Black Bough

Sakura isn’t angry.

The sun has barely been up an hour and the wet market is overflowing with patrons and animals, stray dogs sniffing around the ground for scraps dropped by civilians carrying more than they can keep track of and vendors too focused on counting ryō to notice a few carrots getting swiped off a table by a filthy paw.

Hound scratches one of the thinner dogs behind the ears as he passes, heedless of fleas visibly bouncing around its patchy brown fur. He nearly ruffled her hair just like that before they left the house, halting halfway through the movement, leaving his hand hanging in the air between them before he pulled it back to his side, clearly as confused by his desire to touch her as he was by his instinct to retreat from the gesture.

Sakura trails reluctantly behind him as he expertly navigates the chaotic sprawl of produce and vendors, live chickens pecking at feed and dodging his boots, getting tufts of white and brown feathers on the cotton-wool blend of his black pants when they flap frantically away from a dog with pink skin before the vendor sweeps it back with a straw broom. Hound steps over the hens with the same cautious footing with which he steps over discarded newspaper clippings and plastic bags, using the backs of his fingerless gloves to gently nudge hanging clusters of plucked foul and strings of drying chiles out of his way with the kind of care he does everything.

Sakura isn’t angry.

But she avoids Sai’s gaze anyway, walking ahead of him, keeping him out of her line of sight.

She has barely looked his way since returning to the village a few days ago, when Hound led him through the dark doorway of the main house with a hand on his back and his uncovered eye squinting facetiously while he said, “Found him,” as if that were something she’d doubted he could do.

It was habit, the quick review of Sai’s body she conducted within the next half a second. He hadn’t lost weight and his dark clothes were clean and pressed, points she acknowledged and moved on from, noting the bruises under Sai’s eyes from lack of sleep, the stress in the lines of his shoulders others would miss, the way he clipped his fingernails so short she can easily picture him holding the trimmers with unnecessary precision, his focus single-minded, an exercise in control; the same story was told in the disciplined way he stood just outside the doorway with his hands at his sides, watching her closely with black, light-stifling eyes, waiting for indication from her of how to time his next calculated act.

“How was your mission?” Sai prompted, but was asking a different question.

This is one reason for Sakura’s not-anger.

It is clear he knew Root would try to re-recruit her, just like he knew M0-1 would come for him to collect his head for his betrayal. She wouldn’t be surprised if he accurately predicted who Danzō would send to coerce her; if he’s wondering how it was, seeing M0-3 again; wondering if she’s wavered; wondering if he’ll need to watch his neck around her from now on while he determines how to bring her back around to his side.

It adds insult to injury, that he would doubt her. Makes the wound M0-3 inflicted sting all the more, knowing Sai can see she’s tempted. Knowing Sai can see her writhing weakness, her desire to return to what she knows, the allure of taking M0-3’s hand and disappearing from the Leaf forever. She could never kill Sai. Even if she wanted to kill Sai, he would kill her first, and she would deserve it.

All of this unspoken knowledge has made their interactions tense the last few days.

When she first saw Sai after her return, Sakura hadn’t decided how to address the ice in her chest M0-3 put there in the desert, and so she forced the corner of her mouth into a brief upward tilt before leaning her head back on the window frame, turning her nose toward the far end of the room where Hound was pretending to be interested in the worn out spines lining the room’s tall aging bookcase—more accurately examining the shelf for any disturbed dust, monitoring any reading she may have done in his short absence. She admires his paranoia.

Sakura held her tacit smile, and Sai’s eyebrows flattened by fractions above his eyes, a hardness to that stare Sakura could not pretend to shake off.

‘Don’t,’ his eyes have continued to say, every time their gazes meet.

Sakura can’t tell if she’s quite followed that order.

Now drifting around the market behind her, somewhere between the stale coffee beans and overpriced bananas, Sai is watching her body closely; marking the way her muscles strain, still in recovery from her brief stint with hallucinogenic poison after refusing additional treatment; marking the way she does not turn her eyes to him, does not glance over her shoulder, does not try to walk beside him despite the narrow paths between vendors just to feel his arm graze hers.

Sakura doesn’t want to look at him. Doesn’t want to look into his eyes and picture them being eaten by ambiguous insects that change every time she blinks. Doesn’t want to face the future as it crests the horizon.

Sakura isn’t angry.

She’s afraid.

It has been years since she feared for Sai’s life this seriously, she thinks, pulling her black cloth mask up over her nose despite the heat of this part of the market, where vendors have set up grills and stoves to demonstrate the quality and proper preparation of their goods, making quick money selling street food while they’re at it. The mask blocks the smells only minimally, unsurprisingly designed to allow scent to pass through, given his keen sense of smell is one of Hound’s many mysterious selling points as a shinobi. She’d forgotten what it’s like, to fear for someone. It’s a sour, fatty taste in her mouth. It’s smoke from burning charcoal and meat that makes it difficult to breathe without coughing.

It’s the smell of fish taken off of ice, shoved into her arms by Hound only a handful of minutes ago that’s already beginning to make her shirt stink, some of the liquid from the parcel leaking onto her long sleeve.

She isn’t bothered, per se, by the sharp scent of the fresh mackerel wrapped in paper and tucked under her right arm, but but the sheer amount of smells and sounds, the constant buzzing of flies, the people crowded into one long series of streets—it’s all making her head pound from focusing her eyes too restlessly, keeping track of every hand in their vicinity, and it's starting to turn her stomach.

A cold sweat is breaking out on the back of her neck, and she’s glad she left her vest in the house, slung over the same window sill she’d been lounging in earlier this week when Hound returned from apparently bailing Sai out of T&I for “playing too rough with the other kids.”

And if Hound was suspicious of her being seemingly right where he’d left her, those suspicions were quickly overshadowed by his hunger, which Sakura wasn’t about to object to. Neither of them had had a decent meal in weeks, meaning any real food they cooked had to be simple and carefully indulged in, with moderation and restraint, while their stomachs readjusted. Though, she’d fucked that up the moment she drank the Hokage’s saké, before sprinting back to Hatake’s place as if she’d never left. Hound one-hundred-percent smelled the alcohol on her, but after a lengthy pause filled with theatrically stoic staring on both of their parts, decided to let it go unaddressed for the sake of their tentative peace.

The Hokage said she would have a finalized contract prepared and approved by the end of the week. He’ll find out soon, about the deal she’s made, but not today, she suspects.

That would require him leaving her side for more than five minutes at a time, which, given the way his shoulders sagged subtly when he found her resting in his home when he returned with Sai, clearly regretting letting her out of sight for even an hour or two, is unlikely for the time being.

For now, she welcomes his vigilance. Since he took her in after Iron, his constant looming has given her ample time to observe him: from the way he cleans and oils his blades—not all at once, but in rotation, so he always has a handful of fresh kunai—to the way he washes blood off his hands—like it’s a luxury, sensual in how slowly he smooths his thumb over his palm where blood settles into the lines of his hand, like red strings stuck to his skin. He can’t even scrape leftovers off a ceramic plate without employing unnecessary precision, gathering as much as he can against the edge of his knife and sweeping it all into compost soil in one gesture without making a sound, taking pride in doing this small task well.

A light orange, fleshy fruit she doesn’t immediately recognize rolls off a plastic table and onto the cement, and the civilian in front of her crushes it beneath their sandal without breaking their stride toward the vendor Hound is just now walking away from, a pleased crease to his right eye that makes Sakura’s lips want to twitch beneath her mask. He enjoys this, she thinks, despite the startled eyes of those who recognize him as he passes, the mothers subtly guiding their children to their other side, away from him, or the retired shinobi butchering pork letting his cleaver fall a little heavier on the cutting board when he walks by, in his distraction.

