The Clone Gambit

by viridianeye

Sakura manages to stab Obito's Rinnegan when asked, sending the war into chaos anew that prevents Madara from casting the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Everyone's fate depends upon Sakura's game of cat-and-mouse with Madara. With the damaged eye her curse and key, Sakura's forced to push herself and her unexpected allies past their limits. Can she stop it all from ending in Madara's favor?

10. Chapter 10

Sakura tapped her pen against her lips, shutting her eyes. She sat back at her desk, fingers tapping over the unfurled scroll.

She should, she knew. She should detail every word she could recall from her tea shop conversation with Madara and all of the ones from before, here and now, in her belated mission report to the Hokage and the council. After all, according to what she knew from her clones' memories, all of the most detailed information the council got on him came from Sakura's direct experiences.

Sakura tightened her grip on her pen, repositioning herself over the parchment and clearing her throat as if she was about to dictate all that had happened to the page aloud. Nervousness tinged guilt as she debated what was appropriate or not to detail.

It had been easy to write about their fights; how she'd disengaged from potentially dangerous clashes, how she'd torn off his hands. But to write down the meeting they'd had not too long afterwards…

Sakura sighed, leaning her head on her unoccupied hand. Why was it difficult? She should write that she'd attempted to dissuade him from the war, and failed, as expected.

She nodded to herself. That was appropriate. It wouldn't draw too many questions, like their other interactions that day and afterwards would. Pinching the flicker of guilt she felt, Sakura reasoned it out of her system first. It wouldn't hurt to keep the rest out… surely, their reconciliation of a sort was a minor and harmless enough detail that she could omit it. That, the closet incident, their discussions about the genjutsu, and everything else after that. Perhaps their talk about the war was brief compared to the rest, but it was technically the most relevant.

Sakura reflected as she began to write her brief summary, warmth tinging her gaze as she tracked her neat handwriting. Hmm. She had been more than happy to listen to Madara speak of the past, and she had asked the right questions, leading him to tell her more about the warring era, and eventually, a little about the family he'd grown up with. Perhaps, she could get him to tell her more in the future.

She recalled the way they'd parted and reddened a little, pushing a hand against her warming cheek. Not worth reporting, she reassured herself.

Sakura finished the last short sentence of her summary and sat back, running her fingers through her hair and letting Madara's voice rumble across the threshold of her mind, listening to his explanations over tea once more. Stories of war… death, strife, constant conflict. She'd known some of it from her studies, but never in such detail, never told from a personal perspective.

She settled a little deeper in her chair before reaching over and pulling a small journal from her desk's private shelf. Flipping it open and ignoring the all-too-recent memory of Suigetsu's teasing, Sakura flicked past recent entries to a blank page, shifting over and readying her pen again. She had decided: she would write down her clones' many experiences for herself first, and decide what was safe to include in her mission report afterwards.

She banned all thoughts of Karin and Suigetsu's words, though she was careful to shield her writing with a hand as she felt their gazes occasionally pass over the page as they bustled to and from the lab behind her. She wouldn't let their words sway nor embarrass her. She must focus and get this report to Tsunade before she became too worried from Sakura's unusual tardiness.

Swallowing with a determined, trepidatious anticipation, Sakura began to write, the memories swirling to the forefront of her mind in a colourful recollection of the last several weeks that had passed since she'd begun to speak to Madara again.

---

three weeks previously

Sakura leaned against a back shelf of the airy conference room, halfway-hidden by the pamphlet and notebook she held. Her gaze flicked across the backs of perhaps a hundred heads, the conference room brimming over with attendees. Their voices were a mess of murmurs hushed beneath the amplified voice of the current speaker, one Sakura had endured listening to many times at this point.

She thumbed the pin over her heart idly, having long forgotten how much she hated it. The enamelled symbol of the Tsukuyomi Union engraved over the Rinnegan's image had become numbly familiar, as had her henge.

Sakura's ears stayed sharp as she listened for anything worth noting down to include in her next report, the calendar posted on the wall in her head ever-ready to carry more in her memorised schedule of cult meetings and movements. The symbol over her heart glittered lavender-teal in the gentle lights of the low-lit conference room, matching symbols embroidered on coats, cloaks, and scarves across fellow listeners in nearly all directions.

"Now, we'll pray," came the young speaker's call. Heads unanimously lifted all across the crowded conference room. Eyes closed and pages rustled as cultists held peaceful, reverent expressions from face to face.

Sakura rolled her eyes beneath her shock of henge-disguised blonde hair. She stepped further into the back of the room, feeling more comfortable in shadow where no one would see her silent refusal to pray. No matter how deep into the cult's space she'd immersed for her spying, she would never stoop to their worship; and so far, her silent rebellion on this point had gone thankfully unnoticed.

To pray. She bit into her grimace. It disgusted her that it had gotten to this point. First, the flowery, sycophantic titles, and now literal reverence, as if Madara truly was a god of some sort. Her revulsion directed entirely at the cultists themselves, Sakura's narrowed gaze crossed over each of their raised faces. Her taste of empathy from before was forgotten as she watched each wear rapturous expressions while murmuring his name with their prayers under their breaths.

Hear us, Lord Uchiha. Had she not heard this so many times, Sakura might have gagged from it. She scowled instead, fingers digging into the cover of her notes.

She already knew what these people prayed for without listening further. They called for peace, for relief, for lost loved ones; for wealth, for happiness. In the fallout of their losses in reality, they called for their cacophony of wishes to be granted in the widespread casting of the Tsukuyomi jutsu. Everything someone might ask of a god to grant, they seemed to believe Madara could grant with the Infinite Tsukuyomi, rather than by their own efforts in reality.

Sakura scribbled out the titles in front of Madara's name in her pamphlet with a scowl. She supposed the cultists weren't technically wrong. The dreams they wanted so badly would certainly give them what they wished for, and technically, Madara was the only one capable of casting those dreams. From a zoomed-out view, she could understand their perspectives, though she internally reviled them.

He didn't deserve such worship; no one did. Sakura wrote in a few swearwords and a private nickname or two to replace his crossed-out titles and smirked to herself.

She only felt marginally better from her little rebellions, and she tucked her hair behind her ears, feeling stifled in the crowded room. She was sickened by it all — the murmurs of sycophantic adoration all around, the taste of humid petrichor tracked in from outdoors tainted by sweat in the air from all the worshippers, the heat making her sweat beneath her raincoat. Sakura shifted where she stood, wishing she could leave early.

She made a muffled gasp as fingers clapped over her mouth. Her hands flew up, seizing an iron grip over her mouth, and she struggled as there was a deep murmur in her ear. "You are quite the faithful attendee. Every meeting, every week, since they began... should I take this to mean you worship me as well?"

Sakura twisted around, glowering at Madara where he stood behind her in a convenient shadow that hid him from other eyes. The sheer heat of his frame caused her to sweat beneath her clothes where he stood. She pushed at him, shaking off his fingers as she hissed at him like an affronted cat beneath her breath. "Never in any universe. Why do you think I stand in the back? I'm not here to participate."

"Oh yes; your suspiciously astute information-gathering," he replied in a casual rumble. Several heads turned, interested eyes seeking out Sakura and her jagged shadow.

Sakura bit out a curse, ironing out her irritated expression for a moment. With hands seized up in Madara's sleeves, she held the both of them perfectly still, pretending with thin success to act nonchalant. Taking a subtle step back to make sure he stayed out of their sight in shadows behind her, she lifted her head as all the cultists did, blinking innocently at the ceiling; soon, stares drifted away from her towards the front.

Releasing a short breath through her nose, Sakura returned acidic attention to Madara beside her, well-aware of his smug smile. "If you blow my cover, I will kill you," she growled under her breath.

She startled slightly as gloved fingers caught briefly in her hair, his tone disapproving. "What a poorly-executed henge. I do not like blonde on you. Are you trying to look like your Hokage?"

"I don't care what you think!" Sakura kneed Madara with a hiss. He wrenched her further backwards towards rows of bookshelves with a low growl. "You make yourself so painfully obvious, I cannot help but to catch these clones of yours; and with such ugly henge."

Sakura shoved back at him, pushing him up against shelves that wobbled over their heads. "I don't know why I thought we were on better terms after we talked. You're still just as awful."

"Attending these meetings on a schedule is too predictable, no matter your intent." Sakura frowned as Madara pointed out her folly. "Surely you knew I'd come for the clones you send to these meetings. What a pointless waste of your effort and chakra."

He caught the fist she threw at him in response. She swung her other fist at him as he swung her around, deeper through the few aisles of shelves that lined the back section of the conference room and led back into the main library. Struggling harder now that the two of them were fully out of sight of the cultists, Sakura seized Madara's Six Paths robes and slammed him against another rack of books. "What, are you trying to teach me a lesson? I don't care. I'm not going to stop on your account; not after suffering through these stupid meetings enough to be a trusted member. If you think I'm going to give up now, you can eat sh—"

They both paused as voices rose in song from nearly every direction. Sakura clenched her teeth, bringing a sizzling glare up into Madara's smirking, punchable face. As intertwining harmonies rose with a hundred voices, calling Madara's name into a song Sakura couldn't deny to herself was beautiful, she felt his arrogant smug presence worsen.

"Do you know the words?"

Sakura shoved at him again. Several books fell over their heads, thunking off of her skull and making her shake her head with a grouchy huff.

Madara chuckled. "You do."

"Fine then," Sakura spat at him, shoving him hard enough against the shelf that the whole structure gave a threatening creak, "I'll see you at the next one, and the next one. You can keep hunting me, but I'm not going to stop gathering information on these freaks. Not now."

The chorus repeated. She rolled her eyes as Madara hummed a couple of notes through his smirk. She ducked several dictionaries that thundered past their heads, swatting at the hand ghosting her waist. "Good, you know what? You can suffer through this with me at the next meeting and see for yourself how disgusting their obsession with you is. I'd come as an invisible clone, if I were you, or who knows what they'll all do seeing 'Your Holiness' in person."

Madara's rumbling laugh made Sakura push at him so hard that they both fell backwards, taking the whole bookshelf with them in a great thundering of collapsing books and loose pages. The cultists' rising song halted abruptly in the aftermath, the two of them disappearing in a plume of dust and steam.

---

The door slammed open so hard that it cracked and fell out of its frame. Thundering to the street in a bent chunk of metal and wood, its loosened hinges clattered away. It creaked in apology beneath Sakura's feet as she stomped past its wreckage into the night.

She tore the blood-stained scrubs from her person, throwing them aside. Lifting her head, her eyes were a fierce burning green darting across the dark skies and shadowed alley corners, looking for that familiar silhouette of white.

There. And he was striding towards her with his usual confidence like she would welcome his presence. Without hesitation, Sakura lifted her fists, her teeth clenched in uncontemplative rage as she came at Madara with all the disappointment, anger, and frustration that had been boiling beneath her skin for the entirety of her shift.

He leapt out of the way just in time as her fist plummeted through the street. Gravel, dirt and the shattered debris of a destroyed fence flew upwards in a dusty cloud.

Sakura narrowly dodged the slash of white that hit the ground beside her, twisting through the dust and the high moonlight to aim a vicious kick at his center. Madara dodged backwards, Sakura's shin impacting a lamppost instead. It dented into a V-shape and shuddered into the crater she'd made between groaning buildings.

"You're actually trying somewhat," came Madara's mocking call as Sakura seared towards him, fists back at the ready. Her teeth were clenched, and he shot her an odd look as he countered her flurry of jabbing strikes, dancing backwards over screaming civilians to a rooftop Sakura chased him onto. She hit the tiles and threw herself at him again, limbs surging with furious energy.

"Still not good enough." Madara swept between rooftops, Sakura staying on the chase, tiles flying up in shattered bits of bright orange-red as she kept up with his quick pace. Several roofs collapsed beneath the force of her kicks and fist-throws. There was a mess of shouting and scrabbling in the streets below as panicked civilians tried to get out of the ongoing warpath in time.

He and Sakura landed on the forest floor outside the breadth of the village. She flew at him, green eyes piercing; he narrowly dodged her furious punch, side-stepping her forceful kick and catching her leg, wrenching her closer.

She hissed into his scowling face, struggling to break out of his grip. "Why do you think I'm so upset?! You severely wounded a whole team of Konoha shinobi. Of my friends. And what you did to Yamato — he'll be in the trauma ward recovering for weeks!"

"Nearly," Madara quoted her, flipping her around by the leg and throwing her across the night-drenched clearing. Sakura caught herself against the ground, skidding to a halt. He stood tall, hands at the ready, glaring back at her; the clean moonlight beat down on them both, illuminating them in silver. "None of them actually died."

