Black Bough

When Sakura is sixteen years old, she nicks her shin while shaving with shaky hands and a flat razor alone in the barracks showers, being one of only three operatives in her section not currently deployed. It bleeds more than she’d like, staining the grout between the tiles under her bare feet, and she uses a younger operative’s towel to stem the flow, unwilling to ruin her own.

She has just received her first intel-gathering mission scroll coded ‘red-light.’

She hopes the target will not mind the cut.

Sai finds her with her back to the barracks wall, sitting in the lower bunk that used to belong to op F3-26 before she fell behind in Cloud country; Sakura had to double back to slit her throat, spill her life all over her hands and vest with plans to stow her in a body scroll before enemy nin could get their hands on her. She had misty purple eyes and, with her white mask askew, it’s the only time Sakura ever saw her almost-smile.

By now she has changed into loose training shorts and a short sleeved cotton sleep shirt, and Sai is tracing his thumb over the small bandage on her shin with quiet interest. She could scold him for sitting on her stiff mattress before showering or peeling himself out of his fatigues, but even with flakes of dried blood falling on her blanket every time he moves, even with dirt getting under her fingernails when she runs her hand through his dark hair, removing dried leaves and twigs, she does not want him to leave.

“It’s your first red-light,” he says, with detached certainty. He knows her file. He knows everything about her. “You’re unprepared.”

She sucks on her teeth until her gums ache. Her stomach is turning in on itself. She pulls her knees into her chest, his blunt fingernails catching on the bandage as she tries to breathe. Her voice is tight when she speaks, and it feels too loud between the hollow metal bed frames of the barracks at night.

“Did he tell you? About my mission?”

They know who ‘he’ is.

“He did.”

She closes her eyes, tilts her head back to try and further open her airways. Ease the process. “And did he tell you to ‘prepare’ me?”

His silence draws her eyes open and back to his, glass beads in the dark, a subtle crease threatening to form between his eyebrows as he studies her face and the question, struggling to detect the source of her spite. “That bothers you.”

Yes, she thinks, but does not say. 

“Have you,” she starts, and has to take another deep breath, curling her toes into the rough linen sheets, “had a mission like this?”

Sai turns slightly away from her in thought, eyebrows lowering over his eyes, considering, comparing, deciding if it is similar enough to count. “I don’t have the…talent…to make things appear mutual,” he muses, and when his eyes drift back to hers, there is no pain in them. Only distance. “But if I ask for compensation first, they don’t question it.”

Nodding, she raises the inside of her wrist to her teeth, worries the skin, tastes the salt and presses hard against her mouth to curb the urge to be sick. She could probably kill herself, she reasons, by biting out the veins.

“Should I start?” he asks, as he begin to trail his fingers strategically higher on her leg than the bandage, drawing lines she can’t see over her knee, up her thigh, just shy of dipping under the edge of her long shorts; he is purposely building sensation, waking up her senses, but he does not look away from her eyes. It is a practiced, unfeeling gesture, but there is sincerity in his eyes’ voided darkness, she thinks. He is still wearing gloves.

The oxygen in the room thins as he slowly shifts closer to her on the bunk while her knees slide away from her chest, guiding her jaw with his left hand and pulling her in further, until she can taste blood on his breath. He must have bit his cheek while taking a hit, during his last stroll off-base.

She is a fool for asking this here, where every word could be recorded. “Would you touch me,” she asks anyway, so quietly she feels her voice activate more than she hears it, “if it wasn’t an order?”

He hums noncommittally. Less fool than her.

She lets her eyelids flutter closed and parts her lips for his, tightening her hands into fists on the bed. His mouth is warm but overly skilled to the point of professionalism. It is a first for her. She does her best to match his movements, to follow his lead, but her chest feels like it will burst, and she can’t stop the anxiety from manifesting itself in her throat; in the words that are beginning to spill from her lips.

“Can we pretend you’re my mission?” she asks, nearly inaudible against his mouth, and his responding inhale is slow and impacted, his left hand twitching minutely against the skin of her jaw. “That this mission ends with you?”

It is the closest she has ever come to saying she doesn't want to complete a mission. It is the most insubordinate she has ever been. He does not acknowledge what she suspects he understands, but she knows he hears her defiance, because he covers her mouth with one hand and signs for silence with his other, pressing two fingers to his lips.

He removes his gloves, after that. His grip is firmer, less perfunctory, without the additional layer.

‘What am I feeling?’ she signs, when his orders are nearly fulfilled.

His black pupils are blown wide in the shadow of the bunk. He draws lines into the skin over her ribs while he thinks, before he signs back: ‘Me.’

When all that is left of him is the forest’s detritus that fell off his clothes, she is glad for the fact her bandage peeled off on its own, staining the moth-hole-ridden, yellowing sheets crimson in small places only she will see. She can still feel him in the sweat on her skin, does not think she will ever stop, and so she leaves the dirt and leaves and hairline twigs in the bed and crawls between the bedsheets with them.

By the time she departs, she finds that someone has stripped the bed.

A week passes slowly.

She has only just passed the sensors guarding the compound when Sai finds her again. He’s waiting above ground. She pretends not to notice him, continuing to trudge up the mulch-covered path toward the training ground instead of toward the entrance to the bunker where she’s meant to debrief. Sai keeps pace with her up in the trees. She has tried rigorously to scrub the mission from her skin, but she finds herself self-consciously sniffing the collar of the black fatigues she changed into before traveling, her pulse louder in her ears than the sparrows hiding among the leaves.

When they are far enough from prying ears for him to drop down from the towering branches, he displaces fallen leaves and acorns and makes enough noise to alert her to the fact something is wrong. His posture is off, his muscles tense, but she can’t see any blood seeping through his black long-sleeved shirt or his gray utility pants. There are charcoal shadows under his eyes and his skin bears an unhealthy pallor even for him.

“Were you successful?” he asks first, to which she nods once, sharp, and feels acid activating in her empty stomach, having thrown up her breakfast of dry granola squares and solder pills on her way back to the compound.

His expression loses its blank architecture with a flinch in the muscles above his brows, like there’s a dent in the supporting beams, something heavy bearing down on the structure, threatening to collapse it.

“Give me your hand,” he says, pulling a thin needle from the white holster on his thigh, along with a small glass bottle with a black liquid shining like oil inside, holding the needle between his index and middle fingers and the black substance between his middle and ring fingers.

She is following instructions before it’s a conscious decision, stepping over twigs that snap beneath her boots and extending her hand as he tugs the black glove from his left hand with his teeth.

“New chakra ink?” she asks, gesturing with her chin toward the intriguing little bottle in his hand, and he lets his glove fall from his teeth into the dirt, holding his left hand up with his palm facing out.

She gasps at the black lines of ink woven over the skin, contained within a thick black circle like the walls of a hidden village. It’s chakra she senses, hidden in the lines. It is against the rules, to mark your body. It is not your body to mark. This is why his movements are stiff, she realizes, he’s been punished, and feels a wave of fear overtake her confusion because—

“Why?” The word is choked, and his black eyes are unperturbed. “What is that?”

He tilts his head three degrees to the right, and looks almost pleased when he says:

“A solution.”

When she debriefs, she does so with an uncovered hand, pulsing with radiant pain from the needle. Danzō has her back shredded by chakra whip and partially healed, but she never sees a ‘red-light’ mission scroll again, the growing collection of seals and scars on her body too conspicuous to hide. 

…

The walls surrounding Konoha are hollow.

There are only stairs and narrow, suspended metal catwalks on the inside, bisecting the twenty-foot thick barrier of cement and sandstone, but Sakura is shocked enough by the revelation to still be thinking about it forty minutes later from her perch on top of the steel guard rail that surrounds each of the sentry houses dotting the miles of fortification, currently overlooking the edge of the wide crescent wall where it locks the village into the colossal cliffs of Hokage Rock like a handcuff.

There are no lights on the wall, a tactical decision that keeps the figures patrolling the top of it relatively hidden from eyes on the ground. Sakura agrees with this decision. The light from the moon is typically bright and inconvenient enough on its own, especially when it bounces off the white ceramic of her and Sai’s masks when traveling at night, requiring them to direct small amounts of chakra over the surface to absorb light and reduce reflection. 

Not that she has to worry about the white paint of her mask, right now.

She isn’t permitted to wear her Anbu kit during her probation—and Hound is quick to explain that not all of her missions will be Anbu, that one can be a part of Anbu and still show their face on unrelated missions, and isn’t that a strange thought—but when her unease doesn’t abate Hound lends her a black fabric mask to pull up over the bridge of her nose, which is an unnecessary kindness she both appreciates and suspects ulterior motives for.

