Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Sun Goes With You

baby, baby, baby

 when all your love is gone

who will save me

from all i'm up against out in this world

-matchbox 20, bright lights

I have to get out of here.

Sakura was covered in blood. Hot, red, thick, sticky, angry blood. It was burning her skin, burning her nose with its corrosive metallic scent, flowing into her eyes and mouth. Screams grated at her senses, wordless shouts of pain and fear and loss. Her lungs were deflating, her bones were crunching under the weight of falling bodies.

She clapped her hands over her ears and fell to her knees. She repeated simple words to herself like she did every time she found herself back here - back on the battlefield.

This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real….

The blood disappeared, replaced by water so hot that it scalded her. Sakura found herself sitting the floor of her shower, knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around herself, fingernails digging into the skin of her back. She gasped for breath, but it didn't reach her lungs. She squeezed her eyes shut and let the water run over her face.

This was a daily occurrence for her since the end of the war. She would see things that weren't there, feel things she couldn't feel, and then come to her senses seconds later feeling like she had been gone for hours, days, weeks.

The war had ended a month ago. Four weeks, thirty days. But she couldn't get out from under it.

She reached out and turned the water cold. She sat in the cold spray until she was shivering violently, her teeth chattering and her fingers shaking, and then she pulled herself out of the shower. 

She stared at her naked body in the bathroom mirror. She'd lost more weight. Her eyes were tired, distant. She turned away from the girl in the mirror, unwilling to look at her any longer.

Her hands gripped the edge of her sink as a wave of dizziness came over her, threatening to send her to her floor. Slowly, she gave in to the nausea, sinking to her knees and pressing her forehead into the cool tile of the counter.

She stayed this way for nearly two minutes before trying again. This time, she was able to stay standing as she pulled on her clothes. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror and studied herself. She studied her eyes, looking for any warmth - adjusting her lips, the crinkle of her cheeks to make it look more authentic, more welcoming than she felt.

When she was satisfied, she let the smile slide off of her face and into her pocket, to be taken out whenever she needed it.

It was already dark outside when she left her apartment. Her shift started at 7 PM and had no defined end - there was too much work to do. She didn't want to come home, anyway. There was nothing for her at home.

She kept her eyes downcast as she walked through the dark village to the hospital. She didn't want to see the shop windows full of happy displays or the well-kept jacaranda trees on the sidewalks. She just wanted to work.

She let out a sigh of relief as she walked into the hospital. The fluorescent lighting and smell of disinfectant were simple and sterile, bereft of the ability to spark any memories or feeling other than simple work. She pulled on her white coat and clipped her badge to the collar.

Haruno Sakura, Head Medic. Nurses smiled at her as she began her rounds. She smiled back with the fake smile that she had practiced earlier, letting her eyes say things she didn't feel.

A nurse touched her arm, asking about a patient. The contact made Sakura nauseous. It took all of her strength not to jerk her arm away.

I have to get out of here.

Her first patients of the night were a civilian woman and her pre-term twins. All three were recovering well and sleeping - she did not wake them as she checked vitals, labs, coloring. Her second patient took longer - a grouchy old retired nin, admitted for exacerbation of his asthma. He refused to quit smoking. Sakura changed his inhaler, sent him for X-rays, and told him to come back if he started having chest pain. He would, of course, start having chest pain. They always did.

The evening hours passed this way, with simple routine. It never ceased to amaze her how grateful people were for things that were as difficult for her as tying her shoes - a script for antibiotics, a refill on blood pressure medicine, smooth reassurances that a woman's baby would not die from a case of the sniffles.

She knew why. It was easy to heal someone else; your own afflictions evaded you time after time until they finally got the best of you.

Sakura checked in with the nurse's station and sighed when she saw the name of her next patient. Her easy night had come to an end.

Uchiha Sasuke.

Even written, the name sent a flutter across her nervous system.

She still loved him. She loved him so much that it felt almost clinical - a pathology that could be studied, a part of her being that was not supposed to be there but was completely incurable. It was chronic, it was terminal, it was uncorrectable. She would die of it someday - it had very nearly taken her life on more than one occasion.

Incurable, indeed, she thought to herself as she flipped through the pages of his blood tests. Organ function fine, blood fine. He didn't have high cholesterol - she didn't know why they even tested him for that. He'd been here for a month, since the end of the war, and they kept running new tests on him. Useless - he hated it, she hated it. It had been necessary, of course.

He had accepted the offer of a new arm, grown from Hashirama's cells. This meant he had to stay here. It meant that she had to see him every day. The thought made it hard to get out of bed in the mornings. She didn't know what she was more afraid of - that he would be there when she opened his door, or that he wouldn't.

Itinerant. That was the best word for him, she decided. She was incurable and he was itinerant.

She pushed open the door to his room.

I have to get out of here.

.

.

.

When Sasuke awoke, he knew exactly where he was - a feeling he would never get used to. After so many years of continuous migration, he had grown accustomed to never being quite sure where in the world he would wake up.

But this place was becoming more and more familiar as the weeks passed, much to his chagrin. The four moonlit walls of the Konoha hospital room he was imprisoned in seemed to shrink every night, almost imperceptibly, but closing in on him all the same. The barred window looked out on the destruction that the war had caused - he would never know if they had given him this view on purpose, to remind him of why he was being kept there, but he suspected they had.

Of course, if Sasuke really wanted to leave, there was no room in the world that could contain him. The elders knew it, and his rinnegan pulsed in quiet agreement. But where would he go? He was purposeless, a blank sheet of paper in a breezeless sky. Here, at least, things were interesting. This was where Itachi would want him to stay.

The steady sound of another person's breathing drew Sasuke's eyes to the side of his bed, although he already knew who he would see there. Haruno Sakura, arms crossed upon her chest and white coat unbuttoned, slept in a chair pushed up against the wall. Even in her sleep, the bags under her eyes were apparent.

Sasuke stretched his arms out experimentally, testing the progress she had made on his new limb that night. He could feel the new vasculature and nerves that were now silently working under the new skin. Certainly, she was almost finished. The new limb was almost imperceptible from its predecessor - even the hairs were the same. There was the smallest of delays in response when Sasuke commanded it to perform, as if his old body and new one refused to speak to each other. But surely that would go away with time - she had promised it would.

This was their arrangement, and as close to friendship as Sasuke could come to someone with whom he was not cosmically linked through repeating souls. Every night, well past midnight, she would quietly let herself into his room and tut disapprovingly when she found he was still awake. She would drag a chair to his bedside, roll up her sleeves, and settle into her work. She rarely spoke to him, except to ask him questions about his arm. Her concentration was a mighty, unshakeable thing - Sasuke wondered if she would even hear him if he attempted to speak.

However, his new arm was not the only gift she gave him. Each night, not long after her chakra first flowed into him, a pervading feeling of peacefulness would wash over his mind and lull him into a dreamless sleep. He knew that this was her doing, that she poured her own calmness into him for his sake.

He had become addicted to it, in a way. For as long as he could remember, nightmares had plagued him every night - but as long as she was touching him, the ghosts of his family dared not rouse him. He felt nothing, thought of nothing. He would be this way for hours as she worked.

But as soon as that thread of peace was broken, the ghosts came crawling back. And he would wake up, well rested but shaken, to see that she had dragged her chair as far from him as possible to sneak a few moments of undisturbed sleep. Immediately after the war, Tsunade had retired, taking Shizune with her, and left the hospital to Sakura. And a post-world-war hospital was not an easy beast to tame. Yet, she still made time for her old teammates.

Sasuke was not the only one in the hospital plagued with nightmares, either. The hospital was rife with the screams of men who returned to the battlefield in their dreams every night. He wondered sometimes, for the briefest of seconds, why she did not go to their bedside, to calm them the way she calmed him. But he already knew the answer. He had always known.

She was no exception, herself one of the injured. She saw her own terrors when she closed her eyes. She did not scream or sob like the other patients, but her eyes would fly open, sweat beading on her brow, and her gaze would fix itself on the wall above Sasuke's head. She would stare for several minutes before silently taking her leave, venturing back out into the well-lit hallways of the hospital, where she was so desperately needed.

Sasuke gave her no indication that he saw those episodes, and she never spoke of it. But she must have known.

Tonight, she was peaceful. He eyed the clock; dawn was closing in. Someone would be looking for her, surely.

"Sakura," he murmured, his voice permeating the silent room.

She stirred briefly before her eyes snapped open. There was no need to wipe sleepiness from her eyes; it was not there. "Sasuke. Is everything alright?"

"It's late," he shrugged.

She rubbed her forehead with her palm, lingering on the diamond-shaped seal on her brow. "I didn't mean to sleep so long."

No, she never did. Her voice was tinged with an apology, as if Sasuke would begrudge her the extra moments of sleep she could steal from the hospital. He never did.

He waited for her to stand up and apologize once more before leaving, as was their routine. But she didn't. She leaned forward in her chair, her elbows on her knees and her fingertips pressed together.

"I have news," she said carefully.

Sasuke didn't respond. He knew he did not need to - she would tell him anyway.

"I would have told you earlier," she continued in his silence, an obvious nervousness pervading her words. "But you looked so tired, so I just -"

"Sakura," he cut her off. He knew she was stalling, and it made him uneasy - her news was never good, and he would prefer her to just get it over with. "Get to the point."

She sighed. "Your arm is finished, Kakashi has signed off on your release, the council found you an empty apartment. You're being discharged."

Her words caught Sasuke by surprise - he had been expecting her news to be of the sort that made his gut twist. More Konoha shinobi succumbing to the wounds inflicted by the war, or dead of post-war reconnaissance missions. But this news… this was good, wasn't it?

"Say something," Sakura murmured, and Sasuke glanced at her. Her green eyes held no emotion that Sasuke could place. They were searching him for something, although he could never figure out what.

"So I can go?" he asked, only to quell her.

"In the morning."

He nodded and looked out the window at the remnants of his village. Tomorrow, he could go. He could… what? Everything that had been his life until this exact moment was now useless. There was no one to take revenge on, no one to run from or run to. No unattainable standard of power that he had to live up to.

"Sasuke."

"Huh?" he murmured, distracted.

"You'll be okay," she said gently. He looked at her, surprised; somehow, after all these years, she knew what he was thinking.

She reached a hand out to him, as if to touch his shoulder reassuringly, but the gesture never settled. Her hand stopped halfway to him, and then the gesture died; her hand returned to her lap.

The tension was painful.

Sakura cleared her throat. "Another doctor will come by in the morning to sign you out, and a nurse will assist you in the exercises you need to do to become accustomed to your new arm."

"You won't do it?" he asked her, apprehensive. He did not relish the thought of some skittish nurse, afraid of the rumors she'd heard about him, trying to teach him to use his own arm. Better to have someone who could at least touch him without shuddering.

She did not answer immediately. Her gaze became slightly glazed, focused just to the left of his eyes. After a moment, she responded. "No, I… I have somewhere I need to be."

He frowned. Here was where she needed to be. The hospital. With him. But he did not push her.

She finally stood, the chair squeaking back across the floor. Again, there was hesitation. He turned to look at her, expectant; she was not one to keep her concerns quiet.

But she did not do what he was expecting.

"Take care of yourself, Sasuke," she murmured, and the softness in her eyes, the gentleness in her expression, left him tongue-tied, searching for the right word to tell her to stop, to tell her to share what she was thinking, to tell her to stay.

Sakura turned to leave, her white coat fluttering as the door closed behind her. He stared after her, half expecting her to turn right around and come back.

She didn't.

He would lose count of the years before he saw her again.

Chapter Text

The Sun Goes With You

Chapter 2 - Snow

i never thought of running

my feet just led the way

-bright eyes, if the brakeman turns my way

four years later

Sakura was balanced atop a tree branch in a forest nearly six hundred miles from Konoha. Her current mission had brought her back within the borders of Fire Country - it was closer to her old home than she'd been in months.

She removed her Anbu mask - a crimson and cream bear - and squinted up at the sky. It was late evening; the sun had receded and deep blue was darkening across the horizon.

The sky growled, threatening rain, and she sighed back at it, as if to say I'm not afraid of you, but I wish you wouldn't.

Of course, her request went ignored. If anything was going to be considered the grand theme of her life, then this would be it: ignored pleas. The rain came down in sheets and she frowned at the clouds from her perch in the tree - the coming hours had threatened to be miserable enough already, even without this downpour. Rude.

Her dark clothes were soaked through quickly, sticking uncomfortably to her skin. The grey vest gained another fifteen pounds of water weight, but she did not move. Her eyes adjusted to the watery veil that was drowning the forest, and her nose began to detect the scents that had been masked by wet earth. The rainfall on the leaves provided feeble cover to more pressing sounds: footsteps, labored breathing, a pounding heartbeat.

There you are.

This far into forest, there would be no civilians. There was no path to follow, and the only thing in any direction for hundreds of miles was trees, endless and densely packed over the uneven, mossy ground. No civilian would venture this deep into these woods; it had to be ninja, or in this case, something even worse. Sakura was certain it was her target, even through the carelessly masked chakra signatures. For someone with as meticulous control of chakra as she, the smallest edges of energy might as well have been a flashing sign: it's me, I'm your target, I'm here. Kill me.

She was not happy to oblige. But she would do it anyway.

The footsteps were too close together to be just one person. She listened carefully. Two more heartbeats, thick and wet. A three-man cell. Predictable, easy. Possible formations ran through her head. Her heart rate increased imperceptibly, her adrenal glands pumping epinephrine into her rushing blood, her pupils dilated. The familiar dread that seeped into her core was quickly silenced. The footsteps were growing steadily closer to her stakeout, dangerously unaware of her presence.

She waited until they were so close they were almost under her. She prepared to jump, her joints anticipating the fall they were about to take. There was the slightest hesitation that she was experiencing more and more lately, catching in her breath.

This is real.

The last thing those footsteps and heartbeats saw were emerald eyes, pink hair, and glowing points of green chakra.

..

..

..

It was springtime in Ice Country, and the Anbu base thawed by precisely one degree.

Morino Ibiki savored that single degree. Treasured it as he sat in his frigid office, the fire crackling in the wood stove doing nothing to soothe the ache in his aging fingers.

Morino Ibiki was many things. A popsicle, he was not.

At least, he didn't want to be. He wanted to be retired, somewhere warm, drink in hand, not a thought for the weather....

A knock came at his door in two short, sharp raps, interrupting his fantasy.

"Come in," Ibiki barked. If the operative that knocked let so much as a hint of that bone-chilling spring breeze into his office, he would spatchcock them like a chicken.

A masked operative silently slid into his office and approached his desk, dropping a soaking wet scroll in front of him. The mask did little to hide the ninja's identity from his commander - Ibiki was glad to see him alive.

"Found this," the operative said, gesturing to the scroll. "It's got your name on it. No seals or tags or anything. Looks like she left it for you."

The scroll was bound neatly with white ribbon, with his name written in neat, delicate strokes. And he knew who had left it behind - Ibiki narrowed his eyes at it, as if it might jump up and run off of his desk if he let it sit too long.

He snatched it up and rolled the scroll over in his palms, the wet paper sticking to his skin, and he looked up at the operative who had brought it in. It was too early for this - the sun wasn't even entirely up yet. "Where'd you pick it up?"

"Mile out of camp," the operative said, frowning at the scroll. "Stuck in a tree trunk."

Ibiki raised his eyebrows in surprise. She never came that close, not when she knew he was in the camp. He ran several scenarios through his head - arrogance, failure, injury. But she had never been the arrogant type, she'd never failed a mission, and she certainly couldn't be injured, not when she was a more skilled healer than the fifth hokage herself. She must be resupplying.

He stood abruptly, his metal chair screeching against the stone floor. The operative flinched, but Ibiki didn't much care. This was his chance.

She's here. 

"Dismissed," Ibiki barked as he quickly stalked out of his office. "Return to your post immediately."

He hurried across the slushy, icy dirt of the encampment, not bothering to button his flak vest shut to keep the freezing winds at bay. There was no time for comfort, not when she must know that he was coming for her.

He flung open the heavy door of the medic cabin, out of breath. He was not the spry young spring jonin he had once been, but he could still get where he needed to go when a reward was promised.

His efforts were not wasted. Haruno Sakura was there, crouched over a box of medical supplies, stuffing rolls of gauze into small pockets on her vest and into the small duffel she carried with her. She froze when she heard him walk in.

"Haruno," Ibiki puffed, trying not to sound winded. It just wouldn't do to let her realize how rapidly he was aging out here. 

She slowly turned to face him, rising to her full, unimpressive height. Her eyes remained guarded, if a little guilty. She didn't look well. "Ibiki."

"You slipped up, dropping the scroll so close to the camp. You couldn't evade me forever," he said, and buttoning his vest up to his chin. Damn Ice Country. It would be the death of him - hopefully sooner than later.

"I would never want to evade you," she said sweetly, zipping up her now thoroughly stuffed supply bag and patting her pockets. "But unfortunately, I have new orders. From the Hokage, you know, so it's out of my hands. So I'll be heading out."

"I don't think so," Ibiki growled, and blocked her from sliding past him out of the cabin. "Do you still understand that, as an Anbu operative, I am your commander? Or have you gotten a little big for your britches these days? I taught you everything you know, and this is how you repay those years of training?"

"Yes, commander-sensei," the girl said sarcastically, and bowed. If it was a little exaggerated, he allowed it to pass without remark. But he did not allow her to sidestep him, standing in her way.

"And as an Anbu operative, you have a duty to the organization to alleviate the workload. Especially if you're going to be pilfering supplies," he narrowed his eyes at the rolls of gauze spilled on the floor.

"Morino, we have this discussion every time," Sakura sighed, her shoulders drooping ever so slightly. "Can we skip it for now? I'm in a hurry."

"I don't ask much of you, Haruno," he said, raising his hands placatingly. "I deliver your reports to the hokage quickly, I sign off on the evaluations you miss, I allow you to pillage my medic's supplies. I don't pry into your business."

"You already know what I'm doing out there," she said tartly. She was starting to get snippy; he would have to get to the point. Once she got snippy, it was all downhill from there.

Her attitude did not bother Ibiki, although it might have when he was a younger man. He had the highest clearance possible - nothing was confidential from him - and he knew why she was out there, knew exactly what mission Kakashi had her chasing. But he didn't pry. Not with this. It made him lose sleep. He'd been in the business too long, and every type of directive possible had passed over his desk -- assassinations, undercover work, espionage, even less-than-legal operations - but with this, Ibiki remained steadfast in his pointed ignorance of the particulars of the mission she had been given, for his own sanity.

What Ibiki wanted was to set her loose on some of the more challenging directives that were piling up in his inbox. Missions that returned corpses to him, instead of successful reports. He had lost - no, Konoha had lost - good men on these missions. More than shinobi. Sons, daughters, brothers, fathers, friends. Zippered inside each body bag was a piece of a family, a puzzle piece that would never be returned to its picture.

But her? A machine. No failed missions, no late reports. A perfect operative (if he didn't count the attitude), protected under Anbu designation, but free from Anbu responsibilities. If she was good enough to be the hokage's own operative, then she was good, period. He'd seen it firsthand. Hell, he'd made her, in a way. Maybe she could ease the steady pileup of bodies on his front steps.

However, she wasn't his to command. She was the Hokage's. She did not take orders or missions from Ibiki or anyone other than that damned rascal of a copycat ninja hokage.

He drew in a deep breath to steady his frustration. "If you would just look at some of the missions that come across my desk. Take one or two that are on the way to your next one. We're losing operatives faster than they come in. I can't send anyone else home in a body bag."

Her eyes softened, but barely. "What do you think I'm doing out there, Morino? Don't you trust your hokage?"

"Of course I do." And he did. While he didn't think the newest Hokage was the most serious of the bunch, he was surprisingly competent as a leader. "But you have to understand. The S-rank missions are coming in faster than the Academy can turn out genin. The peacetime after the war is coming to a swift close."

"I know it is," Sakura said wearily. She sounded tired, small.

Memories leaked unbidden into Ibiki's mind. They did this sometimes, despite his best efforts to leave the past where it belonged - in the past.

An exam room full of nervous genin. A wide-eyed and pink-haired girl, an uncontainable blond tornado, and a raven-haired boy whose intense frown contradicted his carefully concocted air of disinterest. Team Seven. So similar to the sannin, even then.

But if he'd had to pick one of them that would amount to nothing - and he had picked one that very afternoon, who he'd decided was nothing more than a squad filler - it was the girl. No bloodline limit, no tailed beast, no clan. No taijutsu, no genjutsu. Just enough book smarts to perfectly answer the questions on a chunin level exam.

But here she was, a war hero, a student, and confidante to two Hokages, and an Anbu operative. Standing in front of him ten years later, tiredly contemplating the disintegrating peace. She'd made herself into something, proved them all wrong, and Ibiki could respect that. But he couldn't ignore it. Not even for her sake.

"Do you have anything on the way to Kiri?" she asked after the long silence, her voice still tired. "I can take one or two on the way there, and if you have one that isn't so time-sensitive, one on the way back."

Ibiki's ears perked up. She was offering to take at least three missions. That was at least three men who could be used in other operations, or who could maybe be spared.

"How long?"

"Four months," she shrugged. "At least. Maybe six. Got anything?"

He almost laughed at the redundancy of the question. Of course he had something. Multiple somethings. "You sure you can only take three?"

"Give me what you've got. I'll get to it eventually."

"You'll be back in six months? That'll be blizzard season," Ibiki said cheerfully. He had not expected such a victory, not here, not now, not with her.

"Then maybe that's the time that I stick around for a while," she winked, and hoisted the bag of stolen supplies on her shoulder. "But for now, fork over the missions. I really have to go. Good to see you, by the way."

"Eat something before you leave, will you? You look like shit. Kakashi will kill me if he sees you looking like that."

..

..

..

six months later

Sakura squinted up at the sun, a blinding but welcome sight after so many weeks trapped in the dense fog of Kirigakure and the miserable network of caves underneath it. How anyone could willingly live there was beyond her.

It amazed her how quickly the fog had dissipated as soon as she'd stepped over the border, like nothing but magic had kept the opaque water droplets suspended in the air.

For a brief moment, she allowed herself to yearn for the green of Konoha. She hadn't seen her home in years. The closest thing to permanence she had was the Anbu base in Ice Country, and she was so rarely there. For good reason - it was miserable, and Ibiki was a bastard. And it was safer this way. If she didn’t stay too long anywhere, there was less chance of... well, less chance of things getting out of hand.

But she did not linger on thoughts of a home she would never see again. She rolled up her sleeves, letting the sun kiss her skin, and stuck her hand into her bag, rummaging for the last scroll Ibiki had given her. She'd warned him that she could have been gone for a very long time, but she'd managed to finish Kakashi's mission within the timeframe she'd promised. 

Quick did not mean easy, however. Her stomach churned at the thought of the violence that had occurred at her hands; the slick, somewhat slimy warmth of blood that had spurted onto her face and slid down her neck, only to congeal in the valley of her collar bone in the hours after the fight. The crunch of bone, easily powdered in her grasp, and the feel of sinews being sliced to ribbons. A flash of the sensation made her hand twitch involuntarily, and she clenched her fist to steady it. There was nothing wrong. Nothing to lose control over.

She put it out of her mind.  If there was one thing Sakura knew, it was that she would be made to answer for her actions. But she wouldn't answer to them a minute sooner than she had to. She unrolled the scroll and scanned its contents, praying that she could have a reprieve from the violence. Just for a little while, let her be someone else. Let her be good for something else.

Maybe. It was just a collection mission. If she could get in and out undetected, then there would be no need for anyone to die.

She had just picked up Kakashi's next orders, too. One of his dogs had met her on her way out of town. Her work seemed never-ending. She liked it that way - it kept her mind off of the other things that were rattling around in her brain. It kept her hands steady. Kept her in control.

The busier she was, the less fuel there was for that fire. The fire that was still growing daily, if infinitesimally. The fire that made her afraid to touch others because she never knew what might cross between them. She could feel it smoldering; she sometimes felt as if her body wasn’t hers, as if someone was feeding the flames just out of sight. It made her fingers tremble and made her wake up with the sheets soaked in sweat, a scream unable to dislodge itself from her throat.

The work stopped her from seeing things, feeling things - none of that pain was rightfully hers, the last rites of the lives that were snuffed out in milliseconds, lives that had no right to end while she was watching, moments she should not have been allowed to intrude upon - Mama-

She shook the vile thoughts out of her head. For now, she could rest. For now, there was a brief interlude between missions. She could pretend that she wanted this. Pretend that she needed a break. Pretend that she was still the one holding the reins.

She sat on a grassy hillock and pulled lunch out of her pack - some fishy, unappetizing abomination that she'd picked up on her way out of Ame. After one bite, she didn't have much of an appetite left, so she tossed it aside and fell backwards onto the grass.

As she stared at the sky, she thought of just how different her present and past were. How different her present was from anything she'd ever thought it could be. A younger Sakura would never recognize the person she was now.

She spoke very little; most of her conversations were written on paper, or took place inside her own head. She often went weeks or months without seeing her own reflection, cutting her hair with a kunai the second it started to brush her shoulders. There was no longer any girlish softness about her, not in appearance or demeanor.

She wondered what Ino was doing in that moment; Sakura liked to imagine her sipping tea in her family flower shop, frowning about some boy or another. She wondered after Lee, Hinata, Shikamaru, Kakashi. Her friends. She had places she liked to imagine all of them; happy, safe, protected. Married, hopefully, maybe with children. Doing something that made them happy.

She did not wonder after Sasuke. Not on purpose, anyway. 

Communication with the hokage had been sparse - which was to say, nonexistent. She'd left small messages here and there, but she had no confirmation he'd received them, and there was no way for her to receive messages while in deep cover in Ame or Kiri. She assumed that if anything pressing happened in Konoha, she would pick up gossip on her travels, or Naruto would send her a letter if Kakashi was too busy.

She tried not to worry about what it meant that Kakashi's updates had been falling off. It could not mean anything good.

Ibiki was right. The peace was crumbling. She had seen it on the road. Shinobi from other villages were less trustful, less willing to help in a bind. Even Sakura herself - she hated to admit it, tried her best not to give in to it - felt her amiability towards other nations dwindling, her patience with other ninja growing thin.

Peace could not last forever. But she had hoped it would have had a longer and fuller life than a measly five years. If it had not lasted even long enough for an apple tree to bear fruit, then what had all of those people died for? Nothing?

Sometimes it felt like nothing.

Sometimes she felt like nothing. 

Mama, Papa.

She watched an impossibly small spider weaving an impossibly small web between two blades of grass.

"Life is coming for you too, little buddy," she murmured. "Not just me."

It didn't care for her words, continuing to labor tirelessly on its tiny masterpiece.

She stood and brushed off her pants. It was time to get back on the road. Ibiki's mission promised to be simple enough, and then she would return to the ice country base. She might even stay there for a few days, sleep in a real bed. See who the new medic was and if he or she needed any help, see if anyone had left behind any good paperbacks. Not romances.

She peeled open the mission scroll that Kakashi had had delivered by one of his dogs and scanned its contents.

Head back to the Ice base. You're getting a rookie this year. No arguing. It's tradition.

Love, Kakashi.

p.s. go easy on Ibiki. He's cold and elderly.

She frowned and squinted at the words as she read them again, hoping her eyes were playing tricks on her.

Kakashi, you bastard.

She might be spending more time in the snow than she had anticipated.

..

..

..

Sasuke took one last look at his apartment, scanning the sparsely furnished space for anything he was leaving behind. He was wearing the standard black mission garb, complete with green vest and red armband; a pack of modest size was hoisted on his shoulder, carrying the belongings he thought he might need for an extended contract with Anbu. It wasn't much - mostly just weapons, in fact, as he figured everything else might just be kind of pointless.

As he was turning to leave, he remembered something. He walked back into his bedroom and pulled open the top drawer of his nightstand.

At the bottom of the drawer, well-hidden beneath stacks of folded shirts, was a picture. It was old, well-worn. Three dumb kids and their sensei, who always looked younger in the photograph than in Sasuke's memories. 

He fingered the edges of the photograph before tucking it into the pack with the rest of his belongings.

Sasuke did not spare a second glance for his apartment as he left. He hadn't cared for it, and he had been aching to leave Konoha for months - years, if he was honest. He was done trying to fulfill Itachi's ideas of protecting the village from the inside.

We'll keep the apartment for you, Kakashi had promised.

No need, Sasuke had replied.

We'll do it anyway, Kakashi had shrugged. Sasuke had shrugged right back, figuring that Kakashi could do whatever he wanted with the apartment. It was his village, after all. He was the hokage.

No, Sasuke did not spare it a second glance. Hopefully he wouldn't be back for a long, long time.

Chapter Text

homecoming

so tell me why my gods all look like you

and tell me why that's wrong

-king princess, 1950

It was cold.

It was fucking cold.

Sasuke frowned as he looked over the dark, snowy landscape that would be his home for the next six months. If one could even call it a landscape, really - it was an ugly conglomeration of cinder block cabins and barracks, protruding starkly from a deep layer of snow. The occasional solitary tree stood detached from the buildings, their thin branches drooping from the weight of the ice.

It was completely flat for miles, although a mountain range rose starkly in the distance; nothing to see, nothing to do, and perhaps most importantly - nowhere to run. It was a far cry from the balmy greenery of Konoha. But that was what he wanted, wasn't it? A change of scenery?

All things considered, it was a truly miserable scene. Although he didn't know what else he had expected from the Anbu base in Ice Country.

Maybe it would look better in the morning. The temperature had dropped steeply as the evening had rounded off into the night; he shoved his hands into his pockets to keep them warm.

You could stay, you know, Naruto had told him when Sasuke had first been offered a position with Anbu. You know I can't, Sasuke had replied.