Maybe those wary expressions make him want to keep his hands free, Sakura thinks, hence why Sai and her are carrying the bulk of the groceries. Sakura has a soft green bag cradled in her left arm, half-full with mangoes, kai lan—“It’s bitter-sweet, you’ll like it,” Hound said, tossing a neatly secured bundle of the leafy greens over a startled civilian’s head for Sakura to catch and stow—okra, and a large array of differently shaped mushrooms Sakura is struggling to keep track of.

Stepping over large bags of rice stacked on the cement, Sakura wedges her shoulders past groups of middle-aged civilians in floral vests and white cotton shirts with stains on the front, bickering over the price of strawberries after watching Hound make off with a crate of the freshest, juiciest looking ones practically for free, the shopkeeper balking at the sight of that infamous, masked face and practically throwing the goods at him to send him on his way.

This is the other thing Sakura has observed.

Hound is loyal to his village, but he is not a part of it.

He banters with the senbon-twirling Tanuki on the walls or outside the Hokage’s office, but easily evades invitations out to drinks with the other Anbu—rejections they take in stride, like it’s a routine effort that most often fails. He is known by all, on sight, but known by no one.

The only humans she’s seen on his clan lands are her and Sai, no others brave enough to vault over that low wooden fence that marks the boundary. Not even his students. He tells them to keep away, and they listen too well for it to be a new barrier he’s erected on account of Sakura’s presence at his side. He’s told her he has an apartment in town, hence the dilapidated state of his estate, but Sakura somehow doubts he spent much time there even before taking her under his wing. He behaves like a man used to being in the field, and he hides it well, the restlessness, the split-second of aimlessness at the start of the day before he covers it with a squinted eye and announces the next absurd activity he’s arranged for them, like throwing horseshoes, or learning chess, or painting shoji.

He’s not just filling Sakura’s idle time, battling her restlessness. He’s battling his own.

She hasn’t known him long, and she doesn’t know him well, but it doesn’t take a genius to notice Hound does not particularly enjoy killing, and yet is objectively exceptional at it. He is perpetually disappointed in himself and others. He values his students, sure, but he is more interested in keeping Sakura away from them than he is in spending any time with them, himself. He does not have close confidants. He does not have equals. He does not have peers. More people call him ‘Captain’ than by name. More people walk in wide arcs to avoid getting too close than are comfortable standing within arm’s length. Less binds him to this village than she’d originally believed. And yet he has remained loyal. It goes beyond a sense of duty. Something else is tying him down to this place, something deeper than his living connections.

If she can locate what that is… If she can use it…

It gives her ideas. Ideas she is still debating the benefit of acting on. She needs the protection of the Hokage, for now. Hound will fight beside her when the time to face Root comes, without any drastic manipulation on her part. She is building a rapport with him, drawing him in closer, and any bold moves on her part run the risk of backfiring, undoing the progress she’s made in gaining his trust. But she needs him sharper than this content shell of himself, if he’s going to be of any use. She needs to remind him what he is, who he is, and she needs to bring it out in him before M0-1 decides to make his move.

It’s a lofty goal, one she’s unsure is possible, but it would be for his own good, if she could manage it. This place weakens him, the way he’s trying to weaken Sakura with his gentle war of attrition.

She could not sleep last night, suffering intrusive thoughts of how carefully Hound injected her with antivenom back in Wind, his bare ring finger stroking the skin of her arm in a soothing motion she’s not sure he realized was happening as he pushed the plunger down with his thumb, sliding the needle into the vein closest to the surface. She remembers being held against his chest with her nose buried in the musky cotton of his shirt, stealing body heat while he held his fingers firmly to her pulse. Even as her mind drifted and her senses distorted, she heard his voice in the dark when she started to convulse, subjected to violent shivers that made her bite her cheek and taste blood.

She thinks she traced the top hem of his desert mask with her fingers while the night sky turned rainbow colors like the inside of an abalone shell, touched the pads of her index and middle fingers to his cloth-covered lips and watched his eyelashes twitch, feeling the damp air of his breath warm the fabric. She felt his lips curve upward under the mask, a brief, closed-mouth smile against her touch, his silver eye exuding patience as he used the hand not monitoring her pulse to guide her head back down to his chest, the word “rest” never having sounded so soft.

Sakura is squeezing the mackerel under her arm too tightly, and the paper is starting to ooze something watery onto her sleeve.

As if sensing her thoughts, Hound glances back at her over his right shoulder, strips of light slipping through the gaps in the colorful fabric canopies strung up on mental poles over their heads, striking bright lines across his recently washed hair and the black mask obscuring his expression. 

His gray eye is darker in the shade, as he visually assesses the general state of her—darting from the mask on her face, to the bag hanging off her shoulder, to the chicken shit she probably stepped in, back up to to the likely pallid coloring of her face where the mask doesn’t cover. She’s always worn her nausea regrettably plainly, for all to see.

He signs in Basic for her to stick closer to him, quickly enough the gesture flies far beneath civilian notice, and she trots forward obligingly, weaving between awkward limbs and narrowly arranged stalls of hanging meat and spices until her right arm brushes the sleeve of his shirt, the sensation of fabric grazing fabric sending pleasant signals to her brain she doesn’t understand but finds easy enough to indulge in.

Hopefully that will put him at ease enough to put her at ease, his subtle tension infecting her, worsening her already mounting discomfort at being in such a crowded space for so long.

The raised voices of haggling and customer-wrangling are giving her a headache, the bustling putting her on edge for how easy it would be to slip an assailant into the fray, how little mobility these clustered stalls of meat and fish and fruit leave for evasion and counter-attack.

At least Sai is watching her six, staying a considerate four-or-so steps behind her as he follows. Though, it feels an awful lot like being stalked, with how his gaze sears the backs of her thighs, tracking the way her muscles shift for signs of deviation from the path—as if she would turn on him in the middle of the market.

It would not be the worst place to fight him, she acknowledges. But she won’t.

If Sai is going to die regardless of what she does, if M0-1 gets serious about eliminating him, Sakura should just die with him. Die for him. Maybe that’s why he took her with him; to sacrifice her somehow to defeat M0-1. Sai brought her out for a reason. He left Root for a reason.

She’d like to know what that reason is, before she dies on account of it.

“Easy,” Hound comforts—or warns, she thinks—either sensing her growing unease, or spotting the way her right hand just twitched, the desire to summon a kunai getting difficult to ignore.

“I’m not a horse,” she says, already bored before she’s finished speaking, numbly going through the motions of their usual banter, and lets a man carrying a bag of rice on his shoulder shove past her without cutting his stomach open and emptying that sack directly into his internal organs.

“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘abused dog with aggression issues,’” he says, “but ‘startled horse’ works too.”

Sakura appreciates that Hound at least leans down to her ear to say this, not forcing her to sift through the noise to parse his cotton-muffled words from the balding man to her left complaining about the rising price of grains, or the baying goats two aisles behind them whose scent of droppings and dry grass has lingered in her nose since passing by.

It takes a while to break through to the end of the parade of goods, but break through, they do. 

Hound hangs back near the edge of the market, seemingly unashamed to be carrying only a plastic bag so thin Sakura can see a few round and orange-ish shapes within and that small crate of strawberries, waiting for Sai to take his time catching up before falling silently into step a few long strides behind them.

She takes a deep breath through the cotton of her mask once they’re a few blocks away from the market, relieved to no longer be in the thick of the hissing spits and raw freshwater fish and blood-coated butcher’s counters competing with her nose against racks of colorful spices and the sugary aroma of honey being boiled. Now it’s just the smells she’s carrying she has to contend with.