With her seals hidden under the long sleeves of her jōnin uniform, only her unfortunate green eyes and pink hair, pulled back in a hair tie at her nape, are left to distinguish her by. It’s not ideal, but it’s familiar enough.

She rests her elbows on her knees as she crouches, balancing on the metal bar beneath her boots, staring down a distance of several stories at the specks of shinobi stationed outside the wall below. She can sense Sai looping back from his patrol. He’ll be coming into view from the left, soon enough.

“I think the point of the guardrail is to stand behind it,” one of her Anbu escorts says, coming to stand a good meter to her left. A glance confirms it is the one with a red and white tanuki mask who spoke; she recognizes his chin-length brown hair, the red swirl on the forehead, and the red lines scoring the sides. ‘Lieutenant,’ the others call this one. They call Hound, ‘Captain,’ even out of his fox mask.

Root did not have stable ranks. You were leading the mission, you were following the mission leader, or you were dead. There were no alternative positions, and you didn’t get to take your authority with you when you funneled back into the barracks. Not to say there wasn’t an unspoken hierarchy. There were plenty of operatives who held their breath when Sakura walked past them, just as Sakura was sure to go still and silent when anyone with a zero in their name entered her line of sight, with one notable exception.

Hound is in standard black jōnin kit under his green vest tonight, red spirals embroidered on the shoulders, as he places himself strategically between her and the tanuki currently whittling away at her patience, resting his exposed forearms on the railing, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, his fingerless-gloved hands hanging limply from his wrists over the steep drop. She makes note of the scars she can see, thin and clean like the one on her cheek. She would comment on the wisdom of deflecting knives with his forearms, but he could just as easily pontificate on deflecting them with her face, so she keeps her sarcasm to herself.

“Let the youth take risks,” Hound says, making the tanuki scoff.

She feeds chakra into her eyes and watches the dark tree line below them, instead, unflinching as another gust of wind rolls over the walls and flutters her fatigues where the fabric is loose, the cool weather far stronger up at the top than down below.

“You sound like an old man,” the tanuki says, as metal flashes in her peripheral vision, the Anbu lieutenant twirling a senbon between his middle and index fingers, moonlight gliding down the thin needle with every rotation like water. If there were enemy nin looking for target practice tonight, his little light show would make him the perfect pin cushion. “And don’t let your ‘rival’ catch you talking about youthfulness, you hear?”

“If he tries to hug me and breaks all of my ribs at once, I could retire early,” Hound says, dry, and Sakura clicks her tongue against her teeth, the sound even quieter behind her fabric mask. Shinobi don’t retire. They expire. And they certainly don’t do it in their mid-twenties.

One of the chūnin guarding the ground level keeps pacing slowly back and forth instead of standing at attention with the others, wearing a line in the dirt. Sakura has seen her yawn three times in five minutes. It makes her want to wake her up, maybe drop a kunai off the wall directly in her path, let gravity decide how hard and deep it cuts her, if she’s too drowsy to dodge.

She’s not the only nin slacking off, this evening.

A few yards away, near the door to the wooden sentry house, a cluster of chūnin are smoking an unfamiliar brand of cigarettes that poisons the air, thoughtlessly blocking one of their senses as the red embers burning at the ends of their fingers light up and fade with every pull, like the spinning bulbs of lighthouses she’s seen in Wave, glowing and shrinking every time the light rotates out of view. Off-duty operatives were allowed to smoke in Root, but they had to report to the med bay after and get their lungs cleared every time. Sakura tired of it quickly.

“You’ll be forty before they let you do anything less than A-ranks,” the tanuki says, with an airy quality of voice that grates against her skull, flicking the senbon around his fingers.

The tanuki is dexterous. A bukijutsu specialist, most likely. She wonders if she could sever his hand at the wrist faster than he could make use of that senbon. His confidence must come from somewhere. Hound wouldn’t let him get so close if he didn’t think he could react appropriately should Sakura decide to test his reflexes. But he feels more like prey than an equal. So, tokubetsu jōnin, she reasons. Exceptional at something, but not so skilled at too much else.

He’s still talking, she notes distantly, not bothering to focus on his benign chatter. He’s making a lot of noise, for a shinobi on duty. Maybe she should hold his tongue for him. Hound is being too soft on his subordinate. Sakura doesn’t mind playing the heavy, doling out punishment for the betterment of the whole.

Maybe if an Anbu lieutenant’s body falls in front of that chūnin on the ground level, these soft nin will feel more motivated to mind their surroundings.

Hound shifts his weight, subtly edging closer to where she’s squatting on the railing, but the tanuki seems unconcerned with the sudden change in the Anbu captain’s attention, altogether too lax. It bothers her, his attitude. But he’s the first of their escorts aside from Hound to creep out of the darkness and interact with her, and that makes him interesting, if reckless. She senses the other Anbu in the shadows shifting their weight, preparing to intervene.

“Careful with that,” the tanuki says, and stops fiddling with his senbon to hold it loosely between his fingers, leaning forward over the railing to see around Hound, his white and red mask angled toward her as he looks her over. “You’ll give a guy the wrong idea.”

Sakura hums noncommittally, Hound’s hand a warning pressure on her mid-back through her shirt, and she reluctantly dials back the killing intent she intentionally let slip while the tanuki was talking. Hound removes his hand from her back with equal reluctance, clearly unconvinced.

She catches sight of Sai, slowing into a walk on the stone lip of the wall a hundred yards to the left of the sentry house. Sakura holds up a hand as she stands up on the guardrail to her full, unimpressive height—a compact five feet and four inches that almost never gains her superior reach during a fight—drawing his eyes to her if he wasn’t looking already.

He’s foregone his uniform for black utility pants and a standard issue long-sleeve shirt under a dark blue tactical vest, but the nondescript attire doesn’t do much to curb his intensity. Sai has Root running through his veins, and it sets him apart in both quiet and blaring ways. Unless he is actively disguising his movements, the way he carries his body demonstrates more fine-tuned control and ease in his pinky finger than most nin see in their lifetime.

She maintains an even flow of chakra to her eyesight as Sai signs in Basic, walking toward her at a leisurely pace. ‘Status—Report,’ he prompts.

She signs back, ‘Status—Quiet,’ referring to lack of hostile activity in the area. And then, after a thought, she makes the sign for a barking dog with her hand out of Hound’s view and nods, shallow and subtle, toward the tanuki, knowing he’ll get the message: noisy mutt.

Her breath catches at the faint lines of amusement around his eyes, the right corner of his mouth twitching in the barest of micro-expressions she would have missed if she’d not been enhancing her vision. As always, Sai is quick with a solution, switching to Standard: ‘Run a lap with me.’

Turning to meet Hound’s eye, the Anbu captain having been diligently following their silent conversation, she bends her knees and braces her right hand on the railing before swinging silently down to stand beside her acting superior, cocking her head in question.

“Go,” Hound says, and then, “I’ll catch up.”

Sakura does not need to be told twice.

…

“I thought you said she was in a good mood?”

Kakashi has the irrational urge to gloat, side-eyeing Genma’s perturbed expression, the Anbu lieutenant having pushed his tanuki mask up onto the side of his head the second Sakura was out of eyeline, now worrying his senbon between his teeth like a sprig of hay. Kakashi busies himself stretching out his arms, shaking tension from his legs one at a time, getting ready to run. The two jōnin he’s about to chase are already hundreds of yards down the length of the wall.

“She is,” he says, charitably, before vaulting over the top of the rail.

May as well get some wall-walking in while he’s playing round-up.

…

At age twenty-one, roughly four years after being charged with the care and development of Team 7, watching from the corner of his uncovered eye as a streak of orange jumpsuit blocks a series of what would have been clean hits on behalf of a panting, bedraggled Hinata, giving her time to dig the balls of her feet into the sand and dart the edge of the clearing, Kakashi is aware he has not bonded with his students the way other genin instructors have.

He is not the fatherly figure Sarutobi Asuma is to Team 10, nor the larger than life role model with a booming laugh Maito Gai is to—actually, maybe he’s only that to Rock Lee.

The point Kakashi is making is that he is not a natural mentor.

His own unofficial mentor, while more impactful than his indifferent genin leader Ishikemuri (also deceased), was in his life almost comically briefly before sacrificing himself for Konoha and sealing the Kyūbi inside his infant son, which is—well. It’s many things. Conducive to being a present mentor, it is not.

Tilting his head to the left, letting a deflected shuriken whiff past his right ear and embed in the bark of the tree behind him, causing a resident squirrel to chirp in alarm, Kakashi admits he had no business dealing with genin, having barely ever been one himself.

