Black Bough

Sakura is relearning how to skin a rabbit.

They’ve hiked roughly ten miles northwest of the Root compound, to where the roots of the trees grow larger, raised above the soil’s surface enough for smaller animals to shelter inside them, and where clover grows in sprawling patches, encroaching on the trunks of trees with a clinginess that rivals moss. They’ve settled at the edge of a creek bed, and the sounds of water rushing over rocks is making her bladder complain.

Sakura has learned this before, she thinks, pinching its hide at the back of its neck, its speckled-brown fur impossibly soft against the skin of her fingers, having been instructed to remove her gloves before beginning to work the animal free of its skin. She cannot recall when or where, but it feels familiar, being talked through the motions.

Not that her current teacher is talking much. He hasn’t spoken more than a handful of words since arriving at her bunk this morning, the sudden appearance of a zero scaring her entire section into silence, and ordering her to follow. This is the most time she has ever spent with him. She has passed him in the halls once or twice, but he rarely spends more than a night in the barracks a month before being sent back out into the field.

The operative teaching her reminds her of Sai in his eerily precise muscle control, in the way he holds his kunai, loose and at ease, only with white eyes and short brown hair. He is the same age as Sai, thirteen years old, just one year older than Sakura, and just as difficult to interpret in his silence. He is squatting in the grass across from her in black fatigues that look notably more imposing on him than her, dutifully staying no more than one step ahead of her with his own rabbit, already widening his cut with two fingers as Sakura mimics the way he made his incision with her kunai, trying not to grow squeamish when the blood seeps out into the fur, trying not to recall the fresh sensation of shaving human skin off a scalp while the prisoners scream.

She watches him hook his red index and middle fingers under the skin and begin to pull one hand toward the tail and one toward the head, splitting the hide as he shucks it expertly like corn. Sakura remembers corn. She remembers delicate hands belonging to a woman who smiled often. The memory is sudden and warm like the blood on her hands as she jerks the skin open on her own rabbit, sloppy in her distraction.

“Don’t rupture the stomach when you kill and clean an animal,” he reminds her, and tugs the hide off his rabbit's feet, leaving behind tufts of fur like winter shoes. “It will spoil the meat.”

Sakura nods, following his actions, needing to grab more of the supple hide to prevent it from tearing unnecessarily. It is a fragile thing, this rabbit’s skin. Nothing like humans, whose skin fights separation from the muscles, making a mess of everything by being too thoroughly attached. This is much cleaner. It is better to let go of things you are not strong enough to keep, she thinks, and rips the fur clear off the feet.

“Watch closely,” he says, when he cuts the hands and feet free of the body. He watches her just as closely as she follows his example, and nods once in approval.

When they are finished, they lay their rabbits on a cluster of rocks by the creek. He washes his hands in the stream, motions for her to wash hers, too.

“Thank you,” she says, when they are drying their hands on their pants, and the white-eyed boy jerks his gaze to her sharply before flickering into the space before her, grabbing her long hair in his fist and pulling, less intent on causing pain—given the full fist of hair he went for—and more on forcing her chin up and bringing his bloodied kunai to her neck as he takes her down to a kneel in the fallen leaves and soil, those Hyūga eyes watching her watch him, watching her pulse accelerate; her chakra flow erratically; her instinctive fear of death override her training.

“Gratitude is for humans,” he says, and she digs her nails into her palms at her sides to suppress her urge to act as he presses the edge of his blade into her neck like a shallow kiss, warmth trickling down her clavicle as she shivers in the shade of the forest, his breath hot on her face in jarring contrast. “What are you, F11-6? Are you human?”

For a moment, she is unsure she will be able to speak, unsure if her bladder will release in preparation to flee, but she manages to maintain continence and force words past her closing throat, even if they arrive in a revealing rasp. “No.”

“What are you?”

“A shinobi.”

“Are you grateful to me, F11-6?” he asks.

Sakura is afraid to shake her head ‘no’ with a kunai still held threateningly to her neck and his tight hold on her hair pulling dully at her scalp, and so she utters a quick, “no,” and hopes he does not punish her for using her voice so many times in one interaction.

“You still feel fear,” he says, and the observation stings like a slap. She has not shaken off her emotions, yet, and he has noticed. He sees her failure.

She holds her breath as he studies her eyes through the milky film of his colorless pupils. Eventually, he loosens his hold on her hair, flipping the kunai in his hand away from her neck to point tip-down as he slides his fingers through her hair, smoothing his hand through the strands, taking particular interest in the splitting ends of her cherry blossom tresses.

“Soft,” he says, neutrally, and slides his kunai into an empty slot in the weapons holster at her left thigh, the gesture pointed in its invasive quality, pointed in how it reveals the difference in their abilities, for him to have stolen a kunai in that split second without her even noticing. “Like a rabbit.” She is unsure whether he means her hair, or her demeanor in general.

Sakura is too frightened to push him away, and is relieved when he sits back on his heels on his own and braces his palms on his knees, pushing himself to standing. He wanders back to their skinned rabbits laying exposed on the rocks, and begins tying their limbs with twine from one of the many pockets in his black fatigues.

“Cut your hair, little rabbit,” he says, without looking up from his hands, and Sakura finds her legs unsteady when she tries to follow his lead, her knees weak with the sensation of a close encounter with death. “I think you know how easy it is to skin an animal with a firm grip on the pelt.”

It is not bad advice, she thinks. It did seem easy. It would have been very little effort for him to flay her alive. He made that clear. But, somehow, she doubts shorter hair would have spared her.

She reaches for her rabbit with shaking hands. She should probably be thinking about how to close the power gap between her and the shinobi beside her, too steep a difference between herself and the operatives with a zero in their name for her assured survival. She should be thinking of how she’s going to beat the cowardice out of herself, how she’s going to retrain her fight or flight response until she can withstand the pressure of a more powerful opponent without freezing up. How she’s going to surgically remove the emotions she has no use for, how she’s going to face Sai’s penetrative gaze when he returns from his mission and hears of her continued failure to cease feeling.

She thinks none of these things.

Instead, watching M0-3 slide the bound limbs of his rabbit around a stick he found on the forest floor, what Sakura thinks is this:

He called her ‘little rabbit.’

It was a very human thing to do.

…

Predictably, Kakashi yields to time and proximity, too little distance left between their targets and Suna to accommodate his overbearing approach to this mission.

They split up.

It has been less than a full day and night since Sakura body-flickered out of his sight, and separation anxiety is building up like the sand in his shemagh. He feels the fine layer of crushed sandstone coating every inch of his skin in every movement, granules creasing and rubbing against themselves as he eases himself back behind the dune he was about to cross, sand spilling into his fatigues as he slides stomach-down a foot lower, his gloved palms sinking into the cool sand of midnight, his heart beating slow and easy, his breath warming the inside of his cotton mask with every silent exhale.