“Feel like getting some more sleep?” he asks, and Sakura side-eyes the now familiar angle of his lashes drooping lazily over his gray eye, the impeccable posture of his shoulders and back contrasting the air of lethargy in every movement he makes, from how loosely he holds the plastic bag between his fingers, to the way the soles of his shoes only lift from the ground the minimum amount not to drag when he walks.

Her body has not recovered from the events in Wind. It’s still early morning. Her muscles ache every time she breathes, still bouncing back from the scorpion venom after refusing medical treatment the second Hound’s back was turned, not trusting these Konoha nin not to use the opportunity to examine her chakra pathways or worse. She wants nothing more than to lay her futon out beside Hound’s in his decaying estate house and listen to one of his and Sai’s passive-aggressive, murmuring conversations until she falls asleep.

“No,” she says, and tightens her arm around the wrapped fish when it starts to slip.

He tilts his head, likely restructuring his plans for the day.

“Hm.” The low sound conveys he is unconvinced, but too lazy to pry. “Early lunch?” he asks, and Sakura is disgusted by how badly she wants him to cook for her despite having snubbed breakfast willfully; wants the savory broths that heat her stomach and charred squab that tickle her nose while they roast; wants that tight feeling she gets in her chest watching him chop vegetables into smaller shapes she didn’t have to tell him she secretly prefers. It’s unacceptable, the amount of comfort she has begun to derive from the sounds of fish popping in oil and Hound grinding pepper over a pan.

“I’m not hungry,” she lies, turning her eyes to face the street in front of her.

They’ve entered a part of town lined with book stores and clothing boutiques. Sakura wonders if Hound would normally have stopped inside that used book store with the damaged blinds in the window if he’d been on this errand by himself. She thinks she would like to see that. The Friend Killer making other people uneasy, pacing around the romance aisle.

“Something light, then.” He sounds vaguely amused, the tone only slightly disguised by the way the mask muffles his voice when he speaks quietly.

Sakura hums noncommittally and spares a glance over her shoulder at Sai walking a few meters behind them, holding a brown paper bag of produce, bread, and at least one jar of strawberry jam with one hand under the bottom of it, watching her with a knowing darkness to his gaze that makes her want to grind her teeth. 

On second thought, she’s not too angry to eat.

…

“Here.”

The fruit Hound tosses up to her is the same kind of small fleshy ball she saw someone step on back in the market. It fits in the palm of her hand, and without her gloves on she can feel its fuzz tickle her skin as she turns it over, examining its pale orange hue in the high sun of one in the afternoon, sunlight skipping discs of light off the river snaking through the landscape roughly forty feet to their right like one of the taipan snakes tangled up in the tattoo on her left arm.

Sai is standing up from the edge of that river, shaking water off his hands, the ink seals on his skin blurring with the motion.

“Loquat,” Hound provides, sitting directly below her with his back to the eight-foot wooden post closest to the river—one of three sticking up out of the patchy grass of the third training ground; a post Sakura is currently sitting on the flat top of, one heel braced on its edge with her knee bent toward her chest, the other hanging down directly over Hound’s head a few feet below her boot, if she counts the height of his hair.

Sai wipes his hands on his pants and turns to face her with a determined edge to his black eyes that makes Sakura almost crush the soft fruit in her fist. Hound pulls a jar of strawberry jam from the brown, dried out wicker basket he’d blown the dust off of before they left the house, and begins rustling around in the paper bread bag for something, possibly for what he’d called a “dessert bun,” claiming, as he’s taken to doing, that she’ll “like it.”

Before they packed up some food and headed out to the training grounds, Sakura changed out of the long-sleeved shirt that smelled like mackerel and into a thin white athletic tank, and she’s glad for it now, enjoying the mild heat of the sun on her exposed skin as she tugs her face mask down around her neck to feel the breeze on her cheeks, letting the UV rays slowly break down the pigment of her tattoos, fading them a little more every day she lives to age. She’s tempted to fish around in her cargo pants for a hair tie in one of her pockets to pull her hair back with, letting the spring air flow a little more freely around her neck, but she can’t be bothered.

Movement to her right draws her eyes lethargically back to Sai as he approaches in silent steps, his hands loose at his sides, his dark hair and eyes diluting daylight in contrast to his pale skin that reflects it like porcelain. She can see water stains on his gray pants where he’d wiped his hands, forming shifting shapes like clouds as they dry unevenly in the sun.

He stops six feet from her and Hound’s shared stump to say to her, with confidence, “You did not embrace me when you returned.”

It’s a reasonable starting point, she thinks. From his point of view, anyway.

Sakura lets her eyes trail over the meticulous way Hound, seemingly undisturbed by the sudden questioning taking place, is spreading red jelly thinly over the powdered top of some kind of sugary bun using a hunting knife, and rotates the fruit in her hand, considering where to bite.

“You don’t like to be embraced,” she says, which is generally true, but besides the point.

From the way Sai lowers his eyelids, his expression darkening into a tepid glare, she knows he understands she’s missed the point intentionally. It’s unlike her, not to seek his affection after weeks away from him. She’s been avoiding him for multiple days. He’s losing patience. “You have something to say,” he observes, and Sakura decides to bite the fruit directly over the bruise, getting the unpleasantness over with first.

The juice is tart and sugary despite the bruised texture, and because of its softened meat it drips down her chin and between her fingers as she holds Sai’s black-marble eyes with her own.

“How is it?” Hound’s voice drifts up to her, though he doesn’t look away from his mindless task, placing the covered bun onto a large cloth napkin in the grass beside him, pulling out the next bun from the paper bag, and beginning the process again.

Sakura wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, chewing and swallowing before she speaks. “It’s sweet,” she says, and Hound hums a quietly satisfied sound in the back of his throat in response, making Sai narrow his eyes further, his hands tensing and untensing, not appreciating the interruption, nor the implied rapport.

“Sakura.” Sai says her name like an expectation, indifferent in tone and expression but anticipating immediate obedience, and Sakura lets the loquat fall wastefully from her hand onto the grass, ignoring Hound’s reprimanding, “Oy.” Hound plucks it from the grass and dusts it off, setting it down on one of the napkins beside him. Sakura licks the juice from her palm and fingers, contemplating her words, weighing how much she is willing to say, and how soon, because what started as fear is evolving into frustration so deep it makes her bones ache in the marrow.

“Why did you do it?” she asks, examining the remnants of juice caught in her cuticles.

Hound’s knife pauses its sweeping movement, the jam losing its shape from sitting in the sun while being spread so thinly. Sakura would have preferred to have this conversation unobserved, but Hound doesn’t often leave Sakura alone with Sai, and Death is casting its shadow over them like the passing clouds starting to block out the sun. She deserves an answer.

Sai angles his head back further, appraising her anew. “Does it matter?”

“Considering we’re going to die for it,” she says, leaning forward on her tenuous seat, enjoying looking down on Sai from this height, “I’d say it might.”

She can feel Hound’s mental gymnastics as he quickly runs the scenarios, weighing the value of his silence over his questions, playing out how likely he is to learn what he seeks from listening alone. She told him in Wind that Sai was being targeted, and he can probably piece together that if Sakura doesn’t kill Sai she’s next on that list, but he lacks details. Once he’s done, he resumes spreading his jam like the mental sprint never happened, opting for silence. For now.

Two white and gray pigeons flutter down into the clearing one after the other, their wings stirring up yellow pollen, investigating the contents of Hound’s aging basket with narrow bobbing heads from a safe distance of several feet away.

“Why?” she asks. The breeze lifts the fine hairs around her face, shuffles leaves from the branches and scatters them on the spotted ground, sweeping them under nature’s rug like the secrets Sai is holding back.

Sai holds his stillness and his silence, and Sakura digs her nails into her knee, pressing her tongue to the backs of her lower teeth before she speaks again. “Hound, why do you think Sai turned to the Leaf?”

