Black Bough

It is spring. Sakura is seventeen years old. She has been told she has the fourth-highest mission completion rate in the history of Root. She takes pride in this.

As she lies among the decimated bodies of the eight-person squad she led into the land of Rivers, her Root mask broken and discarded a few yards away, the sun high in the sky, her mouth and right eye partially submerged in the viscous slow-cooling blood—slow to cool, because their fallen limbs lie on a dirt road in a break in the trees, allowing the sun to warm them, bodies soaking up heat like boulders—it occurs to her:

The mission was to confirm rumors of Akatsuki building a stronghold in the south.

Sakura has confirmed Akatsuki’s presence in the south.

This is not a mission failure. This is the mission’s true face. It is no accident that Sai is not here and Sakura is, being expendable to Danzō in ways Sai is not, despite her accomplishments. Her squad will not return, and Danzō will know the rumors are true. Mission success. Her record, unblemished.

The thought brings much relief.

She wonders which of the zeros will supplant her record, once she’s dead.

There is too much blood in one place for the compact soil to absorb it quickly, allowing it to continue to pool, coloring half her vision a blurry red as she dares not blink. Not while the S-rank criminal with a chakra-eating sword of hardened shark skin still walks among the corpses.

She focuses on the burning sensation in her eyes to ground her while weaving the thinnest of genjutsu to dull the senses of the strange creature with black gills that flex periodically under his eyes, known as ‘Kisame’ in her Bingo Book, just enough to make him overlook the chakra gathering in her body, the sound of her heartbeat and the speed of her blood flow, not bleeding out as sluggishly as the bodies around her—a sheer enough illusion to go unnoticed by a predator at ease after a kill, one that suctions itself to reality like rice paper to a tongue.

He took barely any damage during the encounter, she notes, only taking on shallow wounds from stray kunai he let hit him, attacks he deemed too pitiful to warrant dodging. 

She did not fare as well.

Her skin is littered with close calls from his deceptively swift blade, but the cuts on her left arm and back are the most extensive, severing the tendon of her biceps brachii and cutting deep into her thoracolumbar fascia and latissimus dorsi, stopping before her spine by less than a few inches. She is holding the nerves and muscles and tendons and blood vessels together with millions of microscopic chakra threads, carrying pulses from her brain, trying to direct blood flow and restore movement, but it is becoming a challenge to stay awake.

Sakura can hold her breath for fifteen minutes before oxygen flowing to her brain decreases to unmanageable amounts, and so she does not breathe, as his black cloak drags along the gore in the road, the white bandages on his sword that came loose during the one-sided fight trailing messily behind him, the pinprick of black in his white eyes passing over her like an inanimate object. He is smiling broadly, exposing rows of sharp triangular teeth.

There is a moment with every step he takes where his cloak parts for his leg and a strip of chalky gray skin, bleeding red from one of those negligible cuts in his white leg warmer just above the ankle, becomes accessible. Sakura observes this with fading logic, no longer able to feel the sun on her skin, only the blood in her hair, the blood in her eye, the blood on her tongue, the blood rushing through her and out of her too quickly as her heartbeat accelerates in response to what she is planning to do. What she will die attempting to do.

He is looking almost directly at her, as the heel of his sandal touches the ruddy earth beside her arm, his chakra flowing loose and unguarded, leaving plenty of openings as she tightens the threads holding her together and blinks exactly once, his keen eyes snapping to hers as planned while she grabs hold of that open wound on his leg in the same second she grabs his mind, splitting all of her remaining chakra into a powerful paralyzing genjutsu and flooding his blood with chakra, connecting to the water in his cells and instantaneously increasing the kinetic energy of the molecules well past the necessary one hundred degrees celsius, her own chakra pathways on fire from the rapid proliferation and acceleration, and she feels it like a stab to the back of her eyes as he manages to break her genjutsu and raise his sword over her broken body, but not before he is boiling alive.

His grip falters first. The blade falls tip-down into the soil behind her head, sharp and heavy enough that it stands on its own, a strand of its blood-soaked wrappings falling over her lips in a morbid kiss.

He fought like a demon, but he falls like a man.

He writhes violently on the ground beside her, enough that it nearly severs the chakra strings in her arm as he attempts to kick away from her. His scream is guttural and unlike any she has heard before, worse than the experiments in the basement of Root, and it drowns out her own as his flailing pulls at her shredded back, black dots clouding her vision as she holds onto consciousness.

Overwhelmed, he does not even attempt to counter.

Her hand is beginning to burn, steam rising under his skin, his cognitive processing shutting down as she breaks down the fat and proteins in his body at an unsustainable rate, bonding individual cells together and frying nerve endings, filling the air with an unfamiliar, foul odor, a sickly sweet musk mixing with the stink of releasing bowels that makes her gag into the blood near her face as his gray skin begins to change color.

She does not look away.

His face flushes an inhuman shade of red, his body beginning to swell from a futile histamine response, large blisters breaking the skin, weeping under the sun as his eyes fog like the cooked egg whites, the pupil that overlooked her no longer visible.

She watches saliva continue to ooze between jagged teeth from the corner of his open mouth onto the blood-soaked ground long after he ceases moving. Each breath she takes rattles around in her lungs, the sound of her slowing heart loud in her own head like her ear canals are stuffed with cotton. Chakra depleted, she can’t bring herself to peel her palm from his steaming corpse, knowing the skin will tear from the third degree burns that will have distorted Sai’s beautiful linework.