A man was waiting to greet him. He had a familiar face that took Sasuke a few seconds to place - Morino Ibiki, he remembered after a moment. He had aged significantly since Sasuke had last seen him - to be fair, that was ten years ago, at the chunin exams. If anyone had aged since then, it was Sasuke. The Anbu commander frowned at him.

"Uchiha. You're early," Ibiki said gruffly. "And alone. You were supposed to come in with the other rookies."

"They were going too slow," he answered shortly. "And I like to travel alone."

"That's not really how it works here," Ibiki grumbled. "We already got enough lone wolves. And we aren't ready for you yet. Everyone's out on missions. How far back is the rest of the group?"

"At least a day, if they didn't pick up the pace." Sasuke had left the rest of the new recruits behind a few hundred miles back. They were a chatty bunch and Sasuke was not conflicted about moving forward on his own. He didn't like chatty; if something had to be said then he would say it, otherwise there was no need to clutter the air.

"Well, can't be helped now," Ibiki sighed, and gestured toward the the circle of small cabins in the distance. " Those are the barracks. You can start getting settled in. You've got the pick of the rookie cabins, since nobody is here to fight you for it. First thing in the morning, head over to the medic cabin to get cleared for active duty."

Sasuke nodded curtly; Ibiki dismissed him with a wave of his hand and a mutter about the godforsaken cold and needing to get back to his office. Sasuke was glad to take his leave, and set out in the snow toward the circle of cinder block buildings.

If anything could be said about Anbu, it wasn't that they were wasteful.

He found a suitable cabin without much effort; they were all the same. A small gray affair with two small windows and a small porch with three steps leading up to the door. A key was already in the lock, waiting for him. He let himself in and took in his surroundings: a bed, a pillow, a blanket, a wood burning stove. A table with a single chair. Not much else.

Sasuke started a fire in the wood stove and found that it heated the small cabin to a livable temperature rather quickly. He unpacked the sparse belongings he had brought with him: his weapons, a single set of civilian clothing, and the picture.

He paused, running his thumb along the faces in the glossy photograph. He had debated with himself whether to bring it for a long while, ultimately stuffing it in his pack just moments before he left.

Team 7. Of course, they weren't much of a team anymore. Kakashi was now hokage, and being hokage in a village still recovering from a devastating war was sure to be busy. Naruto was frequently sent away on diplomatic missions, in preparation to take over for Kakashi someday. When he was in the village, he spent most of his time with Hinata, with whom he had cultivated an unexpectedly productive relationship. There was talk in the village of marriage. And Sakura had disappeared years ago, unseen and unheard from, at least to Sasuke. He was sure that she kept in touch with at least some of her friends, judging from the way no one was all that concerned by the way she seemingly evaporated into thin air.

No one would speak of her in his presence. Even Naruto would laugh nervously and clumsily change the subject when her name came up in casual conversation. It was like she had never existed. After the first year, he got the hint: she wanted nothing to do with him.

Sometimes he wondered about her, if she had found whatever she was looking for. She must have, if she hadn't returned to the village. He had only been out of the hospital for a week before he heard of her departure. She'd healed his arm and left before he could seek her out to thank her, to apologize again for all of his wrongs, to try to set things right.

She could've settled into his heart as easily as she had the rest of the village's, as she'd been threatening to do since they were genin, if he would have let her. He wouldn't have pushed her away forever, he was certain of it. He had never been anything but selfish, had never been all that strong a proponent of delayed gratification. And he'd craved her love and warmth as much as a man could crave anything. She would have grown comfortable in his silences and he would have begun to listen to her neverending chatter.

Maybe it was for the best that she had gone.

But still, despite the many degrees of separation between them all, Sasuke had brought the photograph with him. He'd had it since he was a young boy. As a child, he'd looked at it often, and when he'd left the village, the image had regularly entered into his mind in spite of himself. The three of them were as close to a family as he would ever get, and they had fought tooth and nail to bring him home, to pull him from the hatred that had engulfed his younger years. They had forgiven him entirely despite his crimes. The photograph was a reminder of the good in Konoha. The part of the village he wanted to protect.

Now he slid the photograph under the rather deflated-looking pillow and pulled off his clothes, wet with melted snow.

The fire crackled as he slid into bed. It was too cold for him to dream.

When he awoke, it was late morning; the one window in the cabin faced west, so no sunlight had filtered in to wake him at dawn. He'd have to get used to that - in Konoha, the first light had served as an adequate alarm.

The fire had burned itself to nothing but embers during the night, but the cabin remained livably warm. Sasuke rolled out of bed and pulled on his uniform.

He remembered Ibiki's instructions from the night before: Head to the medic to get evaluated for active duty. Sasuke didn't need to be told twice - active duty was exactly what he wanted, sooner rather than later. Immediately rather than later. He was sick of sitting around.

He left his cabin to find the medic.

As he walked, he wondered what type of woman the medic would be; she must be at least somewhat strange to have chosen to be posted out here. Kakashi had told him that there was only one woman in the entire Ice Country base. So few men became medics that Anbu recruited women for the sole purpose of staffing the foreign bases to treat their injured. It must be a strange kind of loneliness, he thought, to be the only woman in an encampment of men who hadn't seen another female in months.

Sasuke was able to easily identify the building from the large red cross on its otherwise unremarkable door. He knocked loudly, willing the medic to come quickly and not leave him waiting out in the cold.

A part of him thought that it might be her, that he might find her here in the snow, healing frostbite and hypothermia. He didn't allow himself to dwell on that thought. Impossible.

A large, gruff looking man with a thick walrus mustache opened the door, rubbing his eyes. "Who're you?"

"I'm looking for the medic. Is she in?" Sasuke asked rather brusquely.

The man chuckled, his grin making the ends of his mustache curve upward. "You must be one of the rookies. It's me you're looking for."

Sasuke scowled. "You're the medic?"

"Come on in. I'm Yuuto. And unfortunately, I'm the medic at this camp. I know, I know. Not who you were expecting."

Shaking off his surprise and disdain, Sasuke entered the building. A fire crackled cheerfully in a fireplace in the corner, casting a warm glow around the cot-filled room.

"You can sit on that cot right there and take off your cloak. Ibiki send you for your clearance physical?" Yuuto asked, snapping on a pair of gloves.

"Yes." Sasuke sat on the nearest cot. Yuuto pulled a stool in front of him and sat his rather large body on it.

"Liking Snow Country so far?" Yuuto asked conversationally as he shone a bright light into Sasuke's eyes.

He shrugged. "I'm not here to enjoy myself."

"No, I guess you're not. Take a deep breath for me - good, now exhale. Lungs alright. Heart sounds good. Doing the usual rookie rotation?'

"Six months." The cold stethoscope on Sasuke's back made him wince.

"They tell you that, but it'll be closer to nine. They're pretty short staffed out here. Only got a couple of regulars. Even Ibiki's only out here because he drew the short end of the stick."

"Why do people stay?" Sasuke asked, curious. After rookie rotation, an agent could request which base to be sent to. He couldn't imagine any agents asking to remain here - but if there were regulars, then there had to be some redeeming quality of this wasteland.

"Nothing and nobody waiting for them back in Konoha, usually. The agents who stay usually do it as a sort of self-imposed penance for whatever they've done in their past."

"Hn," Sasuke murmured. He knew the feeling that Yuuto was talking about.

"Not me, though. Been an agent for almost eight years, only came out here because they're offering good money. You see some bad injuries out here. But once my year's up, I'm out of here. No way, no how am I staying in this shithole."

Sasuke didn't reply to this. Yuuto continued his inspection, his eyes pausing on Sasuke's new arm.

"This isn't the arm you were born with, eh?"

"No. I lost it in the war," Sasuke said, smiling wryly. It was the truth, if only part of it.

"Whoever put it back did a hell of a job. Usually impossible to do. Do you remember the medic who did it?"

The smile faded from Sasuke's face. "A girl I used to know."

Yuuto nudged Sasuke, a knowing look in his eyes. "We all got one of those, eh? Well, she's a damn good medic, looks like, if she can regrow an arm from scratch. Maybe we'll get her out here one of these days."

"She disappeared years ago," Sasuke said flatly. He did not wish to spend any more time that day dwelling on Haruno Sakura. She took up far too much real estate in his mind as it was.

"Too bad. The boys out here would love to have a female medic," Yuuto sighed. "But women disappear as easily as anything. Haven't seen a woman in months."

"I was told there was a woman at this base," Sasuke said, noticing the faraway look in Yuuto's eyes.

"Sometimes. She doesn't spend much time here." Yuuto said. "Been based out of this station for years, though. I heard she started out as a medic and Ibiki nixed that. Had her on combat quicker than he could throw a kunai. Now she's one of the best we've got, S-rank exclusively. But you might not ever see her."

"What's her name?" Sasuke asked curiously. He didn't know Anbu currently had any women in combat roles.

But Yuuto just shrugged. "Who knows if any of us know her real name? She's never around long enough to share that much information. She's been on a mission for a few months now, but we got ten or so guys coming back tonight. I think she's one of them. No doubt she'll be back on the road tomorrow, if she is."

"Hn," Sasuke intoned. In spite of himself, he was curious about her. He wondered if he could procure a similar deal - solo work, gone for months at a time.

"You've got a bit of a fever. Do you feel sick?"

"It's normal," Sasuke assured Yuuto. His temperature had always been a few degrees higher than what it should be. His mother had proudly called it his will of fire when he was little, the sign of a true Uchiha.

"Well, if you say so," Yuuto shrugged. "Everything looks good. I'll bring your official clearance to Ibiki this afternoon. You're good to go. I'll see you at the rookie tattooing ceremony tonight."

"Ceremony?"

Yuuto laughed at the panic in Sasuke's voice. "Not one for a party, eh?"

"Not really," Sasuke grumbled.

"Well, it's mandatory, so that's too bad. They gotta get that tattoo on your arm some time, and you'll also get assigned to a mentor."

"Mentor?"

"Yeah, an older, more experienced operative. It's tradition! You rookies need someone to show you the ropes. And someone to do your evaluations, since Ibiki's too busy to do it these days."

Sasuke bit back a sigh. He did not like compulsory, he did not like jumping through hoops, and he certainly didn't like mentors. But he supposed that if obedience was the quickest way towards taking missions, then obedience was his new middle name. "Who's my mentor, then? Can't I just go meet him now?"

"Dunno," Yuuto shrugged. "Only Ibiki knows. He picks them randomly and then the both of you will find out tonight. He likes a bit of pomp, that old man. A little mystique."

Sasuke hated both of those things.

Yuuto handed him a soft stack of folded black cloth. "This is your new uniform. You won't be needing the Konoha gear you're wearing, so you can toss them if you'd like."

Sasuke took the bundle of clothes wordlessly and stood, preparing to face the biting cold once again.

"I'll bring your medical clearance to Ibiki this afternoon," Yuuto called after Sasuke as he left.

The rest of the day passed without much excitement. Sasuke changed into his new uniform, feeling remiss without the Uchiha fan on his back, before going to the mess hall for breakfast. Sometime after lunch, the rest of the recruits made it to the encampment, and from their glares, Sasuke could tell they harbored some resentment over his abandonment of their little group. He simply rolled his eyes; he had not joined Anbu to make friends, and there was no reason to travel at as slow a pace as they had been, unless the reason was incompetence.

He learned that the snow rarely stopped, if ever. He was told by two separate operatives that he was lucky. If he'd arrived a week earlier, he would have found himself in the midst of a icy flurry. A week later and he would have been smack in the beginning of blizzard season.

An hour before dinner, operatives who had been away on missions began to roll in. A few came in with teams, but most of them were alone. They were all dirty and tired-looking as they headed straight for Yuuto's cabin. But they seemed to be in good spirits by the time they reached the dining hall.

"Is she back yet?" Sasuke overheard one tall, light-haired operative ask his companion, a tinge of hopefulness in his voice.

"Naw. Ibiki said she'll be back for the ceremony, though. She's got a rookie this time around."

"Bad luck. Bet that has her in a mood, after what happened with Haru."

"She's not as superstitious as you. Besides, look at Shota. He got a rookie last time around, and he's still alive."

"Shota also lost his right hand a week later on a mission with Aoi," grumbled the other man. "And there was barely enough left of Haru to bury. I'm just saying, if I got drawn to get a rookie, I'd fucking quit. I'd be back in Konoha before Ibiki could throw a kunai at me."

"What's so bad about being a mentor?" asked the man sitting next to the operatives. Sasuke recognized him as one of the rookies who had come in today.

"Nothing," grumbled one of the older shinobi, but another operative shushed him.

"Rookies always get their mentors killed," the man said imperiously. "Although most operatives only make it a couple of years anyway."

"That's not true," said his friend grumpily. "What happened with Haru was a fluke. Stop scaring them."

It looked a little late for that, though. The rookie had turned white as a sheet. Sasuke smirked. What had he thought he was in for, a bunch of D-rank missions? Finding old ladies' cats? It was common knowledge that over half of all Anbu operatives died within their first two years. There was a reason that Anbu recruited largely young men with no family left. Of course, that was not the case for every operative; many came because of the thrill, or because it was a way to travel, to get out of their villages, to earn respect. But the best operatives were the ones who had no one counting on them to come home.

"She'll be fine, though. So you don't need to worry about anything until the next batch of rookies," the light-haired man said encouragingly.

"Who is she?" asked another rookie excitedly. "I heard there was a girl here. I thought that she was gonna be the medic, but instead it was some fat guy with a mustache."

"Go easy on Yuuto," warned the older operative. "He'll save your life someday. And don't get your hopes up about any girls out here. She takes missions directly from the hokage, no one else. She's not around much, because as soon as she finishes one mission the Hokage sends her another one. But she's been out here for years."

"How long have you been here?"

"Eight months. They said I could go home after six, but then they took it back, bunch of assholes."

Sasuke turned away from the men, no longer interested in their conversation. He finished the rest of his meal in silence, tuning out the chatter around him. He did not try to make friends: what good would they do him? He planned on only taking solo missions.

The evening passed this way, with idle chatter between operatives and recruits, punctuated by the occasional return of agents. They would stumble into the base, weary and forlorn, for Yuuto to intercept them and Ibiki to instruct them to wash up and report to the firepit by nightfall for the tattooing of the rookies.

Sasuke found that Anbu was a tight-knit operation, heavily steeped in tradition but also in loneliness. Yuuto was right; everyone was looking for a reason to celebrate.

Dusk fell early in Ice Country; the sun set and the temperature dropped swiftly, leaving the operatives to rush to their cabins to pile on layers before the ceremony took place.

Agents slowly began to filter into the clearing that held the fire pit in the center of the base. Sasuke followed them out, finding that the flurry of snow had only increased. The warmth from the large fire was hardly enough to stave off the cold. He looked around the gathering curiously; there were no women in sight, but many new faces. He wondered which one would be the unlucky soul assigned to babysit him.

..

..

..

Sakura arrived back at the Ice Country base with water squelching in her boots and ice forming on her eyelashes. It was late evening and the sun was down, but there were still a few minutes left before it would be completely dark.

It was almost beautiful, the soft, dusky blue light on the silent white snow. It glittered sweetly around the smattering of cabins, and the warm glow coming from the mess hall lent itself to an ethereal, almost cozy atmosphere.

Almost.

She knew that everyone would have been filtering back into the base today; Ibiki had put out the call for all operatives that could return to do so, and do so quickly, in order to attend the rookie tattooing ceremony.

The Anbu tattoo on Sakura's own shoulder tingled uncomfortably under the layers of clothing as she remembered her own tattooing ceremony and her own mentor. She shivered.

She had arrived at this cold hour because she knew everyone would be in the mess hall having dinner, therefore there would be no welcoming committee camped out to herald her return.

No, this way she could go straight to Ibiki. Keep the old man unaware, ambush him in his office, look him in the eye and lay it on thick. That was the best way to get him to acquiesce, Sakura had found over the years. A little feminine charm went a long way out here in the ice.

"Looking for me?" a voice growled from behind her.

Sakura nearly jumped out of her skin and turned to see Ibiki ankle-deep in the snow, arms crossed over his chest.

"Thought you could sneak up on me because I'm getting old, eh?" Ibiki asked, eyes narrowed.

"Um," Sakura said, biting her lip and thinking it unwise to lie.

Ibiki waved a dismissive hand in the air. "You never change, do you?"

Sakura smiled, sensing she wasn't in any real trouble. "You tell me."

"You got Kakashi's scroll, I take it. Unless you're here just to visit me."

"I got his scroll," Sakura confirmed, the smile sliding off of her face. "Look, I really don't think this is a good ide—"

Ibiki raised a hand to stop her. "I don't want to hear it, Haruno. You've been Anbu for long enough now that you know how it works, and you can't shirk your duties to the brotherhood forever."

"I haven't been shirking my duties," Sakura snapped, stung. "I've been turning out missions just like the rest of you. Including the six you saddled me with the last time I saw you, so you're welcome, by the way."

"No need to get snippy," Ibiki said placatingly. "A lot of men are here tonight because they didn't die on those missions that you took."

"So let me keep working," Sakura pleaded. "Don't make me do this. I don't want to be a mentor. I don't want a rookie, I just want to work."

"It's too late now. Besides, we're short staffed, and we can't release a troop of green-bellied loose cannons on the world without having someone show them the ropes. There's a way we do things around here, and you know the code, so bring up a new recruit. Show 'em what you wish you'd known."

Sakura grumbled something under her breath about the things she'd wished she'd known. Ibiki decided he didn't really care to hear what she'd said - he could guess.

"So get to your cabin, get cleaned up, and figure out what you're gonna say to your rookie, because I'm going to go get the ceremony started. We'll be at the fire pit. Try not to be too late," Ibiki warned. "I don't want to have to come looking for you again."

He began to walk away, but Sakura reached out and grabbed his sleeve to stop him.

"I'm getting worse, Ibiki," she said quietly. "Something is coming. It's getting closer every day. Don't take me out of the field now."

Ibiki paused and studied her for a moment before sighing. "I know, kid. And I know what you've been dealing with out there. Think of it this way: don't let our new recruits go in blind."

Then he turned around and stalked away, leaving her standing in the snow alone once again. She squinted after him, hoping he could feel the holes she was trying to burn in his back. He didn't turn around.

That didn't go well, she thought to herself as she stomped away to her cabin. She wasn't sure that she had expected anything else; she had known that she couldn't keep using Anbu resources and claiming Anbu immunity without having to participate in Anbu customs.

As she changed into fresh tactical gear, she felt a twinge of pity for whoever her rookie was, sitting out there around the fire waiting for her. They probably didn't think they needed a mentor – they thought they were already the best of the best, the hand-picked jonin elite who had been selected by the hokage himself.

She didn't know what she was going to teach them when she herself was so lost in this world. She didn't know how she was going to guide them through the violence and field of bodies that this job turned up, didn't know how she was going to explain who she was and where she came from and why she couldn't go back there. Why she couldn't sleep at night with the heavens looking down on her for all she'd done.

She sat at the tiny table with a pen and scribbled a few words on a napkin. When she finished, she read them back to herself.

They weren't beautiful, lacking elegance and polish, but they were true, and true was the best she could give. She didn't want her rookie to expect anything she couldn't give them.

She glanced out of the window; it was completely dark by now. Ibiki was going to have a cow. The ceremony must have long since started while she was dallying over pretty words. She lit a fire in the tiny cabin before venturing back out into the dark – she might as well have something warm to return to after this nonsense was over. She hurried across the snow towards the warm light emanating from the blaze, tucking the short speech she had written into her pocket.

Let's get this over with.

Chapter Text

the sun goes with you, chapter four : blind

I've been finding it hard to say how I feel, as of late

There's a depth to my fatigue, it's getting hard to explain

There's a dirt on my skin and it doesn't seem to wash off

Set sail or call to port, this wind's tying round my neck in knots

-tell me, ziggy alberts

The fire pit was situated at the heart of the snow country base, surrounded by a circle of wooden benches which enveloped a large and magnificent fire. The fire crackled loudly as operatives found their places amongst their friends and waited for the tattooing ceremony to begin; Ibiki found his place standing in front of the fire to address his subordinates, his dark figure silhouetted against the flames that danced against the black night sky.

"Alright, rookies. In the middle," Ibiki called, and Sasuke stepped forward toward the fire, content to stay at the back of the tiny group. At least thirty agents had come for the ceremony, not including the eight rookies that now stood at the front of the pack. Sasuke didn't recognize anyone.

"Now, I'm not really one for sentimental words," Ibiki continued.

The chuckle that arose from the crowd told Sasuke that this was an understatement.

"So I won't be saying any, except for welcome, and that your village and country thank you for your commitment to their continued safety. This year's rookie ceremony is going to be conducted by Yuuto, your base medic and camp mother. And as is the custom of this ceremony, I have something for the rookies. A gift, if you will."

Ibiki held out his fist; in it was clutched a fistful of long, black strips of fabric that dangled down from his hand.

Please don't be blindfolds, Sasuke thought.

"Blindfolds," Ibiki announced. "Traditional and symbolic of trust and inexperience. When you get your own rookie in a few years they'll get the same treatment. The mentors have also been blindfolded – not to symbolize anything, but just for fun. They're waiting to meet you now, and it's cold, so no fussing about putting these things on."

Sasuke sighed. In the old days – before he was born, or maybe before he was old enough to realize what had been happening beneath his nose – Uchiha clan traitors, being led from imprisonment to their clan-meted execution, were always blindfolded. To the Uchiha, taking a person's eyesight from them was the ultimate symbol of weakness, the final debasement – the last insult as you died, blind by the hands of your brethren.

Still, Sasuke took the blindfold that was handed to him and tied it around his eyes without complaining, even when Ibiki stopped in front of him and stared with hard eyes and did not walk away until he was satisfied that Sasuke could no longer see.

Ibiki was one of the old soldiers who remembered why it was a good thing that the Uchiha were massacred. Sasuke could sense the distrust that rolled off the old ninja in waves. He could also sense that Ibiki knew exactly the significance of blindfolding an Uchiha.

Sasuke shifted uncomfortably, bumping shoulders with the rookie next to him, as his other senses leapt to fill in the void left by his missing eyesight. He reached up to touch the blindfold, wishing he could rip it off. He didn't know how Kakashi did it for all those years, even if he'd only had the one eye obscured.

"Welcome, rookies!" Sasuke heard Yuuto's booming voice exclaim from several yards away. "Welcome to Ice country! As I'm the only one here - aside from our dear commander - who's met each and every one of you, it's only right that I get to introduce you to your new family. For those of you with short memories, I'm Yuuto, the camp medic. Has everyone got their blindfolds on?"

The question was met with the sound of shuffling and chafing fabric as the eight rookies nodded their heads and shifted awkwardly. These sorts of theatrics did not agree with Sasuke and did nothing for his already irritable mood.

"Then bring in the mentors!" Yuuto roared. There was much clapping and laughter from the crowd as the sound of ice crunching beneath boots filled the air. "Don't you dare touch your blindfolds, you scoundrels!"

Sasuke was acutely aware of the warmth of approaching bodies; the line of mentoring operatives was being led to stand face to face with the line of newcomers. A breathing body stopped directly in front of him. Sasuke could tell that the mentor was shorter than him, but nothing else could be deduced with that stupid blindfold on his face.

Other than the fact that the person in front of him smelled like soap and tea leaves and something distinctly familiar and melancholy that he could only define as home.

"Operatives, prepare to meet your new rookies. The mentors may now remove their blindfolds."

There was rustling as eight operatives pulled the blindfolds from their faces; he heard laughter and clapping from the others, but not from the agent sitting across from him.

He hoped this meant that his mentor also did not appreciate these sorts of histrionics. He could work with the silent type. Please be the silent type.

"Mentors, please remove the blindfolds of your pupils."

Sasuke felt his hair being ruffled as a pair of hands reached around his face and warm breath on his cold cheek as the operative leaned forward to free his vision.

Fingers brushed across his cheeks, pushed aside his hair. Soft.

The fingers fumbled with the knot briefly before finally loosening it, letting the blindfold fall to the ground between them. Sasuke opened his eyes to look into the face of his new mentor.

He found himself staring into the discontented green eyes and frowning face of Haruno Sakura. His heart skipped a beat.

Her hair was shorter, and she was ever so slightly taller, markedly thinner… but it was her, there was no mistake.

"Sasuke?" she whispered.

No.

No.

He blinked once, twice, three times – attempted to dispel the obvious genjutsu he was placed under, but nothing changed. Never before had he thought to doubt his own eyes, the one sense that never failed him.

She was standing right in front of him, short pink hair swirling around her face as the bitter, icy wind whistled through the night, the flames of the bonfire reflected in her searching eyes, cheeks flushed from the cold and lips pursed in an unhappy line.

And she was wearing the same thing as everyone else here – the same black and gray Anbu uniform, the same Anbu symbol emblazoned across her vest – and if he'd looked, he would have found the same Anbu tattoo on her left shoulder. She can't be.

What felt like hours passed in the span of a single second.

"You?" Sasuke demanded finally, and his voice was biting but also - and he hated this - weak.

"Me," she said slowly, and her voice was unreadable. "What are you doing here?"

Her voice was drowned out by the shouts of rookies and mentors as one by one, the rookies were released from their blindfolds – their voices were joined by interjections and hollers from the crowd of operatives behind them. Still, he could hear that she wasn't exactly happy to see him.

Who could have thought that after all these years, he'd find her here?

"I could ask you the same thing," Sasuke said stiffly. "I'm here because Kakashi sent me—"

"Kakashi sent you?" she asked sharply, and she sounded angry and startled, and betrayed, almost. "He wouldn't. You're lying."

"I'm n—"

"Operatives!" Yuuto bellowed, sounding entirely too upbeat and unbothered for the situation at hand. "Introduce yourselves to your rookies!"

Sakura sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I guess I don't need to introduce myself to you."

"Don't you?" Sasuke seethed, because he was quite certain this was not the Sakura he once knew, sitting across from him in full Anbu uniform, short pink hair framing her unhappy face. This woman looked like a stranger to him. A stranger whose every contour he knew like the back of his hand, a stranger who was accusing him of lying as the first sentence out of her mouth after five years.

She blinked, as if this was not what she had expected him to say. "Cheeky."

Yuuto appeared behind her shoulders, large meaty hands clapping down on her. "Haruno! Don't be a spoilsport. Introduce yourself to your rookie!"

"I already know him," Sakura said accusingly – and Sasuke knew the accusation wasn't leveled at the medic, but at himself.

He didn't know she could sound that way towards him.

"Tradition!" Yuuto barked. "Introductions must be made!"

Sakura glared up at the large mustachioed man, but then relented when she sensed that she was fighting a losing battle. "Alright, since I already wrote it."

She reached into her pocket and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper. It looked awfully akin to a scribbled-on napkin as she flattened it against her thigh. She waved Yuuto away, and the medic was all too happy to oblige, flouncing off to butt into the business of other mentors and their rookies.

She sighed and glanced up at Sasuke again, as if to say are you really going to make me do this before looking back down at the napkin.

"My name is Haruno Sakura, and I am your new mentor. I know that I did not choose you, and you did not choose me, but I hope that we can be friends."

Her voice faltered slightly, and their eyes met.

"Because of that, I will promise you the same things that I promise all of my friends: I promise to protect you always and to help you understand when you find this new life to be too difficult. I promise to keep my door open for you. I promise that as long as I am with you, no harm will come to you, and that I will defend you until my last breath. I promise to stand behind you and to support you when no one else will. And…"

Here she trailed off, her eyes fluttering back down to the paper in her hand.

"I promise to lay my life down for you, if need be. We are all your family now; welcome." She said these last words with a strong sense of finality.

For a moment, Sasuke was rendered speechless.

For what was supposed to be an introduction, she had certainly created more questions than she had answered.

Their eyes met again briefly as Ibiki spoke. "Mentors, you may now seal the Anbu tattoo on the left shoulder of your rookie."

"Give me your arm," Sakura sighed, holding out her hand.

"First tell me what you're doing here."

"Same thing as everyone else," she replied dismissively, sighing again as she reached out and grasped his forearm; with her other hand she pulled down the collar of his shirt, revealing the skin of his left shoulder to the elements. The hair on his arms stood from the cold.

"Freezing to death?"

"Do you understand the commitment you are making?" she murmured, keeping her eyes averted from his.

"Of course I do," Sasuke said. "I don't understand –"

"A chronic affliction of yours," Sakura muttered, and she sounded weary, forlorn; some of the fire had gone out of her voice. She placed her palm flat against his exposed skin, and the warmth of her fingers was frustratingly distracting on his arm. How long had he wondered exactly what her touch would feel like, after all of these years?

"It's not too late to back out, Sasuke. Go back to Konoha, meet someone, revive your clan. I thought that's what you wanted," she continued quietly as she pulled a kunai from her hip pouch. Her other hand did not budge from his shoulder.

Sasuke could hardly believe what he was hearing. "Excuse me?"

"Don't do this. Go back to the village. Be happy. Be safe."

"I want this. I wanted to join," he told her, confused.

With one last unhappy look, she lifted her palm from his shoulder momentarily and let the kunai in her other hand make a shallow cut in his skin – his blood dribbled down his arm and spotted the white snow. She made a deeper cut into her own palm, letting her own blood pool slightly in the cup of her own hand.

"Then welcome to the brotherhood, Sasuke."

She laid her bloody palm against his shoulder and for a moment, his skin grew unbearably hot as their blood combined.

When it cooled, she withdrew her hand, and all that remained was the familiar swirl of the Anbu symbol, tattooed into his skin with her blood, a permanent, dark red mark. The cut she had made into his arm had disappeared.

