Black Bough

The soldier pill cracks between her teeth with more of a bitter snap than usual, hardened by the harsh winds sloughing off the cliffs of the Three Wolves, down into the smaller slopes and valleys surrounding them. They’ve stopped to recoup significantly south of the nearest rocky maw, where the cold bites the hardest, but Sakura is more perturbed by the thought of sleeping with one eye on the jagged teeth of an open, earthy jowl than she is by a temperamental breeze. Their standard Root fatigues can fend off cold well enough, but that unnatural rock face makes her palms itch on a primal level. Iron isn’t particularly hostile to Konoha nin, but her and Sai aren’t wearing a leaf, and their Root masks don’t often receive the warmest welcomes, should they happen to be seen.

Sakura swallows the last chalky granules of the pill and shivers from the slowly building heat in between her ribs as it replenishes her previously dwindling chakra reserves.

There aren’t enough trees in these mountains.

Evergreens pepper the landscape, clustering in the dips between passes, creeping up toward the peaks where they thin out, but it’s not a forest. Not really. She misses Fire country trees. These branches are too close together, and they propagate at the ends, making traveling by tree at high speeds impossible.

It took much hunting around to find a tree as large and spacious as the one Sakura is currently stretching out on, her back to the trunk, legs extended in front of her and crossed at the ankles as she tries to get comfortable with a third of the weapons she owns holstered or stored away on her body. She can only fit so many in Sai’s ink seals. The rarity of their perch doesn’t lend itself to staying hidden—any nin familiar with the area would check these overgrown twigs first when doing a sweep—but experience has made Sakura weary of sacrificing comfort to avoid fights, when the stakes are low.

Sai drops down silently, joining her on the largest branch. She catches the quick movement of a brush, a flash of ink and black fur near his hands, as he presumably releases a few ink mice to further scout the area. She hears them scramble down the trunk of their tree. 

There is a collection of dried pine needles clinging to his black pants and tactical jacket, and when he nudges her legs apart with his boot to make room for him to crouch in front of her, she plucks one of the needles off the ivory weapons pouch holstered at his thigh and sets it down on the bark beside her. Adjusting her position until she’s comfortably settled with her right leg tucked under and her left knee bent in front of her, heel to bark, she flicks another pine needle off one of the red straps sewn into the shoulder of his jacket. It hits the hilt of the tip-less tantō strapped vertically to his back behind his right shoulder and flutters down toward the ground. If there were any human chakra signatures within a half mile, she would have stopped it from falling, lest it give away their position.

He tilts his head, white mask rotating eerily, but doesn’t otherwise comment on her small act of affection as she begins to sign in Anbu Basic.

‘Confirm—two hours north. Cut off target at N-i-r-i pass.’

She studies the familiar lines of his mask as he considers the best course of action, red lines on either side of the mask’s face splitting into three red claws on either side. Sakura thinks they look like branches, like a tree cleaved in two turning in on itself, framing the ambiguous animal mouth and blacked out eyes. She likes to think her own mask is an inversion of Sai’s; a red, abstract tree bisecting the middle of the mask, six sharp, bloody boughs sprouting at the eye line, two red slashes under the eyes, three on the forehead.

It is unlikely anyone would’ve taken much note of the designs individually, but between the frequent appearance of them together and her unusual hair color (which, being as rare as it is, she would have dyed black immediately if it wouldn’t have been taken as a sign of weakness by her peers—like admitting she lacks the skill to remain unknown and unnoticed regardless of outstanding features), they have become somewhat of a recognizable partnership in the field; even if it’s only whispers, with no names to attach to them.

It is not a good thing. Their reputation.

All Root masks have some variation of the same abstract motif for a reason, the black lines of a generic animal mouth and some form of red embellishment make it clear they’re Anbu operatives at a distance and discourage interference, but up close it is difficult to identify exactly what creature correlates with their mask, and thus which unit they may or may not belong to. They pass muster, but are not easily distinguished.

But Sai and Sakura, they have accidentally become memorable. Eight years is a long time to build a reputation despite their best efforts, and stories of two masked Konoha nin trailing death across the elemental nations have begun to quietly precede them. There are more noteworthy nin in Root than her, and no rumors circulate about them. It is an embarrassment that anyone escaped her with their lives to spread rumors in the first place, but Sakura was young and still learning to be ruthless, and Sai was inexperienced in convincing her to clean up after herself, and at this point it’s little more than spilled milk.

They will need to make this reputation work for them, Sakura thinks, if she is going to keep Sai beside her; keep Danzō complacent. She needs Sai. And not just for the free ink seals and chakra art, though that’s a joke she makes often. She only says it so she can watch Sai angle his head like a hawk and stare at her in mild amusement—an emotion he actually feels, now. Sakura has more tattoos than a missing nin. At least Sai practices on himself, first.

But it is true. She needs him, and she thinks it is possible Sai needs her too. And Danzō is a threat to that. He’s already sent her to her death, once, and the fact she survived has not won her any trust. In fact, it has made him more wary. He will do it again, soon, if she doesn’t convince him she’s worth her quirks; worth his anxiety over why she alone was allowed to live—something made significantly more difficult by the fact she’s actively concealing all of her best selling points. But Sai insists she keep her cards close, and Sakura finds little value in acting against his advice. He’s all she truly cares about, and everyone, including him, knows it.