“You killed him.”

She has no energy left to acknowledge the smooth voice filtering through the haze of her senses, registering only enough to warrant letting her eyes drift up to the man slowly crouching beside her and Kisame’s swollen body.

She hears the delicate chimes of a cluster of small bells, preceding a wide straw hat being set down in the grume beside her.

She sees black soft martial arts shoes leaving embossed imprints in the mortal fluids on the ground; sees crimson clouds embroidered in the deep black of a cloak that folds and pools around his bent knees; sees hands with blunt nails trimmed to the quick, painted a calming shade of indigo, drawing her eyes to a silver band on his right ring finger; a red stone imbued with the character for ‘crimson.’

She sees pale, unblemished skin on a young man’s face, no more than five or six years older than herself. He has two rigid black lines tattooed from his inner eyes down his cheeks, their shape opening up like a triangle. 

Some nin aim to be forgettable. Others, like the one with the distinctive lines on his face in front of her, go to great lengths to be remembered. Massacring your own clan is a fast-track to infamy, she thinks, as she studies the slashed leaf centered on the steel forehead protector displayed unrepentantly on his head.

Sakura is looking at Uchiha Itachi, and he is looking at her as well. Any slim hope of survival she’d had promptly blows away like the spring breeze easing through his hair.

It is an almost certainly fatal thing to have: Uchiha Itachi’s attention.

“That was a unique yang release,” he says, as Sakura’s eyes dance around two raven-black strands of hair framing vermillion eyes like stalactites. She can’t even flinch in acknowledgement of the three tomoe beginning to spin. “You must have studied under one of the Sannin.” He looks over her body dispassionately, his eyes narrowing as they settle on the red straps of her shoulders—red, that is, if their color is visible through all the blood. “Or perhaps not.”

Her head is too heavy to lift as Sakura takes a shuddering breath, mustering the strength to force her words out despite the rawness of her throat.

“It was a dishonorable kill,” she admits, because she is dying, and the truth is a luxury she would like to indulge in while she still can.

His eyes are breathtaking, two war moons with tomoe that stretch into three blades of a fan as he activates his Mangekyou Sharingan, so quickly turning that her eyes have to clip the image as a still—stroboscopic.

“There is no such thing as an honorable kill,” he says. Clan Killer. Akatsuki. Undefeated devil. Sakura wants to laugh, but she thinks she will faint and never wake up, if she does. “Tell me, why would Shimura Danzō send you here to die?”

She doesn’t have it in her to feel surprised that he knows the driving force behind her and the carnage surrounding them. There are crows settling in the trees she can’t be sure are real, drifting down in her peripheral vision to investigate the dead and dying, shaking out their black wings, sunlight sliding off their feathers like oil. She sticks her tongue out slowly, watching his eyes dip down to study the purple lines of the cursed seal.

He hums in the back of his throat, pinching the edge of Kisame's bloody sword wrapping still stuck to her lower lip with his index finger and thumb, peeling it away to get a better look. She doesn’t try to close her eyes, when his gaze eventually drifts back to hers. She will die with her eyes open, no matter the price of that conviction.

“That is interesting. Though, ineffective.” His hand lingers by her mouth, the side of his index finger pressing up beneath her chin. “A word of advice, before we begin,” he says, with galling sincerity. “Abandon your pride.”

Sakura blinks and the sky blooms crimson, like a red chrysanthemum falling on an ant.

…

Hound gives her a ten minute head start before he finds her bathed and dressed in black fatigues, lying on her back high in the trees, forcing her lungs to fill with the bright scent of pine needles and morning-damp bark as the sun casts a tentative glow up and over the horizon that precedes its arrival, a warning, a request, a threat, to start the day anew.

Hound does not join her on her branch, but stands below her at the base of the great evergreen with his hands in his pockets and his head cocked, his face turned upward, ready to meet her gaze as she works up the energy to roll onto her stomach and look down, her right arm dangling over the edge of the branch like she’s offering a hand to pull him up.

“A bit early to be feeling murderous,” he says, mildly, but his steely eye is blade-sharp. He does not project his voice, trusting in Sakura’s finely tuned hearing not to make him strain.

It takes her a moment to notice how saturated with hatred every cell in her body is. Sakura didn’t realize she was feeling anything at all. How undisciplined of her, to let it be noticed. 

“Still on mission time, I guess,” she replies, equally dryly, and feels something in her chest tighten at the way he smiles up at her behind that black mask, only his eye creasing in evidence. She’s not wrong, she thinks. This is the perfect time of morning to attack an enemy camp.

People tend to let their guard down, at the first sign of the sun.

“What’s for breakfast?” she asks, articulating her ungloved fingers slowly. From this angle, Hound looks small enough to hold in one hand.

“I was thinking quail egg soup,” he offers.

She’s never had quail eggs. “Is it good?”

“That’s subjective.”

“Would you eat it?”

“I’d say that’s implied.”

Sakura hums, closing her left eye to force perspective and watching Hound’s covered face disappear and reappear between the webbing of her fingers as she rotates her hand. 

Here. 

Gone. 

Here.

Gone.

The bark is rough against her cheek, but its earthy musk is pleasant, after smelling nothing but blood all night in her sleep.

“Feel like coming down?” he asks. He always sounds half-interested in his own words, half-present, half-not.