He watched as the laceration on her own palm receded and then vanished, leaving not so much as a scar behind.

"How did you do that?" Sasuke asked – he'd never seen someone heal themselves so effortlessly without the familiar glow of medical chakra.

"Huh?" she asked distractedly, as she looked over her shoulder.

A raucous cheer had gone up among the operatives, and they rushed toward the fire to congratulate their new comrades. There was much clapping of backs and shaking hands; the closeness of the bodies made Sasuke uncomfortable. He turned to look at Sakura, to ask her again what she was doing here, to ask her what she meant when she said it wasn't too late, to ask her anything, maybe even how she had been all these years… but she was gone.

He scanned the crowd for her pink head, but she was nowhere to be seen in the mass of people. Eventually, his eyes lit upon a figure on the outskirts of the crowd, following Ibiki away from the celebration.

No you don't, Sasuke thought, gritting his teeth. She was not going to walk away without any sort of an explanation. Not again. He could still not believe that after so many years of silence, he had found her in a remote ANBU base in Snow Country - and that she thought she was going to run off again. He extricated himself from the throng and went after her.

..

..

..

"Morino," Sakura called out as she chased after the receding figure. She knew he could hear her, but he kept walking. "Morino, damn it, I know you can hear me."

Finally, he paused and turned to face her. She stopped when she was just feet from him, the clouds from her breath closing the distance between their bodies.

"You promised me!" she said angrily, willing her eyes to light him on fire, resisting the urge to stomp her foot in the snow, knowing it would just make her look childish. "We had a deal, Morino. What's he doing here?"

"The deal had to be adjusted to meet the staffing needs of the base," he said, his gaze unrepentant.

"And you didn't feel the need to let me know?" she seethed. Her anger was threatening to boil over; she felt the familiar pull of her chakra, whispering, telling her to let go, to show him how angry she was instead of just telling him. "And that's your answer to staffing needs? Uchiha Sasuke? You couldn't tell me, Morino?"

"You were on a mission when I found out. Rein it in, kid. You're going to lose it."

"I'm always on a mission, and you seem to manage to talk to me just fine when you need something else from me," Sakura snapped. He had had no problem getting her a scroll telling her, a month into what was supposed to be a two-week mission, that her directive had been extended. Or to add a new kill to her list, or to tell her to pick up the special egg noodles he liked from Suna on her way back to the base. "You can't just go back on our agreement. Send him back."

"Don't presume to tell me what to do, Haruno. I don't take orders from you," Ibiki's eyes narrowed, but she refused to be intimidated by him.

"And I don't take orders from you. I'm here on the hokage's command. The same hokage," she said, letting her voice take on some of the petulance that she felt, "who agreed to the terms that you're changing. And I know that you can't afford to lose me. Send him back."

"Are you threatening to desert your post, operative?" he asked quietly.

"You uphold your end, I'll uphold mine, commander," she said through gritted teeth.

"Take it up with Kakashi, then. He's the one who sent him. I just put in the request for new recruits."

Sakura froze. So it was true - Kakashi had allowed this to happen? He of all people knew very well exactly how much she would object to this. And to send him here, have him right under her nose, as if they were taunting her… if Kakashi thought that she would just let this one go, he had another thought coming. She might even have to make a stop in the village on her next trip to Fire Country, to remind him that she was no longer a girl to be walked over whenever he felt like it.

Ibiki, seeing that he had won, turned and kept walking toward his quarters.

"Morino," she called after him again, softer, once she was sure that the shock of betrayal would not seep into her voice.

He stopped again, not bothering to conceal the annoyance on his face.

"I have new orders. To the outskirts of Kiri, starting tomorrow. I can't be his mentor," she pleaded, hesitating before adding, "Please."

"Take him with you," Ibiki said, waving a nonchalant hand in the air.

"You know I can't do that. It's dangerous. He doesn't know."

"Then he'll wait for you to get back."

"Like hell he will," Sakura snorted mirthlessly, the irony of the statement not lost on her. "Listen. Ibiki. Come on, don't do this to me. I thought we were friends."

"Friends has nothing to do with it. It's my understanding that Lord Sixth is worried about you. Wants you to get back to your roots. Your roots being teamwork."

"Then I quit."

"Yeah, Kakashi said you'd say that. He said you can either head straight back to Konoha and get put on indefinite medical leave until you get a proper attitude, or you can stay here and show the Uchiha the ropes."

She laughed then, without humor. "He doesn't need a mentor, Ibiki, and he especially doesn't need me."

"His brother is the whole reason we have this mentor program, because of what happens when you take your eyes off an Uchiha. People still don't trust him. The optics would be bad if we just let him loose without supervision or gave him special treatment."

"I don't give a damn about the optics. Send him back."

"You want my advice, Haruno? I always thought you didn't need it, but looks like you do. Sit down, shut up, and do what you're told quietly. That's the fastest way to get what you want, and the fastest way for things to get back to normal for you."

She changed tactics quickly. "I'll take whatever missions you need me to take. Twenty of them. Two hundred. Anywhere you want, anything you want."

"Then he'll wait for you while you finish your new assignments," Ibiki shrugged.

"Just give him to someone else. We'll both be happier."

"I'm done arguing with you, operative. Good night." With this, he kept walking, his steady plod crunching through the iced surface of the snow.

Once he was out of earshot, Sakura let out a frustrated groan, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingertips. She would not stand for this. In the morning, she would… what? Send an angry scroll to the village? Argue with Ibiki some more?

For a moment, she stood and watched the snowflakes swirl lazily through the air, stark white against the pitch black sky.

Again, it was almost beautiful; the flurry of ice crystals glinted in the moonlight as the small clumps of white floated down from the sky. She angrily wiped at her eyes, getting rid of the frustrated tears before they froze on her lashes – tears, a reflex from her past life that simply refused to leave her no matter what happened.

Of course, of course he was sent here. It perfectly followed the seemingly endless downward spiral of her life that had started five years ago. No, that had started ten years ago. With a last huff, she turned to head back to her cabin…

And walked straight into the folded arms of Uchiha Sasuke.

"Shit!" she exclaimed, jumping back. Her hand was already curled around the handle of a kunai in her hip pouch, ready to strike.

"Did you just try to have me sent back to the village?" Sasuke growled at her dangerously. The familiar scowl on his face told her that he had heard their entire conversation.

"First of all, don't ever sneak up on me again," she warned, ignoring his question. "Second of all, that conversation was private. Eavesdropping is rude. Goodnight, operative."

She pushed past him, willing him to let her go.

"Stop," he commanded, grabbing her shoulder. She sighed; obviously, he would prefer to do this the difficult way. Without turning around, she concentrated her chakra onto the surface of her skin, exactly where he was touching her.

After a millisecond, he snapped his hand away, burned.

"That is no way to speak to your ranking officer," she said quietly. The words felt foreign on her tongue, and her voice felt like it belonged to someone else. Before she could crack, she continued on her path, determined not to give him any ground. She was an adult now; gone were the days when a stern word from the last living Uchiha could turn her into a puddle.

"Sakura, wait," Sasuke called again, and she stopped. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping that he would just give up, go away, leave her alone, the way he'd always been so good at….  His voice was confused as he asked, "What is going on?"

She refused to look at him; tears were welling in her eyes once again. She found that she desperately wanted to tell him everything, and simultaneously wanted to never see him again. "Please, Sasuke. Let it go. Goodnight."

And with those final words, she continued on the lonely path to her isolated cabin. She knew that he was watching her back as she left; she did not give either of them the satisfaction of turning around.

It was a sleepless night for all involved.

Sasuke tossed and turned in his bed, his head swimming with questions as he stared at the ceiling. The image of his first sight of her all these years later wouldn't leave his mind – her wary green eyes, the angry snap of her clear voice and the rain-like hush of her whisper, the swish of her blush-pink hair over her shoulders.

The tears he'd seen her wiping off her cheeks, alone in the ice as the snowflakes swirled down around her, and the erratic puffs of her breath into the dark night.

The burn of his skin where he'd touched her. Sasuke rubbed his palm where the skin was still red and angry from the assault.

What was that?

He wondered if she'd been here the whole time – wondered if anyone else knew that this is where she was.

He snorted mirthlessly when he remembered that he'd half expected her to be the base medic and how he had scolded himself afterward for even thinking that this was where she would turn up.

Well, here she was. Five years later, he'd found her.

Sakura was Anbu. Sakura, the same girl who'd once been able to do nothing but ask him to stay as he walked away from everything he'd ever known, who'd insisted she loved him year after year until she disappeared into thin air, Sakura who had once been so loud and vivacious that the way she was now, all hard edges and biting words, seemed downright alien. She looked tired, weary, and both astonished and utterly unsurprised to see him standing in front of her.

It took him a few hours to pinpoint the biggest difference.

She'd lost everything about her that had once made her soft.

Across the base, in her cabin that was isolated from the rest of the barracks - the girl cabin, she'd been told, as if girls were wild animals that needed quarantining - Sakura did not toss and turn like Sasuke. Instead, she remained perfectly motionless, as if by staying still life might not see her and might just pass her by, might decide to leave her alone this time, might forget about her entirely.

She watched the fire flickering in the wood stove, the fire that she'd set before she'd set out for the ceremony. In a few hours, it would burn itself out and nothing but embers would remain. Then, she would rise, and she would depart on another mission – business as usual.

Except now, everything was different.

No. She couldn't afford to think that way. Things couldn't afford to be different.

Her thoughts returned to Sasuke, as they often did at this hour of the night when sleep escaped her (which was most nights). He was the same, as she knew he would be – taller, but still – porcelain skin, intense stare, inky black hair, and demanding voice.

Beautiful.

It didn't matter now. Not after everything that happened in the last five years.

Not with what was coming.

to be continued…

A/n: So my beta read this while he was drunk, and tbh I wish you guys could read his comments - which include telling Sasuke to "go back to being a terrorist, you goth piece of shit," referring to Yuuto as a frat star conducting a toga party, and Sakura as a crossfitter doing keto...

Also, I worry that I've made Ibiki a little bit of an asshole, but he's done a lot for Sakura, as will be made clear in coming chapters.

read and review!

Chapter Text

the sun goes with you, chapter five: the foundation

love, it's just a little late

for you to be seeing me this way

-ziggy alberts, runaway

On the day that Sakura left Konoha for good, Kakashi had found her standing in his office, staring out at the village from the wide window behind his desk. Her arms were crossed across her chest, fingers absentmindedly tracing circles against the fabric of her hospital uniform.

It was an early morning - too early for even the stars to have all retired; the sun was not yet risen, nor were the villagers. Kakashi had hoped to be the first one in, so that he might, for once, have some peace. No such luck.

For her to be here waiting for him this early could not bode well. Good news could always wait; bad news hardly ever had the luxury. Her hospital shift would have not yet ended, so whatever it was had to be urgent enough for her to abandon her work.

"Everything alright?" Kakashi asked cautiously, frowning as he shut the door behind him and crossed the room to his desk.

She startled slightly - lost in her own thoughts, like she was most of the time since the end of the war. But when she looked at him, wide-eyed and shaken, what was unspoken in her eyes answered his question: everything was most certainly not alright. Kakashi feared the worst - who had succumbed to their injuries in the night? Guy? Naruto? Sasuke? What had finally proven to be too much for her to heal?

She was silent as she regarded him - her mouth opened and closed like a stunned fish before she looked away, her short hair flipping over her shoulder, turning back to the window.

"Sakura," Kakashi said firmly, his patience an exposed nerve. "Tell me."

She was silent for another moment before she spoke, her voice a bare whisper. "Kakashi, they won't stop. The voices. The screaming."

Kakashi visibly deflated as he sunk into the chair behind his desk, a warm trickle of relief flooding through his veins. Maybe he should feel guilty for this - relief that her struggles were not something that he would have to share in - but he couldn't waste his guilt on this, not now. His voice was sympathetic when he spoke. "They'll go away eventually, Sakura. Trust me. They always do."

He wasn't lying. He had heard his fair share of screams in the night, had seen his fair share of death. They always left him alone in the end.

"No," she said, running a hand through her hair, turning to face him again. "They're not - I don't think it's just in my head. There's more to it than that. Not just a bad memory. Something's there, and it's not going away. It's getting worse."

"You've been through a lot recently," Kakashi said gently. "You need to give yourself more time."

"No!" she said forcefully, slapping her hand down on his desk. "Stop - stop doing that, Kakashi, god damn it. Stop treating me like a little girl. I'm telling you something is going on. Listen to me for once."

"I'm listening," he said, raising his hands in the air placatingly. And he was listening - but what he was hearing was an overworked, overtired, scared young woman who had never really been meant for this sort of life anyway.

"No you're not," she sighed, the fight going out of her. "You're looking at me like I just need some sleep, or some therapy or something."

Well, this much was true. If he could make her take a month or two off, he would. But Kakashi couldn't afford to send her on leave, not now - not when she was the only senior medic on staff since Shizune had left to run off-site operations. There were too many wounded to be taking able bodies out of the field. And besides, Kakashi trusted her; if he could have any set of eyes where he couldn't be, he wanted them to be hers.

Sakura was his only student that had been on the battlefield every day of the war - Naruto and Sasuke had shown up in the nick of time, certainly, as was their habit. And then true to form they had done some flashy world-saving with lots of collateral damage and left behind a mess for everyone else to clean up.

And true to her own form, she had worked methodically and tirelessly, without needing direction or encouragement. She'd sort of just shown up, the right place and the right time, and started doing exactly what he would have told her to do, but without being told.

But she'd just lost her parents - they'd been killed on the battlefield late in the war effort, and she was grieving the same way everyone else in Konoha was. Kakashi had forced time off on Yamanaka and Nara and Akimichi, who had all lost their fathers - but they had big families that needed tending to. The only people Sakura had left now were in the hospital and Kakashi thought the last thing she needed was forced isolation.

Once upon a time, he'd thought that most of his failings where Sakura had been concerned were more or less benign - where Naruto and Sasuke were involved, his various failings as a teacher had been dangerous, reckless, ill-afforded in a world tearing apart at the seams.

But for a while now, he had seen that maybe the damage he'd done to her had splintered her at the foundation. Maybe worse than what he'd done to Naruto and Sasuke.

"What do you mean, something is going on?" Kakashi asked, leaning back in his chair, frowning.

She sat in the chair across from his desk, looking nervous. She smoothed her hands over her lap uneasily. "I think something happened to everyone that died during the war. Everyone on our side."

"Something like what?"

She chewed on her lip for a moment before speaking again. "Remember… remember during the war and I did that thing with Katsuyu - where she split into thousands of little slugs that attached to everyone so I could use my chakra to heal them remotely?"

"Yes," Kakashi said. He didn't much like the slugs. "Slimy little things."

"I was really spread out. I was trying to cover thousands of allied forces. Tsunade didn't have much chakra left so she wasn't spread as thin. And then… things went wrong."

"I remember," Kakashi said simply, wondering where she was going with this. "Sakura, it's not your fault that-"

"Let me finish," she said. "Just let me finish. Like I said, things went wrong. While I was connected to all of these troops through my chakra. And it doesn't work like a telephone - usually. I can only tell when a slug is pulling on my chakra to heal someone."

"It doesn't usually work like a telephone? Did it work that way this time?"

"I don't know exactly what happened - I was too far away - but do you remember when we lost almost the entire Second Division?"

"Yes," Kakashi said softly. Her parents had been in the second division. Which had been lost in a large-scale ambush that had killed nearly twelve thousand out of the eighty thousand forces that made up the Alliance.

"I was covering some eight thousand of them. I felt everything," Sakura said, her voice was pained, tightly checked. "I felt what they felt as they were dying. All of that pain - limbs blown off, bleeding out, crushed bones. Everything. And the fear of dying, the anger, the longing. All of it."

Kakashi was silent, watching her as she traced patterns with her fingers on the glossy wood of his desk. He hadn't known this. He'd assumed she might have just felt a bunch of lives blink out of existence - there one moment, gone the next.

"But there was something else," she continued as her breath hitched, caught on something in her throat. "Something that I can't… I can't get it to make sense."

"Strange things happen in war. To the mind."

"Stop that. It's not a mind thing. It's not just in my head."

"I didn't say it was."

"You did. But there was something else, right before the connection broke. Everyone had this feeling of just… pure terror. That's the only way I can describe it. Worse than the fear of dying. This sort of uncontrollable panic."

"A reasonable reaction to dying."

"It wasn't that, though. Because then three things happened."

"Okay," Kakashi said slowly. It was turning out that there were quite a few things Sakura hadn't shared with him. "What are these three things?"

"First, my connection to everyone broke. All that chakra I had tied up, trying to heal who I could - it snapped."

"And then?"

"My chakra came back to me, but it had all of these… memories attached to it. Thoughts that weren't mine. Memories, Kakashi. Everyone's last memories. The last things they saw, the last things they thought of as they died."

"Did you break the connection yourself?"

"No," she said miserably. "It just… it splintered. I tried to hold onto it but I lost it. It was like someone yanked it away from me."

"It's probably for the best," Kakashi sighed, leaning back in his chair. "Who's to say what would have happened if you hadn't let go?"

"I was going to go with them," she said quietly. "My mom and dad… I felt what happened to them. I have their last memories, too."

"You don't have to tell me," Kakashi said gently, hoping that she wouldn't. He didn't need to hear it.

"My dad went first," she said numbly, and her eyes were blank. "Crushed to death. My mom bled out a few feet away from him. She watched him die and then she… she went, too. She thought of my grandmother's hands knitting my first blanket as she died."

"It's a good thing the connection broke, Sakura. Trust me."

"It's not," she said desperately. "If I could have just hung out for a few more minutes…"

"No. You could have been taken with it."

"But when the connection broke, not everyone was dead yet. Not everyone was beyond healing. I was… I was working on it, I was fixing them. I lost them when I lost the connection. They didn't have to die. If I could have held on a bit longer… I could have saved them."

Kakashi was silent for a few moments. That was news to him. "...What was the third thing?"

"I felt them go somewhere. Everyone. All of their… souls, I think they were. The last thing I felt before the connection disappeared. They went somewhere else and left their bodies behind."

"The… void?" Kakashi said, lacking a better word for it.

"No. Somewhere here. On Earth. And I think that place is what they were all so afraid of."

Kakashi leaned back in his chair, sucking in a breath between his teeth. "Let me get this straight. You and your slug summon - who was a million little slugs and not just one great slug - were covering the second division remotely, by channeling your chakra stores into the slugs and from them into the people. When the second division was attacked, we lost twelve thousand soldiers, and you felt eight thousand of them die, somehow acquired all of their last thoughts and experiences, felt their life forces being taken somewhere… and now you hear all of those people screaming in your ear all day long."

"Exactly," she said helplessly.

"That's fucked," Kakashi said simply.

"Tell me you believe me," she said desperately, leaning forward in her chair. "I know I sound insane-"

"I believe you," Kakashi said, and it was true. Chakra was strange and relatively poorly-understood, even as they built their civilizations on top of it - new phenomenons happened every day. This was one of the more believable ones, as much as the possibility of what she had just told him made his skin crawl. Yes, Kakashi believed her. "You said you felt their souls go somewhere? Where?"

"East," she said weakly. "Just… east. Sometimes, when I walk that way… when I stand at the eastern edge of the village, I can hear them getting louder. The further I walk… the stronger it all gets."

It didn't make sense, Kakashi thought to himself

"What do you want me to do?" he asked, sensing that this was what she came for.

"I'm tired of being weak. I mean it this time," she said. "Make me better. And then let me go find them."

..

Five years later, it was a morning much like the one on which that uncomfortable conversation had occurred. Kakashi remembered her words from his office, peering down onto the village that he had been tasked with the care and keeping of.

She'd left that very same night. He said yes to her request, and she laid out a plan that was too sound, too well-considered for it to be anything but the product of many sleepless nights. She wanted to shed Konoha like a chrysalis, learn how to really fight, and then hammer down whatever ghosts were still chasing her. And that sounded perfectly reasonable to Kakashi, more or less. So he let her go.

Of course, Kakashi was not exactly the patron saint of reasonable decisions.

If only he'd known what they were getting into at the time. He wouldn't have let her go, wouldn't have sent her out of the village and into the gaping maw of the beast. But how could he have guessed the magnitude of the issue at the time? That the girl was onto something more sinister than she thought?

When she'd told him all about the screams and the memories and the souls, he'd been new to the job. Kakashi was not Naruto; he had been perfectly fine with the amount of responsibility and acknowledgment he'd already had before all of this hokage nonsense, thank you very much. But it wasn't about that, was it? If the job needed you, it needed you, and you did it.

Kakashi leaned forward and rested his forehead against the cold glass and let his breath fog the window. It had not been a good month - news from outside of Konoha's walls had boded nothing but ill; it left a bitter, coppery taste in his mouth.

But there was something else that had settled like a rock in his stomach.

Somewhere out there, Sakura was upset with him. Probably even hated him. Sasuke was sure to have arrived to the Anbu base by now - they were sure to have come face to face again after all these years. She had made her feelings quite clear to Kakashi many times; absolution would not come easily.

Forgive me, Sakura.

It was ten years ago now that his three genin brats had been plunked in his lap – three raw, exposed wires sparking at each other and at the world. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together should have given Kakashi any genin. But especially not those three.

At the time, all he had been able to see in Sakura was the past. She was destined to be the collateral damage in the fallout that would result from the inevitable collision between Sasuke and Naruto. He couldn't train the girl to march out onto the battlefield and end up with Sasuke's arm through her heart like Rin had ended up with Kakashi's.

Well, that hadn't worked out as planned, had it? Not in the slightest.

She'd tried to find her power elsewhere when Kakashi failed to draw it out of her, and she walked right into Tsunade's open arms and all that potential was just thrown away, completely and utterly wasted.

The girl had more cleverness and precision than the elephantine methods that Tsunade had foisted upon her. It was a waste for a girl like that to be reduced to just punching things - or such was the opinion that Kakashi had always privately maintained.

Then five years ago, he got his wish. The war was a little more than a month gone and the bodies were still being tallied, and Sakura had come to his office and asked him to let her run away from it all. Said she wanted to become the sort of indispensable weapon that could go toe to toe with anything and always come out on the other side.

So Kakashi made a plan. All of the things he could have taught her all those years ago - he could give them to her now, make her into the force of nature that he knew she could be. But he couldn't do it himself. He was the hokage, the autocrat of a broken village - he couldn't just up and leave. So he gave the job to Ibiki.

It had taken three years for Kakashi to feel that Sakura had finally reached that potential he had always seen in her. Ibiki had dragged it out of her - Ibiki and Anbu and a training program that Kakashi created himself. It had been a genuinely unpleasant experience to implement, or so Kakashi had been told. He'd had to authorize several infrastructure repair expenditures for the Ice base and promise Ibiki a lush retirement on the coast when it was all said and done, but Ibiki had given Kakashi the exact weapon that he needed to face the coming storm.

And now… the girl was a force to be reckoned with. Not to mention, she was now his friend. More than that. They were unhealthily codependent in the worst way - Sakura needed him to enable her avoidance of everything that made her her and Kakashi depended on her right back in ways he couldn't admit to anyone. It was an insidious and sick bond, created out of the sort of shared knowledge that kept them both awake at night, but it was something that Kakashi treasured more than he should have.

Which is why he hated what he had done - sending Sasuke, of all people. It was out of necessity, he knew. But she wasn't going to forgive him for it any time soon, even if they all made it out of this mess alive. And that was nearly enough for Kakashi to say damn it all and let the world go up in flames.

But things were deteriorating on Sakura's front. They had been for a while. The situation was quickly becoming far too serious for her to contain on her own, no matter how strictly Kakashi trusted her. To let her continue alone, in light of the newest information, would be risking the fate of humanity. And that would just be a bad time for everyone.

Of much less importance to the general world but of far greater consequence to Kakashi - as irresponsible and private as the sentiment was - it would be risking her.

So no, he did not send Sasuke out to the Anbu base just to hurt her. In fact, he'd exhausted all of his other options far past what would be considered responsible leadership to avoid damaging whatever it was they had.

Kakashi sent Sasuke because he was the only one who had the necessary ability to help her see this mission through to the end. He was the only one who had the kind of skills needed to put this demon to rest once and for all, and Kakashi knew that Sakura would see this eventually. It was the only way that they might keep the world from splitting at the seams and swallowing them all whole.

And if Sasuke could bring back a little of what she used to be - and he was the only one who could do that, too - well, that was just fine with Kakashi.

..

..

..

Across the continent, Sakura woke well before sunrise and dressed for her mission in silence, careful that her tired breaths were hushed, that even her footsteps across the floor were inaudible - although she was alone, she was silent with the care of the hunted. She didn't want to risk waking anything, startling another stolen memory to come and take her.

When she was dressed, she extinguished the fire and stepped outside of her cabin - immediately, the frigid wind sent a chill down the open collar of her vest, a reminder that the cold would get her eventually; she zipped the vest up to her chin with numb fingers, and pulled her soft wool gloves over her hands.

Sakura's breath escaped her lungs in opaque puffs, and for a moment, she was a dragon, breathing smoke over an ice kingdom, and she could unfurl her wings and fly away from here, on to the next gold-filled lair and the next conquest, never to return.

But only for a moment, and then she was just a girl again. No smoke, no fire, no wings, just soft and shivering vulnerable flesh and the tired beginnings of a sunrise. She stepped off the tiny porch that was attached to her cabin and out into the still-dark morning, the sky a silken blanket stitched with stars that faded to welcome the dawn.

The first thing she did was to silently slip across the camp to slide an envelope addressed to Kakashi under Yuuto's door - on a small base like this, the medic could be expected to manage the mail as well as the sick and injured. The envelope contained an invective-filled letter, the language included being of the sort that would have driven her mother to tears, if her mother were still alive. Since leaving home, she'd found she had a talent for vicious words - the kind that inflicted pain that she couldn't heal, the kind that made people wish she would just punch them instead. It wasn't something she liked about herself.

In her defense, Kakashi deserved it. As she slipped the letter beneath the crack in the door, she frowned in the general direction of Konoha, hoping her scowl would reach Kakashi in his sleep and give him horrible indigestion for the rest of the day. She exhaled another dragon-puff his way.

I'm not a child anymore, Kakashi.

And then she left the base, flitting over the moonlit snow like a ghost, a lonely specter retreating across the horizon.

She would be back in a week.

It would be a violent mission - she didn't know it yet, but it would be a blood-soaked week for her, and one with tragic consequences - ones that would not make themselves immediately apparent, but they were there, following her from a distance, waiting for her to close her eyes.

She would be terrified, unbalanced, and coming apart at the seams by the end of this mission, crouched at the muddy bank of a river and scrubbing the blood out of the creases between her fingers and choking back sobs, pounding her open palms against her forehead to shake the violence from her skull. And then she would pull herself back together, take a deep breath and give herself a stern talking to, and head back to the base. And if she got back and Kakashi told her to turn around and do it again, she would.

A dutiful soldier until the last.

..

..

..

Sasuke didn't see Sakura for a full seven days after their strange, heated conversation after the tattooing ceremony.

This irritated him greatly. The nerve to just up and disappear for five years, show up randomly in the middle of nowhere and do all sorts of confusing shit, just to disappear again - well, that was just too much.

Especially since it appeared that he had no chance of getting off of the base without her.

Sasuke quickly learned there was a strict protocol with new recruits and their mentors. The other rookies were evaluated by their mentors within the first two days following the ceremony; generally, evaluations consisted of physical combat. The mentors then recommended their rookies for specific divisions based on the demonstrated skill-set. Sasuke watched all of these skirmishes and decided that the pairings were too well-matched to be truly random; his suspicions were confirmed when Ibiki firmly denied his request to be evaluated by a different operative while waiting for Sakura to return.

She's the only one suited to handle you, Ibiki had said shortly. You'll wait for her. He'd had no sort of answer when Sasuke asked when she might return, other than soon enough.

And it would be a cold day in hell before he believed that Haruno Sakura was the only person in Anbu who could handle him.

Yes, all of this led to a very disgruntled Uchiha.

Not to mention that he'd not expected snow to be quite so cold. Sasuke had been many places in the world - Orochimaru had dragged him all over the continent and to other places besides - but the man had avoided the snow like the plague, snakelike and cold-blooded as he was. So now Sasuke was bored, confused, and freezing, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Such things would turn a man to stomping about grumpily and ineffectually, they would.

It was the morning of his ninth day on the base when he was woken by a sharp rapping on his door.

When he opened it, Ibiki was standing outside, arms crossed. "What, still sleeping?"

"It's ass o'clock in the fucking morning," Sasuke groused in return.

"Early bird gets the worm."

Sasuke grumbled something inappropriate about murdering early birds. Like Kakashi, Ibiki did not mind a few snide remarks here and there; he collected his due in other ways.

Ibiki, used to this sort of behavior, waved Sasuke's irritation away like it was little more than a fly that could not even manage to be a minor annoyance despite its best efforts. "Get dressed. You and I have somewhere to be."

Sasuke's ears perked at the mention of actually having something to do. "What's that?"

"Your mentor is back," Ibiki said shortly. "It's time for your evaluation."

A/N: Ah! I'm so sorry for the delay. It's never intentional. I took a bit of a gallivant about the EU and put all of my duties on hold for such shenanigans. For those of you going "update seek!!" you are totally right and I throw myself at your feet to beg for forgiveness!! I am updating it but not in the new chapter sense... I'm rewriting a lot of it. Once it's been adequately rehabbed and deemed fit for public presentation then I will begin adding new fixtures and such. It will remain up in the meantime but it's no longer representative of my best work - which is why it's getting the old one-two right now. 

