Black Bough

Sakura dares.

…

Wind howls against the upper cliffs of Hokage Rock, flakes of false gold grabbing moonlight and holding onto it, burning it into washed-out orange sandstone that scuffs her soft-toed boots, brightening the face of the Senju Hashirama, whose nose she is perching precariously on the tip of.

Balancing on the balls of her feet, she stakes chakra from the palm of her gloved right hand into the statue, holding her in place as she scans the lingering lights in the village; bars and restaurants still open; handfuls of civilians wobbling home drunk, and even more still on their way out to drink, eat, fuck. Revel in being alive, Sakura imagines, even if she can’t relate. She can spot the Konoha shinobi easily—the ant-sized nin lugging their friends home over their shoulders, strong enough to carry each other and heavily incentivized by their peers to drink when off-duty. They look easy to kill because they are. They look vulnerable because they are. They are more worthless than the ants they resemble.

If Sakura were energetic enough to be spiteful, she might tug her black mask down to spit over the edge of the nose she’s crouched on, spit on the village and all it stands for, and hope it turns the founders in their graves. She breathes warmth into the fabric of her mask instead, the heat of the broth she’d been sipping earlier still trapped in her mouth. Her hip is starting to ache from crouching so long without moving, a phantom pain from an injury long healed, but she doesn’t shift to ease it. It isn’t a good habit to get into—disrupting stillness at the first twinge of discomfort. She can still feel the ghosts of bruises on her spine from getting smacked with a tree branch every time she let her ribs move when she breathed—M0-6’s lazy-but-effective method of improving her stealth while growing up.

An ear would have been a more comfortable chair, she concedes, with a glance at Sai sitting easily in the curve of the Second Hokage’s stone cartilage, using the tip of his kunai to clean dirt from under his nails, but Sakura is a confusing mix of weary and restless tonight, and the updraft fluttering her fatigues and blowing out her loose hair is exhilarating and low effort in a way she can’t resist.

Sakura is tempted to slide down the long stone hair of the First and let herself hurdle over the edge, the crickets singing up at her with longing, urging her toward the freedom of free-fall down into the night-thickened canopies below. It’s the easiest thing one can do: fall from great heights. So much easier than the climb. It would feel good, and then it would be over. No M0-1. No Leaf. No loaded glances from the former Root operative currently looking at her like he might eat her corpse once she’s hit the ground, if she decides to end it here.

Hound calls those ‘intrusive thoughts,’ and recommends she ignore them whenever possible.

She wonders how long the powdered crow’s root they slipped into tonight’s stew will keep him down. Sakura and Sai have a tolerance built up over years, and she still felt her vision want to swim a bit, unable to differentiate its side effects from the haze of steam rising from the undetectably-altered broth as she held the bowl to her lips, watching Hound slip off his log and hit the earth through a curtain of heat.

Serves him right, for sedating her first. For letting others put their hands on her unconscious body, and then having the nerve to say she’s the one at risk of wasting his ‘earnest efforts.’ He’s lucky they moved him to his futon inside, if only for appearances’ sake.

Estimating time under for someone unaccustomed to the rare poison—more of a sedative, really, in such a small dose—she imagines they have the night to themselves, for whatever purpose Sai intended when he proposed the idea.

“You should have told me Hound was our objective,” she muses, as Sai wipes the tip of his kunai on his black pants before sliding it back into the white holster on his thigh so bright it gives their position away to anyone who cares to look.

Not that anyone is looking. The village is so lax in its security, it’s a miracle that it’s not invaded and toppled every night. She and Sai shook off their Anbu detail before they could even try to follow. The white masks think they saw two cats run out from beneath the house’s porch, courtesy of Sakura’s genjutsu, and likely haven’t grown wiser in the time they’ve been gone, still under its effect, believing they can sense her and Sai’s sleeping chakras inside. She’s been constructing similar genjutsu every so often since the first time they put a detail on Hound’s house at night to watch her, preparing for a situation like this.

“He’d suspect, if you were less hostile from the start,” Sai counters. “It was better this way. To let it happen naturally.”

Sakura snorts. It would be a fair argument, if Sakura were ‘naturally’ the type others decide to plant their loyalty onto of their own accord. She has about as much natural appeal for trust as a half-submerged alligator with a whimpering dachshund between its teeth. Even less, after having poisoned him once. But Sai seems to think this is the way forward, and Sakura didn’t follow Sai through the last eight years to start doubting him now.

Sensing the direction of her thoughts, Sai allows his lips to twitch, not forming a smirk, but suggesting one. “Your strength is not in being trusted, Sakura,” he says, and if she didn’t know any better, she might call it fond. “Your strength is in how others desire trust from you.”

After a few seconds of baffled silence, Sakura decides not to take it too seriously.

The stars and galaxies are bright overhead, minimally suppressed by the weak light of the village. They sink into Sai’s black eyes as he fixes his stare to her face. His eyes flick down to Sakura’s long sleeves, pulled all the way to her wrists, before he makes the call to protect his own arms from the breeze, rolling his sleeves down to cover the matte ink of his tattoos, guarding his skin against a chill he feels but struggles to scale the danger of—using her as a litmus. 

Sai may not be sensitive to cold—not sensitive to any of his body’s needs, if she’s being honest; or rather incredibly sensitive to his body, as one is when monitoring the condition of a complicated machine, only lacking the inherent urgency his brain is supposed to provide when something like hunger or cold is trying to kill him—but it makes it more difficult for him to notice when the temperature has dropped to concerning extents. After nearly freezing to death halfway up a mountain once or twice, he’s learned to err on the side of caution.

He’s thinking about something. He has something to say.

“Say it,” she prompts, and releases the chakra in her hand, jumping onto the spiked hair of the head Sai is cradled in the ear of like a parasite.

Leaning against one of the spikes, she peers down over the side of the Hokage’s head like the craning grouse she knocked out of an evergreen for dinner despite Hound’s insistence they had food at the house just to watch him grimace, Sai’s pale face unearthly in the night’s bone-light as he looks up at her with the patience of a tarantula buried in the dirt, waiting for prey to cross its path.

“You’re going to be assigned a mission in Frost.”

Once she’s processed his words, Sakura has several questions and complaints.

She chooses one.

“Why would the Hokage deploy me so soon after an encounter with Root?”

“Because I made her think she wants to,” he says, and looks down at the village with semi-neutral distaste. “And because you unintentionally helped convince her,” he adds, and Sakura wonders what part of the deal she told him she struck with the Hokage he’s referring to.

He’s been busy while Sakura was out of the village. While Hound was out of the village, she mentally corrects, quickly catching up to the situation. It’s a risk, sending her out with Root Zero at large. The Hokage could be using Sakura as bait, but to what end? If she has half as much intuition as Sakura would expect of a Kage, the Hokage should know any Leaf squad she sends against Root will die a moot point. And it’s a wasteful use of Sakura to begin with.

It’s in the Hokage’s best interest to keep Sakura close—unless, Sakura thinks, this Hokage is so set on keeping Sakura out of the library she was promised access to, so keen to keep her away from the Aburame clan—or any clan, perhaps—that she would send her back into the field immediately after taking her memories for all they’re worth. It seems Sakura’s attempts to let the Hokage feel in control may have been for naught. She’ll need to arrange the fulfillment of their deal, herself, if that proves to be the case.

