Black Bough

Sakura is still seventeen.

There is no way to know how many days or weeks it has been since Sakura has seen the sun; how few, if any, seconds have passed outside this genjutsu. She does not waste energy counting minutes. Does not count anything, anymore. The only signs of time passing are the thousands of spider lilies growing all around them, having begun as seeds and been slowly piercing the soil, reaching for the endless moon, the longer she’s spent inside this illusion.

Her existence is an amorphous concept of suffering, and she is losing sight of her convictions; losing reasons to resist the drain on her mind, the constant fog threatening to break her cognition beyond repair. She distracts herself with learning her captor. In the act of dissecting her mind, he opens his own.

“The lines,” Sakura says, listless and raw, the barrier between her thoughts and mouth broken in this awful, timeless space soaked in red. “What are they for?”

He touches the beginning of one of the black tattooed lines near his tear ducts, almost absently, like he’d forgotten they were there. It is revealing, a product of the intimacy of this infinite moment he’s trapped them in, that he even considers the question.

“You still have questions,” he says, and it is somehow worse, that she thinks he sounds impressed. “Your mind will survive the oath.”

The illusion shifts, and Sakura is lying on her back in her Root fatigues, sinking down into mud like the roots of a lotus. She tries to sit up on her elbows, struggling pointlessly toward the surface, like a cicada un-burying itself to die. The spider lilies remain; one of few constants in her new, shrinking world. Sakura suspects her blood is watering them, that this is part of the oath Itachi just mentioned. They are almost blooming.

Itachi kneels among the red buds beside her with his gentle hands and spinning fan eyes. He has always been there, hovering over her, she is beginning to believe, and he always will be. He eases her back down to the earth, pressing her shoulders into the mud, letting it cool her skin that burns every time she tries to imagine a more detailed sensation.

“What is the oath?” she rasps, a plea as much as a question, as moisture that isn’t real obscures her view of that hateful crimson sky.

He hums, a low, comforting sound amid an unnatural, noiseless landscape.

“The condition of your continued existence,” he settles on. His words are clinical, but there is pity, she thinks, in the brush of the backs of his fingers against her cheek. “Only a hundred left. You’ve done well, Night Flower,” he says, the nickname striking her as odd, before he tips her head back gently with his palm to her forehead, baring her throat to the edge of his blade once more, and speech becomes impossible again.

She is slow to realize, he meant a hundred deaths.

…

Kakashi likes to focus on small blessings.

The next book in Jiraiya's series showing up in his mailbox a month early, autographed with the code phrase, ‘Thinking of our wild nights with Sheila,’ indicating the encoded message within.

Successfully beating a housewife to the last crate of blackberries at the half-off market that doesn’t have mold growing in the tight spaces between fruit like fungus under a toenail.

Finding an extra handful of ryō in his pockets when doing laundry.

These small things keep him going.

Yesterday, he was thankful for the fact Sakura likes the dried fruit ration bars better than dried meat, making divvying up supplies on the final stretch of their journey a peaceful affair where everyone wins.

The day before that, he was thankful that Sakura could run at high speeds again without immediately throwing up, the heat of her body on his back as he carried her quickly becoming a comforting pressure he plans to permanently limit indulgence in for the foreseeable future.

Today, he is thankful Tsunade does not ask why one of the severed heads he brought her looks like the half-crushed pomegranate he and Sakura split on the way home, grotesque even after Kakashi carefully plucked the toothpicks from the eyes to avoid unnecessary questions, as she reseals them in their body scrolls without further comment.

It’s been only hours since he and Sakura grumbled their way past the blurry-eyed shinobi guarding the front gates to Konoha before the sun was up, followed by a brisk shower in the sparsely populated Anbu barracks that would have been more relaxing if he actually got to use the shower instead of kill time counting cracks in the tile walls, waiting for Sakura to be done detangling the remnants of internal organs stuck to her scalp she missed when she tried to wash it out creekside. He almost offered to help, and then immediately thought better of it. She was very vocal about the fact the communal showers were completely vacant aside from them, mocking him heavily for opting to wait and clean up later in his private bathroom at home.

It has been a while since Kakashi has been so openly harassed for every choice he makes as he has been by Sakura since stepping foot back in Konoha, her mission officially over, which apparently opened season on all of the shit-talking her training wouldn’t allow in the field to come pouring out. From the sounds of it, she’d been keeping track of every single decision he made that she found inefficient and why, and now that they’re on home turf she’s been extremely generous in her commentary. He suspects it's affectionate, the way she’s pecking at him like a crow on a corpse, trying to see what makes his nerve endings twitch. It doesn’t worry him, when she’s mouthing off. It’s when she’s quiet that he feels the need to look over his shoulder.

Though, some of her recent silence can be chalked up to how much focus it took her to run in a straight line while still shaking off the venom, as opposed to general plotting.

She didn’t even prickle defensively when Kakashi rolled her sleeve up and injected the antivenom intravenously, instead choosing to silently observe his genetically given eye with a cryptic expression under the shemagh she stole from him that Kakashi lost sleep over. 

The expression. Not the shemagh.

When he did sleep—usually during the day, sitting in the shadow of a sun-warmed rock—he woke to Sakura right where he left her, spending her turn on watch (once she’d recovered enough to start taking turns) pressed up against his side despite the heat, her eyes blank, her senses extended in mysterious ways that he is still considering his approach in inquiring about further.

Alarming, in its own way, the fact he can apparently sleep even lightly with her arm flush to his; as is the fact she would seek out his proximity in her enervated state at all, barring that first night waiting for the antivenom to do its part, which she spent huddled against him for warmth, her body unable to handle the drop in temperature unassisted. Even if there had been a third shinobi to cover his turn on watch, Kakashi would not have slept that night, too busy counting her heartbeats and the seconds between breaths, studying the few white eyelashes intermingling with the light pink majority twitching against her pale cheeks.

Clearly, something shifted between them back in Wind, and since she hasn't tried to kill him, Kakashi is tentatively accepting some of her newer antics as a sign they’re moving in a positive direction.

He’s getting to know Sakura at Ease.

For instance, instead of singing songs in the shower or—Sage forbid, showering silently—Sakura at Ease prefers openly speculating on if Kakashi enjoys being gently waterboarded by his own mask when he bathes, if he has a red target somewhere on his body marked “stab here for best results” that he doesn’t want her to see, as well as if he’s ever considered becoming a monk when he’s tired of real work, citing his general piety and the fact she suspects his clothes are sewn into his skin, for how unwilling he is to part with them. He can’t say much about that last point. The more layers of fabric between him and his surroundings and, generally speaking, other people, the better.

Eventually, he suggested she get dressed before attempting to incite punishment, clarifying that if he has to fight Sakura to the death someday, he would prefer it not be the type of fight someone could reasonably walk in on and accuse him of sexual harassment.

She’d laughed generously at that, which if he’s honest is a bit concerning. Kakashi had almost left his spot with his back to the wall just outside the showers to confirm she’s not relapsing from the venom again—she’d laughed the last time she relapsed, too, before she tried to burn her own skin off with an unexpectedly refined fire jutsu, desperate to kill a swarm of insects that weren’t there. He hadn’t expected her to be afraid of bugs, after what she pulled with that scorpion back in Wind. Other than that, it was nice, hearing her laughter bounce around the damp tiles of the Anbu showers.