As always, I implore you to leave a review - I do so cherish all of your feedback. (unless they only say "update :(" in which case I do not cherish them as much :P ). I would be interested to know if you want the next scene to be from Sasuke or Sakura's perspective.

Chapter Text

you return along with the sun

where have you been, darling, what have you done?

you were out finding trouble again

there’s fire in your eyes and blood on your hands

rest awhile, they're coming for you

there's a price to be paid for the things that we do

lullaby, lord huron

5 years earlier, Konoha

It was a late night in the Konoha hospital, a few days before Sakura left the village for good - Sasuke’s window was open, allowing a cool breeze into the tiny room. He was lying in bed, surrounded by stiff hospital sheets and stiff hospital air, and Sakura was standing next to him, bent over his arm, squinting at it as if it might start talking. It remained silent, of course, and so did she.

But tonight - for once - Sasuke didn’t want her to be silent. 

Maybe it was because she had been promoted to jonin earlier that day and the only reason Sasuke knew was because a nurse had mentioned it in passing, an off-handed remark to the other staff, and Sasuke had only overheard it. He wondered if there had been a ceremony, if her friends had been there, if there was a reason that she had kept it from him. At the end of the war she’d said she loved him - screamed it. Now she hardly spoke to him, flitting in and out of his room every night like a butterfly, never lighting on any surface for too long for fear of what might happen if she was still.

Maybe - and neither he nor she had any reason to know this yet - it was because he could sense that she was leaving.

Or maybe there was no reason at all, and it was because the sun rose in the east and set in the west, but tonight he didn’t want her silence. 

“Sakura,” he said stiffly, the word sticking in his throat - not how he meant it. When they were children that’s all it had taken to send her tumbling into small talk. A single word from him and the chatter would become never-ending.

“Hm?” she hummed, distracted. She traced her thumb over the space in Sasuke’s new elbow as she squinted at the blue veins visible under the skin. “I think I’m missing some minor vasculature. Does your hand feel cold? Tingly?”

Sasuke shrugged. “Sometimes.”

She sighed and sat in the chair next to his bed, her fingers grazing over her own forehead briefly, pushing her hair behind her ears - stress, fatigue, frustration -  or that was what the gesture meant when they were children. He didn’t know if it meant the same thing now. 

“Can you fix it?” he asked, another trifling attempt at conversation. 

She glanced up at him, her tired eyes telling him it was a stupid question - of course she could fix it. 

Maybe the silence they’d shared in the past weeks had not been coming from Sasuke - maybe it had been from her as well, perpetuating the quiet that had settled between them.

She began her work, a small crease forming between her eyebrows, and Sasuke knew his time was limited.

Soon she would send that overpowering peacefulness crawling through the chakra connection she had formed, and Sasuke would drift to sleep. He’d been wondering where she learned how to do that - to send feelings through chakra.

“Is it too late?” Sasuke asked, and his voice was more steady than he felt. Too late - too late for him, too late for her, too late for trust or friendship or - or for anything at all. 

“It’s never too late,” Sakura murmured, but her voice was flat, reflexive, and the words were a meaningless platitude. She wasn’t really listening. She was concentrating, and that was something that had initially surprised Sasuke. He’d never much thought of her as being a serious sort of person, but in the past few weeks, he’d found in her a singular focus and peace that was hard to reconcile with the little girl he had known. 

And slowly, that gentle, somnolent fog began to roll over him, like it did every night, warm and gray and soft… and compulsory. He glanced at her - she did not look at him, but her gaze was too controlled, too purposeful - she was avoiding eye contact, she knew what she was doing. She’d heard him after all, and this was her response. 

He could have resisted.

He didn’t.

..

..

..

3 months later, Konoha

It was well past midnight when the door to Kakashi’s office burst open rather unceremoniously - at least, it had better be without ceremony, as Kakashi was tired and not feeling up for a party. He did not look up from his book. 

“Where is she?”

Kakashi sighed and put his book down slowly, unwillingly, and looked up at his student standing in the doorway - slightly out of breath, clothes and hair damp from the late night rain that had settled over the village. Kakashi glanced out of the window behind his desk - more than a light rain, now, it was positively pouring. “You’re dripping on my floor. Have a seat.”

Sasuke rolled his eyes, didn’t move. “Like you give a damn about the floor.”

“But I could give a damn about the floor. Plus, it’s not my floor, it’s the Hokage’s floor. So let’s have some decency. Sit.”

“I don’t want to sit,” Sasuke snapped.

“Then at least close the door behind you.”

Sasuke slammed the door shut. “Anything else? Do you want me to close the blinds and put on some tea? Or are you going to answer me?”

Kakashi sighed and leaned forward at his desk, pushing his fingertips together. “It’s very late, Sasuke. And quite spontaneous, especially for you. You seem upset.”

“Answer the question. Where is she?”

“How are you, Sasuke? Strange of you to visit so suddenly, when I had started to think you’d forgotten me.”

“I saw you three days ago at lunch. Why are you being so dramatic?”

“It suits me,” Kakashi shrugged. “And you, as well - clearly, standing here at midnight soaked from the rain like a madman. Great form. I taught you well, obviously.”

Sasuke sighed, ran his fingers through his soaking wet hair, visibly doing his best to regain composure as he seemed to realize what he must look like in that moment. He glanced around at the wide, circular office - his earliest memory of the place was unpleasant, to say the least, and did nothing to soothe him. He remembered the old man - the third hokage - telling him that all of the Anbu teams in Konoha couldn’t find Itachi, that they were giving up the hunt. In fact, Sasuke did not have a single happy memory in this room. It was a Pandora’s box, except that hope had fled first and everything else had stayed behind. 

“Where is she?” he asked again, his voice more steady. 

“Where is who?” Kakashi asked, but the tone of his voice was wrong, the look in his eyes was too innocent, too unconcerned. He knew who.

“Don’t be stupid. Sakura. Where did she go?”

“Sit,” Kakashi suggested again, this time softer. “It couldn’t wait til the morning, huh? She’s been gone for three months, you know. Three months, and this is the first time you’re asking me.”

Sasuke did as he was told this time, dropping into the chair in front of Kakashi’s desk. 

“Coffee? Tea? Warm milk in a bottle?”

“Just answer the question,” Sasuke said, exasperated and frustrated and wet and tired and angry.

“She’s working for the village,” Kakashi said simply. “She’s working for me. She’s fine.”

“Working for the village,” Sasuke repeated.

“Yes. I thought she’d be home by now, to be fair, but it’s been a valuable arrangement. She’s doing good work.”

“Should someone go get her?” Sasuke asked helplessly, and Kakashi almost felt sorry for the boy. There was something there after all. 

“If she wanted to come home, then she would come home,” Kakashi said gently. “She’s staying where she is because she wants to, not because I told her to.”

 " Then where is she?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.  She’s doing what everyone else is doing - keeping the village safe. There’s bigger things out there than even you can guess. That’s really all I can share, Sasuke. It’s classified. But she’s fine, she’s still out there. Now let me ask you something. Quid pro quo.”

Sasuke crossed his arms over his chest. “What?” 

“Why now? Why three months after she left? Did it take you that long to notice she was gone?”

“Of course not,” Sasuke grumbled. “I just wanted to know.”

“At midnight? Such a strong interest that it couldn’t wait until the morning? Nothing more than curiosity? You’re a shit liar. Always have been.”

Sasuke stood abruptly, the chair screeching unpleasantly across the stone floor. 

“You can say it, you know. It’s not a weakness,” Kakashi said casually.

“There’s nothing to say,” Sasuke snapped, and stormed out of Kakashi’s office and back toward his restless, sleepless, lonely bed. He didn’t notice the storm.

..

..

..

Present Day, Ice Base

The morning had not been easy for Sakura. She’d stumbled onto the base in the deathly quiet early morning hours - when the night was at its coldest and dawn was still somewhere far beyond the horizon and the only sound was the distressed howl of the wind. The mission was still a fresh wound, crusted around the edges with the blood of those who would do her harm; friends or enemies, heroes or villains, it had all become very gray to Sakura, who had been outnumbered by her nightmares long ago. 

She was surprised to see that Ibiki was waiting for her outside of her cabin, taking meager shelter from the icy wind on her cement porch. But she didn’t ask questions. She’d collapsed into his open arms, tears freezing on her cheeks before they could land on the thick wool of his black cloak. He’d smoothed her hair, murmured words of home and gratitude for her safe return, and then gruffly advised her to get her shit more or less together because they had work to do. Inside of her cabin, she lit the wood stove and told him what she’d seen and done, and he told her the updates that Kakashi had sent in her absence. 

In the end, they both sat together in stunned silence at the rickety little table in her cabin, with nothing but the crackle of burning logs to punctuate the air while they each became lost in their thoughts. The very first rays of dawn began to turn the sky a gentle periwinkle before either of them moved.

“It’s going to be okay, kid. It’s not your fault,” Ibiki said, and reached for her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. 

He didn't take his gloves off when he touched her hand, and Sakura hated this. She knew why - she knew why no one could touch her, but she craved the sort of contact that didn’t end in her killing someone, the kind that came from a friend. 

“I was too late,” she whispered. “They were all dead by the time I got there. And I… I couldn’t save the ones that did it. I had to kill them. They weren’t going back.”

“All we can do is move forward. Kakashi’s got a plan.”

“Which way is forward?” Sakura said, pulling her hand away. “We’re absolutely fucked, Morino. After what you just told me we might as well just lie down and wait for them to come for us.”

Suddenly, Ibiki pushed away from the table, standing. “Well, it’s time for your rookie’s evaluation. So why don’t we start there.”

“Are you serious? After everything I just told you and what you just told me? You want me to go see him?”

“The world spins on, Haruno. You’re not going anywhere until that’s done. He scares the locals, you know? His hair is very pointy.”

“There are no locals,” Sakura snapped.

“Just me, then, and that’s good enough for you because I’m your commander.”

“Kakashi is my commander,” she replied petulantly.

“Kakashi is your hokage and he’s even more invested in this happening than I am. Keeps asking if you’ve gotten it over with yet. And he’s got something he wants you to know, so get your ass dressed for a fight and I’ll go get your rookie. I’ll meet you at the north snowfield in twenty minutes. And Kou is going to be looking for you.”

“He’s back?” Sakura asked, perking up.

“Unfortunately.”

..

..

..

After Ibiki had knocked on his door and told him Sakura was back, Sasuke had dressed within minutes, and opened his door once again to find that Ibiki was still waiting for him. 

They crossed most of the base in silence; Sasuke because he had nothing to say, and Ibiki because he was rather cross with the cold. The dawn had been a magnificent one, setting the snowfield aglitter, enrobing the camp in velvety pinks and gentle blues; they had passed several operatives tiredly making their ways to the mess hall for breakfast.

“I sent her to the far edge of the camp for the evaluation. Away from the buildings,” Ibiki grumbled as their walk began to extend past the outposts. “She’s a death sentence for concrete structures.” 

“I remember,” Sasuke said simply, because he did. 

“Worth mentioning, the point of the evaluation is not for you to defeat your mentor or vice versa. The point of the evaluation is for her to have you showcase your skills in a high-pressure situation. Neither of you should be going for the throat.”

“But-”

“If I feel that you are going for the throat, I will have you drawn and quartered and sent home as jerky. ”

“And if she’s the one going for the throat?” Sasuke grumbled - he wouldn’t put it past her, the way she had acted in their brief interaction the night of the tattooing ceremony.

“Then pay close attention. It’s an interesting experience.” 

Sasuke did not have the chance to ask Ibiki how he knew that - if maybe he’d been on the receiving end - because at that moment a small crowd became visible in the distance: Sakura, obvious by her head of pink hair, and another person, tall and brown-haired and gesticulating wildly for no apparent reason, and a small audience standing several feet away from her.

“There she is.” Ibiki pointed to the group. 

“Who’s she with?” Sasuke asked, squinting; evaluations were supposed to be one-on-one.

“You draw a crowd, Uchiha. You and her both. Lot of operatives put good money on the outcome of this evaluation.”

“Who’s that she’s talking to?” Sasuke asked casually - but he didn’t feel casual. There was a familiarity to the distance between the pair, the way she so easily turned toward him and the carelessness of his smile. 

“Kodama Kou. He was in her rookie class and they were partnered up for a while before she was solo detail only. He’s about as much a pain in my ass as the two of you are, which is quite an achievement, but he’s kept her from going off the deep end and he puts up a mean fight when you need him to so I keep him here. He was going to be your mentor, actually, if she really put up a fight about keeping you around.”

Sasuke scoffed. “That wasn’t putting up a fight?”

“Hardly. If it was really non-negotiable she would have put this whole place in the ground and me with it, and I would have sent you packing before it came to that because I want to go home someday. But the hokage thinks that having you here is somehow in her best interest, and he’s just about the only person she’ll listen to, so here you are.”

“That’s… reassuring,” Sasuke grumbled. He would certainly not consider himself to be in anyone’s best interest, and did not appreciate the insinuation that he was only here on Sakura’s good graces and for her benefit. 

“I assure you that it is not,” Ibiki said. “For reasons that I assume I will need to share with you in short order, but I don’t have to yet, so I won’t. At any rate, let’s get a move on.” 

Sasuke turned his attention to the horizon, where Sakura and the man were still too far away for their voices to be heard. It was strange to see her interact with someone else so easily after seeing how stiff she had been with him only a week ago. She carelessly shoved her hands into her pockets, looked up at the sky and squinted at the clouds - she said something, and the man shook his head, pointing at the mountains in the distance. She laughed, and Sasuke could very nearly hear it, although he was too far away for the sound to reach his ears.

Kept her from going off the deep end. Sasuke had some experience with the deep end himself, but he’d pushed away everyone who might have dragged him out of it. 

Sasuke decided that he didn’t like Kodama Kou.

“He’s got his own rookie who should be around here somewhere. Kou keeps burying him in the snow. Come on, you moron, let’s go get this godforsaken evaluation over with.”

Sasuke followed as Ibiki trudged across the snowfield; even his walk was rather grumpy.

It was the man with Sakura who noticed the pair first - he pointed at them, murmured something to her; the sound was deadened by the snow, although the distance had been mostly closed. She stiffened as they drew closer, and the smile slid off of her face, like she had just remembered how cold it really was outside.

“Where is your rookie, Kodama?” Ibiki barked, as soon as they were within hearing distance.

“It’s a mystery,” the man said, grinning. “Slippery things, rookies. Always gettin’ away from ya.”

Ibiki stopped a few feet away from him, hands on his hips and a frown on his face. “Haruno, shed some light on the mystery for me.”

“Kou sent his rookie to get muffins from the mess hall, commander. Five minutes ago,” Sakura said; her voice was brisk, business-like, but her eyes betrayed soft mischief. 

“Rookies are not for retrieving your breakfast, operative!” Ibiki snapped at Kou.

“He’s a bad mentor,” Sakura said sagely. “Send him away.”

She wore a sense of humor as if it was something she had always had, Sasuke noted, and maybe it was; maybe it was something she’d just never shared it with him. Ibiki grunted something that sounded like agreement before jutting a thumb in Sasuke’s direction. “Look, I brought your rookie. Say good morning.”

“Kodama Kou,” the man said with a wolfish grin on his face, sticking his hand out to Sasuke. “No need for you to introduce yourself, Uchiha, I’ve heard all about you.”

“You shut up,” Ibiki barked. “Nobody was talking to you. Go find your damned rookie and make sure he’s got muffins for all of us if he’s got any at all. Haruno, say good morning to your rookie, and do it nicely.”

“Good morning, Sasuke,” Sakura said obediently, her voice soft, but her eyes guarded and cautious. 

“Good morning,” Sasuke returned stiffly - the last week had been spent dwelling on the way she’d tried to have him sent back to Konoha on his first night here, and he’d decided he wasn’t going to be taking it well.

Ibiki sighed.  “Oh, for christ’s sake. The two of you are peas in a goddamn pod, and I want you to understand that I mean that in the worst possible way. Let’s get this over with. And Kodama, go get your rookie. ”

“Yep yep,” Kou said cheerfully, and clapped a hand on Sakura’s shoulder. His fingers lingered overlong before he pulled away. “Be right back, ladies.” 

Sasuke was decidedly not sad to see him go. 

Ibiki watched as Kou walked away, frowning after him. “Well, now that there is one less idiot in my presence, let’s not waste any more time. I don’t want this to last more than ten minutes, and I want a civil display of skills that you think are most useful to you as an Anbu operative. Not your most deadly, not your most technical, but your most useful. Haruno, do what you need to do, but do not destroy my base. Not again.”

Sakura nodded. “Yes, commander.”

“Uchiha, the same goes for you. Infrastructure damage comes out of your paycheck, as she will confirm for you from her own experience. Am I understood?”

“Yes, commander.”

“Then you take fifty steps back,” Ibiki directed Sasuke. “And you wait for my signal to start.”

Ibiki watched the Uchiha boy walk away - the boy was his father incarnate when he moved, and Ibiki had known Fugaku well enough for the similarities to send a shiver down his spine. It would be a cold day in hell before he could trust an Uchiha again.

When the boy stopped at exactly fifty paces back, Ibiki turned to Sakura as she was taking her gloves off. 

“Show him what you’re made of, kid,” Ibiki murmured, clapping a hand on Sakura’s shoulder.

“He’s not the enemy, Morino,” Sakura replied softly as she set her gloves down in the snow, her fingers stinging in the cold air.

Ibiki shrugged, unconvinced. “Depends on what the fight is.”

Sakura sighed. “You’re impossible. Don’t let it go too long.”

“Ten minutes,” Ibiki vowed. 

Sakura was silent. A lifetime could happen in ten minutes. Multiple lifetimes. Mistakes could be made in ten minutes that would take years to undo; no, Sasuke was not the enemy. The anger she felt was just an old trick of a tired and injured heart that was recoiling at the prodding of old wounds. Wasn’t it? 

Across the clearing, Sasuke was equally silent, watching Sakura and Ibiki talk quietly; he could only guess what they were saying, but he didn’t imagine it was anything particularly nice. It didn’t matter. He was used to people muttering contempt in his direction.

She was watching him with a look on her face that was almost sad, and for some reason, that irritated him. He didn’t know what to expect, but Sakura was Sakura - power had an intrinsic limit, and hers could not have been that much further beyond the rock-smashing she’d been up to five years ago.

Ibiki stepped away from her and raised his voice so that Sasuke could hear him. “Once I’m out of your way, you can start whenever you’re ready.”

He moved away from the center of the clearing and towards the outer edges; out of the corner of his eye Sasuke saw that Kou, had returned with a rookie in tow - the rookie struggling to balance at least eight muffins in his arms while Kou, hands in his pockets, did nothing to help - but that detail was hardly worth noticing now.  

Sakura studied him carefully, as still and watchful as a doe in an open field, her viridian eyes tracking his slightest movements. The slight rise and fall of his chest, the involuntary twitch of a finger, the rustling of hair by the wind - each cataloged silently but noticeably with rapid flicks of her irises, deceptively cervine.

Sasuke noted there was nothing like fear in her eyes, none of that prey-like disquiet that he’d come to expect in his opponents. The last time he’d seen her a week ago, those eyes had been aflame with anger, and the time before that, five years earlier, they had been drowning in a listless post-war fatigue. Today they were clear and sharp and unnerving. For a long moment, neither moved, each waiting for the other.

And then Sakura felt it: the battle calm. The crystalline quiet, the serenity of impending violence and a future of nothing but the fight.  

And then the tension snapped like a twig, and he was gone, and in a nanosecond, he was by her side.

She had forgotten how graceful he was, how deliberate and effortless he made everything seem - once upon a time it had been irresistible; now it was just a reminder of the danger that he had always presented, a snake in the grass. 

He attacked with every movement, and she had no choice but to remain on the defensive. She was fast enough, but just barely, and only for as long as he was being conservative in his offense - he could tell by the way that she was only just able to block each of his blows, each of her reactions just a hair too slow for comfort. 

But she had prepared for this. She’d known he would rely on the Rinnegan’s dimensional travel; it was predictable, but predictable didn’t mean weak, predictable didn’t mean that she could counter it. He wasn’t aiming to kill, not this time, and he wasn’t a killer anyway, not really, and Sakura knew that. She also knew that she had to keep her cards close to the chest - between the Rinnegan and the Sharingan, she would only have a few milliseconds for her plan to work.

Ibiki watched the fight from the very edges of the clearing, surrounded by the operatives who had gathered to watch the fight. He had to be careful here - he could not showcase his obvious favoritism, but he felt very fiercely at the moment that he’d rather like to thwack the Uchiha with a good, weighty stick. And then he’d like to set that stick on Kakashi, just for good measure. 

Sakura had met the Uchiha in the middle of the field, but not by choice; the boy flickered from one place to another, folding in and out of the planes of this dimension only to appear again milliseconds later right in front of her, or behind her, or right in her blind spot. A sudden and delicate flurry of knives, as graceful and deadly as a blizzard, erupted before Ibiki’s eyes. Just regular kunai, short black iron blades, in each of their hands, quick and biting. The boy was fast and cunning as a devil, and she was sorely outmatched at the outset - the speed of the Uchiha was unnatural and unmatched, she knew that. 

What are you doing, kid? Ibiki squinted. Why let him put her at a disadvantage right at the start? She should have made the first move. Ibiki could think of five ways that she could beat the boy within minutes. And another ten ways that the boy could demolish her within seconds. I taught you better than that.

But it’s personal, isn’t it?

A thin line of blood blossomed on her cheek as the tip of his knife glided across her skin - a momentary touch and minimal physical damage, but the first contact nearly always belonged to the victor in things like this. The cut healed immediately, skin knitting together unconsciously, but Ibiki bit the inside of his lip, frowning. She should have started the fight at a distance and directed it from there. Instead, she let him corner her. 

As the seconds dragged on, the operatives watching the fight began to fidget and whisper - nobody had come to watch a civilian knife fight. They’d wanted black flames and shattered earth, the ancient Uchiha power and the uniquely brutal pinpoint techniques that Kakashi had developed especially for Sakura (specifically tailored to be effective against Uchiha, Ibiki had long suspected). 

They had not gathered to watch a quiet struggle for dominance between two wounded animals. What was unfolding before them felt undeniably primal, vicious in a way that should have remained private. 

The Uchiha was cruel and forceful, methodical - he would never slip up, never do anything other than exactly as he intended to do it . Sakura was unafraid and lithe, and the whole thing was burning with frantic anger. They were furious with each other - likely for the same reasons, Ibiki thought - and each wanted to hurt the other with their own hands, even when more effective methods were available. Some evaluation. This is useless.

A gentle nudge against his shoulder broke his concentration. Kou was standing by his side, arms crossed and eyes watching the fight.

“She’s about to do it,” he murmured.

“You shut up unless I ask you to speak,” Ibiki muttered in return. He didn’t need another idiot telling him what he already knew. Of course she was; he could read her like she was his own mind.

She had Kakashi written all over her now. The way she fought, the way she analyzed her opponent’s movements, even the look in her eyes; she was his man through and through, as they said in the force, and it was obvious. Tsunade was gone from the girl; gone in her temper, gone in her crushing strength, gone in her voice. 

Tsunade’s training had been completely cleansed, except for one thing: the small lavender diamond on the girl’s forehead, a permanent, delicate marking of the energy hidden in spades behind it. Although that was different too, now, in that it wasn’t alone. Sakura had two more of those seals hidden away - in her cubital fossa, she always called them, but Ibiki just said inner elbows because he wasn’t a precocious brat who didn’t know how many books were too many books. 

Only twice was she left in a position from which she was able to counterattack and deliver a blow. Twice, she struck. One to the temple - the right temple - and one under the left arm. Each blow should have been fatal, but neither was, for she left nothing behind but the softest of touches on the Uchiha’s skin. The mumbling from the crowd grew into mutters - she was nothing but a myth, after all, then, the operatives whispered to each other. 

Ibiki smiled as the fight wore on. 

She made the third and last contact against the Uchiha’s left cheek as his knife slid across her hip, opening the skin and slicing through the muscle – red blood dripped onto the snow, the heat tunneling into the ice and sending gossamer filaments of steam into the air.

The wound did not linger – it began to knit itself together immediately as she jumped back to replace the lost distance between their bodies. 

Why aren’t you fighting back? Sasuke thought - she was on the defensive, but just barely, only just evading his attacks. Every time she looked like she might make a move, she pulled back at the last second. 

And then he saw it. 

Three angry, swirling, colossal oceans of chakra - fuck. She had more than one now, more than the single store controlled by the seal on her forehead. Now there were three, and much, much more vast than he'd remembered. He didn't stop to think why he hadn't seen them sooner, why his sharingan had only just now revealed them to him.

Because they were pointed at him like cannons.

The ringing in his ears started at the same moment that he unleashed a terrifying amount of blue lightning from his fingertips and blasted her away from him, sending her flying across the snow, where she landed, to his surprise, on her feet. It had been a haphazard move but his instincts told him that he needed to get her far away from him. Faint tendrils of smoke floated up from her clothes, and she was breathing hard, each breath sending opaque clouds into the air, but she was standing. 

And smiling. 

The ringing got louder. 

And then he went blind. 

Chapter Text

It wasn't a victory yet. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just want to talk. 

..

..

..

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

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

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

Ah. Now this was a genjutsu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I can still fight blind."

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

"Probably," Sasuke snapped. 

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

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

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

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

"That was twelve years ago , Sakura."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Absolutely."

"No."

"No?"

" No. "

“Is that all you have to say?”  

“It’s your show,” he snapped. “Why would I have anything else to say to you?”

Another long silence hung between them.

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

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

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

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

“You are so annoying,” she murmured in his ear.

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

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

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

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

     He’s just toying with me.

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

Unless…  

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

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

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

“I wasn’t,” Sakura said petulantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re not going to like it, kid.”

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

“New orders,” Ibiki said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fucking excuse me? He is not my partner.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Control yourself,” Ibiki said dangerously. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

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

Sasuke had a realization.

 "Sit down, " Ibiki roared thunderously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ibiki was silent, eyebrows raised at Sakura expectingly.

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

"Do you remember the Jashinists?"

Chapter Text

"Not really," Sasuke said, frowning. He hadn't expected anything, but that was a surprise. The word was vaguely familiar, rolling around his brain in a way that he knew he'd at least heard it before.

Sakura looked at Ibiki as if to say he knows nothing and you can't make me do this at the same time;  it was astonishing to Sasuke the way that she could communicate so much with just the crinkling of her nose. “You start, then.”

Ibiki sighed. "Fine. The Jashinists are a death cult. If it sounds familiar to you it's because you've rubbed shoulders with one of their own - Hidan, of dead Akatsuki fame, was a reject of theirs. Indestructible but dumb as a brick, so when he killed Asuma, Nara Shikamaru buried Hidan's living but detached head in his parents' backyard."

"It's their ancestral forest, Morino, stop calling it their backyard. Please," Sakura snapped, leaving Sasuke to wonder how many times a decapitated head in Shikamaru's backyard was thrown around in their day-to-day conversations that Sakura was exasperated with how he was referring to Shikamaru’s lawn.

"Political correctness is ruining your generation," Ibiki grumbled. "Anyway, death cult, Hidan. Does that ring any bells for you?"

Hidan… That did ring a few dull bells for Sasuke - he remembered a gray-haired and long-faced young man in Akatsuki robes, who was more often than not wearing stupid face paint, and who inflicted damage on his enemies by inflicting damage on himself. Sasuke also remembered vaguely that the guy would have to ingest his opponent's blood first for his trick to work, which had always seemed so inelegant and awkward. "I remember him."

Ibiki gestured to Sakura - your turn.

She looked about ready to rip Ibiki's head off, or to turn and run, or both. 

Ibiki cleared his throat. “Now, operative.”

“You can’t just spring this on a person,” she argued. “Kakashi should be the one to tell him. This was his idea.”

“Just get it over with,” Sasuke snapped. “You’re just wasting my time by bickering over it.”

“Okay, fine,” Sakura said sarcastically, angrily. “Okay, fine. Here’s the problem: Hell has broken loose. Literal capital-H-Hell. The afterlife is spitting souls back out and the Jashinists are trying to use them to resurrect their god of suffering and death. But they can’t control them so those feral souls are possessing living people and killing them, which the Jashinists are also fine with because they want people to die, which is what will happen anyway when they resurrect Jashin. There you go.”

“Well, that’s one way of putting it,” Ibiki said quietly. “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Sasuke's expression was unreadable, a slight furrowing between his brows but otherwise neutral.

“I told you,” Sakura said. “He wasn’t ready.”

“What part of this is supposed to be shocking?” Sasuke asked shortly. “Sounds like what Kabuto tried to do during the war. Keep going.”

Sakura, somewhat surprised, looked at Ibiki. He sighed before picking up where she left off.

“We have… uh, a dimensional aberration? An irregularity… a problem, really. So, naturally, there is a place where souls go when the body dies. Hell is an indelicate way of putting it because there’s no sign that it’s a bad place to go nor that it has anything to do with any religion. Maybe an afterlife, maybe just a glorified storage unit. But there is a dimension that serves as a physical location for souls of the dead,” Ibiki said.

“Huh,” was all Sasuke could say, processing as if someone had just laid out the mechanics of a new jutsu. Some of this was news to him, some of it wasn't.

“The existence of that dimension isn’t the problem. It’s always been there. The problem is that it’s leaking and we can't figure out why, or who's causing it. The Jashinists started it, but nobody's maintaining it. There's no jutsu to undo. It's just... doing it. On its own.” Sakura said.

“It’s leaking on its own? Like a faucet? You’re telling me the afterlife has a plumbing problem?”

“Well, yeah. More or less.”

“And it contains all of the souls of all of the people who have ever died?”

“It seems likely.”

“And how did you figure all this out?”