Sai clarifies without prompting. “Once you give up your memories, she will want to delay her end of the agreement as long as possible. She doesn’t have an accurate understanding of the outside threat, yet, and so she’s prone to make the mistake of sending you outside the walls—as long as you tailor the memories you give her. Make us all appear weaker. Her orders would originally have been opposed, but Hound won’t fight the mission as hard as he would have otherwise. He will not like it, but he will see it as an opportunity to put distance between us, which he should believe necessary, after witnessing my treatment of you in the training ground.” And further, “He’ll be feeling confident he can protect you, having fought me.”

So that had purpose, as well. Sakura nods along.

It hadn’t occurred to her in the moment, how strange it was for Sai to rile her up seemingly by accident. Sai has been studying her for years. He can soothe and stir her any way he likes, the moon to the tide. He fooled her, like he fools everyone.

It’s impressive, Sai’s ability to act while appearing to be idle, or ‘slipping.’ To manipulate situations without anyone ever the wiser. He does not have social skills like M0-4, but he doesn’t need to. He stacks situations often without ever showing his face. He treats people and places like a chain reaction machine to be invisibly built and tinkered with, until he sets his marble at the top of the complex mechanism and lets it roll.

It was not uncommon for Sai to be sent on extended solo missions to foreign lands for this very purpose, this ability of his nearly unmatched even among Root. He would disappear for months, his actions only visible through the quiet ripples Sakura would watch and wait for with bated breath. 

The only operative they had more efficient than Sai at this type of subterfuge was M0-4, because he can make people do almost anything he wants with a smile, and usually leaves them feeling as if he’s done them an incredible favor.

There is a reason, after all, that gratitude was among the most forbidden emotions for an operative in Root.

It’s invasive, alchemical in its ability to change even the best of shinobi, to corrode them. Sakura suffers from its poison, still, never quite able to scrub it loose. It’s the reason her blade couldn’t reach M0-3 in the desert, the reason Sai has such a firm grip on her loyalty… Maybe even the reason Hound is only sleeping, not dead.

At least, she amends, picturing Hound’s judging eye turning glassy and unfocused and noting the way it turns her stomach, it’s one of the reasons.

He is more valuable alive.

“What do you need in Frost?”

Sai angles his head, considering his response as he unfurls from the Second’s ear and jumps up onto the head to join her, sliding down the spike of stone hair she was leaning on, displacing gravel on his way down, forcing her to make room by taking a generous step backward.

Sakura has to tilt her head up slightly to meet his eyes directly, and she marvels at the absoluteness of his focus on her.

“I have investigated Konoha’s Torture and Interrogation facility. It is insufficient to hold him even temporarily,” he says. “You will go to Frost and secure our alternative.”

The wind whips her hair into her face, and Sai steps closer to her to catch it with his hands, his touch warm even through his gloves as he tucks the strands behind her ears and holds them there, his palms a comforting brace on either side of her head.

It’s a rare sort of touch from him, and it makes Sakura’s chest ache. Sakura does not have a family, does not remember ever having one, but when Sai touches her of his own volition, even if it is just to keep her hair from her eyes so he can study them more accurately, Sakura wonders if this warmth is something close to how it would feel.

Sakura leans her head into Sai’s left palm, and he watches her seek his comfort like a reptile watches a mouse, unfeeling, waiting for the correct moment to satiate their rare and hollow hunger.

It does not bother her.

“You think we can trap him,” she says. A feeling struggles toward the surface of Sai’s black eyes, an animal writhing in tar, fighting to be freed, but ultimately sinks back into ambiguity.

“We can try,” he says, and releases his hold on her, leaving her ears cold, letting her hair fly loose in the sputtering gusts that break unevenly against the red faces around them. 

In other words, Sai would prefer not to kill him. Even if they miraculously managed to subdue him nonlethally, they would need a place to keep him afterwards, until whatever Sai has in mind is concluded. These things are unlikely. It does answer a question she’d been meaning to ask, however.

She’d been wondering why Sai allowed himself to act up and be put on that little time out in T&I. It’s surprising that he’d goad the Leaf into incarcerating him just to get a good, long look at their facilities from a prisoner’s perspective, but she gets the sense there could be more to it than that. Maybe he really did lose his cool. She wonders what, or who, could have gotten under his skin.

“We can’t afford to hold back against him,” she says, dry and maybe a little irritated that she has to say it at all.

Killing M0-1 is an impossible goal. Capturing him is a deluded one. One she can’t even begin to guess the purpose of.

The rough stone snags on her gloves in small, negligible places as she slides her hands away and steps back over the uneven surface of the statue’s head, trying to appease her anxious body by climbing up a taller, sharper spike of hair, hooking her left arm around it, sticking her left foot to the stone with chakra, and looking out over Konoha, searching the shadows of its ceramic roofs, dragging her eyes over winding dirt and paved roads and sidewalks.

Maybe she’ll get lucky and someone will invade. Hound would be quicker to forgive her for drugging him, if she could show him the heads of his enemies by the time he wakes. Not that she wants his forgiveness. But it’d be easier, if she had it.

“He is mortal, Sakura,” he says, the words slow and deliberate, and Sakura supposes he would know. Sai might be the only person in Root who has seen M0-1 bleed.

But she does not believe him.

Nothing about M0-1 feels human, to her. The chakra in the air recoils from him, like he is unnatural. The same way it recoils from Danzō, himself. Sai does not sense this, and it shows.

Sharpening her vision with chakra, she notes the main closed-circuit canal cutting through Konoha is littered with the same number of small boats as it was during the day, no oddities under the cover of night. There are a few merchant floats unloading cargo tonight, moving supplies from one side of the village to the other. Sakura has determined they are preemptively moving supplies and gifts to a centralized location, making it easier to eventually load up a caravan for the Kage summit in Lightning country, of which she saw the guest list for on the Hokage’s home-office desk during her last visit.

After a breath, she skids back down into the pockets between stone clumps of hair, facing Sai once more. She repeats: “What do you need in Frost?”

Sai props his boot heel against the stone spike behind him, crossing his covered arms. “There’s a scroll hidden in a cave north of Shimogakure. The Hokage is putting Team Ro on an escort detail for the Hot Water Daimyō into Frost for trade negotiations. I need you to fabricate an excuse to break off from the caravan and retrieve it.” And then, because underestimating others’ intellects is a hobby of his: “I will provide you with an updated map of the region surrounding the cave’s entrance, but the internal cave system is undocumented. You’ll have to manage without one.”

“Must be a special little scroll,” she drawls, and Sai’s eyebrow twitches with the effort of determining if that was a legitimate question. She doesn’t bother asking how he found out about this precious artifact, knowing she won’t receive a satisfying answer.

“It is,” he answers, earnestly, and Sakura manages not to intentionally jerk her head back onto the stone behind her with enough force to jolt her brain in her skull.

Sakura lays her head back gently, instead, letting it go, and tucking her gloved hands into her pants pockets as she thinks. The sky hurts her eyes, so she dials back the chakra she’s feeding them. The stars look different than they did a moment ago. She wonders if it’s her imagination. She removes her hands from her pockets, just in case.

“And if I run into any old friends?” She crosses her ankles and arms, settling in, trying to appear at ease. Sai knows the zeros have incentive to obtain or kill her; likely knows more than Sakura does, when it comes to their motivations. He must have thoughts on what her best move would be, should they choose to snatch her up while she’s vulnerable.

“You will,” he says, calmly, looking at his ungloved fingers, avoiding her eyes.