And then she started in on his alleged waterboarding fetish again, and he almost left his place outside the showers for another reason entirely. Whoever said “violence doesn’t solve everything” was correct, but they definitely never rose through the ranks in Anbu.

There were a lot of days right after becoming ‘Tiger’ when Yamato used to need a good thrashing to remind him why Kakashi is the one with the special little white cape in his closet he only wears when directly ordered to by his commander, and occasionally not even then—an attitude afforded him by the fact said commander was only promoted because Kakashi repeatedly refuses to be kicked upstairs—and there were plenty of days long before that when Kakashi needed to watch his life flash before his eyes to remind him why Weasel was captain of Team Ro and not him despite being the same age.

Sakura is a lot like Kakashi, he suspects, and she’s used to being in charge more often than not. Right now, her attitude is cute; when she swipes a kunai at him these days—typically in response to him purposefully testing her limits—she’s just being playful, like a kitten trying to scratch out his right eye for attention. But someday Kakashi is going to make a call she really, really doesn’t like during a mission, and he needs to know she won’t go for the throat once she’s officially assigned to his squad.

But, thinking back on their first mission together on the whole, he is optimistic.

Kakashi is unashamed of the amount of mental energy he’s directed into dissecting the flash of that Root operative’s kunai striking the senbon on Sakura’s forearm as she placed her weakened body between himself and her former cohort; analyzing every detail he can recall about that moment—the unexpected pressure of her back colliding with his chest, the stiff way her hair moved with her momentum, caked with blood, the flare of chakra the Hyūga lost his grip on in his surprise, his white eyes widening a fraction of a millimeter as his muscles shifted and he pulled his strike—looking for flaws in what appeared to be an unmistakable lack of hesitation on her part, no deliberation as to which one of them to protect, leaving the Hyūga as shaken as Kakashi by the revelation.

And he is. Shaken.

By all means, Kakashi intended for that mission to be a place they could meet on neutral ground and begin to build a framework for trust. But now that it seems their little bonding excursion worked better than anticipated, he’s having a tough time taking it at face value. It might take a while to shake off the lingering paranoia, but all-in-all, Kakashi would call it a success, if he wanted to jinx it.

Still. It’s bad manners to pontificate falsehoods about his—as she went on—increasingly deviant relationship with his face mask in his place of work. Apparently being trusted by Sakura also equates to eliminating the healthy fear that kept her mouth shut. It puts Sai in an entirely new light, that this is Sakura’s natural state when she’s feeling worked-out and unrestrained, and that Sai—the shinobi who would non-figuratively kill someone for looking at him wrong if he thought there wouldn’t be consequences—chose to not only not kill Sakura, but would not allow himself to be extracted from Root without her.

To be fair, Kakashi kind of gets it.

If it were anyone else, he’d probably have been tempted to cut off her waxing poetic on Kakashi’s love affair with his waterlogged mask by saying he actually does enjoy waterboarding. Other people, in fact, and isn’t it great that you volunteered?

Something about Sakura makes people want to let her have it, he suspects.

Regardless, once she was dressed and dry, he took a little more pleasure than kind in putting his palm to the back of her head and shoving her through the doors to the med bay to get checked after managing to piss off one of the rarest, most reclusive scorpions in the desert—a find so far beyond a needle in a haystack it borders on divine intervention—only placing so much faith in the antivenom they picked up from a small civilian village while taking the long way around the border of River.

Now Kakashi stands behind the Hokage, washed and pressed in black fatigues, feeling like the love child of fresh laundry and a Nara’s shadow, where she lounges in loose white robes with her legs crossed and hanging over the end of the wooden deck leading out to the sweeping stone gardens of the Senju estate. It was too early for the Hokage to be found in her office, the sun still under the horizon line, giving the morning a gray wash of color.

“He has a Hyūga,” Kakashi says, once she’s finished reading his report, and Tsunade lifts the tapered tip of her cherry wood cigarette holder to her lips as she sets his report down on the deck beside her, the ember flickering far brighter than the dawn-faded red maples staked into the manicured landscape, pruned meticulously at the center of circles raked into fine white gravel. A paradise of control.

She exhales a cloud of smoke, and Kakashi mentally bemoans the fact the smell of tobacco will linger in his fresh clothes and mask long after this meeting ends. “That is not possible.”

Kakashi understands the skepticism. Last he checked, major clans do not misplace their young. It defies reason, the distinctive white eyes of the brunette operative Kakashi found Sakura prepared to die at the hands of, all of the fight having gone out of her loose limbs. Turns out, Kakashi hates how peace with her maker looks on Sakura’s face, and he hates the careful conditioning that put that expression there more.

“He had a similarly sized stick up his ass as Sai,” he offers, and steps closer to the edge of the deck so he can watch her amber eyes narrow on some point in the distance. “Looked about the same age, too.”

They’ve discussed the possibility that Sai’s ninja art could be related to an unknown kekkei genkai. The appearance of another Root operative with a known, powerful kekkei genkai the same age as Sai feels less than coincidental.

It was difficult to question Sakura about it with that mark on her tongue, but they’ve developed a system of him rambling about what he thinks he knows and Sakura offering vague, restricted one-word insights, or occasionally signing her response, the two of them testing the bounds of what she can and can’t say before triggering an asthmatic fit. It’s a nerve-wracking process of trial and error, neither keen on accidentally spending her last breath on details that will be revealed in time. He was hoping that signing her responses in Anbu Standard would be an easy work-around, but again. Not something worth testing, when it could result in immediate death. From what he gathers, the cursed seal is context specific, allowing her to speak freely with other Root members like Sai when alone, which indicates it has more to do with the brain than the tongue. But they’ve made some progress. For instance, when Kakashi was monologuing about the Hyūga she fought being one of the eight shinobi Danzō absconded with, Sakura looked at him pointedly and signed the number seven.

It took him a moment, staring deep into moss-green eyes by firelight in the cave they were sheltering in, no longer operating under such strict stealth protocol having crossed back into Fire country, to understand exactly what she was saying. Sai told the Leaf, without using so many words, there was an eight-person squad of specialized, elite operatives within Root that survived the fall of the division.

Sakura was telling him Danzō only took seven of them with him.

Assuming they are both telling the truth, it points to a potentially crucial detail Sai conveniently left out, in his overly literal interpretation of Kakashi’s question.

“Shit,” Tsunade says, rubbing her thin eyebrows with the hand not holding her cigarette holder, having finished mulling over everything in his report and its implications, and Kakashi agrees. He’d said the same thing, when he’d put it together. The Hokage is a smart woman with many years of experience dealing with bullshit. He would expect nothing less from her, than to work her way to the same conclusion as him in a fraction of the time. “He was stealing clan kids.”

“Only eight, that we know of, though I expect he lost a few along the way,” he says, and watches a reddish brown leaf quiver in the breeze on the end of its stem, barely holding onto the maple closest to them. It must have gotten damaged in the rain he missed while on their mission in Wind. “And we have one of them.”

She taps the ash off her cigarette over a small green ceramic dish, her blonde hair slipping over her shoulder as she leans. “This isn’t the type of thing we use the word ‘only’ for,” she says, and Kakashi tucks his hands into his pants pockets.