Below her, Hound is tapping his fruit-bloodied knife against the sugary bun in thought, considering his words, deciding how to approach this game Sakura’s roped him into based on mutual benefit. Sunlight grazes the blade with every touch, a distracting flare of light at regular intervals that triggers foggy memories of practicing giving signals with a mirror some time before her induction to Root, catching her own small teeth in its reflection when she changed her grip on its palm-sized circular frame. Right now, Hound is signaling his willingness to play. He can’t afford to let this moment pass, while he has her cooperation in interrogating Sai. He’s as strapped for information as Sakura, and he doesn’t know she already volunteered her memories away. In this, at least to him, they are allies.

“Hard to say,” he offers, and Sakura nods. “Protection, most likely. Being on the run forever is easier said than done, and if he was determined to keep you out of Shimura’s hands, defecting to the village Shimura is determined to protect, under the umbrella of a Sannin... That’s not a bad option. Maybe he thought making yourselves useful to Konoha would make Shimura hesitate.”

“So you think it was about me,” Sakura surmises, and sees Hound’s hand stop in his absent tapping of the knife. He let that slip. How uncharacteristic of him. “It wasn't that he took me with him. You think I was the entire point of the betrayal.”

“It was not possible for you to stay,” Sai cuts in, tilting his head to his right as he considers her, like he’s watching an animal struggle in a trap. It bothers her, that he can still look down on her while she’s seated above his head. “There is no justification for your anger.”

Sakura presses her sticky palm to the post and pushes off, Sai not even doing her the complement of taking a reflexive step back as she drops down in front of him, dirt and gravel crunching underfoot.

“There is no justification,” she parrots with venom, shoving him in the chest with one hand, pushing him back that step he didn’t take, watching his pupils dilate, his eyebrows twitching, the threat of retribution rising, “for withholding critical information that will determine how and when we are about to be violently executed as punishment for a choice you made without me. A choice you made for both of us.”

Calming her breaths, she walks over to the furthest wooden post and moves several yards away to prevent further lashing out at him for the way he’s studying her, unable to take his outward apathy when she feels the end inching closer by the minute.

He muses, “You’re afraid.”

Sakura wants to laugh because she wants to scream. She digs her heels into the soft earth under her boots, dry but still malleable from recent rain, and activates a seal to summon a kunai into her right palm, Sai stepping into her peripheral vision, out of focus, blocking out the sun like a wraith. The iron handle is firm and in her control as she lets her grip slip down to the blade in preparation of a nose pin technique. She pulls her arm back and releases the knife toward the wooden post she assumes, given the amount of shallow chips and slashes, is used for low-velocity throwing practice. And by inexperienced throwers, most likely, with the majority of the marks indicating missed throws.

Her blade sinks into the log a conservative inch.

“Yes, I am,” she says, calm because she must be, “and I’m right to fear him.”

She thinks it’s her sensitivity that has the birds in the surrounding trees sounding more shrill, the breeze feeling a few degrees lower than before.

Still resting with his back to the pole closest to the riverbed, Hound waves a fingerless-gloved hand to ‘shoo’ one of the birds that’s gaining ground, the pigeon fluffing its wings and hopping back a foot as he chimes in with a flippant, “Someone I know?”

“No,” she says.

Rather than summon another kunai, she uses a chakra thread to stick to the handle and wrench it out of the log, back into her hand, cutting the air with a sharp sound on its way.

“One of Shimura’s?” Hound asks, tone so uninterested he must be dying for the answer.

Sakura can feel her cursed seal threatening to react, tightening her throat, and so she quickly forms the sign Anbu uses to indicate the order to drop an objective, and Hound sets his hunting knife down on the napkin beside the buns, a very particular kind of shift in his posture she reads intuitively as concern, which she pointedly ignores.

This time, she holds the kunai by the handle and lets it fly in a full spin before sticking it to the pole.

She wishes she could let go of her questions as easily.

“Why did you choose this?” She can’t force her eyes to face Sai’s bleak silhouette any more than she can stop the desolation creeping into her tone. “Help me understand.”

Give me a reason not to take M0-3’s hand. Give me a reason not to attempt survival.

The leaves high in the sprawling oaks brush against one another, surrounding the clearing with the rising tide of the breeze, a reminder that they are outnumbered, cornered, immersed, in what they cannot control.

“No.”

It takes her a moment to process the refusal.

Sakura wraps her chakra around the blade and tugs it free once again, snapping it back into her hand with unnecessary force as she finally pivots to face him, noting the subtle pinch between his brows, the frustration barely detectable in those black eyes. “No?”

“You tried to hurt yourself.” There is an undercurrent of long-faded panic in the words, dulled by time and Sai’s suppressed emotions, and Sakura has no idea what he’s referring to. She finds herself wondering at exactly what age he turned against Root, grappling for context. “It was unsustainable for you to remain there. You do not need to know anything further.”

She lets her kunai sink back into her palm like a stick into sand. “Sai, what are you talking about?”

“You were not going to survive.” She can see his struggle to articulate in the flexing of his fingers at his sides, the widening of his stance that displaces soil, the tension in his jaw, but it only further confuses her. There is something he is not saying. Something pivotal. Something worth hiding.

“We’re shinobi. We all die young,” she says coolly, tucking away his odd words for later dissection. And adds, considering M0-1’s sadistic preferences, “Only difference is now we die harder.”

Sai steps closer, until his body heat kisses hers. “Why do you think you were allowed to keep your emotions?” he asks, and Sakura slides her back foot out involuntarily as she squares her hips toward Sai’s looming figure. He watches her brows pinch toward one another, then looks away from her face, choosing to examine the wooden post she’d been attacking previously. “To make you easier to subdue. To make your mind fragile. So that when the time comes, you will be so strained by the incompatibility between your missions and your mind, so controlled by your loyalties, you won’t resist death.” Sakura watches his throat contract, watches him choose his words carefully to avoid instant death by the seal, gauging what information is restricted based on prior and meticulous exploration. “If you turned your blade on yourself, no one was supposed to stop you.”

Her thoughts spin like slick wooden wheels in mud, sputtering, tractionless, the words coming out of Sai’s mouth failing to string together into a sentence she can understand.

Vague memories of matted brown hair in a pool of blood rise like a tide, memories of being fourteen years old and huddled in darkness as a wagon rattled over potholes, of viscera and dirt and merchant wagons she slashed the tarps of with a rough-edged machete, memories of Sai’s forearm closing around her windpipe, his legs hooked around hers as she fought for another chance to bury the blade she’d held into her stomach, into the hollow space where her organs are supposed to be, into the place that will hurt the most, take the longest to die by.

“Not every fight is won by being the stronger fighter. It’s premature to assume defeat when you’re at a disadvantage,” Sai says, pivoting away from everything that makes her head ache and spin, and Sakura can’t help it. She takes the lifeline out of her own thoughts. Sai saves her from herself once again, and Sakura is more than happy to abandon the subject and return to the more pressing issue of M0-1.

“You think we can beat him in strategy? All he does is kill and think about killing. He’s probably been pondering how to eliminate you as long as he’s known you, which is—” She puts a few fingers to her chin, still sticky from glucose, as she tacks on a facetious, “his whole life?”

Sai re-closes the distance she’d put between them when she shifted her weight, staring down his straight nose at her, their three-inch difference in height always feeling more significant than it is for how well he uses it against her. “If you’re not interested in developing a strategy against him, I suggest you develop one against me. I can think of at least one operative who is blindly advocating for your return. He could be easily convinced to assist you in eliminating me.” And then, with quiet spite: “If you beg.”

Sai would never let her return to a place he seems convinced will kill her. The words are designed to hurt, nothing more. It rankles, as intended, but she takes a deep breath, attempting to quell the rising anger.