He has found his target. Nearly stumbled right onto them while following their scent, for how well they’ve hidden their chakra signature and how suddenly they stopped. They’ve paused for a drink of water just on the other side of his dune, and based on the pitiful dribble of water they manage to shake out of their canteen, Kakashi is less hurting for time than they are for resources. He can hear their labored breathing from here, just under the steady swell of wind causing him to squint or risk losing sight in his right eye. He reinforces it with a thin chakra windshield, not stingy enough with his chakra at the moment to gamble on how long he can let the desert treat his eye like sandpaper before he goes stark blind.

From the glimpse he got before creeping backward out of moonlight, he’s caught up to the younger one, her headscarf down around her neck so she can drink—or try to drink. That split second of anguish that crumpled her tanned face a second ago communicated about how well this defection is working out for her, how underprepared she was for the cost of turning traitor. Kakashi tries not to underestimate opponents, but he has a hunch this nin won’t be putting up much of a fight. He is relieved, at the thought of not needing to waste precious hours breaking her down for interrogation. The desert already broke her for him.

This desert breaks most people, to be fair. He thinks it's the surplus of sand just as much as the dry heat and wind that does it. The unending grit of it all. The way it works its way into clothes and orifices. Surely, feeling sand crunch between their teeth every time they eat could make most shinobi want to cry a little on principle, after a week or two.

But not Sakura.

Eerie, how the same climate that etched that desolate face into the Hidden Rock defector has brightened Sakura’s eyes to a piercing green, has flushed her cheeks with a healthy glow, has brought more than one smile-with-teeth to her stoic face, before the winds get so high she loses her sight and her legs tremble under her own weight and she’s forced to cover her mouth more securely, though she never steps uncertain, never appears to lose her surroundings; or when sweat glazes her face and her sharp eyes dull and she looks like she’s getting dangerously dehydrated, and she shakes her head ‘no’ before Kakashi can even suggest they take a rest, something wistful in her suffering that makes his chest ache, as she intentionally allows herself to be worn down by hunger and thirst, conserving rations almost unreasonably, conserving chakra by letting her muscles do most of the work, purposefully exhausting her body. When Kakashi tried to critique the choice as inefficient, tried to goad her into satiating some of that hunger, into leaning on her chakra a bit more like himself, she flashed a humoring grin over the edge of her slipping shemagh so cryptic it caused him to question if he’d ignored his own exhaustion to the point of delusion.

Kakashi has involuntarily choked on an inhale more than once during this mission after catching sight of such a smile, at the vitality radiating from inside her with some miles between them and the village, warmer than the tan they’ve both picked up from baking in daylight; at how her predator eyes soften with the setting sun, something thoughtful painting her expression in orange hues when she looks over the waves of sand from her perch on a high rock formation; at how close she feels, when it is just them lying with their backs in the sand, taking a break, breathing in tandem.

It has been a long time since Kakashi has felt this way. Felt that shriveled, neglected desire to know and be known. Felt so complicit with someone watching him this closely—as closely as he’s watched her.

He has watched this parched landscape massage her into a state of unmistakable release, has watched the wind strip away the outer skin and show him glimmers of the calm, unshakable shinobi she is underneath the restlessness and hostility she feels around the village. Her file undersells her, he is sure of that now. If this is how she fights while draining her body to its base functions—taijutsu fast enough to tempt him to whip out Obito’s eye just to keep track of her, bukijutsu intricately orchestrated and effortlessly executed to the point it makes Genma look like a retired circus act, chakra use so minimal and discerning it makes it impossible to estimate her strength and speed—well. If Kakashi weren’t sure before, that she’s hiding her true skills, he’s more than certain now. He’d suspected her strength, but he sees now that his estimation had been too conservative by half.

Sakura looks at her fellow Leaf like they’re one wrong word away from death because they are. He could probably count the number of shinobi on this continent she wouldn’t be able to kill if she got serious and still land in the lower double-digits.

He’d also underestimated Sakura’s—against all expectations—naturally mellow temperament. She’s only tried to mutilate him twice, and not very seriously. As long as they’re making progress on the mission, it turns out Sakura is actually almost-somewhat pleasant company. She doesn’t bitch much, either, compared to his usual companions. For all her self-flagellating on this little hike—a behavior he suspects is not a general habit of hers so much as a coping mechanism he’ll need to unpack with their rucksacks once they’re home—Sakura has not let slip so much as a grunt of discomfort. Not a single complaint. She has not faltered in combat once. She is more tactically minded and utilitarian than most Anbu captains, and he can tell from her little head tilts when he gives orders she’s constantly checking them against what she would have done, clearly accustomed to leading, but not adverse to following. She is black ops to the core, and Kakashi is reluctantly impressed.

Her competence is contagious. Kakashi has caught himself disguising his own fatigue when her eyes graze him, caught himself keeping his snark to a minimum unless she seems receptive to conversation. He’s resisted her influence in small acts—rereading his favorite Icha Icha chapters, commenting idly on her general ruthlessness when he deems appropriate—but he’s careful not to disturb the respect slowly gathering in her green eyes when she looks his way, like sand caught in her eyelashes. It feels…rare. Not unpleasant. Her respect.

He wonders how much of that will remain, when they return to the Hidden Leaf.

He is unconvinced that this truce between them won’t disappear into this desert while his back is turned, while he’s here laying silent in the sand, assessing the sounds of muffled sobs as the shinobi he’s preparing to kill wastes what little water she had left, bracing himself to make this night much worse for the girl who made a bad decision and is paying a steeper punishment than probably deserved.

It might be pity, that urges him to work his way to standing, cushioning his steps with chakra to prevent sand from sliding down and preceding him, moonlight casting his shadow behind him as he walks down the other side of the dune and stands behind the girl hunched over her knees, hands shaking over her eyes, wet, rasping sounds escaping her now in unrestrained wails that cover his approach. Kakashi unsheathes a kunai from his thigh, rotating the blade in his hand once, twice, as he stares at the back of her brown hair, tangled and matted from the tan scarf currently lying limp around her shoulders and neck. It might be pity, that makes him want to end this quickly.

It might be why he says, “I have an idea. Why don’t we skip the fight, have a short, pleasant conversation, and I’ll make it painless when I deliver you into the waiting hands of your dearly departed friends?”