“There are seventeen clans in Konoha, alone, and we’ve confirmed he’s been harvesting children from across the elemental nations for at least twenty years. He’s been running this underground compound long before what we thought was Root was disbanded. The only reason he’s been so sparing in his pursuit of kekkei genkai is likely their conspicuous nature,” Kakashi says, eyes catching on the matte black back of a beetle burrowing its way through the pristine gravel, disrupting order with its mandibles and multi-jointed legs. “I think ‘only’ is exactly what we should be saying.”

This earns him a resigned sigh, some of Tsunade’s world-weariness bleeding through her youthful appearance.

They bear the relative silence together, letting waking birds and the small creek running lush after a heavy rain the week before speak on their behalf. They will need to involve the clan heads, now that this information has come to light. It will not be peaceful among the clans for the immediately foreseeable future, as they dig up birth records and infant graves, trying to gather information on which of them was spirited away into the underbelly of the village. There will be a lot of false hope and uprooted grief going around, he suspects. Tensions will be understandably high.

This is a pretty long-held secret Danzō let slip, in order to have a shot at reclaiming Sakura. Though, Kakashi reasons, the second Sakura and Sai were brought in by the Leaf, being the cautious sort of man he is, he likely ruled all and any information they had regarding Root effectively compromised.

“Why her?” Tsunade asks, her neglected cigarette becoming a toppling pillar of ash. “Why did he recruit her?”

It’s an excellent question. One that has been weighing on Kakashi’s mind almost as heavily as the words “Clan Killer,” since Sakura spit them at her former colleague back in Wind. It’s not in Sakura’s file that Sai stole before the fall of Root, as he suspects the majority of relevant information is not, that she’s crossed paths with Uchiha Itachi before. It would partially explain her visceral response to Sasuke, at least, if she had. She seems like the type to hold grudges against blood-kin.

If Sakura ran up against Itachi and survived, it’s just one more puzzle to solve, one more vested interest that suggests there is a very specific reason Danzō picked her up eight years ago.

Before all this, Kakashi thought he knew why she was recruited. Sakura doesn’t have the backing or protection of a shinobi clan, and yet she was on track to graduate at the top of her class, was neck-and-neck with Uchiha Sasuke, with perfect scores on all of her written exams and high enough marks on practicals that Sasuke would have had to cram theory to overtake her GPA, regardless of his exceptional fighting ability and advanced clan techniques. Sakura mastered the basics of tree-walking in under five minutes, Iruka once told him, only two more minutes than it took Kakashi. Sasuke mastered it in five hours. Kakashi is surprised Danzō didn’t orphan her on purpose back when she was just starting the academy, the signs of her potential probably apparent early.

But the more he learns, the more suspicious Danzō’s special interest in her becomes.

First, he recruits her at an unconventionally old age, and at the genin level. Second, he immediately assigns her a handler—something he doubts was provided to every general operative in Root. Third, the handler he gives her, Sai, Kakashi now knows to be one of eight elite shinobi all stolen from different clans across the elemental nations. Fourth, after investing all that personal interest, Danzō sends her on a suicide mission to River two-to-three years ago, during which Kakashi has yet to receive the details of what happened, the records Sai smuggled him incomplete, and Sai himself playing ignorant. Given this additional confirmation Sakura has crossed Akatsuki before, that is likely what went down in River, since that territory is a known stronghold. Fifth, Danzō waits another three years before trying again, this time using Sai, someone Sakura won’t resist death at the hands of. Sixth, he allows another high-ranking Root operative to attempt to either kill or re-induct Sakura to what Kakashi assumes is a pretty fucking exclusive bunch, all with either kekkai genkai or clan bloodlines it’s safe to assume, making them valuable enough not to leave behind when he scorched-earthed the compound.

That’s six compelling reasons to believe there is more to this than meets the eye.

Sakura’s not even the one who flipped and sold Danzō down the river. Her former handler is. Sai had been insistent that Danzō wanted Sakura dead but was anxious about giving the order, and now, from what Kakashi overheard arriving at the tail end of their conversation, the Hyūga was trying to convince Sakura to ‘choose Root’ once again. It took Kakashi the rest of the trip home and several debasing games of charades to get her to divulge what that choice entails. Asking her to kill Sai seems even more tone deaf than asking Sai to kill Sakura in the first place, though he suspects it's a bit of a win-win for the former council member; either Sakura kills Sai and returns to Root, or he sends someone else to kill her and Sai at the same time. Nothing gained, nothing lost.

Unless, of course, Sakura had not been on the verge of very serious complications from a very rare scorpion’s venom, and Kakashi, not needing to prioritize her safety, had been feeling less accommodating of the Root operative’s right to continue breathing after having the balls to try and re-recruit her out from under Kakashi’s nose. In which case the risk for Danzō is a great one, compared to Sakura’s significance on paper.

Sakura hasn’t seemed to realize, yet, that the scorpion that stung her was likely placed there by that Hyūga, its small chakra signature sealed, allowing it to get close enough to strike. She’s barely been in his life for a couple of months, and her safety is already being played against him. Danzō has been watching them closely, to know such a play would work—to feel so certain Kakashi would focus on getting Sakura away from the influence of her former teammate and closer to a vial of antivenom and bedrest to the point he’d let one of Danzō’s operatives slip his grasp.

Honestly, sometimes he understands Sakura’s disdain for the self-righteous decision making of the Leaf. Look how much trouble it’s caused him, trying to live like a human being.

There’s something else worth noting about the circumstances of Sakura’s original recruitment, he thinks: Sakura’s family were civilian merchants, not shinobi. Her abilities are absolutely worth acknowledging, sure, but were they at age eleven? Compared to the operatives her age Danzō already had? Was she worth giving a shot at catching up to her peers when he already had so much talent to work with? Clearly the gamble paid off, but would it have been worth the investment up front, the special treatment, the close monitoring of her progress using his top operatives, without knowing she would develop so spectacularly?

The answer to all of the above is, ‘no.’

So, the question remains. Why does Danzō give a shit about Haruno Sakura? For whatever reason, she mattered enough to recruit, and now she matters enough to risk one of the only operatives he has left to retrieve or kill.

Even more suspicious is the fact Sai turned on Danzō almost three years before Sakura was sent on that first alleged suicide mission. Kakashi has never received a satisfying answer to the question of why Sai turned double-agent. He started laying the brickwork to extract Sakura long before he seemingly had any cause to do so, given how uninterested he seems in her successful integration—at least socially—now that he’s succeeded.

“What made Sai decide Danzō shouldn’t have her?” he asks, only partially rhetorically, and Tsunade uncrosses and re-crosses her legs, robes parting over her bare thighs, humming thoughtfully.

“That reminds me,” Tsunade says, and sets her burning cigarette down on the ashtray, interlacing her manicured fingers over her left knee. “Sai is in a holding cell.”

Kakashi would like to say time stopped and nothing moved in the garden in the wake of these words, but in reality the only thing interrupted is Kakashi’s previous train of thought. The beetle continues to scale ripples of sand like waves, the red leaves continue to tremble, the creek water continues to trickle over river rocks and moss.

“Why?” he asks, because he may as well.

“He put Yamanaka Ino into a bit of a state. Baited her into using her clan technique. Showed her curated memories, intending to harm her mind. According to Ino, Sai has had extensive anti-mind-jutsu training.” Her fingers twitch toward her cigarette holder, but that’s as far as she lets it go. “You might want to pay her a visit. She has some things to say you may want to hear.”