It takes a moment for Sakura to quiet her instincts enough to respond with equal calm.

“I can’t overpower a squad of zeros. If Hound had not intervened in Wind—”

“I don’t expect you to kill them,” he cuts her off, and it stings irrationally, that he expects failure from her, that he expects— “It’s by design, that you can’t neutralize them.”

A gust of wind roars in her eardrums, causing them to ache. She does not let herself flinch, goes predator-still, breathing silently, keeping her arms crossed with the same tension she had them before, not letting her muscles shift, not letting herself feel the words currently falling down into her brain with a clatter, loud like coins in a metal stein.

Sai uncrosses his arms, watching her closely, prepared to receive an attack from her should she lose her calm. Her blank stare is question enough. At her persisting silence, his brows twitch down, as if trying to parse the reason for her delayed understanding despite how clearly he was allowed to speak, the seal on their tongues un-inhibiting now that they’re alone. He continues.

“It’s by design, that you are unable to turn your blade on high-value operatives within Root. I asked M0-4 to adjust your subconscious to assist those results early on.” Sakura can barely see Sai’s facial features, her eyes have unfocused so dramatically. “You performed as expected, against M0-3.”

As expected.

Her hands tremble, and she tightens them into fists to stop the movement. M0-4 fucked with her head, she knew that. He fucks with everyone’s head. It doesn’t matter. So why does her chest feel like it’s burning? Why does her throat tighten when she tries to speak?

She finally asks what she has always suspected.

“My memories,” she says, and manages an even tone. “You had him remove those as well.”

“Suppressed,” he corrects and confirms. “I requested a clean slate, when assigned to you.”

Sakura bends over her knees without intending to, staring at the gravel accumulating in the dips between stone spikes of hair, at the debris of erosion settling in the crevices, waiting to be worn down to dust and blown off this ostentatious rock with the next strong gust. Her arms are so tightly crossed they are bruising.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you thought you failed,” he says, but it’s his cold fingers under her chin rather than his words that draw her eyes back to him, pulling her stomach out of her chest. She takes a deep, cleansing breath as she unfolds herself, standing upright, pressing her spine into the stone hair behind her with renewed vigor as Sai maintains his hold on her jaw, his warm breath passing through her mask, heating her lips. “You did not fail.”

She did not fail.

She performed as intended. She is exactly how Sai meant her to be.

She closes her eyes, relief pouring over her, like hot water overhead.

She had wanted a clean slate, as well, she thinks. She must have. She must have wanted this. It’s as M0-3 said. She chose to shed what made her weak. It’s what she desired, from the start.

It’s enough of a balm to let her reorient the subject to the issue at hand: “They’ll use me as bait to lure you out, if I am captured.”

“Take Hound as support,” he says, and Sakura strains not to find his lack of concern suspicious.

He is awfully confident in Sakura’s abilities, if he thinks she can convince Hound to follow her off-mission. After poisoning him in his own backyard, at that.

“He’ll be angry for a while.” She can’t quite feel bad about it. Every time she pictures Hound’s red eye spinning in rage, she has to suppress a shiver of anticipation. It’s unfair, only Sai got to fight him.

“He’ll be awake,” he counters, and Sakura has to think about it.

He will wake, literally; they didn’t kill him. But she doesn’t think that’s what Sai is getting at.

He’s been dormant in this village, sleeping off his own potential. This will bring his guard back up to appropriate levels, wake him up from his complacency, give him a fighting chance when he’s inevitably dragged into worse conflicts with them than a stomach ache after eating bad stew.

It’d be convenient to have his trust. Eventually, they will. But it is absolutely necessary to remind him why trust is a bad idea to begin with. These two competing needs are too essential to a desirable outcome to neglect one in favor of the other. Hound has spent too long on one side of the spectrum. He let his guard down predictably after an eventful day on his home soil, content in his assumption he’d earned enough respect to equal compliance, as if one naturally precedes the other. He thought he finally held power over the situation, and subsequently left himself vulnerable enough to lose it. This small prick of betrayal was necessary, to bring that error to his attention before it costs him more dearly.

They’ll need to harden him, before reeling him in closer. And they’ll need to do it quickly, before M0-1 makes his appearance. They need the Friend Killer. The Anbu Captain. The Copy Ninja from their Bingo Books.

Not someone’s Sensei.

If this is enough to send Hound running to his Hokage with his tail between his legs, he was never cut out for their needs to begin with. This is a necessary step, without which nothing can change, nothing can proceed.

‘This could be our last night out of handcuffs for a while,’ Sakura had grunted, lugging Hound toward the house with her arms hooked under his armpits while Sai let Hound’s boots drag on the dirt, enjoying watching her struggle with his loose limbs without bothering to dip into her chakra, not for lack of strength, but lack of height. If Hound turns on them temporarily, they’ll have to wait his temper out from inside a cell, while they work their way back into good graces.

‘It won’t be,’ he’d promised, and Sakura is inclined to agree.

Something tells her he’ll walk this off better than either of them are expecting. Something tells her this won’t even make him doubt his belief in his mission. Only his method.

“You’ll be alone,” she muses, just shy of argumentative, finding her calm in the rising waves of sound from the forest that surrounds them, the grinding hums and chirps of crickets and nightcrawlers, the faint cooing of owls tucked out of sight, the light scuttling of Sai’s ink mice over the rocks on their way up and down the cliffside.

M0-3 said Sai would die the moment he leaves the village, but there is no guarantee his words will hold true. If M0-1 wanted, he could easily infiltrate the village and attack Sai, the Hokage’s protection meaningless if she isn’t close enough to Sai when it happens. The only faith she has is that Danzō might not trust M0-1 to hold back; might not find it wise to unleash him onto Konoha, if he’s still determined to protect it. It’s strange that he’s biding his time so much. It makes Sakura think there is something more at stake, a plan going unseen.

A plan Sai is most likely aware of, and actively concealing from her.

“I’m more effective with Hound out of the village,” he says, and Sakura can’t argue with that. He can maneuver more easily, without Hound sniffing around his movements. She has little reason to object, but she wants to, anyway. Sakura’s instincts are grinding their teeth, too many things about this situation setting off alarms in her subconscious.

Sai cages her further into the rock face until her head is bruised by its jagged surface, his grip growing forceful as he tilts her chin up further, watching her cooly with half-lowered eyelids, and Sakura’s heart accelerates, her palms beginning to sweat in her gloves.

“You’re thinking too much.”

Sakura laughs, a breathy sound of doubt that makes Sai’s eyebrow twitch. She does not understand Danzō’s intentions. Something is off about his recent actions, his goals growing less clear the longer she looks at them.

“You said you were ordered to kill me in Iron,” Sakura pivots, and feels Sai’s attention narrow, his suppressed chakra seeping out ever so slightly at her serious tone. “Why?”

She knows he is lying before he speaks. “He determined you were a malfunctioning operative—”

“No,” she interrupts, and studies the sky with increasing scrutiny, trying to differentiate planets and stars and distant clusters of galaxies. “Why did he choose you? M0-1 would have been the obvious choice. The correct choice.”

M0-1 would have completed the mission, she thinks.

It’s possible Sai fully convinced Danzō their attachment was one-sided—even Sakura can’t fool herself into believing their attachment is mutual—but she has trouble imagining a reason for Danzō to have taken the risk, or not foreseen the risk at all. 