He graduated from the academy at the top of his class at five years old, only a year after starting, and made chūnin easily the year after that. By the time he was the age the kids on his genin team were when they were dropped in his lap, he was mere months from having one of his teammates’ Sharingan shoved into his bleeding eye socket and his Chidori shoved through the chest of the one that was left, lightning-chakra cooking her from the inside out. Sure, she practically kabab’ed herself on his arm with no regard for how he might feel about it, but it was still his fist, and it still smelled fucking awful. He couldn’t eat barbecue for a year, and he occasionally wakes to the sounds of birds chirping and sees his arm steeped in blood up to the elbow, pieces of charred flesh stuck to his skin.

Kakashi did not even consider Rin and Obito team at the time, thinking of them mostly as dead weight, until they eventually embodied the metaphor and he was forced to acknowledge the twinge of discomfort their deaths left behind, like a splinter stuck under the nail that didn’t hurt until he knew it was there.

The closest thing Kakashi ever had to a peer, a tentative bond he formed during his first year in Anbu, succumbed to Root’s insidious machinations, murdered his entire clan, and fucked off to Akatsuki, leaving behind his little brother who is somehow now Kakashi’s responsibility, along with his dead mentor’s pariah son and a disinherited Hyūga who (wisely, he would add) just wants to take care of her friends and stay alive.

So no, Kakashi has not bonded with Team 7 the way the previous Hokage would have hoped. 

But Kakashi never anticipated accomplishing more than keeping the runts alive long enough to get their legs under them. His success facilitating peace between Sasuke and Naruto’s divergent personalities was mostly luck, his spiel of ‘you are both completely alone and nobody likes you but if you squint you might learn to like each other’ delivering better results than is probably healthy.

His pep talks to Hinata have been slightly less fruitful. 

The boys, he can send into a fight with a slap on the back and a ‘Win or I’ll break your legs,’ to which Naruto reliably explains why telling them to ‘break a leg’ and actually threatening to break their legs are ‘totally different things.’ 

With Hinata, he has to schedule separate training one-on-one where they focus mostly on dodging and running for her life while reciting the mantra, ‘If it gets too dangerous, I will run away and retire as a medic,’ so Kakashi can sleep at night knowing she will eventually be dragged into the same C- and B-rank missions as her combat-hungry teammates who think they’re in fighting shape just because they made chūnin before age fifteen, which is so unimpressive it makes him want to cover his mask with another mask and pretend he doesn’t know them. At least Hinata is humble, even if she is being stubborn. Kakashi has had no luck convincing her to study at the hospital full time. She wants to be in the field to heal her teammates. She gets a hard look in her foggy white eyes when he pushes the issue. So. More evasion drills it is.

And if the other instructors find it strange that the Hyūga on his team often stumbles out of the training grounds by herself, looking like she might die, smelling like a pack of dogs and covered in paint pellets, so be it. Soon she’ll be dodging like a tokubetsu jōnin and they’ll be buying him drinks to find out how he did it.

All this is to say he was well prepared for the sideways looks he receives from the other genin instructors, like the one Yūhi Kurenai, jōnin-leader of Team 8, is giving him from the sandy edge of training ground seventeen with a beige shawl draped over her shoulders like the wings of a crane. 

She’s glaring haughtily at the large-print paperback in his hand titled How to Manage Disappointment he’s taken to bringing to Team 7 training sessions, as Kakashi pretends to read under the spindly branches of an oak tree, letting his pups kick the shit out of hers without comment, only glancing up to meet her uniquely red-and-useless eyes—as opposed to the Uchiha red-and-ominous variety—and squint his right eye in a smile he doesn’t feel but he hopes communicates: “Would you look at that, I’ve directed their collective trauma into a rotating triangle attack formation. Hope your team doesn’t die.”

The squirrel scrambling along the branch above his head, balking at his persisting existence under this particular tree, lets out another shrill churl of protest, having accidentally dropped an acorn too close to Kakashi for it to comfortably retrieve.

Kurenai narrows her eyes, thick black hair loose around her shoulders, and flips him off.

He was prepared for this.

What he was not prepared for when he became a genin instructor, he thinks, reaching behind his head and plucking the shuriken from the bark, reinforcing his fingers with chakra and flicking it back into fray—resulting in Naruto crying out, “interference,” with gusto—was the unique experience of having failed one of his students before he’d even been formally introduced.

He was not prepared for a fifteen-year-old boy with black marbles for eyes wearing a uniform that isn’t supposed to exist anymore to pop up like a panic attack during an Anbu mission in Grass country six months ago, coughing asthmatically from testing the bounds of a cursed seal on his tongue as he told him in so many words that he needed to deliver a message to the Hokage regarding a member of the council, a conversation that, after a few months of following up on the strange boy’s claims, culminated in the revelation that Haruno Sakura is alive.

It had been a whim, when Kakashi showed him the photo of Sakura he’s kept on him during away missions, one he shows civilian strangers, asks around with when he gets the chance.

He had not expected the boy’s pupils to widen, his body to tense, his focus to sharpen. He had not expected to be studied with renewed suspicion, to be told the girl in the photo has nightmares that end with a fox in the rain and be asked why, exactly, that is, with an intensity that promised attempted assassination if the answer was unsatisfactory.

Haruno Sakura is alive, but she is moving fast toward a bad end, the village having left the girl grieving and isolated to the point she was snapped up into the rotting jaws of Root, Kakashi taking too long to reach for her, his fingertips grazing the metaphorical back of her shirt as she slipped out of range.

She is sinking deeper and deeper into the foundation beneath this village, and Kakashi is not permitted to pull her out.

And now he has to sit quietly, letting his eyes glaze over the words on the page of a book he refuses to actually read on principle unless it’s out loud while Team 7 runs drills, meanwhile knowing one of his would-be-team is deep in enemy territory having her humanity stripped away like fat off of bacon and she doesn’t even know she has someone on the outside counting on her to make it out alive.

And maybe Kakashi hasn’t bonded conventionally to the talentless, fumbling teenagers with unfair genetic advantages currently attempting to fry a swarm of surprisingly diverse bugs with mid-level fire jutsu without accidentally melting each others’ faces, but he already has more in common with the unofficial fifth member of Team 7 than he would wish on any of them.

Without looking up from the page, he picks up one of the acorns nestled between the rusty brown leaves drying in the soil next to his thigh, feeling the ridges of its hard shell with his thumbnail, and tosses it a few meters to his right, giving the tree-rat room to harvest.

If he gets the chance, if he gets within arm’s reach, he decides, snapping How to Manage Disappointment shut as he senses the scuffle in the clearing coming to a close, he will not let his grip slip again.

He turns his faux-smiling eye to where Sasuke, two tomoe spinning—fury-flushed face, sweat-dampened t-shirt and singed blue training pants all equally smeared with dirt and roasted cicada—stops his kunai centimeters from the cracked lens of Aburame Shino’s goggles, holding the poor kid by the high collar of his green flak jacket, and glances at Kakashi for confirmation.

Kakashi gives him a ‘thumbs up,’ and Sasuke drops him in the dirt.

…

Sakura is not an impressive elemental ninjutsu user on paper. Not particularly. Not where she's from.

She has a documented affinity for water and earth jutsu, and it is known she can manage modestly with fire, but she doesn’t have the cavernous chakra reserves for ninjutsu with high chakra-consumption rates. She cannot carelessly crowd a room with forbidden shadow clones or stand around siphoning chakra into an indefinite water prison for hours on end. She can’t flood a sprawling desert battleground with Raging River Force without needing to be slung over Sai’s shoulder and carried back to base. She can pull off a good Earth Release, sure; can bury someone alive or conjure a swamp of the underworld, but she can’t do it five times in a row and still have enough chakra left to stay standing.

But on a smaller scale, say, contained to the human body, Sakura borders on uncounterable.

She can break down water to its basic elements and introduce pockets of air into an opponent’s bloodstream. She can suck the moisture from an enemy’s eyes, blinding them long enough to land an attack. With enough focus, she can deoxygenate blood, turn it paramagnetic and collapse an enemy with a clogged artery when she brings a magnet close to their veins. If she can connect to an opponent’s chakra—and that is a big if, if her opponent is wise to her tricks—Sakura has experimented enough with her savant-like control and sordid techniques to make Orochimaru blush.

That's without even mentioning the other, tentative ways she's learned to play with yin and yang, cautious in her unguided exploration of such volatile jutsu.

Most of the more interesting things Sakura knows how to do are things she taught herself in secret, few of them are known to anyone but two currently living shinobi, and none are conducive to the type of classroom environment Hound is describing.

“You won’t be participating,” Hound assures, ushering her toward a large patch of shade at the edge of the grassy clearing, blades of vibrant green bending with the breeze. She spots a few small purple flowers beginning to bud, hidden in the weeds. It’s been three weeks since Sai knocked her out and dragged her over the border between Iron and Fire country, and spring is vying for an early appearance, fighting back against the lingering cold. “We’re just going to watch.”