She was terrified to let others see her growing attachment, at first. Afraid the budding bond between them would outweigh their usefulness as a unit. Her concerns regarding this are what drove Sakura to befriend recruit M10-5 in the first place. To give Danzō someone easier to point his bony finger at when it came time to break her bonds. She understood enough at that age to anticipate the order to kill her closest attachment in the compound. She understood enough to break M10-5’s body as violently as possible while Danzō watched, eager to make it easy for him not to question her loyalties.

It took years for her to realize that she never had Danzō fooled; to realize the real reason he let sleeping dogs lie. 

It is not common practice, the way Danzō has kept her and Sai looped together like charms on a string. Sai did not give her a name to call him or start using hers as an act of closeness. He acted on orders. He purposely allowed her to form an attachment; insurance, should she fail to lose her sense of self.

Sai is not her friend. He is her handler. Sometimes she questions if that’s not still all he is. 

It’s hard to tell, when affection is something she has to color in between the lines of his violence like a half-finished painting; Sai cutting off the hands of the nin that struck her with poison; Sai laying face-to-face with her in their two-man tent, digging his fingers into a wound on her side, fascinated by the way her breath hitches and her body coils; fascinated by the fact she lets him. Even after Sai figured out how to effectively transfer his chakra ink to a body using his chakra art instead of manually tattooing the skin, she still asks him to do it by hand, unwilling to part with the addictive pain of his meticulous attention.

Movement draws her eyes down from his mask. Having taken a few seconds to formulate his response, Sai lifts his hands to chest height, black gloved fingers signing slowly at first as he commits to the thought, then quicker as he gains certainty in his position.

‘Question—Alternative—Avoid confrontation. Approach target camp at 16:00. Maintain distance. Remote assassination. Poison.’ And then, after a beat. ‘Senbon.’

Sakura suppresses the urge to click her tongue against the backs of her teeth. They’ve been nonverbal for the last two days. She’s not about to break stealth protocol over a little impatience with Sai’s uncharacteristic wariness of this mission. He’s been on edge since his last mission report, which was almost two weeks ago now, something about the tension in Danzō’s “eye-wrinkles” putting him off his rations.

Samidare Unmo is a jōnin of Kirigakure and a vocal enemy of Konohagakure, but he’s not skilled or enigmatic enough for Sakura to feel Sai’s desire to keep their distance is justified. Sai has been a jōnin for over half of his life, and Sakura was field promoted to jōnin before she’d had her first monthly bleed, before the Root medics took her down into the basement med bay and put that bodily function on indefinite hold, sending her back into the daylight with a cursed seal above her sacrum to match the one on her tongue.

Together, they’ll be more than sufficient. Samidare Unmo doesn’t warrant a remote assassination. Either one of them could take him down easily even with the handicap of not using any jutsu or methods easily traced back to Konoha, Sai, or Sakura in particular, to the point it’s redundant to have sent them both, and Sakura has been looking forward to burning off the energy she’s been accumulating during the hunt. Samidare is traveling alone, and he’s highly strung from the week he’s been staying out of large villages and avoiding rest, paranoid about picking up a tail he thinks he lost back in Sound. If this nin were enough of a challenge to force Sai and Sakura to take precautions, they would be leading a four-person unit, and they would have received mission directives in person as opposed to by hawk and scroll.

‘Denied.’ In response to Sai’s displeased shift in weight, Sakura switches to Anbu Standard for its more developed vocabulary and syntax. ‘Poison takes too long. Quick is better.’

Sai is quick to counter-offer, likely having anticipated her argument during those seconds he had the argument in his own head before starting to sign his thoughts at all. He signs irritably, hand movements quietly emphatic. ‘Senbon. Eye. Exploding tag.’

Sakura purses her lips behind her mask and leans back into the bark of the tree they’re resting in, her sheathed tantō digging into her back, letting her eyes survey their surroundings while considering their position.

It’s not snowing, yet, but it’s threatening to, the air getting colder as the sun slips below the horizon line and diffuses in the darkening sky, orange light no longer skimming the wild grass poking limply out of the ground or painting leaves warmer colors where it passes through the branches of the evergreens. It will be a minor drain on their chakra when it eventually does, snow-walking almost as much of a nuisance as water-walking after several hours of running, but she and Sai are among the best in terms of chakra control within Root, and they haven’t left a footprint anywhere since leaving the compound.

It’s an artless solution, but that fits the mission: assassination by missing nin; Samidare’s chakra signature blown out like a match by his own shady dealings. His reflexes aren’t fast enough to compete with Sai’s aim, so chances of complications developing are low. He might sleep through the whole thing. Their instructions were to leave his body to the wolves. Making a mess of him first would certainly speed up the process.

After a few silent breaths, Sakura nods once, a short jerk of concession, and signs, ‘Affirmative. Senbon. Eye. Exploding tag.’

She can feel Sai’s relief; can see it in the nearly negligible lessening of tension in his shoulders as he deepens his crouched position in front of her, getting comfortable. If Sai’s instincts are balking, Sakura isn’t going to forcibly overrule him. She may be the lead on paper for this particular mission, but they both know that’s a formality meant to make her feel more in control than she is, and if he’s leading the next one, she’d rather not tempt him to flip her the bird the next time she wants to weigh in on the plan.