It certainly feels like pity, as she lowers her dirt-stained hands, turns her head, and points dull brown eyes up at him, moonlight whitewashing her face, making the tear tracks on her cheeks look like glass. He lets her assess his exposed eye for a long few minutes, lets her process her position, kneeling in the sand in front of him, process the blade in his hand, process the lack of tension in his body, the resolution he is offering. Whatever she sees causes her muscles to uncoil further, exhaustion peaking, as she smiles somewhat hatefully, offset by the relief saturating her voice as she says, “You Leaf are such fucking hypocrites, you know?”

Kakashi knows.

“They don’t care about us. None of them. Just pigs having meetings on how to fatten themselves further, how to make their full pockets fuller, to make their war hounds hungrier and more loyal,” she spits, and the glass tears flow harder.

She isn’t wrong.

“Spare me your conscience, Friend Killer,” she says, and though he’s well desensitized to that name, to that fundamental misnomer he’s never felt the need to refute—either because he wasn’t their friend, or because most would not believe him if he explained he didn’t kill Obito for his eye (didn’t kill Obito at all), just like he didn’t kill Rin for being weak (though weak she was)—Kakashi feels a deep melancholy begin to settle on his shoulders at the iron will breaking through the dull surface of her gaze, like Sakura cracking the sugar glaze on the scone he brought her before departing on their mission. Not as broken by the desert as he’d hoped. This shinobi means it, when she says, “Make it hurt all you like.”

He’ll take that as a ‘no,’ to the pleasant conversation.

Kakashi is aware he could get her talking, given a day or two. But her cathartic digression on shinobi politics, brief as it was, is sitting on the back of his tongue with an acidic, bitter weight, and Kakashi does not have time to spare on this nin before catching up to Sakura and corralling her back to Konoha, which he is optimistic she will let him do with little fuss; it is situations like this that make him reluctantly acknowledge the double-edged convenience of her obsession with her former handler. Like a magnet, he could place Sai wherever he needs her to go and watch her dart off in that direction the second he gives the green light. But if he’s not around when she completes her mission, there is little guarantee she will stick around to wait for any colored light from Kakashi. And that’s assuming she cares enough about the mission not to immediately split and head back to the Leaf to retrieve Sai and give the missing nin lifestyle a try.

It is for this reason, he tells himself, that he switches his hold on the handle one more time, flicks the sharpest edge of his kunai across this shinobi’s neck, and watches her scarf swell a deep red, watches her wide brown eyes grow unfocused, watches her fingers twitch and listens to her gargled breaths as she falls forward onto the sand, the wind ruffling her hair and clothes as the sand eases up around her deadweight, the desert already trying to suck her down, bury her, take her into the earth.

Like the unfed, hypocritical bloodhound she accused him of being, Kakashi will not allow her to be laid to rest. In a moment, he will remove his gloves and begin sawing her head off at the neck, will need to snap it from her spine to ease the work, will be watering the stones beneath them with her blood, getting it under his fingernails, feeling grains of sand cling to his wet hands and forearms as he does what must be done. In a moment.

For now, he sighs in heavy fatigue that has little to do with the sand crusting his eye or the complaints in his thigh muscles and everything to do with the endless parade of death he’s chosen to spin his baton for, and tastes his own bitter breath behind his mask like a pill slowly swallowed.

He did not need to question this one, he tells himself, watching crimson soak the sand under her head, beading on top of eroded rock.

She had nothing to say he did not already know.

…

The next time Sakura blinks, she is covered in viscera and straddling a war crime in-progress.

There is no salvaging her beige fatigues, her front entirely stained a deep rust with mixed fresh and drying blood, from the tips of her hair to the fronts of her boots. It’s all over her hands, sheer enough to show her tattooed palms, but it’s caked around her cuticles. She has no idea where her shemagh went, but at least she can feel her tantō on her back. There are parts of the human body she does not recognize clumped on her pants, caught on the outer seams of her pockets and the edges of the two holstered kunai at her right thigh, and spilling out into the sand around her and the shinobi she’s brutalized.

She thinks it was only moments ago, that the evening heat of southern Wind forced her to dip into her reserves, forced her to regulate her temperature by expanding the air molecules near her skin, decreasing atomic collisions, cooling it down, giving her internal heat somewhere more appealing to rush to, easing the early effects of heat exhaustion she felt creeping up on her as her sweat proved ineffective against the high sun bearing down, unbroken by a cloudless cerulean sky.

Now the early morning light washes the arid landscape out into a dusty orange shade of itself, the cool breeze sweeping low over the rocks and sand, and Sakura is piecing together her recollection like one of the jigsaw puzzles Hound was in the process of enticing her to play with him before they’d left for this mission.

Focusing her eyes on the reddish, humanoid lump in the sand directly below her, a knee in the sand on either side of the object that is still slowly becoming a person in her eyes, Sakura recalls exactly what got her into this mess, and fervently wishes she were as good at purging venom from a bloodstream as she is at putting it there.

In her peripheral vision, she can see Hound-but-not-Hound’s silhouette against the rust colored rocks, at ease as he observes her. He has mass, now, displacing the sand under his ass and boots.

She is still hallucinating. Convincingly, she notes.

“How long was I under?” Sakura asks Not Hound, as she tries to remember what the fuck she was trying to do and why, tries to hang on to this moment of clarity. Though not much clarity, she acknowledges, if she’s still talking to her own delusion. Hopefully her subconscious will feed her hallucination the correct answer.

The man she’s straddling does little more than twitch at the sound of her voice, which is enough to shock her, since she thought it was a corpse. She is almost certain the shinobi beneath her is the Ishigakure nin she was tailing, but his clothes and face are too blood-soaked and torn to identify, and the fact she can’t be sure is causing her blood to pump faster, which isn’t good if she’s trying to stop the slow venom from spreading any further than it already has.

Hound doesn’t answer.

Her vision warps, and she balls her hands into fists, her skin sticking to itself tellingly, and refocuses on staying present. Grounding herself. 

“Okay, where were we?” she breathes. “What about the thousand jutsu? Is that true?”

Sakura, trying to hold onto consciousness, has begun keeping herself entertained by fact-checking her Bingo Book against Not Hound’s word, quizzing herself for fun. Not Hound is finicky about when and how he answers her questions, but he is attentive, in his own way. Much like the real thing.

The extremes of yesterday’s high heat and last night’s stark cold have exacerbated the effects of the powerful hallucinogenic venom currently working its way through her system. In a stroke of karmic irony, Sakura was pricked by what she thought was a common sand scorpion almost six hours after separating from Hound. She’s let it go too long without treatment, she’s aware, taking too long to realize she must have been struck by one of the exceedingly rare subspecies with mutated venom, fondly referred to as ‘spurs’ within Root, identical in appearance to their common counterparts but much nastier in their sting, known for its uniquely slow-acting effects. Where common venom takes hours to shut down a nervous system, spurs take days, making its uses particularly niche. Bad luck, for it to be the rarest scorpion in this desert, not one of the more prolific creatures whose toxins she’s been microdosing since age eleven, its venom too expensive and hard to procure to routinely inject. It won’t kill her, she thinks, not in this dose, but it’s not ideal.

