk back to teachers? Sasuke thought, almost rolling his eyes - he remembered a time of raised hands and bouncing in her seat to answer questions, eyes bright at the prospect of ingratiating herself even further to whatever authority was available.

"You're not going to like it, kid."

She was quiet for a moment before responding, as if considering the possibilities. "Not going to like what?"

"New orders," Ibiki said.

Sakura's heart dropped into her stomach. "I've already got orders."

Ibiki reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a single scroll. "Now you've got new ones. And you've got a partner on it."

"I don't take orders from you. I take orders from Kakashi." There was a frantic edge to her voice.

"Good news. This is straight from the Hokage's desk," he said, handing Sakura the scroll. "So you don't have to take any orders from me at all."

She didn't open the scroll, her hand a vice grip around it.

"More good news," Ibiki continued dryly. "You don't even have to read it because it's no different from the orders you've already got. Only difference is that now they're his orders too. Congratulations. You've been promoted to team leader."

Sasuke glanced at the scroll in her hand. "What're the orders?"

"Tell him," Ibiki said to Sakura, gesturing broadly, as if to say be my guest.

For a moment, Sakura looked back and forth between Sasuke and Ibiki, waiting for one of them to admit it was all a very bad joke. Neither was forthcoming.

"No. I quit," she said simply, placing the scroll tartly back on Ibiki's desk. "That's it. I'm done."

"Cut the bullshit. Kakashi wants him brought in. He's your new partner on this and that is very much final so stop being a baby and brief your partner."

"Fucking excuse me? He is not my partner."

"Watch your language," Ibiki said heatedly. "I tried to warn you this morning that this was about to happen."

"What kind of bull- you call that a warning? All you said is Kakashi had something he wanted you to tell me!"

Ibiki shrugged. "Kakashi wanted me to tell you that you're getting a new partner and he's sitting right next to you. He also told me to tell you to get on board because it's your own time you're wasting. So tell him. I'd get it over with now if I were you, because your work is cut out for you and we both know what's at stake here."

"Five years of my life, Morino, and I have done nothing to deserve this. I'm handling it. On my own."

"Like hell you are. It's been out of your control for at least the past year and you know it."

"And you think he's the answer to getting it back?" she shouted, standing; her chair screeched unpleasantly across the cement floor. Her voice was nearly hysterical. "You're fucking delusional, Morino, and so is Kakashi if you think this is going to end any way other than with me dead and the rest of you shit out of luck."

Sasuke slammed his hand on the desk. "I'm right fucking here, Sakura. What the fuck is going on?"

"Get a grip," Ibiki growled at Sakura, "And tell him. Or I will. Is that what you want?"

She stood back from the desk, and for a moment - the briefest second - a few green sparks danced between her fingertips angrily.

"Control yourself," Ibiki said dangerously. "Don't do anything you'll regret."

Sakura wasn't sure there was anything she could do that she would regret.

Sasuke had a realization.

"Sit down," Ibiki roared thunderously.

To Sasuke's surprise, Sakura did so, quickly and quietly, appearing stricken and chastised.

"Kakashi has realized that this is no longer a one-man job. The risk that we will end up losing you, and therefore all of our progress for the last five years, has become too high. And there is one person who Kakashi has deemed has the ability to mitigate that risk for you, and the success of the mission was weighted significantly higher than your personal preference as that is your job."

"I can protect myself," Sakura mumbled after a moment, quieter than before, but still audibly upset.

"No one is saying you can't. But you will be needing to focus your efforts on things other than keeping yourself alive. The level of protection that you require from the level of threat you are facing, and the level of skill it will take to reliably ensure your survival, is down to two people. And one of them is a blonde numbskull who is otherwise preoccupied."

"So I'm a bodyguard," Sasuke said heatedly. A bodyguard only here because Naruto is too busy playing hokage.

"You are as yet entirely uninformed and should not speak until you know what you are talking about," Ibiki snapped.

"Then now would be a great time to let me in on the secret," he said bitingly. "Either of you."

Ibiki was silent, eyebrows raised at Sakura expectingly.

Sakura met his gaze for only a few moments before sighing, her shoulders dropping in defeat.

"Do you remember the Jashinists?"

AN: I know, I know... 7 months later. I'm sorry.