"Because I had to save them!" Sakura launched herself back at him, her snarl echoing across the clearing. "I've been in the ICU all night healing countless injuries you caused!"

Madara grimaced as her fist swept past his face through his wild mane. With gloved hands snatching the slender shape of her shoulders, he wrenched her into his grip, locking her still and growling down at her. "What did you expect? That I would hold still and let them try to kill me?"

She shoved at him, using his hold on her to slam him against the trunk of a nearby tree. "You didn't need to beat them into within an inch of their lives." Madara's wild hair flowed around them both from the impact of her pushing him against the tree, the bark cracking in complaint while Sakura spat her words. "I understand self-defense, but you were too rough."

Madara's incredulous laugh shook the branches above his head. "You should be thanking me for not killing the lot of them. Even with their organised effort, they were weak. I was tempted to wipe them out, but I was merciful."

"Merciful." Bloodied wounds flashed through Sakura's memory, and she clenched her teeth. "What about Yamato? I can't believe that you would enslave him like that. I don't care about wartime or not; it was inhumane treatment."

"I do not know a Yamato." Madara cut in. He eyed Sakura with ire; she searched his face for a moment.

She paused before deciding to explain further. "You kidnapped him and held him captive for his Wood Style. He was clearly being used to strengthen that army of White Zetsu, like some kind of animal. But why? I know you have Wood Style yourself."

Madara tilted his head, releasing Sakura. Stepping back, she brushed the dirt from her qipao and folded her arms tightly. Distantly, angry shouts rose from debris-ridden streets; Sakura stepped out of sight into the heavy shadow of the tree Madara leaned against.

Flicking a firefly away from his vicinity, Madara exhaled through his nose, the mussed silver-white hair around his face flickering with his breath. "I did not know about that."

"What?"

Madara folded his arms as Sakura's rage faltered into confused annoyance. She stared at him with a tight knot between her brows.

His gaze touched upon the dark circles beneath her eyes. "That sounds like something that Kabuto person would have done," he replied, "perhaps reconsider your sources of information."

Letting out a puff of air, Sakura ran a hand through her pink locks, shaking her head. "You know, you're assuming that I'll take your words at face value. I know better than to do that, with all the things you pull." She slid narrowed eyes back to Madara's slightly smug expression. "How do I know you're not just lying to me to calm me down? I haven't forgotten what a manipulator you are."

"You don't." Madara's half-smile widened as Sakura scowled; he hummed, tilting his head back against the tree. "But I am certainly guilty of your other claims."

She swerved towards him, jabbing at him with an accusatory finger, but Madara cut her off before she could speak. "What do you expect of me? You think I'm going to just spare the lives of your companions as they come to kill me, and for what? Why?" He leaned over her, mismatched eyes flashing. "We may have spoken civilly for a time, but that does not mean we are now allies. I have no reason to act in your favour against my own cause."

"That's not quite true." Sakura stood her ground as Madara stood tall, his shadow crossing her; instead of shrinking back, she only blinked calmly, her gaze clear and sharp. Lifting her chin with confidence, she met Madara's stare levelly. "Don't kill my fellow shinobi. Save it for me; I'm your quarry, not them," she said, searching his face.

His eyes narrowed incredulously, and she set a hand on his arm, her brows drawing over her serious, weary expression. She needed Madara to understand that if he ever were to kill someone she loved, she'd never forgive him no matter the efforts he might make, her previous "rebellion" making its permanent, violent return.

Beside the steel in her eyes, the exhaustion she felt showed too. Sakura's tone lowered, and her fingers along his arm squeezed lightly as she spoke, her voice fervent and soft. "...Please."

Before he could say anything else, she disappeared, steam rising in the space where she had been moments before.

---

Sakura bent over an illuminated patch of stained skin, her gloved hands and utterly focused expression aglow in green. There was a soft beeping coming from the screen near the head of the steel table; several figures dressed in hospital whites and greens hunched around her, swathed in hair nets, protective glasses, and masks.

Sharp, pinpoint-fine light burned between her fingers as she worked, one hand holding bone in place, half-buried in flesh; the other mending, dancing between seams, binding and sewing with strings of pure chakra.

Dubious murmurs around her went on deaf ears as she worked. Sakura had no thoughts in her mind but her sheer concentration. The time to worry about trying a completely new procedure had gone; now was the time for decisive, flawless action.

There was a soft blubbering sound as the patient stirred, making incoherent sounds in his drugged sleep. "Up the dose," Sakura murmured as she worked. Several green-gloved hands shifted over as more anaesthesia was administered. Others handed Sakura the tool she needed as she pried at skin and muscle, prodding them into place, her movements like that of a fine artisan's as her fingers swayed and spun, drawing intricate threads of chakra into mended flesh.

"Blood levels are still good," one nurse said as another scribbled on a clipboard. "Doctor?"

"Almost done." She sighed through her mask, her back stabbing with aches that she was used to ignoring. She shoved back the glow of excitement bubbling through her chest as she continued to heal. "No signs that the patient's body is rejecting the new limb. Seam above the upper thigh is holding tight. Blood flow is good. The new threads are holding. What about vitals? He isn't stirring again, correct?"

Several voices around her spoke up. "Still fully anesthetised, no more signs of stirring for now."

"I should hope so, I gave him yet another half-dose. It's added up to enough to knock out a full-grown cow at this point."

"Vital signs stable. He's looking good."

"How is this fool still alive?"

"Someone wipe his drool away. The cart's out of my reach."

Sakura paused before snorting to herself with a hidden smile. She began to stitch muscles and skin together, sewing up the replacement leg fully, having to bite back her amusement. "Too blunt, now," she hummed. "You should show more respect. Though… I know what you mean." She let out a shaky exhale, her body screaming for rest, sweat dripping down her forehead beneath her hairnet and mask.

Sakura spun threads across the final layer of skin down the brand-new leg, standing back and peeling off her bloodied gloves. The figures around her were quiet as she shut her eyes, daydreaming of her bed a moment before holding out a palm. "Bandages, please. He's all done. You can take him off the anaesthesia. I'm going to patch him up and go home for the night."

Monitors beeped and scrubs shuffled. She guessed that the sudden silent tension around her was from her scolding, however mild it was.

Sakura shook her head. To hell with their sensitivity. She was too tired to worry about it, and she huffed to herself as she tossed her soiled gloves into the nearby hazardous waste bin, her thoughts drifting hazily back to the pleasant image of a hot bath and a fat medical textbook before a long night's sleep. Perhaps she'd even celebrate with a cup of expensive tea to celebrate this successful, high-profile surgery.

"Have your lackeys do the easy work." She stilled as a gloved hand turned her cheek over her mask.

Sakura stared up through her yellow protective glasses at a fully-masked face, blinking as she registered Madara's velvety voice. "I am impressed with your chakra control." He tilted his head, and Sakura registered the shock of white falling in jagged streaks behind his head, untamed, falling down around his shoulders. "I did not fully believe that you had enough skill to work on an Uchiha eye of any level; your fumblings with the Rinnegan have made me dubious. Perhaps now… I am closer to convinced."

Frightened voices around her went ignored as Sakura tugged sharply at Madara's stolen doctor jacket, hissing at him through her mask. "What the hell are you doing here?" She reached over, snatching something from a nearby counter.

Madara blinked down at Sakura as she pushed her hands up past his face, fingers raking through his wild mane of hair. "Look. If you're going to come and watch my surgeries, you have to wear a hair net."

She shoved at tangles of silver, fisting some and pulling it beneath the thin net; she ignored Madara's bemusement and the stares of nearby frozen nurses as she fought with his untamed mane. He smirked as she managed to get maybe a third of his hair tamed before the net snapped loose.

Their narrowed gazes locked as wild hair fell down over Madara's bony forehead-visor, shadowing their faces, twice as messy as it was before. It shivered around his broad shoulders and back in a bush of glinting jagged locks.

Pieces of hair net fluttered to the floor as Sakura folded her arms with a huff. "Hmph. No wonder. I don't think there is a net that could hold up such a mess."

"You repay my compliments with insults?"

"You do nothing but insult me! I can't help but to not believe you. What, are you sensitive about how you look? I'm not sure why." Sakura smirked, her weariness removing a few layers of her patience and any inclination to be polite. "Though I've wanted to say; you've got more hair than a princess."

"Watch your tongue. Do not call me a princess," Madara growled; Sakura shook her head, smiling as she pulled off her face mask as well as his, utterly unfazed. Panicked nurses were quietly wheeling the unconscious, drooling Gai out of the room in a hushed clatter of shuffling feet and equipment while she prodded Madara in the chest. "You watch yours, doctor. Your mean streak runs so deep that you insult even just a helpless sleeping injured man during surgery. He's taken enough hell from you already, okay? Leave the poor 'fool' alone."

Hurried, afraid and confused, the escaping nurses didn't catch the playful spark dancing between their eyes in their sizzling staredown before each disappeared in a puff of steam.

---

Sakura startled up from the couch in her small inn suite as the door burst open. "Sakura," one of the innkeepers was shouting, "you need to run!"

An explosion accompanied his words. He darted back into the hallway, sprinting out of sight. Smoke poured up against the ceilings as heat blasted through the corridor. Screams and shouts had Sakura jumping to her feet, tossing her book aside with clenching fists.

She had been embedded in this obscure rural hotel for only a couple of weeks. She'd thought it was a well-kept little secret hidden in the hillside, being that it was run entirely by people she knew for a fact were involved with Sound shinobi under orders to help her. Had Madara just taken down yet another network of her contacts?

Sakura gave a curse as she left her room, head swivelling as she surveyed the area. Smoke billowed above her head like thunderclouds. More screams, and she began kicking down every door that she passed as she ran towards the source of the fire, cursing repeatedly as she went. "Run! Leave the building and get as far away as you can!" she shouted, hoping to be heard by anyone still asleep. She sprinted, breathing hard, coughing up smoke as she launched down a set of stairs to the main lobby.

She gasped as the roof collapsed around her. Black-clad figures blurred around her as kunai and shuriken sliced through the air, accompanied by the sounds of blades drawn from their sheaths.

Casting a smouldering chunk of wall away from herself in a vicious punt of her bare foot, Sakura glared up at where Madara stood high above. His lethal stare glittered as he gazed down upon where she emerged from burning rubble, his grin widening in victory.

Bladed projectiles slivered through the air. Screams accompanied the sounds of battle as Madara raised a black-gloved hand.

Lightning scorched out in a vivid web, stunning the group of shinobi flitting around Sakura in their high-speed battle. Locked in painful electric shocks, they shuddered and fell to the burning rubble, eyes going blank; the lightning continued to flash through smoke and flames, lighting Madara's malicious expression in flickering violet.

Sakura soared upwards, landing hard beside Madara. She turned back towards the shinobi who continued to fight with a cry. "Stop! He's only here for me. This fight is not worth your lives!"

"Your benefactor hired suspiciously bland mercenaries," Madara commented, turning towards Sakura as she looked around at the collapsing, burning building beneath their feet. "Trying to hide the village they hail from? It will not work for long. I will know who it is that is supporting you."

"Don't even talk to me right now," she spat back at him. She ignored his glare, breathing hard as she surveyed the rubble from above, poised like a figurine of steel. Two; six; she formed a quick plan as she assessed the amount of bodies, her burnt fingers flexing.

"You're too destructive," Sakura was saying as Madara appeared at her side with a scowl, "you didn't need to cause all of this. You could have just come for me directly."

"Too bad. You're simply upset that I took down another of your networks. Besides; this destruction is no fault of mine. Your hired guards initiated the fight upon seeing me."

Sakura shoved an elbow against his chest where he stood behind her. "That's just part of this, isn't it? I expect you to make this chase harder and harder for me, and these mercenaries signed up knowing the risks. It's not about them. I'm angry because—" She twisted with a vicious shove, her green eyes ablaze. "You didn't think of all the innocent civilians staying here, about to burn alive. You never think of anyone but you." She broke loose of the hand he'd snagged around her arm, her features twisted into a snarl; his brows twitched as she leapt backwards into the flames and smoke, making a graceful somersaulting fall into the glowing embers of rubble and chaos below.

Madara stood watching, his eyes narrowed.

Sakura came soaring out of the rising flames, the limp body of a fallen mercenary slung over one shoulder. She dipped into clouds of smoke, burns scorching across her cheeks, her hair singed. When she emerged again, three more people were safe in her arms, covered in soot.

She danced between falling beams and collapsing railings, twisting to avoid embers, kicking down walls and diving into rooms; she pulled trapped people free, leading them towards the remaining intact exit doors across the inn building. Before she broke out into the night with frightened civilians and injured shinobi in tow, she cast a challenging glance back up at where Madara stood, meeting his glinting eyes through the light of the burning building.