Based on M0-3’s monologuing back in Wind, he and the other zeros didn’t notice Sai was straying until he essentially detonated the program. Maybe it was a test for Sai. Maybe she’s overthinking. But Danzō, for all his faults, is a strategist. It is unlikely he would not have seen through Sai’s facade of indifference toward her. It’s the reason it never occurred to Sakura that Sai was sent to kill her. If Danzō wanted her dead, he would have made sure the second attempt did not fail; would not have allowed room for error.

If Danzō was serious about her death, Sakura would be rotting in a ravine.

From the way Sai studies his own tattoos on his knuckles where he holds her jaw, he knows this, too. Maybe even he doesn’t have the answer—only theories.

‘You are not afraid of death, Sakura.’ Sai’s words from the training ground rumble under her skin, trying to wake something up. ‘You are afraid of finding out you’re strong enough to evade it.’

Recalling the surge of power that tore through her, the mental grasp she’d taken of the chakra in the air, her lungs, the earth, she thinks: maybe she’s looking at it all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t about who would be most willing to kill her.

Maybe it was about who she’d be least willing to resist.

Before she can think further, a black shape cuts off the light of a few stars overhead; Sakura tries to twitch feeling back into her right hand and prepares to activate the seal on her palm, increasing chakra flow to her straining eyes.

The small black speck is moving.

She thinks she can see the outline of a wingspan, blacking out a small section of stars as it moves.

And another. 

And then another.

Crows.

There are dozens of them, circling high overhead—high enough to go unnoticed by even Sai, who is not so compulsively wary of them; who has no reason to feel his gut clench at the sight of them in the middle of the night.

There are plenty of crows in Konoha. It is not suspicious in and of itself.

Except the sun has been down for hours.

These crows are hunting when they should be roosting.

Unnatural.

Her mind is sprouting spider lilies before she thinks the word, her stomach acid rolling, her saliva drying out with her accelerated breaths despite her mask trying to hold moisture, driving her memories into dark corners she doesn’t want to visit, recalling the illusion of her own decaying flesh, rotting in her own corpse, waiting for a death that never comes.

Itachi is watching. Of course he is.

She’s done something interesting, after all.

Her stomach lurches anew.

Sai follows her eyes and narrows his stare at the sky, trying to see what she’s seeing. Sakura does not give him the chance to look closely. If he sees them, he won’t dismiss them as oddly behaved birds. He is not trained to dismiss oddities. He is trained to eliminate them. She cannot have him knowing how closely Itachi watches her—that he watches her at all.

Impulsively, she tips her jaw forward the short distance between them until she feels Sai’s lips through her mask, snapping his attention back down to her, focusing him on evaluating the contact. He watches her face like he’s studying one of M0-4’s more interesting specimens, slowly releasing his hold on her chin to pinch the fabric of her mask, pulling it slowly down, the textured slide of it against her lips making her heart race faster as her nausea competes with the spectral pressure of Sai’s cool touch, as he brings it all the way to the base of her throat so he can see her expression unobstructed.

The pad of his thumb is rough against the corner of her mouth, his eyes a deeper black than the moonlit grays of the sky, his pupils indiscernible from the irises, and Sakura shivers from his undivided attention, his judgment, his scrutiny.

“You’re shivering,” he notes, the flat chord of his voice not undercutting the power of his proximity, making Sakura’s breaths weaken between them, her knees wanting to follow.

“It’s cold,” she says, and Sai tilts his head, examining her eyes for signs of truth. She isn’t cold, but she can pretend to be, if it will convince him he has to warm her. If it will make the unravelling stop. Sakura would gladly take a thousand deaths from Itachi, all for how Sai has learned to soothe her when her nerves are frayed, her mind breaking into unspooling threads. Because of what he’s discovered works—at least when she’s coherent.

His brows lower heavy over his eyes, knowing.

The trembling of her fingers doesn’t cease when she creases the front of Sai’s shirt with them, grasping at the material until her knuckles ache. She doesn’t care about the crows anymore. Her voice is a hollow remnant of herself at age seventeen, angry and desperate for assurance, of that first clawed swipe for Sai’s empty affection and sure hands in the dark, when she says, “Remind me what it’s like.”

They are words she’s said tens of times, their meaning shifting with passing years and varied contexts without losing that core ache that drives them from her throat over and again, despite her resolve to need less, to feel less cavernous and unfulfilled.

The first was thinly excusable, a request to refresh the lesson he’d given her in the barracks at sixteen before her first and only ‘red-light.’ The second was even less excusable. And so was the third. And then the fourth.

By now, the words are empty vessels, a distorted parody of themselves.

Sai knows what the words mean, really. What she really needs reminding of: how his blood tastes when she bites his lips; how his calluses drag against the skin of her thigh, toward the point where her limbs connect; how warm he can feel, how human, when he has a willing body to split open and contort himself into, a hot-blooded corpse to disguise himself inside. It’s nearing half a year, since Sakura was last reminded, and it has felt like an age. Like Kage have been born and sucked back into the earth, villages rising and falling, since she last had this particular weakness humored.

It’s impossible to say if Sai’s assessing stare softens or sharpens when he says the cryptic words, “You forget often.”

Impossible to say, if the way his hand slides back to the base of her skull is intended to shield her from the sharp edges of the rock, or to feel her pulse jump as he digs his thumb into her skin.

Impossible to say.

But Sakura doesn’t have to say anything.

She captures his bitter lips before he can rebuke her—bitter, because of the delayed aftertaste of crow’s root on his breath, just like her own. Bitter because she’s never prepared for the chill of his skin at first brush, or the detached, patient slowness of that initial kiss; his controlled response, his awareness of how inevitably she’ll fall further into him no matter what he does, how she’ll chase the heat of his mouth to the ends of the elemental nations as she attempts to stoke that neglected flame of life in his chest that occasionally flickers out, and even more rarely flares in size.

She breathes oxygen into it, wrapping her arms around his neck and leveraging her chest into his, and Sai allows it, for a moment, letting her lick into his mouth and bite his lips, before grabbing her by the hair on the nape of her neck and jerking her back, like pulling a kitten off a meal by its scruff.

His focus is animal, as he searches her face for the distress she started this with, for the meaning of her lapse in composure. The flash of heat in otherwise stoic black eyes is worth the sting of disappointment when he doesn’t allow things to progress. 

She had forgotten, for a blissful second, that Sai had something important enough planned that it was worth drugging their keeper and weathering the fallout. Worth angering the man they need to forge into something useful, something that belongs to them. 

He doesn’t have to say it. This is not how they should spend their time.

Letting her arms unravel from his neck, Sakura sighs and leans forward into him instead of away, warming her cold nose against his neck. She’s losing her discipline, being in this village. Being with Hound too often, who is quick to let objectives sit out of view while dallying in smaller pleasures. “You haven’t told me what we’re doing.”

There is an uncharacteristic tension in his fist in her hair, as he says, “Your words to the Hokage inspired me,” in a tone decidedly uninspired.

Curious despite herself, Sakura pulls her face away only enough to observe the moonlight on his sharp features, and the predatory gleam in his eyes. He could be referring to anything she’d said during that negotiation, Sakura having painstakingly conveyed every word, every gesture, as Sai listened in focused silence.

She doesn’t ask. He answers anyway, teeth flashing like fangs in the dark as he says, with words that echo the early years of their cooperation:

“Threats are better with a plan to enact them.”

…

Sunlight has not hurt this much since Kakashi stopped day-drinking.