Kakashi can’t say he’s surprised. Sai should have been placed with an older, more experienced shinobi—preferably one with a messy history of war and black ops, not a young jōnin with personal ties to Sakura that override her judgment—but Kakashi picks and chooses his moments to say ‘I told you so,’ and he can tell this moment isn’t it.

The beetle loses its footing on an incline, overcorrecting and flipping onto its back, black spindly legs moving frantically and without success. 

Anti-mind-jutsu training, she says. Huh. “You don’t suppose Danzō has a Yamanaka up his sleeve.”

While theoretically anyone could learn mind jutsu if they had the resources, the Yamanaka have been breeding themselves into natural users for centuries in order to achieve the results only they are capable of. To demonstrate strong enough resistance to toy with Yamanaka Ino… Whoever trained Sai would have to have superior mastery—highly unlikely, outside of the clan’s unrivaled genetic compatibility with mind jutsu.

She doesn’t wince, but he can tell she wants to, her jaw muscles tightening. “We’ll find out, won’t we,” she says, and then, “You might want to bail him out before Sakura goes looking for him. We’ve kept him comfortable, the cell was just a good place to keep him before you returned and we could reevaluate his housing, but I imagine she won’t take well to seeing him behind anti-shinobi glass.”

Kakashi left Sakura back at the Hatake main house, trusting her not to get into too much trouble while he made a trip out to the Senju estate to debrief, figuring it would be good for her to wander a bit on her own, or maybe sleep. Worst case scenario, he’d thought she would seek out Sai and get their greetings over with, without him lurking voyeuristically in the background. He is regretting that decision now.

“You know what an introvert she is. She’s probably holed up at home with a book right about now, just like her captain,” he says, a quick reminder to ‘put her on my Anbu team like you said you would or I’ll start making things difficult,’ and otherwise does not believe a word he is saying, his gaze lingering on the tenacious fluttering of red in the garden in front of him.

That maple leaf is one strong breeze from falling from the branch.

…

Two stories underground, Ino leans her elbows on the concrete ledge of the viewing window outside Sai’s holding cell, the white-polished nails of the ends of her interlaced fingers cool against her bottom lip. It’s cold inside T&I, and her pale arm warmers aren’t quite offsetting the chill allowed by the maroon halter shirt she’d thrown on this morning over black shinobi pants, bound at the shins with white bandages currently helping her legs keep warm.

If Sai is bothered by the temperature, he doesn’t show it.

The room is brightly lit, the walls of this detainment cell plastered and painted white, unlike the exposed concrete of the lower floors. There’s a thin cot on a metal bed frame nailed to the floor, a metal toilet, and a metal sink. She’s been told he’s being provided changes of clothing and three meals daily, but his confinement has had such little effect on his demeanor that it’s giving her goosebumps, making the metal foldable chair she dragged to the observation window feel even more cold and unyielding than it already did.

Currently, he sits on the cot with his arms resting on his bent knees, tattoos of strange seals interwoven with a menagerie of beasts on his forearms and biceps bared to the air in his gray short-sleeved shirt. He’s tucked the ends of his charcoal pants into the tops of black tactical boots he doesn’t seem to see a problem with resting sole-down on the same mattress he uses to sleep. 

He activated a cobra on his left arm a few minutes ago, and is now watching with foreboding black eyes as its inky body slithers around his wrists and hands, raising its iconically flared head near his shoulder, tasting the stale air of his cell with its tongue. Ino wonders, reluctantly, what would happen if someone were to be bit by one of his venomous ink beasts, if they have venom at all.

“They call the king cobra ‘snake eater’ in Tea,” he says, suddenly, and Ino straightens in her seat at the sound of his voice through the grainy speaker that feeds into the observation room. She’s visited him a few minutes every morning like this since he was locked up, hiding her presence. This is the first time he’s let on he knows someone is there.

After a fortifying breath, Ino reaches down and almost presses the button on the wall below the one-way window connected to her end of the speaker, almost engages him, before she thinks better of it, letting her fingers interlace once more.

He’s undeterred by the silence.

“It’s a defining characteristic, a reptile’s diet,” he says, as said cobra coils down his arm and around his right leg lethargically, wrinkling his pants in the process. Ino can see individual scales rippling over its muscled body, hyper detailed and realistic. The only sign it’s his chakra art is the pitch black of its features, made up entirely of grayscale.

“Pythons and boas, they like warm things. Rodents. Birds.” The cobra ducks under his knee and begins easing up his left arm, its body extending longer than Ino first realized, struggling to grasp its size with it winding around his leg and arm. “Rat snakes prefer mice and frogs, squirrels, bird eggs,” he trails off, lifting the cobra’s head with his black gloved finger, stroking under its chin. “King cobras are cannibals. They hunt rat snakes, pit vipers.” He tilts his head. “Other cobras.”

His eyes don’t leave those of the slowly arching snake as it lifts its head above his finger, as if trying to escape his hand. “I’ve seen one eat a python three times its size,” he says, and lowers his eyelids slightly, dark eyelashes partially shielding his irises from fluorescent lights. “Or try to.”

This is the most naturally she’s ever heard him communicate, Ino thinks, as she slowly stands from her chair, both sweating palms braced on the window ledge, unsure what exactly about his words has her hackles raised, her instincts urging her to exit the observation room. Her breath warms the glass in small patches of fog that disappear as quickly as Ino is tempted to flee. The last time he felt talkative didn’t go so well for her. Excuse her fucking caution.

“The problem with being a cannibal,” he tells his empty cell, “is what can happen when the snake is left alone too long, under stressful conditions.” Ino dislikes this. He’s toying with her again. She doesn’t want to listen to what he has to say; wishes he’d go back to pretending she isn’t there, but it’s too late for that. “Occasionally, one will try to eat its own tail. It’s unclear if it mistakes itself for another snake, or if it’s trying to sate its stomach the only way it knows how.”

The cobra snaps its head forward as Sai grabs it by its neck just below the jaw, its long black and white fangs protracted toward his neck, the body writhing in displeasure, coiling and uncoiling frantically as his fist slowly tightens around its neck.

He looks into its eyes like it’s something interesting he just scraped off a wall, as he says, “I wonder what it would take, to make a person that hungry.”

…

Ino throws up the rice soup she had for breakfast, looks into her red-rimmed eyes in the bathroom mirror, and promises herself she will crush this fear Sai is lording over her.

…

When Kakashi finds her later, she’s leaning against the unassuming stone wall outside the back of T&I that faces one of Konoha’s many forests—this one filled with Anbu operatives and trap seals—raising one of Shika’s strong tobacco cigarettes to her lips with trembling fingers and blaming the dewy air of morning for making her shiver no matter how hard she resists.

It’s taken Kakashi both more and less time to approach her than she expected, since he and Sakura returned in the early hours of morning. It is well known amongst her peers that Hatake Kakashi is difficult to predict the timing and appearance of, and even more difficult to understand once he eventually turns up.

Ever since she first met the leader of Team 7, he’s seemed to her somewhat of an enigmatic symbol more than a person. Naruto, Sasuke and Hinata appear as baffled by him as everyone else, and can offer little insight into his motives and perspectives. He’s only six years their senior, the youngest genin instructor of their year by far, but he’s so far out of reach it’s almost funny. Even though none of them are technically on their genin teams anymore, they naturally group and refer to themselves that way anyway, the bonds they formed with each other and their team leaders on their paths to chūnin going strong all these years later.