She vaguely remembers stalking and attacking her target amid shadows and large mouths that were trying to swallow her, and she recalls trying to free a voice trapped inside the nin’s chest at some point, but nothing concrete. It will make her report to Hound less than satisfactory.

Speaking of Hound: while the warping colors dancing on the dunes like light on an oil spill and vicious whispers on the wind are concerning, it is the hazy presence of her new handler that seems the most persistent.

Not Hound does not ask for a report. 

He sits with his back to a large boulder at the center of a cluster of rocks beginning to absorb the sunlight, digging the heels of his desert boots into the sand as Sakura kneels over the last, barely recognizable, (hopefully) Ishigakure defector.

Real Hound is not going to like this, and she doubts he will be amused by her excuses. ‘I blacked out,’ ‘his face kept changing,’ and ‘fake you told me to skin his arms so we can watch his muscles twitch’ are not going to offset this level of mutilation, she is aware.

She obviously is done asking the man questions, has been—she assumes—prodding with scientific fascination for biological reactions through the shinobi’s dying breaths, which Sakura can see with clarity now that she’s paying attention, given the fact his lungs are exposed to open air, sand dusting his organs. Sakura can imagine clearly, after a night of Not Hound’s unhelpful commentary, how it would have been Real Hound’s role to pull Sakura off this…thing…and inform her she’s acting ‘fucking insane.’

Hound left her alone for what can’t have been more than two days—she hopes she hasn’t been wandering the desert high as the sun in the sky for more than that—and she’s seemingly forgotten every single rule he made in his absence. Not to mention the humiliation of being stung by a scorpion in the first place—she killed it as soon as she woke, but she’d been pushing her body too hard, to be so tired she didn’t jolt to awareness the second it got within a few feet of her. He’s never going to let this go.

“When I gave you that box of toothpicks, I gave them to you in good faith you would use them for dental hygiene.” Sakura looks at the fresh corpse as his lungs cease moving, then at the bloodied mounds for eyes. Sure enough, there are the rest of her toothpicks she got from Hound before parting ways. To say it is wasteful would be an understatement. “I see my faith was misplaced.”

Even Not Hound is disappointed, and he was on board for most of it.

“If it’s exaggerated just say it’s exaggerated,” she says, in response to him dodging her question, and sits back on the corpse’s thighs. She looks at Hound, the small, involuntary snarl on her lips, triggered by the details below her going in and out of focus, wavering as she finally meets his cool gray gaze. It’s judgmental. “What?”

“I’m debating,” he says, and leans his head back against the stone holding him in his seated position, gaze passing over her ruined clothing with mild interest.

“About?”

“If it’s my moral obligation to cultivate empathy in you, or if after everything you’ve done and seen it’d be unnecessarily cruel and I should leave you be.”

It raises her eyebrow, slightly, this comment, and Hound watches silently as she slowly looks down at the dead shinobi beneath her, at the mess she’s made of the human body, furrowing her brows before she clears her expression with practiced ease and pushes herself to standing, motioning as if about to brush dirt off her hands before glancing down at her stained palms and letting them fall useless to her sides as she steps over the body.

The ground shimmers and dips, and Sakura does her best to compensate by shifting her weight as she walks, only it doesn’t seem to work. She ends up with her knees in the sand a handful of feet from the blood soaked earth around the corpse, a surge of nausea squeezing her insides, her stomach contracting as her stomach fails to heed her mental warning not to waste the water, her hands swallowed up to the wrists as she chokes up mostly clear liquid with specks of red from her most recent ration bar, saliva thick and mucusy with dehydration, spittle hanging from her cracked lips and she shudders from a sudden chill.

It’s getting colder as the morning goes on, and part of her knows that’s not a good sign, not a normal progression in this land that has gone from towering dunes to gentle slopes of sand, bits of vegetation poking out of the ground, succulents of green and brown and red. The six senbon holstered around her left forearm like a cuff over the top of her sleeve are looking…wriggly.

“You know, when I said you should find a hobby, I was thinking something like wood whittling or ceramics. Scorpion doping is a bit extreme, even for you,” Not Hound says, mildly, and Sakura wonders, once again, why the fuck she is hallucinating him and not Sai instead.

Sakura watches the damp patch of sand directly below her mouth evaporating rapidly. It’s not cold here. Only Sakura can’t feel the burn of the hot sand on her palms. Only Sakura is shivering. She needs to regroup with Hound and get her hands on some antivenom, stat. She isn’t wrong, in that the venom might not kill her on its own, but traveling alone through the desert with her senses dulled, unable to keep her head clear, will most definitely do the job. She’s mildly impressed with herself that she even managed to take down her prey, while the world is twisting and turning around her.

That is, if she did indeed take down the correct nin. She turns and stretches her arm out toward the corpse, wipes the coagulated blood off his forehead protector with a rare clean spot of her sleeve, sees the slash through the symbol of the Hidden Rock, and feels some relief. At least there’s that.

Sitting back on her heels, Sakura ignores the way the blue sky undulates as she turns her head and assesses her position, mapping her place between the distant cliffs and rock formations to the north and the faint blue peaks of the mountains to the east that border the land of Rivers and shelter the Hidden Valley.

She has gotten too close to Suna, has allowed her prey to flee too far south in her delirium. She is less impressed with herself, with that clarified.

“Did I flare my chakra, while I was out of it?” she asks the shadow in her peripheral vision.

“You did.” 

Not Hound’s voice is losing accuracy, she thinks, coming out too flat. Too cold. Slightly higher in pitch. She hums, turning her eyes away from the wind, toward her imaginary companion. She is about to comment on him actually answering a question for once, gore-stiffened strands of hair falling past her eyes to hang down over her forehead as she tilts her face up, when she discovers Not Hound has been replaced with an even less likely presence.

Easing down into a crouch beside her in gray and beige fatigues, a frayed gray scarf loose around his neck, is a familiar operative with short, choppy brown hair and porcelain white eyes, watching her fail to resist a small, parched laugh from leaving her stinging lips.

M0-3, she thinks, and feels a bitter smile displace the sand on her cheeks, feels it trickle onto her collarbone the way adrenaline trickles into her bloodstream at just the sight of him. Sweat drips into her eyes, but she can’t feel the heat stimulating it.