It didn't take long before Sakura had all of the people rescued from the inn safe in the night woods, their burns treated. She'd managed to keep anyone from dying. Her hands and wrists ached from using up almost every ounce of her already limited chakra, treating both fire and electrical burns from shinobi to civilians.

Sakura swerved, chest heaving. She was barely able to stay undismissed with how low her strength and chakra were now, hands at the ready — but Madara did not come for her again, long-gone from the rooftop of the collapsing ruins.

She slowly relaxed, releasing a slow exhale of relief. Shutting her eyes, she allowed herself to dissipate in the light of the untainted moon.

---

The little white cat sat primly upon the steel counter's edge, washing her face. Her long white tail was wrapped about her; the graceful movements of her paw sent a small yellow feather fluttering away from her mouth as she finished cleaning herself up.

Karin was leaning back in her chair next to her, rolling her eyes, Suigetsu at her side looking on with raised brows. Jugo was still mid-rant, hands waving and bright eyes alflash with anger.

Sakura hunched further over her newest mission report, trying not to pay attention. She felt a little bad that Karin's cat ate Jugo's canary, but it wasn't her fault. She had another report to write, and too much to recollect; she didn't have the time to worry about their antics.

Sakura rubbed at her temples, setting her pen aside. More yet-unwritten memories unfurled in her head, crisp and new from recently-lost clones.

The journal was already fat with her carefully-recorded recollections, and her wrist hurt, but there was so much more to jot down. She was neck-deep in new memories, new details, and it seemed she cut more and more from what she let the council know of her evolving interactions with Madara.

Imagining having to give any of her reports in front of either set of her teammates brought back the taut, embarrassing memory of them all laughing at her. Sakura felt a little less guilty as she refocused upon the page, shaking the shadows of sleep debt from her eyes. She steadied her pen with a soft breath, immersing herself in her memories once more, ready to recollect the newest host of her rapidly evolving moments with Madara.

---

Sakura shook her head. "No ma'am. I promise, this seat's taken." She kept her hand firmly placed upon the seat beside her. She looked away from the scowling stranger to the front, where lights were coming on above a wooden podium.

Pink hair fell in long waves around Sakura's face that she had made longer with the useful illusion of henge, framing her pale face, red-painted lips and shadowed green eyes she had made the effort to dramatise with dark mascara. An elegant, subtly feathered hat shaded her eyes where it rested upon her head. No full disguise, she'd decided this time; just costume, and it had worked so far, though she felt somewhat overdressed where she sat in the far back like before.

"You can't save seats! There's not enough for everyone as it is, even with the venue change."

Sakura glanced down at the aged scroll in her hands, the text leaping out to her as much more interesting than the entitled woman harping on about rules she was never going to care about in the first place. She wondered how much breath the woman planned on wasting in her tirade before the speeches began. Would she continue her complaining even after they'd started?

"Who do you think you are? Are you one of the rich people who attends? Look at you, you've never done an honest day's work in your life." The angry lady gestured at Sakura's form-fitting black dress and coat.

Sakura ran a finger down the scroll's face, humming thoughtfully to herself. "I've paid good money to get a seat!" the lady was going on, "did you pay? Let me see your ticket!"

Sakura stiffened as a deep voice spoke up. "Move. You are in my way."

The stranger squeaked and scurried past as a shadow of black drew nearer. Sakura didn't dare look up from her scroll as he settled down in the seat next to her, the wooden chair creaking beneath his tall, lean frame.

"Hmm."

Sakura kept her eyes affixed to the words within the text before her, though she'd stopped registering them after sensing Madara's approach. She swallowed as gloved fingers drew through a curl of her hair; she could hear his smile as his gaze swept slowly along her figure. "Better, this time."

She shifted in her chair, her leg bumping against the side of his as she lifted her head, still unwilling to dare look at him next to her as lights cranked and the crowd settled. The bothersome lady had scurried off to join the crowd of cultists without seats that stood at the back. A hush quieted the hundreds who awaited the meeting's official start, like the pause before a live concert.

Sakura swallowed as her right side prickled where the close-quarters of her chair against Madara's caused their shoulders to be touching. She shifted her chair, but found it put her nearer the sour-faced couple sitting to her left. Scowling, she pushed back to where she had been, their legs and shoulders brushing; she carefully ignored his eyes following her movements as she brought her gaze back to the stage.

Annoyance pinched Sakura's slightly flushed features as she recognised the cult leader and library curator Saito strutting across onto the small stage. It wasn't until she saw the way that he winced with a hand pressing lightly along his bandaged shoulder that a smile quirked her lips.

"And what," came Madara's question, a hand drawing over her leg as he leaned into her space, "is this drivel?" He prodded the scroll in her hands.

Clutching the cover tightly, Sakura finally turned to Madara. She took in his changed image, promptly forgetting to breathe.

"Gods." She shoved at him lightly, her thunderous expression doing nothing to hide the red scorching across her face. "You're going to kill people, looking like that."

"Hm?" Sakura ignored Madara's mock-innocent confusion as her stunned and inexplicably annoyed gaze swept over him. He'd disguised himself, but just barely: his hair was deep black, falling in wild ebony locks over his face; his skin was a hale tan. He wore plain dark robes in a deep nightshade colour, his tall frame cut from the night sky where he shadowed the chair beside her.

"You couldn't look more like an Uchiha," she griped, rubbing at her stinging cheeks. You're in real trouble now, came a thought from her inner self, and Sakura sank deeper into her seat with a grumble. "Couldn't you have picked a less obvious henge?" She looked away from Madara again, doubly annoyed at her thundering pulse.

The glittering eyes of several women had drawn to him at her side. They leaned back in their chairs and stole interested looks when their partners weren't looking; their stares lingered much too long upon him. Clearly, they didn't recognise Madara as they god they worshipped; just as someone attractive to ogle, and Sakura let out a moody huff, glowering at them.

She glanced back at Madara with tightly folded arms, her fingers tapping irritatedly along her shoulders. "It's obvious why, right? You Uchiha are just unfairly— ahem." She caught herself from saying attractive in time. "Eye-catching."

While Madara smirked in response, Sakura found that she couldn't blame herself for having the thought. She had never once seen or heard of an unattractive Uchiha.

She was almost unaware of her anxious heartbeat beneath the tight bodice of her fitted dress. Too tempted not to, Sakura allowed her gaze to drift back to his face, memorising and slow. Black hair drifted over Madara's upturned lips as he pretended not to notice her fascinated stare, his attention maintained upon Saito giving a droll speech far up front before the crowd.

She hadn't noticed the elegant definition of his side-profile before, nor the dark lashes above his matching ebony-black irises. His mane was as wild as ever, but in a rich obsidian shade, deepening her impression that Madara was like a living nocturne. She was reminded of how tall he was as he reclined beside her, and her breath of his steely scents was smokier, like he'd just walked away from a recent forest fire.

Sakura swallowed tightly, shifting in her fitted dress, finding her chair uncomfortable. She'd had her moments seeing Madara as just a man before, but never quite as much as now; the visor and powerful eyes disguised, his skin tan, his appearance much more human, and with the same gravity as before. Unfair. He easily outclassed any other man she'd laid eyes on, and he was a thousand times to her taste; unfair, that just one look at him like this made her nearly forget Sasuke's existence.

She finally looked away, troubled. The contrast between the comfortable image of Madara in her head versus this black-maned Uchiha version of him was jarring; she didn't know which she preferred. It felt forbidden to witness him like this at all.

Her eyes narrowed as she looked back to the front of the hall, wishing she could punch the other women who continued to hook moon-eyed stares upon Madara. Giving a long-suffering sigh, she shut her eyes so she might be able to resist doing just that.

"This henge is nothing unusual," Madara commented casually, "this is how I looked before becoming a jinchuriki." Sakura's eyelids fluttered back open as his attention narrowed again upon the scroll in her hands. "Now answer my question."

Sakura realised which text she was holding and rolled it back up abruptly, trying to set it to the side out of Madara's view. He caught her wrist, his voice a harsh murmur as she pretended to listen to Saito's droning up in front of the crowd. "Speaking of Uchiha… and you are reading the worst source about my clan that you possibly could." His voice lowered into a dangerous growl. "Tobirama…"

"What?" Sakura answered innocently, leaning into him as she kept her voice down, all too aware of the stares continually drawn between herself and Madara. "The Second Hokage wrote a lot of credible sources used widely today," she countered quietly, holding on to her scroll protectively, "I figured he was an eye-witness, and I couldn't find any better literature about the warring era, so…" Just please don't question me for being interested in learning more about you, she silently hoped.

Sakura bit her lip as Madara snorted. She blinked up into dark eyes as his hot breath pushed across her face. "Tobirama hates the Uchiha. He ostracised my clan; he killed my very own brother." Derision shadowed his snarl, aging Madara through haggard lines of remembered hatred that ran through his features. "I would kill him in return were it possible. To watch him suffer would be nothing but a joy to me."

Had she not known him at all, Sakura might have been offended by Madara's tone, or even just frightened from the venomous look he wore while the Second Hokage was on his mind; but the conversations the two of them had had at the tea shop shuffled to the forefront of her thoughts instead, a quiet reminder that she did know him well enough now to understand.

Sakura's features softened slowly as she remembered Madara's few imparted stories about Izuna. He hadn't needed to tell her that he'd loved his family and his brother; she had felt it in his tone, and she knew that Madara had deeply grieved his loss, able to see it beyond his guarded words and layered expressions.

Somewhere beyond the bubble of quiet they spoke within, ethereal music played, the warm hum of a hundred voices in tune with each other rising in an invisible cloud over their heads and spreading throughout the large hall. High above, the setting sun bled its final colours through the glass, blurring through lines and painting contrasting figures in one unified amber hue.

Madara tensed slightly as Sakura slid a hand over his knee. She offered him a small but sweet smile, her presence emanating a gentle warmth. "All right." She surrendered the scroll into his hand. "What should I read, then?"

"Hn." He accepted it, withdrawing from her with a satisfied hum.

Sakura settled back into her seat, one hand thumbing the pin over her pounding heart as his intense attention shifted to the scroll in his hand. Glancing upwards, she sought distraction from how overheated she felt, trying to pay attention to the song and speech in its strange duet far up front and failed. She was ever so aware of her leg brushing along Madara's in their familiar heated proximity; she didn't know if she liked how they were almost comfortable in this civil situation.

She also belatedly realised she hadn't paid attention to a single word of Saito's speech, essentially rendering her official reasons to be here useless: Madara had thoroughly captured her attention instead.

Unable to get herself to be angry about it, Sakura glanced at where Saito was doing some sort of jerky interpretive dance to the sermon-song that flowed around them.

She nudged Madara in the side. "Look, he's like a braindead chicken up there."

There was a brief flare of light as the scroll in Madara's hands burst into flame. Sakura clapped a hand over her mouth, stunned into silence.

Madara watched with satisfaction as it crumbled into ash. He dropped it to the ground, crushing its embers beneath his boot and brushing off his gloves.

Rocking in her chair, Sakura bit back a peal of giggles, shaking with amusement. With a catlike, smug smile, Madara leaned back, stretching his arms while Sakura tried her best to keep quiet.

Several heads turned, curious eyes glueing to the unusual pair. Sakura covered her pink-flushed face, chortling; Madara brought his inky glare to each viewer, drawing an arm possessively around the back of Sakura's chair. Heads quickly turned back towards the front, fear shivering across their faces from his acidic glance.

"I think burning a book inside of a library is some kind of cardinal sin," Sakura was giggling, "you're going to get cursed or something."

"Place was already cursed for carrying Tobirama's scrawlings."

Madara glanced down at Sakura as she leaned in conspiratorially, her head brushing along his shoulder. "Can you believe it? There's a whole wing of the library dedicated to him."

His scowl became thunderous. She sucked in another laugh as Madara moved to get up as if to go destroy said wing, pulling him back to her side and shaking with laughter. "Madara! Get back here. I was kidding."

Madara eyed Sakura, a playful hint beyond his suspicious look. She shook her head, smiling impishly. "Besides, his work is kind of spread out everywhere. It would take a long time to eradicate it all. Anyways, you didn't tell me; if I'm going to read about you and your clan, where should I…"

He hummed, tilting her chin upwards. Sakura stiffened, Madara regarding her with a twitch between his brows. Her cheeks flushed a fresh red as she realised how they were sitting much too closely, her hand gripping his thigh where it had dragged up from his knee. His arm had snaked around her shoulders, the quirk of his smile all she could see in the jagged black frame of his wild hair nearly surrounding them both. "Do not seek erroneous sources," he murmured, "you may ask me directly."