Well, mostly.

Naruto and Sasuke are inseparable as always, despite their constant bickering, and these days they make more of an effort to include Hinata when possible, given her general unavailability now that she’s working more hours at the hospital, but when it comes to their former genin instructor, it’s…noticeably not the same as other teams.

Team 7 trusts Hatake Kakashi with their lives during a fight, and Kakashi is fiercely protective of his former students, she’s witnessed first-hand, but they won’t be initiating any group hugs with their ‘sensei’ anytime soon.

They’d have to find him, first.

When Ino is having a rough patch, Asuma-sensei is one of the first people who opens their doorway for her, invites her in for tea. It’s partly the nostalgia that makes it so easy, she thinks, the familiarity of laying out her problems for a mentor to walk her through with warm smiles and insightful advice. The feeling of having somewhere safe to retreat and regroup. She’s seen similar behavior from others with their former instructors, this lack of hesitation to lean on their mentors.

Team 7 is different. Even if they wanted his advice, Kakashi doesn’t make himself available enough to frequently seek it. Ino isn’t sure Kakashi even took a break from Anbu when his team were genin, if she’s honest. Naruto does his best to wrangle his former genin instructor into the occasional team dinners and spars, but his success has varied year-to-year. If Kakashi’s not getting out of socializing with them using bizarre and fantastical excuses, he’s not in the village at all. It’s been years since Kakashi spent this long behind the walls uninterrupted, an entire month, and then he was right back in the field, taking Sakura with him. Further, he barely showed his masked face around the village last month, and when he did, it was with a dark shadow trailing him, pink hair pulled back from her face, wearing tactical blacks and grays and one of Kakashi’s masks.

They stirred up quite the gossip before they deployed, with their brief walks around the village canals or through the trimmed greenery of the central parks. Rumors of Kakashi being spotted on wall duty with her haven't helped. Everyone wants to know the identity of the shinobi Kakashi, who keeps everyone at several arms’ lengths, is suddenly attached at the hip to; and everyone who already knows wants to steal a peek at who Haruno Sakura has become during her mysterious absence.

Even Naruto and Sasuke have been lurking around the Hatake estate suspiciously these days, taking longer routes around the village just to pass by the grounds, eyes on the trees, trying to sense if Kakashi has returned. It’s telling that the two shinobi least respectful of authority she knows are unwilling to cross that threshold onto Kakashi’s lands uninvited.

They don’t even bother checking his small apartment in town, the one-bedroom unit left all but abandoned the second he brought Sakura into the village. 

Ino understands the rationale of why Kakashi would choose to harbor her on his lands; she understands the politics, the logistics, of that decision. But it makes the hairs on her arms stand up if she thinks about the implications, of how much closer Sakura already is to him than his own genin team, to be allowed into a place he keeps everyone away from. 

She watches Kakashi from the corners of her eyes as he leans his back against the wall beside her with a quietly misleading sigh of relaxation probably meant to put her at ease. His silver hair is catching the sparse light escaping the cloud cover, his hands are hidden away in his black pockets, and the black face mask covering his neck up to his nose is predictably tucked under the forehead protector shielding his left eye from view. She wonders if he is standing to her right on purpose, intentionally making it harder for her to read his right eye without craning her neck around to look.

“You’re starting to look like Tsunade,” he says, the only person she knows who addresses the Hokage by name, and stretches his neck out to the left, massaging a kink in his shoulder with the opposite hand.

“It’s the hair, right?” she asks, and runs her free hand through the long cord of blonde hair she’s laid over her left shoulder.

“The vices, actually,” he says, and Ino presses her tongue to the backs of her teeth, feeling like she walked into that one.

He’s not in his usual jōnin uniform, no red spirals on the shoulders of his black long-sleeved shirt, his vest a washed out gray instead of green. Ino could probably count on one hand the amount of times she’s seen Kakashi without his jōnin vest. It puts her more on edge. It’s not just Sakura who is taking on his appearance with her borrowed mask. Kakashi is dressing more similarly to her, if the rumors of her sightings are accurate, taking on her darker palette. He’s mirroring her. Ino hopes it’s a psychological tactic he’s employing, and not a sign of something else. This color palette is Anbu, even if he’s not in the official kit. He has always kept his Anbu career buried out of sight from non-operatives, a thin attempt to conceal the sides of him better left unacknowledged by the public. For that to change now is…unsettling. Kakashi’s unchanging aesthetic is one of the few forms of stability she and her friends have, like Rock Lee’s bowl cut, or Naruto refusing to let the color orange fade quietly out of his wardrobe. He should give them some warning if he’s going to change it. Next thing she knows he’ll be showing up to Ichiraku’s in his pajamas and Konoha will disappear into a sinkhole.

“Get held up in Wind?” she asks, flexing her knowledge of where he’s been to trample on his love of secrecy, and inhales more smoke than intended. She holds onto it stubbornly before exhaling in a cloud that gets quickly dispersed by the gentle breeze that’s been caressing Konoha all morning, letting it burn her lungs on the way out. She coughs, and feels ridiculous.

She doesn’t even like to smoke, but Shika is on a mission in Water country and this is about as close as she allows herself to get to seeking his comforting scent, as she’s not about to stoop to stealing his clothes or crashing the Nara compound and demanding to sleep in his bed. It was hard enough to talk him into taking the mission, with him being as overprotective as he is, after he found her in the state he did back in the flower shop, crying her eyes out like a preteen. She won’t be having him return to gossip around the village of Ino clinging to his utility jacket and creeping around his house. Childhood friends or no, that shit’s embarrassing. She’s a Yamanaka. Mind games are supposed to be her thing. But she let Sai get under her skin. Let what he showed her get under her skin.

Sage knows she’s weak, where Sakura is concerned. No wonder Kakashi won’t let her near her.

“A stubborn little beetle fell on its back on my way here,” he says, settling in more comfortably against the wall, like he’s preparing for a longer conversation. “Took a while to get it to flip over.”

She’s not sure why she bothered asking.

“The thing is, even if you want to help,” he adds, choosing his words awfully carefully, “even if it takes longer, it’s important to let the beetle do most of the work itself. You can do more harm than good, trying to force it onto the right path.”

“If this is allegory, it’s going over my head,” she says, which is mostly a lie, and taps ash onto the cement between them, to the right of her sandals, careful not to drop any on her feet.

“I’m just telling you about my trip,” he says, and Ino tries to exhale tension, staring at the tree line that stretches out behind T&I, smelling the faint earthy musk of plant life and mulch beneath the ashy film on her tongue and in her nose. “By the way, you didn’t happen to see a pink and black blur somewhere around here within, say, the last fifteen minutes or so, did you?”

Ino hardly even knows where to start with that one, but she lands on the obvious. “You fucking lost her?”

“Unlikely,” he says, and Ino believes that about as much as she believes in the tooth fairy.

“Right,” she says, anyway, because if he’s not worried, it isn’t worth it.

The papery edge of the cigarette sucks the moisture from her lips the next time she puts it in her mouth, holding it there with her lips long enough to shake the tension from her hand. She waits until it’s back between her index and ring fingers before removing it, blowing another thin cloud of smoke into the air, steeling herself for what needs to be said.

“How much do you know?” she asks, “About the things Sakura has done? What they made her do?”