So he did guess it was M0-3 who would make contact in Wind, and what his bargaining chip would be. And he let her go anyway, without so much as a word of warning. “I’m not a coward for acknowledging when I’m outclassed.”

“And yet,” he says, enunciating the words maliciously behind perfect teeth, a challenge in them that has Sakura’s self control snapping in half like a dried twig as she throws out a chakra thread to stick to the jam covered hunting knife resting on Hound’s napkin, flinging it at Sai’s face at far greater speed than she’d demonstrated against the log.

Sai catches it inches from his left eye, but her true goal was the sugary mashed fruit that splatters onto his cheek in two red globs, the insult of which makes his knuckles turn white from his grip on its wooden handle before he tosses it to the grass, anger finally thawing some of that chill in his perfect posture, his shoulders turning more languid as he takes a threatening step toward her.

“I was using that,” Hound says, dusting off his pants as he stands.

Sai advances with purpose, and Sakura retreats a step for each of his, feeling the hairs on her neck rise in response to the way his chakra is evolving, his usually smooth signature sloshing up around him like she dropped a rock in an inkwell. He wipes the jam from his face with his index and middle fingers, smearing red against his pale skin, then glancing down at his hand to examine the substance with a small curl of distaste to his lips. 

She nearly stumbles in her backward march when Sai’s eyes snap to hers, and she answers Hound. “I repurposed it.”

She can’t afford to look away from Sai, but she can hear Hound just fine as he asks helpfully, “And how’s that working out for you?”

Sai’s expansive chakra flares, intimidation making her already sore muscles weaken, her heart pumping harder, her palms sweating with anticipation of pain.

Gravel rolls under her boots as she slides into M0-3’s preferred defensive taijutsu stance on instinct—a mistake on her part, given the context—and Sai sneers in what she’d dare call a full facial expression, his displeasure peaking at the sight of M0-3’s influence as he falls back into a stance of his own, that well of ink inside him abruptly flattening out, unnaturally, forebodingly calm.

She has exactly enough time to curse once under her breath, before he attacks.

Sakura does not see the strike. She feels it.

The rush of air.

The oily scent of ink mixing with the pollen disturbed from the soil.

The heat of his body brushing against her left arm.

The kiss of his palm to the fragile skin of her neck he threaded between her guarding forearms, distracting her, making her flood chakra to protect her throat and leave her ribs less protected against the fist that follows.

Sakura does not see it.

But pain bursts in her side like a grape in its skin. She tastes the grass and dust her body skids over like a stone being skipped. Feels her spine bruise on the trunk of the great tree that stops her, hears the eruption of crows displaced by the shockwave of the impact that cracked the side of the trunk, its bark clinging to the back of her shirt, scraping her skin as it deflects her, dumps her down into its roots in a gasping heap. 

Sakura’s vision is blurred when she grips the gnarled roots and braces her weight on her arms, easing her feet under her, focusing on getting these high-pitched, wheezing breaths back in working order. She prods with her left hand around the source of the throbbing pain, feeling for inconsistencies. Her ribs are bruised, not broken. She can’t tell if her chakra shielding was better than she thought, or if he held back to an infuriating extent, which means it’s likely a combination of both.

Sai allows her to take her time in her self-assessment, appearing in a flicker a gracious ten feet away, still inside the clearing. She digs her nails into the bark of the tree as she leans against it with one hand, feeling splinters testing the skin of her fingertips. 

A short distance away, Hound is standing alert by the wooden posts, his body language revealing his surprise at the speed Sai just attacked, likely unlike anything he’s seen among Leaf shinobi in years. There are only two living shinobi Sakura has met who she’s confirmed are as fast or faster than Sai: Itachi and M0-1. She’s never seen Hound fight full-out, but he has the potential to be one of those, too, which could be problematic if he decides to take offense to Sai’s sudden aggression. Sakura holds up a placating hand, hoping he gets the message: She’s good. Don’t interfere.

When she can breathe, she feels her lips curl involuntarily, fighting a smirk through the words, “You’ve gone soft from village life.” Sai of Root Zero would have broken at least four ribs just now, to teach her a lesson.

Any hope she had that he’s gotten his irritation out of his system dies at the shallow angle of his tilted head, the visible wing of his tattoo stretching near-imperceptibly with the movement of his neck. “You should dodge, next time,” he says, rolling out his right wrist.

Next time, sending chakra to her eyes and senses, she does.

In the minutes that follow, her world narrows down to the streak of black and white that is Sai in motion, her focus blocking out the birdsong and rustling of hard-bodied bugs in the grass as she extends her chakra and senses into the air around them, the advantage of feeling his muscles shift against oxygen giving her the additional microsecond she needs to keep up with his flurry of hits, allowing her to just barely dance out of range of a heel aimed at the side of her head, even if he grazes her jaw with the punch that kick was putting her into position for, his knuckles missing her, but his chakra cutting open the skin beside her scar in its path.

He hasn’t even pulled a blade, isn’t using his chakra art or elemental ninjutsu, and it’s all she can do to evade his well-calculated strikes, sweat already starting to form a layer on her skin, her muscles already complaining from keeping up with him, her blood already dripping down her neck and shoulder from the cut on her jaw.

He is reminding her, she thinks, who he actually is.

‘Sai’ is the name he gave her. ‘M0-2’ is the name he believes in.

This is the reason he is giving her.

Do not take his hand, his chakra says, rolling over her skin like a gelatinous film. Take the hand that’s stronger.

She understands. That while she was allowed to walk beside him, she is not cut from the same cloth. That when Sai was not on missions with her or working solo, he was often deployed with M0-1, fighting at his furthest limit, growing further and further in his abilities, widening the gap between them.

She understands, as she blocks his shin with her forearm and feels the bone want to splinter, her chakra barely holding it all together under the force of his hits, that Sai wants her to believe in him. In his strength. His cunning. His unfeeling persistence.

But he can’t sense the world the way Sakura can. He may see M0-1 as he is, but Sakura can extend her consciousness into the air that he breathes, feel him from within, feel his chakra like it's a direct line to his soul, and know him. Against almost anyone else, she would believe in their odds in the coming fight, but M0-1 is not a normal opponent. Sakura senses something monstrous in him, something worlds beyond the other members of Root Zero. The air around M0-1 is potent with death and cruelty, but it is more than that.

Sai does not understand.

Danzō did something to the First of them. Something unnatural.

Even Kisame did not feel so foul. So frighteningly immense in power and depth.

After a particularly vindictive punch to the face that ruptures a few blood vessels in her mouth, Sakura spits blood onto the grass, caught between pleading and snarling when she says, “You don’t sense what I can, you don’t feel what I feel,” and leans out of the way of another fist, thankful he’s still holding back enough to let her talk. “This isn’t a battle we can win. We need to run.”

Her pulse jolts as Sai appears behind her, his hand around her throat, calloused fingers digging into the skin covering her larynx, a clear indication he could have torn out her voice box if he’d wanted to take advantage of her distraction.

“You’re naive,” he says, his clinical voice warming her ear, “to think you can outrun him.”

He’s right, Sakura thinks, as she throws herself into a shunshin aimed closer to the river, in case Sai decides to take this fight away from taijutsu and into elementals. She knows she can’t avoid him. M0-1 is inescapable. But her instincts revolt. 

“Forgive me for not wanting,” she says, feigning an overextended punch in hopes of drawing him in for a knee to the face he easily evades, “to die choking on,” he forces the air from her lungs with a palm to the solar plexus, and she goes with momentum, folding over his strike, throwing her weight down and flipping diagonally onto his flank, hooking her knee around his neck on her way to the ground as she rasps, “maggots.”