Sakura’s stomach is tight. She doubts she has an appetite, this morning. But the heat of the fire as Hound stokes charcoal to a steady orange hue beneath a cast iron pot sounds nourishing, in its own way. She rejects this easy feeling immediately, and does her best to disrupt it in him.

“Did you mean to raise them like veal?” she asks, conversationally, and flexes her palm, straightening her fingers like the starfish she saw the first time she and Sai ran a mission down the coastline. Sai said if you cut off its limbs, each appendage will grow a new starfish. They had to have amputated at least twenty on that trip. It didn’t matter that they would not be around to see it happen. Knowing they’d sewed a hundred new starfish that would either die or grow in their absence was more than sufficient. “Your students?”

As desired, any warmth in his gray eye is quick to fade. He does not outwardly shift, his hands still in his black pockets, his posture still loose, but she feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise in response to the internal change she just breathed life into. Sometimes it makes her feel like a god, this ability to change others, but then she remembers this is a human experience. It’s what humans do. Change each other. Break each other. Reshape each other.

“You didn’t recognize cooked bamboo shoots, but you know the word ‘veal’? I’m starting to think you’re playing ignorant for attention,” he says, unaffected, but Sakura knows better.

“The Uchiha has hungry eyes,” she says, with one eye still shut, as she closes her hand around Hound’s perspective-forced head. She feels satisfaction curl her toes at how he disappears into her palm, his glare losing its purpose within the confines of her hand, unable to threaten those it cannot reach.

Gone, she thinks, and allows herself a smile.

…

“Give us a mission.”

The rain is pushing down hard on the tile roof of Hokage Tower, sloughing off of red ceramic onto the already drenched, miserable shoulders of the Hokage’s personal Anbu detail currently concealing their presences along the wooden slats of the exterior walls, clinging to ledges, wedged between the wall and the open shutters of the window. Kakashi spares a thought to hope Genma catches a cold, and then refocuses on the loosely robed woman standing up from her chair, cotton sliding off her bare shoulder as she dismisses Shizune from the room with an apathetic sweep of her fingers.

“Is that how you greet your Hokage?” she asks, smoothing blonde hair over her shoulder, playing with the strands as she rounds the age-smoothed corner of the cherry wood desk, trailing a hand over a large stack of mission scrolls bound in black, green, and brown leather cords. 

Kakashi doesn’t bless that baiting statement with a response, nor does he move from his place in the center of the office in a familiar stance, feet hip-width apart, wrist loosely held behind his back, watching the pearlescent sheen of shinobi-grade polish on her sharp, elongated nails trap light.

“Team 7 just returned from a mission,” she says, amber eyes cunning. Sober, today. How fortunate for him.

“Not them,” he says, and then, because he said it too quickly, “Anbu. Something S-rank we can let her off the leash for.”

“Her probation isn’t over.”

If all you offer her is peace , Kakashi thinks, one of these days he is going to wake up to an unsurvivable amount of blood pooling between the wooden slats of his family home for the second time in his life—hers or his, fifty-fifty chance.

“How ungenerous,” is what he says. “I need to stretch my legs outside the village or my tendonitis acts up.”

“I know what you’re doing.” Tsunade’s sky blue robes part to expose loose white shinobi pants beneath them as she sits on the edge of the desk in front of him, crossing her arms and letting her hands tuck into her draped sleeves. If she liked him any less, Kakashi would feel threatened by the fact she’s placed her hands so close to where she likes to conceal weapons. “If she can’t learn to live peacefully, she isn’t fit to be Leaf.”

Kakashi mulls this over for all of two seconds before deciding it’s hypocritical bullshit. “That’s hypocritical bullshit.”

Tsunade lowers her eyelids further. “Some would call that type of language treasonous.”

“Humor me.” Her right eyebrow arches, and she inhales very slowly like she’s talking herself down from actions that would result in Kakashi’s immediate retirement, but she sets her jaw and nods once, permission to continue saying his piece. “She’s a shinobi. Treat her like one. Give her a mission,” is what he says.

Give her an enemy, is what he means, before she decides it’s us.

After a tense moment of nothing but the rain hammering the roof above their heads, Tsunade leans further back against the desk, untucking her right hand from her sleeve to reach back and pick up a scroll from the pile. She tosses it to Kakashi. He catches it, turning it over, and sees the black leather cord it’s bound with as a positive omen.

“S-rank. Not Anbu, but it should give her a workout,” she says, and Kakashi narrows his eye in a smile. And then, “You really would look good in the hat, Hatake. Let me know if you want to try it on sometime. You’re older than Minato was by a good four years.”

Already on his way out before she finished that sentence, he holds the scroll up as a goodbye, waving it side to side as he says, “Please keep threats like that to yourself.”

…

The desert is a thirsty, corrosive thing.

It wicks the moisture from her eyes, billows through her desert fatigues, tries to unravel the cotton shemagh protecting her mouth and flattening her hair. It latches onto her sweat; every part of her body the wind cools on-contact is a hoarse whisper that she is wasting water, that she has a finite amount of life in her body and the desert is siphoning it away with every lash of wind as it tries to break her flesh down for consumption with gusts of air and sandstone, grind her bones down like rocks into sand, suck the water from her corpse and feed it to the small leathery creatures that subsist on its meager resources.