It’s not the first thought he has, when he startles awake with his back to his futon, ominous streaks of daylight peeking through the web-glistening cracks in the wooden structure of the main house, signaling an abnormality in Kakashi’s schedule—always up before the sun, never sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time.

It’s not even his third thought.

The first is to touch his hand to his jaw and confirm his mask still covers his lower face, despite his forehead protector’s mysterious absence.

The second is recognition of the two unoccupied futons next to him, thin blue-dyed wool blankets crumpled at the foot of each.

The third thought, accompanied by a familiar stake of dread to the sternum, is that it is possible everyone in the village is already dead. This thought is—surprisingly—not unique to mornings after being poisoned. This is a normal part of his routine.

By the time he is thinking about when he used to day-drink, he is already outside, his fury—with himself, for his lapse in awareness, for this mistake that may have cost him lives or something equally unrecoverable to the insidious touch of the two unreasonable, suicidal operatives he’s harboring who can’t take a fucking hint and relax —vibrating the molecules in the air around him, his chakra whipping dried pine needles and topsoil like the blades of a fan as Obito’s uncovered eye ignites in his skull, worsening the pounding in his head but dulling the sting when he pricks his finger on a kunai and looses a drop of blood toward his boots, the ground rippling like a pond as his most loyal ninken rises into the visible plane.

Wisps of energy distort the wolfish silhouette of his summon, making it difficult to spot where his ochre coat becomes chakra, becomes air, just as his brown eyes shiver like flames in the sockets.

Kakashi doesn’t waste time on greetings.

“I want to know everywhere the former occupants of the two futons inside that house have been in the last twelve hours.” ‘Former,’ in the sense they are literally no longer occupying them as of this moment, and in the additional sense that both of them will be sleeping on the fucking floor for the foreseeable future.

From his canine kneel, Pakkun raises ancient eyes to Kakashi with some skepticism. “It’s been a great while, since I’ve seen you so troubled.”

The mask covering Kakashi’s mouth doesn’t feel sufficient, under that old gaze. The guise of personhood he’s been wearing since being assigned a genin team lies cracked and abandoned on the floorboards inside, shards so fine it could take hours or days to put it back together. The thought causes a fresh wave of helpless rage, clearing the woods’ debris into the outskirts of his chakra’s swelling radius, cracking with bursts of blue electricity that make the air smell sour.

“Every floor they walked on, every object they touched, every person they came within ten meters of, and for how long.” When his words bear no immediate fruit, Kakashi feels his old self licking at his heels, brightening his exposed eye with excess static. He tempers it, quiets it, but it doesn’t die. “Can you do it?”

The leader of his ninken ducks his head in cautious deference, keeping a knowing eye on Kakashi’s loose grip on his patience.

“It will take time, but it will be done,” he says, finally, and disperses into the temperamental wind Kakashi stands at the epicenter of, taking shinobi breaths, trying to flood his brain with oxygen, to inflate himself back into a humanoid shape.

He should have known that they would not stay idle, after Kakashi finally managed to tangle that first thread of truth about the situation around his straining fingers, catching hold of the first answer that matters about Sakura’s abilities, her value to Danzō, and potentially her origins. He’s been thinking too rationally, to assume they would want to keep him happy for a while. Since he’s keeping her secrets when he doesn’t have to. Since he’s currently all that’s standing between them and the Hokage’s preserving judgment. 

He misread them, as always.

They are not rational. They are a different brand of shinobi than what he’s used to. They play high-risk for high-reward because their stakes are never low to begin with. Everything they do is framed as life-or-death. It’s their unshakable paradigm.

Kakashi’s protection, alone, is not enough for them to sleep soundly in this village.

Neither is his leniency.

He expects this flavor of bullshit from her handler—nothing about how that fight ended yesterday implies anything but Sai’s thoughtful, tentative cooperation. It’s Sakura’s betrayal that stings. And that tells him all he needs to know. He’s slipping.

Even if this entire performance is just to rattle him, if not a hair on anyone’s head has been harmed, Kakashi knows he has been too soft on her, for her to feel she can spit in the face of his patience to this extent without consequence. Without fear.

She only knows the hard way, his conscience whispers, and he curses under his breath, pinching the veins near the bridge of his nose and inhaling deeply. He wants to show her a softer touch, but she won’t let go of what’s familiar. The harder he tries to gentle their interactions, to blunt the edges of his authority over her, the harder she tries to bite her way free. He’s been too idealistic, and this has shown him the potential consequences of continuing to do so. It was easy to remain patient when it’s only his neck in range, but this morning has reminded him: it’s the entire village at risk, the longer he takes to bring her to heel.

He thought yesterday would get her off his ass a little, buy him at least a week of good behavior before she starts gnawing at her leash.

And it worked, for a moment, those glittering green eyes tracing the blood pattern on his vest with unnerving reverence, the pleased scrunching of her lightly freckled nose a rare and generally off-putting sight as her lips curled and her expression warmed.

And yet.

Breathing in through his mask, catching the bitter aftertaste of poison on his tongue, Kakashi thinks, with equal acidity:

If his commander finds out he’s grown sloppy enough to unknowingly ladle poison into his own fucking bowl, he’s going to lose his fancy white cape.

…

“I don’t suppose he’ll buy it if we say we’re so used to eating it, we forgot it was poisonous?”

Her voice floats above the gentle burbling of the creek as she pillows her cheek on her forearm, her skin steam-slick against the rounded stones they gathered to dam the natural hot spring they discovered while washing this morning in the creek. 

With her other hand, she traces the metal relief on Hound’s fabled forehead protector nestled in a patch of loose soil, feeling all the micro-abrasions catch on the pads of her fingers, scratching her nails over places a blade has deflected, feeling her way over the needle-thin rim of blood rust encircling the bolt-like pins that secure the plate to the fabric, no amount of polish or scrubbing able to wipe it clean.

In the distance, she can sense him, like a vibrating drop of water in an otherwise still pond.

They’ve unnerved him.

She can hear the wheezy squeaking of a warbler in the trees nearby, sharp and clear between the brisk gusts of morning that whistle through the dense forest of Hound’s lands, the wind intermittently dispersing the steam rising off the water, rustling the fabric of Sai’s black fatigues where he lies redressed on his side in the patchy grass in front of her, his head propped on his left fist as he looks down on her placid face, his hair already drying. His elbow rests on Sakura’s folded clothes, treating them like a thin cushion.

It took minimal chakra and effort, to deepen a reservoir for their discovery of spring water to pool into before returning to the larger flow of the creek, the level now at rib-height for Sakura, its surface breaking tension along the exposed skin of her back and she rests at the spring’s edge. It is one of Sakura’s favorite things, a luxury she is hard-tempted by when it appears. She has soaked off the worst fights of her life, like this, with Sai’s steady presence beside her.

His artist’s fingers drag strands of wet hair sticking to her face clear of her eyes as she smiles, small and languid, up at him, inhaling hydrogen sulfide, exhaling everything else, her body pliant and warm—though not sated, Sai cruelly withholding his embrace even after their jobs were done. She wishes he’d indulge her.

She wants to be one of Sai’s works of art. Wants to watch him make everything beautiful for the rest of her life.

Because he is, she thinks. An artist.

He’s an artist in the way he cleaves heads from necks—slipping his chakra blade between vertebrae like he could do it with his eyes closed, looking over his shoulder with blood-spattered teeth and lethargic eyes, making sure she’s still behind him; that she hasn’t strayed in mind or body in the brief moment he looked away.