He slides out of her hold before her back hits the soil, and stakes his fist into the ground inches from her head, restraining the force of the impact to go directly down through the layers of earth she can hear cracking and absorbing the hit, leaving little trace of it on the topsoil his knee is resting on beside her, his other boot on the ground to her right as he hovers over her with an unfamiliar emotion stirring in the depths of his eyes, like smoke on black water.

“Should I have killed you in Iron?” he asks, and Sakura digs her hands into the dry, loose soil. He is not even breathing hard. She does her best to control her breathing, too, but her lungs inflate a touch more urgently than his despite her best efforts. “Would that have satisfied you?”

She allows that sentence to settle like the dust she kicked up when she landed on her back, staring blankly at the blue sky behind Sai’s dark hair. It begins to click into place, a lock turning, ticking as it goes: the redundancy of sending her and Sai for that mission in Iron; his unease the days leading up to it; the timing of their extraction.

He was ordered to kill her, and he chose that moment to act.

Makes sense, she thinks, as a crow circles a few miles overhead, so small she almost mistakes it for one of the black dots speckling the outskirts of her vision. It sends ripples of unease down her spine, but she pushes the sensation aside.

She considers the question. Would that have satisfied her?

She imagines dying gently by Sai’s precise blade; imagines his hands, warm with her blood, holding her jaw firm as he watches the light leave her eyes, soaking in her last breaths like he can subsume her life as it leaves her.

Then she imagines dying with beetles and locusts coming out of her eyes and mouth, and says plainly, “Probably.”

His eyelids twitch in the negative. Wrong answer, apparently. 

He takes it out on her.

The problem, Sakura thinks, as she has her ass handed to her without Sai even using blades or chakra beasts, is he knows her too well, and Sakura is too reluctant to harm him. 

Her more offensive capabilities aren’t suited to nonfatal injury, and Sai can’t heal his injuries the way Sakura is passively stopping herself from hemorrhaging as her organs absorb another shock from a kick she failed to avoid, allowing herself to be wrangled to the ground and nearly choked out, her heels kicking up another cloud of dirt as she scrambles for purchase before she manages to free herself of his hold, rolling and getting her feet under her; but Sai is already behind her, his hand a hot pressure through her shirt and bindings directly over the the chakra replenishment seal on her back.

By the time she clocks his intent, she has no time to react, his palm shoving her forward while he activates the seal and floods her with chakra too dense for her reserves, overloading her system in a painful rush of power that fries her pathways, and Sakura bites the inside of her lip to hold back the cry in her chest, her muscles spasming, her vision losing clarity from the pain, like being lit on fire from within. He must be desperate to make his point, she thinks, as her consciousness flickers, for him to use a cheap trick like that.

As she crumples forward, she feels a firm arm around her bruised stomach, inhaling the familiar scent of woodsmoke and pine fused with something distinctly Kakashi; she grips his sleeve and catches her breath, her knees brushing the ground, looking through her hair that’s fallen into her face at where lightning dances along Kakashi’s kunai, held close enough to Sai’s neck for strands of light to lick at Sai’s pale skin threateningly. Sakura has rarely been this close to a lightning release, unable to produce it herself. It smells less like petrichor, more like plastic burning—a sour, inorganic smell.

“Let’s call it here,” Hound says, and Sakura barely recognizes his voice, for how all false charity has left him.

Sai lifts his tattooed palms, but his eyes are unrepentant, as he takes a cooperative step back.

Once she gets her bearings, Sakura shoves herself off Kakashi, swatting his sparking blade away like a fly, and staggers to Sai, wiping blood from her mouth and nose with the back of her already filthy hand. She glares at him as well as one can, while struggling to focus their eyes. “He’ll kill you.” She says it with certainty. M0-1 does not fail. “You know he will.”

Sai, with his hands still up, tilts his head in condescension. He’s covered in smeared soil and clipped stems. There are small granular rocks in his hair and grass stains on his gray pants, but he is otherwise unruffled.

“Are you finished?” he asks, and while he’s cool-headed, there is something unusually intense about his tone, she thinks. This matters to him. What she does next. “Are you going to let it end here, because you’re losing?”

Sakura inhales slowly, ignoring the pain in her ribs and the blood turning tacky around her neck and arms, letting his words penetrate, letting his cool stare rime her wounds, unconsciously syncing her chakra signature with his, following his lead, smoothing her rippling current out into a glass surface.

“Fight harder,” he says, a direct order from her handler, and the whispers of the Sage’s shadows could not incite more allegiance in her. Her entire body sings with compliance.

It is instinctive, for Sakura, to disregard Hound’s warning bark of her name and follow Sai’s resonating command. Her mind is clear but distant, a fugue state, uninhibited by ego. She does not hesitate to lunge for him, chakra sharpened into blades around her hands as he dodges slash after slash, driving Sai back further toward the riverbank while quickly forming the hand seals to send chakra down through her feet into the earth under the river, erupting jagged rocks from between the current, sinking her chakra into the white foam and mist the new obstructions form above the rapids and proliferating each bead of moisture rapidly, dispersing the growing cloud of mist throughout the clearing until it fills with a dense fog that she promptly disappears into.

He cannot hide from her like this, with her chakra humming in every drop of water. She senses everything. She can count the seeds in the soil. She can feel the blades of grass that bend under his feet. She tastes the moisture on his tongue when he breathes, she feels his pupils dilate as he tries to locate her when the entire clearing is her, his hands open and ready to receive her attack when it comes.

It takes no thought for Sakura to scatter chakra threads to latch onto individual beads of moisture in the air near his body, sharpening and hardening them with chakra, stretching them into needles and sending them flying toward Sai’s vitals.

It is an irritating attack to navigate, she’s aware, her chakra infused so pervasively it makes it difficult to distinguish the projectiles from the air, and the entire saturated vicinity serves as a potential origin point for the next wave of needles.

Sai takes the defensive, dodging water needles aimed for his eyes and blocking ones he can’t evade with his forearms, getting shallow cuts on his arms, legs, face, only able to avoid so many at a time while fending off her physical attacks; he avoids having his feet swept out from under him by her leg, but allows a needle to graze his ribs; he leans out of range of her elbow aimed at the back of his head and into another cluster of projectiles that stick into his chakra-enforced forearm when he blocks them from piercing his face, before he pulses his arm with chakra and they evaporate into steam, leaving his arm red-dotted like pocks.

It does not take long for him to lose patience with the situation and dart out of the misty clearing, breaking through the fog, sprinting into the forested area of the training ground while keeping his attention on her.

With another twitch of her fingers, she drops the needles and drags her chakra threads along the forest floor, whipping chakra-sharpened leaves into the air to swarm him, blocking his vision, and he easily disperses them with a hand seal and a pulse of wind, but not before Sakura is directly in front of him, tantō unsealed from her palm cutting upward, and he can’t stop his momentum in time to fully avoid it, lets his upper body fall backward and his head tilt even further as he slides beneath the blade, its edge barely cutting his cheek, before he plants his palm and twists into fan kick, sending his heel up to her head and nearly taking it off her shoulders, she estimates, by the sting of the wind when she slips just out of range.

Under the canopy of trees, Sakura can no longer see the outline of the hills on the far side of the river, the sky only visible in the peppered gaps between branches and leaves that cast speckled shadows on the mulch and roots spanning the ten meters between where she stands with one side covered in drying blood from the shallow wound on her jaw, flipping her hold on the wrapped handle of her tantō, feeling something curl pleasurably in her gut at the sight of the thin cuts darkening the black of his sleeves with a deep red, clean lines through the tattoos on the backs of his hands. 

Her eyes focus on the bright red slash on his left cheek where her blade slipped past his guard, the same blood delicately lacing the edge of her short sword. She is following orders, and the hollow satisfaction in her chest grows as she tucks her tantō under her arm and takes her time forming the hand seals for a basic fire jutsu, moving leisurely through horse, tiger, serpent, ram, monkey and boar; she abandons the final horse and tiger, breaking the envelope that stabilizes the katon, letting it engulf her left hand in blue flames that require molecular levels of chakra control to keep in check. 