“This is unexpected,” she muses, glancing at the unscarred knuckles of the hands on his knees—ungloved, as he often preferred them. A detailed illusion, she’s constructed. “You were good at detoxification. Maybe I’m getting desperate.”

“What you are, little rabbit,” M0-3 says, “is an hour or two away from hypertension.” He tilts his head, the sunrise making his skin glow as he sizes her up just as he did in her memories. Just as he did the last time she saw him, when he passed her on his way into the barracks before her mission to Iron. He’d looked like he wanted to say something, back then. He looks like he wants to say something, now. “The venom has progressed more seriously than you think.”

The breeze eases over them, causing her joints to ache and her muscles to shiver in an attempt to keep warm, carrying the sharp scent of iron and waste from the foul corpse behind them into her nose.

Her heart pumps harder. His milky eyes are filled with a rainbow film that doesn’t belong there, but his focus on her is real, as is the chakra he’s allowing to curl off of his body and brush her skin like a cat licks at a puddle of water, or how smoke wisps off of burning sage, while crouching beside her, letting it brush against her ruined skin; the faint chalky scent of soldier pills on his breath as his gaze drifts over her gore-stained fatigues.

It’s real.

He is real.

She freezes. He notices, white eyes snapping back to hers, holding her in place with the reality of his attention.

There are only two people within Root who could consistently defeat M0-3 in an extended altercation. Sakura is not one of them. Has never been one of them.

She trained until near death for eight years to be able to handle herself in a one-on-one fight against at least the youngest four out of the eight operatives known as Root Zero—all from powerful bloodlines; all plucked from the womb under the guise of being stillborn; all with a zero in their operative name as their age of recruitment, hence their moniker.

A little over twenty years ago, Danzō got tired of looking for strays across the elemental nations, wanting better shinobi bloodlines to work with, and began collecting infants from powerful clans across the continent like souvenirs. He continued the practice for roughly four years before determining it too risky a practice, resulting in an elite eight person squad, one of the most powerful operatives of which is currently standing up from his crouch several miles too close to Sakura for her likely continued survival.

“How long have you been watching me?” she asks, closing her eyes to stop herself from vomiting again, vision spinning from her heart circulating blood too quickly while under the effects of the scorpion venom she has less time to address than she thought, if M0-3 is correct—which he is. Always.

It angers her, that he doesn’t fear her stare, her genjutsu. It angers her that he doesn’t need to, that he and M0-4 taught her most of what she knows about how to construct a worthwhile illusion. Open eyes aren’t going to save her from the likes of him, and she is no longer the type to hold them open out of a misplaced sense of dignity. Itachi taught her that, the dysfunction of pride. She’s abandoned it well. She thinks he’d approve.

“Since before you left the village,” he says, and she doesn’t doubt it. The Byakugan kekkei genkai has never failed to be a sharp pain in her ass. “Since it was discovered you were captured.”

Captured, he says. Her poisoned mind starts to catch up.

She peels her crusted eyes open again to check his. Those white opal eyes seem to interpret her blank expression easily, as he looks down his nose at her like M0-1 might look at a cockroach on his shoe: with apathy, and plans to use it well. “You were subdued and transported against your will. I’ve observed you for the last month and confirmed your lack of involvement in the exposure of Root. You’ve retained your active Root operative status, F11-6.” M0-3 extends his hand, palm up, to her kneeling form. “Time to debrief.”

For an irrational moment, she’s so relieved her entire body goes numb. Or that could be the venom. Either way, she does not place her bloodied hand in his, doesn’t so much as twitch with the suggestion of movement.

Sakura does not know why Sai betrayed the Root. She does not understand what about their new situation is more desirable to him; why he would rather waste away among the weak than bear the mild inconveniences of living among the strong, taking missions worthy of their time, doing work befitting their skills. But Sakura does not need to understand his inscrutable desires. She just needs to oblige them. Sakura would slit her own throat if he asked nicely. Defecting from Root is a much smaller request, when she thinks of it that way.

“Are you bringing me in?” she asks, letting the relief color her tone misleadingly, and M0-3 lets his hand return to his side, not one to waste his effort if she’d rather struggle to stand by herself while she still can, which she does, managing not to slide around too much in the loose top sand as the breeze picks up into what may be better defined at wind.

If he is planning to extract her from the field, Sakura quickly debates if she should go willingly and then plan to escape later, or if she should force him to kill her—or do it herself—to prevent them from using her to lure out Sai for retribution. Either way, this is not a situation she can fight her way out of. Not under the effects of the venom. Not alone. Not against M0-3.

Even if she manages to get a clean shot at his vitals, she fears she’ll hesitate to take it.

M0-3 gestures with two curled fingers for her to follow and begins walking toward the boulder no longer occupied by Not Hound, leaving no footprints in his wake. As she stumbles after him, the sand turning to water, then back to sand, watching his muscles shift under his beige shirt, his gray scarf around his neck lifting slightly in the wind, she notes not a single grain of sand has been allowed refuge on his person. Not in his brown hair clipped no more than two inches from his scalp, not in the creases in his clothes, not even dusting the tops of his tan desert boots as he reaches the rocks and pivots to lean his back to the largest one, crossing his arms and waiting for Sakura to drag herself close enough to be respectful before she drops into a kneel, bracing her left forearm on her bent left knee, bowing her head and preparing for either death or orders.

“Our leader,” he says, to avoid speaking Danzō’s name, “does not believe you can be salvaged.” The sand around her boot is liquifying, playing with sunlight like water, lapping at her ankle. “I am less convinced.”

It is a quirk, of his, to openly contradict Danzō in front of another operative. It is evidence of how difficult he is to kill, that he does so without fear. Unless, like most things that come out of his mouth, it’s just another tactic designed to further the desired outcome of the conversation. He’s spent too much time with M0-4, honing his mind games, to be taken at face value.

“He requires evidence of your willingness to be re-educated,” he continues. “Evidence you are going to give him.”

“You know my faults,” she says, because delaying her refusal will only prolong her life a few months at most if Root Zero is determined to end it. “You know where my loyalty lies.”

She waits for the blade. 

It doesn’t come. The lack of execution tugs her gaze up from the changing earth and into glowing white eyes, warmed by sunlight gaining height in the sky. His expression is as unreadable as ever.

“He betrayed you, Sakura.”

She holds her breath for the moment it takes her mind to recover. M0-3 has never used her name. It makes her lightheaded, hearing it now, despite his obvious manipulation. She has always struggled not to bond to those she respects and fears in equal measure. M0-3 is no exception.

Whenever Sai was away, M0-3 was one of four Root Zero operatives most likely to make an appearance—either to pull her out of her regular training and into their newest idea of how to improve her, or to watch her in eerie silence as she went about her day, setting all the other general ops on edge.