She never should have taught him what the middle finger means, in the first place, but she’d been twelve and had just learned it from an older operative. 

If it weren’t for Sai, she’d have no one else to use it on.

…

It turns out, Samidare Unmo is not the problem.

Sakura is standing over his exploded head, picking one of his teeth out of her short hair, tied back at her nape—it’s amazing how far those things can fly, how far blood and bone can scatter—when the problem presents itself.

Her eyes have only just left the Samidare shaped stain in the dirt when she feels the chakra in the air being disturbed, barely managing to unsheathe her tantō and deflect the kunai aimed non-lethally at her shoulder, the feel of steel-grazing-steel vibrating down into her wrist. The blade would have lodged into the joint, hindering her mobility for the moment it would have taken her to recover. Given that their guest is skilled enough to hide their presence so successfully, she doubts it was a misthrow. They’re aiming to subdue, not kill, and they want her to know it. Maybe they want to talk. Maybe they want her to drop her guard. She’s not interested in doing either.

Sai shunshins behind her to cover her back, flaring his chakra minimally in case she’s too keyed up to recognize him as a non-threat, as Sakura directs chakra to her eyes, enhancing her vision to see three white masks emerging from the dark. They’re Anbu, tip to toe, from the black fatigues and white weapon holsters strapped to their legs, to the gray tactical vests and black fingerless gloves. No red straps, and the ink on their masks form distinct animals. So, not Root. Or at least, they do not want to be seen as Root.

The one in the center steps forward slowly, tilting his head, letting his black boot crunch the gravel and soil as he moves, and Sakura feels the strangest sense of deja-vu as her eyes settle on the white fox mask, on the red slashes under the blacked out eyes, as he holds his empty hands up in a mockery of defencelessness that convinces no one.

Even within the extreme isolation of Root, she’s heard plenty of Hound and his squad, Team Ro. They are encouraged to memorize Bingo Books and more, in their free time. Hatake Kakashi. He is infamous in a way that Sakura doesn’t wish to test with Sai tense as a bow behind her. She’s never seen him fight, has no baseline of his skills and how they’d fare against her own. If this is Hound, that makes the cat mask to his back-right, with a vertical red stripe on the forehead and two horizontal stripes where her cheekbones would be, Coyote. The cat mask to his back-left, with red crescents on the outsides of the eyes, green strips stretching down from the top and bottom of the mask, must be Tiger.

This does nothing to make her feel better.

She mimics Hound’s gesture without dropping her weapon, letting the handle of her tantō rotate in her palm tip-down, gravity pointing the blade to the earth as she holds both hands at shoulder height. No need to overreact, yet, she decides. Hound is on the ‘no-touch’ list of Konoha shinobi. She’d rather not give Danzō another reason to kill her.

“Sakura.”

Chemicals flood her bloodstream at the sound of her name in Hound’s placid voice, the way his tongue curls on the ‘r’ like her name has weight, like he’s said it a thousand times before, and she feels Sai forcibly loosen up his body at her back, turning languid with the realization she is still reeling from: that the plan is no longer to convince Team Ro to go their separate ways, but to eliminate them.

Sakura has not heard her name spoken by anyone but Sai in eight years. For eight years, Sakura has been “operative F11-6” and nothing else. ‘F’ for female; ‘11’ for the age she was recruited; ‘6’ because she’s only the sixth female operative to be recruited at age eleven—ancient, by Root standards.

It seems Hound has forced her hand.

He knows who she is, which means her identity is known to main branch Anbu, which means Root has been exposed, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a branch of Anbu hidden from the Hokage herself is as likely to be permitted as it is likely to be warmly integrated upon discovery, which means Sai and her have nowhere to run to but away. And that may be difficult while Team Ro is breathing. Running and fighting without a plan will only serve to exhaust them both. They’re outnumbered, Tiger and Coyote’s skills are unknown, Hound is infamously a pain in the ass, and Team Ro has been planning for this confrontation an undetermined amount of time.

Either way, Sakura is finished. Her existence prior to Root is documented, but Sai is like a ghost. He was taken as an infant; Sakura was old enough to know better. She practically defected. They’ll hunt her until her dying day. But Sai? She can buy enough time for Sai to make it and take at least one or two of them down with her in the process. Ideally, Sai would choose to activate one of the chakra beasts tattooed on his or her body to help even out the numbers of this fight, but he stays uncharacteristically still.

Stall, separate, engage. She has no time to make a better plan. She locks eyes with the black eye holes of Hound’s mask, feels their eyes connect, and tugs at the same moment he does, both trying to overpower the other in a genjutsu, the world warping around the edges, the air shimmering from the distortion caused by two powerful users metaphorically arm wrestling in the dirt. She signs ‘gopher’ with her left hand, their private code for Sai to ‘retreat via ground,’ but he doesn’t even shift his weight.

Sharp pain in her eyes precedes the warmth of blood leaking out like tears as she meticulously snakes a chakra string along the ground, inching it toward Tiger, but she’d rather go blind than go willingly to the cage they’ll put her in. She finds it irritating but convenient, how his team stands still, waiting it out, giving them space to piss up the wall, and she is losing, and she isn’t sure why, until she sees a flare of red in one of his eyes and thinks, ah. 