He’s an artist in how he needles hyper-detailed chakra beasts into her skin, the way he can freehand a dragon’s intricate wing into her shoulder blade, the way he can look at her body and see a canvas, see what he can turn her into instead only seeing what she is.

He’s an artist in the loose way he holds an ink brush, Sakura perpetually mesmerized by nights like the one she just had, getting to follow him around as he applied creative trap seals in hidden locations around the village, Sakura keeping a ‘third eye’ on their surroundings as he worked in focused silence.

Sakura was not lying when she told the Hokage exactly how she would threaten her, if ever need be. Apparently, after the events of the training ground, Sai decided they should be prepared to back up that threat. Contingency, he’d called it.

Merchants, politicians, shinobi clans; they caged their invisible hands around each of the most weight-bearing families before heading back to Hound’s lands and pretending they never left. Hound won’t believe them, of course, but he’s only human; he won’t have any leads to follow or proof of their absence—just a razor’s edge of dread that will keep him up at night until its presence dulls.

After last night, Konoha’s pillars of strength and commerce lie deaf and blind in the palms of their hands, victims to a game they’re not even aware is being played.

Hound will have to adapt to the discomfort of never knowing what piece they just swiped off the board, she thinks, and then tries not to smirk as his distinctive chakra makes itself known in the woods to her left, as if summoned.

It crackles with violence, and Sakura shivers amid the steam rising off the water, lifting her head from her arms and backing away from the edge to properly face him, even Sai bothering to adjust the way his head rests, angling his nose slightly toward the imposing presence. 

He emerges from the shadows between oaks and pines cast from the pale morning light like one of the inhuman fictions civilians scare their children with, ferns and branches clinging to the black fatigues and long-sleeve shirt he’d changed into before dinner as he treads steadily closer, twigs and small exoskeletons breaking under his boots. The usual black gloves are missing from his scarred knuckles, and Sakura thinks she sees sparks near the skin of his palms with every pulse of fury he’s trying to restrain.

During her time with him, Sakura has come to think that if she and Sai are the roots, Hound is the underside of the leaf. He has never touched the sunlight that the rest of the village thrives on. He supports the leaf’s shape from beneath, content to feel the day’s green-tinted warmth passing through the vein-thin barrier between him and everyone else.

This is the least touched by that light she has ever seen him.

The silver threads of his uncombed hair make him look like something carelessly unearthed from the Mountain’s Graves of the north, his scarred, stolen eye a haunting crimson wheel above the black mask seemingly fused to the lower half of his face. Power seeps from his pores, overwhelming the sulfuric burn in the back of her nose, replacing it with something sharper that threatens to break apart the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air with every surge of emotion he can’t contain.

His approach slows when his gaze flicks down to the hot spring that wasn’t there the day before, a brief hint of surprise pulling at his eyes—brighter than Sakura remembers, one a whitish-gray that reminds her of the clouds crawling up the cliff sides in Lightning—but it doesn’t delay him long.

It’s a marked difference from the way his eyes typically avert themselves from her in any state of undress, the way they now affix to her face and flare with chakra.

She takes an involuntary step back, water curling lazily around her lower ribs as she does so, toes curling on the rocks underfoot, when Hound doesn’t cease his approach at the edge, instead continuing forward with an effortless water-walk that ends with him lowering into a relaxed crouch on the churning surface of the spring, the soles of his boots flexing at the toes as he grabs her arm from the pool and jerks her hand up toward his face with a bruising grip on the wrist, turning her palm this way and that without regard for how it tweaks her ligaments. She takes shallow breaths, pale hair sticking to her pebbling skin, as he adjusts his hold and presses his thumb into the pads of her fingers, pulling the skin away from the underside of her nail beds one at a time, trying to see underneath.

Her curiosity grows when he drops her hand back into the water and repeats the process with the other, Sai watching without so much as a muscle twitching in his relaxed posture as Hound proceeds to grab her face and jerk her head to one side, then the other, rough hands sparing her no discomfort as he checks behind her ears, the roots of her hair, even her teeth, forcing her lips from her gums like one examines a dog, his skin tasting like salt and iron when she licks the edges of his fingers to provoke him, and it earns her a hard flick to the forehead that makes her flinch but doesn’t otherwise budge him. She grins around the intrusion, too beguiled by the nature of his search to disguise it.

He’s looking for blood.

To see if he’s caught her washing it out. To see if anyone died while he was drugged on his own floor. To see if he will be killing her today, or only thinking of killing her.

She’s reluctantly flattered, that he knows to check her incisors, knows her well enough to recall her fondness for biting.

“Not going to check mine?” Sai says, the words laced with something sinister, decidedly not fond of how intimately Hound is touching her, and Hound only glances at him, index finger still hooked in Sakura’s cheek like a fish on a line, uttering a deceptively neutral, “It’s not your turn.”

However Sai interprets that seems to reluctantly appease him, as he settles comfortably on the bank of the spring, rolling onto his back with his hands under his head, but Sakura is less charitable when being ignored. 

During that second of distraction, she pulses her chakra into the active molecules where water meets air, disrupting the surface tension and frequency of Hound’s chakra control, and he sinks hip-deep into the spring with the grace of a cat dropped into a lake, hissing his displeasure as he catches his balance on the bedrock and she rips his fingers out of her mouth like pulling meat off the bone, scraping his skin with her teeth.

It’s been a while since she’s earned the type of incredulity he turns on her now, like he can’t even begin to express the depth of her audacity, the gravity of the circumstance, or the insanity of her immaturity as he deadpans, “How many personality flaws do you have?”

But it’s already become a game, the moment he came directly to them, alone, instead of with a squad of operatives armed and ready to lock her up where she can’t do things like wrap her arms around him and hang off his neck, breasts and stomach dampening the front of his cotton shirt into a deeper black as he stares cooly down his masked nose at her face.

“Sleep well?” she asks, and enjoys the way his expression doesn’t shift, the way he studies her with the type of focus a shinobi only needs when they’re a breath away from burying a knife somewhere they shouldn’t. Her ribs are purposely accessible to him, stretched out and unguarded, tempting, tempting, tempting.

When his control holds, she twists her mouth and brows into a mask of concern, tilting her chin up, closer to his mask. “Not talking? Did that broth burn your tongue? Let me see—”

She dips her fingers over the top edge of his mask as if to tug it down, and he finally reacts, catching her wrist and tightening bruisingly. No mercy reflects in mismatched gray and red eyes. He will cut off that hand if she tries to pull it down.

“Self-conscious?” Her slowly forming smile mocks his unfeeling eyes, unable to help herself. She’s been jealous, since she saw that ribbon of Sai’s blood on his vest. She wants one to match.

“Fully conscious, now,” he retorts, ‘no thanks to you’ implied, but there is something unnerving beneath his otherwise steady tone, a sureness, a certainty.

It makes her want to find out what he thinks he knows; if he thinks she’s satisfied hovering a finger over the flame, or if she’ll stick her hand inside the fire and watch the skin char and drip off her bones, just to learn how it burns. Sakura has the memories of eating the fatty smoke of her own skin, weeping from the katon she could not yet control, to know exactly where she falls on that spectrum.

“Are you going to tell me where you’ve been?” he asks, lifelessly, and Sakura’s lips twitch with humor.