A surreptitious look to her right reveals Sai treading soundlessly beside her, even sunlight unable to warm his stark features, not even the faintest edge of brown in his short black hair. Sensing her gaze, his eyes leisurely find hers, but there is no question in his black irises. He hikes the strap of his gray rucksack higher on his shoulder, and looks away.

Settling against the roots of the tree, holding her left knee to her chest, her right leg bent and tucked beneath her left, Sakura traces the edge of the black bandages binding her lower leg over her black utility pants. She’s begun wearing elements of the Anbu uniform Kakashi had issued for her in silent protest of continuous shifts guarding the walls. With the black pants, black long-sleeved shirt under her gray tactical vest, and an arsenal of knives, kunai and shuriken holstered on her arms, legs, chest, and hips, only half of which are concealed, she presents as far from a civilian profile as possible. It’s a deterrent, she’s found. More eyes follow her when she makes her cautious daily stroll into town with Hound at her back, her black mask pulled high over her nose, but they give her space. Lots of it.

With their chakra signatures suppressed and their presences hidden behind an area-effect genjutsu of squirrels roughhousing around the trunk of their tree Hound was kind enough to construct, they are gently hidden from perception. She saw the moment when Hound considered asking her to do it, given her known affinity for genjutsu, before thinking better of bestowing that level of trust on her just yet.

A consistent miscalculation on his part, this desire to trust her. One she will graciously entertain in hopes he makes a similar mistake when it most benefits her.

Sakura watches the odd group filtering into the clearing from the opposite side. At the front of the group is an adult, a man with a brown, spiky ponytail and a thick scar stretching from one cheek to the other, curving over the bridge of his nose, walking backwards while explaining the basics of chakra control to the twelve children trailing after him, ages somewhere between seven to nine years old.

The sight is…uncomfortable. She tries to soothe the feeling by leaning further into Sai’s right side where he’s squatting beside her, and he seems to recognize her discomfort, placing a gloved hand on her knee—a learned behavior, from years of his experimenting with ways to keep her calm.

‘What are they doing?’ she signs in Standard, glancing away from the scene only long enough to confirm Hound caught the movement of her hands. 

He’s standing to her right, leaning back on the trunk with his ankles and arms crossed. Unintentional, on her part, the fact they are in nearly identical kit, minus the tantō holstered behind her right shoulder blade and the fact he has what looks like an orange book strapped to his right thigh. It looks worn around the cover, but he has yet to read it in front of her. He doesn’t look her way, eyes fixed to the man in the clearing, but she is confident he can carry a conversation with his peripheral vision.

‘Learning,’ he signs.

Sakura resettles her eyes on the clearing, taking in the fumbling attempts of the children to fill fallen leaves with their unrefined chakra. They’re like civilians. They’re loud and emotionally fickle. Every success is cause for joy, bright smiles and high-pitched celebration. Every failure is a frustration, eyebrows furrowing on small faces, lips pressing into bloodless white lines. No one is afraid. When one accidentally tears their leaf in half and needs to ask for a new one, there are no consequences. The man gives them a new leaf.

She studies him closer.

The man is wearing soft cotton robes tied at the waist over faded green pants, and there are tan lines on his feet where the straps of his sandals lift when he steps around the seated children, giving small bits of advice as he goes. That scar looks familiar.

She feels suddenly ill.

‘Who is he?’ she signs, afraid to be overheard by the man with kind eyes she wants to look away from.

Hound hesitates. Sai leans forward, putting his weight on his toes in his crouch, pausing in his lazy drawing of seals in the dirt with his finger, and watches Hound for the answer, reluctantly curious.

‘Your teacher,’ he signs back, eventually, and Sakura doesn’t understand. She shakes her head, communicating her confusion. Hound tries again, but his visible eye is a narrow glint of steel, no emotion interrupting his focus on her. ‘Do you remember him?’

Sakura slowly drags her eyes back to the man in the clearing. His teeth are less jarringly white than hers and Sai’s when he laughs, having kept to less of an intensive care routine over the years than the rigorous health screening of Root. Maybe he drinks that bitter brown liquid called coffee Hound has been trying to muster interest in, going on long anecdotal tangents about how the beans are harvested and roasted until she attempts to shut him up with an elbow to the solar plexus. Hound did say it leaves a stain.

The man remains a stranger.

For the first time in years, her lack of remembrance begins to chafe.

…

Before opening his eyes, Kakashi tastes the woods pressing down on his mask, feels the chill of the low-lying breeze crawling up onto the porch of the Hatake main house, and knows two things.

One: he slept outside again.

Two: he must lie very still, or Sakura might try to slit his throat.

He opens his uncovered right eye slowly, trying not to breathe too deeply, and attempts to get his bearings, wrangle the adrenaline surging in his bloodstream; tries to think like a man and not an animal; tries to remind himself she is a girl, not a monster, despite the insistent thought in the back of his mind that it should not be possible for someone to get their hands and knees on either side of him without waking him up.

Her mossy eyes are wide and focused, a wildcat winding up in the grass. Gravity loosens pink strands of hair to fall down past her face, framing her blank expression, partially covering the white line of scarring on her jaw and cheek. The white bandages binding her chest appear creased from an attempt at sleep, her jōnin black pants tied loosely at her hips. The muscles in her arms shift beneath Sai’s seals as she tenses her forearms beside his head.

“Do we need to have a talk?” he asks, eventually, slowly sliding his right hand closer to the kunai he keeps under the futon by his hips, careful not to brush her knee with his hand. Her eyes snap to the movement for less than a second, but it’s enough to still his hand.

The grass extending out from where the wooden deck ends to his right is weighed down by a layer of morning frost, the night's last grasping hold on nature as the sun begins its ascent into the sky. The wooden cottage-shaped hummingbird feeder he hung on the lattice marking the beginning of the garden is working, he notes, a few flashes of purple and teal hovering around the wooden archway.

Sakura looks stricken, he decides, and he flattens his palm against the futon, deciding against the kunai.

“Walk me through it, kid.”

“You’re six years older,” she says, unmoved, “not sixteen.”

“But I’m far more worldly.”

“I’ve been to every territory on this continent.”

“You’d never seen a pomegranate,” he says, and watches the muscles near her jaw twitch. 

“I want to meet the others,” she says, and Kakashi isn’t fooled by the steel behind the words. Her chakra is erratic, like a puddle of water trying to stay smooth in the rain.

He lets the air out of his lungs slowly, heating the inside of his mask, and focuses on the hard plane of wood beneath the futon at his back instead of on the tension building in his limbs the longer he chews on the words she just said. He would like to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it’s difficult when she’s chosen to interrogate him on his back before the sun has fully broken the night.

“You didn’t seem to like my team much, back in Iron,” he deflects, and her eyes flash with something volatile that makes his heart try to pump a little harder.

A better man would feel conflicted, offering up Team Ro as bait to redirect her general bloodlust away from his former students, who, last he checked, can barely hold their own hands while crossing the street. Kakashi is comfortable with the trade.

He stays perfectly still as she lowers her uncovered face, hyper aware of how any movement he makes could be interpreted as aggression, and he cannot be communicating anything until he understands what exactly is going on in her institutionally fried brain.

“Not them,” she says, and it must have been a bad night for her, he thinks it’s safe to say, red veins clustering the corners of her eyes from lack of sleep. She smells like his family lands, like fresh bark and charcoal fires and crushed pines, as she aligns her lips to his ear above the mask until he can feel the damp heat of her breath ghost his skin—a threatening demonstration, he understands, putting her teeth so close to his ear when he’s already seen her bite one off. “I want to meet the ones you’re hiding.” And then, because she is smarter than she looks, “The ones who knew me. The ones you’re protecting.”

She’s prodding him for weaknesses. How disheartening.

She has spent the last eight years being systematically reshaped in the shadow of Konohagakure, he reminds himself. She adapted to survive. She has spent more time tangled in the gnarled roots beneath the tree than she’s spent admiring the leaves. She’s forgotten empathy. She doesn’t know it’s impolite to poke allies with a metaphorical stick to find where it hurts so she knows where to apply pressure. He’s not sure she understands he’s an ally, at all. But she’s trying to use her words, he’ll give her that.

“You will meet them,” he says, keeping his voice steady, “when you get your shit together.”

At his declaration, she draws back far enough to look into his right eye. For a moment, he sees past her restrained violence, sees the small girl in the rain, covered in mud, glassy-eyed, body caving under her own weight at the first sign of rescue, and it redirects his anger.

Itachi had that same look in his eyes, near the end.