“What did he show you, Yamanaka?” he asks, sounding bored while cutting to the quick. “And who else have you told?”

Ino shakes her head, blonde strands falling into her face with the breeze as she scoffs. Of course. He’s more concerned with damage control than whatever it is she has to say. Sage knows what he’d do, if she had told anyone but the Hokage and her father.

“Infants in their cradles,” she says, and nearly loses her cigarette to the ground from her weak, ridiculous, quivering fingers. “Pregnant women. Entire families. Entire clans.” She has to pause to breathe, to stop her voice from rising in volume as she fails to reign in the mess of emotions controlling her voice. What she saw, that was not normal shinobi work. Not Leaf shinobi work. “If a teammate is too injured to move and not valuable enough to carry, she puts them down like a horse. She’s ruthless. She can kill dozens of shinobi in seconds. I think he wanted me to fear her, to show me she’s not who I remember, show me that that girl is—”

Her voice fails her, and it’s just one more humiliation, that she has to choke back the word ‘gone.’ She clears her throat and resets.

“And Sai,” she says, and shakes her head from the sheer difficulty of articulating the essence of what she saw, before taking a firm pull from her cigarette, exhaling forcefully. “He’s obsessed. His memories of her, the way they come across—doesn’t matter if she’s covered in blood and bowels, everything she does is art, to him. He’s proud of his hand in her creation. She’s his ‘magnum opus,’ or whatever.”

Kakashi’s silence is both helpful and not helpful at the same time, nothing stopping her from getting more and more upset, as she slides down the wall to lean her elbows on her knees in a squat, pressing her head back against the wall, a few loose strands catching on the concrete behind her and pulling sharply at her scalp, the base of her high pony digging into her skull, caught between her and the wall.

“You need to look into some of the attacks on merchant caravans that’ve been blamed on bandits within the last ten years or so,” she says, and feels Kakashi’s focus shift. “When I was in his head, I got a glimpse of Sakura and Sai attacking a civilian caravan posing as bandits. The memory had a routine flavor, like it’s something they’ve done more than once. I don’t think he intended for me to see it.”

“If you saw it, he probably intended it.”

Ino snorts to disguise how that comment stung. “Let me know if you need some privacy, while you’re sucking his dick.”

Kakashi doesn’t rise to the bait. Thinks himself better than her in even small ways, apparently.

At the end of her cigarette, Ino stands up, takes one more solid pull before it’s dead, anymore abuse and it’ll burn the tips of her fingers, and then lets it fall, crushing it into the dirt beneath her sandal. This is her revenge, she thinks. Sai underestimated her observational capacity, thought her so weak she’d be too overwhelmed to analyze his memories. Jokes on him, she can be traumatized and intelligent at the same time.

“Anything else?” Kakashi asks, unaffected, and Ino nods once, forcing her eyes to his gray stare as she turns to face him, and he faces her in turn, head cocked, an arrogant angle to his shoulders that sort of pisses her off.

She considers telling him to go fuck himself, but she’s not suicidal, and she’s a shinobi. She has an obligation to the Leaf to give him all the information she has, as instructed by the Hokage. Even if he’s a mythic asshole.

“Yeah,” she says, and turns her cheek, glaring toward the sun rising over the lush green canopy of trees circling the T&I building, letting it sting her eyes before she blinks, and the world is awash with green and blue afterimages from looking too closely at a celestial object. “Sometimes when you’re in someone’s memories, you catch traces of emotions attached to objects and people in their vision, catch where their eyes focus and for how long, things like that.”

At Kakashi’s silence, she glances over to confirm he’s paying attention. She can’t read his expression behind his mask. Can’t read the look in his exposed eye, either. Nothing stands out about his body language, aside from looking generally competent and unconcerned. He hasn’t taken his hands out of his pockets more than once the entire time she’s been talking.

“It’s just a hunch, but you might want to check out Sakura’s solar plexus, maybe look for scars or markings,” she says.

“She was just in the shower, too. Feels like I missed my chance,” he says, tone flat, and Ino raises a brow at his persistent nonchalance. With a sigh, she gets to the point.

“Laugh all you want, but for some reason, Sai has a whole lot of stress accumulated around that part of Sakura’s body. His eyes stray to that location subconsciously.”

“Well. They did go through puberty together.”

“Fucking listen to me.” She snapped at him, she realizes, and immediately regrets it for how his posture shifts, the air around them turning thicker as his aura presses back against her with a rising threat, her instincts balking at what she just did.

She tries to be more respectful when she completes the thought. “I’m talking about her life force,” she says, as politely as possible with gritted teeth. “He could be stressed about an old injury, or he could be stressed about something subdermal, intangible, like her chakra core. Look into it.”

When he narrows his steel gray eye with violent intent, she quickly adds:

“Please.” And for good measure, as he squints in cold approval, “Sir.”

…

Tsunade is a difficult woman to impress. As difficult to impress as she is to sneak up on. Haruno Sakura, stepping out of the shadows in the corner of her home office only minutes after Kakashi left, manages to do both with jarringly little effort.

The walls are thin, the entire home traditionally designed with wood and paper walls, tatami mats in almost every dry room, but the shoji are accessorized with silencing seals, among other things, meaning the following conversation will remain private—as her and Kakashi’s talk should have been.

Sitting on her zabuton behind her low wood table currently stacked with mission reports and loose documents she’d rather not have Sakura snooping around, Tsunade places her hands closer to her concealed kunai under the guise of crossing her arms, tucking her hands away under the flared white sleeves of her robes. She does not alert the Anbu detail that guard the perimeter around the Senju main house, and Sakura doesn’t draw attention to her presence, chakra signature fully suppressed, undetectable even by Tsunade. It’s enough of a feat, the mastery of infiltration and shadow walking she just demonstrated, her technique forebodingly reminiscent of the Nara’s, that Tsunade doesn’t doubt Sakura was listening in on her and Kakashi’s little chat this morning—maybe has been listening in on all of their chats, since she’s been brought into the village.

“You’re putting me in a difficult spot, girl,” Tsunade says, and Sakura places her boots carefully as she walks over the tatami. Rude thing didn’t remove her shoes before entering.

She looks better than when Tsunade last saw her. Her damp hair is pulled into a loose twist on the back of her head in a large clip, a few loose pink strands brushing the thin white scar on her jaw and cheek. Her green eyes are sharp as blades of grass in the hands of a wind specialist, but less hollow, less hunted, more determined. Her muscles are more relaxed beneath her black shinobi fatigues, as well, the excursion having done her as many favors as Kakashi predicted. It’s telling, that she looks more alive after her brush with death than she did after a month of rest and recuperation. It’s a bit insulting, however, that she is of a mind to barge into Tsunade’s house uninvited, eavesdrop, and have the nerve left to feel at ease standing less than ten feet from a Kage-level fighter who has every right to execute her on sight.

Unlike the last time they met, Sakura does not kneel. Apparently all of that lowering of the head was indeed for Kakashi’s benefit, making herself look more pliable. It makes Tsunade want to smack her upside the head. Smart girl, getting Konoha’s Hound on her side. Tsunade has been hesitant to allow Kakashi so much time alone with her, not liking the look in her eyes, the calculations happening at every moment.