“Are you going to let me check that burn on your tongue?” It’s half nettling, half suggestion. A secret for a secret.

He gives her another second to reconsider.

She sticks her hand in the fire.

Her fingers only manage to curl the fabric down a quarter of a centimeter before her wrist is broken with a heady snap, a bolt of pain lancing up her arm and widening her eyes, and from there it’s a whirl of steam as Hound muscles her naked back to his chest with an arm locked across her torso—water rocking up between and around them from the sudden movement—and secures a wet, chakra-heated palm tight around her throat as she swallows reflexively, sparks threatening the moisture now trapped between his hand and her skin.

Sai sits up abruptly, already into a crouch and twitching toward her—

“Sit. Down.”

—but considers the cadence of Hound’s demand before cautiously sitting down on the steam-slick grass, eyes communicating with Sakura silently to let him know if she wants an assist.

“You want me angry. Tell me why.”

With bated breath, Sakura lifts her hands up in front of her in a reversal of their very first meeting, one wrist hanging limp and throbbing, water dripping from them both in gentle sounds as the sloshing water at their hips and waist respectively begins to settle.

“Can’t a girl be curious?”

“If you hurt this village, all your games, all your power plays, it all ends. You lose the second you step too far out of line, and once you do, there is not a prayer in hell that can give you back what you’ve lost.” His tone has deepened with sincerity, his voice purposefully soothing, luring her in, making her listen more closely. “I can get you missions. I can give you bodies to bleed. I can get you out of the village for months at a time until you’re so sick of rations you’d rather starve. But I can only do that if you play by my rules. The Hokage’s rules.”

“This village is poison,” she spits, and his hand tightens around her throat, as he hisses, “This village is the only chance you have.”

“At what?” The question escapes her, more raw than intended because she didn’t fucking ask him to save her. She didn’t ask to be taken out of Root. He has no right to lecture her on what she does or doesn’t have. “My only chance at what?”

“Peace.”

Ha!

The irony has her head rolling back against Hound’s sternum, her eyes glazing over until the landscape looks like a frosted painting of a haunted forest. “Is that what you have?” she asks, hoping he chokes on his hypocrisy and has to cough it back up. “Peace?”

“Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes an hour.” The answer is forced out between teeth, Hound limping off the sting of that particular truth. “But I think we both know how much those moments count.” Sakura laughs into the trees, because she doesn’t need this type of peace. She’s not like them, and neither is he. Not really. “I think you know what happens when you need a second to breathe, and you can’t have it.”

And that, that pisses her off. What does Hound know of watering fields of flowers with his own blood, over and over, without reprieve? Of not taking a single breath that isn’t a dying one for what feels like an eternity of madness?

She isn’t thinking, when she activates the seal on her good palm and reaches behind her to press the sharpened tip of a kunai to Hound’s suddenly rigid neck, the muscles keeping her locked against him giving a telling twitch at the unexpected escalation.

She knows what he’s doing. It’s his ‘more flies with honey’ nonsense. 

But Sakura isn’t a fly, and his words aren’t sugar, and he needs to grow the fuck up and handle this like the shinobi he is.

“You want me to talk?” Her tone flatlines between them, and Hound’s chest caves with an exhale she can feel the heat of inside her own throat. “Then you know exactly what you have to do.”

The silence stretches.

“Should we try this your way, then?” he asks, matching her cold, and Sakura knows she’s succeeded in making the thread of Hound’s seemingly endless spool of patience snap. Sees it in the slightly lifted curve of Sai’s brow as he watches for a signal Sakura is never going to give.

They need to see if Hound will rise to the occasion.

They need to know if they’ve achieved something with their betrayal. If they’re gaining ground, or losing it.

But more than that, Sakura is taking this personally. She wants Hound to make her bleed. She wants to make him face himself, instead of parading around like someone’s savior.

“Let’s set some ground rules,” Hound says, mildly, and Sakura laughs breathlessly from the sudden sting of electricity in his palm. She jerks instinctively, the edge of her kunai catching on the texture of his mask, the primal fear of electrocution in water blurring with the head-lightening high of thinking he won’t and then, immediately, he will. “When I ask a question, you answer honestly. If you do, this all ends in a few minutes. If you don’t, I’ll give us both a little extra charge until it jolts your memory. You like collective punishment, right? A well-trained op like you?”

Her injured wrist is going numb as she grips the forearm pressed into her clavicle with her bad hand, nails digging into wet skin as she takes faster and faster breaths, breasts growing heavy in the chilled morning air as he asks his first question, and her eyes find a focal point in the peeling bark of a large oak a few meters out from the edge of the creek bed, focusing on the trilling of the sparrows and warblers, the hollow crack of an acorn split between a squirrel’s blunted teeth.

“What did you do?” His voice reverberates, deep with distrust, and Sakura takes a quick breath before responding with a put-upon smirk.

“It’s been a while since we had some time to ourselves. What do you think we did, uninterrupted, all alone in the middle of the night?”

The huff of air from beneath his mask is not enough warning for the sudden burning of her throat, nor the electric shock that ricochets between her bones and organs, causing her muscles to seize, her jaw to clench, and her back to arch before it passes, leaving her trembling as an unavoidable physiological reaction, a foreign tingling left behind as she sucks air back into her quaking lungs. She watches a few stray bolts of light dance across the water’s surface in a daze, knowing she’s reflexively dropped her kunai into its shallow depths before it could burn into her palm. Her brain is slow to process the fact she doesn’t need to reconstruct any frayed neural pathways or repair any organs, Hound having controlled precisely where and how he attacked her system.

But he still did it. He actually did it.

A hoarse laugh breaks open from her chest, and she holds fast to his flexed forearm with both hands now, broken wrist singing with negligible pain when she moves it. Even Sai is sitting close to the edge, attention ensnared by what can only be signs of their influence.

Hound remains predictably unaffected, functionally immune to the effects of his own lightning release. It’s not collective punishment at all. He’s being unfair, and it makes her laugh harder. 

She sees Hound’s hard eyes reflected in flat disks on the choppy water, as he says, with growing tension in his voice, “Somehow I doubt you spiked the stew for a quiet night in.”

“Did it hurt your feelings?”

“Pride, mostly.”

“Feeling left out?”

The pain is worse this time. She thrashes harder in his grip, straining his muscles as he keeps her flush to his chest, keeping her from slipping down below the water, and the muscles in her jaw clamp shut so forcefully she bites a minuscule chunk off her tongue, blood flooding her mouth, staining her teeth while black dots crowd her vision. When it stops, he asks again:

“Where did you go?”

Blood drips from her mouth when she parts her lips. The daylight is darkening and surging, her sight impaired, her limbs numb with pins and needles, but she can still read the discomfort in Sai’s shoulders even when he tries to look indifferent, the veins on the forearm resting on his bent knee protruding, the ink of his snakes threatening to lift from his skin. He’s nearing the end of his tolerance.

She smiles at Sai with a mouth of red camellias, silently encouraging him to wait it out, as she lies, with a voice so raw it hurts to speak, “Oh, a little bit of everywhere. My knees. My back. The garden, the porch—Sai can be such a demanding lover—”

The next pulse of energy causes her to briefly black out, coming to with her weight fully sloping into Hound, both of them lower in the water than she remembers, his hand loose against her throat, his other arm more supporting than constraining, keeping her from slipping down his body any further toward the waterline—all evidence of how his determination to protect this village wars with his desire to protect her from what he’s currently doing.