She feels its thirst in her own throat. She feels its hunger when the exhaustion digs into her muscles and begs her to kneel for just a moment in the sand while Hound hands her a leather water bottle to sip from, and the radiant heat of the unstable ground burns hot enough under the high sun to penetrate the barrier of her pants, eager to cook her alive.

It has been just over two weeks since they crossed the border into the land of Wind, tracking a group of missing nin from Ishigakure. Two weeks of being able to expand her lungs fully, since being hauled out of Root and into a state of hellishly inactive stasis.

Two weeks of minimal breaks in what little shade is provided by the desert terrain, taking turns sleeping lightly with their backs to large boulders. Two weeks of intermittent silence that turns the wind rushing over the dunes into an ocean of sound, a soothing symphony of erosion. Two weeks of fighting scavengers trolling the dunes for travelers to maim while trying not to lose their targets’ trail since they split and ran; she knows these criminals are not part of the mission, knows Hound is letting her kill them for what little sport they offer so long as she cleans up after herself, letting her work her muscles out of the cramped position the village has squeezed them into.

Two weeks of stretched provisions of soldier pills, nutritionally complete bars of ambiguous dried ingredients that either crumble at the first bite or stick to her teeth depending on which color wrapper, and dried rabbit meat so tough it makes her jaw click. Sakura’s stomach aches with hunger constantly after growing used to regular meals, and the familiar, dull pain nourishes her more than rations ever could.

She can taste acid in the back of her throat, can smell her own hunger, the scent pushed back into her nostrils by the cotton of her shemagh every time she breathes. She pulls the scarf down around her neck as she ducks down into their cramped make-shift shelter consisting of a triangular nylon sand-colored tarp nailed into a rust-orange boulder and tied down with two large bags of sand Sakura buried fifteen minutes ago. It does little against the cold that will begin to set in with the sun ticking down the horizon like hands on a clock, but it’s a decent windshield, and having a rock at her back does wonders for her mental health after so many hours traveling out in the open. They’ll be moving again soon, anyway.

Hound is already lying down on his back, using his beige and black speckled shemagh like a pillow—the scarf bordering on redundant with the cloth mask he wears beneath it—with one hand tucked behind his head and the other holding open the pages of a faded orange paperback, the edges of the cover weather-worn and peeling at the corners.

She kicks his desert boots, crossed at the ankles, out of her way as she half crawls to the center of their temporary shelter, her muscles complaining dully as she drops her rucksack and sits facing Hound with her back to the rocks, her shoes sinking into the sand under the weight of her bent knees. 

After a breath, Sakura begins the tiresome process of declawing her upper body. She peels off her gloves and pockets them by her right hip. She unholsters the tantō from her back and places it on the earth beside her, before she begins removing the senbon strapped to her forearms, the sounds of velcro tearing washed away under the steady barrage of wind against their shelter. Next, the kunai. The first time she did this in front of Hound, he looked openly wary of her motives, unable to fathom how comfortably she disarmed herself in his presence. He forgets that Sakura does not need to cling to her visible weapons at all times like her partner on this mission. Thanks to Sai’s storage seals, Sakura has not been truly unarmed in three years.

When she is done, there is a sand-dulled pile of blades to her right, still easily within reach. She needs to oil and sharpen them again, when she gets the chance.

She watches Hound from lowered eyelids, skeptical of how he often fixates on the book in his hand during their quiet moments. There is barely enough light left to read by, Sakura thinks. Just enough to illuminate their small space with a soft glow, like they’re resting under a lampshade, a few rays slipping past the nylon tarp to warm the light gray of Hound’s right eye and highlight the grains of sand caught in his eyelashes. Still, Hound keeps his gaze firmly on the words as Sakura strips out of her shirt down to her sweat- and sand-crusted chest bindings, the edges of the bandages curling from moisture damage.

“If you freeze to death, I’ll be extremely disappointed in you,” Hound says, dryly, and turns the page one-handedly, soft paper rustling quietly as it drags across the edge of his gloved finger. He’d be hard to pick out of the landscape from a distance, she thinks, even his black face mask having been switched for beige.

The rocks are still warm against her exposed lower and upper back where they scrape her skin in places her bandages don’t cover, but soon their shelter will have little to offer in the way of heat. Sakura fully intends to put her shirt and weapons back on once the sun is down, before resuming their hunt, as unpleasantly stiff as it feels against her unwashed skin. They both smell unbathed and exhausted, but it’s a familiar and almost pleasant smell, for Sakura, this human-y musk that means her teammate is alive and well enough to sweat. Though they won’t be sneaking up on anyone in this state, not if the enemy is downwind.

Closing her eyes to aid her focus, Sakura pushes her senses out along the sand, feeling miles of grains of sand being swept up, unobstructed, by the breeze, before determining they are still far enough from enemies to speak. Her affinity for earth jutsu aids her unconventional sensor technique, but she’s still perfecting dispersing chakra through individual granules of sand that swirl in the air, unable to mimic the clarity of the mist, at least for the moment. If Sai were here, he could send out some of his ink mice, or let one of the falcons or needletails off his skin to circle the sky—though, on second thought, those would draw too much attention in the desert.

She misses him.

It’s not that they’re unaccustomed to being apart; they were often independently leading and supporting missions for extended periods of time—though less often, near the end. If anything this should be easier, knowing he is safe behind village walls.

It isn’t.