Kakashi is going to hunt Danzō down like a dog. He’s going to hogtie him like an animal, block his airway with his own shriveled testicles and roll him face-down in a ravine. But first, he’s going to purge the lingering adrenaline of an anticipated attack in a controlled exhale.

He needs to deescalate her. Disrupt this line of questioning.

He takes a calculated risk.

He moves with less caution now, lifting his left hand to press into the chilled hair on the back of her head, soft like goose down, and guides her face down to the cleft between his left shoulder and neck where his pulse pumps the strongest, her nose cold against the sliver of exposed skin at the base of his neck. She goes stiffly, but she goes, tentatively resting her body against his left side, muscles tense, posture rigid. He’s heard the sound of a pulse can be instinctively calming. He hopes it’s true. He wouldn’t know. People tend to keep their vitals covered around him. The last time he purposely felt someone else’s heartbeat, it was to check if it’d stopped.

It had.

“I know you’re bored,” he understates, exhaustion lacing the words. Off to their right, near the garden, a hummingbird zips away from the wooden feeder, spooked by the way it swings with the breeze. And then, the secondary crux of the issue: “It’s been less than a month since the collapse of Root. The Hokage will give you a better mission once the dust clears.”

“She doesn’t trust me.”

“She will. Eventually. But you’ll earn that trust slowly.”

She hums skeptically, but her weight is settling more firmly against him, less poised to maim. It’s warm, where she lays against his side, the moment surprisingly easy between them, her bloodlust fading away with the breeze, and he knows he made the right decision.

“Will we walk the walls, today?” Her voice is unaffected, but Kakashi senses the eager undertone that urged the words out of her.

“Yes.”

“With Sai?”

“If you’d like.”

She would. He knows.

It makes him nervous, the way her and Sai’s eyes track each other in a room; the way their body language syncs when they’re within a hundred feet of one another, like proximity triggers muscle memory. They are the last standing fragments of a foundation only they crawled out of the rubble from. He understands a certain level of codependency is inevitable. What Kakashi struggles to tolerate is how Sakura’s entire focus shifts the moment Sai enters a room, like she’s awaiting orders, an instinctive deference to her handler of eight years. It will take time for that dynamic to shift. For her loyalty to broaden beyond her unquestioning support of Sai’s allegiance of convenience.

He will need to work on cultivating real loyalty to the Leaf in Sai, something less fickle.

For now, Kakashi will focus on cultivating trust within Sakura.

It’s not a replacement for an experience-based rapport, but as a short-term solution, using physical affection to stimulate oxytocin and increase a target’s attachment is a tried and true trust-building tactic. He is unsure of what types of conditioning she underwent in Root, and it could backfire if she recognizes it for what it is, but if it prevents her from massacring his village, there is very little Kakashi is above doing. He’s done far more questionable things than ‘cuddle’ in the name of Konoha.

She hums again in thought, but it’s a slightly softer sound than before; she’s beginning to relax. Kakashi tests his luck by brushing his fingers through her hair, noting the way her back muscles twitch at the touch as he skips over small knots, careful to soothe, not agitate. Eventually, she uncoils her muscles, accepting his ministrations as non-hostile.

He can’t remember the last time he tried to pet someone to sleep. He’s not sure he ever has.

He might have, if she’d been on his team from the start. Might have let her take naps in the grass while he read awful discount self-help books out loud as her teammates ran laps for general insubordination. It would have been so much easier to train her than Hinata, who he sees more of Rin in every day; than Naruto, whose face transposes Kakashi’s vague recollections of Minato with each passing season; than Sasuke, who shares Obito’s ancestors and none of his more redeeming qualities, too much of his brother in him. Kakashi can barely look him in the eyes without feeling Itachi’s firm grip on his shoulder.

The bird feeder continues to swing, three hummingbirds zig-zagging in a four-foot radius around it, closer, away, closer, and away. The sun is cresting over the horizon. Soon it will melt the frost on the grass, leaving behind drops of dew that cling to the blades.

“How do you feel about jigsaw puzzles?” he asks, and receives only baffled silence. She’ll have to try it, then, he thinks.

Glancing toward the garden once more, he determines the hummingbirds are too tentative in their endeavor for food. He’ll have to secure the birdhouse with a secondary line to keep it from swaying. Just when he has the thought, a streak of blue breaks up the cluster of vibrating wings, a large blue jay bullying its way in, bright wings flexing violently, the house swinging more from its aggressive clinging to the side than it ever was from the morning breeze.

…

In the end, Hound does not get to choose.

It rained most of the day, while Sakura sat cross-legged at Hound’s low wood table under his leaky roof, watching condensation form on the outside of a sage green teapot, listening to the steady drum of water saturating the earth in preparation for a thick layer of radiant fog to form now that it’s stopped, starting along the forest floor and soon climbing up the walls of the village, the air sucking up remnants of the sun’s heat into itself, leaving the ground cold and lacking.

Sakura can taste the mist through the fabric of her mask as she leaps from branch to branch, working up a bone-chill as it penetrates her clothes, feeling like a black and gray smear on the landscape, chakra reaching out from every surface near enough to touch, trying to graze her skin, connect to the life thrumming through her body, subsume her back into the natural world.

It is always like this for her, in the fog. The dense moisture in the air disperses fine particulates of her chakra farther and deeper than she ever could on her own. It seeps into the soil, letting her feel the places where foreign chakra presses into the ground to cushion a footstep; it rolls off the backs of beetles burrowing into the dirt; it eases into the lungs of her teammate as he keeps pace easily behind her despite the impenetrable fog, less because of the chakra she can feel he’s pushing into his eyes and more because he can read her body, anticipate her movements, and because he trusts her implicitly enough to follow her lead blind through the interlocking angles and branches between trees.

As she and Sai see it, it is not a water sensor technique at its core, but something else entirely, something unique, like a yin technique spliced with water jutsu—Sai has always insisted the intuitive way Sakura studies and dissects the world is related to yin—though, keeping her partially tapped affinities for yin and yang releases secret from all but Sai has not allowed for much open access to research materials. Sai’s bloodline technique with his chakra ink is something of a yang jutsu, and so he was able to pass some reading materials on to her in secret under the cover of them being for his own use, but Hound is much more attentive in his observation of her than even Root managed to be. 

She can’t let her guard down around the Leaf any more than she could around Root. It’d be best to pass off most of her talents as less…prolific elemental ninjutsu.

And so, she’ll leave her uncanny talent for sensing as vague as possible, if Hound happens to ask. It’s a sensor technique of her own invention, an overwhelming wave of sensation that took years of experimentation to refine. At age thirteen, this technique rolled her eyes back into her head, taking her out of the field for a week. But at nineteen, she can safely feel hundreds of heartbeats in the forest at once, including the birds tucked into their nests, avoiding flight in the fog, flapping their wings in warning when she cuts her path too close to their swaddle of branches; to where they’re keeping their young warm under-feather.

For once, Hound wasn’t quick enough. He followed her off the wall into the woods, but he quickly lost her visual, lost her scent, lost her chakra signature, no doubt confused by the way it has permeated the fog blanketing the forest, disorienting in its illusion of omnipotence. Sai, however, has much more practice at keeping up, and Hound won’t panic, yet, knowing her less volatile counterpart is on her heels.

Hound said she could run the trees. He didn’t say she had to do it with him.

A blur of blue and black obscures her vision as Sai shunshins in front of her when she touches down on the next branch, caging her loosely against the large trunk of the ancient oak they’re standing in. Enough moisture has gathered on the steel plate of his forehead protector for a drop of water to begin slipping down the engraved lines of the leaf. Sakura wipes it clear with her thumb, dampening the black fabric of her gloves. They haven’t given her a leaf, yet. She’s still deciding if she wants it; still deciding if it wouldn’t be better to spirit Sai away, become missing nin, keep him for herself.

“He’ll trust you less if you evade him,” Sai warns, gauging her eyes.

She pinches the edge of her mask and peels it down around her neck, letting him see her teeth flash in the encroaching darkness of dusk when she smiles briefly. She lowers her other hand to his cheek as she withdraws her chakra, letting it disperse slowly, shrinking from its farthest reach—near the edge of the cliffside—to her immediate three mile radius near Konoha’s second largest gate. Hound will be able to find her easily, now.

In response to her lack of remorse, he adds a stern, “It is convenient for us to stay here. It will be less convenient if they decide to terminate you.”

And I don’t want that, he seems to be saying, in the spaces between words. It’s a rare sort of statement, from Sai, and she feels her senses shrink even further, honing in on feeling the warmth of his face through her glove, pleasant enough that she lifts her other hand to feel it too, framing his face with her palms; he wraps a gloved hand around her wrist but doesn’t try to break her hold, seemingly pressing his thumb to her pulse point, feeling her heartbeat.