Trying to remain casual, Sakura glanced between Madara and the speaker that had taken over for Saito up front where he was beginning his overly passionate sermon. "I'll make you my only source," she swallowed as gloved fingers glanced along her throat, "if you let me interview you during these meetings, since you're serious about showing up to thwart me every time. If not, I might go insane from having to listen to their sermons and songs, over and over—"

"Deal."

Feeling the heat in the air growing too intense, Sakura's fingers dug into Madara's leg, thoughts shorting out into panic mode as she registered again that velvet texture smoothing out his voice. Her eyelids fluttered as he smirked down at her blooming face, dark eyes crinkling with his subtle victory.

The melodies of the cultists' songs accompanied the unsteady breath she drew in response, and Sakura was questioning everything for a moment as she swam in the heated dark pools of Madara's stare. She found it disturbingly unsurprising that she found herself here, balancing upon a precipice she dared not name — a frightening drop just beyond, should she make one more reckless move. The discovery that she had no interest in backpedalling was a terrifying one.

Finding that she couldn't trust herself not to do something stupid, Sakura made an abrupt decision. "I'll see you at the next one," she said in a rush, pulling back from Madara with a shivering breath.

She remained just long enough to see the annoyance flash across Madara's face as she disappeared in a swirl of steam, leaving his hands empty once more.

---

What a weak force of shinobi. Madara strode through the sun-painted trees, pretending to be continually unaware of the large crew that had been tracking him for almost an hour through the forest.

They were disappointing at best. Though this was the largest set of shinobi Sakura's side of the war had sent after him in a while, they conspicuously lacked any individuals of marked strength.

Tch. Madara glared forward as he walked. Did they think he was some sort of training fodder? He couldn't imagine they were quite stupid enough to think that large numbers would give them any sort of advantage, considering that he'd decimated their entire armies before without so much as breaking a sweat. That, too, had been child's play; and with several of their stronger shinobi at hand, as well.

None of them were present now. Not Sasuke, Naruto, Obito, or any of the others. The ones tracking him with painfully average skills in stealth at the moment were shinobi he did not recognise as anything more than paltry.

Boring. He tapped his fingers along his folded arms, debating whether or not he'd waste the time seeing what this newest battle-hungry detachment wanted. Considering their lack of strength, Madara had little interest in gracing them with a fight.

Did they want another beatdown? Some of their chakra signatures matched those of the last team he'd decimated, sending them to the brink of death, only for Sakura to wrench them all back into life. She must have healed them in full if some had already made their return, ready to be thrashed again.

Madara's hands tightened over his arms at the thought of her. These shinobi were fortunate that he had to weigh the severing of his strange bond against the pleasure of killing them off. It was their luck that its value outweighed the brief sense of satisfaction he would get from seeing them struck down for good.

Maintaining his influence over Sakura would yield a more worthwhile outcome than the deaths of those who hunted him now, and Madara's fingers twitched restlessly, the itch to use the power he wielded protesting at the thought. How very annoying. Perhaps it was good that they had sent a weak force after him; any battle they'd bring would be just as tedious as holding back was, effectively turning off his usual inclination to fight.

The capricious hunt he entertained with Sakura was the only amusement that he had these days. Perhaps, with luck, her surgery on Might Guy would bring him back to full capacity, and he might come around for another nine-gates round of extreme taijutsu.

Madara recalled that fight with some fondness as he continued on his way, lifting his head. The sun dappled his lean figure, his hair shifting around his shoulders down the back of his Six Paths robes, his boots scuffing the dirt as he kicked aside a boulder sitting in his path. As it thundered into the distance, taking a few trees down with it, he did another count of the figures stalking him at what they considered a safe distance.

Several had departed from the main group. Ah; they were finally about to make a move.

Madara scowled with disappointment as the strongest of the chakra signatures he could sense was only that of the least powerful among Team Seven's four, and thus the least he wanted to fight; Sakura's sensei, Hatake Kakashi, formerly of the Sharingan. Madara blinked his stolen red eye with half a smirk.

Or perhaps five, now. Madara exhaled in an irate huff. Damn that Obito for surviving, and twice again for not being present to at least make this upcoming clash more interesting.

Having reached the border of the village, Madara stopped, folding his arms. He shut his eyes, releasing a weary sigh. Fine; he'd see what they had to offer, amusing himself with at least a bit of battle. Then he'd hunt down Sakura's clone that he knew was hiding somewhere in the village and make sure she disappeared, thus removing her final information connection to this section of the country.

Madara's lips curved up in the ghost of a smile. He'd taken down each one in this region, the most recent being the one who disappeared in a cloud of red-faced embarrassment at that cult meeting. It occurred to him that he hadn't had to actually kill one of her clones in a while; she kept dissipating on her own once he appeared.

Sakura's games felt easy to play, but it seemed the stakes only got higher each time. The more networks he discovered and squashed, the more appeared elsewhere, supporting the slow trickle of new clones she sent throughout the nation to keep up her spying, refusing to give up. Her unknown benefactor was steadfast, and with apparently deep pockets, keeping her original self well-hidden; Madara had long expected to find her by now. His clones continued to hunt through the endless subterranean labyrinth, fruitless in their suspicion-bound searches thus far.

Fine. Madara was enjoying himself. He would continue to hunt her until she finally ran out of resources and chakra. He'd cultivate their unexpected, resurrected connection until she was fully persuaded into treacherous waters, locked into his control, all of her inclinations to resist eroded away in the face of the boiling heat they both simmered in. He could see through the haze, but he knew that it blinded her.

Easy… without bloodshed nor strenuous effort – with pleasure, even – he'd get his eye back just yet. Madara's fists flexed as he unconsciously grinned to himself.

Hn. No, it was not easy, Madara corrected himself. He blinked away a particularly bright fall of sunlight that crossed over his face as he walked through his thoughts. He liked that she was proving to be much more challenging to win over than he'd assumed when he had first decided to take this path.

Good. He wanted Sakura to be stubborn and difficult. He appreciated that she wasn't always easy to read; that he didn't know for sure if she was truly drawn into this game they played, or if she was simply playing a long con. It pleased him that she remained as headstrong as a bull, a hundred times stronger than one, and with a backbone of steel. Especially with the latest progressions of the games they played, the challenge made this chase genuinely enjoyable, rather than a wartime chore.

Perhaps it would be more conducive to his plan logically if Sakura was quick to fall to his will, but Madara had no desire to dig into why exactly he liked that she was a challenge. Perhaps it made his efforts feel more worthwhile now that he'd come to enjoy her as more than just entertainment. Or perhaps it was simply that she was one of very few that was refreshingly brave and stupid enough to challenge him head-on, unafraid to face him, unhesitant to disagree and fight when it came down to defending her values and beliefs.

He suspected it was a combination of all of the above, which was… concerning.

Madara blinked, feeling something holding fierce control over his limbs, having taken hold during his ruminations. He couldn't so much as glance to the side, his body frozen from head to toe. He almost laughed at how he'd been snared while pondering: it seemed Sakura was a dangerous distraction even without being present.

As he stood still against his will, shouts rang out from above in the forest canopy. Shinobi flitted from tree to tree, spreading out in a sparse circle that surrounded Madara from an ever-cautious distance.

Unperturbed, Madara used a small measure of strength in a casual attempt to break free. The unseen trap held strong; he hummed to himself, having already recognised it. The Nara clan still had some talent in their younger generations, it seemed.

Hm; or perhaps not. Madara managed to break his fingers free, wrangling further control of more and more of himself. Gloved fingers flexed in the afternoon sunlight.

He smirked as he heard shouts between the trees. Apparently he wasn't supposed to be able to break free just yet. Did they expect so little of a god?

A team of Konoha-garb clad shinobi landed a stone's throw away, armed with spears; a girl with twin hair buns directed grim-faced fellow shinobi to attack.

Madara's disinterested gaze flicked to another flight of figures that landed to the opposite side. Already breaking free before the spears could skewer him in the shadow-snare trap, he dodged the combined Wind-Style attack the second team hurled at him. In a whoosh of air, Madara flipped backwards, the shadows springing loose of his fluttering robes.

Landing on his feet, Madara twisted, summoning a staff that formed in time to block the arrows shot at him from yet another direction as the unfamiliar hair-bun girl made another call. Somewhere in the trees, he could also sense Kakashi directing more shinobi, probably in a futile attempt to re-ensnare Madara in a more effective way.

Madara swung his arm, sending the arrows in a harmless scatter that punctured the dirt in an array of slivers. Hearing the telltale whistling through the air, he didn't bother dodging this time, letting the next rain of projectiles continue on their path towards his vital points.

Aimimg a half-amused glance back at the team of shinobi who had thrown their latest spears, Madara's gaze swept across to them just as the spears passed harmlessly through his body. His stolen Sharingan spun once, as if in mocking reminder: none of their attacks were going to hit him, not with his ceaselessly useful intangibility. He was sure to slide his gaze upwards, letting Kakashi somewhere in the canopy see his stolen eye where it glinted within Madara's smug countenance.

More voices, high in the trees. Madara gestured briefly, and he heard cries to change direction as his attack was recognised only just in time for them to flee.

A vast plume of flame the size of a thundercloud billowed from Madara's gloved hands up through the forest canopy. A circle the diameter of a small village was burnt away, leaving blackened, fire-beset trees and thick smoke drifting off through the breeze.

Shinobi flitted through the trees that remained, singed, but very much alive; none had been caught in the full breadth of the flames. Madara's attention slid back towards the teams on the ground as another cloud of spears punctured harmlessly through his body, skewering the ground around him instead.

He glared out at them this time, bored with their repeat attacks. What a waste; the ground was peppered with their projectiles, their only use now being that of creating a hazardous terrain that might have been treacherous were Madara an average shinobi.

An ashen cloud of smoke stretched out across the singed clearing he'd created, what remained of the forest in his immediate vicinity slightly aglow in its wounded embers and lingering flames. It was large enough that it masked the teams of shinobi that had retreated into the safer shade of the dense forest beyond the burnt clearing, leaving Madara at its heart.

Letting a rain of shuriken pass through his body harmlessly, Madara looked over to where he had sensed the Nara shinobi with a smug smile as the sun beat down upon him. Now, there were no dappled shadows of trees, no shade from clouds, and thus no shadows to ensnare him.

More shuriken and spears uselessly thrown were barely noticeable for Madara as he continued easy use of Kamui's untouchability. He eyed the moving groups of shinobi, folding his arms, his scrutiny sweeping over their continual flitting between remaining trees and nearby village outbuildings. This fight had bored him so far, their constant attacks countered by Kamui in every passing minute. It felt as if they were testing something, rather than attempting a serious fight – and they were calling out something to each other, hissed in a symmetrical type of communication Madara was immediately suspicious of. This battle they had initiated was too weak, too easy, indicating that they must be hiding some sort of ace up their sleeve.

Good. He was ready for an actual challenge, weary of this projectile playtime.

Madara didn't waste the small effort of moving out of the way as a volley of projectiles rained upon him from the right. They hammered through his body and back out, clattering across the forest floor. Useless again: they'd never touch him when he could counter them like this.

Madara aimed a grin up at where he'd seen Sakura's sensei directing that attack. "Come now. How many times must you keep trying the same thing? You knew that wouldn't work."

He dodged a rain of blades from behind, a swathe of even more wasted steel skewering into the ground. Dancing atop their edges, Madara leapt to the side in a blur of grace and lightning-speed, kicking down a large tree that had been housing another team of long-range attackers. While they made their escape across what remained of the forest canopy, Madara caught a thrown kunai with its attached paper-bomb tag, ripping it free and slapping it onto the trunk of the tree Kakashi was positioned in. He stepped back as the tree exploded, twisting in a graceful ripple of synchronous dodges to avoid the next volley of projectiles thrown his way just for the fun of it.

He hummed as poison clouds rose from the ground, waving a hand over his nose. "Cowardly," Madara declared this motley force of shinobi. "If none of you are brave enough to fight me head-on rather than throw things like children, I have no interest in humouring you further." He sighed. "Are all of you so pitifully afraid to face me directly?"

Madara's features twitched with annoyance as his body stiffened once more: the clouds and thrown blades had created new shadows.

No matter; it would take him but a second to break loose from the irritating Nara shadow-jutsu again.

Voices from above, and Madara caught what they were calling to each other, passed between shinobi down to the teams spread out on the ground: it's the fifth.

Madara glanced over, seeing their young kunoichi leader pointing towards him, brown eyes fierce and ninja-tool scrolls in hand, her team readying their aim. Already newly bored, he eyed them all, starting to kick the shadow jutsu loose from his body once more. What? Some new ranged attack? Had they not observed it was fruitless against Kamui?