M0-3 was usually the former.

She isn’t sure he valued those days teaching her basic survival and bushcraft, or overseeing the development of her chakra control, sinking needles into her skin one at a time, not letting her remove them until she could push them out with chakra in the same precise order he put them there. She isn’t sure how he felt, if anything at all, about those hours refining her taijutsu under the canopy of massive oaks, breaking almost every bone in her body at one point or another, recreating all walks of niche and common injuries alike to acclimate her —This is how you learn your body. This is how you remove your hesitation. This is how you choose which wounds to give and which to receive— as he explains in anatomical terms exactly why she is gasping from pain so intense it makes her vision blur, taking his sweet time to heal them once he’s finished hammering her weakness into her.

While none of the zero operatives can be described as cozy with one another—aside from maybe M0-7 and F0-2, the youngest living zeros at age seventeen, often seen peering down from tree branches together like siamese cats—M0-3 has always had a particular sort of distaste for Sai, which Sakura figured extended to her, his impatience with her insubordination harsh and punishing; when Sakura changed shirts in front of him after Sai had tattooed one of his ink-chakra beasts into her arm for the first time, M0-3 twisted said arm behind her back and made her kneel on the concrete floor of the barracks, seemed to be debating if skinning her arm would be worth the effort of healing her afterward to avoid accusations of damaging Root property, before F0-2 walked into the room and summoned M0-3 for a mission with an indifferent glance at their compromising position.

The interaction that baffled her most happened roughly a year ago, when Sakura limped into the med bay while M0-3 was on his way out. He healed a cut on her brow with a swipe of his green-haloed thumb, but left the puss-weeping gash on her side, bleeding through her bandages and between her fingers where she applied pressure, unaddressed. She mulled that over for months, and still has no idea what it meant.

“He spared me,” she says, eventually, because she may not understand why Sai betrayed Root, but she understands the more efficient action would have been to kill Sakura once he did, not drag her through Iron and half of Fire country to Konoha. 

She watches M0-3’s responding facial twitch with fascination. It was a split-second of a micro-expression, but Sakura is accustomed to recognizing those in Sai. That was a sneer. That was an emotion.

“And only you,” he says, no trace of grief in his voice, but Sakura’s blood cools in her veins even further at the implication anyway. The splattered anatomy on her clothes is fully dry, making the fabric feel thick and stiff as she shifts from her kneel into a squat, getting her back foot under once again. She is listening. From his eyelids relaxing down less than a millimeter, he approves of her focus. “You are the only remaining non-zero operative.”

The desert slips sideways, the sky flickering red, her pulse thudding past her ears as her throat dries even further than its already parched state. It rings of truth. This is what she has been afraid to ask Sai. This is what she has wanted to know.

“How?”

“He took you with him.”

“No,” she rasps, and stares unseeingly at the reddish rock to the side of M0-3’s head, struggling to breathe. “How—?”

She fails to complete the question, mind awhirl with too many emotions, too much conflicting information because they were weaker than her, less valuable, less necessary. She would have snapped any one of their necks for the sake of a mission, and yet. And yet.

“M0-2 killed them.”

No. She shakes her head, acid burning the base of her throat, threatening to come up. She wants to deny it. Wants to deny that she can easily picture Sai walking out of the Root compound covered in brain matter and burst blood vessels, can imagine with sickening clarity his cold black eyes as he tied up the easiest of his loose ends, her loose ends, for both of them.

“Maybe not with his own hands,” he says, but it brings no comfort. “But he knew what would become of them. It’s why he extracted you, first. He’s grown…possessive,” is the word he lands on, speaking it like it has an unfamiliar taste.

Sakura’s vision feels like looking through a glass bottle, everything offset by fractals, M0-3’s straight nose not quite lining up over his thin lips.

“I used to wonder why all of our lessons never seemed to take. Why we could not free you of your emotions, your limitations. You had all of us to learn from, a privilege afforded no other non-zero operative, and yet you failed to release your final burden,” he says, his fingers relaxing against his crossed arms, counter to the growing agitation she senses in him but can’t prove the existence of. “But then M0-2 revealed his infected mind, and I finally knew why. Where your training failed you. Who,” he emphasizes, “failed you.”

Sakura stands up slowly, dizzy from scorpion venom and dehydration, a nauseous fury building in her gut as he slanders Sai, and tries to meet his eyes without hostility as he steps away from the boulder and into her space, looking down at her, always looking down. Everyone is. She’s so fucking short.

“Your previous handler was defective, rabbit.” He slides his gray scarf from around his neck, carefully wrapping it around her neck and mouth to block the sand making it hard for her to breathe, effortlessly protecting his own mouth with a chakra shield as another gust rips through the desert. “You are the closest in skill to a zero ever reared outside of the program. Those are skills worth salvaging.”

He braces her head on either side with his palms, his earthy scent filling her lungs with every one of her labored breaths behind her borrowed scarf, her own hands hanging useless at her sides as her head pounds and consciousness wavers, the venom taking its toll.

“You were led astray by a malfunctioning operative. Cultivated improperly from the moment your loyalty became his mission.” He rubs his thumb over her brow, dragging sand across the skin and hair with enough pressure to sting. “I will correct his influence. I will make you one of us,” he promises, “but first, you will kill M0-2, kill the traitor, prove your resolve.”

This is the problem with zeros, she thinks, distantly. They cannot fathom the depth of the attachments they purposefully grew within her. Even Sai, she suspects, being raised within the compound since birth, can’t fully fathom her devotion to him in all of its illogical, damning dysfunction. It would be better to die here, than live to be used against him—as bait or otherwise.

As if sensing her thoughts, he says, “M0-2 dies either way.” In her ill mental state, M0-3’s eyes shimmer like crushed sugar, his hands firm on her head, undeterred by the crunch of dried gore stuck to the strands as he tightens his hold. “The second he steps foot outside the village, M0-1 will kill him.”

The desert quiets.

Sakura’s ears ring in a frequency almost too high to be noticed. The sweat on her skin suddenly chills, the threat of his words restoring sensation to her venom-weakened body. She does not want to picture what will happen if Sai is forced to fight M0-1. Those black, scar-rimmed eyes might remind the likes of even Itachi, the strongest nin Sakura has ever encountered, what it means to feel death’s breath warm the back of his neck. Not even respect can make Sakura feel anything but overwhelming dread in the face of M0-1. He is Danzō’s ultimate success, a shinobi without fault, like an insect staring out at the world from behind a human face.

“I can’t.” She doesn’t mean to say it out loud.