Sakura was silent. 

“It’s a touchy subject,” Ibiki said to Sasuke. “Haruno, you don’t have to answer that right now. It’s not the important part.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “There was a time during the war, towards the end, where I had been maintaining a chakra link between myself and about twelve thousand shinobi. I had been funneling my energy into them through my summon, Katsuyu, to heal their wounds. Then about eight thousand of them were killed immediately.”

Sasuke remembered that division. And he’d remembered Sakura with her dainty little slugs flung around the battlefield, healing everyone remotely like a strange zoo exhibit.

“But when they were killed the connection didn’t just die out. I felt all of these lives go somewhere, and some part of me has been able to feel them ever since. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the afterlife dimension. And then not that long after the war ended, some weird things started happening.”

“Weirder than the catalyst for this being a girl and her slugs.”

“Oi,” Ibiki barked. “No cheek. Not about this.”

“No, it’s okay, Morino.” Sakura sighed. “Yes, weirder than that. That’s where the Jashinists come in. Somehow, they're behind this - they used the war as an opportunity to kill a huge number of people at once, and to exploit that moment of souls passing into the other dimension to create a pathway between our world and that one. We don’t know how they did it. But they’re planning to use the souls of the dead to resurrect their god, Jashin. That alone would be a disaster. But the problem is that the souls are escaping on their own and forcing themselves into new hosts, which corrupts the nature of the soul and kills the person originally inhabiting the body.”

“So… how do you stop it?” Sasuke asked, leaning his elbows into his lap. “How do you close the rift?”

“I’m working on that part,” Sakura said, sounding so weary and forlorn that Sasuke almost regretted thinking about trying to Amaterasu her earlier. “Right now we’re just trying to stop these corrupted souls from massacring entire towns.”

“And what happens if the Jashin-people resurrect their…”

In that moment there was a sharp knock at the door.

"What?" Ibiki barked sharply. 

A timid-looking operative opened the door, slightly out of breath. "Yuuto needs her."

"Me? Now?" Sakura asked, hesitant.

"Now," the man confirmed. "In the medic tent."

"What's the problem that the base medic can't solve by himself?" Ibiki snapped. "We're busy."

"A team came back in bad shape - one's off his mind and the other's got an arm missing, and another one is still a mile out and needs to be retrieved. Yuuto said maybe she can help and if she doesn’t then it’s going to be more body bags. And less staff, he said to tell you."

Sakura glanced at Sasuke - her eyes traveling to his arm, the one that she'd spent a month re-building until it was like it was never gone in the first place. 

"You should go," Sasuke said quietly.

"Oh for fuck's sake," Ibiki said, throwing his hands in the air. "Go. I'll finish this but you are not off the hook and you are not the base medic so get your ass back here the second you're finished."

..

..

..

As she walked out of Ibiki’s office, cold air hit her like a gale, and she realized how heated she had become - every part of her had gone into panic response. She took a deep breath. That could wait - and time was all she needed, a moment to think.

Off his mind and arm missing. 

This is what she had thought her life might be, once - she thought she would always be a medic, never a combatant, always staying back and waiting to put people back together after they put themselves in danger for the greater good. Somehow that had felt like a cop-out to her, when she was younger. Now she’d seen so much death that it felt like the only thing worth doing, sometimes. 

She hurried across the base to the medic tent, where she found a frantic Yuuto with his two patients on cots, one pale as a sheet and unconscious, the other babbling loudly to himself. Other operatives had gathered uselessly upon hearing the commotion, trying to help but ultimately just getting in the way. 

"Hey," Sakura said quietly, placing a hand on Yuuto's shoulder. "Which one do you want me to take? Or both?"

"Just do what you can," Yuuto said, almost desperately. "They've got a third not far behind, we just sent out a team to look for him."

"You can go find him," Sakura said, rolling up her sleeves. "This is fine. I can do both."

And just like that, it was her tent, her domain, and Yuuto was gone into the dusk.

She put a hand on the shoulder of the babbling man, sending twelve small pulses of chakra - one into each of his cranial nerves, and immediately his head sagged to his chest, asleep. She could tell from the brief contact that his was a simple condition that could wait.

The other man was missing most of his arm beneath the elbow. That was easier than a full arm, at least. She staunched the bleeding quickly, cauterizing arteries and casting a simple jutsu to replenish some of the missing blood and dull the pain - color returned to his face quickly, and Sakura remembered how easily this all came to her, how it was the only thing she'd ever been a natural at. 

She settled into the stool and began her work - five years ago a new arm would have taken her a month. Today, a new hand would take an hour. She didn’t need Hashirama’s cells anymore - her own chakra was good enough for this, her own chakra and some of the man’s existing bone and musculature. She just had to find one of the man’s pluripotent stem cells in his bone, multiply it, differentiate it, use it to grow bone and muscle and nerve… It wouldn’t be quite the masterpiece that Sasuke’s was, and the man wouldn’t be fit for duty for another six months, but it would be better than no hand at all. She left the bones a little weak for lack of materials - he’d have to have a calcium heavy diet for a while. Maybe osteoporosis treatment. 

She lost herself in her thoughts, her mind swirling. 

Why would he do this? she thought miserably; she hadn’t decided if he was Ibiki or Kakashi or Sasuke, or all three at once. 

She could leave tonight. Run away into the night, turn her back on all of this and continue her work by herself. But Kakashi had proven twice now that there was nowhere in the world that he wouldn’t find her, and, well -- the alternatives weren’t honestly that much better. 

She wasn’t sure what, exactly, she found so repulsive about working with Sasuke. It wasn’t that she hated him - not at all, although she was certainly upset and resentful. She was afraid, that was for certain. She feared that on some level she would always be afraid of him, the same way children would always be afraid of fire; burned early, scarred forever, always cautious.

But that wasn’t it. She could hurt him now. And she’d hurt a lot of people that she’d loved, or at least people she’d never intended to hurt. She’d lost herself a long time ago and she knew it, and had become little more than a weapon. Hardly better than the things she’d been fighting. She saw a threat and she did whatever she could to survive. 

Oftentimes, that meant weaponizing fear. 

The kind of fear that came from being relentlessly hunted, the kind of fear of knowing that you were hopelessly weak. The kind of fear that Sakura knew best.

She twisted the people that threatened her, crumpled them up like pieces of paper, watched with cold eyes as their humanity dribbled out of them pathetically… and then walked away. All with the effort it took to crack an egg. A simple, pinpoint chakra stimulation of the amygdala to activate the pituitary gland to pour so much cortisol and epinephrine into the blood as to give a man a heart attack. It was crippling. And that was only one way to do it.

He could end up one of those people. She could’ve done it to him today. And if he was her partner, it would be even easier. And that scared her to death.

But that’s not his fault, she thought. Stop being a baby. Get a grip.

Change sucks, but it’s coming for you, Ibiki would always tell her. And he was always right - change was always just around the corner.

She’d had two partners in the last five years. A man named Haru, who was just as instrumental as Ibiki in Sakura’s new skillset, and who maybe she could've really loved one day. And Kodama Kou. 

Haru was killed. Sakura thought that would kill her, too,  

She couldn’t bear the thought of anyone new - a new team member, a new friend, a new person she was supposed to trust and talk to and rely on. It hadn’t been easy, but Kou made it simple. He was a little like Naruto, if Naruto had been a smooth-talker with a cruel streak a mile long. He always had something to say, and when the silence was too much, he was good for that. And he never hesitated - whatever it took to complete a mission, he would do it. 

But when the world came crashing down, Sakura asked to be put on solo detail work exclusively so she could focus on piecing the mysteries together. Kakashi approved her request immediately - Sakura knew he could sense that things were changing, that the things that kept her alive and in her right mind were shifting.  

Kakashi had always been right about her before. And now he thought she needed Sasuke. 

And if it came down to trusting Kakashi - well, she did. 

But boy, was she going to wring his neck the next time she saw him.

..

..

..

In Ibiki's office, the room was considerably quieter in Sakura's absence. 

“So…,” Sasuke said eventually, just to break the silence.

“She died eight thousand times in one second,” Ibiki said gruffly. “She felt ‘em all. Heard every last thought. That’s the part she always leaves out. And then for months she could hear them screaming in her ear like it was still happening, all those people still dying in her head. It took us years to find out as much as we know now.”

“It sounds like you still don’t know that much."

“Maybe not,” Ibiki shrugged. “Maybe the afterlife dimension is just a big storage unit for spent materials. But that’s the least of your worries. There’s a lot you still don’t know. Kakashi is dropping you in the middle of a minefield.”

“I guess I don’t have any choice in all of this,” Sasuke said, pinching the bridge of his nose. This is not a good idea, Sakura had said. Sasuke was beginning to realize what an understatement that was. 

“You do have a choice. Of course you do. You could stand up and walk out of here this second and who would stop you? Not fucking me, that’s for sure. Not her. You’d be a deserter again but who’s going to try to bring you in this time, knowing what you can do now? Nobody. So go ahead. Walk the fuck out,” Ibiki said, gesturing toward the door. 

Sasuke remained in his seat, silent.

Ibiki leaned forward over his desk. “She needs you, Uchiha. The Leaf needs you too, Kakashi needs you, hell, even I might need you. But she needs you. And she’s going to push you away like she did to the rest of us and she’s going to make it hurt. But it might save the world, so who knows? If it’s something interesting you’re after, this’ll have interest in spades. Proving yourself, making up for your past, it’s got that too. But she needs you, and that's what needs to matter.”

Sasuke was quiet for a while before speaking again. “She’s got a control problem. Whatever new tricks she has, they run away from her.”

“You noticed that, huh?” Ibiki said. “Yeah, she’s got a control problem. There’s certain situations where things get away from her and she snaps and it’s a bad situation for everyone involved. It’s hard to get it back under wraps. And that’s another reason why Kakashi sent you: you’ve got it in you to stop it, or turn it into something constructive.”

Sasuke remembered the way Ibiki had intervened in his evaluation, flinging Sakura to the ground - don’t you dare, he’d said. He had been stopping her from letting go. And then earlier - the green sparks that had danced between her fingertips. Control yourself. Don’t do anything you’ll regret. That’s all Ibiki had said. But it had been enough to tip Sasuke off to a very big problem.

“Kakashi,” Sasuke said carefully, “is an idiot.”

“I know that,” Ibiki snapped. “I’ve been telling him that since before you were born. I personally think it’s a shit idea.”

“Why?”

“She’s gentle,” Ibiki said. “Nobody here is gentle. Nobody who ends up in Anbu. But she still is.”

“Not from what I saw today,” Sasuke said. 

“That’s because if anything is going to turn her vicious, it’s you. That’s why it’s a bad idea. You’ve still got your hooks in her somehow - I can see it, I know you can too. I won’t say what that is exactly. But it’s dangerous.”

“So what happens when she loses control?” Sasuke asked, ignoring the part about the hooks. He hadn’t seen any proof of any hooks. 

“Pure energy meltdown. Something takes over her mind and that something thinks everything is a threat, and she’s going to neutralize that threat no matter what.”

Sasuke remembered her genjutsu - the way the clouds suddenly blackened and converged and the air decayed around him like his own mind was caving in on him. It had been distinctly horrible and he never wanted to feel that again. And he suspected that was very much the tip of the iceberg.

“Well, are you up for it or not?” Ibiki asked.

Sasuke sighed. No.

And then he sighed again. Yes.

“Yeah. I’m up for it.”

“Great. Let’s go get her. Or else Yuuto will keep her forever.”

..

..

..

Sakura was sitting in the medic tent, one hand on the shoulder of the man who’d been babbling so incoherently when she’d first seen him; she was channeling calming chakra into his nerves as he slept. The worst had passed; one man had a new hand, the other would be fine. Her chin was resting on her other hand as she stared into space. 

Yuuto had returned with the third member of the damaged team, whose injuries were less severe than the others, and was busy dabbing blood away from minor scrapes and cuts as he talked. Neither of them noticed Ibiki and Sasuke entering the tent.

“Anyway, then he says to me - he says if only you had spots I’d think your mother was a cow! So I clocked him right there,” Yuuto said conversationally.

“That’s good,” Sakura said absentmindedly. 

Sasuke wanted to laugh. He’d heard that before - the same disinterested tone she’d take on when Naruto started talking about ramen toppings. She was clearly deep in her own thoughts, her eyes unfocused and fingers tapping her chin. 

“I’ll say!” Yuuto roared. “Had it coming, anyone would agree. Oh, hi Commander. Uchiha.”

Sakura finally looked up. Her eyes looked different to how they did an hour ago, when she’d left Ibiki’s office. Maybe she'd done some thinking.

“Got your guys patched up!” Yuuta said to Ibiki. “And Ibiki, look at this! Turns out your girl can re-grow entire hands—“

Yuuto stopped talking suddenly, looking at Sasuke, eyes flitting between his face and his arm as if realizing something. 

“Oh ho! Oh ho indeed! A girl you used to know, eh? The disappearing one? The one who makes your black soulless eyes sparkle like the clearest night——“

“I didn’t say any of that,” Sasuke snapped, reddening, remembering his initial exam with Yuuto and the brief conversation about his regrown arm. He avoided looking at Sakura.

“Didn’t you? Maybe I made it better,” Yuuto said, grinning. 

“How do you all have so much energy?” Ibiki sighed. “Haruno, are you done here?”

“I’m just helping him sleep,” she said, nodding towards the man sleeping under her palm. 

“He’ll have to sleep without help,” Ibiki said. “You guys have training missions to sort out.”

“Training missions?” Sakura asked, surprised. 

“It’s been years since the two of you worked together. Time to get back on the ball. Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

Ibiki strode across the Ice base, with Sakura and Sasuke struggling to keep up. He was headed back towards his office.

“So here’s the deal,” Ibiki said as he walked. “You guys have got a week to get to know how to work together again and then you’re back on the big assignment. In that week, you’ve got a mission to complete, unrelated to to the whole find-Hell-and-stitch-it-back-together directive. It’s high enough stakes to be Anbu only, but you two can consider it a training mission.”

“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” Sakura said, with a peculiar tone in her voice that Sasuke had come to associate with coaxing Ibiki into something he didn’t want to do.

“Funny how I don’t give a shit what you think is necessary,” Ibiki said as they arrived at his office. “Wait here.”

He ducked inside the building for a moment and emerged again carrying a small scroll. “Here’s your mission. Just came in an hour ago. You leave at dawn tomorrow. No more sass. Figure it out for yourselves.”

And with that, he slammed the door in their faces, leaving Sakura with a single scroll in her hands and Sasuke with a thousand questions.

“Is he always like this?” Sasuke murmured.

“One hundred percent of the time,” Sakura said flatly. “I bet he didn’t even look at this before he gave it to us. Decrepit old man.”

“So what's the plan?”

She looked at him, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“You’re team leader, aren’t you? Doesn’t that mean you tell us what the plan is?”

“Oh, yeah. Right,” Sakura said uncertainly. “Um. Look, Sasuke —“

“No, I get it,” he cut her off, waving a hand in the air. “You don’t want to do this. It’s not what I signed up for either. Let’s just get this part over with. We can even split up—“

“No splitting up!” Ibiki said, flinging his door open once more. “Idiots, trying to scheme while I’m one thin door away from you! I can hear everything!”

“He was joking,” Sakura said defensively. That was my plan too, she thought miserably. Way to blow it, Sasuke.

“Haruno, get in here,” Ibiki barked. “Uchiha, go away.” 

“Ugh,” she muttered. “Thanks a lot. We’ll leave in the morning. See you then.”

Ibiki slammed the door in Sasuke’s face and quickly sat at his desk. “Look-“

Sakura threw her hands in the air. “Fine, we won’t split up. We’ll be a happy little murder family. You don’t need to yell at me. Can I go now?”

Ibiki sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“I’m not going to yell at you. Look, I get it, kid. I do. But you don’t feel as hard towards him as you’re acting. And if you’re not fooling me, then you’re definitely not fooling yourself. I know why you’re scared.”

Of course. He just wanted an excuse to talk to her without Sasuke there… about Haru. Her shoulders dropped. 

“I know you know,” she said quietly, after a long pause. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re not the same person you were a few years ago. You’ve got a better handle on it. And he’s a Uchiha. He’s not Haru.”

“Haru was strong,” she said, sounding stung - her former mentor was a sore subject, and she couldn’t stand to hear Ibiki imply that he had been weak.

“I know. But you were stronger. If you lose control with Sasuke, he’s going to be fine. So stop shutting him out. I don’t much like the kid, but Kakashi is right about that much.”

“He brings out the worst in me. I almost lost it twice today. I haven’t been that close to an incident months, Morino.”

Ibiki shrugged. “It’ll get better. You’ll learn to deal with it. You always do, huh? And like I said, he’s not going to get blown over by a strong gust of wind from you. He can weather whatever storm you can throw at him.”

“Can he?” she said, unconvinced. “What makes you so sure?”

Ibiki shrugged. “I told him the risks involved in working with you, that things get away from you sometimes, about what happens when you can’t rein it in. Just the basics. I told him he could leave if he wanted to. He didn’t. He’s choosing this.”

“So you went and told him my screws are loose, then? Whose side are you on?” she said, her voice sounding more defensive than she felt. At least I won’t have to tell him myself, she thought, privately relieved. 

"There's no sides," he said, his hands in the air placatingly. "Unless it's us versus them, and I gotta tell you, buddy, he's not a them. He's an us now. Has been for like, five years or something like that."

“I know that,” Sakura said defensively. “You could have let me tell him myself, is all.”

“You know you weren’t going to. You said it yourself, he’s not the enemy. Better for him to know now before it’s too late. Listen, give it a chance. You know I always have your back if shit really goes sideways.”

“I know,” Sakura admitted reluctantly. "Alright, Morino."

“Then you’re dismissed. For now. Everyone’s going to the fire pit one last time tonight before they all take off again in the morning. You should be there.”

..

..

..

Back in her little cabin, Sakura unrolled the mission scroll that Ibiki had given her earlier. A small scrap of paper fluttered to the ground - she picked it up, immediately recognizing Kakashi’s messy scrawl. 

Got your letter. Don’t be upset. I know you. Sasuke knows you. He can help. ♥

She frowned. Why do you all think I need so much help? Haven’t I proven myself enough?

Then - what does Sasuke know about me?

She looked over the mission. To her surprise, it was a request from Gaara, who she knew occasionally leaned on Konoha-nin to carry out missions where Suna needed plausible deniability - it was a mutual agreement. 

That meant this wasn’t some random scroll Ibiki plucked from a mountain of missions. Sakura liked Suna. And Suna liked her - Sasori and Chiyo’s little puppet show, with Sakura as the dancing marionette, as well as Kankuro’s poisoning, were enough for her to earn a permanent and comfortable place in their hearts.

Suna did not like Sasuke. Gaara liked Sasuke because he was Naruto's friend, and therefore so did Kankuro and Temari. They asked after him whenever Sakura passed through, although Sakura was unsure if they'd met again in the years following the war and were just asking out of politeness. But the rest of the village did not forget his treason so lightly, and they held it against him — Sakura wasn’t sure why she held this against them.

She read over the scroll. Arms dealer with a large missing-nin protection detail. Sounds familiar, Sakura thought, thinking of Tazuna and Imari, of needles jutting through Sasuke’s skin and Naruto’s red chakra. Funny joke, Kakashi. 

It’s okay to be seen was written on the scroll - ah. No subterfuge. Make a show of it, send a message with violence, that Suna and Konoha were still working together to isolate and eliminate threats to their people. 

This seems... easy, she thought. Suspiciously easy - there was no way Kakashi was going easy on her for her own sake, not now. There must be more to this than meets the eye.

She rolled the scroll back up, mind swirling. She set to packing - lighter clothes for Suna, it would be blistering hot, regular tactical gear for the other two. 

She sighed - she’d have to tell Sasuke, or he wouldn’t know what to bring. He couldn’t cross the desert in his current clothing, he’d melt into a black puddle of bad attitude.  

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. She would tell him tonight at the bonfire if he showed up.  

She set to work on devising some sort of a team strategy with the bare information written in the scrolls - something she hadn’t had to do in a while, and which did nothing to lighten her mood.  

It was going to be a long week.

…

…

…

When night had well and truly fallen, Sasuke made his way to the fire pit one last time. The base was emptying out again in the morning, everyone having been assigned new missions with their rookies; the operatives had gathered around, talking and laughing with each other.

He was surprised to notice that Sakura was already there, sitting alone, at a distance close enough to appear participatory but not so close so as to actually be roped into the current conversation circulating amongst the operatives. This level of calculated distance was an art she’d clearly mastered in the past few years.

He watched her, careful not to stare. Sometimes she’d look at him too, and he’d pretend not to notice. She needs you, Ibiki had said. Yeah right, Sasuke thought.

Then Yuuto went up to her, a little tipsy, and they didn’t call him Yuuto The Bear for nothing - he clapped his paws around her shoulders, proclaiming her to be a great medic, no, the very best medic, and forcing a cup of sake into her hands - when he wasn’t looking, she surreptitiously tossed the contents of the cup into the snow - and Yuuto went on and on about his heyday, the old man who had taught him medical jutsu, and all the women he’d loved and lost, which he somehow made relevant to everything. Sasuke watched Yuuto envelop Sakura, and he watched her smile — small and private, but still a smile. 

The way she was with others was so strange, he thought, compared to how she was with him - with others, she was a real person. With him, she was an angry shadow, hollow and cold. 

He did not have long to contemplate this thought, though, for Kodama Kou sidled up next to him, his rookie trailing not far behind, dejected and resigned. 

Oh, god. Not you, Sasuke thought, groaning internally. He made no greeting, hoping his silence would beget further silence. 

"I know what you're expecting me to say," Kou finally said -- conversationally, as if they’d already been talking for hours.

"I would be shocked if that were true," Sasuke said drily, as he truly had no expectations of the man sitting next to him.

"You're expecting me to say that if you hurt her I'll kill you or some shit like that. Listen, fuck each other up all you want, send her back here a basket case, she'll get fixed up just like last time and shipped back out to wherever Kakashi needs a regenerating human sacrifice. So hurt her if you need to. That's life and that's fine with me."

"Fantastic. Thanks."

"I’m just here to tell you what the last guy told me."

"There's more of you?" Sasuke asked, rolling his eyes. What karma had caused him to be beset by idiots at every turn in this lifetime?

"What, you think you were always going to be the only love of her life? You believe everything else you thought was true when you were 16? Anyway, he was her mentor. And he told me - if she ever starts to crack, you know, starts to step off the cliff - you have to get control of her before she gets control of you."

"Where is he now?"

"Dead," Kou said. "She killed him. So take what I'm saying with a grain of salt."

“She killed her mentor?”

“Didn’t Ibiki tell you?”

“No.”

“They’d been running the same op for a while. Nobody heard from them for weeks, they were presumed dead or captured. Then she turned up in the middle of the night with his body - looked like he’d been dead for days - and she was just out of her mind, absolutely hysterical, wouldn’t let anyone take the body from her. Had to be knocked out. She woke up a few days later and wouldn’t say a word. Kakashi came in, and he and Ibiki got her talking again. Ibiki’s a torture specialist, you know — knows the human mind like the back of his hand. He got her back up and shipped back out within a couple of days.”

Wait. At some point, Sakura was captured, presumed dead for weeks, and Sasuke had been sitting on his ass in Konoha, unaware — nobody had told him? Why wouldn’t I be told?

Sasuke shrugged the thoughts out of his head, turning away. There was something about Kodama that screamed dangerous, that implored Sasuke not to engage. His eyes found Sakura again, the same moment that her eyes found him - her eyes narrowed when she noticed him talking to Kou. She frowned and extricated herself from Yuuto’s grasp.

“They say that it’s the rookies that always get their mentors killed, though —  and I heard you’re a bit of a berserker yourself,” Kou said quietly, picking a bit of lint off his shoulder. “She seems scared of you, you know. Maybe she thinks you’ll try to kill her again. There’s bets you take her out in the first week. Want to know where my money is?”

Sasuke opened his mouth to reply, a biting retort on the tip of his tongue, but he was interrupted. 

“What are you guys talking about?” Sakura asked as she approached, frown still perched primly on her brow as she brushed off of her shoulders. She sat on a tree stump next to them, pulling her knees to her chest. 

“You,” Kou said. “You’re the main character, aren’t you?”

“Not with you around,” Sakura grumbled. “Don’t talk about me behind my back. It’s rude.”

“It’s just jokes, lady. We were just saying how you guys are leaving in the morning. Me’n’my rookie are heading out tomorrow, too,” Kou said, jerking a thumb towards the young man sitting next to him. “Not optimistic about his chances, to be honest. Shame.”

“Be nice,” Sakura snapped. “Where are you going?”

“Isn’t that classified—“ the rookie attempted to interrupt before Kou slapped a hand over his mouth. 

“Hush,” Kou said. “The grownups are talking. We’re going to Ame. What about you?”

“All over the place,” Sakura said, waving her hand in the air noncommittally.  “Not Ame, though. We’re getting sent on an assassination for training or team-building or something. It’s bullshit.”

An assassination? Sasuke’s interest was piqued - his idea of Sakura, although admittedly diversified in the past week, was diametrically opposed to her ever being party to an assassination. This would be interesting, at least. 

“When was the last time you got a simple assassination?” Kou grinned. “It’ll be a break for you.”

"Yeah, killing people. Fun break."

“How come you don’t just be a medic?” Kou’s rookie asked, genuine curiosity in his voice. “Yuuto says you’re too good to be in the field, you should be a doctor in the village or at a base.”

“People say medic the same way they say dead weight,” she laughed humorlessly. “Nobody wants to be a medic. Medics don’t win wars or eliminate threats. Medics are nannies picking up after messy children, from the safety of the village.”

“Alright, alright, don’t let your constant rain cloud get my rookie wet,” Kou said, placing an exaggeratedly protective arm over his rookie’s shoulders. “Geez, you talk like such a little villain sometimes. Good luck, anyway. We’re going to go tell Yuuto you called him dead weight.”

Sakura sighed as Kou walked away, dragging his rookie by the ear. Sasuke glanced at her - the firelight flickered across her face as she watched the pair go. 

Sasuke opened his mouth to speak, but then stopped himself. Although it was dark, the firelight provided enough light for him to see that she was miserable. Her chin was resting on her knees, and she was pulling apart a twig she had picked up off the ground. Her eyes were staring straight ahead, but they were glazed, as if she was lost in thought. There was no trace of a smile on her face. In fact, Sasuke wondered if he had imagined every smile of hers he had ever seen.

“The assassination is in Suna,” she said wearily. “Pack for warm weather. It’s hot there this time of year.”

“I thought you just said we’re going all over the place?”

“We’re not. Be careful with what you tell Kou, unless you want him showing up —- and I don’t.” 

Could’ve fooled me, Sasuke thought, kind of bitterly - then he erased the thought; he had no reason to mind who she was friends with. 

“I don’t think medics are dead weight,” Sasuke said as casually as he could manage as he forced himself to look anywhere but her face.

“We all are at some point or another,” she shrugged, not looking away from the fire. “Medics aren’t an exception.”

“Just because it’s not violent means it’s weak?”

“There’s no room for you or me in a world without violence,” she said quietly. “If there’s no wars or people to kill or information to extract… then you and I, what are we good for?”

“You can heal people, can’t you?” he shrugged. “Most wars are wars of attrition. Makes you good for more than most, if you can help people when they’re hurt.”

“People hurt by the violence we perpetuate,” she sighed. “And what about you? Without violence, where are you?”

Sasuke was silent.

“Ever since we were kids… eight years old and choosing to be a soldier. You come from a dynasty of soldiers, you didn’t stand a chance… and I was just a civilian kid who lived in a mercenary village.”

Sasuke simply shrugged again, unwilling to admit that he’d entertained similar thoughts in the past.

“I was told they would make me into a hero,” she said bitingly.

“Didn’t they?” Sasuke asked vaguely.

“You and I were manufactured and sold as weapons,” she said with finality, standing to walk away. “We’re leaving at dawn, alright? I’ll meet you at the medic tent. Don’t be late.”

..

..

..

The next morning, Sakura waited for Sasuke in front of the medic tent. She dared not enter, for Yuuto would be only too happy to put her to work once more. She watched her breath escape in short puffs, counting the seconds; if he was late, she would happily leave without him. In fact, even if he was on time, she might already be gone.

Sasuke saw her before she saw him, as he walked through the quiet Anbu camp. It was still dark out, but the dawn was swiftly approaching; she glanced at the sky, shifting her backpack slightly, adjusting the straps and fidgeting with her vest. She looked… nervous. 

Why would you be the nervous one? Sasuke thought to himself grumpily as he approached. He wondered if she would still be upset from the night before, wondered which version of her he would be getting this morning.

She dropped the backpack straps when she noticed him, standing straighter, trying to conceal her nerves. 

“Morning,” he said gruffly, by way of greeting. 

“Ready?” she asked, her voice cool. Sasuke guessed she was still upset.  “If we leave now, we should reach Suna before nightfall.”

“Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

One year ago, Ice Country

Sakura sat up suddenly, her world spinning. She was in her bed in her cold, miserable little cabin on the Ice base. Ibiki was standing in front of the door, leaned against it with his arms crossed. 

For a second, she couldn’t place why he was there, clearly blocking the entrance like she might try to escape, or why her entire body ached, why her heart and stomach burned with the heavy acid of grief and worry and fear. She didn’t know why she was here, and not with Haru in Ame. But then her memories of the past few weeks came crashing down on her. 

Haru’s dead.

I killed him.