Still refusing to draw a blade, Sai slides his front foot out and raises his hands into a loose guard in response. “Do you know what I think frightens you more than M0-1?” Sai asks, coldly.

Swaying leaves overhead break up the sunlight that slips past them and touches his face, Sai watching her patiently as she untucks her tantō and draws two fingers down the blade, painting it vibrant blue as she steps once, twice, towards him, before leaning into a sprint, drawing her blade back and slashing the air near his chest, flames singeing his shirt as he dodges conservatively, evading swing after swing with minimal effort as he leads her deeper into the trees in her chase.

He has breath to spare as her blade cuts the air by his neck as he steps just out of range, enough to say, “You are not afraid of death, Sakura. You are afraid of finding out you’re strong enough to evade it.”

Sakura hisses behind her teeth, frustration is a blight on the empty state of her mind as he still refrains from unsealing a blade to use against her, and she copes by feeding the fire oxygen at an accelerated rate until the flames burst into white, passing 2,400 degrees, hot enough she has to control the temperature of the sword itself with chakra to keep it from melting, flames curling off the blade like solar flares that finally widen Sai’s black eyes in alarm, forcing him to give her cuts a wide berth; to evade more drastically, maintaining distance as she pursues him, cutting through branches and trunks like butter, felling oaks and inhaling clouds of woodsmoke and pollen as the ashes and bark burst around them.

She loses sight of Sai in the debris, until she feels a hand on her arm followed by scales sliding against her skin, and she twists around to cleave the air he was breathing as two sharp points sink into her neck, realizing too late that it isn’t one of his cobras he just activated, but one of the taipans on her arm, still partially attached to her skin as it drains her chakra aggressively, making her vision cloud with black spots from the rapid siphoning of her energy.

She rips it out of her neck, fangs tearing open a vein that spurts before she closes the wound with her field-refined medical ninjutsu, crushing the neck of the snake in her hand in a burst of ink that her skin quickly resorbs, the tattoo slinking back into shape.

Aiming to reduce the strain on her chakra, Sakura lets the fire on her blade wink out, sealing her blade in her palm, and makes the instant switch to an element that comes easier to her, not requiring hand seals to gather moisture in the air into a rope of water, the end of which she grips tightly in her left hand, extending her senses into the trees and locating Sai, now well on his way back toward the clearing.

Sakura closes her eyes, takes a deep breath of smoke and floral seeds that tickle her nostrils, and feels the taxing tug on her chakra as she body-flickers the entire distance between her and the edge of the clearing just as Sai breaks through the tree line, rotating midair as she slings her water whip at his braced body as his eyes snap to her hands, slowing down the molecules with yin as she straightens it into a spear before impact, freezing it solid; Sai predictably moves to block instead of evade, and Sakura waits until the last microsecond to accelerate the molecules with yang, melting it past boiling, letting it whip around his chakra-shielded forearm and lash his unguarded neck as the water hisses, steam erupting from the broken skin, blood staining his pale skin further.

Instead of backing off to regroup, Sai presses unexpectedly close, fast enough to get his hands on her, his shoulder digging into her gut as he puts her in a throw, the world spinning out of focus as she’s flipped up and over toward the dewy ground, light reflecting off the moisture left behind from her earlier mist.

She twists on the way down, kicking her legs out to lock around Sai’s neck and continuing the rotation in an attempt to bring his head down to earth with her, but her plan is interrupted as she is forced to body-flicker out of range of the kunai he decides to draw on her after all, barely missing her throat the first time, and again, when she exits her shunshin to find he’s released the kunai toward her head.

Sakura arches into a kick to send it back to him, the first touch to flip it around and the next to return it, but as her heel connects with the metal ring on the end of the kunai, she sees something black smeared on the blade’s edge, and she’s not fast enough to pull her leg fully back before the exploding-ink jutsu detonates.

The blast is loud enough to ring in her ears, forceful enough to hit her body like a metal bat and fling her across the ground like a wooden doll, rolling and skidding to her feet. She clicks her tongue against her teeth in irritation, flexing her muscles and digits to make sure everything is still attached despite the sour taste of the explosion on her tongue. She avoided serious damage, but her right lower leg feels numb around the calf, a wet-looking burn quickly developing on the skin visible through disintegrated cotton of her pants.

The smell of her own singed flesh penetrates the selfless state of her mind, and it makes her angry.

Across from her, Sai stands with barely touched stamina, lifting his right eyebrow near imperceptibly and stretching his neck and shoulder out, unbothered by the way it makes blood weep from the shallow laceration on his neck.

“I’m not feeling very heard,” Hound says, and Sakura goes still at his voice, a flicker of red in her peripherals drawing her attention to the wooden post Hound is pushing away from with his Sharingan out, stepping into the stretch of torn up grass and soil between them, hands in his pockets, pupils dilated with anger his voice conceals. “I could have sworn I told you to stop.”

His demeanor sours further, as Sai releases a wave of intimidation that ripples through the third training ground. It’s dense, opaque like the ink he wields, hard to breathe around, but she manages to get out the words, “Could have sworn I told you to stay out if this,” to Hound as she wipes blood from her chin, her injuries warming, glowing a faint green as she takes this time to heal herself, just enough to stop the bleeding.

“Ignore him,” Sai says.

Sakura’s senses attune to the command, and it’s as if Hound winked out of existence, negligible like the two chakra signatures approaching from one of the closer training grounds; she distantly recognizes the Uchiha and the one with a pure, watery signature. They were likely training nearby and subsequently drawn in by Sai’s nightmarish unsuppressed chakra—nightmarish, at least, to a strong sensor who can taste the nuance. It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter.

All that matters is Sai, and how to survive him.

She and Sai attack simultaneously.

Sakura quickly determines she doesn’t stand a chance.

Not against the tangled web of blades and fists and kicks he weaves around her, of which most connect, rattling her bones and knocking around her internal organs until she coughs blood, her ability to heal herself as she fights suffering from the chakra depletion she endured at the hands of her own tattoo. 

She can’t spare the focus to listen to the exchange happening between Hound and his students as they enter the clearing, but Hound’s agitation is tangible in the erratic electrical pulses in his chakra signature.

Ignore him.

The order stands, even if her will to fight wavers, watching Sai pull out a rice-paper drawing from one of his storage seals and flood the page with chakra, a black, scaly body expelling from the paper in a writhing torrent of leathery skin that coils on the ground, a cobra three times the size of an adult man, wasting no time launching itself at her throat with a detached jaw and protracted fangs.

Every time she evades her frustration mounts, her morale waning as the two kunai in her hands deal pointless damage to the beast, ink refilling everywhere she cuts it, regenerating even its head as Sai sweeps his leg into her knee hard enough to cause her to falter just enough for the snake’s fangs to pierce through her shoulder into her ribs, thankfully ephemeral this time, but deep; she muffles a cry of pain, feels its fangs draining her chakra dangerously low; her vision has abandoned her by the time she gathers condensed chakra into her kunai, sharpening it with life, and feels it meet promising resistance as she swipes out and up, feeling the fangs disintegrate and ink splatter against her face and neck as she decapitates it.

This time, it does not regenerate, falling limp in a puddle of ink at her feet, leaving her standing unsteadily on black grass, panting as her vision clears, her chakra compensating, balancing itself to keep her conscious. Black dots still cloud her eyesight, but she can see well enough to see Sai standing indifferently across from her as he releases two wet-black whips, one in each hand, a rainbow sheen sliding across them as they writhe, looking more like oil than ink.