That unlikely claim is true.

As soon as the second string connects with her target undetected, she swaps places with Tiger and catches him in Hound’s illusion, a much more chakra intensive one than Tiger would be able to handle since she forced Hound to play tug of war. 

In the breath before Tiger’s knees hit the dirt, Sakura unseals three senbon from the ink seal on her left gloved palm, the seal phasing them through the fabric, and throws two at Tiger’s neck while he’s dazed, needles reflecting moonlight for the rarest of seconds, to force Coyote to get into range of Sai’s tipless tantō in order to deflect them before she’s pushed back by Sai’s attack. 

Sakura finds it odd that Sai’s blade does not anticipate the other nin’s dodge, but she doesn’t have time to question his conservative approach. Perhaps he is conflicted about harming those on Danzō’s list of protected shinobi. She holds back in kind, deciding to keep the extent of her skills hidden until Sai is clear. The element of surprise is half of all a shinobi has, and if Sai is unsure of making a genuine attempt to eliminate Team Ro, he may have an alternative plan. Sakura needs to buy time and reconsider her options.

By the time Tiger’s knees touch the earth, Sakura has body-flickered up into the branches of a sparse evergreen twenty feet away and thrown the third senbon at Hound’s left eye to get his attention before she takes off toward the ground; he cancels his genjutsu and does her the favor of chasing after her, Tiger jolting to consciousness and flickering into view at Hound’s flank soon after.

She doesn’t feel relief, but something close enough to pass for it, because Sai can subdue Coyote even non-lethally. Sai can take on an S-rank nin alone and win, and based on the fact Coyote got distracted by guarding her teammate’s throat instead of going after the target, she’s A-rank at best, and less monstrous than the rumors of Team Ro seem to paint her.

Hound, on the other hand, is maybe more monstrous than the rumors.

The trees in Iron aren’t large and open enough for them to take the tree-road, so she’s left with the less dynamic option of fleeing over dead grass and pine needles between trunks, not bothering to hide her trail with forest-walking, only increasing traction at her feet and cycling the majority of her chakra into her eyes and muscles to maintain a speed that will kill her if she loses focus in the dark blur of the woods warping around her, putting distance between her and Sai.

All this and, still, Hound is at her heels; worse, with the Sharingan she caught a glimpse of earlier, he has the spare focus to send a few clusters of kunai her way. His aim is predictive and the force and swiftness of his throws are troublesome. It’s been years since the last time Sakura had to work this hard to avoid a projectile, made even more challenging by the fact she’s restraining her own speed and agility, keeping her cards face-down until it’s time to play them. The majority of them she can dodge and turn into near misses, but two slice through the outside of her upper arm, cutting through her black tac-jacket easily, and a third nearly takes her eye out as she drops to a slide and accepts the fact that her dodging has allowed Hound to overtake her in speed, as he skids to a stop in the clearing dead ahead of her with his hands open and up diplomatically once again.

She has to reinforce and protect her organs with chakra as she stops herself from sliding further by staking chakra down from her feet into the earth like roots breaking through the soil, halting her dangerous momentum with a sudden stillness that would have killed a civilian as she comes up out of her movement into a low stance, dirt clouding around her heels, drifting higher with the breeze.

The dry rustling of the pines caresses her heightened senses as the wind lifts a few pale strands of her hair, and she isn’t surprised to sense Tiger up in a tree to her right as Hound attempts to hold her attention with his disarming, misleading posture, but she is surprised to feel Sai’s chakra signature flicker into the space just behind her right shoulder as she flips her hold on her Tantō into a more comfortable reverse grip, though she doesn’t risk taking her eyes off of the enemy long enough to confirm the state of him, or why he’s not still occupied with subduing and interrogating Coyote, or why he’s still fucking here.

“Easy, easy,” Hound says, forcing the barest edge of mirth into his otherwise stolid tone. He sounds younger than she’d expected. “No need to gnaw off your own arm over answering a few questions.”

She’s in the process of connecting her chakra to the moisture in the air, preparing for the right moment to let it connect with the water in Hound’s eyes, when she hears Sai’s voice over her shoulder.

“I don’t understand the metaphor, but I think you now understand she will not go willingly.”

Sakura’s pulse quickens at Sai’s flat response, followed by a pulse of chakra to her spine from Sai’s hand on her neck that travels up to her brain. She only manages to feel a spike of betrayal before her knees give out, Sai’s arms hooking under her armpits as the night swallows up the world in darkness. Before she loses consciousness, she thinks she feels a flake of snow melting quickly on her nose.

…

Standing in a T&I observation room three stories underground behind one-way glass with his arms crossed and feet spread hip-width apart, Kakashi watches Root operative, orphan, missing person of eight years, civilian born Haruno Sakura spit blood in Yamanaka Inoichi’s face, a small chunk of flesh stuck between her lateral incisor and cuspid as she snarls like an animal, and thinks: She should have been on his team.

It’s not her blood, for what it’s worth, dripping down her jaw and neck onto her black sleeveless undershirt. The investigator whose blood it is is currently undergoing emergency medical treatment from having their ear bitten off. Sakura got an extra chakra-suppressing band around her waist chained to the concrete floor behind her and the head of the analysis team’s personal attention, for her trouble. They have not been given approval by the Hokage to employ any mind invasion techniques without consent because, as far as the law is concerned, Sakura and Sai were under the direct control of a council member for all acts under examination. Based on this performance, Sakura is unlikely to give such consent any time soon.