“They won’t,” she says.

“You think they’re weak,” he says, and it’s a question as much as an answer, his dark eyes hovering closer as he tries to read her mind. “For not killing you.”

She does. She understands it better now, after catching Hound off guard in the early hours, startling him into vulnerability so she can see the truth in his eyes—or, eye. He is wary of her, true. But he fears being forced to kill her, more. He feels responsible because she was once one of them. Because she’s a lamb that slipped through the gates and escaped into a den of wolves, but a lamb that’s learned a taste for blood is not suitable to keep in the pen with the others.

Hound sees himself in her, and he is determined to believe she is redeemable. That she can be Leaf. He will not let them kill her, so long as she sustains his delusion.

She does not share this knowledge. Instead, “How will you feel, if they try to terminate me?” she asks, and watches Sai very closely, tilting her face up like a flower to the sun, feeling the warmth of his breath kiss her face. The muscles between his eyebrows twitch as she stares deep into black pits for eyes, Sai attempting to calculate emotion.

“They will fail,” he settles on. Sakura tries not to feel too flattered by the neutrally delivered promise.

Her focus shifts abruptly toward a disturbance to her extended chakra network, and Sai releases her as she retracts her hands to quickly sign in Anbu Basic, eyes glazing over as she pinpoints the sensation. ‘Inbound—Three chakra signatures. 2.8 miles southeast. Moving northwest.’ She cocks her head, estimating their speed. It’s slow, for shinobi. Either their energy is depleted or they’re not in a particular hurry. One is moving slightly faster than the others, two of the chakra signatures almost on top of each other, making their natures familiar but difficult to define, their combined essence something like a warm monsoon. She switches to Standard. ‘Possible wounded. One being carried.’

‘Question—rendezvous with Hound,’ he suggests, using the ‘nickname’ sign they decided on behind the Anbu captain’s back, which looks comically like two strokes of jacking off a pinky finger.

She shakes her head, already rotating on the branch, feeling out the forest to mentally map out a path to her target as she signs her response in mixed Standard and Basic. ‘They’ll cross our path either way. If friendly—Provide escort. If hostile—’ Sakura shrugs. Then they kill them.

Sai seems to find this acceptable, signing a quick, ‘You lead,’ before Sakura body-flickers to the next branch and into a sprint.

Their trajectories intersect by design in a small clearing in the forest, where the fog lays heavy over tall grass, water pooling in pockets in the soil as the three nin she’s tracking slow their pace to a stop just inside the tree line, proceeding cautiously as she makes herself known, allowing her chakra signature to diffuse noticeably throughout the mist, improving her senses and disguising Sai’s presence even further with her own. She makes eye-contact with Sai when she spots him in a tree roughly ten feet to her right during a break in the fog, and Sai slowly lowers into a crouch at the same as she pulls her mask up over her nose, directing a little extra chakra into connecting the soles of her boots to the branch to stop herself from slipping on the rain-slick bark underfoot.

She flares her chakra signature in Anbu Interval, two quick pulses, one long, one quick, and waits for confirmation they’re friendly. It doesn’t come. Not Anbu. Could still be Leaf. If she focuses on the water molecules near the ‘stacked’ nin, she feels the fog fuse with blood from an open wound, a gash in the thigh of the one being carried; it is not a serious enough wound to justify slowing down a teammate.

The one who has been running point walks slowly into the clearing, and Sakura accepts the invitation, disturbing the fog with her body as she abandons her tree, employing a combination of forest and water walking to silence her landing before taking a few careful steps, wisps of grass gliding noiselessly across her chakra-smoothed shins as she moves. She can sense him getting nearer: average height, suppressed chakra that feels like trying to catch sparks flying off of flint. The mist is catching on the edge of a blade as he draws it silently, a precautionary act rather than one with intent to kill. She can sense its shape. A straight single-edged sword, the length and profile matching that of a chokutō.

She enhances her eyes as she advances slowly, emboldened by the familiar staticky chakra signature heading her way quickly from the west, Hound having located her and begun closing in. She pushes forward, and she feels everything, from the controlled breaths this nin is taking to the soft cotton of his robe-like shirt and the dry, papery texture of the bandages wrapped around his forearms and lower legs, but she still can’t see.

She gets her wish.

Bright red irises cut through mist, her pulse accelerating fast enough to make her vision swim as she hastily averts her eyes from the crimson wheels as she gathers chakra and forms a double-edged water blade from the mist in a near dissociative state, because it isn’t him. He feels too different, far weaker, nothing like she remembers him. Itachi doesn’t use a chokutō. She would have recognized if the two nin he’s traveling with were Akatsuki members. It can’t be him because it can’t be time. She isn’t ready. He wouldn’t be here, prowling around Fire country so close to the walls. Not yet. He is not here.

Except she feels his sudden intake of breath as he recognizes her hair, her eyes, her proportions, her fucking white blood cell count, something, and that makes no sense. Because there is only one man with a full set of Sharingan who knows her on sight, who would recognize her even without her Root mask, even with black cloth over her face, and this man is not him.

The figure halts in front of her, and rather than speak he parts the fog with a chakra-infused swipe of his chokutō, body tense but no longer preparing for a fight. Sai stays hidden, watching her back as the man who is not Itachi comes fully into view.

A harsh laugh escapes her as she takes in the uncanny similarities, the same silky black hair falling into his eyes; the porcelain skin, the narrow nose, the thinness of his lips. The resemblance coalesces within the eyes, which she looks upon unflinchingly now, her water sword deconstructing and dripping down her hand: three black tomoe steeped in blood red irises, raising the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

She knows who this is.

“Little brother,” she says, pulling her mask down around her neck, her mouth twisting into a grin despite her best efforts to reign in the bloodthirst, disregarding Sai’s warning flare of chakra urging her to behave as the last memory she has of those eyes threatens to overpower her mind and stain the sky red, urging her to hold back the desires threatening to cripple her: the desire to summon a chakra scalpel in her hand and take an eye for herself; to take something from Itachi he cannot protect; to make that demon the last Uchiha and let the clan die with his final hacking, sickly breath. 

Itachi once said there are no honorable kills, but Sakura believes there are worthy ways to die, and dying while Itachi looks into his mutilated brother's transplanted eye, as he redeems the blood of the brother he designated sole survivor for some greater purpose that will never come to fruition, and knows it’s Sakura who made it so—Sakura, who he delivered the final insult of sparing that day in spring, with the promise to “retrieve” and “make use of” her when the time is right; Sakura, who he tried to break and partially succeeded; who he allowed to heal and limp back into Danzō’s arms to deliver a message like one of his crows, full of secrets she can barely keep, full of his words, his frightening promises, a scar on her chakra core she had to claim was from nearly dying in River when questioned—she shudders in anticipation.

That would be a worthy death.

She hears the man who is not Itachi echo her words under his breath, his chakra signature sparking erratically, and feels his questions burn unspoken in the space between them.

She allows it, the way Hound breaks into the clearing and cuts off her vision, his back to the Uchiha as he braces the back of her neck with one hand and covers her eyes with the other, blacking out the world—to protect her from the Sharingan or to protect the blonde nin with scars on his cheeks standing behind him, gaping at her without precaution against genjutsu, she isn’t sure. The air near his skin tastes like tree sap and fear.

“Sai,” Hound says, with fabricated calm, “please escort Team 7 to the secondary gate. I just remembered I promised Sakura I’d treat her to chirashi sushi after our shift.”

“Shouldn’t you be offering to treat us? Since our mission went to shit,” says the blonde, aiming for levity, and Hound presses his palm to her eyes a little more firmly.

“It’s called favoritism,” Hound says.

She laughs, again, at Hound’s continued tolerance; of her; of the blonde nin ignoring his orders. There is a reason Sakura allows herself to be restrained by Hound, again and again. If this were Root, the blonde would be at risk of having his vocal cords removed before he could backtalk the mission leader further. This nin has no healthy respect for who Hound truly is beneath the easy-going facade, no awareness, no fear. Hound has worn that mask around his mouth so long the people around him have forgotten his fangs. Hound himself has forgotten. This village is crushing his potential.

She wonders if that is by design. If they gave him the name ‘Hound’ in hopes he would forget he’s a fox. If he knows that foxes do not devoted dogs make.

“Invite them to dinner,” Sakura dares, trying not to salivate at the idea of irrigating the grass below their feet with Uchiha blood. There’d be no point in attacking the little brother without a plan. He isn’t Itachi, but he is likely still formidable, and her actions will bear consequences. Sai wants to stay in the Leaf. She will do her best not to compromise that goal, for now. “It’s like you said. I’m unsocialized.”