Sakura should be planning her defense, but maybe the exhaustion from her anticlimactic near-death in the desert is catching up with her, or maybe she’s just unmotivated, because as she does her best to dodge the whips hissing past her face and ears as she flings herself further into the clearing, all she can think is fucking why?

All of her focus spirals down to the black ropes that are taking the rest of her venom-damaged stamina to evade, but she loses track of Sai’s hands in the process, something she realizes once she’s been thrown into the air above the clearing, splotchy grass and dirt looking like a map of the earth, a reminder of all the places she hasn’t been and might not live to see, as Sai appears above her like a dark cloud, delivering a clean and unavoidable spin-kick to her ribs, wind rushing her eardrums as he sends her back down into the ground, the impact pushing her past the top layer of soil, erupting the earth into a shallow crater she gasps for air at the center of, a dying insect at the center of a flower, coughing up something hot and metallic, her bones unbroken for how aggressively she shielded them with her dwindling chakra, but she was less successful, she suspects, in redirecting the force around her internal organs.

When she feels the wet cords of Sai’s ink whips slide around her neck and torso, dragging her heels through dirt as she’s lifted up from the crater until the toes of her shoes brush the disturbed grass at the edge of it, Sakura goes limp in his chokehold. It takes a few tries to focus her eyes on his pale face, and his dismissive eyes cut deep.

“Do you know why M0-3 calls you ‘Rabbit’?” It stings, that he’d bring that up, now. She tries not to let it show. “Because you go limp like one when overwhelmed.” He’s frustrated, she thinks, the muscle between his eyebrows folding. “Because you don’t fight death. You give up your life the second you think you’ve lost.”

“I’ve always wanted a quick death,” she rasps, because sarcasm doesn’t take chakra, while pulling at the ink around her neck fruitlessly, her fingers sinking through it, the cord reforming around her neck instantaneously as she chokes out the rest of her words with spite. “The verge of one seems like a shitty time to—” She fights to speak. “—drag things out.”

She thinks she sees something cross his face, a flash of emotion she can’t interpret, but then the chakra whip tightens around her neck, cutting off circulation to the brain. She’s losing consciousness. Oxygen she can make last. No blood going to her head? Not something she can counter. She has seconds left before she passes out. She can hear her own blood slowing. She can hear her lungs straining for air.

She can hear a thousand birds chirping, echoes of an abrupt release of power saturating the clearing, breaking through Sai’s viscous aura.

Eyes she hadn’t purposefully closed snap open. She knows it’s name without ever having witnessed it before. She can taste its sour air, can feel its electric pulse accelerating with her own, the threat of it activating parts of her brain reserved for life and death.

Chidori.

She has visions of Hound’s sparking fist breaking through Sai’s ribs; visions of Sai’s blood on her face, his chest bursting, his organs exploding. 

Sakura’s body reacts.

She is half conscious, all instinct, as she grabs hold of Sai’s chakra whips, pushes her senses past the physical into the plane of energy that lies beneath, connects to the essence of his chakra, the essence of his life, his power, and shatters the technique from the source, ink splattering on them both, staining her gritted teeth with a sharp, metallic taste as her feet hit the ground and her knees strain while he staggers back, clutching a hand to his solar plexus and curling over, trying not to let his body go into shock from the sudden rupture of his chakra flow.

The warmth of the day has turned stifling, the breeze becoming sandpaper against her exposed arms as her senses riot, the world too closely felt and seen to process without pain. 

Movement snaps her eyes to Hound’s body, vibrating with power her eyes struggle to focus on as he steps forward, the black mask on his face looking liquid and nightmarish, his stolen Sharingan a pulse of red further scrambling her thoughts with images of blood-soaked fields and carnivorous skies as she matches him step-for-step, digging her heels into the soil—soft and churned from their fight—placing herself between him and Sai’s vulnerable, wheezing frame behind her.

She can taste his hostility as he tilts his head back and sizes her up, just as she can taste the foul air around the lightning crawling up his arm, sparking out around his right hand, painting his fatigues in a violent kaleidoscope of light even with the sun bright overhead.

“Easy,” he says, his voice a low purr that contradicts any attempt at conveying peace to someone with ears as sharp as hers. He hasn’t released his Chidori, still waiting to see her next move, to determine if peace is even an option.

“He needs medical attention, his pathways are damaged,” comes a feminine voice, its owner trying to sound stronger than she is, the girl’s attempts to step around Hound being promptly cut off by Hound’s arm, blocking her from going further.

Behind him, Sakura sees white irises framed by black bangs that send pangs of unease through her body, a short girl with fear-pale skin and determined eyebrows that don’t match the way her pulse jumps when Sakura’s attention barely grazes her, taking a coward’s step back, subtle enough to convey conflicted impulses.

Hyūga, a voice whispers within her, calling for blood.

Lavender robes swish into view as another masculine body places itself between Sakura and the Hyūga, her attention snagging on the whole set of Sharingan spinning, clouding her head further with visions of violence, suffering, fear.

Fingers snap, and Sakura’s eyes slide back to Hound’s dark expression, the hand not engulfed in electricity still poised from the action. “Eyes here.”

He’s difficult to look away from, regardless, cords of light arcing around him, through him, as Sakura looks with her deeper senses instead of her eyes, tracing threads of power that glisten and hum alongside his veins, clustering around his solar plexus, gathering around his right arm and tightening into a bright light at his hand.

“Sakura, slow down and breathe,” he says, as he uses his uncharged hand to grab the sneering Uchiha by the back of his robes and tug him back from where he’d been creeping forward with carefully placed sandals and a palm on the handle of his chokutō, yanking him into the protected zone behind him from which the white-eyed girl peers out.

“You’re going to hurt him,” she says, breathing faster despite the advice.

That sparks something strange in Hound’s mismatched red and gray eyes, as he steps once toward her, causing Sakura to take a step back toward Sai, who she can tell by the sliding crunch of gravel and soil is failing to stand, his limbs doe-like and weak, battling muscle spasms she gave him. “The one getting hurt was you, Sakura.”

Shaking her head, Sakura holds her palm out to stop Hound’s slow advance. She can feel too much, her senses overwhelmed by the molecules in the air, inside her and inside everyone else, too distracting to think past their constant vibrations and evolving interactions. “Stop.” The word is a whimper, barely audible. Hound steps forward again, and Sakura gasps from the pain of the overstimulating charge in the air around him, his chakra burning her eyes and mind, unable to manage the flow of information. “Stop!”

With a surge of power, she gathers the strands that connect all things and pulls them taut, wrestling for control. It’s like shoving her fist through gelatin to stick a fork in an outlet, watching his physical body twitch in alarm at the invasive, intangible touch, feeling that hot core of power within him revolt in a panicked burst of sparks as she tightens her fist, constricting, punishing, delivering pain to the deepest parts of him, stealing his breath as he stumbles back, his spine curving forward as he widens his stance to bear it as he shouts something that sounds important.

She can’t understand the words he is saying now, her vision turning black at the edges, lightning striking out against her hand and arm, stinging her chakra pathways, the smell of burning flesh thick in her nostrils as she folds and sways.

The inside of her mouth is hot and dry; her eyes burn; her legs give out, knees landing hard in the dirt as Hound drops Chidori as if he’s the one being burned, his chest contracting with a hiss of pain she can hear through the mask, his eyes bright with emotion she doesn’t understand, wide and intense, fixed to her arm, her face, and then her arm once more, evidence of the hold she had on his chakra smoking from her skin.

“Don’t—” She chokes on the word, throat raw, as Hound lunges, hands reaching for her before she even knows she’s falling, but she can’t get out the words ‘hurt him,’ before the spotted darkness closes off her sight, gravity pulling her down into the gaps between the grieving cries of crows circling lower and lower overhead.