Inoichi doesn’t even wipe his face—sickly-pale, from all that time he spends underground—letting the red-stained saliva cool on his cheeks and cling to the two strands of ash blonde hair hanging down from his leaf forehead protector and otherwise cropped-short style, as he calmly reviews the file on the metal table between them like he hasn’t memorized every character on the page.

As if they haven’t been waiting for this moment for four years, from the second their inside source positively ID’d a Root operative with flowery pink hair and excellent chakra control as Iruka’s missing former student, Haruno Sakura. As if Kakashi hasn’t been holding his breath ever since he first heard the words, “Danzō stole your genin.”

“Only months from graduating from the academy, you left the shinobi program. Why?”

Kakashi steps closer to the window, the black mask covering the lower half of his face preventing his questionable proximity from fogging the glass as she rolls her shoulders back, as if having her wrists cuffed behind a metal chair isn’t a satisfying enough stretch. 

There are intricate black, chakra-infused tattoos visible on her exposed arms, hands, shoulder blades and sternum, reminiscent of the ones he’s seen on Sai’s hands, arms, chest, back, and legs on the rare occasions they’ve passed each other in the locker room, maybe twice in the four years he’s known him; after turning on Root and making first contact with main branch Anbu through Hound, Sai has remained deep undercover; visits to HQ were understandably risky and rare.

The only colored ink he can see on her skin is a blue abstract flame similar to a red Anbu seal on her left shoulder, framed in part by what, from this angle, appears to be the scaly body of a three-headed snake—or maybe three different snakes tangled up into the illusion of one—wound around her upper arm. He was surprised to see it the first time, the blue flame on Sai’s shoulder, but Root was originally a seedy subsidiary of the main branch before being formally dissolved, so it’s not surprising that there is still overlap there. But that’s where the similarities likely end. Root was a cesspit when Kakashi was briefly a part of it, and he never set foot inside what turned out to be actual Root, a project Danzō had in the works for decades; he can’t imagine less regulatory oversight made the experience any better.

Once again, the young woman in the chair says nothing, letting her head tilt back like it’s too heavy for her neck, unwashed light pink hair falling out of her face as she glares at the gray concrete ceiling. There is a faded scar on the right side of her jaw up onto her cheek; a thin white line from a clean swipe of a blade, a near miss. It’s difficult to spot her other scars, of which he assumes there are many, hidden between and under the ink seals and artwork littering her skin. White fluorescents highlight her deceptively delicate bone structure, making her look sharper, every line of her body speaking to discipline and high performance, lean but lithe, corded with nimble muscle.

There were few photos of her to be found, when Inoichi and Shikaku’s kids jointly filed a missing person’s report. Not much more than a paper trail to prove she even existed, aside from former friends at the academy, though those friendships had been strained enough after her parents’ deaths to make it difficult to retrace her steps leading up to her disappearance. She’d been reclusive by nature even before the attack on her family’s caravan, to the point no one raised the alarm for two weeks after her last known sighting. Ino and Shikamaru were in rough shape when they realized she wasn’t avoiding them, but gone. The orphanage didn’t even make a note in her file. They claimed she told them she’d found a place to live, and they just washed their hands of her, dusted off her empty bed and gave it to someone else.

Even if there had been more than her academy headshots and a few photos of her small face squished between her two childhood friends, he doubts he’d recognize her as she is now, no longer the trembling child in his memory. She’s only six years younger than his twenty-five, but it had felt like a lifetime of difference when he was barely seventeen years old and wondering what a civilian kid was doing so far out from the village, reeking of blood and fear.

She glances toward the one-way glass, backing up the accuracy of Sai’s reports of her uncanny sensor instincts by looking straight at Kakashi, and he allows his previously suppressed chakra to flare in acknowledgement of her attention, earning himself an irritated sigh from Inoichi who doesn’t deign to look up from his paperwork. She pretends not to care, fixing her gaze once more to an old blood stain on the ceiling above her.

Her eyes are green.

He hadn’t noticed, when he picked her up out of the mud eight years ago. When she walked five miles in the wrong direction, away from that slaughtered caravan and right into Team Ro’s path on their way back to the village post-mission.

“She will talk to me.”

Kakashi spares a glance with his uncovered eye at the twenty-year-old double-agent who has been darkening the doorway of every one of Sakura’s interrogations for three days straight, and doesn’t doubt it.

“I’m sure she has a lot she’d like to say to you,” he says, instead of what he is thinking, which is that there is no way in the Sage’s six shadows their superiors will approve of putting her in the same room as the only other Root asset left until confident she’s not loyal to Danzō. 

The elder set fire to every file he had and fled during the night with a squad of elite operatives the same day they brought her in—a partially wasted effort, considering Sai has been feeding them all the evidence they need to convict for the last four years, though Kakashi doesn’t doubt the existence of secrets Danzō intends to hold a while longer, yet. The compound was found empty, save a mound of charred corpses aged from five years old to twenty-six. Sai had insisted on securing Sakura before raiding the compound, not willing to risk tipping Danzō’s hand and losing her in the crossfire. He seems undaunted by the cost of that decision. Kakashi is still working out how he feels about it.