“You’ll get a rash from not airing your skin out,” she counters, recovering from her distraction, a strand of her hair falling into her eyes while she opens them again to find Hound’s tapered gray eye drifting toward her.

She ceases breathing for a fraction of a second from his sudden attention. It’s been happening frequently, this tense reaction to his focus. She thinks it started when he held one of their targets’ head steady for her without her asking while she took a kunai to the roots of their teeth, even if the effect was lessened by him telling their target to “hurry up and talk” because “torture gives me ulcers.”

Her perception of him is deepening, she surmises, while watching him set their brutal pace through the desert without him showing outward signs of fatigue aside from sweat and silence; watching him fight underhandedly and artfully, not the sterile combat she half-expected from him. For all of his insistence on moderating her behavior in the village, that morality of his is a concept he wears like his shemagh, she is learning—one he lets slip from around his neck at the first sign of it hindering his movement. She’d begun to doubt the name Friend Killer, back in the village, watching him protect everyone within arm’s reach like it’s a compulsion. But here, on this mission, she is getting her hopes up again.

During a fight with some unfortunate scavengers three days ago, his kunai got stuck in a slab of sandstone, and instead of wasting effort trying to remove it or reaching for another one, he brought the enemy’s head down on the protruding handle, staking it through their eye.

Sakura is struggling to contain her growing respect.

Instead of holding his gaze, she begins rifling around in the rucksack beside her, looking for the ration bar with a blue wrapper that tastes tart and sugary at the same time.

“How do you know I don’t have a rash right now?” Hound asks, and returns his gaze to his book. “I’m positively covered in them.”

“If you have rashes, it would be best to expose them to open air,” she says, purposely missing the sarcasm.

“It would,” Hound agrees, mildly, “but this shirt is my last line of defense against your little pets.”

Sakura feels the corner of her mouth want to curl up as she pushes the fine strands of pink hair that were inching closer to her iris out of her face, tucking the hairs behind her ear. Her hair is sweat-matted and covered in sand. The less it touches her face the better.

Sakura does not have any ‘pets.’ She used a sand scorpion to extract information from their most recently dispatched target. Hound has been unwilling to let it go. He called it “inhumane,” once he was done with, “If you’ve been carrying scorpions in your pockets, we are going to have another talk.”

Sakura admits she got a little impatient.

Two weeks of scouring the desert, and they have only caught and processed three out of five of their actual targets, the final two proving more slippery than their late companions. Sakura knew it would be a challenge, when she heard the words “Hidden Rock” during the mission briefing. They’ve a talent for staying hidden, and the desert is an inconveniently spacious arena to hunt them down in on a tight mission timeline. Sakura can’t say she’s not enjoying it.

It is not unheard of for the somewhat reclusive Hidden Rock to reach out to the Leaf for aid, especially for missions that would carry them south into Wind, due to Konoha being on peaceful enough terms with Suna to come and go without straining relationships. But Sakura’s previous experiences with their nin have given her the impression they are a secretive, bull-headed group, so it does feel like a last resort.

Their intel claims the missing nin they’re tracking plan to defect to Suna, bringing years of classified information with them. This unnamed two-shinobi team led by Hound has been tasked with finding and killing them before they reach the hidden village of Sand.

Naturally, the secondary objective of this mission is to conduct field interrogations and extract as much critical information from the missing nin as possible before killing them, and Sakura suspects the leaders of Hidden Rock knew this was the trade they were making: ‘Keep this knowledge from our hostile neighbors, and we’ll give it to you instead.’ This is the nuance to the alliance between Leaf and Sand. They will cooperate with one another, but they will covet information under threat of death, too much blood spilled between them in the past to let any potential advantage slip.

“I told you, I wasn’t carrying it. It crawled onto my hand.”

“Lots of things crawl onto my hand. I don’t immediately violate human rights with them.”

“Shinobi have high pain tolerance,” she defends, “the best interrogators break minds, not bones.”

“See, it’s that sort of reasoning that makes it hard to be vulnerable around you,” he drolls, and turns the page.

Hound has been trying to coax her into his honey-laden information gathering techniques, insisting a hand plucks more berries from the bush than a machete. Sakura thinks, if it were her, she would prefer pain and fear to the way Hound talks his way through their targets’ defenses. His way is far more violating. That said, the combination of their polarized approaches has shown satisfactory results, the appeal of Hound’s easy going nature deepened by Sakura’s threatening shadow behind him.

Sakura finally finds what she was looking for in her bag, settling back against the rocks and making quick work of tearing open the cobalt wrapper, her stomach clenching in hunger at the sight of the brownish-red mashed and dried something before she takes a bite out of it. It has to be dried fruit, she thinks. Or it could be honey she’s tasting? If this were Root, she would know exactly what she was eating because it would be one of very few things she ate regularly for eight years. Her time with Hound is beginning to distort the solid lines of her world, the possibilities of what she could be ingesting too numerous.

But it’s calories, and it’s sweet enough to sting her jaw muscles. So she doesn’t mind. She likes sweet things, she’s learned. When she mentioned it to Hound, he called it “adorable,” before Sakura tried halfheartedly to cut off his tongue. Sakura earned herself a faceful of sand and a sore shoulder joint in the process, which she allowed, but there’s a small rust-colored stain on his cloth face mask from a shallow cut that periodically reopens where her kunai grazed his lip. He seemed more put out by the tear in his mask, having to use his backup, than her attempt to disfigure. She would not have offered to heal it, even if she wasn’t keeping her medical ninjutsu need-to-know. She hopes it scars.