Kakashi is an excellent shinobi, worthy of trust, but he has a potential weakness in Sakura he doesn’t acknowledge in their discussions, born of a desire to pull her up out of the mud and bring her home once more. He’s determined to hold onto her. If she’s in a tug of war between the Leaf and Shimura, he’s set his mind on being the stronger tug. And he is willing to make concessions, she’d bet, to manage it.

He could not pull Itachi back from the edge—his first peer; his first and only friend. Tsunade can only hope he won’t allow that failure to drive his reason, as he tries to prevent another tragedy in Sakura.

It has not escaped Tsunade’s notice, that the untraversable tundra he’s maintained between himself and everyone in the village, even his former students, is collapsing dangerously between him and Sakura like a closing fan. He believes cultivating mutual respect will naturally lead to cultivating loyalty, and that loyalty will allow him to guide her. But Tsunade has lived far longer than Kakashi’s twenty-five years, and she has seen more kinds of loyalty lead to worse things.

Shimura Danzō probably saw the same things in this girl Tsunade does. She’s not sure it makes her wiser, not following his judgment, killing her while they have the chance.

Sakura’s loyalty is a mutated animal, one that moves unpredictably. If he isn’t careful, this girl, this bloodthirsty, intelligent thing, will sniff out and eat Kakashi’s desires, twist his arm with it, punish him for his faith, turn him into something she can use, and she will do it all while brimming with respect, overflowing with that same loyalty he thinks will save them both.

Arrogant brat, not bothering to try and fool the Hokage while she’s at it. Or maybe that’s her intelligence showing, again. Maybe she knows Tsunade can read her. Maybe this is her version of humility; this lack of pretense, standing tall in front of her desk, looking down her nose at her like she has the right.

“If this is about Sai, I can spare us the conversation and assure you he will be released into Hatake’s care momentarily,” Tsunade says, and taps a nail on one of her kunai, letting the girl hear its presence. Sakura’s gaze does not waver from her own, unsurprisingly unmoved.

“That’s not why I’m here,” she says, finally, and Tsunade arches her brow, reluctantly curious where she’s choosing to go with this. “I’m here to make a deal.”

Now that, she thinks, ceasing tapping her nails against steel, is interesting.

“And what is it you believe you have to offer, in said deal?” she asks, tracing the edge of a blade under her sleeve. “You have no leverage here, girl. If you want something, ask with a little more humility next time.”

The girl is undeterred by this dismissal, gloved hands loose at her sides, muscles untensed, eyes focused. She has one objective and will not be distracted from it.

“My memories.”

From the way she says it, the girl knows the power she has in this moment, which is not a great start to negotiations. Tsunade presses her tongue to her cheek, mulling her words over, contemplating their significance in spite of their bitter aftertaste. It is both the best and worst outcome, Sakura deciding to use this bargaining chip.

“Pertaining to…my previous workplace,” she addends, the seal on her tongue preventing her from even uttering the former Anbu branch’s name.

Tsunade inhales quietly through her nose, cultivating patience for the conversation to come. She realizes a few of the loose papers on her desk are pertaining to the upcoming Kage summit, and is careful not to draw attention to them by looking at them as she says, “State your terms.”

“There are three. One of them is access to the Hokage’s library.”

Ridiculous.

“Why not ask Hatake to escort you to one of Konoha’s main libraries?” she asks, untucking her hands from her sleeves, pinching the edge of a nearby report between her thumb and index fingers, tracing the sharp corner of the page as she thinks. “Those should be more than sufficient, for some light reading.”

It would be unwise, allowing a nin with such fickle loyalty so close to such sensitive information. Tsunade is surprised she had the gall to request it. The girl seems to consider this, quirking her head to the right as she thinks, like a hawk staring down its beak at the creatures scurrying around below it.

“Are you in a position to refuse?”

“You think too highly of yourself,” Tsunade says, neutrally, prodding the page more aggressively with her thumb. “I don’t see why your cooperation should be such a precious thing to me. If I wanted to peek inside your head so badly, I could mandate it as a requirement of your probation.”

It is not true, not with the amount of red-tape barring her from doing so, due to the girl’s missions all being conducted under the direct supervision of a council member within what the shinobi in his care had (allegedly) been misled to believe was an active division of Anbu. But Sakura may not know that.

“Maybe not now,” Sakura says, and Tsunade doesn’t like the look in those eyes, doesn’t like much at all about the girl holding her wrist behind her back in a mockery of militant deference, the posture correct, but the gaze burning like a green chemical fire. “But it’s as you and Hound were discussing. You’ve yet to determine the source of my apparent appeal to those known to seek powerful means. Are you confident in undervaluing my cooperation, while your enemies plan to put me to use?”

Enemies, she said. Plural. She is saying Shimura is not the only enemy of Konoha—though he’d resent that title—who has taken an interest in her. It’s unpleasant, the amount of unknowns that followed this girl into the village, the gaps in Tsunade’s knowledge of what has occurred and what is to come, and what part Haruno Sakura is to play. Gaps only Sakura’s memories can fill.

“You and I share an objective,” she goes on, and Tsunade tries not to find that as unlikely as she does. “I need to understand my value, and so do you, before you can intelligently decide what to do with me.” 

Tsunade leans her weight forward on her cushion, fingers caressing the edges of loose paper in front of her as she slowly unfolds her legs from the pretzel they're in, trying not to kick any saké cups or any of the empty or full bottles under the table.

“You have no love for this village. The only reason you aren’t throwing threats around my office is because you’re wise enough to recognize superior strength,” Tsunade says, and sees no contradiction in the girl’s thoughtful expression. “You are not Leaf, girl. Not at heart. You are asking me to give you more knowledge to threaten me with. You are asking me to arm you against us.”

She has the insolence to look annoyed at this, the muscles between her brows creasing for a fraction of a second before she corrects and smooths her expression.

“You’re one of the Sannin. If I wanted to threaten you in the future, I wouldn’t do it using ninjutsu I learned from your library,” she says, angling her head lower, letting the lamp on Tsunade’s low desk light her face, the faintly raised skin of the scar on her chin almost glossy where the light touches. “You may be strong enough to protect yourself, but you can’t reasonably protect every council member, merchant, and major clan in Konoha. That’s where I would direct my efforts, not standing before you and trying to bargain for books and scrolls. If,” she hedges, “I was planning to threaten you.”

Tsunade’s scoff is muted by the privacy seals inside the room as she raises her chin, tapping the nails of her left hand on the desk, controlling the fury threatening to make her rash. “Considering the subtext of your words being willingness to threaten our political, economic, and defensive pillars, what’s stopping me from killing you right now on principle and taking your handler’s memories instead? It’s what you would do in my shoes, correct?”

The girl tilts her head just so, staring directly into the eyes of the Hokage with nerve Tsunade has a rising urge to squash. “If you had the conviction to kill me based on what you think I might do in the future, you’d have illegally mined my memories by now,” she says, like she’s the one exercising patience in this interaction. “You want me to give you what I know willingly, because the council is determined to see me serve this village. My mission record is too good to pass on, my uses too limitless, not unlike their greed. And you’re running out of time to deliver on the promises you made when they allowed you to place me under Hound’s purview.”

Tsunade should have known, that the girl’s lack of interest in village affairs Hound reported was feigned on her part. She’s been holding her finger to the wind, biding her time.

It’s an unpleasant feeling, having one’s bluff called.