Kunai, this time many of them, coming at him in a rain of dark blades. They were larger than standard and each tied to a small, specialised scroll; likely more paper bombs. Madara broke free just in time to catch the ones he couldn't dodge, grinning out at the fierce faces of all the shinobi who leapt backwards out of his reach. Fools, all of them. It seemed they would never learn.

Every kunai simultaneously exploded.

Air hissed out through Madara's clenched teeth as thousands of shards of glass shunted through him. He'd swerved to shield himself from the cloud of flashing, thundering slivers the moment he'd registered that the Kamui had somehow failed — he'd managed to halt the majority of them from reaching him in time with the forceful power of his single Rinnegan eye, but he was far from unscathed.

Without hesitation Madara leapt backwards into a malingering cloud of smoke, blood spattering the ground where he had been seconds before. Now obscured, he took the moment to assess himself, ignoring the shouts of the shinobi teams as they tried to ascertain if and how much they had managed to damage him.

Steam rose in a billowing cloud around his grimace. There was a cracking sound as Madara flexed his left hand, breaking the shards of glass actively puncturing his palm, fingers, wrist, and nearly every other inch of his side. Blood flowed from his skin as it tried to knit itself around more than a hundred open wounds, unable to close against cracking and shattering shards head to toe all across the left half of his body.

Madara lifted his head — ah. Any movement caused a sharp chain-reaction of not insignificant pain through every part of him. He could feel the glass burying deeper, worsened by his body's attempts to regenerate and heal over entry and exit wounds; movement caused buried shards to crack and multiply into smaller, just-as-sharp fragments.

It was a clever enough attempt to counter his regenerative abilities, though far from fatal. Madara brought glaring mismatched eyes to the crowd beyond the wafting steam and smoke surrounding his jagged figure. Fifth — fifth minute mark. It made sense now; Obito must have instructed these shinobi on finer points of Kamui that Madara himself had not yet known, and it must be true that the useful intangibility of Kamui only lasted a limited period when it was in constant use. This is why they had continued their constant volleys even when it appeared to be utterly futile; this must be why they had counted every second, measured each minute, waiting for that fatal five minute mark.

No more playing around. Madara took a threatening step forward, ignoring the sharp protests of his blood-soaked body. These weak shinobi had made their attempts in their prepared little plot, and finally managed a truly damaging attack. Now, he would take pleasure in returning the favour.

The units of onlooking shinobi stepped back in a unanimously cautious, fearful reaction as a red-drenched Madara emerged from ashen clouds.

He lifted his right hand, his other hand twitching and bleeding against his injured side. Madara's pale features twisted into a malicious grin as he prepared to roast the lot of them in a web of chain lightning until they were charred corpses left to crumble in the sun.

But — their numbers had increased. That subconscious count of all the enemies he was now preparing to roast alive had ticked upwards by one.

Madara paused as he sensed the newcomers's powerful, if muted, chakra. He caught the glimpse of where she'd flattened herself against the back of a chimney, standing atop the bordering village home's rooftop along the fringe of the battalion. In the drifting, smoke-tainted wind, a single pink lock was just visible beside the chimney.

His hesitation lasted just long enough that she stepped back out once more, her green eyes wide as she met and held Madara's stare.

Madara analysed Sakura in a blink. She was in her civilian clothes, unarmed and apparently unprepared. The rest of his attackers seemed unaware of her presence, like she hadn't known this assault upon him was being made at all. And that look on her face — troubled, as she made no move to alert her fellow shinobi of her presence, her features wrought with shock, conflict, and stress. Her gaze swept over him, a knot between her brows.

She pivoted in a significant turn, diving in the opposite direction across the rooftop and back into the village.

Madara's injured fist clenched through broken glass. Damn these fools and damn the countless shards piercing him. He wouldn't let this little game be ended just yet; nor would he allow this clone that now knew of his arrival to make her slippery escape. Sweeping away the violet static charge in his tensing fingers, he kicked off from the bloodsoaked ground where he stood, ignoring the confused shouts of surrounding hostile shinobi and leaping past them in the direction Sakura had gone.

---

She was a flash of pink, and she was fast, but he was faster. Shouts rose from the madness of the streets as he thundered after her through carts and crowds and panicked civilians. Sakura dove from swatting hands and flailing feet, leaping over a mess of food displays.

Madara remained hot on her trail, observing as she skidded into an alleyway. She was leading him away from the crowds, wanting to avoid collateral damage.

He landed hard outside the alley mouth, blood splattering across the street where he landed. His cutting glance caught hers as she'd dared to look back where she had paused beside a small residential courtyard along the alleyway.

Sakura swerved as Madara threw her down against grass and cobblestones, the both of them skidding backwards against the ground in a mess of red, pink, and white. She'd braced her hands along Madara's shoulders; he pushed her down into the dirt, his silvery-white hair catching the ambient light at its jagged edges.

He paused at the sight of her scrabbling to protect something peeping out of her collar. Mildly perturbed, he watched as Sakura made a defensive huff, one hand protecting the little yellow feathered bundle at the throat of her qipao. She was slightly flushed with embarrassment, as if she hadn't meant for him to see the little bird at all; this was certainly an unplanned encounter.

Ignoring that for the moment, Madara adjusted where he loomed over her, offering her a victorious, mean grin. "You shouldn't have revealed yourself, clone. Now… you will lose your last connection to this region. Based on your recent lack of replacements, you're low on chakra again." He leaned in, his wild hair falling around her face; his lips quirked regardless of the shard of glass sticking out from his cheek, bleeding harder with his change of expression. "You are losing this game you're playing with me, and you know it well."

The little bird poked its head out from beneath Sakura's collar again, causing Madara's grin to falter as he glanced at it. Sakura patted it as he hummed. "A prey bird?..."

"Prey bird?" Sakura scoffed, soothing the canary with a light stroke, keeping her other hand braced along Madara's shoulder. She adjusted where she was flattened beneath him, one knee pushing up against his side, wincing as she shifted away a rock that had been digging into her lower back from the cobblestoned ground. "I just bought her, so don't mess with her. She was expensive."

"A weak companion with no functional use. You should consider a predatory bird instead," Madara commented.

Sakura shot him a half-amused glare, but it was her expression that faltered this time when bright red drops of Madara's blood dripped onto her cheek and slid down her jaw. Her eyes flickered, and her expression tightened, her fingers digging into his uninjured shoulder as she seemed to silently assess him, stress returning to draw lines between her brows.

Madara slid back, releasing her and sitting against the nearby wall with a grunt. Sakura sat up carefully, minding the feathered bundle at her collar as she settled at his side. The hand she had kept along his shoulder slid down along his knee. "I might," she said, offering him a small smile, "this one's just a gift; not for me. A replacement, really. I don't have any pets of my own."

Madara ripped bits of glass from the exposed skin of his side beneath his torn robes as he adjusted where he leaned back. Sakura turned to face him fully as he wiped blood from his lips, eyeing her. "Falcons are far superior. They eat birds like that one. Whomever you bought it for has weak tastes."

Sakura huffed, but her smile quickly faded, her green gaze intense with increasing concern as she looked Madara over. His blood was drenching the alley wall behind him, soaking past his robes to dribble through the street, staining her pale legs where she knelt with him. Shouts overhead perhaps a mile off had her grimacing.

Madara made a dismissive wave, the cracking sounds that resulted beneath his robes causing Sakura's attention to jerk back to him with increasing concern. "I have clones distracting them all. They shouldn't reach here for some time."

He held her eye, and he didn't know why it surprised him that Sakura appeared as worried as she was. He put no stock in it: she could easily be acting.

Sakura's voice was tight and hushed as she leaned closer, as if she didn't want others outside the alley to hear her. "What did they do to you?"

Madara scoffed. "Exactly what it looks like."

Sakura repositioned herself so she was perched in front of him upon the cobbled street. Glancing down, her eyes widened upon the pool of blood spreading from beneath where Madara slouched against the wall. Most of the white in the left side of his robes had become a deep, dripping red. Glass shards tinkled to the ground when he adjusted his left arm; he reached up, gloved fingers dripping as he went to pull out the shard in his cheek.

Sakura caught his wrist, leaning closer with a frown; he didn't miss her slight wince as the glass piercing his skin cut through hers where she lightly gripped him. "Let me."

Madara's eyes slowly narrowed. "Why?"

"Hold still," she shot back.

He huffed at her determination, making no move to stop her as she pulled his injured hand down to rest in his lap; she winced bodily at the cracking sounds of more embedded glass breaking beneath his skin. Gritting her teeth, Sakura cupped Madara's cheek.

He watched her as she carefully, painstakingly pulled the shard from just beside his jaw free, cautious not to allow it to break into any more pieces. Blood dripped from the wound, sliding down around the shape of his chin and falling down to stain Sakura's qipao in a blotch of dark crimson.

Pulling the shard free, she threw it aside, glaring at it as it skidded across the street. Ignoring the shouts growing closer from above, Sakura returned bright, intense eyes to Madara's face, meeting his stare. Steam rose from his cheek as the gash slowly sealed shut. "How many more are there?"

"Many, but do not pretend you would make the effort." He shifted stiffly, Sakura wincing more than Madara did as several more broken red-spattered shards clattered to the street from his robes. His shadow crossed her as he tilted his head slightly, holding her conflicted gaze. "These wounds are not fatal, so do not think that the war is over just yet."

Sakura's mouth opened and shut before she frowned. He could see his words circling behind her troubled eyes, and he continued to watch her with veiled suspicion. He was being too trusting in allowing her to remain this close when he was injured. She might have shown him unexpected affection before, but it did not mean that she wouldn't take an opportunity attack from such proximity while he appeared weakened.

His fingers cracked as he flexed them; ignoring the sharp pains, Madara found himself in a suspended pause as he watched the conflicts play across Sakura's eyes, curious of what she might do next.

Her conflicted gaze drifted down to her hands, already stained with his blood. Her eyes slowly shut, and for a moment, they were both silent, Sakura kneeling with Madara splayed back against the blood-soaked wall, red pooling around them both.

In the absence of their voices came the sounds of the madness around them, beyond their alleyway. Distant shouts had spread throughout in each direction, the scattered clones having split up the pursuing shinobi forces. Wind howled through the streets, whipping pollen and sunlight past in spirals; the main roads were recovering from their chase's chaos, a hundred different voices becoming a muffled din as feet and cart wheels bustled to and fro past the inconspicuous side-street Sakura and Madara had stopped within.

Though they were swallowed in the shadow of the narrow alley and well out of view, both knew that their discovery was forthcoming.

Sakura's eyes had gradually opened. Her expression reset as she registered the sounds of her fellow shinobi where they hunted across nearby rooftops, starting to close in, and Madara recognised after a moment that she was counting.

She paused, all the conflict gone from her features as she met his gaze with a slow blink.

"You spared them."

His eyes narrowed as she searched his face, a knot between her brows as she listened, registering again their undepleted number. She swallowed tightly, her voice softening a touch as she realised it. "You didn't even… injure any."

Madara scowled as Sakura went on. "With what I asked you — what we talked about. Did you have so much mercy on them out of consideration for me…?"

Sakura trailed off, wide eyes searching Madara's blood-spattered face.

He scoffed. Even with his internal resounding yes, he was sure to correct her from that thinking. He had influence over her, certainly not the other way around. "I abandoned battle only to make sure you didn't make an escape," Madara growled. Glaring out past her at where he'd seen shinobi flitting past the mouth of the alley, Madara didn't notice the way Sakura had recognised his lie; her face was stricken as he went on in an irate rumble. "I don't know why you'd ever assume such a foolish, naive—"

Lips streaked red with his blood as Sakura descended upon him. She cradled his face, tilting slightly as she pressed a kiss into Madara's still slightly steaming cheek.

Sakura lingered, her eyes closed, the whole of her body shaking a little with her unsteady, quick breaths. As her sweet, not quite innocent kiss ended with the careful withdrawing of her lips, pulling back just enough to part from his cheek, Madara trailed his fingers up along her shoulders with a subtle twitch about his brows. Blood dripped down Sakura's toned arms, tracking red where his hands had slid upwards in a gentle grip around her frame. She felt as fragile as a fine vase, her pulse aflutter beneath her flushed skin.

His nose brushed along hers as she carefully pulled back, green eyes searching mismatched ones. Her burning gaze flicked to his mouth, and Sakura drew another breath, a hand on Madara's chest splaying, their tangled legs where she sat surrounded by him stained with his blood as his injuries continued to seep and steam.