“We’re getting close to Suna,” Hound says, glancing away from his book to squint at the strip of sun irritating his eye, as if debating if it’s annoying enough to justify the effort of moving.

They’ve discussed the possibility that Suna may send a party to escort the defectors, once they get within a certain range of the village.

It would complicate things, if Konoha were caught killing their guests, Sakura thinks, feeling the rations stick to her teeth as she chews. She will need to use a senbon like a toothpick, at this rate. Last time she did that in front of Hound he took one look at her bloody teeth and lectured her on gum health for at least ten minutes while he hunted around his home for actual toothpicks. Maybe he brought some. She’ll have to ask him later.

“We need to split up,” she says, for the thousandth time. If it were her and Sai, they would have split up as soon as they hit the desert. “Sai and I would have wrapped this mission within a week,” she adds, and enjoys the way it makes Hound give up on his farce of inattention and lay his book open-face-down on his chest where sweat has stained the front of his shirt, the arm behind his head tensing and untensing as he stares at the tarp over their heads.

“And if I were alone, I would be taking a hot bath at home right now. Think of this time on probation as a chance to meditate on how much of a hindrance you are.”

Sakura is not a hindrance, and he knows it. It’s her probation, she’s aware, that necessitates him keeping an eye on her. “You’re intentionally dragging this out,” she says, anyway.

“And here I thought you were enjoying our little camping trip.” And then, with his gray eye still blankly assessing the last dredges of light phasing through the tarp, “Are you that eager to return to the village?”

Sakura is eager to bring the severed heads sealed in her body storage scroll to the Hokage and not leave Sai’s side for the foreseeable future. But the village…

After swallowing her bite of rations, Sakura says, “I’ll take watch.” She still has another twelve hours in her, before she’ll be tired enough to rest.

Sakura would happily live in this desert, spend her days picking off travelers like a vulture for sustenance and forget the village existed, if Sai were here. If Sai were here, Sakura would be sorely tempted to kill Hound in his sleep—painlessly, with his eyes closed, so she would not have to face his stare, face his betrayal or lack of surprise, or worse, that condescending sadness of his—and convince Sai to slip away from the Leaf together. It is the reason Sai was not put on this mission, she is aware.

Seemingly taking her non-answer as confirmation of his suspicions, Hound closes his uncovered eye without complaint. Once the sun is fully down, Sakura will wake him from his shallow nap, and they’ll pack up and continue making ground without the sun beating down on them with a metaphorical stick.

While he isn’t looking, she slides a soldier pill out of her left pocket and grinds it down quietly between her molars, anxious for the release of life energy in her chest.

“You realize that’s your fifth pill, today,” Hound says, without opening his eye, and Sakura sucks on the moisture clinging to her teeth.

She had not known, before Hound, that competence could be this annoying.

…

“The thing about the language of flowers is it’s not a universal language,” Ino says, lifting the left side of her wooden board and sliding it to the edge of the large table, sliding the stem clippings into the green waste bin to the right of the worktable. “Different cultures have different meanings. Different associations and significances.”

She pretends to focus on pulling a handful of yellow daffodils out of the bucket of water sitting heavy on the tile floor under the table, cool droplets dribbling down her wrists from her palms, trying not to be to conspicuous in her tracking of Sai’s progress as he wanders her family’s flower shop for the first time with his unnerving, methodical way of moving that puts her on edge even after multiple weeks of being around him. 

He has been restless, she thinks, in Sakura’s absence. She’d hoped he’d find the shop soothing, if only slightly.

“What do the yellow ones mean?” he asks, quickly grasping the concept, slowly lowering himself into a squat in front of a black bucket of pink hyacinths. She assumes he is referring to the daffodils she’s just set down on the wood board in front of her.

Ino brushes a drop of water from one of its velvety petals lovingly. Sakura turns twenty years old on the 28th of this month. Daffodils are her birth flower. It will be the first of Sakura’s birthdays in years that Ino and Shikamaru will not spend traveling to Tea to view the cherry blossoms before they wither and fall.

“Hope, mostly,” she says, picking up her plant shears and lining the blades up with the stem about two inches from the end at a diagonal. “Rebirth.” The word tastes slightly acidic on her tongue, as she monitors the near-stranger in front of her.

There are unfamiliar markings he claims are seals on his hands, though she’s never seen him activate one, and she can see the feathered edge of a bird’s wing extending up his neck on the right side from under his black shirt collar. The only visible weapons on him are a few kunai holstered at his thigh over gray utility pants, but he does not carry himself like he’s lightly armed. His fingers are tattooed and pale as he gently lifts a few light pink petals toward the light with his index finger, but there is no emotion to scrape from the surface of those black eyes, like bottomless pits, taking everything in and giving nothing back. It makes the hairs on her arms stand up straight, like standing too close to static electricity.

The high neck of Ino’s purple halter feels suddenly too tight around her neck, the white bandages around her forearms and shins too restrictive. Her palms sweat around the silver handle of her shears as she closes the blades around the stem and cuts.

“Do you like those?” she asks, and tries not to tense up when his black eyes slide her way. She only partially knew what she was getting into, when she volunteered to take in the former Root operative those weeks ago. She wonders if Kakashi feels this on edge around Sai, or if she’s just ironically weak-minded, for a Yamanaka. “Those are pink hyacinths. They mean—”

“Playful joy,” he says, aloof, and returns to studying the airy light cluster of petals, dragging the tip of his finger down the bloom. “Sakura told me.”