M0-3 tilts his head, assessing her, lowered eyelids belaying boredom she doubts he’s capable of feeling. “You’re confused. That is expected,” he says, and releases a wave of killing intent that triggers muscle memory, urging her to kneel, to bow forehead-to-sand until he deems her properly humbled. She fights it. “Allow me to clarify your options.”

Sakura has enough sense to at least try to body-flicker as far as she can get with the world twirling and threatening to make her hurl—which is not far—before his leg strikes her abdomen with enough force to break ribs if she hadn’t reinforced hers and blocked with her arm at the last second, sending her flying and tumbling over sand and rocks, uprooting succulents with her hands as she gets her feet under her and slows her momentum enough to stop in the rising cloud of sand and dust, once again meeting the white eyes of her opponent as he parts the airborne debris with his body.

Each step, each careful placement of his boots in the sand is like the opening of an intricate dance he begins with a feint to her left she’s almost delirious enough to fall for, the heel of his hand nearly making contact with her solar plexus, clearly planning to take advantage of her already struggling to breathe. She manages to partially redirect the hit with her forearm and twist out of the way, following through her rotation with an elbow to his jaw that whiffs past him by millimeters as he leans back and disappears.

The flash of a kunai through the gathering dust cloud around them Sakura jerks away from turns out to be the afterimage of the one already slicing through the muscles of her left deltoid, and she finds the only benefit of being heavily poisoned for this fight to be the dulled sense of pain, the wound barely registering beyond a sharp sting she instinctively begins stitching back together with her fine chakra threads.

“The venom will spread faster if you resist,” he advises, reappearing behind her, and Sakura would have laughed behind her borrowed scarf if she had the oxygen to spare, her lungs laboring, the larger sandstone rocks speckling the landscape turning into severed heads that weep from the necks.

She pretends to favor her right leg, a fabricated shift in weight so subtle no one but a Hyūga would notice, as she unseals a kunai from her right palm mid-turn and swipes at his neck, not even grazing skin with his superior speed. It’s his only weakness, she thinks; his tendency to underestimate her, to take her weaknesses and twist them to his advantage.

He takes the bait, kicking her left leg out, putting the back of his knee in range of her left hand as she summons a kunai to her palm as she jerks the blade up and slices the tendons as she regains balance, eliciting a sharp hiss from between stark white teeth before he’s twisting around, snapping his hips as his shin makes contact with her side with more force than the last kick and sends her skidding across the desert once more, her borrowed scarf detangling from around her head and flying off into the wind, leaving her to inhale sand and cough up specks of blood and saliva as she struggles onto her hands and knees, the ground waving unhelpfully, the pain in her ribs making it harder to breathe.

He grips the back of her hair in a tight fist and hoists her up to standing, her eyes catching on the green glow around one of his knees, healing himself rapidly, as he presses the flat of his kunai to her cheek. Sakura doesn’t bother holding either kunai in her hands to his unguarded body, activates the seals in her palms and tucks them away in acceptance of her impending end. She lacks the resolve to follow through on the threat, and they both know it. It is her flaw. Her failure, as an operative.

Sakura is not a zero. Not in name. Not in their cold, unfeeling gazes, their secret inner worlds, their elite missions so steeped in violence even Sai came back to the barracks looking like he’d nearly caught the edge of death’s cloak. Sakura is not as perfectly engineered for her purpose as they are. But Sakura fought with everything she had for the right to run at Sai’s side—at the side of M0-2, the Root Zero operative second only to the first, not only in order of recruitment but in actual skill. Sakura became a shinobi worthy of Sai’s regard, worthy of being his preferred mission partner, worthy of watching his back. Sakura is not a zero, but somewhere along the line Root Zero decided she was going to be strong enough to stand among them, anyway.

It doesn’t matter to her, if they were under orders to do so. M0-3 spared his attention, his instruction, his time. He is one of the hands that fed her, the hands that forged her, that wounded her and healed her and sculpted her in their image. Sakura does not think she can kill him, with nothing at stake but herself.

“Take his life,” M0-3 says. “Take his place among us. That is all he can offer you, now.” Sakura shakes her head in his hold, feeling the blade's edge break skin, warmth dripping down her cheek and neck, and he brings her in closer, speaking quickly, something putting urgency into his hold, his voice. “He dragged you back to a life you ran from at age eleven. You may not remember why you enlisted, what you wanted from us, but I do. He tore you away from the path you chose.” He pauses, the film in his eyes rippling with color as he stares deep into hers, so close she can feel his breath cooling the blood on her cheek as she coughs once more, her lungs seizing as the venom’s hold on her body tightens, flecks of her blood spraying his jaw he doesn’t flinch from.

“I have not forgotten the ideal you strived for,” he says, in a tone that could be mistaken for tender, under the rising wind. “Have you?”

Sakura is having trouble holding her own head up under the stress of another disorienting wave of nausea and color, relying on M0-3’s hand sliding down to the base of her skull when her face tips up toward the sky and her eyes roll, the kiss of his blade against her cheek an almost comforting source of cold, cooling her flushed skin. She thinks she can see green glowing in her peripherals, can feel something hot pushing through her veins and chakra pathways, feel her lungs clearing, her accelerated heart slowing, but she can’t trust her own mind anymore than she can remember why she joined Root in the first place.

She doesn’t know when she stopped trying to be the perfect shinobi, when she started wanting to hold onto herself. She can’t recall at what point Sai became human, either. Sakura looked for evidence of Sai’s humanity in his manners and speech for so long she can’t be sure if she eventually found him or if she created him, breathed life into him through that act of trying; if he became a person because she repetitively expected him to be one. Maybe she became a person the same way.

“You chose Root, once,” M0-3 says, with finality. “Choose it again.”

“Or,” comes a familiar, unflappable voice from behind the zero currently keeping her from pinching a nerve in her neck, and mixed panic and relief spikes Sakura’s pulse at the very real, electrifying chakra signature that accompanies it, “you could not do that, and we could take a brief moment to unpack why all of my toothpicks are sticking out of that missing nin’s eyes.”

She senses the air shift before M0-3 moves, a preternatural instinct formed from sparring with him and those like him throughout her entire adolescence. Without consciously making the decision, heedless of the fact Hound is far from defenseless, Sakura throws herself into another shunshin too fast to be advisable in her weakened state, wedging herself into the space between the zero and Hound in time to stop M0-3’s kunai with her forearm, the blade sparking against the six senbon strapped over her sleeve before Hound body-flickers as well and takes her with him via an arm tight around her midsection, depositing her against a rock about a quarter mile from the Ishigakure nin’s body.

“As heartening as that little stunt was,” Hound says, the sharp gray eye visible above his tan shemagh focused on scanning the wind and sand as he releases his hold on her waist, Sakura leaning admittedly heavily against the rocks, “maybe sit this one out.”