Even with her eyes blocked, she can see it through the mist, when the blonde shinobi with a teammate on his back nods in agreement, casting meaningful looks at the Uchiha, as the ever forbearing Sai observes from the trees, waiting to see which way the scale tips.

In the darkness behind his hand, Sakura feels the fog kiss Hound’s eyelashes as he narrows his uncovered eye, and Sakura knows she’s won.

…

Chirashi sushi, Sakura is coming to understand, staring at the large lacquer box of assorted sashimi and cooked seafood plated over rice and vegetables their server placed in the center of the table a few moments ago, along with four blue and white speckled ceramic bowls stacked beside it, was never going to be a believable excuse for Hound to whisk her away from his former students. The idea of two people splitting this is ridiculous.

Hound’s elbow brushes hers as he uses the serving tool to surgically section off and transplant a portion into a bowl, which he then places in front of Sakura before moving on to the next. Before sitting down, he lifted his wooden chair and placed it back down uncomfortably close to hers with a weighted warning in his gray eye, before he quickly squinted in a mockery of a smile behind his mask and sat down beside her.

Pushing the rice around orange roe and bright green wedges she recognizes as snow peas with her chopsticks, Sakura glances up at Sai from under her lashes where he sits on the right side of the glossy wooden table, comforted by the slight downturn to the corner of his lips as he examines the food Hound is placing in front of him with similar skepticism. His black eyes don’t take long to raise to hers as he senses her stare, and his right eyebrow twitches minutely, but it’s like a shout to Sakura: ‘We could leave,’ he is thinking, and it makes Sakura start brushing small leaves and dirt from his fatigues she missed while fussing over him on the way here, giving herself something to do during their walk other than hyper-fixate on the Uchiha whose eyes haven’t left her since dropping off his teammate at the hospital for chakra exhaustion.

Sakura crushes a dried leaf between her fingers, letting the particulates fall to the floor from her open palm, and meets the eyes of the Uchiha currently searching her face for hidden meaning. She has been waiting for an opportunity to study him without him noticing since he sat down across from her, but given the way he doesn’t even lift his chopsticks to address the bowl of food Hound slides in front of him, it seems an unlikely scenario.

In fact, the only person eating is the blonde shinobi seated on the left side of the square table, called ‘Naruto,’ who, rather than wait to be served by Hound, has already dragged his bowl through the platter and begun shoveling it into his mouth with his bowl raised near his chin and his chopsticks held loosely between his tan fingers. She wonders if he eats everything like this. In Root, they were encouraged to eat the way they were encouraged to do everything: inconspicuously.

Hound doesn’t fill a bowl for himself, instead setting the serving tool down softly and lifting his hand to indicate a drink to a white-aproned server as they pass. She wonders if he’ll lift the edge of his mask to drink, or if he’ll just drink it straight through the fabric. He’s nin. She’s sure he has the details figured out, by now. Sakura does not share his commitment to concealing his face, and has had her own black cloth mask down around her neck since stepping inside the restaurant.

Sakura uses her chopsticks to poke an ambiguous white piece of root or some kind of vegetable with trepidation, and feels a pang of gratitude when Hound, watching her from the corner of his right eye—is that why he sits on her left, she wonders—signs the word, ‘b-a-m-b-o-o,’ indifferent to the curious eyes following the exchange.

Only Sai’s eyes flash in recognition, immediately picking up a chunk of cooked bamboo shoot with his chopsticks and placing it in his mouth, Naruto’s blue eyes remaining curious over the rim of his bowl, the Uchiha’s brows lowering slightly over his black eyes in frustration at being left in the dark.

Sakura wants to know where they are keeping Sai, those days when he isn’t with her at the Hatake estate; if he is eating as well as she is; if he has someone guiding him through this the way she admits Hound has been carefully leading her. She wants to know how long Sai has been working against Root, and how. And maybe most of all, why. Root was all he’d ever known and all she can remember. There were small inconveniences, true, but was it really so much less desirable than this? Than living aimlessly among undisciplined cattle? There may not be any soft feelings between Root operatives, but they were kin. They raised themselves, together. Raised each other. She wants to know if anyone survived the backlash. Surely, the zeros made it out. Surely, Danzō would not abandon the compound without them. Every time she tries to ask Sai these questions, he is suddenly busy doing something else.

Maybe she would have better luck asking Hound.

Eyeing the unknown red and black flakes of seasoning speckled among her rice like mold, Sakura has a sudden craving for Hound’s simple fireside meals, his inane attempts at conversation. He is more at ease when it’s just the two of them. Maybe because he’s not worried about what she’ll do to him as much as what she could do to others he views as vulnerable.

She tilts her head, allowing her eyes to unfocus until her food looks like a mosaic of color. That means he knows, she thinks, that his former students are soft and vulnerable. It’s possible he left them that way on purpose. She is guessing he may regret that decision now.

The sound of Naruto setting his bowl down hard on the table draws her eyes to his suddenly resolute expression, the red whisker-like scars on his cheeks dark and angry against his otherwise sun-kissed skin. “Kakashi says you don’t remember us.”

“Hound says a lot of things,” she says, and Hound eye-smiles threateningly.

“Let’s not use nicknames at the dinner table,” he says, but Sakura hears the reprimand clearly. No Anbu names in public.

“I was told nicknames are a sign of closeness,” says Sai, as he raises his chopsticks to eye-level, staring at the roe that looks like an orange drop of dew resting on top of them.

“Well, sometimes they’re a secret,” says Hound.

“Yours isn’t,” Sakura says, and stabs through the rubbery flesh of a piece of shrimp with her chopsticks, because nothing she does to her food will overshadow Naruto’s attention-grabbing manners, or lack thereof. “Everyone knows who you are.”

“Sakura calls me Sai,” Sai offers, somewhat adjacently, one step behind the moving topic, dark eyes meeting hers over the bright dots of orange he’s still determining the edibility of. “And I call her Sakura.”

“Those aren’t nicknames, those are your names,” Hound says, tapping a finger silently on the table. Impatient for that drink, she suspects.

Sakura shrugs at Sai’s narrowing eyes as he works through that one, trying to negotiate what that would make their operative names back in Root, if he had it backwards the entire time. Sometimes she forgets that the name ‘Sai’ was given to him when Sakura was recruited, so he would have a name to give her when she asked. So he could appear more human. He puts the roe in his mouth. His expression is impenetrable, and Sakura finds herself wishing he'd make a face so she would know if it’s safe to eat.

A server sets a white ceramic cylindrical vessel with a canonical lip on the table in front of Hound, followed by a small porcelain cup that can’t possibly hold more than two ounces at a time. Saké, she confirms, observing the clear liquid he wastes no time pouring.

“What do you remember?” The Uchiha’s voice is a low, stable thing, and Sakura has the thought it could have been comforting, in another life.

He has dark shadows under his eyes she suspects are a persistent feature of his. His light gray robe-style shirt is open at the chest, showing the suggestion of a toned physique, but Sakura is more interested in the way his chakra is avoiding a section of his shoulder near his neck, flowing around it like the pathways are damaged. Or maybe it’s by design. Maybe the pathways have been redirected. Either way, it’s interesting.

She refocuses on the question: what does Sakura remember?

She remembers having her feet washed by a woman with lightly callused hands. She remembers a tall man with delicate glasses on his nose. She remembers ink stains on her fingers from taking notes. She remembers a boy lying beside her in the grass, describing clouds. She remembers manicured nails tracing lines on her open palm, telling her a future that won’t come true. Sometimes she sees a flower and knows its meaning. Sometimes she sees a sunny daffodil and remembers a small hand putting it in her hair, and feels like she wants to tear out her own throat.

Sometimes she remembers a severed hand falling in front of the wooden crate she hides under, turning white as the blood ekes out of it slowly without a pulse.

“Nothing substantial,” she says, and steals the small cup Hound was raising to his mask without meeting more resistance than a subtly tapered eye, tossing back the liquid herself and setting it back down in front of him. It’s warm, and it’s sweeter than she expects it to be. The saké she’s tried before, at the table of a wealthy client during her ‘red-light’ mission three years ago, had a more earthy flavor.

Hound’s stare is like a hand on her shoulder, threatening and grounding in tandem.

“We were your classmates,” Naruto says, fingers tense around his bowl. “We were,” and he hesitates on this, blue eyes darting to read Hound’s forbidding eye before disregarding the warning and plowing onward. “We were going to be teammates.”

Sakura allows the information to settle like falling snow, letting it dissolve weightlessly on her shoulders. There are a lot of things Sakura may have been, if she’d never joined Root. Weak, is one of them. Or maybe she would have a chakra anomaly like them. Like his teammate, there is something off about Naruto’s chakra, the longer she’s around it; like there’s an undertow, a source to the hot wind cycling up to the surface. She wonders what the Leaf is doing with their nin to result in such strange chakra signatures.