“She is loyal,” he says, inflectionless, but his back is straight, his shoulders tight, and his eyes have not left his teammate’s exhausted face in an hour.

“To Danzō? To you? Or to Konoha?” Kakashi asks, tilting his head as she manages to get that bit of skin between her teeth free with her tongue and spits it to the side.

Sai, wisely, ignores the question. “She will think I betrayed her.”

“You did.”

That earns him a sharp, predatory side-eye from the stoic man beside him. Since allowing himself to be convinced to shower and leave Sakura unobserved for a few hours, he’s changed out of his dirt-crusted Root fatigues into his standard Anbu uniform—dirt-crusted because of how many times Sakura defied logic by regaining consciousness on the way to Konoha before being wrestled to the ground by Sai again so he could knock her out—but he looks far from refreshed.

Kakashi pivots to lean his left shoulder on the glass, cold even through his black sleeves, and considers Sai more closely. There are dark bags accumulating under his eyes, and his black irises look glossy. He’s refused to consume anything but dried rabbit, undressed bitter greens, and water since he subdued Sakura and brought her in with Team Ro.

Kakashi wonders. “Does she know?” Referring to the orders Danzō had been weighing the pros and cons of giving for the last year and a half, as his unease grew. “That he ordered you to put her down in Iron?”

Before he’s finished asking, Sai is shaking his head. He lifts his fingers to the glass, grazing the surface just barely, not enough to heat the window with his skin.

“I thought it best to keep her calm.” Dark eyes flicker to meet Kakashi’s stare. “I wasn’t sure I could stop her, if she tried to do it for me.”

…

Unless her captors have been intentionally distorting her sense of time by bringing her meals at irregular intervals, it has been three days since she was betrayed by the only person she would give anything—do anything—for, and she still does not understand why.

She’s not stupid enough to ask, can see the way her sharp-eyed interrogator is hoping she will get curious enough to strike up a conversation, give him an opening to begin to pry her open with.

They haven’t implemented torture, yet. She finds it makes her think less of them. She can’t decide if the softness of it all is evidence that this place is what they say it is, unaffiliated with Root, or if it’s just more evidence of Danzō’s smoke and mirrors.

Settling back into her homey metal detainment chair, Sakura worries the fleshy gunk out from between her teeth and spits it to the side, too numb to the minor violence of it to shudder in revulsion. She hasn’t cringed from gore in years. Not since flaying live prisoners with a shaky chakra scalpel in the basement of the Root compound during her initial training. It’s not a skill they needed; just an experience designed to make them vomit up bile and the rest of their humanity.

“According to our source, you were considered something of a failed experiment.” Her interrogator stops pretending to read the file in front of him, and she feels obliging enough to lower her eyes back down to meet his gray, intelligent stare with a patient one of her own. He interlaces his pale fingers on the table in front of him, and she notes fine lines of raised skin around the joints: scar tissue. She doubts he got those sorting file cabinets.

“Why not pull off a few fingernails and find out?”

His lips press into an unamused line.

“Our source has indicated you’ve undergone extensive training to resist interrogation. I’d prefer if we could simply talk.”

She wants to bare her teeth in a sardonic grin, but resists. Our source, our source, so fucking annoying, how they’re dangling it around in front of her.

In response to her not taking the bait: “I’m familiar with the cursed seal on your tongue,” he offers, and Sakura’s neck tingles with awareness of the hints he is dropping, trying to lure her out of silence. “I know the boundaries of what you can and cannot say. I know you can answer my questions about your motivations. About your own mind.”

The chakra signature on the other side of the wall is humming distractingly, and Sakura finds her gaze drifting to the reflective window without her permission, her fingers cold from poor circulation without her ability to cycle chakra with these suppressive cuffs on. There is another presence in that room she can barely sense, as there has been since she’s been captured.

Sai is here, and he is on the other side of the glass. And he is with Hound.

They want her to ask about Sai. It’s why they let him stick so close. They want to see her emotions. Her attachment. Test her loyalties. Prod at the betrayal and see which hand she bites.

Hound is not Root, she doesn’t think. But he could be part of the steel wool being pulled over her eyes.

“I used to dream of a white fox bleeding in the rain,” she says, voice dry from disuse, and feels the air sucked out of the room, tension building from the other side of the table. Her eyes stay firmly on the one-way window where she senses Hound, his chakra spiking slightly at her words. He’s invested in this line of thought, and letting her sense him.

Huh.

“Where did we meet, Hound?” She asks the glass, and is met with silence that rings like the air vibrates after a bell, but her interrogator doesn’t interrupt. “When I was a child?”

Come play, she urges, silently. Show me your face, Friend Killer.

“Do you have other memories?” Her interrogator presses, clarifying, “Of your childhood?”

She settles back into her chair, having leaned forward in anticipation of Hound’s response, and takes in the glimmer of interest in the eyes across from her—not as gray as she thought, now that she’s looking more closely. There’s blue in there. There’s something familiar about his eyes. Something familiar about his face.

“I have all my memories,” she offers, which is a lie, and he seems to know that. 