Madara's pupils dilated from the tone he'd never heard her use with him before, all silken warmth in her inviting murmur.

"Come see me."

Sakura tilted her head towards the east while holding his eyes before she disappeared in a puff of steam and traces of blood. The canary she'd bought dropped into Madara's gloved hands instead, fluttering with panic.

He narrowed his eyes upon the bird in warning. With a melodic, panicked chirp, the canary flew upwards, taking off clumsily until regaining its grace and flying off into the setting sun. He dismissed a dark thought about who she would possibly be buying a bird for, lifting a gloved hand to the skin that still tingled along his cheek.

As heads began to pop up behind rooftops and along walls, Madara got to his feet. Broken, bloodstained bits of glass fell from his robes as he rose to his full height.

Shinobi in all directions looked on, weapons at the ready, fear beating in their hearts. Kakashi appeared, perched atop a high peak, narrowed dark eyes taking in every detail.

Madara turned east, towards Konoha, brushing himself off.

He was gone in a flash of red and white. The host of shinobi were left confused and disoriented, his abrupt absconsion unexpected as Madara left revenge behind yet again in favour of taking that invitation.

---

"Doctor." She ignored the nurse nudging at her arm as she exited another patient's room, frowning and tapping a pen against her lips as she studied her clipboard. Her pink hair was tied up behind the back of her head, her slim figure cinched beneath a white coat. Sunlight filtered in through windows from the open doorways to patients' rooms, the organised chaos of the Konoha hospital a familiar and homey environment that Sakura naturally fit into.

Another nudge, bumping the notes Sakura had written regarding her previous patients' wound regression. She shot a glare at the insistent, nervous nurse next to her, who pointed down the hall. "Doctor, there's another patient you need to see. They wouldn't wait for a scheduled appointment, I told them you're busy but I—"

"That's fine, I'll add them to my list," Sakura dismissed them. She waved off any more entreaties, too busy to think about it. The nurse sighed and handed her the sheet of the new patient's information; Sakura shuffled it to the bottom of her queue as she moved down the line, going from room to room.

She arrived at the new patient's assigned examination room a half an hour later, turning around and shutting the door behind herself after entering. Sakura scratched her head with a sigh as she glanced again at her clipboard, looking forward to finishing up this last visit of the day before heading home to rest; her limited chakra reserves as a clone were getting much too low. "Okay… your details here say you declined to provide your name. You also declined to see any different available doctors. Considering the nurses assessed your condition as critical based on sight alone, and since you refused even a basic exam from them, I'm going to ask you to head immediately down to the emergency room, no matter what you previously insisted." She scribbled a note on the bottom of the clipboard, utterly focused on the page for the moment. "Though I'm flattered you demanded specifically my care, I can promise you that there is much talent in each department of this hospital, and your treatment will be—"

"You have kept me waiting far longer than I thought you would."

Sakura fumbled her clipboard, her head jerking up. She stared at where Madara sat at the edge of the small hospital bed, arms folded, his Six Paths robes still slowly dripping with blood. Bits of glass had fallen to the tiled floor beside his splattered black boots; the starchy white comforter on the bed was bright red where he leaned.

Madara's henge was still melting away as he held Sakura's wide-eyed gaze. Black trickled from his hair like the sunlight was painting him in slow motion, his blood-matted mane melting into bright silver-white. His skin paled to unnatural near-teal; his inky dark eyes blinked back into mismatched Rinnegan and Sharingan.

"I…" Sakura stood up taller, adjusting her doctor's coat self-consciously and tucking her hair behind her ears. A whisper of her lost clone's recent memories warmed the back of her mind. "I didn't think you'd come."

"Even when you invited me yourself?" Madara tilted his head, his red-streaked hair drifting over his shoulders. Sakura ignored his somewhat quizzical scowl, her brows furrowing, her gaze sweeping over his dishevelled state. Recollections brought her what she'd observed of his injuries before he'd come here, and she wondered how much more the embedded glass had deepened and fragmented with running long-distance. Though Madara sat as casually as if he was uninjured entirely, Sakura was well aware that he was in likely the worst state he'd been in since the dawn of the war, the hundreds of shards undoubtedly a constant, excruciating pain all throughout his left side.

A wide set of medically-related questions arose in her head, mixed with her conflicting emotions, though those were quelled for now by the easy knowledge that this was her territory. This situation was within her control for now, and she must remain professional.

Sakura maintained an apathetic look carefully as she spoke. "All right. I'll allow you to be my patient, if just for the hour. That being said, I need you to do something for me first."

Madara eyed Sakura suspiciously when her expression paled with her nerves-wrought nausea. His fingers tapped impatiently along his arms, his joints making unsubtle glass-cracking sounds, the white of his robes now stained almost entirely in rusty red.

Sakura shut her eyes so it was easier to choke the words out. "As is standard procedure for an emergency surgery like the one you need, please disrobe and wear the paper gown folded at the end of the bed next to you." Hugging her clipboard to her chest, she finished her words in a rush. "I'll wait outside this room until you're ready."

Silence, and Sakura dared to crack open one eye. Madara was staring at her incredulously, the ire in his face replaced by a judgmental disbelief at what she'd just asked of him.

Sakura took a step back, waving her hands placatingly. "Standard procedure. I'll be fast. And take a look at your injuries. And we'll be done," she promised before ducking back behind the door at perhaps the fastest speed she'd ever managed.

She flattened herself against the back of it, not shutting it all the way; she released a shaky breath as she left Madara alone in the room once more.

Had she really just told the most fearsome shinobi in all of history to undress for her? Sakura ran a hand over her forehead, swallowing. Surely it was fine. She certainly wasn't going to pull off that robe herself.

Sakura reddened further at the thought, her skin flushed like she'd just finished an arduous sprint. The heat of her skin might have had her checking herself for a fever if she didn't know better.

Rustling of fabric registered in her ears, and she went from pink to scarlet: he was really doing it.

She tried not to entertain the images dancing in her head and failed. Sakura tilted her head, hearing Madara hm; a little more rustling, and her intense curiosity pushed her hard enough that she couldn't help but to crack the door just a hint further ajar, pushed by an almost unconscious justification that she'd earned herself a peek with all he'd put her through.

Ignoring the cajoling, scolding tone of her thoughts, Sakura leaned over into the sliver of light she could see of the room, holding her breath.

She caught a glimpse of pale hips and a nude torso.

Her heart stopped. It staked her where she stood, unable to move. She watched as white hair shifted over a bare back and toned, blood-spattered legs. Sun reflected off of silvery locks that shuddered down the edge of the hospital bed as Madara leaned against its frame, kicking off his other pantleg. Fabric rippled through the air as he tossed bloodied black pants to the floor; Sakura's gaze followed his as he glanced at the folded paper gown and scowled, the blood-drenched Six Paths robes open around his lean unclothed frame like a loose reddish cloak.

Sakura clapped a hand over her mouth, shaking slightly from her amusement at the look on Madara's face. She ducked back behind the safe shield of the door, growing still again, the glimpses she'd stolen making her burn with heat and guilt as they simmered their way into her memories in vivid detail.

"You may return."

Sakura shut her eyes. She reached up, slapping at her own cheek. Get ahold of yourself. What's wrong with you? She imagined Tsunade during early days of training and how she would have reacted if she'd caught Sakura sneaking peeks at attractive men, especially while on duty. She flinched just from Tsunade's imagined wrath. We're professionals, Sakura! You never let personal interest conflict with our work!

Personal interest? Sakura frowned to herself, adrenaline thrumming through her veins as she set a hand on the door handle, bracing herself. She supposed there was nothing professional about finding Madara attractive, and especially not when it came to stealing looks at him like this; but he was no traditional patient, and traditional rules thus did not apply.

Sakura was a ripe tomato colour as she finally gathered the courage to step back into the room. She kept her eyes on the floor as she locked the door behind her, and she had to remind herself that Madara was clothed again.

Remembering the glass shards stuck in his body had her lifting her head with a determined expression, stepping forward.

Madara sat at the edge of the bed, bare from head to toe but for the paper gown still folded that he'd cast over his lap. He continued to eye Sakura with suspicion.

Swallowing her nervousness and glancing him over, she could see how his every muscle was tensed beneath his pale, teal-tinted skin. Her attention traced over to his left side, the air hissing in through her teeth as she saw the full extent of the damage done to him. Steam wafted from his skin so much that she couldn't observe every detail, but she could understand enough that she took another step forward, heart thudding against her ribs.

Red painted Madara's left half in streaks and blotching stains in varying shades of fresh and dried blood, flowing from open wounds over swollen, irritated skin. The light caught upon chunks and slivers of glass in many sizes that poked out from his skin and emerged through his limbs and back. Sakura could see his skin still actively attempting to mend over glass obtrusions both subtle and obvious where they pierced nearly every inch of his side from head to toe, steaming and bleeding. When he adjusted himself, she winced, hearing again the crack-crack-crack of glass, tearing through layers of both skin and muscle perhaps down to the bone.

In the twist of conflict through Sakura's chest, she recognised that Madara had made himself somewhat vulnerable for her. She was sobered by the thought, her face losing its rosy hue and her brows drawing tightly together in a stubborn look of resolve.

Setting her clipboard on the end table by the bed before turning back to him, Sakura approached with open, empty hands, standing between Madara's legs. Taking a slow breath, she kept her voice hushed, biting back the tightness in her throat. "I'm just going to look to start, okay?" She lifted her head, searching Madara's shadowed features. "I won't do anything without asking you first."

He was silent, and she understood him enough to know this was his irritable but surefire assent. He would tell her if and when he wanted her to move or stop, never being one to shy away from giving direct commands.

Easing her fingers down the slopes of his biceps, Sakura examined the irritated skin of Madara's heavily injured arm with light, probing fingers. She drew her thumbs along the shape of it, immediately encountering a long sliver buried deep into his skin. Ignoring it for now, she assessed just his bicep, counting as she went, keeping her touches glancing and gentle.

Her frown deepened as she moved on to his tricep, his forearm, then his wrist, catching his hand last. She spread his fingers beneath hers, examining each digit, drawing over his palm, the number in her head going from double-digits to triple. Steam continued to rise between them as his skin repeatedly tried to heal over his open wounds.

Sakura released a frustrated sigh as she shifted her intense attention to Madara's shoulder next. Entirely in her element and no longer shy, she didn't think about it at all as she reached up, tucking the hair behind his left ear; her gentle fingers brushed his blood-matted mane away from his shoulder. She ignored the tingling of her skin where his warm exhale brushed her face. Her focus was pointed as she continued to count embedded shards, their relative severities and depths dually tracked as she went.

Madara hummed as Sakura lifted his arm, her fingers probing down his abdomen and examining his side. She was scowling now, two lines deeply furrowed between her brows, her green eyes afire with the setting light of the sun. Blood stained her fingers as she continued her thorough assessment, her small but practised hands shifting and sliding down to his leg where she traced the shapes of his toned muscles, her touch dancing over shard after broken, bloodied shard.

She saw that only his foot and part of his calf had been spared as she finished her initial assessment. She rose from her knees, having barely registered that she'd bent to examine the rest of Madara's leg; she drifted her palm along his thigh, counting several more shards she had previously missed.

A pale hand caught hers. Halted in her examination, Sakura paused, realising she'd stopped just beside the folded paper gown over his groin. Reddening, she abruptly pulled back, clearing her throat as she met Madara's inquisitive stare. "It's bad," she said.

"Hm."

Madara glanced over his glass-peppered body with disdain. "How long would it take to extract everything from my arm?"

"Hours," she answered easily. "It got the worst of it. The rest of you, maybe an hour. If you—"

She gasped as Madara tore his left arm out of his shoulder socket, tossing it to the side in a spray of blood.

"Madara!" Sakura exclaimed, his severed arm making a muffled wet sound as it hit the tiles and rolled beneath a cart. Madara stretched his shoulder, showing no signs that he'd felt the loss at all and watching as it began to regenerate, steam hissing as bone, muscle and skin regrew slowly.
The arm regenerated in about a minute. Sakura pulled back into Madara's space, seizing the regrown limb and probing it cautiously; he was smirking slightly as her wide eyes swept over it, finding no flaws whatsoever in the lean muscle or slopes of unnaturally pale skin. "I… guess that works," she shook her head. She met his eyes with a huff. "You're too reckless, you know? What if you had suffered enough blood loss that you couldn't regenerate it? That's one of my biggest concerns. There's no way your regeneration can just work forever without limit."

"Then the damaged one could be reattached," Madara shrugged.

Sakura gestured at him in her frustration, bloodstained hands waving about. "That's a lot of work too! Just because you watched me replace Might Guy's leg successfully doesn't mean you should assume I can or will fix what happens to you."