“You must not have been significant to her,” Sai says, neutrally, immune to the way all three of the other men at the table go still at his words, hovering a piece of what appears to be a seared tentacle by his lips. “She was not difficult to convince.”

The Uchiha’s eyes flare red for less than a second before he regains control, and Sakura feels her chopsticks snap in her hand in response, her pulse accelerating with a rush of adrenaline that wakes up her body, the cotton of her long sleeve shirt suddenly chafing her oversensitive skin. She lets one of the chopsticks fall into her barely touched food, unsubtly rotating the other between her fingers in preparation to put it through one of those precious eyes if he so much as flinches in Sai’s general direction.

“What do you mean, ‘convince’?” the Uchiha asks, deceptively calm, and Sakura spares a glance at the blonde, Naruto’s, stricken expression, and then at Hound’s somewhat rigid posture, feeling a flicker of surprise at the realization that this is something even he does not know; a detail that slipped through the cracks of Sai’s debriefing and her failed interrogation: that Sai was not just the one who brought her out of Root. He was the one who brought her in.

Unbothered, Sai chews the chunk of tentacle slowly. This time he does make a face, his nose scrunching almost unnoticeably, before he sets his chopsticks down and swallows. Not a fan.

“She did not resist, when I was sent to obtain her,” he clarifies, vague enough to just barely slip past the seal on his tongue. Hound’s fingers are tense around the neck of his saké. Sai looks directly at the Uchiha, uncowed by the gaze of the Sharingan-holder bearing down on him with suppressed hostility. “She went willingly. She was…” He tilts his head in thought. His black eyes are inscrutable when he looks at Sakura, having smoothed out his expression. “Eager to be utilized.”

Taunting, she realizes. He has found a wound, and he is rubbing salt in it. 

He didn’t like Naruto’s implication, she suspects; that Sakura was meant to be theirs, and not his. The moment leaves her light-headed, elated, at Sai’s pettiness, at this evidence of his attachment.

“Try the shrimp,” Hound says to Sai, pouring himself a drink, but his voice is underlined with a cold steel edge. Sakura has to consciously refrain from panic at the unfamiliar tone. Sai is unlikely to allow himself to come to harm, but he is trying not to anger the Leaf, and that limits how aggressively he can defend himself. The Uchiha is emotional and arrogant, giving her an advantage in a fight, but if Hound decides to harm Sai, she might not be able to stop him without using lethal force. 

It is a numbing thought, like the brief absence of pain that follows the sting of a whip before the brain processes broken skin: Sakura does not want to kill Hound.

That is a weakness she can’t abide.

She drops the other broken chopstick in the bowl, then pushes the food away from her to make room for her arms as she pushes her sleeves up her forearms and rests them on the table in front of her, peering at Hound through the pale strands of blushing hair that fall into her vision when she leans forward. It is unclear at what point she began to consider Hound worthy of the air he breathes. Worthy of keeping alive. She looks for the answer in the lint stuck to the outside of his mask, the varied shades of black and gray that make up his eyelashes, the fine lines on the outside corner of his right eye from constantly faking a smile.

“Well, the important thing is you’re here now. It’s good to see you, Sakura,” Naruto says, sounding pained as he changes the subject. 

His eyes are very blue and uncomfortably sincere, when she drags her gaze away from Hound’s stoic profile. The blonde is no longer interested in his meal. Sai is still slowly perusing the options in his bowl, less driven by hunger than curiosity. 

Sai tries the shrimp, as suggested. His right eyebrow quirks up minutely. He doesn’t mind it.

“Maybe if you’re, uh—” Naruto’s eyes dart to Hound. “—feeling up to it, we could train together sometime. Or grab lunch? Do you still hate ramen?”

Hound shifts in his seat beside her as if he wants to intervene, and Sakura has the urge to place a quieting hand on his scarred forearm where it lies extended on the table in front of him. She doesn’t, but the urge is there. She has had ramen many times, while traveling. It is inexpensive and filling.

“I would like that,” she says, because she is sick of probation, and Naruto seems easy to befriend, easier than recruit M10-5 was, at least. He seems eager to think the best of her, eager to believe in a version of her that no longer exists, which is ideal for building an alibi in the future.

“Great,” Naruto says, looking slightly washed out in his orange utility jacket, his eyes jumping between the black ink on Sakura’s forearms and her face, smiling warmly when he meets her eyes once again. “That’s great.”

She traces the subtle scarring on her left gloveless palm with her fingers, the memory of a different spring day pressing on her mind the longer she sits across from the pale, dark-haired Uchiha she’s trying not to appear too focused on.

Hound’s saké cup is empty again. She didn’t even see him drink.

The Uchiha’s eyes have long returned to their natural glossy black state, as he reaches his hand up to massage his shoulder and neck, self-soothing, as he works through his anger. She notes it’s the same location his chakra is avoiding, and feels her focus sharpen. If she is going to grasp the opportunity fate afforded her, if she is going to uncover Itachi’s plans for Uchiha Sasuke and stand firmly in his way, it would be wise to learn everything she can about this little brother. When she learns what future Itachi is protecting by keeping his brother alive, Sakura needs to be in position to steal it; the closer the throat, the easier to cut. She needs to get closer, become trusted. Maybe trust is too high a hurdle. Sakura has never excelled at that kind of subterfuge. But, she reasons, based on the hungry way he watches her, he doesn’t seem particularly difficult to entice into range.

Power. Strength. Sex. These are the strings that pull him. Luckily, Sakura has plenty of each.

“I didn’t expect to see Sharingan while patrolling the village perimeter,” she says, starting with the truth. His pupils widen a fraction-of-a-fraction in response to being directly addressed, and his shoulders square with hers in reluctant interest. “Hound could have mentioned he had an Uchiha up his sleeve.” And then, with a sly glance at the dog in question. “How tight-lipped of him.”

Hound taps the edge of his thumb against the ceramic rim of his cup, a slow movement all eyes at the table unconsciously follow. “What can I say?" He narrows his gray eye into a happy, murderous slit, sharp as one of his meticulously cared for knives. "I'm easily embarrassed.”

Hound is so conveniently transparent, when it comes to what he wants to protect.

His former students barely even bristle at the suggestion of being swept under the rug like dead leaves tracked into the house on the bottom of Hound’s boots. In fact, they barely blink, apparently accustomed to the insult.

“You called me ‘little brother.’” The Uchiha interlocks his fingers on the table, meeting her eyes as she raises them from Hound’s frayed glove, like he has the right to ask questions. Like he has weight to throw. Like he has anything to back up the fight in those black eyes that want to turn red.

“Did I?” Sakura hums, juggling watching Hound’s fingers twitch against his cup in her peripheral vision, his ears immediately perked by the hollow depth to that denial, and observing the simmering heat of conflicting emotions on the Uchiha’s face. “My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

The anger drains from his expression at the flippant reminder of all she’s forgotten. Of the girl they allegedly lost when Sakura was born a second time. It’s satisfying, how he takes the bait, his attention now divided between his mind-consuming questions and his hesitancy to uproot what to him must seem a delicately balanced ecosystem, her memories. It makes it easier to sell the utter lie that follows.

“Maybe you could join us, when blondie and I meet up to train,” she says, letting her head tilt, her hair falling from behind her ear, soft against her cheek. “I have a feeling you might jog my memory.”

The Uchiha stares, slowly processing her words, before swallowing reflexively and looking away, unable to hold eye-contact with her—striking, she has been told—green irises. Naruto’s expression fails to conceal a desperate mix of suspicion and hope. Sai fails to pick up a snow pea that fell out of the pod with his chopsticks, too busy watching Sakura with questions in the tension around his mouth.

Hound fails to be amused, something harsh about his stare as he studies her, wise to her deceit. He raises a hand slowly, and for a moment Sakura feels a thrill of anticipation, wondering if he will call her out on the manipulation, if he will disrupt the uneasy peace, crush his students’ naivety, but he only looks over her shoulder at a server and motions for the check.

…

That night, Kakashi dreams of a suffocating fog saturating a clearing where he stands between his former students and the woman he is trying to save, moisture drowning all of their senses in Sakura’s ephemeral bloodthirst.

He does not move, as Sakura tenderly wraps her gloved fingers around his neck with mocking benevolence, damp fabric warming over his carotid artery. The smile curling her lips is unfriendly and ominous, more so with his black hand still laid over her eyes like a blindfold, and he tightens his hold on the back of her neck in warning to stay still until his former students are clear.

“Found them,” she says, softly, stringing the words between them like a skinned hare.

In his forbidding silence, she traces the outline of his covered jaw with her thumbs, and Kakashi suspects his grip is slipping.