She began gasping for breath as the realization forced her throat to close, tears flowing from her eyes, the saltwater burning her raw cheeks. Her fingers found the window ledge, started scrabbling at the latch, looking for an escape, searching for the air that had been suddenly sucked out of the room. Beyond the thick glass, the sunrise was an orange-red rinse over the snowy horizon; she needed to go, needed to disappear into the sun before it went away and it all went dark again— and she would see Haru’s face as he died in her arms, his chest caved in, skin hanging off his limbs, blood pouring from his eyes and ears and mouth, trying uselessly to heal the carnage she’d caused — she’d dragged his body back with her, she couldn’t leave him —

“She’s been like this every time she wakes up,” Ibiki said - she ignored him, refused to look in his direction, it could be another hallucination, and when she started seeing things is when she started to get dangerous — “She won’t talk, just starts hyperventilating, so I keep knocking her out. It’s a mercy. I’ve been waiting for you to get here before I tried anything… else.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her fingers into her eyelids - try what?

And then, Who are you talking to?

“Sakura,” another voice - her eyes flew open this time, and she was right about that voice, she would recognize it anywhere — Kakashi. 

You came , she thought, reaching out for him like a child, but then snapping her hands back, burned, remembering what happened when she touched the people she loved - planting little ticking time-bombs in their arteries, nerves, organs, ready to explode into horrific violence when she lost control— she wrapped her arms around herself tightly, to hold herself in, started rocking back and forth to quell the fear that rose in her throat like bile. Not you too, she thought, imagining Kakashi’s blood exploding out of his veins as she raised his blood pressure with her mind — I can’t lose you too, please, not you too, anyone but you.

Kakashi grabbed her arms, held them at her sides, and forced her to look him in the eyes. 

“Hey. Kid, it’s okay. I’m here now. I know about what happened with Haru. It’s okay. Look, it happens, alright? I know what you’re going through. Trust me, I know.”

It happens ? Sakura thought. It just… happens? Haru, beautiful, strong, kind Haru reduced to just another happenstance, an accident, not a tragedy, not a murder - his corpse had just been starting to bloat when she dragged it onto the ice base, screaming for Ibiki— 

Kou had come running at the sound of her voice, his eyes worried and and voice hoarse as he pulled Haru’s body away from her and grabbed her face, saying things she couldn’t hear, couldn’t understand, but he was there, somehow always there when she needed him and when she didn’t… and then Ibiki had come running too, pushing Kou out of the way-- 

“Don’t touch me,” Sakura said, trying to wrench her arms out of Kakashi’s grip, choking on her own words. Her eyes were frantic, flitting from Kakashi’s face, to his hands on her skin, to Ibiki’s face, to the window. Like a trapped animal that didn’t know it was being helped. “That’s how— Kakashi, I killed him — that’s how he died—I touched him and —“

Kakashi shushed her and held her tighter, pulling her head to his chest, smoothing her hair. “I know. I know what happened. But — oh my god, Sakura, I’m so glad you’re alive. I thought you were dead. I’m so happy you came back.” 

His voice was hoarse, raw, honest. At this, Sakura let herself collapse into her teacher’s arms. He was warm, his clothes were soft, and he was holding her like he wasn’t afraid of her. She sobbed, each heave of her lungs sticking in her throat painfully. He was happy she came back. She knew Kakashi didn’t care what she had done - he would still love her, he would still want her to come back. Even if she didn’t deserve it. They were family. 

“You can come home,” Kakashi said quietly. “Come back to Konoha. You don’t have to keep doing this. It’s okay. Haru wouldn’t blame you. After I — when it happened to me, I should’ve gone home. It’s the right thing to do. So just come home for a while.”

He’s talking about Rin , Sakura realized. Somehow, this only made the pain worse. 

She glanced at Ibiki’s face -- a face she knew so well, now, after these godforsaken years -- it was closed off, avoiding her gaze, like he did when he wanted to say something but didn’t know how. Usually, she would come to his rescue in situations like this - but not this time. 

He’d seen this scene too many times before. Too many young people left broken by their own actions -- actions sanctioned by the village -- destroying another life in the name of peace that they would never be allowed to participate in. A sick and twisted buy-one-get-one sale - the girl had killed the boy, and she was left about as useful as if she had killed herself. 

“What happened to his body?” Sakura asked dully after the long silence, her voice muffled in Kakashi’s sleeve. Ibiki looked up, finally meeting her gaze. 

Ah , he thought, seeing the look in her eye - there was a familiar determination there. Maybe she’ll be alright after all. He didn’t know why, but calling Kakashi out was always the right move when she got herself into a state - something about being in the same room as him charged her up enough to muster the strength to press onward.

“It got sent back to the village,” Ibiki said gruffly. She buried her face in Kakashi’s sleeve again. 

Haru. Her friend - funny, bright, optimistic, dead. A few years older than her, but with young blue eyes, always searching for the silver lining in the worst situations. She knew he wouldn’t be upset at her. He’d loved her, and in the end, she didn’t deserve that, either. 

“Bury him next to my parents,” she said softly. “He didn’t have anyone else. Okay, Kakashi? Promise.”

“Okay, Sakura,” Kakashi said, weariness in his voice. “I promise.”

Kakashi knew she wasn’t going to come home. He glanced at Ibiki, who just nodded. I’ll get her back out there . 

And he would.

“You’re gonna be working with Kodama Kou from now on,” Ibiki said. “C’mon, kid. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

...

...

...

Present day, Sunagakure

The journey to Sunagakure went quickly, even if the heat and dry air grated on Sasuke’s patience for traveling - he wasn’t sure if the snow or the sand was worse, but he knew his ideal world had neither. 

He found Sakura to be a quiet travel companion. When she spoke, it was to give sparse direction, guiding them towards their destination in as few words as possible. She didn’t tire, or if she did, she hid it well. 

By the time they had reached Suna, the sky had already begun to darken. They crossed through the gates and into the winding roads of the Village Hidden in the Sand; the streets were still busy with bustling crowds, shoppers going in and out of stores and people waiting outside of restaurants. Sakura expertly maneuvered through them, leaving Sasuke to wonder how much time she’d spent in Suna to know its roads like this. 

As they walked, the pair drew significant attention; everyone seemed to know Sakura, or at least know of her, and they were excited to see her - people would point and whisper with smiles on their faces, or call out to her; she would wave, but never stop to chat. Then, inevitably, they would notice Sasuke.

Their smiles would drop and their whispers would turn sour, dark and angry. He was used to it. Even people in Konoha still glared at him in the streets sometimes; he’d learned to block it out. He wondered if she noticed. The thought that she might bothered him more than the fact that it was happening at all.

“Where are we going?” he asked her after a while of walking.

“Hotel,” she said shortly, then stopped and reached into her bag, handing him the mission scroll. “Here. You’re going to need to read this. I know a place to stay tonight, and tomorrow we can go talk to Gaara and do a dress rehearsal of the strategy.”

He peeled open the scroll and squinted at it as they walked. The information was sparse and heavily coded. “Why do we need to talk to Gaara?”

“Because talking to him is the diplomatic thing to do when you’re about to kill someone in his country. The target is some big-shot black market arms dealer named Kinizushi. He’s a missing nin who went underground a few years ago, and he cropped up last month moving massive amounts of stolen weapons, state secrets, and performance enhancers. I guess they want him dead.”

“That sounds… tame,” Sasuke said, unsure why this was an Anbu-worthy mission in the first place, or why Gaara or any other Suna shinobi couldn’t handle it. 

She shrugged, but her voice was a little agitated in her reply. “It’s training. And part of the job is political theater. We kill him to show that our villages are still strongly allied and working together.”

“Sounds like something a chunin could handle.”

“Not necessarily. There’s always a catch with Anbu missions. And since the war, there’s not exactly a great supply of chunins. Plus, you’re just Anbu-in-training so maybe they gave us an easy one for your sake.”

“That’s just a formality,” he grumbled.

“Not really. Rookies always fuck everything up, thinking they know what they’re doing. It’s never as simple as it seems and rookies only make it more complicated, barging into things like it’s your first day at the academy.”

You’re hiding something from me, Sasuke thought - she was more irritable than usual at his questioning, like she didn’t want to talk to him about it. The thought annoyed him.

“And look -- just drop it, okay? Even if it is easy, that’s fine, isn’t it?” she said, exasperated. “We can get it over with faster.”

“Fine. I’ll try not to slow you down, mentor ,” he said sarcastically. “Sorry you got stuck babysitting .”

“Drop the attitude,” she snapped. “I’m just being honest.”

“Nobody needs you worrying about me ,” he said, petulance in his voice. It was childish, he knew, and full of subtext for her to interpret however she liked; but if she was going to treat him like a child, he may as well act like one.

“Oooh, I am going to give Kakashi such a fucking talking-to if we make it out of this,” she growled under her breath. “Let’s just hurry up and find a place to stay for the night.”

He followed her sullenly through the busy streets of Suna, until she stopped at a small, unassuming inn on the main road and slipped inside.

“Two rooms,” Sakura said flatly to the girl at the counter, dispensing with formalities and pushing money over to her. The girl’s face lit up with recognition, and she clapped her hands together in delight.

“Certainly, Miss Sakura - the Kazekage said you and your guest might be coming. He’s already paid for the rooms. We can accommodate you together, if you wish? Or adjoining rooms?”

“No. The further apart, the better.”

Sasuke rolled his eyes. Like I’m going to kill you through the wall, or what?

“Well, I can put you both on the same floor at least,” the girl said, smiling as she handed two sets of keys over. “Enjoy your stay!”

They found their rooms easily - it was a small inn, its two floors each consisting of a few hallways framing a small outdoor courtyard, although it was certainly nice enough. They awkwardly stood at the separate doors, neither knowing what to say.

A wash of guilt came over Sasuke; he shouldn’t have needled her like that earlier. Sakura, with her averted eyes and frown tensely perched on her brow, was clearly stressed, and he’d really been upset at Kou’s words from the night before, not at her.

“Do you want to go get something to eat?” Sasuke said suddenly, somewhat awkwardly, hoping she would recognize it for a peace offering. 

“I’m not hungry,” Sakura sighed, but her voice had lost the irritated edge it had carried before. “But if you are, there’s a good place just at the end of the street. The one with the orange door. You should go.”

“Shouldn’t you eat something?” he said, shifting uncomfortably. “We didn’t eat all day.”

“I’m just going to sleep,” she said, sounding so bone-tired and weary that Sasuke didn’t question her. “We’re going to go see Gaara in the morning and then run through the plan of attack a few times at the training grounds. Read the mission scroll a couple more times. I’ll get you in the morning when it’s time to go.”

Then she disappeared into her room, shutting the door in his face.

Sasuke did go out to eat, in the end - although he wished she had agreed to come, even if just to buffer the dirty looks and angry eyes that pointed at him everywhere he went. The restaurant she recommended was indeed at the end of the street with a jumpsuit-orange door, a color he associated with annoyance and ramen.

Inside the restaurant,  it was busy, the tables filled with couples chatting away or families quelling boisterous toddlers. People lined the walls, milling around waiting for takeout orders to be handed off. The lighting was dim, familiar, and various oddities hung on the walls, no singular design theme to be had. 

When did you come here? Sasuke frowned. Who with? How do you know the food is good?

When he had been the one who left, he’d known where Sakura was the whole time - at home, in Konoha. He could imagine who she was with, where she would go - none of the places or people were unfamiliar to him. The cafes she went to were the same ones he had been to, the trees lining her street were the ones he had seen, her friends the same annoyingly garrulous and shrieking bunch he’d known. Now she was the mystery, and he would never again know everything about her. 

As he found a table to sit, he dwelled on this same issue that had, frankly, bothered him so much over the years. He drummed his fingers against the tabletop impatiently. 

Behind him, someone cleared their throat - he turned, hoping it was a waiter so he could quickly eat and leave.

But it wasn’t. It was an old - ancient, even - man, accompanied by a much younger man - maybe a few years older than Sasuke. Both were dressed in dirty, long white robes - Sasuke couldn’t recognize what clan or village from which those robes might be the custom, but he didn’t really care. The mismatched pair stared at him intently - the old man grinned, his rotten teeth glistening sinisterly. 

“You’re Konoha-nin, aren’t you?”

Sasuke didn’t answer. Any number of things could have given him away, including his own far-reaching and nefarious reputation or the Konoha sigil on his sleeve. 

“Not with anyone?” the old man asked, pointing at the empty seats, and his voice put Sasuke on edge, grating against his instincts. 

“No,” Sasuke said shortly. “Can I help you?”

“Shame,” the old man said. “We’d heard that there was a famous Konoha ninja in town. The one that saved the hokage’s brother and killed the puppet-master Sasori. Isn’t that right, Takeda?”

The morose-looking young man nodded glumly.

“She is,” Sasuke grumbled. “She stayed in. I’ll send her your admiration.”

“Ah, no need to bother,” the man said lightly. “We were simply curious. Enjoy your evening.”

The odd pair then walked away, their dirty white robes swishing after them as they left the restaurant. Sasuke stared after them, unsure why he found them so unsettling - and why he felt rather glad that Sakura hadn’t been there to see them.

…

…

…

Alone in her hotel room, Sakura showered, fiercely scrubbing her skin with the hottest water she could force out of the showerhead; she thought about bringing the water to a boil with her chakra and then simply healing the burns, wondering if she would feel clean then.

Stop being dramatic, she chided herself.

Drying off, she leaned over the sink, splashing cold water on her face to bring her temperature back down; she found herself back in a familiar position, hands gripping the edge of the counter, staring at herself in the mirror. Her skin was pink and raw, eyes bloodshot, jaw tense, clenched teeth working the muscles in her neck, knuckles white and shaking as nausea rocked through her.

She was going to lose control. Not now. But soon.

Sasuke had been right, of course. This stupid “training” mission was tame. Political theater, my ass. A good enough genin team could absolutely do this mission, or a couple of bored chunin. She could do it alone. Which meant that it wasn’t training at all - it was testing . Kakashi was testing her to see if they could work together without her losing her shit and popping the last Uchiha like a grape. 

And the worst part - he was right to test her like this. It had been getting worse for the last year - almost every time she killed someone, she lost control on some level. It didn’t matter much when no one was around, but now she had a partner, someone who would be in the blast radius when she inevitably snapped. Not just any partner, either. A whole new kind of trigger.

Sasuke . The newest threat to her control - for whatever reason, even being close to him threatened her sanity. The urge to turn her chakra loose, to succumb to the chaos that was always only a few centimeters under her skin, was overpowering with him nearby. It was like a voice in her head was cooing to her, over and over, just let me take care of it. You don’t want him here. He’s dangerous. 

He’s not, she snapped at herself, slamming her palm into her temple, trying to dislodge whatever voice was residing in the worst parts of her mind, the parts decayed by the things she had seen in the last five years. He’s not dangerous. He’s trying. He’s not the same. You can’t make me hurt him. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Even more embarrassingly, being in Suna meant Gaara was in on it. As a Kage, he knew about the Jashinists, of course. But he also would’ve been warned that Kakashi was planning on using his country as the test site for a nuclear bomb. Another spectator to her endless humiliation.

Sakura stared down at her fingertips. It was always there, lurking just beneath her skin, that awful power - not just when things were bad. If she could just figure out how to use it without the murderous rampage… but that had never worked.

After Haru, she and Ibiki had talked about trying to seal away that part of her - some sort of stopgap to suppress her chakra if it ever got away from her. They’d given up when even the most complex sealing jutsu barely managed to take the edge off. But last night she’d stayed awake and placed a hundred little seals all over her body, desperate to avoid a future where it was Sasuke’s mangled corpse she was dragging back to Ibiki.

She stomped her foot angrily, tears burning her eyes, threatening to spill onto her face.

Stop.

Don’t cry.

Get a grip. 

She sighed, dragging a hand down her face. It wasn’t his fault, but every time he spoke, the screams in her mind grew louder, more desperate, more afraid. And the more she remembered just how deeply she had loved him, the closer her sanity stumbled to the edge of the cliff. And that was no good for either of them, for her to give in to those old feelings. It was like the more she remembered, the stronger the urges became. An impossible addiction.

I’ll be better tomorrow, she told herself, a constant refrain in her life thus far. Then she dug a squished granola bar out of her pack, forced herself to eat it, and got into bed for a night of tossing and turning. 

…

…

…

In the morning, they went to see Gaara. On the way there, Sakura seemed like she had something she wanted to say, starting to speak several times, but then stopping herself. Sasuke didn’t push her on it - she looked like she’d gotten no sleep at all. They walked through town silently, the early hour at least affording him a reprieve from the judging eyes of civilians.

Eventually, they arrived at the Kazekage’s office; the older woman at the front desk was effusively pleasant with Sakura and civil with Sasuke as she asked them to take a seat to wait for Gaara.

Once seated, Sakura leaned in, her voice a whisper. “Have you seen Gaara since you tried to, you know, murder him?”

“Is this you trying to start a conversation?” he grumbled. “No. I haven’t seen him.”

“He’s nice,” Sakura said simply. “You’ve both changed a lot since then. Relax, you shouldn’t be so worried.”

Sasuke glanced at her. “I am rela --”

“The Kazekage will see you now,” the secretary announced. “If you’ll follow me.”

Sakura stood, brushing off her pants, and followed the woman; Sasuke trailed behind them. They were let into a large office, well-lit from the many windows that looked down upon the city.

“Ah, Sakura,” Gaara said in his quiet, warm way, standing from his desk and coming to greet them. “Sasuke. Glad to see you’re working together again.”

Sakura smiled, leaning in for a hug. “It’s temporary, you know. I’m sure Kakashi told you to expect us?”

“He did. Well, he told me to hope to expect you. He wasn’t sure you’d both arrive in one piece. I’m glad you came - our people like seeing you, and they like knowing the alliance is strong.”

“Naruto will be jealous I’ve gotten to see you,” she said. “He wrote to me about Temari and Shikamaru. Congratulations.”

“Yes, Temari would love for you to be at the wedding. And I’m sure you’re welcome to come as well, Sasuke. She wants it to be a big affair.”

“Thank you,” Sasuke said, for lack of a better response. He didn’t really like parties, nor was he generally welcome at them.

Gaara cocked his head to one side, as if curious about a question he couldn’t quite ask. 

“Anyway,” Sakura said, breaking the awkward silence. “Kunizishi?”

“Oh, right. The arms dealer. He’s been causing some trouble recently, moving some new performance enhancers that have been annoying to deal with. He’s got some tricks up his sleeve. I’d worry if they had sent anyone else, but since it’s you, Sakura, it’ll be alright.”

“Sasuke seemed to think it was tame , even,” Sakura said easily - her words a little too buttery. Sasuke raised his eyebrows at her strange tone. Was she still upset about him calling the mission easy last night? Get over it. “So if you have something more difficult, please don’t hold back on us.”

Gaara laughed. “Well, Kakashi asked if we had anything we’d rather not deal with ourselves, and this is it. Sending the two of you is probably overkill for most things, anyway.”

Sasuke simply shrugged at this. He’d been up against worse odds, certainly. But he’d noticed that the smile on Sakura’s face had become forced, her eyes narrowed as she spoke to the Kazekage.

“We were going to go to the training grounds and run through the plan, and then take care of it tonight if you have a location. Tomorrow if you don’t have one,” Sakura said. “Although something tells me you do have one.”

“Actually, we got a tip that he’s doing business out of an old storehouse a few miles from town. Out of the way from any populated areas, at least.”

“I figured,” Sakura said, maintaining that false, cold cheeriness - Sasuke glanced at her. Why had she figured? Why had that upset her?

If Gaara noticed the aberration in her tone, he gave no indication; he pulled a small square of paper from his desk and extended it to her, but she didn’t take it. “There’s the information we have. The warehouse was slated for demolition later in the year anyway, so you can take care of it however you see fit.”

“Really? However I see fit?” she asked cheerfully. “No need for us to restrain ourselves, then?”

Gaara couldn’t feign ignorance of her impertinence any longer - he shifted uncomfortably, although his expression remained unchanged, the piece of paper still in his hand, hanging awkwardly between the two of them. 

Sasuke reached out and took the piece of paper. “Uh, thanks. I think we’re going to go to the training grounds and run through the plan now. So we’ll let you know when it’s done.”

“I’ll let you say hi to Kakashi for me then, Gaara,” she said, the cheeriness of her tone betrayed by a hint of acid as she turned and walked out of the room. “Come on, Sasuke. Let’s go.”

…

…

…

The Sunagakure training grounds were different from Konoha’s - they were more secluded, mostly cement and dirt, bereft of the cool patches of shade that genin depended on to catch their breath. No grass, no trees. Just rocks, in varying sizes from boulders to gravel. In fact, Sasuke hadn’t seen a single green thing since they’d gotten to Suna. You’d think they could plant a shrub or something. 

Sasuke handed Sakura the folded-up piece of paper that Gaara had given them regarding the arms dealer’s location. She leaned against a rock, staring at the paper, and sighed. 

“What was that back there?” Sasuke demanded. “Did Gaara piss in your coffee this morning, or what?”

She looked up at him, and rolled her eyes. Then she sighed again .

“Something’s wrong,” Sasuke said. “You’re not telling me what it is. You’re just sighing about it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said testily.

He said nothing, gazing at her intently. 

“Stop looking at me like that,” she demanded.

He didn’t.

“Alright, fine,” she said, throwing her hands in the air in exasperation. “You’re right. This mission is for kids. They gave us a map to the location, for god’s sake. It’s a single-target assassination and the guy’s barely S-tier.”

Aha.

She scuffed the tip of her shoe in the dirt, arms crossed, looking at the ground. “Kakashi’s testing me. We’re going to have an audience, I bet.”

“Why would he be testing you ? Wouldn’t he be testing me?” Sasuke asked, confused - if anyone was to be tested, it was the semi-reformed war criminal, wasn’t it?

“You don’t have to act like Ibiki didn’t tell you. I have a control problem.”

Oh. That. “Yeah, he told me. But what makes Kakashi think it’s a sure bet you’ll lose control here on some genin-level mission?” 

She reddened slightly, embarrassed. “Because it’s been getting worse lately. For the last year, every time I have to kill someone, I lose it. Sometimes it takes even less than that. If I’m alone it’s not as much of a problem, but you’re here now.”

“What causes it?” Sasuke asked, privately thinking it was a little insulting that anyone thought a temper tantrum of Sakura’s could cause him more grief than slight annoyance.

“Anything. Everything. Strong emotions. Being around death. Killing people. That kind of thing.”

“Being around me?” Sasuke prompted, crossing his arms. 

She glanced at him. “Is it that obvious?”

“Were you trying to hide it? You act like I’m a migraine you can’t get rid of.”

“I’m not trying to be mean,” she said defensively. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. I’ve hurt people before when I didn’t mean to.” 

“So what happened a year ago to make it so much worse?”

She sighed, her shoulders dropping. “Stop acting like you don’t know things, alright? I know you know I killed him. I heard Kou telling you the other night.”

“Well, if that’s what’s going to happen tonight, then I should hear it from you.”

If she was upset by his forthrightness, she didn’t show it. She looked up at the sky, tucking her hair behind her ears, and sighed. For a few long moments, she was silent.

“You’re right,” she said simply, after a while. “You should know. I killed my mentor a year ago. His name was Haru. We were going after some Jashinists trying to turn a village into a sacrifice. They cornered us and I lost control. Haru was too close, he thought that he could get through to me when I… was like that , and he couldn’t, and he died. It wasn’t unexpected, I guess. I’m a ticking time bomb. I wasn’t right for a long time after it happened. That’s why Kakashi is doing this. So that it doesn’t happen again.”

“Okay,” Sasuke said slowly. “What happens when you lose control?”

“I lose conscious command of my chakra,” she said, and raised her hand, allowing her bright, verdant green chakra to dance between her fingers for a moment before it vanished. “It changes into something else. My natural affinity is earth release. I could never really get the hang of fire release, like you. But suddenly, some switch flips and my chakra changes. And this fire comes flooding out of me like I’m made of it. I don’t know where it comes from - but it’s like standing on the surface of the sun, just fucking blindly destroying everything. Even me, but I regenerate too quickly to kill myself with it. Go figure.”

“Sounds… painful.”

“It is. When I’m like that I can do things that I can’t explain - things I never knew I was capable of. Any horrible thing I can imagine, that chakra will force into existence. Nothing can get in its way, nothing can shut it off. It just disintegrates reality. It kills people. I kill people.”

Sasuke was silent, frowning. It all sounded familiar. 

“I think… I think Kakashi’s hoping that the stakes will finally be high enough that I’ll be able to stop myself,” she said, looking down. “But he should have taken me out of the field a long time ago. He should’ve given you a choice.”

Sasuke glanced at her. “You know, you’re not the only one here who’s had a control problem. I did it first. So aren’t you just copying me?”

She was taken aback. “Huh?”

“The chunin exam, that stupid forest of irresponsible adults or death or whatever, Orochimaru’s curse mark,” he said. “You aren’t even being original. I was already doing this when we were twelve.”

“I…” she said, stunned. “I forgot about that.”

“So your chakra’s been running wild,” Sasuke said, shrugging. “But it’s about to run into me, right? If you only lose it when you’re backed into a corner, then we just won’t get backed into any corners. I’ll take my chances.”

“No,” Sakura protested. “Look, there’s no 'taking your chances.' If it happens, you need to just get out of the area as soon as possible. Use your Rinnegan space-warp-glitch-thing and get out.”

“I haven’t changed that much, Sakura,” he said, waving away her concerns. “Not even you can tell me what to do. So just try not to kill me and we’ll be fine.”

Not even me? she thought, flustered. 

“Anyway, shouldn’t we be going through your plan for the mission tonight? Isn’t that why we’re here?”

When she didn’t say anything, he continued. “We could just walk through the front door. That’s what I would do. It’s an old warehouse, right? So we walk in and then walk out a minute later. You won’t even have time to lose it.”

She sighed, giving up on their prior conversation. “Good for you, you literal reincarnation of a god. The rest of us can’t just walk through the front door in every situation. Don’t be a rookie.” 

Sasuke shrugged. “Seems like you could, though. These days.”

“That won’t work with the Jashinists anyway, so we might as well get in a few practice runs of a different tactic before it matters. It’s supposed to be a training mission.”

“Whatever you say, then,” he said. It was the first time she’d referred to a we when mentioning the Jashinists.

“Great. That space-time… thingy that you do, where you swap places with something. Can you use it on other things? Could you make me swap places with something else?”

Sasuke shrugged again. “Sure. That’s easy.”

“Easy, he says,” Sakura grumbled under her breath. “Okay, switch me with something.”

Sasuke bent down and picked up a pebble, turning it over in his fingers, and then flicked it into the air. He turned his Rinnegan on her, and she flickered in and out of existence, appearing inches from his chest; where she had stood a few feet away, the pebble clattered down onto the cement as if from thin air. 

She turned red, pushing away from him.

So you can still look like that? Sasuke thought, smirking. 

She picked up the pebble, trying to hide her face.  “That’s not a pleasant feeling, is it?”

“No,” Sasuke agreed. “You get used to it, though.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, unconvinced. “What’s the range? Can you swap moving targets?”

“A few hundred meters, and yes. I just have to be able to see both objects.”

“Okay,” she said, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “Here’s the plan.”

Chapter Text

One Year Ago, Iwagakure

Haru walked five paces ahead of her, like he always did. It was their eleventh mission together in six months, and Sakura had begun to say things like that in her head - that Haru always did this or he never did that. He’d begun to feel like a friend, like someone she knew. 

They were walking down a long dirt road on their way out of a rural countryside town in Iwa. Her shoes scuffed on the path, kicking up dust, and the sun was setting in the horizon ahead of them. She watched his back as he walked, his Anbu uniform covering the broad expanse of his shoulders, catching the eyes of strangers as the pair headed out of the small village. They were only passing through, but something about the town felt… melancholy to Sakura. The way the trees rustled softly in the summer evening breeze, the soft dusk settling in, reminded her of home. She stopped, glancing back at the town they were leaving behind.

Haru turned around, his soft brown hair catching the fading sun, throwing golden splinters of fading light into the dusty air between them.

“Reminds you of home, huh, rookie?” he said, his blue eyes crinkling with a wistful smile as he walked backward. “With the trees, and all.”

“Yeah,” Sakura said softly, lost in thought. “I wonder if everyone’s okay.”

“You know, if you want - we could go back for a visit. Kakashi’s always on me about getting you to take some time off.”

“We?” Sakura asked teasingly, shaking away her thoughts of home. “How can I take any time off when you hog it all for yourself? Someone on this team has to actually work.”

Haru waved her comment away with a laugh. “Fine then. Go on. You explain to my mother why you pulled up to Konoha all alone and why her only son couldn’t visit her.”

“Luckily your mom doesn’t know me, so she won’t know who to blame,” Sakura said, petulant. She didn’t want to go back to Konoha.

“She knows you’ve got pink hair and green eyes. She’s still very lethal for her age, you know. You’d be toast.”

“You told your mom about me?” Sakura asked, curious.

He shrugged and turned back around, continuing along the dirt road, but not before she caught the hint of red that tinged his cheeks.

She caught up with him, grabbing his arm and laughing. “You know Ibiki would never give us the time off. He’s already mad at Kakashi for giving you to me instead of letting him put you in rotation.”

Haru smiled, flipping his brown curls away from his eyes. “Ibiki does whatever you want. You say you want an apple and he’ll start an orchard in the ice for you. How’d you manage to finally thaw the old man out?”

Sakura hesitated, remembering her first few years on the Ice base, training with Ibiki – blood on the snow, splitting headaches, screaming, trying to stem the rage that had taken root in her faltering mind. Learning about the Jashinists, about their part in the war, their part in the death of her parents and ten thousand others. Apologizing to Ibiki every time she hurt him because she couldn’t control herself. Healing his burns. Giving up, over and over and over.