Madara opened his mouth, but Sakura interrupted him, hands on her hips. "And you can't just rip off your shoulder, side, hip, or upper leg. It was risky enough tearing off your own arm in the first place, not to mention painful. Don't—"
She caught Madara's thigh before his descending hands could, fingers digging in; he loomed over her with a somewhat playful, definitively dangerous glint in his eyes. Sakura reddened, removing her hands from him. "Don't tear off any more limbs without telling me first."

"Perhaps."

"The answer is yes." She poked his cheek, pointing at the cot he leaned on. "Now shut up and lay back. I have a lot of work to do."

Madara's pupils dilated slightly; he caught her hand, preventing her from pulling closer. There was a decisive shift in his tone, away from playful towards something dark, and she blinked up into his face as she sensed his seriousness.

"Are you certain that you wish to cross this line?"
His blunt question called back everything Sakura had consciously suppressed during her examination. She blinked up into Madara's cryptic expression, searching his dark pupils as the conflicted thoughts stirred back to life within her mind.

Guilt: she knew well that she shouldn't even consider helping him, the examination already past borderline.

Healing Madara was treasonous. Speaking with him here, in such a compromising situation as this, was treasonous. Their unreported conversations and tension, the lack of proper animosity between them, the vivid warmth she'd felt in previous encounters could all probably construe legal sins, and Sakura found that she just didn't care in this moment.

Not with the triple-digit number of glass shards sitting in her head, nor with the blood soaking her hands and arms. Not with the pull in her chest reawakening her fierce instinct to help, to mend; to protect, to heal. She refused to think about when or why it was that such instincts had extended to envelop not only her teammates, but Madara, as well.

Sakura swallowed hard, the decision she had already made sinking deeper as she held Madara's stare with renewed, quietly stubborn confidence. "Yes. I am."
"Why?"

Sakura's brows twitched; she looked away from him to the sunlit windows, her hands resting lightly along the sides of his lap where she stood between his legs against the edge of the bed.

"Call this a truce," she said after a long pause, shutting her eyes with a soft exhale. "Don't worry; once we leave this room, we'll go back to fighting each other and hating each other's guts. But while we're here in this hospital, and while I'm your doctor," Sakura frowned, reaching for the right excuses, "I'm going to treat you like my patient, with the same level of care. For professional interest. For — science."

For the medical data, her thoughts supplied helpfully. Whatever information she'd already gathered could be easily useful in a mission report concerning the extensive damages done to Madara; useful to improve their glass-rigged kunai idea. Whatever personal medical information she could glean in such a situation as this could be valuable to use against him for many reasons, no matter how it was technically treasonous to heal him.

Her fingers twitched, her expression tightening. Why did thinking such things feel so wrong, when she knew it was logically right for the sake of the war?

Conflicted, Sakura opened her eyes slowly, seeking Madara's burrowing stare as if for reassurance. He had a thoughtful expression that evolved into sharp interest, hooking her gaze. "Not for the science," he snorted. Trailing a finger along her cheek, he watched the colour bloom beneath his fingertip. "It is obvious to me that this matters to you beyond any reasonable mission objective, nor research prerogative. That… is what I question."

"Don't." Sakura caught his hand with both of hers, her face paling once more as she spoke in a hush like outsiders were listening. "I don't dare try to label it. To question it, even, because then it becomes something else entirely, something dangerous." Her fingers tightened anxiously around his. "Just call this our conditional, temporary truce."

Withdrawing to lean back upon the edge of the bed, Madara inclined his head with a hn, smiling to himself. "It already has, labelled or not. You are well aware, Sakura, that neither of us hates the other. I do not think I need to point out specific examples for you to understand how this is so."

She turned bright red, unable to respond as his words sunk in.

Madara laid back, stretching out languidly along the brittle frame of the hospital bed, white-red hair spilling down the side and brushing along the tiled floor; he pulled his arms up behind his head, mismatched eyes burning upon Sakura. "Well? Are you coming?"

She brought simmering eyes to the ceiling, holding her breath, her shoulders hunched up tight, her skin tomato-red once more. "Madara," she squeaked, and he hummed questioningly. "Yes?"

"If you could replace the gown where it was…"

His deep chuckle had Sakura flushing ever-redder. Paper rustled, and she pulled a chair up beside the hospital bed, sitting down stiffly at Madara's side. He caught her eye, and she narrowed her gaze upon him with a lighthearted scowl. He smirked, and she huffed, swatting at his arm. "You should be wearing it properly, anyway."

"No."

"I'll make you wear it."

"I welcome you to try."

Sakura bit back her smile as she began her work upon Madara's shoulder first, shaking her head; he tilted his head back with a slow exhale. As her hands glowed green and that resolved, almost ferocious focus returned to her expression, he was content to observe her work, the air between them steaming as his skin continued to bleed and mend beneath her decisive, painstaking extractions.

---

The metal plate on the cart beside Sakura began to fill with bloodied bits of broken glass the longer she worked. She kept Madara's shoulder steady in her firm grip, her practised fingers pulling sliver after sliver free. She was quiet in her concentration, her extractions painstaking and thorough; Madara watched her procedural work in thoughtful silence.

Conflicting thoughts battled behind Sakura's gaze as she gradually healed Madara. The soldier in her announced the importance of the glass attack's discovery. It was the first of its kind that had lasting effects upon someone as powerful and difficult to strike as him. His rapid regeneration had been difficult to counter on its own, let alone his power and battle-experience making him hellish to fight already. The knowledge that his body could not simply purge embedded shards of glass without a skilled medic's assistance was going to make waves with her superiors and, no doubt, trigger manufacturing of many more of those rigged kunai.

It was an effective way to slow Madara down, even if just a little, though it would be difficult to land more attacks of this nature now that he was aware of it. It was a promising look into future inventions to injure and assist in killing him in the future. It could mean the end of this war.

The next shard Sakura pulled free was thrown unceremoniously into the tray beside her. It broke into two, her expression fierce as she returned her hands to Madara's side, thoughts rankling. She didn't give a damn about the logistics of it as she pulled the three-hundredth shard loose and tossed it into the blood-soaked tray. She didn't give a damn at all. She hated this.

She hated every piece of glass she pulled out of his skin; how her hands were drenched in Madara's blood, dripping down her forearms and promising to haunt her nightmares. She hated how she had to dig and pry at his flesh and muscles to pry free each miniscule broken shard, each insistent, sharp little bit that cut her own fingers in turn. She detested this glass-attack idea down to the depths of her heart as much as she did the obligation she had to support it, and she was unaware of the vehement anger seizing her face until Madara turned his head, eyeing her questioningly.

Sakura held his gaze for a moment before shaking her head and returning to his abdomen, where she was nearly done with the next region of punctures. Their earlier conversation replaced the thoughts she'd just troubled over, and she felt her heart clench with worry and everlasting guilt.

She felt for Madara's pain, no matter how little he showed it. She should be glad that he suffered, but all she could feel was resentment and frustration at the complicated situation as a whole, shadowed by a warm sympathy that she knew she shouldn't feel either. Her heart's depths stirred with the recollections of how Madara had shown mercy to Tenten and Shikamaru's teams for her own sake, a truth confirmed in his eyes even as he denied it with with his words; it was a truth that had shaken Sakura with the striking reminder that he was capable of so much more than just the evil everyone else assumed. It defined new hope, though she was still afraid of pursuing her ideas that he had potential to change.

What she felt was only sympathy. Sakura was sure to assert that with herself as her fingers drew down to his hip, tugging more slivers free, steam rising beneath her fingers. She couldn't help but to admire Madara's lean body in her peripheral vision, having to catch her eyes from visibly obvious wandering, especially over to where he kept the folded paper gown positioned over his lap. Little questions about scars she'd noticed, curiosities asking her to explore in a much different way had been fiercely tamped down upon with the harsh reminder to herself that she must remain professional.

Another half hour, and Sakura's gentle fingers trailed along Madara's ankle, her eyes wandering up his leg, across his bare waist, up his chest and to his narrowed gaze, her voice a little unsteady. "It's done."

She shut her eyes briefly. It's done. Her words echoed down, down further still, to where guilt boiled and bubbled. It was done, and what she'd done was far from insignificant. She'd helped her enemy in black and white, no gray areas this time; she'd crossed that line, clearly, consciously. The faces of her fellows began to push through the back of Sakura's mind, and she swallowed tightly, her brows twitching over her shut eyes: panic – what had she just done?

Her eyes fluttered open as a hand grazed her chin, her eyes widening. Madara leaned over her from where he'd sat up; he examined her troubled expression that she was quick to revert, stepping backwards and out of his reach with a quick exhale and clearing her throat. "I'll do a quick physical exam and take some notes, and then we'll be finished here." Then I'll clean up this room, go home, and ponder what the hell is wrong with me. Sakura's features twitched as she tried to bring back her professional, wooden demeanour; not to steel herself this time, but to hide the conflicts she felt. Medical data, she reminded herself as the guilt stung her over and over. She'd report his medical data. She hadn't just turned against her side of the war. She hadn't; there must have been a good reason that her instincts had pushed her to help him rather than not.

"No," Madara declined. He moved to get off of the bed, and Sakura steered him back against the edge of the bed with her hands across his shoulders. "What do you mean, no? I need to check you over. We don't know what other effects the glass might have had. And when's the last time you saw a doctor, anyway?"

"Never."

"Well, that ends today." She pulled out her stethoscope, ignoring the scorching across her cheeks as she caught how Madara shifted the paper gown more securely over his lap. Being careful not to show the mildly perturbed fascination she felt upon drawing closer to the subtle face imprinted over the left side of his chest, she pressed the scope over his heart, shutting her eyes and listening.

Steady, calm rhythms beat through her ears. Warmth, from his forest-fire presence; she could smell his smoky scents through the overwhelming tang of blood in the air. His pulse was constant as a river and as strong as its currents where it pounded through her ears.

Unconsciously soothed by Madara's heartbeat, Sakura gradually relaxed. Her previous anxiety eased. A warm, deeply-seeded sense of calm moved through her, a reassurance that melted away her building terror into the steady and inexplicable feeling that she had, no matter her doubts, done the right thing.

A rough palm glanced along Sakura's side; she remembered herself, opening her eyes. She met Madara's shadowed gaze with a small smile, her throat unexpectedly tight with relief. "See?" she said softly, "I'm just checking vitals. I don't mistreat my patients, if that's what you're worried about." She set a hand over his heart, exhaling unsteadily. "I would never hurt you in a situation like this. I want you to know… that you can trust me."

"Hn." Madara's rumble was warm as he brought a hand along her red cheek with a deep hum. "You do not see me as a patient. Look at you… I do not think you are like this with your every patient." Madara's eyes narrowed. "You had better not be."

Sakura's eyes widened upon his, standing taller where she stood between his legs. What was that she'd detected in his tone?

She reached up with a hidden smile, fingers sliding through wild white locks of his hair. Madara blinked at her as she checked his ears, scribbling something on her clipboard. Before he could push her away, she examined his mouth and nose, her probing, practised fingers drawing down his throat and then pressing along his ribs as she examined him as quickly and efficiently as she could.

Feeling the heat in the air beginning to rise again, Sakura took a quick step back out of his reach, turning a new tint of red as she bit out her question. "How old are you?"

Madara frowned. He folded his arms, the setting sun lighting him in a fiery sienna shade. "Hmm… perhaps ninety, at this point."

Sakura's eyes nearly bugged out of her head before she laughed, waving him off. "Look, okay, I know you've lived a while, but come on. It was a serious question."

"I told you the truth." Madara was unamused; Sakura stared at him with furrowed brows. "You look thirty at most."

He smirked, and she shut her eyes, sighing. "I should probably… as your doctor, and for a patient of advanced age that's never had so much as an exam—"

"Hmm?"

"Never mind." Sakura turned away, wide eyes on the wall. This was the first time her years of experience in examining patients could not help her: where she'd stopped getting embarrassed checking all parts of patients in a physical long ago, it all came back to her now in a rush of mortification like it was her first day on the job, suddenly too daunting to pursue. Not here and now. Not upon Uchiha Madara of all people, and she bit out her words in an embarrassed rush. "You can get dressed now. We're um, done here."

"What was it you wanted to do?"

"Don't worry about it." Sakura shuffled items on the counter, flustered. Seeing him disrobed had been enough for her to handle in one day. "Standard stuff. Hey, uh —" She sensed Madara getting to his feet, and kept her head down as she heard clothes rustling. "I'll make you a deal."

She heard his pause and glanced backwards only to swerve back towards the wall, face red, having glimpsed him half-dressed again, robe settling around his tall frame, black pants only partly pulled back up.