Ino’s fingers slip on the next daffodil she was preparing to cut, nearly missing and splitting her thumbnail with her shears as her chest seizes abruptly. They said she doesn’t remember, is the thought that closes around her throat, like a belt slipping onto the tightest notch.

“Does she,” Ino clears her throat as she finishes the cut, not liking the choked quality to it, nor how much emotion it gives away, “does Sakura talk about flowers often?”

Sai shakes his head, retracting his hand from the flowers and returning to standing. He doesn’t seem inclined to say more, she thinks, until he turns his eyes on hers once again, his posture following his focus, something predatory about the way he is looking at her with renewed interest.

“She doesn’t like flowers,” he says, angling his head like a crow, irises sliding over the long tail of blonde hair combed over her shoulder, observing the white manicured tips of her nails, then back to her face as he steps once, twice, closer to the table she suddenly feels is an insufficient barrier between them.

Ino holds his gaze, getting the distinct impression averting her eyes right now will result in immediate death. “She used to like them,” Ino says, unable to shake the feeling she’s standing trial; that she has to justify her place in Sakura’s past. “She liked asking me what they meant.”

Sai lifts his chin so minutely she would never have noticed if not for her paranoid fixation on his gestures, as he regards her carefully with slightly lowered eyelids. Ino tightens her grip on the shears, and holds her breath.

“She was exposed to you often,” he says, and Ino is too baffled by his sudden interest in conversation after weeks of unbroken silence to feel defensive about his questionable wording. “What was she? To you?”

“We were friends,” she says, and then, because it couldn’t hurt to assure Sai she means Sakura no harm, “I’m hoping we can be friends again, when I’m allowed to see her.”

After a brief silence, he continues in his approach. He does not stop until he stands directly in front of her. She does not move, when he slowly, as if aware she might startle, reaches over the table and takes the trimmed yellow daffodil directly from her hand, its dewy stem sliding between her fingers sensually as she lets it go.

He looks down at the flower in his hand, and Ino lets herself quietly release the air in her lungs. This is who Sakura trusts, she thinks. This nin is Sakura’s equal or superior in all things, she’s been told. Sakura has earned the uncompromising respect of this inhuman, frightening thing.

Sai crushes the yellow bloom in his fist, watching the petals crumple and fall with impartial interest. “Your clan’s technique,” he says, rubbing a yellow petal between his thumb and index finger. “You’ve asked to use it. For my…consent.” He says the word like he’s never used it. Like it’s something she made up. Like he’s humoring her.

Ino cautiously removes her fingers from the shears, setting them down quietly on the wood cutting board. She inhales the near-overpowering fragrance of the shop, trying to calm her rising pulse. She has been trying to convince Sai to open his mind to her from the first day, has been trying everything she knows to get him to want to share his memories with her; it was the reason her request to become to him what Kakashi is to Sakura was granted in the first place. The council have not wanted to make an enemy of him, have been holding out hope he will give them the information they seek voluntarily. She did not expect the flower shop to be the keystone.

“I have,” she says, and glances at the glass double doors to the shop, praying no customers walk in during this delicate moment. The daffodil petal tears under the stress of his pinched fingers, but he continues to rub away, until its pieces are curling in on themselves, further breaking apart under his small ministrations.

“Would you like to see her?” he asks, without looking away from his destruction of the flower, and Ino’s heart stutters in disbelief.

“Yes,” she says, only a little breathless.

There is no world wherein Ino does not want to see her missing childhood friend; no world where only hearing the words ‘she’s alive’ are enough to fill the gaping hole Sakura left in her life when she walked away from her and everyone else in the village. Of their age group, only Naruto and Sasuke have spoken to her, and they have been ordered to keep quiet by their former genin instructor, Kakashi blocking her access at every turn. He tried to block Ino’s appeal to house Sai, too, but luckily failed in at least that.

Kakashi does not understand the depth of this emotion, does not understand how desperately she and Shikamaru have been seesawing between hoping their friend would return one day and hoping she died the day she disappeared, hoping that she has not been suffering unknown horrors for the years she’s been out of sight. He does not know how much they took for granted that she’d continue to exist by their sides like she had since Ino first pushed back the bullies closing in on her at the park; how many times they’ve shed ugly, private tears over the likelihood that she is gone forever; how many hours they’ve sat in silence imagining what would have happened if they had held her longer when she was in the hospital, told her they loved her more, begged their parents’ harder to take her into their homes instead of letting her wilt away in that orphanage.

The worst mistake they ever made was giving Sakura space when she asked for it, and now they are being ordered to make the same error again.

What Sai is offering is confirmation of her existence. Of her return.

When Sai’s eyes finally meet hers, there is nothing left of the daffodil in his hand save a faint yellow stain on the pads of his fingers, the bare stem hanging limp in his other hand. She does not know what made him change his mind, but she will worry about his reasons later. Sai has decided he wants her to see the truth. She only hopes she will still be able to sleep, after seeing it.

“I consent,” he says, cooly, and Ino puts her palms down on the wooden board, digging her nails into the wood grains until his eyes do not scare her.

Ino does not see the way his pupils dilate in anticipation.

Later, she will wish she had.

…

“What did you do?”