Haru slowed when he saw her falter. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“It’s fine,” Sakura said quickly, flashing a smile to show that she wasn’t affected. She shouldn’t be affected, not so easily, not with just a few words. It was embarrassing.

Sometimes with Haru, she forgot she was broken. His light patched up her cracks with gold, made her feel like laughing again, made her forget. But it was never far from the surface.

They walked in silence for a little while. It was a long journey – they were following up on a lead that the Jashinists were preparing to make another human sacrifice. It was a questionable lead, but Sakura had insisted they follow each one, looking for answers. She hadn’t had a partner before, but it was a relief in some ways – Haru was unshakeable and sure where she was uncertain and cautious. He knew about her problem. He didn’t care.

“I did tell my mom,” Haru said suddenly.

“Huh?” Sakura asked, distracted.

“About you. She’s old, you know, and on her own. She asks about who I’m spending my time with. So I told her about you.”

“Haru, when she asks about who you’re spending time with, she’s not asking about your coworkers,” Sakura chided gently. “She’s going to get the wrong idea.”

“I know what she’s asking, Sakura,” he said shortly.

“Oh,” was all Sakura could say. Her heart did a funny thing in her chest – she couldn’t tell if it skipped a beat or if it stopped altogether. Or maybe the pathetic thing just coughed, trying to revive something long dead and never coming back. Because it wasn’t going to come back, not even for Haru, not even if it should, not even if she wanted it to.

“We don’t have to go back home if you don’t want to.” He grinned as he said it, signaling that his very brief moment of earnestness was gone. “But I’ve got nothing but time, rookie. Now run the mission by me again.”

He was dead a week later.  

…

…

…

Present Day, Sunagakure

Sakura and Sasuke left the hotel just after midnight.

The warehouse was at the far edge of the village’s border; the night fell quiet as they drew further and further from the main roads. Sakura kept looking over her shoulder the entire way there, as if she might catch someone tailing them - an exam proctor, maybe, like the chunin exam, watching her knowingly with a clipboard in hand and a smug smile, waiting for her to fail. 

Although they walked in silence, Sasuke could feel tension rolling off of her in waves. 

They had trained for the majority of the day. The plan was insultingly simple: The best way to enter the warehouse without tipping any of them off was through a roof hatch with a faulty locking mechanism, which would let them drop directly into the exposed ductwork and rafters of the building, directly above the target. Sasuke would then use the Rinnegan to teleport Sakura within killing distance of Kunizishi. While she was busy with the assassination, Sasuke would subdue the bodyguards, who Gaara wanted rounded up and brought in for questioning, not killed. They’d practiced for hours with that little pebble from the training grounds until Sasuke had developed a throbbing pain behind his eyes from overuse. With a tap of her finger she’d healed him and demanded he try again. 

Twice during training, she’d crouched to the ground with her fingers pressed to her temples, trying to slow sudden surges of chakra that would overtake her, as if out of nowhere. Even with his Sharingan, he couldn’t see where the chakra came from - but it was like oil spilling into a clean river, black and contaminated, infecting whatever it touched.

Both times, she’d managed to force the monstrous black chakra back until it disappeared, and he kept his observations about it to himself. There was no need to agitate her further right before a mission. 

Per the mission profile, their target - Kunizishi - was a gargantuan, black-haired man with few defining features other than his size; he was always accompanied by five or six bodyguards, all of whom had physical profiles included.

“It’s like a puzzle on the back of a kids' menu,” Sakura had grumbled. “They could have made it a little harder. For my pride, if nothing else.”

Of course, even if the plan was simple, the implementation was complicated in that Sakura insisted that she was highly liable to dissolve into murderous hysteria at any moment once she killed Kunizishi. By keeping the mission unsophisticated, fewer opportunities for her to lose control were presented, and in the end, Kakashi could be satisfied that Sakura was not going to accidentally wipe the floor with the last Sharingan user over a simple assassination. 

To say that Sasuke doubted that Sakura possessed this sort of potential would be a gross understatement, but he supposed he could humor his old sensei. Not like he had much of a choice.

Now, at nearly one in the morning, the pair sat together in the rafters of the warehouse, perched lightly on the thick wooden beams embedded high up in the ceiling, shoulders carefully not touching as they peered down at their prey.

Hidden behind the exposed ductwork, Sakura counted the bodyguards that were surrounding their target, who was reviewing what appeared to be inventory sheets in the center of the room. Sasuke inspected his fingernails, waiting for her instruction. She was the squad leader, after all.

“I wonder if they knew we were coming,” Sakura whispered, frowning. Sasuke glanced at her - this high up, there was no chance the men below would hear them, but he hadn’t expected her to speak.

“What do you mean?”

“Gaara said the target would only have a few guards. That’s at least thirty. Why buff the security unless he knew we were coming?”

Sasuke squinted down at the bodyguards, scattered across the room. Most of them looked bored. None of them looked dangerous. “Does it change anything if he did get tipped off?”

“Not really,” she said, but then admitted, “This many opponents means things will be too spread out. I’m better in a close-range fight if I’m trying not to use lethal force. I would’ve approached things differently.”

“Then you just take out the target and I’ll take care of the rest,” Sasuke shrugged. “Or we regroup and come back.”

“I said I’m better , not useless,” she said defensively. “Give me a second.”

Sasuke watched silently as she peered down at the group, her brow knitting together as she assessed the risk.

“Fine,” she said after a moment. “Change of plans. Teleport me in right behind Kunizishi like we practiced. Wait to drop in until after I’ve killed him and I’ve drawn the guards in a little so we can keep it a close-range fight.”  

“I could be the one to kill him,” Sasuke offered, not for the first time. “You could just be support.”

“I can do this,” Sakura snapped, still keeping her voice low. “Kakashi wants me to do it. If I don’t do it myself he’ll just keep us in limbo until I prove I can kill someone without killing you too.”

“Ready when you are, then,” Sasuke said passively, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Just trying to be helpful. 

Suddenly, she grabbed his sleeve, frowning at him intently. “Listen. If things start to go bad with me, then you have to leave and get out of here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m serious. Don’t try to prove anything. Promise me.”

“I promise,” he said, knowing the moment he said it that it was a lie - anyone who had a problem with breaking a promise now and then probably shouldn’t be a ninja, anyway, he thought privately. 

“Oh for god’s sake,” Sakura hissed, clearly disbelieving. Then she sighed. “Ready?”

“Yep.”

She locked eyes with him and, pulling the training pebble from her pocket, dropped it right behind Kunizishi.

Sasuke activated his Rinnegan, turning it on her before the pebble could hit the ground. She disappeared, replaced by the little rock that clattered onto the beam she had just been perched on. 

Sakura silently flickered into existence behind Kunizishi, unnoticed, and in the brief moment before she touched him, her eyes were hard, glinting coldly like the steel blade of a scalpel - then she laid the lightest of fingers against the bare skin at the nape of his neck, and the man was clutching at his throat, clutching at his chest, his eyes - blood seeped from his tear ducts, his nostrils, his lips. 

He fell to the floor, dead, his body making a thick, loud thud. 

The sound of his corpse falling alerted the nearest guards, their heads snapping up, shouts and curses thickening the air. In an instant, the horde of bodyguards realized what had happened and descended on her like a swarm of hornets, angry and venomous. 

Time slowed for Sasuke, like it always did in the heat of battle, and his eyes narrowed, ready to descend into the fight. But she’d told him to wait. Not yet. The guards weren’t close enough yet - the slowest of the the group were still staggering to their feet at the perimeter of the room. 

He watched her carefully. 

Even though this was her plan, Sasuke did not like it - he didn’t like the way the men lunged for her, aiming their sharp steel at her soft skin. It made him livid even as she evaded them effortlessly. He trusted her to take care of herself, certainly, but that someone would even try to give her a reason to need to take care of herself - to try to touch —

Stop, he reminded himself, refusing to finish the thought. He did not need to be livid to do this. This was what he was born to do. 

Sasuke’s hand found the hilt of his sword at his hip and slid the first inch of the blade free from the sheath, ready to join the fight. Now.

But then he saw it - a nearly imperceptible catch in her chest as her breathing hitched, an unnatural pause, a clenched jaw, a jerk of the head as if to shake away an intrusive thought… like someone fighting for the reins.

No you don’t. Not today, Sasuke thought, activating his Rinnegan, his promise from a few seconds prior discarded as carelessly as it had been offered.  

Suddenly, Sasuke was in the fight, and Sakura was out of it - she was back in the rafters of the warehouse ceiling, where Sasuke had been a moment before. 

He’d swapped places with her. 

The split second of confusion acted like a bucket of cold water thrown on a sleeping drunk. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as she swayed for a moment, shocked, but then steadied herself, taking a deep breath, that unbalanced look gone from her eyes, startled away by the jolt of space-time travel. He turned back to the fight, a faint but smug smile on his lips.

She made no attempt to rejoin him, staying crouched in the rafters, watching his movements. 

There was lightning and fire at his fingertips, the blade of his sword flashing hungrily. Men started to drop around him, the fight hardly fairly balanced - he relied on the blunt edge of his sword, preferring to use the hilt to render an opponent unconscious rather than lifeless whenever possible. He could feel her eyes on his back, and he felt that this was where his test began. That he could fill the gaps that she couldn’t. Talented, refined, fast. Controlled. And showing off, perhaps, just a little.

At the end of it, he stood alone amongst a pile of bodies. For a brief second, Sasuke was still, his eyebrows knitted together as his Sharingan raked over the field of unconscious opponents - a little sloppier than he would have liked.  But still, it was over in less than a minute - he turned, and looking up at Sakura, smirked. 

She jumped down from the rafters, brushing off her pants gingerly, her expression carefully cool. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Mistake,” Sasuke said, although he couldn’t help sounding just a little smug. “Meant to switch with something else.”

She stared at him, unconvinced. “Uchiha Sasuke does not make mistakes.”

“It worked, didn’t it? You just needed out of the fight for a second.”

“Kakashi isn’t going to go for that as a strategy against the Jashinists,” she said doubtfully, but then relented. “Just stick to the plan next time, okay? I would’ve been fine.”

Sasuke shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him - but he thought he’d just won an important battle all the same. 

She sighed and then gestured at the slumped corpse of Kunizishi a few meters away. “Well, he’s super dead, so let’s get out of here. I’ll write to Kakashi and you go tell Gaara.”

“How about I write to Kakashi and you go tell Gaara?”

“How about you don’t argue with me?” Sakura grumbled, and tried to take a step towards Kunizishi’s body, but something stopped her. She frowned.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look,” she said, pointing at the corpse. “He didn’t have any tattoos before, did he?”

The dead man’s skin, unmarked at the time of his death, had become heavily tattooed in familiar writing - sealing symbols, in neat rows, up and down each of his limbs, his face, his neck. 

Sakura knelt next to the body, running a finger along the glyphs. “Does that look familiar to you?”

“Some sort of curse seal,” Sasuke said. “Probably supposed to protect him but it didn’t kick in in time.”

Sakura opened her mouth to reply, the frown on her face deepening -- but then she yelped, scrambling away from the body.

Without warning, similar markings had begun to appear on her left hand where she had touched the corpse, burning themselves into her skin - spreading up her arm quickly, as if it knew it only had moments. She grabbed at her elbow, sending six pulses of chakra under her skin, cutting off the tenketsu before the curse could reach even deeper into her. She could regrow them later. The curse reared its head against the obstacle, pain burrowing into her arm like daggers digging into her muscle.

Suddenly, she recognized why the seal had looked familiar. Her stomach plummeted as she looked around, her head on a swivel.

“What--” Sasuke started, sounding alarmed. 

“You have to go,” Sakura said urgently, pushing him away, towards the back exit of the warehouse. “Now. Take the back route. This is Jashinist work - I don’t know what they’re doing here but you have to go, they must have followed us--”

Sasuke grabbed her good arm. “What, and leave you to deal with them by yourself?”

“I can handle them. This is exactly what happened with Haru,” she said frantically, snatching her arm back. “Go--”

“No,” Sasuke said flatly. “I’m not Haru. I’m not going anywhere.”

The bodies of Kunizishi’s bodyguards began to stir around them. Sakura looked around - now it made sense, why he had so much more security than anticipated. Why killing him had been so easy. It had been a trap.

“Fuck,” she breathed. One of them must have placed a seal on Kunizishi, knowing she would kill him, knowing it would transfer to her in the brief moment that she had implanted her chakra in him. Which meant that this mission had either never really been from Kakashi in the first place, or that someone had sold her out. But she couldn’t think about that right now. “Listen to me. If these are Jashinists, the only way to kill them is starvation or entirely dissolving the body. Don’t let them taste your blood. If they do, you suffer whatever injuries they do.”

“Got it. Anything else?” he asked, his eyes scanning the twitching piles of bodies. 

“If any of them is a priest, get out and go warn Gaara. Don’t wait. He needs to secure the village before they turn it into a sacrifice.”

“You should be the one to go--”

“I can’t,” she said hollowly, raising her arm that was now covered in Jashinist sealing symbols. “I’ve seen this before. They put the seal on Kunizishi knowing it would transfer to me when I killed him. I’m on a leash now - I bet I can’t walk a hundred meters in any direction until whoever cast the jutsu is dead.” 

All around them, the Jashinists were starting to stagger to their feet, whatever injuries they had having healed to the point they could stand. But they made no move towards the pair, instead just standing, watching. Their eyes held a blankness that set Sasuke on edge.

“Let them make the first move,” Sakura murmured. 

For a moment, there was nothing but silence. 

Then, a shuffling sound scuttled through the air, and the crowd of acolytes parted as a decrepit old man hobbled forward. The man was so ancient as to appear prehistoric,  barely preserved by time. 

“Well done, Haruno-san,” the old man said, his voice creaking with age as he pointed at Kunizishi’s corpse on the ground, now the only body remaining on the floor. “No losing control this time? And with a new friend, no less. So soon after you killed the last one.”

Sasuke started forward, just barely, confusion in his voice. “You?” 

“You know him?” Sakura asked, incredulous.

“He was at the restaurant last night. Asking about you.” 

Sakura glanced at him, hissing under her breath. “There were Jashinists at the restaurant and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t know,” Sasuke said, shrugging. “He was just some old guy in a white robe.”

“I am a grand priest of the temple of Jashin,” the old man said by way of introduction, bowing slightly. “My name is Hideki. I am honored to be in your presence. May the will of Jashin be carried out through you and yours.”

“Stuff it. Are you idiots here to try to sacrifice me again?”  Sakura snapped, trying to sound exasperated and not panicked - they’d been that close to Sasuke. Just to taunt her. He could have been killed. “It cost you a lot of men, the last time you tried that.”

“No, no. We are not interested in that outcome any longer,” Hideki said, sounding slightly amused. “Although it wasn’t just our friends you killed, was it? It cost you your partner as well - if our informant is to be believed, he was quite dear to you. I hear you’ve not been feeling… yourself ever since.”

“Then what do you want? What’s with the seal if not some stupid ritual?” Sasuke asked, and Sakura’s jaw clenched.  

You stay quiet. Don’t draw attention to yourself.

The itch had started again. She cocked her head sharply to shake the itch away, using the movement to disguise an involuntary twitch. Resisting it always made her lightheaded, a little disoriented.

Hideki smiled, baring the ugly stumps of his decayed teeth. “She knows what we want. A god.”

Someone in the crowd mumbled an unfamiliar word - it sounded like a name. 

Suddenly, a searing pain traveled up her arm, and a splitting sensation rocked across her skull. No. Her heartbeat had started a heavy thudding as a familiar feeling began to rise in her chest. Was that the seal spreading, or was she going to lose control? She doubled over, clapping her hands over her ears, gasping for breath that couldn’t reach her lungs.

The screams had returned.

One by one, the Jashinists began to squirm, mumbling incoherently. 

Sasuke’s hand palmed the hilt of his katana, ready to lunge at the men that he’d already defeated once  - they moved oddly, swaying to and fro, mumbling to each other, but made no move towards the center of the room. 

“Don’t engage,” Sakura choked out. She didn’t reach for him to stop him- she knew if she touched him now, it was a death sentence - she would force his heart to stop, his blood to congeal in his veins. It was too close to the surface now. “Get away from here.”

“We have come into possession of information,” Hideki said, a smirk apparent on his wrinkled lips. “Information that we did not have five years ago during your people’s war. At the time, we were simply trying to create a boundary between worlds that would allow our god, Jashin, to be resurrected in our time. A portal of such magnitude requires a sacrifice of similar immensity. So, as you know, we interfered somewhat – your battalions, who were prepared to die anyway, became a sacrifice by dying atop the same seal you have on your skin now.”

“It didn’t work,” Sakura snapped through heaving breaths, the effort of forcing her chakra down causing sweat to bead on her forehead. If Sasuke wasn’t here… “You killed thousands of people for nothing. Where is your god now?”

“Yes, that’s what we thought as well. But now, we think differently,” the old priest said, tapping his chin as if pondering an age-old question. “Oddly enough, you were there. By chance, the perfect conduit to absorb our offering to Jashin. Linked to every individual sacrifice, you channeled their souls and our chakra into yourself. In that moment, you became the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead – the Yomotsu Hirasaka.”

Sasuke took a step towards the priest, who didn’t flinch. “That was five years ago. You failed. Move on.”

“Sasuke, don’t engage,” Sakura repeated harshly, louder than she needed to - she could barely hear her own voice over the sound of the screaming. “Go get Gaara.”

Gaara could stop her if she tried to move towards the village. 

The priest continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Every time you kill someone, you slip a little more, don’t you? The Yomotsu Hirasaka opens a little wider inside of you, and Jashin is able to overwhelm you for a few moments. You have felt this, haven’t you? That you are losing your grip on yourself? But today you were able to restrain yourself. Perhaps because of him. Because he means something to you, like the last one? If we were to kill him, would that… provoke you again?”

Sasuke laughed, his thumb nudging the hilt of his katana out of its sheath. “Try it.”

“What do you want?” Sakura repeated forcefully, trying in vain to straighten her spine. She gasped as a twist of pain wound through her abdomen, snaring her organs in a death-vice. Her heartbeat had started a heavy thudding, skipping every other beat.

No. Please. Not now. Keep it together. She couldn’t lose control, not here, not with Sasuke standing right next to her the exact same way Haru had been right before she killed him. 

Was that the point of the seal, of trapping her here? To force it out of her?

The mumbling of the Jashinists had coalesced into a hum - they were chanting something, their voices too low for her to make out any of the words. But their lips weren’t moving. 

“We want confirmation,” the priest said calmly. “We, like you, thought we failed that day. But we have started to suspect otherwise. You know, our god goes by many names. Jashin is nothing but a title. Names are binding things. And yours is not what you say it is.”

“Sakura?” Sasuke asked uncertainly. She had begun to press her palms into her eyes, sinking to her knees, whispering stuttered pleas under her breath that he couldn’t quite hear. 

“Even now, you try so hard to suppress your madness. Even when you killed a man bearing the seal of Jashin, widening the Yomotsu Hirasaka ever more with every life you force through it at your hand, you try so hard to keep her down. Isn’t that right, Izanami ?”

The unfamiliar name hit Sakura like a ton of bricks, her heart constricting with such force at the word that a gasp stuck in her throat, choking her. “ You’re lying .”

“You didn’t think your new power came from somewhere?” the priest hissed. “You absorbed the Yomotsu Hirasaka we created that day, and you kept it. When you move, so moves the goddess of death. When you breathe, so breathes she. And soon, you will be gone, and she will remain. Because that is who you are . You are Izanami. You are Jashin. ”

Her vision tunneled until all she could see was the priest, all she could hear was the thrumming of his heartbeat, see the soft pulse in his neck, and it suddenly became of utmost importance that she not let him utter his next words.

Kill him.

“And she will do with this world as she sees fit,” the priest spat, “as soon as we drag her out of you . We summon you, Izanami-no-Mikoto .”

“You’re lying,” she screamed again, but the words pierced through her like a dagger, ripping through the thin membrane that restrained the destructiveness that possessed her.  She flinched and staggered backward, collapsing completely as she clapped her hands over her ears to drown out sounds that only she could hear, screams of the dying jabbing like needles into her eardrums, her blood turning into boiling oil in her veins, her organs writhing like snakes. A searing, explosive pain radiated from deep in her ear canals, like an arrow had been shot clean through both ears, and the screams went silent.

She was vaguely aware of Sasuke lunging for the priest, of the Jashinists moving around her. The room was spinning. She pulled her hands away from her ears; they were covered in the blood that was now dribbling from within her ear canals, her eardrums ruptured. She stared at the blood on her shaking fingers, stunned and confused - what’s happening to me?

I’m going mad.

This realization seemed to stop time for a moment. The world around her was moving in slow motion; she looked up from her bloody hands - Sasuke had his sword drawn against the priest, about to strike, purple chakra radiating outward, but there was something wrong with the way the old man was looking at him, gleeful, and for a moment, Sakura saw into the priest’s heart - that this was part of his plan, to be killed in front of her. A sacrifice. 

“Stop! ” Sakura screamed, reaching her fingers out towards Sasuke, as if he would fit inside of her hand, as if she could keep him safe.

A golden light, in the shape of a spear, burst from her palm, hurling the old priest backwards, piercing him through the stomach. Sasuke was thrown back by a blast of burning hot air, propelling him across the room and pinning him against the wall. His head cracked against the hard concrete, and he slumped to the floor, unconscious. Blood trickled from his nose.

Around him, many of the Jashinists collapsed - the ones that had been close enough to him to be knocked back by the blast, reduced in part to ash that traveled upward, crumbling away the bodies of the faithful.

Shocked, Sakura scrambled backward - she’d never seen that strange golden light before, but it had read her mind - to put space between Sasuke and the priest. But the impact of Sasuke’s skull on the concrete wall -- that would be more than a bruise, she had to heal him, he wasn't moving --

The priest was laughing, although she still couldn’t hear - he was speaking and gesticulating wildly as blood poured from his mouth, and his skin that had been pierced by the golden spear began to disintegrate around the weapon - the Jashinists that hadn’t been killed had fallen to their knees, hands clasped in prayer and mouths open, lips forming the same word over and over -

Izanami.

Izanami

Izanami.

Her thoughts became more and more muddled, her vision hazy, disoriented, and spinning. She looked at Sasuke’s collapsed body - aren’t you going to get up?

But he didn’t move. She could see that blood was flowing freely from the back of his head - I did that… didn’t I? That horrible feeling became stronger - the air had become uncomfortably thick, heating up several degrees, worsening by the second. Her eardrums had begun healing themselves, unbidden, regenerating without her approval, and the sound of the room came back in bits and pieces, the grating screams of the dying Jashinists mixed with the chants of the faithful, their words stringing together into an ancient language, each word increasing Sakura’s discomfort.

Let me, a woman’s voice whispered in her head. Let me. I can fix this.

The byakogou seal on her forehead twinged painfully as the black bands began to emerge and spread across her body. Stop. You’ll kill him.

Let me.

Chapter Text

“Izanami,” Sasuke said, the name foreign on his tongue as he read aloud from a scroll. “The wife of… Izanagi.”

“Very good,” Uchiha Mikoto said, smiling gently as she prompted her son. “But she was more than just a wife.”

Sasuke was six years old. 

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his mother’s study, scrolls spread out on the squat mahogany table; the shoji of the study were drawn open, and a soft summer breeze drifted into the room. The glossy black sheet of his mother’s hair ruffled slightly in the wind before falling back into place perfectly. 

Sasuke pouted. “I want to go train with Otousan and Itachi. I don’t want to learn history anymore.”

There was no budging the serene smile off of his mother’s face. “The history is just as important as the jutsu, Sasuke.”

It was always like this. Okasan taught her sons manners and history and culture. Otousan taught his sons to fight. For the sons of the head of the Uchiha clan, there was much to learn that could not be taught at the Academy.

“Itachi loves the story of Izanami and Izanagi,” Mikoto coaxed. “He used to beg me to tell him over and over. Maybe he would like to hear you tell it at dinner tonight.”

Sasuke’s ears perked up.

“Not to mention, one of our clan’s strongest jutsu is named for Izanami,” she continued, her voice carefully nonchalant. “Perhaps Otousan would tell you about it… if you impressed him with your history knowledge tonight.”

“Just tell me already!” Sasuke cried, the promise of amazing his brother and his father in one sitting finally proving irresistible. 

Mikoto laughed, a sound that tinkled like the wind chimes she hung in her garden. “Then sit still and listen.”

“Yes, Okasan.”

“In the beginning, at the separation of heaven and earth,  Izanagi and Izanami were some of the earliest gods to appear in our land. They stood side by side on the floating bridge between worlds, and together, they stirred the primeval ocean beneath them with Izanami’s heavenly jeweled spear - the ame-no-nohuko .”

“ Ame-no-nohuko ,” Sasuke whispered, trying to conjure such a weapon in his mind that could stir the sea. 

“From this, they created land,” Mikoto continued. “Our land, which we now call home. Eventually, Izanami and Izanagi fell in love and were married.”

“My friends at school said that getting married is dumb,” Sasuke said. 

“I will homeschool you if you repeat any more of your friends’ nonsense in my home,” Mikoto said peacefully. “Yes, they were married, as you will be one day. They had many children - the many islands surrounding our lands are the result of their union, as are all of the gods we hold close. They were happy. Until Izanami gave birth to fire.”

“Fire isn’t a baby,” Sasuke objected.

“The Fire god, of utmost importance to the Uchiha - Kagutsuchi - is the son of Izanami. But as she gave birth to him, she was fatally burned, and she died.”

“How could she die from fire if she could stir the ocean!” Sasuke screeched, scandalized. 

“Hush. Fire is deadly, Sasuke. It lends our clan its power, but it demands its due. But yes, Izanami died. Her husband, Izanagi, was stricken with grief and traveled to the underworld, Yomi, to try to bring her back. But he was too late. She had eaten the food of the underworld and could not leave with him. But she spoke to the deities of the underworld, and they agreed that so long as Izanagi did not lay eyes on his wife until they were once again in the world of the living, they would permit him to lead Izanami out of the underworld and back home. But Izanagi was impatient, and that night, as Izanami lay sleeping, Izanagi lifted a torch to her face so he could gaze upon her once-beautiful face, only to find that his wife was now a rotting corpse.”

Sasuke wrinkled his nose. 

“Terrified, Izanagi fled. Izanami awoke and was angered and ashamed that Izanagi had betrayed her and had seen her true form. She chased after her husband, but when Izanagi reached the entrance to Yomi - the Yomotsu Hirasaka - he sealed it with a stone, thereby sealing Izanami within the underworld forever.”

“But you said he loved her,” Sasuke said doubtfully.

“Once Izanagi escaped, he bathed in the river to purify himself, since he had been touched by the dead and was unclean. As he bathed, the tears that he shed for his dead wife turned into gods - Amaterasu , the sun god, Tsukuyomi , the moon god, and Susanoo , the storm god. The Uchiha have important jutsu named after each of these gods.”

“But what happened to Izanami?” Sasuke protested. “He just left her down there?”

“He did. Since that day, Izanami has ruled over the land of the dead with anger and hatred in her heart for the living, since her husband abandoned her for them. She cursed her husband and vowed that every day, she would take a thousand souls from the world of the living. Izanagi promised he would create a thousand and five hundred more to make up for what she took. And so it came to be that our race could experience death.”

“Itachi likes that story?” Sasuke said incredulously. “Blech.”

“Itachi is a good boy who listens to all of his mother’s stories,” Mikoto laughed. “Now, go wash up for dinner. Your father and your brother will be home soon.”

Sasuke did as he was told, but as he walked away from his mother’s study, his head was swimming with golden, jeweled spears stirring the sea and the tears of a cowardly god who had betrayed his wife. 

…

…

…

When Sasuke finally regained consciousness, the room was engulfed in flames. He was choking on heavy, black smoke - he coughed, his thoughts slow and muddled, his head throbbing with stabbing pain. The back of his neck was wet and sticky with blood.

His eyes took a moment to adjust - the warehouse was bathed in flickering yellow and red light. The air itself felt like it was ablaze, burning his skin - blisters had erupted on his hands, his arms. Fire. 

Sakura. He blinked, turning his head to look for her to pull her out of the flames, get them both out…

But then he saw his mistake. The room was not on fire. Rather, Sakura was; she was completely consumed in a blazing, swirling inferno of her own chakra that filled the entire room. It had lost the springtime green hue and feathery texture he was used to, and now an angry storm of red flames was swirling and biting around her, disintegrating everything it touched in an accelerated burn. 

She was on her knees in the center of the flames, her forehead touched to the floor as she gasped for air and choked on sobs, tears streaming from her squeezed-shut eyes, her hands clapped over her ears; her lips were moving, but if she was speaking, Sasuke couldn’t hear her over the roar of the flames.

From within the fire, that strange golden light emanated from her in defined, sharp offshoots, like the legs of a spider. It pierced the walls, pierced the ceiling, pierced through the corpses of several of the Jashinists, who hung limply several feet off the floor across the room from her. It zagged precisely through the remaining faithful, punctured through their skulls, like a sick string of beads scattered across the floor. 

The only person not impaled by her golden light was Sasuke.

“Sakura!” he yelled, forcing himself to his feet. He could hardly hear himself over the roar. 

Her head snapped up at the sound of his voice, her eyes locking onto him. Fear. She was afraid. She was trapped. She scrambled backwards, her mouth open in a scream, but he couldn’t hear the words, only see them as her lips formed around the sounds - Sasuke. No. Go.

The stabbing pain at the back of his head threatened to render him unconscious again - time was limited, and his skin had begun to blister from the heat. It was unlike anything he’d felt before. Think. His thoughts were thick like glue, gumming up in his mind. 