She let out a shaky huff. "If you spare this Konoha clone," she gestured to herself with her eyes firmly upon the wall cabinets, "We'll do the truce thing, when we're alone in this hospital. Like neutral ground." Sakura shut her eyes briefly, Madara's image branded into her memory regardless. "No fights here; neither side against the other while we're in this building. And… as the clone posted in Konoha, I don't do anything but my job in this hospital anyway. Sparing me shouldn't pose an issue to whatever your war plan is. In fact… with this agreement, my presence only benefits you."

"I know that." She shivered as his voice was directly behind her, and she dared turn once more. She swallowed as her gaze swept down from Madara's crooked smile to where the open robe exposed his chest, down to the waistband of his pants and to his boots; then back to his eyes. "How is my health?" he purred.

Sakura scowled, folding her arms and leaning back against the counter as he effectively loomed over her. "Much too perfect," she answered. "Which reminds me. I should do a few more things; like a blood draw, and maybe next time the examinations I just — won't be doing today. Because of time constraints."

Madara nodded once, a serious glint about his stare. "I will hold you to your 'deal'."

Sakura lifted her head, heart pounding. He was surrounding her again, one arm above her head as he leaned against the cabinets, and she could scarcely breathe, certain there must be something wrong with her for how she welcomed his invasion of her space. "Of course," she squeaked. Her heart slamming from the heat of their close proximity, Sakura exhaled sharply. "Are you even going to thank me? If you don't, I think I'll just write you a lengthy bill for my services."

Madara's deep chuckle shook the both of them, his gloved fingers digging into the wood of the cabinet above Sakura's head. She inhaled slowly and unsteadily when he dipped his head, lips ghosting along her cheek. He held her stare challengingly. "Then bill me."

She held her ground, her back straight, green eyes burning bright with her demand. There was a flicker of renewed respect behind Madara's mismatched stare in response to Sakura's stubborn refusal to back down, his face so close to hers that she didn't see the pleased curl at the corner of his mouth.

"Fine…" He pressed her back against the counter's edge, and there was nothing subtle about how closely the two of them stood, their legs tangling. Madara took in the flash of heat behind Sakura's eyes with a greedy smile, lips quirking with approval when one of her calves slid up along the back of his own in response.

His velvet tone reverberated between their bodies. "...Thank you."

"I think this is the first time you've said that in your life," Sakura bit back through a sly smile.

Madara laughed, the warm sound giving her a dizzying, intoxicated feeling. She grasped his bare sides beneath his open robe as one of his hands snaked around her back, the two of them not quite twined, but close to it. Sakura tried to remember how to breathe, determined not to be the one to cave in as Madara held her gaze with an unapologetic heat.

His voice flowed down through her body and riled up her unprofessional thoughts further. "Watch me undress uninvited again, and it will be you flat on your back in that cot."

As Sakura's eyes flew wide open with her heart stopping in her chest, Madara released her, turning from her with a hidden smile and leaving her red and breathless where she slumped back against the counter's edge. His white mane dripped into midnight black as his henge disguise reappeared.

She stared after him, gaze drifting down his tall frame and lingering long after he left her behind.

---

Sakura sat back in her desk chair, running her hands through her hair; she closed her eyes, the many memories settling into the back of her brain and receding into the archives of her past. Now that she had managed to write dozens of moments down, it seemed she might be able to find some peace with it; but a variety of troubling, conflicting emotions continued to tumble through her chest as she rose to her feet, images made crisper from fresh recollections warming her thoughts.

She found she felt too troubled to write any more. The thought weighed her down enough now that she couldn't purge any more memories until she'd addressed it.

Getting to her feet with a heavy breath, Sakura slid her journal and her half-finished newest mission report into her pack, glancing uneasily at where Karin and Suigetsu watched her from their own desks with curious, glittering eyes. Jugo had stalked off, Karin stroking her cat where she reclined in her lap.

The elegant corridor was dimly lit in warm torchlight, the shadows dancing beneath the sconces mounted high on the grooved walls. Sakura strode forward, keeping her head high and back straight in a confident posture that didn't betray the anxiety she felt as she approached where she knew she'd find Orochimaru.

She stood in the open doorway to his rooms, a hand pressed unconsciously over her nervously fluttering heart. There he was, meditating upon a circular platform high at the back of the wide, panelled room. He lifted his head, his eyes glowing just a little brighter than the ochre lights of the quiet, stone-cast chamber. "Yes?" he asked, his interested stare flicking analytically over Sakura as she stepped forward.

She shut the door behind her before standing back against it as if ready to flee. Swallowing hard, Sakura forced her hands to fall, flexing her sweaty fingers in and out of fists. "Good afternoon," she greeted him.

Orochimaru hummed. "It is late in the evening."

Sakura let out a huff. When was the last time she had seen the sun with her own eyes? "I suppose. I lose track, after all this time."

He blinked patiently, white fingers clasping where he sat cross-legged upon the high cushioned platform. "What is it that you need?"

"Karin and Suigetsu informed me that you all surveil my clones' activities," Sakura said carefully, her expression neutral, though there was a terse twitching between her brows.

Understanding flickered across Orochimaru's knowing gaze, and he leaned back slightly with a hum, a slight upturn about his wide mouth. "Ah; yes. I was wondering when you would ask me about this."

"I don't remember agreeing to it."

"You didn't specify against it." He tilted his head quizzically, a lock of straight black hair falling in a glossy trickle of obsidian across his bloodless features. "It's only wise to pay attention to your endeavours, especially when they affect my assets as much as they do. What is your concern?"

"I…" Sakura let out a slow breath before lowering her voice, glancing back at the door and stepping forward, her tone hushed. "I want to make sure that there aren't any misunderstandings." She cleared her throat, shifting uncomfortably where she stood as Orochimaru's golden stare remained unwavering from her. "I've gotten the impression from Suigetsu and Karin that they have quite a few misconceptions about what I've been doing, and I'm worried that you might have similar ideas."

Silence, and her head jerked back towards where Orochimaru sat, her heart pounding. She was terrified that he would cut their deal short and boot her from this safe space. She'd been worrying about this ever since Karin had revealed that they knew at least some of her clones' activities. How much did they really know?

Orochimaru regarded Sakura thoughtfully, and his slight smile remained; he leaned his head on his hand, that knowing look lingering about his slitted eyes. "It has been very interesting, watching the two of you interact." He lifted a pale hand as Sakura opened her mouth to protest. "I will not tease you as they do, no matter the questionable nature of your relationship with Madara." He didn't miss the way Sakura relaxed slightly as he went on. "You want to know if and when I will intervene."

Sakura's gaze flitted restlessly aside, confirming Orochimaru's guess. He folded his hands, resettling comfortably. "Let your worries rest. I will continue to only observe for now."

Her frown deepened, and she stood taller, swallowing hard. A hundred images of Madara burned across her vision, the scorched taste across her tongue of memories so recently recollected tracing guilt and anxiety along the back of her throat. "What is it that you know? How much have you seen?"

Orochimaru inclined his head slightly. "That your clones are building up successes, in their own ways. I haven't needed to directly intervene." Sakura stood perfectly still as his golden eyes returned to her, narrowing slightly. "Perhaps you might end this war in the way you're trying to, but don't get blinded by the fires you continue to play with."

Sakura shut her eyes with a deep breath. A hazy memory of glittering mismatched eyes was enough to set her heart pounding again, recently received from one of her lost clones.

She turned away. "I'd be grateful if you and the others continued to refrain from intervening. I'm glad that you haven't made the same incorrect assumptions that they have, though I do have to say that I'd prefer you don't monitor my clones too closely. I can't risk my cover being blown."

"Are you sure," Orochimaru said as she paused at the door, "that you know what you're doing?"

Sakura nodded once, her lips tight. Of course she did.

Now that this matter was cleared up… she had to finish that mission report, and afterwards, finish writing down her many troubling new memories. She could already feel the headache coming on from the set she'd just received, and she passed a sweaty palm over where her pulse throbbed along her neck, a feverish flush passing down from her flagging cheeks to the rest of her body.

Orochimaru settled back in silence as Sakura pushed through the heavy stone door, disappearing into the dark once more. Reclining upon his seat, he watched her leave with a pensive expression, a calm interest stirring ceaselessly in the shadows of his slitted stare. It was no small curiosity that Sakura had not only survived this long in her cat-and-mouse game with Madara, but had begun to influence him; whether or not she knew of that influence and the different ways she could wield it was yet to be seen.

---

Madara strode through the front doors of the sizable mansion, glancing around with disinterest at the elegant architecture and expensive decorations stretching out across painted walls and finely-woven mats beneath his boots. He glanced from a bonsai tree to the desk positioned near the entryway that appeared to be meant as an informal reception counter. It was abandoned, the late hour shading the expansive, lavish house in deep blues and blacks.

He trailed gloved fingers over the polished surface, flicking one of the business cards he'd seen into his pocket.

He sensed the mercenary-shinobi's approach before they sensed his, and he waited patiently, his mismatched eyes burning through the darkness. As soon as they rounded the corner and looked around, confused gaze glancing over to meet his eyes, they fell in a crumpled pile to the floor, Madara's genjutsu immediately effective.

Stepping over their unconscious body, Madara continued through the house. He took his time, knowing his arrival was both unknown and unexpected. He would not bother destroying this place; this time, he would humour Sakura's request, though in his own time, and with the element of surprise on his side.

He found several beautifully-decorated living areas, comfortably-sized bedrooms, offices, and other empty, useless spaces across the ground floor. Several more encounters were kept brief, each civilian and shinobi falling to his effortless genjutsu. They were made unconscious so quickly he doubted they'd remember being struck by a jutsu at all once they awoke.

Madara scowled to himself as he climbed a staircase to the second floor. It was unlike him to be so merciful. Sakura had better be grateful he was in a good mood this evening, sparing the other occupants of this house with such unwarranted lack of violence. They were part of the hidden network that funded and protected her, which he continued to dismantle piece by piece.

Madara strode through the second-floor corridor on silent feet, immediately certain that this is where she would be. He was certain to make not so much as a single sound, walking slowly so his robes would not rustle. He approached the nearest door and slid it open, stepping through into a suite with its own kitchenette and kotatsu table.

He turned his head, interested in the sigh he'd heard in the adjoining bedroom. Was she asleep? He held still, listening, and heard another sigh, this one softer.

Madara's eyes narrowed dangerously. If there was someone in there with her —

He strode forward, only to stop in the doorway, staring at the sight splayed before him on the double-sized futon bed. Effectively stunned, he was motionless, wide eyes memorising what he was seeing.

Sakura arched back against twisted sheets, eyes shut and brows drawn in a rapturous expression. Her pale lips parted with another gasp.

Slender legs slid up as her knees bent, spreading as her fingers continued to dance between her pale, toned thighs. They drew circling, dipping motions through magenta curls, slick in the moonlight that painted down her slim, nude figure; silver pooled down her fine features and across her pert, small breasts, half-covered by a thin sheet she'd cast aside.

Sakura's voice was soft and half-cracked in the dark room, giving a murmur Madara stepped forward to hear again. She tilted her head back into her pillows, her expert hand orchestrating motions his unseen eyes easily memorised.

She inhaled slowly, almost raggedly. He was beside her bed as she exhaled the name again, slender figure shivering with her silken sigh.

Gloved hands twitched beside Sakura's slender figure, and as her fingers moved with more decisive speed, she undulated with pleasure, the rapturous look on her face burning into Madara's memory so that he could entertain her image in perpetuity.

Her skin tickled as wild locks of jagged hair fell over her. The moonlight across her body was unpermitted to touch her any longer as his shadow enveloped her in warm darkness.

Sakura arched back against the mattress, convulsing at the peak of her pleasure. She gave a shuddering, finishing gasp. "Madara!"

Sweat pearled across her forehead as she shuddered down into her sheets, breathing hard. Her pink hair was a damp tangle across her face and along her shoulders, her naked chest rising and falling rapidly, tingling beneath a hot exhale across her breasts.

She slowly opened her eyes as warm fingertips not her own traced down the soft skin of her inner thigh; they caught her slick hand as it withdrew. Lips grazed her ear as Madara's voice of velvet was slightly husky. "...Yes?"

Sakura scrabbled wildly against Madara's frame above her with a horrified gasp as he made a deep, rumbling laugh. She disappeared in her panic, leaving a brief cloud of steam in her stead.

Madara sat back upon the mattress beside where Sakura had been. He glanced up at the moon out the window, his hand passing over his wide smile. Deeply pleased, he slowly shut his eyes; he memorised the moment he'd just witnessed in full, unaware of the warmth settling through to his bones.