She’s bored of this dance, bored of this cell. She wants to see Sai. She wants to see his face, and know what he was hoping to gain by either turning on Danzō or turning on her, whichever it is. He had a reason, of that she’s sure. If this isn’t Danzō’s doing, if this is Sai’s will, she wishes he’d just used his fucking words. She would have followed him anywhere. She would have turned her back on Danzō in a heartbeat, for him. All he had to do was ask. Maybe he was afraid, as she suspects, of testing the knot on the rope around his waist before he leapt; of finding out too late she’d rather detangle herself than follow him down.

Idiot.

“Here is what I don’t understand,” the man lies, propping his angular chin on his interlaced fingers. “Your mission success rate hasn’t dropped below 98% in the last five years. You’re a competent operative, by all measures of success. So why is it that Danzō felt you were a failure?”

She sucks on her teeth and tastes iron. Should she just admit it? Should she just say what they’re trying to get her to say and make them shut up? These nin don’t know her more dangerous secrets. If they did, they would be asking very different questions. She’s tired. She’s filthy and tired and, worse, understimulated. She doesn’t have a reason to dig her heels in, anymore. If this is a trick from Danzō to test her loyalty, she’d rather he just kill her. The only person she’s protecting is standing right there watching her throw a silent hissy fit. If she can see his face, she will know if this is a test, or if this is the end of Root.

Fine.

Fine.

“I want to talk to Sai.”

She’s barely gotten the words out when the door to the interrogation room is thrown open, and all the tension she’s accumulated in her body during the last seventy-two hours leaves her in a sudden purge that has her sharply inhaling the dank air of this forsaken underground building as Sai—clean, unharmed, quietly agitated Sai—stalks into the room in wrinkled black tactical pants and a gray vest over a black long sleeve shirt, knives and kunai strapped to every limb, bruises under his black eyes, his short black hair tousled and uncombed the way it is after a shower.

A muscle twitches in her interrogator’s jaw, but to his credit he slowly stands from his seat, metal chair legs scraping the concrete floor, and lets Sai take his place with not so much as a peep despite his clear disapproval, retreating to the corner of the room to lean against the wall with his arms crossed over his dark blue vest.

Sai sits like he’s not used to chairs, back rigid, arms by his sides, completely alert.

“You are stubborn,” Sai says, but the emotion in his eyes belays his placid tone. He’s stressed. He’s upset by this situation. Fondness curls up like a cat in her chest, taking up space.

“Sorry,” she says, a small smile behind the word, and mostly means it.

“This is not a test,” he reads her mind, unsurprisingly. “This is not him.”

She sees only truth in his inkwell eyes, and allows herself to feel slightly more at ease.

“Are you loyal to him?” he asks, unable to say the name ‘Danzō’ in this context without triggering the curse, and Sakura almost laughs. Sai has no talent for interrogation, nor the patience for it.

“No.”

“Are you loyal to Konoha?”

“Yes.” As long as you are, she doesn’t say.

Sai seems to hesitate, the muscles of his throat flexing minutely as his underdeveloped emotions stall his speech. When he manages the words, she feels their gravity, feels how much he desires the answer.

“Are you loyal to me?”

“Yes.” It takes her breath away a little, this admission. The luxury of this moment. She can’t recall ever having said it so directly, and it feels like a gift to see his pupils dilate ever so slightly, the corner of his lips twitching up, his stunted expression incapable of conveying the magnitude of the emotions she knows he is feeling. She repeats. “Yes.”

“You will continue to serve Konoha, under the Hokage,” he says, and the interrogator holding up the wall behind him seems to shift in slight discomfort, or maybe amusement. Unlike Sai, he keeps his emotions, if he has any, well hidden from her. A side effect Danzō didn’t see coming: if you train your nin not to have feelings, when they eventually do, they have no fucking clue how to disguise them. Or maybe Sakura is just too close to Sai to be fooled. “You will keep your jōnin status. You will be absorbed into Anbu after a probation period. There are ways around the seal, until the source is dealt with. You will tell them what you can.”

The interrogator is running a hand through his blonde hair, giving up on looking anything but put out by Sai’s total disregard for procedure, but Sai is either oblivious or unconcerned.

“And during probation?” she asks, risking a glance at the door as it opens once more, and this time her interrogator pinches the bridge of his nose and gives up on professionalism entirely, muttering under his breath about ‘give just anyone a key, do they.’ Sakura finds herself sympathizing—that is, until her eyes register the Anbu operative with silver hair softly closing the metal door behind himself, giving a causal, two-fingered wave with his fingerless-gloved hand, his exposed right eye squinting in what she imagines is supposed to be a smile hidden behind his black face mask, but it’s a cold, calculating thing.

“Yo.”

This voice is instantly familiar, recognizable even with his chakra now fully suppressed.

Sakura shakes with rage, spits his name like the foulest curse she knows. “Hound.”

…

“I think that went well,” Kakashi says, leaning against a large oak on the edge of Anbu HQ and prodding the forming bruise on his forearm with his index and middle fingers. He underestimated her strength, what with her being shackled with chakra suppressors, insufficiently reinforcing the muscles and bones of his arm when he blocked.

A few dying leaves, turning yellow at the tip, float down from the branch above them, gliding slowly, left, then right, then left again.

Sitting with his back to the same trunk, Sai studies the clear bag of dried plums Genma gave him on his way to debrief, followed by the older shinobi ruffling his black hair affectionately (brave one, Genma is), and nods. “I also enjoyed it when she kicked the table at you.”