She narrows her eyes in distaste as the girl steps closer, a slow, careful approach that makes no noise on the tatami and lasts only two paces in duration and distance, but it is enough to cause Tsunade discomfort. She may not pose a physical threat, not to Tsunade, but something about her prickles her defenses, makes her want to take precautions. From how her eyes dance across Tsundade’s robes and face, followed by the barest upturned twitch of the corner of her mouth, she’s satisfied with that result. Ill-mannered brat. 

Tsunade quickly steadies her turbulent anger, trying not to draw her Anbu detail to her side in her agitation, nor reach for one of the bottles beneath the table.

The ensuing silence of the sound-suppressed office stretches like lamplight across the wooden ceiling over their heads, interrupted only by the enraged thundering of Tsnuade’s heart in her ribcage, until Sakura breaks it.

“Open admittance to your library,” Sakura repeats, eyes trapping light like bugs in a jar.

Tsunade’s thumb twitches involuntarily, and she sees red swelling on the corner of the page she was poking at, her thumb stinging belatedly and tellingly. Tsunade smears the blood on her thumb onto her desk as she tightens her right hand into a fist, her jaw muscles cramping from gritting her teeth. The paper cut stings, and Tsunade allows it to persist, holding off on healing the shallow score.

It would be wise to sit in this moment and reflect, Tsunade thinks, on how she underestimated the humble paper’s edge.

After a moment of contemplating snapping the her neck anyway and weathering the consequences, Tsunade reaches under her low table and grabs a bottle of saké she’d been planning to hold off on opening until noon, getting blood on its ceramic neck as she slams it down, jostling her stacks of scrolls and reports with the force of its arrival, a few tumbling off the desk and onto the tatami below.

She senses her Anbu detail tighten their perimeter, edging closer in concern for her turbulent emotions, and sends a short series of pulses in Anbu Interval confirming there is no cause for alarm. There is no danger here. Only an irritating girl with too many secrets and too little respect for those who hold the most power to help her.

It isn’t just Kakashi’s arm Haruno Sakura intends to twist, she thinks—as she uncorks the bottle with a hollow ‘pop,’ glaring at the delicate features of a face she can still see in her impudent refusal to bow.

It’s hers.

“Supervised access, and with restrictions,” she counters, and Sakura’s eyes narrow in contempt. “Next?”

There is resistance in the tension in the girl’s jaw, not pleased with the word ‘restrictions’ no doubt, but she resets with a subtle calming breath, before finally sitting down partially cross legged on the tatami, bracing her right elbow on her right knee and her chin on her right fist, abandoning formality.

“Freedom,” she says, plainly, as Tsunade pulls two small ceramic cups out from beneath the desk with her left hand, setting them down on the wood in front of her, and pours herself a drink.

“You know I can’t give you that,” she says, tactfully, and fills the second cup with saké, before setting the bottle down on the table, a drop of its contents slowly sliding down the slope of its bloodied neck. “Trust is earned, not bargained for.”

She slides one of the cups toward Sakura, and the girl is endearingly skeptical of the liquid as it sloshes toward the shallow rim from the movement, glancing at least three times between Tsunade’s face and the cup before finally lifting her chin from her black-gloved hand and reaching for it, looking reluctant but resigned. She thinks it’s a condition of continued negotiation.

Tsunade does not correct her; she empties her cup in a lukewarm rush of saké down her throat, and sets her cup down on the table firmly.

“Here is what I can do,” she offers. “I can take you off of probation and put you on Team Ro.” She feels only slightly dishonest, passing Kakashi’s request off as a concession here, striking two birds with one stone, but thus is the requirement of her position. “You will be a fully fledged Anbu operative with all of the benefits of that position, but you will continue to reside on Hatake lands until given further notice.”

“And Sai?”

Tsunade glances down at the full cup in the girl’s hands, and she hastily throws it back, militant in how she empties the cup and sets it down on the wood, eyes intent on Tsunade’s face, waiting for an answer.

“He violated probation,” she muses, as if just now considering how to handle him, tapping her nails on the desk in feigned pensive thought. She notes she’s still bleeding small drops on the table, and wordlessly heals the cut on her thumb—something the girl’s eyes fixate on with more than casual interest.

“Sai is under threat of assassination. He can’t leave the village until I can protect him,” Sakura admits, and despite there being no obvious flicker of vulnerability in jade eyes accompanying this olive branch, Tsunade finds she believes her.

The urge to offer comfort is unwelcome, but Tsunade wants to reward that lowering of her guard, and can’t resist saying, “Then he’ll be a reserve member of Team Ro, for the time being.”

This seems to satisfy the girl, as she nods once in acknowledgement of the decision.

It is another half-truth, to pretend this is mercy on her part. It is a favorable outcome, keeping Sai from joining Sakura in the field while placing him under Hatake’s authority, but she eases the discomfort of politics by grabbing the bottle and pouring herself another cup.

“And the third request?” Tsunade prompts.

The change in Sakura is marked, her posture straightening in her seated position, her shoulders squaring, her eyes hardening. All peace apparently leaves her at the thought of her next condition, and it has Tsunade setting the bottle back down and sitting taller, tension returning to the room’s previously more relaxed atmosphere.

“This is non-negotiable,” she warns, and Tsunade doesn’t like the sound of that. “I need an audience with the Aburame clan as soon as you can arrange one.” At Tsunade’s parting lips, Sakura boldly holds a gloved hand up to silence her. “And I need your full support in obtaining unrestricted access to their clan techniques and records of kekkei genkai.”

Tsunade places her hand palm-down on the desk, her ceramic cup sitting on the wood between her thumb and index finger. “You’re asking too much, girl,” she says, but her pulse is rising, the implications of this request alarming and baffling in equal measure.

“If you want my cooperation, that is the cost,” she says, green eyes unrepentant in the lamp light of the home office, cut off from natural light.

Sucking the moisture from her front teeth, tasting the earthy notes of saké, Tsuande lets her hand slide down to the edge of the desk and grip the edge, careful not to splinter the table. Likely sensing the rising objections, Sakura lowers her hand from its insulting position and rests it on her kneecap, her index finger tapping anxiously before she notices the movement and forces herself into stillness. 

“Why?”

“Get me an audience with the Aburame clan,” Sakura says gravely.

“Tell me why, and I will consider it.”

“You’ll learn why once you’ve written up the terms of the deal and I undergo the procedure.”

Tsunade stares, and thinks quickly. “I can’t guarantee they will grant you the access you seek.”

“You can strongly encourage their cooperation,” the girl says, holding firm, her gaze unblinking.

After a few moments of unbroken quiet, Tsunade takes a deep breath of paper-scented air and accepts this is not a point she can manipulate further in Konoha’s favor. It’s just a meeting. If she finds her reasons objectionable after reviewing her memories, she’ll make arrangements to ensure she does not get the Aburame clan’s approval regardless of the Hokage’s ‘support.’

“I accept your terms,” she says, and of course, now the girl lowers her head, a shallow dip that lets light bend around her pale hair.

Clicking her tongue against the backs of her teeth, Tsunade swipes the bottle by the neck and pours them both another cupful, setting the bottle back on the table with enough force to crack the wood and stiffen the shoulders of the frustrating shinobi sitting across from her.

“The next time I see you, you’d better be wearing a Leaf,” she says, and takes pleasure in the small scowl it puts on the girl’s face.

Her next drink of saké tastes far more sweet.