“They’ll kill me anyway, eventually,” she offers, sagely, as M0-3 materializes several meters in front of them with a grim confidence to his loose posture Sakura wishes was born of arrogance. “Go. He won’t follow you.”

At least if she dies here, she thinks, it will ruin whatever Itachi has planned for her.

Hound squints his eye in suggestion of a smile, as he says, “Now you’re just being cute on purpose.” Unbelievable. “But I’ll heed the subtext,” he offers, sliding his forehead protector up to reveal his spinning Sharingan, a spark of vivid red amid the dull orange and blue of the desert at sunrise. 

So, he understands the threat, at least. Good, she thinks, and shoves herself off the rocks, reasserting control over her trembling muscles, ignoring the bruised feeling in her ribs, the tingling loss of feeling in her left arm as she hastens in her mentally addled state to heal the split muscles causing it to hang loose at her side as blood drips from her fingertips, placing herself between Hound and M0-3 once more despite Hound clicking his tongue against his teeth in disapproval.

M0-3 rotates his kunai—now in both hands—into reverse grips, leisurely bringing his forearms up and sliding his front foot out into a loose defensive stance.

“Go sit down, F11-6.” The words are neutrally spoken, but Sakura suspects it riles him: that she doesn’t immediately obey. “I only neutralized the venom’s effects, not the venom itself.” He tilts his head, staring pointedly at her left arm, glowing faintly green, then bringing his eyes to hers once more in a silent question.

She does not explain herself. It’s not ideal that she’s revealed to him her affinity for yang and some home-cooked medical ninjutsu, nothing as elegant as his, but it’s better to have her file updated than to be dead, and now that Hound is here, dying is looking like a non-option; if she lets M0-3 kill her, Hound will fight M0-3 and one of them will die, which Sakura is realizing she objects to quite seriously. So. Might as well put off her death a while longer and save them the trouble. Itachi wins, this time.

“Why bother?” Sakura stretches her neck, the world not spinning as much as it was a few moments before; that must mean the healing light she saw when he held her wasn’t her imagination. For some reason, M0-3 is genuine in his effort to bring her back into the fold. He’s been holding back to the point it’s an insult. More than holding back, he actually temporarily reversed the effects of the toxin from her blood mid-fight. She can use her own safety against him, now that she’s aware. “You’ll just have to kill me anyway.”

“The verge of death should suffice,” he muses, “until you change your mind, or your mind breaks entirely.”

It’s this statement, in the end, that wakes the bloodthirst in her, cools her head, his hubris outweighing her respect as she feels her arm finish healing, the cut on her cheek closing, the chakra under her skin surging with life as her focus sharpens, something familiar and strange pulsing in her chakra core.

“You think you will succeed where the Clan Killer failed?” she asks, the words laced with the iron tang of blood still between her teeth, having bit her cheek during her tumble across the rocks. “You think you can break what he couldn’t?”

It makes her want to laugh, the hard look in his eyes, that answering determination. M0-3 is powerful among shinobi, but Itachi is powerful among even Akatsuki—among those no longer classifiable as mortal. He had her for what felt like a month, inside that red crack in time and space. M0-3 is being unrealistic in his expectations.

She’s never fought any member of Root Zero using everything she has. She’s not fought anyone save Kisame, she thinks, with everything she has, to the point even Sakura is unsure of what she is capable of without the need to remain inconspicuous in technique.

Itachi told her she has abilities beyond her own expectations and awareness.

Maybe today is the day she learns.

Maybe today Sakura lets go of all the secrets she’s been carrying, all of the training she’s done away from prying eyes, the experimenting she’s done, slowly, cautiously, exploring the implications of yin and yang and their interactions with other elements. Maybe she lets her intuition loose, follows Itachi’s advice and lets her subconscious dictate the flow of chakra around and inside her, letting it shape the world in ways she recognizes somewhere deep in her blood but can’t define.

Maybe today she shows M0-3 exactly who Sai chose to take with him when he burnt Root to ashes. Maybe Sakura will surprise herself. Maybe she will gouge out his eyes and drag him back to Konoha by the scruff of his neck just like the rabbit he mistook her for.

Maybe she will win.

A firm hand on her right shoulder reminds her of the other presence she’d momentarily forgotten, Hound squeezing in warning to ‘calm the fuck down,’ as he’d say, as he fixes that faux-smiling eye at the Root Zero operative currently planning his next move.

“Anyone else think we’ve reached an impasse, here?” Hound asks, with misleadingly good humor, and Sakura feels her eyebrow twitch at the same time M0-3 tapers his eyes further, not budging in his hostile stance. “Because as far as I can tell, you two don’t actually want to kill each other, and if you,” he gestures at M0-3, “try to kill me,” he points to himself with a sand-dusted glove, “best case scenario for you, say, I trip over a shrub and you succeed through blind luck, you would be putting the Hidden Leaf in a bit of a tight spot, don’t you think? Tight enough that it might threaten Shimura Danzō’s self-image as the martyr-slash-savior of Konoha, etcetera, etcetera.”

Sakura watches the calculations behind white pupil-less irises as she and M0-3 both catch up to Hound’s reasoning.

When he speaks next, there is no humor left in Hound’s tone, and his hold on her shoulder feels more like an iron claw than a hand. “What do you think will happen to that operative, who got lucky and killed Konoha’s most valued active shinobi over retrieving a Root operative Danzō has already tried twice to kill?”

The wind rolls sand and some of the succulents she tore from the ground earlier across her line of sight, as she quickly moves past Hound’s confirmation of his place in the village hierarchy—something she’s suspected since she first saw him politely challenge the Hokage in her own office—and onto the part about Danzō actively trying to kill her.

“ That’s if you can kill me,” Hound adds, calmly, but Sakura’s mind is still hanging on the word ‘twice.’ She was only aware of the one, the suicide mission to River. “Which, let’s be realistic, you don’t think you can do, or you already would have tried.”

After a moment of deliberation, M0-3 exhales with what Sakura thinks could be something approximating annoyance—a bad habit of hers, she knows, looking for signs of personhood in a zero—as he slips his kunai into his thigh holsters and fixes her in place with his hazy white stare. “She requires antivenom,” he addresses Hound without looking at him. “Ensure she receives it.”

There is open contempt in Hound’s voice, when he says, “I’ll take it from here.”

M0-3 ignores him. He holds Sakura’s gaze for another two breaths, nodding once, before he shunshins out of her sensory range. Sakura understands the unspoken message. He’ll buy her time with Danzō. His offer stands.

Kill Sai before M0-1, and the vacant space in Root Zero is hers.