Susanoo, he thought, coating himself in the defensive avatar’s chakra - the pain from the exertion of the Mangekyo barely registered as he drew closer to her, testing the strength of his makeshift chakra skin. It seemed to be holding, although he could feel the immense pressure her fire was exerting on his chakra, stabbing like a thousand shards of glass, desperate to take hold. 

She was now only thirty, forty feet away. He took a tentative step towards her, then another, forcing himself to keep going. The sheer heat threatened to melt the skin off of his bones despite Susanoo, and his hands blistered through his own chakra as they reached for her. The fire reached out to him, like it had a mind of its own, almost reaching his fingertips before it snapped back its raging arm into the inferno surrounding its host.

“Don’t!” she screamed at him, and he was finally close enough to hear her voice as she lashed out to push him away, but her hand never reached him, instead spitting out a golden light -- the golden spear bit through Susanoo easily where her chakra-fire couldn’t, grazing against his cheek, and the pain was blinding, like a white-hot iron on his skin.

She screamed again, this time in terror, snatching her hand back as if burned; the light disappeared, like a chastised dog.

“Sasuke, go!” she shrieked. “I can’t stop it--”

But he couldn’t go. He could never leave her like this, no matter what he told himself or promised her. 

He pushed aside the blistering pain from where her light had hit him and was met with the surprising clarity that he had always felt throughout the years whenever he was about to die .

He crouched beside her, placing a determined hand on her shoulder. He waited for her golden light to leap out and impale him, but nothing came; she flinched away from his touch, but he held onto her.

“Sakura, stop,” Sasuke murmured, pulling gently on her shoulder. “Get it under control. I’m right here.”  

She was gasping for breath, her fingers pressing into her eyes as she rocked back and forth on her heels - the air continued to compress around him, swirling too quickly to breathe, the heat unbearable for even a second more.

He took her hand and pulled it away from her face, looping his fingers into hers -- she looked at him, green eyes round and panicked, fervent, wordless, her pupils contracting and dilating - he could feel her screaming soundlessly, don’t touch me, get away from me before I kill you ---

“So do it,” he said calmly. “Kill me.”

He tightened his hand around hers, ignoring that she could easily be telling his heart to stop beating, ignoring that he now knew Susanoo couldn’t stop her. 

“It’s okay. Eyes on me. Good.”

Her breathing was rapid and shallow, sweat beading on her forehead, but her eyes didn’t look away from his.

“You don’t want this,” he whispered. “I know you don’t, Sakura. You can stop any time you want, okay?”

 His face was beginning to blister now, and Susanoo was fading, his chakra stores nearly depleted from the effort of keeping him from turning to ash.

“Sakura, please.”

Her grip tightened around his fingers, trembling, and she pressed her forehead into the back of his hand, her teeth gritted from exertion. “I can’t.”

“You can.”

She choked on a sob, shaking her head into his hand. Maybe this is it, he thought tiredly. He reached his other arm around her shoulders, pulling her against his chest, tucking her head into his neck. If he was going to die, he might as well. 

“I know you.” His voice was hoarse, so quiet he didn’t know if she could hear him any longer - he was out of chakra. It had been drained just from the effort of keeping him from disintegrating. He let the jutsu go, the purple haze around his skin fading away. “You’re not what they said you are. You can stop this.”

Then Sakura’s hand tightened around his, threatening to crush his bones, and he could feel her breath, her lips moving against his burned hand, her tears against his skin.

“Okay,” she whispered softly.

And then, with a loud crack, the air expanded outward, the heat dissipating; the temperature in the room began to fall rapidly, the fire began to recede, and the room started to darken slowly, remiss of the glow of her chakra as it faded from a wildfire into a dull blaze.

The corpses of the Jashinists dropped onto the floor, the golden light slowly receding back into her body. 

Soon, the fire covering her was only an inch high. For just a few seconds before it burned out, it flickered a familiar green, and then died. 

Briefly, Sakura raised her head and met Sasuke’s eyes with a heavy-lidded gaze. Then, utterly spent, she collapsed completely.

Sasuke let out the breath he had been holding. That could’ve ended badly. 

He looked down at the girl that had collapsed into his arms, tear tracks on her cheeks, and sighed. 

“I’ve got you.”

Chapter Text

I’ve got you.

Sakura was falling backwards through a neverending chasm of red and purple eyes, swirled with black tomoe, as Sasuke’s voice echoed around her - she reached her hand upward towards the sound, as if she could grab onto it to stop her descent, but it was no use -- she was falling away as his voice faded into nothing.

She was tired. She was so bone-tired that she could barely muster the strength to care that she was plummeting downward, her limbs heavy as lead.

What was there to be afraid of? Death? Fine. Pain? It would only hurt. She would heal. Or she wouldn’t. Or she would just fall forever. 

But then she hit the ground with a hard thud. Only it wasn’t ground at all - it was spongy, slimy, and reeked of death. She wrinkled her nose, staggering to her feet - all around her, long, slender columns extended to the sky - like fingers. She was standing in a pair of giant cupped hands. Slowly, she turned around.

She found herself staring up into the dead face of a towering woman. Or the remains of one -- its rotten skin hanging like a carapace off of its maggot-riddled ribcage, desiccated flesh sticking to its skull, lips sagging as it sneered down at her. Startled, she stumbled backward.

“Do I disgust you, daughter?” the woman hissed with contempt, and her voice was surprising - it was lilting, feminine, melodic. Its fetid breath on her cheek smelled of rotten meat, but its voice betrayed lyrics of creation, of eternity. “You’re a pretty little thing.”

Sakura blinked. The woman was familiar, somehow. Sakura tried to speak, but no sound came out. She raised her hand to her face – her lips were stitched tightly together with thick twine, silencing her. 

“How I hate you,” she rasped wildly, spittle flying from her mouth. She leaned in, her movements jarring and disjointed as she cocked her head and fixed her gaze on Sakura. “All these years living in the corners of your heart, subsisting on your soul, feeding you my power in return. Hollowing you out.”

She giggled, a twisted, rasping sound. “Didn’t you wonder why it hurt? Didn’t you notice the rot creeping through you? You make me sick. I hate you. Hate you, hate you, hate you.”

The woman spat out the words, curling her fingers around Sakura, forming an icy cage, crushing her to her knees.

“It seems someone started the summoning ritual tonight. A disciple marked you with my seal, traded their life. They called me by name - Izanami. I heard them.” She grinned down at Sakura, voice gleeful. “But they underestimated you, didn’t they? A mistake, a mistake! Tut, tut! They underestimated your mindless devotion to that boy. Worthless animal you are, begging for scraps of his indifference. He loathes you. I feel it in his heart when he looks at you—thudding with disgust at the very thought of you. And you beg him for it. Thud, thud, thud. Nothing like the other boy, pathetic, simpering, lovesick fool. I had to kill him. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t stand the way he looked at you.”

Sakura cried out in anger, heaving Izanami’s fingers off of her. The sound of shattering glass made the being flinch; the red-and-purple-eyed sky cracked and began to fall in large, jagged pieces, leaving blackness behind.  

“Touchy, hateful little maggot,” Izanami leered, glancing upward at the cracked sky. “Your mind fractures even more. That seal on your arm etched itself into your soul to finish what it started. Only a little further now, then it will be you trapped in here with the damned, and me on the other side. And then what of Izanagi’s little pet realm? I wonder if he will weep for your kind, or beg for my forgiveness. It won’t matter. I hate him. Hate him.” 

Izanami threw her head back and laughed, a cackle that trailed off into a rasp as she snapped her dead gaze back to Sakura.  

“They should have started with the boy. Yes. Should have killed him first. Now -- now, I have to do it myself,” she hissed. “Just like the other one. Not my fault. Someone has to do it.”

The sky was falling in larger pieces now, tumbling down and shattering like glass. 

“Time is running out. Sleep, sleep, sleep,” Izanami sang. “Sleep, my daughter. I’ll see you soon... See you on the other side."

Her voice grew faint and joyful as she released her grip, dropping Sakura back into the blackness. 

…

…

…

Sasuke sat in the dark hotel room in a threadbare armchair, his fingers pressed against his temples, staring at the girl in the bed. His injuries ached miserably - he was covered in excruciating burns, face stinging where her golden light had sliced through his cheek, and he was painfully lightheaded, the back of his head throbbing angrily. The room was black and quiet, the curtains drawn shut, keeping away the sting of the first light of dawn. 

Sakura was fast asleep. She was peaceful, her face half buried in the pillow, hair loose and soft, breathing slow and steady her chest rising and falling evenly as he watched. He wasn’t sure why, but the sight eased something within him. At least she was breathing. 

She’d not stirred since he’d stumbled into his hotel room hours ago with her in his arms, except for when she’d whimpered slightly in her sleep when he’d laid her down in the bed, her fingers clutching the front of his shirt tightly, unconsciously protesting. His pulse had quickened.

“Don’t do things like that,” he’d murmured to her softly as he eased her grip from his collar, but he almost laid down next to her before choosing to fall backward into the armchair by the bed, exhausted but unable to sleep from the pain. 

He should have gone to the hospital. But he wouldn’t leave her side, and besides, the people of Suna distrusted him - whispering unkind things just loud enough for him to hear. Murderer. Traitor. Outsider. Outsider. Outsider. Sakura’s own wounds had healed on their own long before they had even reached the hotel, so he’d decided against it. The only mark left on her was the Jashinists’ seal on her arm.

Gaara had turned up at some point during the night, whispers having reached his office of a fire on the edges of the village; his face was pale and eyes tight with worry as Sasuke recounted the events of the past few hours. Gaara promised to send an urgent message to Kakashi and told Sasuke to stay put until morning. Sasuke had only nodded and returned to his room. He would hardly be able to go anywhere like this, anyway.

So now he sat, staring, thinking. There was no sign of the unnatural flames or unholy rage that had wrapped around her like a blanket. No undead god. Just… Sakura. Just Sakura, he reminded himself, though for a moment he allowed himself to watch how her brow furrowed and relaxed restlessly as if vexed, even in her sleep. 

He settled into a daze, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep until the late hours of the morning.

A soft rapping at the door stirred him from his stupor.

Sasuke rose and went to answer it; the hotel concierge was standing there, keeping her eyes downcast as she addressed him.

“There’s someone here to see you,” she whispered, glancing past him into the room where Sakura slept.

“Send them up,” Sasuke said - Gaara had probably heard back from Kakashi by now and sent someone to update him. 

“He said he’d prefer to speak to you privately, in one of the common rooms,” she said uneasily. “You can follow me if you’d like.”

Sasuke glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping girl and sighed, motioning for her to lead the way.

He followed the receptionist down the hallway until she paused at a slightly ajar door and pointed. “He’s in there.”

“Thanks,” he murmured, watching the girl scurry off. Whatever Gaara had to say, he hadn’t wanted to say it in front of Sakura, sleeping or not. That can’t be good, he thought.

Sasuke steeled himself and pushed the door open, finding himself face to face with not just one kage, but two. Gaara sat at a table, fingers interlaced, speaking softly to someone on the other side of the room.

Kakashi. Leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, nonchalant as ever as he looked up. “Ah. Sasuke.”

 Sasuke felt blood rush to his face as closed the distance in a few angry strides, fist closing around his old sensei’s shirt.

“That was fucked up,” Sasuke spat, his face centimeters from Kakashi’s. 

Kakashi extricated himself from Sasuke’s grasp, perfectly composed. “We didn’t know the Jashinists would get involved. That was not the plan. I’m sorry. And you’re bleeding on my shirt.”

“Was I supposed to be too dead to bleed on you?” Sasuke said sarcastically. “She knew what you were doing, you know. About your dumb fucking test. You didn’t fool anyone.”

“It was the responsible thing. And look, you’re alive. Hurray,” Kakashi deadpanned.

“To put her through that was responsible? Have you seen her?” Sasuke asked, incredulous in his anger.

“I agree that it wasn’t the proper way to do things, but it was as much for her benefit as yours,” Gaara said, his hands raised placatingly. “The stakes were too high to go into it blind.”

“I’m not talking to you,” Sasuke said through gritted teeth, keeping his eyes locked on Kakashi’s bored face.  

Kakashi raised an eyebrow. “Gaara, would you mind giving me the room? Sorry. He has no manners, despite my best efforts.”

With a nod, Gaara left, closing the door behind him. As soon as he was gone, Sasuke whirled on Kakashi. “Explain.”

“I’m sorry. Gaara had lookouts posted last night to let him know if you needed him to come bail you out, but the Jashinists got to them. You look like shit, by the way. Why didn’t you go to the hospital? ”

“Why do you care?” Sasuke snapped. “Since you seem fine with getting me killed anyway. Might as well save you the effort.” 

“We had to see if she could stop herself if the stakes were high enough. She wouldn’t survive it if it happened in the field. She’ll understand.”

“And me? Am I supposed to understand that it was better for her to kill me in an old warehouse and not in the field?”

“Yes, you are,” Kakashi clipped. “Sit down. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I’ll stand, thanks,” Sasuke said coldly.

“Look,” Kakashi said, exasperated. “You weren’t there after she killed that other boy. She was shattered for months. If something were to happen to you, of all people, and it was her fault, she would never recover. Don’t tell me you thought she tried so desperately to have Ibiki send you home because she doesn’t want to be around you?”

“I think you have outdated information,” Sasuke growled, thinking that if she heard Kakashi refer to her beloved dead mentor as the other boy, they might both need a hospital. “She barely tolerates me. If you were banking on me not dying because of how she felt about me when we were teenagers, then you’re as stupid as you look.”

“You hit your head that hard? I’m sure she’s not giving you an easy time, but even you can be that dense. She couldn’t survive losing you. Anyone else, maybe. But you? We'd never get her back. It would be over.”

“You’re senile.” Sasuke was concussed, but not that concussed. Kou’s words rattled around his brain: you thought you’d always be the only love of her life? 

Well, yeah. Up until that moment the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. Since then, of course, it crossed his mind regularly. 

“Just sit down, will you?” Kakashi said, sounding more tired than usual. “You look like you got chewed up by a lawn mower.”

“Why are you here, anyway? To see how much worse you can make things?”

“Gaara told me what happened, but I want to hear it from you,” Kakashi said, sitting at the table and motioning to an empty chair. “Start at the beginning.”

Sasuke sighed, but began to recount the events of the night before. Kakashi listened attentively as Sasuke described the mission, the extra bodyguards, the seal, the Jashinists and what they had said. The way that Sakura had finally lost control, catching him off guard enough to send him flying, and the golden spear made of pure light. 

At the end of it, Kakashi leaned back, frowning. “If she killed the arms dealer without killing you too, maybe I should’ve put you on this earlier.”

“You know, you don’t seem surprised,” Sasuke said woodenly. “About any of this.”

“We suspected something like this. Not as far as Izanami, but something had to be going on. Some sort of possession was a leading theory at some point, a few years back. She doesn’t know that, of course. It’s been a thin line to keep her on this side of sanity.”

“And it never occurred to you to give me a heads up before you tossed me in her warpath?”

“I decided against it,” Kakashi said lightly. “But listen. There’s a chance there’s some link between this and your clan. I know you’ve already made the connection with Izanami. That’s one of your clan’s forbidden jutsus, isn’t it?”

“That’s hardly a connection. Lots of jutsus are named after fairytales.” Sasuke didn’t mention that that exact thought had dominated his mind the entire night - but there was a clan jutsu named after everything. His clan hardly had a claim to all of the cool words. 

“On its own, sure, it isn’t much to go off of. But two months ago, we found a bunch of Jashinists loitering around an abandoned Uchiha arms base. Any idea why that would be?” 

“What? ”

“Exactly my reaction. Of course, they torched themselves before they could be questioned. It’s hard dealing with enemies that want to die.”

“And why wasn’t I told? That’s my property, isn’t it? You didn’t think I want to fucking know that?”

“This is me telling you. You didn’t have clearance then. Now you do, and they’re digging around in your shit. We don’t know why, but I’m sure it wasn’t random -- they’re looking for something that they think can be found with the rest of your family’s old secrets.”

“You should have told me. About all of this,” Sasuke said coldly. “The last time the government lied to me, I killed my own brother.”

Kakashi rolled his eyes. “I’ve been lying to you since you were a kid. And look, you turned out just great.”

Sasuke stared at him murderously. 

“Out of curiosity… If I’d told you that Sakura herself was the mission before you left, would you have gone?” Kakashi asked.

“Yes,” Sasuke snapped. Stupid question. Of course he would have. 

“Interesting. Anyway, let’s assume all of this is real and we’ve got another Kaguya situation on our hands: there’s an Izanami. Maybe there’s also an Izanagi out there somewhere. You Uchihas somehow have a big bad technique named after all of those old gods. Why is that?”

“How should I know?” Sasuke said, exasperated, but then sighed defeatedly, rubbing his eyes, bleary from sleep deprivation. “So now what? How do I get it out of her?”

“I don’t know yet. For now, I need you to disappear for a while. Both of you. Don’t tell me where you’re going. And keep to yourselves. I don’t need to hear any rumors of some purple-eyed weirdo and a springtime fairy princess with pink hair turning up in a random town out of the blue.”

“That’s wasting time,” Sasuke objected. “The Jashinists found her here. I doubt they’ll have trouble finding her again.” 

“That’s not the problem. What proof do you have that the best way to stop Izanami from reincarnating isn’t just to kill her vessel?” 

“Excuse me?” Sasuke asked, disbelieving. "Kill her?"

“When the council hears about this, that’s going to be their answer. They said it about Naruto. They said it about you. Gaara and I can keep this from the other kages for a while, but the best I can do is pretend to be looking for her and buy you some time. Eventually, the other kages will take things into their own hands, if it means killing Sakura will prevent a literal apocalypse.”

Sasuke glared at him. “I’d like to see them try.”

“They might. I won’t let it come to that, but I have to consider what’s best for the village, and it’s not to start another war. As hokage that has to be my focus. I'm trusting you to keep her alive when I can't, and when she can't do it for herself. Better than alive would be ideal. Sane would be great. Non-possessed would be even better.”

“So then what?” Sasuke asked, frustrated. “You’re telling me you have no idea how to get rid of it without killing her?”

“That's your new mission. The only way I know how is for tailed beasts, and would end up with her dead anyway. The Jashinists were rooting around in your clan’s shit for something to do with Izanami. Your eye can control tailed beasts. Maybe your clan had a technique for this, too.”

“But what if they didn’t?” Sasuke snapped. “Look, Kakashi, I know you already know this, but if you’re counting on my family, you’re going to be disappointed.”

“Your clan put love before anything else,” Kakashi said calmly. “It made them into better weapons than people. If they can’t find an answer, then you need to make one.”

“Love has nothing to do with it.”

“Sure, buddy.” Kakashi rolled his eyes. “To me, this has to be about saving everyone, not just saving her. Doesn’t seem like that thought even crossed your mind. But it’s good. I raised you to take care of your team, didn’t I? I’m a good sensei. Go on, say it.”

“You’re a war criminal."

“Eh, so are you. You should head back. She shouldn’t wake up alone. I’m going to look into thisYomotsu Hirasaka business. She knows how to contact me if you need to get in touch.” Kakashi stood, brushing off his pants. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, so you’d better get a move on.”

Chapter Text

Several hours later, Sakura awoke with a start, alone in a familiar hotel room. The dead god was gone, the stifling heat replaced by warm, gentle air, the abyssal void traded for a soft bed and comfortable blankets.

Her body ached familiarly, as if every muscle had been stretched to its limit and then snapped back like a rubber band. Her mouth was dry, her head pounding. 2:26 pm flashed on the little alarm clock on the tiny bedside table. 

How long have I been asleep? 

…How did I get back here?

Then she sat up, frantic, her heart thumping erratically against her ribcage.

Sasuke.

Her memories of the night before were hazy and disjointed, obscured by heavy fog -- just bits and pieces of screaming voices, Izanami’s seal etched into her arm, dead Jashinists, and Sasuke’s body slumped against the wall with blood dripping from his mouth after his head cracked against the hard brick. 

Then… Sasuke reaching for her through the flames, covered in a cloak of purple chakra. I’m right here, he’d said. He’d held her as the heat blistered his skin, tucking her head into his neck. He’d looked so tired. But then there was a loud cracking noise and it all went black. And now she was here. Alone. 

That could only mean one thing. Her heart stopped.

No. No, no, no...

Time slowed to a halt. Any second now, Ibiki would come through that door and tell her Sasuke was dead, she’d killed him just like she’d killed Haru, and she would have to see Kakashi’s pitying, scared eyes as he told her it was true, and then it would hit her square in the chest like a ton of bricks and the ground would drop out from under her and the oxygen would leave her lungs for good because Sasuke was gone and she killed him.

Sakura leaned over the side of the bed and vomited bile, the bitterness dripping from her lips, her empty stomach recoiling.

Just then, the door opened.

“You’re awake,” a surprised voice said. Sasuke was standing in the doorway, alive. He clicked the door shut behind him, frowning at her. “I thought you’d still be sleeping.”

Sakura froze. Even though it was dark, she could see his chest rising and falling - he was breathing , generally a good sign that she hadn’t killed him. 

“How long have you been up?” he asked. He came closer, turning on a lamp, diffusing the room with dim light. He frowned at her when she didn’t respond. “Say something.”

The lamplight threw his injuries into stark relief. He was covered in dried blood and burns - 2nd-degree on his face, evident from the blistering, and 3rd-degree on his hands, raw flesh glistening angrily. But the worst of it was a four-inch gash from the corner of his mouth to his temple, dangerously close to his Rinnegan. 

“You’re alive?” Sakura breathed, finally, as if the sound of her voice would startle the illusion away.

Sasuke paused, his frown deepening, and then nodded once, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “More or less, yeah.”

“I thought -” she faltered, taking a steadying breath. “I thought I killed you.”

“You gave it your best shot,” he said dryly, sitting on the edge of the bed and unzipping his tattered mission vest. “But no. You didn’t kill me.”

“Your injuries look bad,” she said. “Was that me?”

He paused, then continued his pointed removal of his vest and his hitai-ate, refusing to meet her gaze. The silence told her all she needed to know.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“You already know it’s alright,” Sasuke sighed. “So don’t bother apologizing.”

“Burns like that can be fatal. You should’ve gone to the hospital.”

“They don’t like me here,” he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. Sakura’s father used to do the same thing when a long day at work left him with a splitting headache. “I’d rather you do it.”

Her heart ached - he sounded so young. She remembered the last time she’d seen him before she left Konoha for good, sitting in the hospital - she’d told him his arm was done and a new doctor would be along to help him with it. You won’t do it? he’d asked nervously. And she’d just… walked away. She thought of that conversation more often than she would like to admit, on sleepless nights and lonely, tear-streaked mornings, wondering if he had even noticed her small abandonment of him. If he knew she regretted it.

She reached for him, but her hand stopped halfway before she drew it back sharply. Her own hands had betrayed her more times than she could count.

“I can’t,” she whispered, clutching her hand to her chest, her gaze falling downward. “I can’t control it. You should go to the hospital and see a real medic.”

“Sakura,” he said, his injuries making him irritable, “you’re a real medic.”

The dead god’s words echoed in her ear - now I have to do it myself. If she touched him now, it would be so easy to kill him, and he was inviting her to do it. She shook her head, retreating further. “I’m getting worse. I can feel it. I don’t want-- I can’t hurt you again.”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that,” she said, her voice breaking. “Sasuke, they were right. It’s Izanami. I saw her. She’s going to… she said…  I can’t . I shouldn’t touch you. I shouldn’t touch anyone.”

Without warning, he reached out and caught her hand; Sakura gasped and shied away, but his grasp was steady. “Look, see? It’s fine.”

At his touch, the Jashinist’s seal on her arm burned, and she could feel that unnatural catch in her stomach, the jolt of panic that always preceded the itch . But it was small, easy to subdue. The tide pushed against her shores, but the rest of the ocean stayed still and silent despite Sasuke’s firm grip on her fingers. 

Memories of the night before came flooding back -- she could hear the echoing of screams ripping through her eardrum, knocking the senses out of her, the ships of rage raising their billowing sails, rising out of the black waters that pooled in the depths of her heart, drowning her lungs. But she could also see him braving the flames to come to her, and she could hear his voice, calm and steady through the inferno she had forced him to endure.

So do it. Kill me, he’d said, as if he was the sacrifice at her forgiving altar, an offering to a god that he knew wouldn’t raise a hand against him. 

Not you, she had thought, and those words planted the vines that strangled the darkness that had taken hold of her, pushing it back down into the cold and bottomless sea. The screaming voices had started to fade. The anger started to recede. Not you, not you, not you. Never you.  

Eyes on me.  

She pulled her hand away, reddening as she remembered the way his voice sounded as he said those words.

“It’s my life on the line,” he said, exasperated. But then, softer, he added, “Sakura. Please. Trust me.” 

Trust you? They had enough history that this request was laughable. Too many lies, too much desertion, a thick fog of painful memories standing between them. How could they trust each other? He was arrogant and stubborn and selfish, and he’d tried to kill her, for god’s sake - and she was certainly no better. But then he was there, and he stayed, and he was trying. Sakura took a deep breath, staring at the ceiling, before bracing herself. 

“I do,” she whispered.

He breathed a sigh of relief as her fingers landed on his cheek, already glowing with the soft green light of her healing chakra, illuminating the familiar curve of his face.

Her heart stumbled over itself, aching, as he leaned his cheek into her palm reflexively. Now, with his face in her hands, she felt she could really look at him for the first time in five years. He was eternally unchanged from the ephemeral boyhood in which she’d first fallen in love with him -- just more refined. Taller, sharper, but somehow infinitely softer; at some point in the last five years, he’d chosen to let the torment of his childhood temper his fire, to round the edges of his broken glass. He’d done it without her. And she’d done the opposite.

Maybe this time she could ask him - how? What did I miss? Who are you now? Can I know you again? Maybe this time it could be different. Maybe this time, she could… 

She stopped herself. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. She knew what she was now - and these were nothing but stolen moments that could be little more than memories to cling to in the coming months of loneliness. There was another goodbye on the horizon, inching closer with each passing second, looming over them like a shadow. This would be their final parting; although she had long since finished healing him, she lingered for a moment, trying to memorize the feeling of his skin on hers.

She ran her thumb over his cheek softly, like a painter signing her work, before pulling her hand away. 

“Better?” she breathed.

“Much better,” he said, rubbing his neck, rolling his head side to side. “Thanks.”

They were silent, neither knowing what to say. She drew her legs to her chest and rested her cheek on her knee, cradling the melancholy, anxious ache in her stomach. 

Time is running out, Izanami had said. I’ll have to kill him myself. It wasn’t safe for him to be anywhere near her. This wasn’t his responsibility - she wasn’t his responsibility. She was only exposing him to more risk by selfishly delaying the inevitable.

“It’s not safe for you here,” Sakura said quietly after a few minutes of silence. It would be better if he left now, before she got any worse. She always got worse. “You should leave.”

“We’re leaving,” Sasuke said, his voice steady, as if she hadn’t just said anything at all. “Kakashi’s orders. He wants us to go into hiding.”

Her head snapped up. “What?”

“He thinks it’s the safest thing to do for now,” he explained. “He’s going to keep looking into things on his end, but we’re supposed to lay low and find out more on our own.”

His words didn’t make sense. She frowned. “Kakashi’s here?”

“He was.” Sasuke’s expression flickered, though it was hard to tell in the dim light. “He came to check on you and make sure we had a plan. He’s already gone.”

“He didn’t want to talk to me?” she asked, looking away.

“He thought it was for the best,” Sasuke said awkwardly. “He didn’t want to give you the chance to argue.”

Her chest tightened, and she looked away, her lips pressing into a thin line. “He’s such an ass sometimes.” She wanted the words to feel angry, but they came out quiet, bitter.

She knew Kakashi must have his reasons to leave without seeing her. He wouldn’t avoid her just to be cruel, or even just to dodge an argument. If he hadn’t spoken to her, it was because he believed she didn’t need him right now. That didn’t make it sting any less - seeing him might have dulled the pain of saying goodbye to Sasuke again.

“He believes what the Jashinists said,” Sasuke said after a pause. “That it’s Izanami. He doesn’t know how to get it out of you, but he’s following up on leads. Apparently, they’ve been spotted near one of the old Uchiha outposts recently.”

Her stomach twisted. “They were on your family’s land?”

“It wasn’t anywhere near the village,” he said quickly. “Just an outpost. A cache of old weapons, nothing important.”

Sakura didn’t believe for a second that it was nothing important. Izanami’s words echoed in her mind. They should have killed him first. But she couldn’t tell Sasuke about what the god had said. Not yet. Not when the pieces didn’t add up, not when she knew it would just make him more stubborn.

She stared at her hands, her voice hollow. “You don’t have to do this. Don’t get involved in this, Sasuke. It’s not going to end well. I can talk to Ibiki—convince him to put you back on solo missions. This isn’t your problem--”

“Sakura,” he said, cutting her off. His voice was low, but firm. “I’m going to find a way.”

She looked up at him. I’m going to find a way -- not you’ll find a way. Not even we’ll find a way .

“Don’t argue,” he said before she could respond, sighing as he stood. His movements were stiff, but his posture was unwavering. “I’m going into town for supplies. We’ll leave in a few hours. And don’t try to run away. Kakashi said he’d just find you again and drag you back like last time.”

“He always says that,” she muttered. He always meant it, too. 

Sasuke paused in the doorway, looking over his shoulder. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Going to try to run away.”

She didn’t answer right away, letting the question hang in the air. Finally, she shook her head, her voice soft. She could decide if she was lying later. “No.”

He nodded, satisfied, and stepped out of the room without another word.