The man with narrow brown eyes and hair tied back like a pinecone is angry, Sai notes, while being held by the collar in the center of the flower shop his host was careless enough to show him. He supposes she would have no way of knowing that Sakura grows silent and distant when she recalls the names and meanings of flowers, that she becomes ill at the sight of those yellow daffodils, or that Sai would be able to approximate that this woman is somehow responsible.

The young woman has been crying for a long time, he thinks. She is on her knees beside the two upside-down buckets she insisted they use as stools after turning the sign on the door to ‘closed,’ dry heaving over a puddle of her own sickness. It would be better to stop trying to vomit, if nothing is coming up. Or at minimum, overturn one of the buckets and use it to catch the partially digested food and saliva dribbling from her lips.

“What did you do?” he repeats.

She is shivering significantly. It is not very cold in this room, he thinks, but Sai is wearing long sleeves. Her arms are bare, aside from the bandages on her forearms. He’s been told he’s not as sensitive to temperature as most, usually while Sakura uses his body to keep hers warm during winter missions. But Sakura does not look this pathetic when she’s cold.

Sai saw a mare just after it was born, once. He recalls stepping over the farmer’s bloodless body to get a closer look at the animal. He remembers wondering if they always shake like that, too cold, too wet, too new and unaware of where they are, what they are, why they are.

The woman looks like that, he thinks, watching drying tears being endlessly replaced with new ones streaming down from the corners of her open eyes. Newly born.

Her throat is beginning to sound raw. If they were outside the village, he thinks he would quiet her braying like he did the mare. Some animals can’t quiet themselves. Some require a blade and a steady hand.

The man who found her like this, found Sai standing over her, watching her tremble on the tile floor, shakes him by the collar once more to regain his attention, and Sai reluctantly allows his eyes to leave the unseemly visage his host has turned into. Those brown eyes speak to strong emotions, as does the vein in his forehead pulsing closer to the surface.

“What did you show her?”

Sai thinks of how to answer the man’s question; of the most efficient way to put into words what he used his anti-mind-jutsu training to do.

“I showed her what she asked to see,” he says, eventually, and wonders at how the man’s eyes narrow even further. Any more and they’ll be closed.

It is not entirely true, Sai is aware. He knows what the woman wanted.

But Sakura has many secrets they have kept at length from Danzō and the Leaf regarding the extent of her abilities, and Sai has even more knowledge to keep, things even Sakura has yet to realize about herself, her origins, her blood. These secrets Sai will guard on her behalf, as Sai guards all of his memories of Sakura. Danzō intended to take her life in the name of her potential. Sai is still evaluating if this village, this Hokage, would do the same. It would be ideal if Sakura were to never learn the truth of how and why she was recruited, and eliminating those who know it is a long-standing goal Sai intends to see to before it’s too late.

There is only one other person, due to Danzō’s faulty decision-making, who has seen more of Sakura than Sai, and that person forced their way into her head, tried to deconstruct her, see her moving parts and determine how to use her if her mind survived the process. Sai was invited in, and he covets her secrets well. He has earned them. He knows too much of her, now, to be willing to share without ample cause.

Sai has tasted the salt of her rare tears. He has felt her muscles shift beneath his hands as he draws lines and beads of blood across her skin with a needle, remaking her in ink that answers only to him. He has seen her teeth bared in joy and rage, has seen her faint freckles darken in the sun, has seen her floral hair unfurl in the wind before she cut it to her shoulders, full of color, so unlike the black and white lines Sai knows how to form with brushes and ink, full of feelings she tries to share with him, tries to force into his chest like a transplanted heart.

Sai learned beauty from Sakura’s green eyes in soft lighting, learned fear from her blood seeping up between his fingers, learned warmth from her breath on his skin as she slept beside him. He learned cold from her absence, from the operative unwilling to meet his eyes as they told him she’d been sent to the land of Rivers while he was deployed, that it had been days without a report, that they were told to reassign her bunk. He learned wrath from the blood of the messenger spraying his face and the concrete walls as he declared their death a training accident, the witnesses too well-trained to contradict him.

He learned relief from her unlikely return, quickly followed by greed as he carefully and gradually thinned the ranks and stacked the odds of being assigned frequent missions together, conscious of not alerting Danzō to the fact Sai’s standing mission has evolved unexpectedly; that his orders to secure Sakura’s devotion have required Sai to meet her halfway; that in the process of convincing her of her value to him, he has convinced himself. Sai has possessed her, invaded her, and this is the cost of that intrusion. Sai has felt her pulse from inside her. He has killed as effortlessly and as often in retribution for her hisses of pain than he has for the sake of a mission. He has been that pain, to her, and been forgiven within the same instant as the transgression.

This village has no claim to her. Sakura is here because Sai is here. He is losing patience with their presumption.

But there are things that are safe to share. Things that were necessary for that woman to see, so she will abandon her one-sided attachment quicker. That woman is weak. Sai thinks it was the right thing to do, to show her why that precludes her from further entangling with Sakura.

“What did she ask to see?” The man with a pinecone for hair looks like he is fighting the answer to that question, those narrow eyes stubborn in their willful ignorance, and Sai feels his eyebrows want to furrow because Sai specifically recalls being told this man possesses a genius-level intellect.

“Memories of Sakura,” Sai says, slowly, for the pinecone to understand, and marvels at how quickly blood can leave a face.