“They really ought to secure those to the floor.” He catches one of the leaves, rubbing the green veins between his fingers gently, a thin string of chakra floating down toward Sai’s bag of plums like spider silk in the breeze.

“They do.”

Kakashi considers this information, then discards it. “Huh.”

He substitutes the leaf for the small dried plum his chakra stuck to, and pops it under his mask into his mouth as Sai frowns down at the leaf inside the bag in mild dissatisfaction. It’s sweet to the point it irritates his taste buds, and it gets stuck in his gums when he chews. Still better than rations.

“For a second there, I thought you might join her,” he says, as he chews, and watches the younger male out of the corner of his eye, prodding for a response. “Take a swing for yourself.”

“You pulled her hair,” he says, plucking the leaf out of the bag and flicking it to the side, where it resumes its descent to the ground.

He did do that. Gripped the back of her head in a tight hold and forced her head back and up, nearly nose-to-nose with him as she fought the restraints keeping her in her chair, blood thundering in his veins as he told her to “stand down” before she could get herself in deeper shit. Kakashi figured it would be like this, based on the way she looked at him in that clearing back in Iron. She’s like a feral dog, snarling and biting at anything that scares her. It won’t be pretty, but she’ll yield to dominance, until she remembers that she can survive outside of barracks and hard orders; that she’s Leaf; that she’s home.

Kakashi can handle that. He understands her type better than most. He’s been that animal, before.

“Your former students,” Sai says, staring blankly ahead, which Kakashi takes to mean Team 7, “they knew her.”

“True.”

She was supposed to be one of them, he doesn’t say. Every time Time 7 links up for a mission and he watches Hyūga Hinata trying to fill the Sakura-shaped space between her discordant teammates, he finds another reason to feed Danzō his own entrails. When the genin teams were announced, Yamanaka Ino let it slip to her peers in a grief-filled tirade that Haruno was the intended fourth member of Team 7. It’s been unfair to Hinata, the way Naruto and Sasuke took that to heart, but at least they don’t say it out loud. They just look at her when she falters in combat and wonder in ways hard to miss, what if?

He can’t say he isn’t curious how his former genin team will take it, with Sakura and Sai tagging along even just for a team lunch or gentle training bout. Sasuke and Naruto are relatively fresh jōnin, only three years under their belts, with more offensive power and childhood trauma than they know what to do with, but they’ve found a hand-hold in each other, found a way to weather their passing storms. Hinata made chūnin five years ago, and has yet to be nominated for the jōnin exam, having spent most of her time interning at the Hospital under Tsunade and growing something resembling a backbone. From what he can tell, Sai is a tactician: unemotional, object focused, clean, a model shinobi; it’s both his appeal and his biggest red flag.

And Sakura is…

If Sai is to be believed, Sakura is a fucking nightmare with legs and pointy objects. It won’t be easy for her to dial it back a notch, or four-hundred notches, and adjust to village life. Similar to Sai, she’s been on active field duty for eight years straight with minimal contact outside of Root, only she’s lacking the tepid temperament of her counterpart. She’s going to have a meltdown within a month of being back, and it’s going to be violent. Toward herself or others, yet to be determined.

“What will you tell them?” Sai asks.

Swallowing the last remnant of plum previously stuck to his molar, Kakashi slides down the tree to sit in a crouch beside one of his new responsibilities, elbows propped on his knees as he tilts his head up to watch the light play across the shimmering leaves at sunset. “The truth, mostly. You and Sakura were deep undercover. Now you’re back.”

“They will have questions.”

“You’re talkative today,” he prompts, watching a hazel grouse flap its way onto one the branches above them rather brazenly, for a hunted species, disrupting another wave of falling leaves with its arrival.

The other nin is silent for a moment, staring at the soil and mulch between his boots. Sai is perceptive and uncommonly thoughtful, when it comes to his teammate—a trait Kakashi finds reluctantly endearing, even if it prods at old wounds.

“She is not prepared to face them,” he settles on, and Kakashi holds his breath, catches himself doing it, and lets the air out of his lungs. “I think...” Sai closes his hand around the plastic opening of the bag of fruit, lips thinning in displeasure. “Their questions will be inconvenient.”

Well.

“And what about you?” he asks, tone intentionally mild. The grouse shimmies its speckled brown wings, cocking its feathered head and watching them warily. “What will you do, if she finds this new team…inconvenient?”

Sai considers this with a blank face, eyes looking somewhere far away as he loosens his hold on the opening of the bag, fingering one of the plums absently. “Killing them would not be permitted,” he says, matter of fact, and Kakashi does his best not to take it as a threat.

“It would not,” he agrees, and Sai nods absently, picks up a circular piece of plum and flicks it up at the grouse with chakra reinforced fingers.

It is unclear whether he was trying to feed it or kill it, but the dried fruit strikes the side of the grouse’s head with enough force to break its neck, its body falling down from the branches in a tangle of twitching feathers as its nerves fire off at random, landing in a bloodless heap at Sai’s feet, his eyes looking it over with calculating distance.

“It would not,” he says, echoing Kakashi’s words, and the Anbu captain finds himself straining to locate sincerity in his disaffected voice, lest his new recruit turn out to be more trouble than he’s worth.