What was it he said in Wind? Torture gives him ulcers?

It coaxes another strangled laugh to curdle behind her bloodied lips. He’s still caught in a net of his own making, torn between duty and ideals. He still thinks he can turn this situation around, without having to choose.

She spits blood into the water and lets the laugh go free, a breathy, mangled sound amongst the peaceful gurgling of the creek running by unimpeded.

“Aren’t you being a bit unfair?” She slurs, nodding weakly to wear Sai sits unmolested on the bank. “Or are you evening things out, since you already half-killed him once?”

His voice is unexpectedly close when he takes the bait of her distraction, a vicious hiss against the shell of her ear that causes a wave of goosebumps everywhere air kisses her skin. “I didn’t share water with Lizard-Brain in the desert. I didn’t keep him from freezing to death face-down on a sand dune, and I didn’t stop him from melting his own skin off every three hours while hauling him back to the village,” he says, before he forces his emotions back down into check, hammering his tone into detachment. “You’ll have to forgive me for holding him to a slightly different standard.”

As he speaks, she can feel Hound’s hand against her forehead under the high moon of the desert while fever shook her frame and rattled her teeth; can hear his grounding whispers landing soft against her temple as the stars spiraled and tried to throw her adrift, and Sakura’s body won’t forget what it was to hold fast to his voice in the dark behind her eyelids, clinging to the warmth that hides in his skin just out of reach, past the chafing barrier of tactical pockets and high thread counts, and it’s a conflicting rush of something that makes her stomach acid rise, makes her panic, makes her mean. “So it did hurt your feelings.”

“I don’t like your tone.”

“You might like it better if you try a little harder.” She’s inexplicably out of breath, out of her mind, courting danger as her senses fray with wave after wave of adrenaline, her knuckles aching from how hard she squeezes his arm, pulling him harder against herself, increasing the pressure of his hand at her burning throat as morning canopies swirl overhead. A few dots of energy prick at the edge of her awareness, getting closer, and as recognition dawns, she endeavors to keep the discovery to herself, distracting Hound further. “You seem like you’d prefer it loud.”

“That so?” he mocks, and the intimacy of feeling his voice vibrate his chest makes her hackles rise. “Let’s find out on ‘three.’” Anticipation bursts between her ribs at the steel tang reinforcing his words. His moment of weakness has passed, his hand heating in ominous promise. This one will hurt. She closes her eyes, abrading her back against the soaked fabric of his shirt. “One.” She shivers, lungs rattling. “Two.” Almost there. Once more, and she wins.

He inhales softly, and in the bleeding gouge of time before he can say ‘three,’ comes a familiar, tremulous voice.

“Sensei?”

Sakura grins.

It was in the shadow of Hokage Tower, the first time Sakura heard that little simper.

Their now-unsuppressed chakra signatures are quivering, lashing out erratically where Hound’s neglected trio of step-children stands at the mouth of a cluster of evergreens, each lost in their own variety of horror, outrage or disbelief, all bearing witness to the electrical burns on Sakura’s neck peeking out from Hound’s damning grip on her throat, to her heaving breasts in open air, pushed up erotically by his bracing forearm as she slips lower in his frozen grip, Hound’s Leaf insignia discarded in the dirt, his masked face angled toward her flushed ear as she pants in the rising steam, face ruddy and glistening with beads of sweat that trap strands of hair to her cheeks and lips with the breeze as Sai watches on.

With victory in hand, Sakura drops her head back against Hound’s stone-like shoulder, her muscles spasming, and smiles at the hazy outlines of their new arrivals with blood dripping down her chin, releasing all facades of sanity, letting her eyes flash with wild, unabated pleasure at Hound’s imminent undoing. “Not now, kids. Daddy’s teaching Mommy a lesson.”

It breaks Hound’s paralysis.

She knows this, because he grabs her hair at the roots and shoves her head below water, getting hot liquid up her nose as she chokes and sputters, trying to dislodge his hold with numb fingers, before he tugs her back up by the scalp, and she coughs it all up laughing, throat on fire, hair sopping wet, generally unbothered and undeniably entertained by Hound’s destabilized mood swings.

By the time her lungs have cleared, Whiskers and the Uchiha have flinched closer, the blonde’s hand uselessly outstretched toward them, blue eyes as wide and guile-less as the Uchiha’s are condemning. While her teammates stepped forward, Sakura notes the little mouse stepped curiously backward, now lurking in the shade behind them like a dark cloud behind a mountain.

Gasping for air while wiping water from her stinging eyes, she notes Sai lounging on the grass as he was before Hound’s arrival—manipulative in intent, further distorting the impression left on the trio—head propped on his fist as his chakra flows languidly, tinged with amusement and unresolved violence. Even Sai sees the humor in it all, despite his desire to punish Hound’s rough handling, and he rarely sees humor in anything.

It’s Whiskers who breaks his silence, unsure what tone to take as he slowly strings together a sentence—not sure what he’s walked in on, Sakura thinks, drolly. “Kakashi…?” He wets his lips nervously, eyes darting between her and Hound. “I’m sure there’s a reason for this, but for now I think you’d better let her go.”

For a moment, Hound does not react, mind rolling through reels of potential outcomes, possibly debating what Sakura will do if he lets her go, but his hesitation doesn’t last.

Releasing his painful grip on her hair—Sakura’s legs briefly struggling to steady her water-lightened weight before her chakra kicks on to recover her frazzled muscles—Hound refocuses, his affable mask resettled like it never even slipped, save a few notable cracks, his eyes curving into an omitted smile he directs toward the three shinobi freshly-frozen in place in her peripheral vision.

Even with the sound barrier of his mask, Sakura can hear Hound part his lips on an inhale that fails to summon words, thoughts whirring mechanically behind his fractured facade, and Sai covers his mouth with his hand, looking away and hiding what could be a rare and incredible smile.

It makes Sakura murderous, that it happens in a moment he feels compelled to hide it.

A darted look at the trio, hair whipping into her eyes as she jerks her chin back in their direction, confirms her sudden ripple or bloodlust did not go unnoticed, each of them a little more tense in their posture—though, her interest is quickly redirected.

Whiskers is largely too unburdened by sin to let his eyes wander anywhere near the womanly curves of Sakura’s moisture-speckled skin, focused on piecing together the bigger picture, as he says bracingly, “We thought, given the situation, a team meeting might be worth inviting ourselves over.”

But the little brother…

“We didn’t expect you’d be so ill prepared for company,” the Uchiha says, with teeth.

Those spinning red eyes belay a different constitution than his pure-hearted friend, a covetous stare torn between the naked evidence of her hard-won skills and successes, the blue swirl of flame on her shoulder, the proven muscles and raised lines of recovered tissue that cut through Sai’s otherwise seamless artwork, and the rosy buds of her nipples tightened with cold, her parted lips stained cherry red, his thoughts ripped asunder by darker impulses beyond the disgust and disapproval directed at his former teacher.

Little brother is burdened.

And the quivering mouse in his shadow seethes at the sight of her teammate's corruption.

It’s a good opportunity, she decides, to try to eke open a wound, fester these relationships.

Pretending to find her modesty, Sakura turns her chest into Hound’s ribs and clutches meekly at his shirt, looking at the Uchiha with heavy lashes as Hound unwittingly aids the torment, absently gathering her to himself with his arm around her back, her broken wrist cradled between them as she hides her malice behind her iron-tanged lips.

It is unignorably natural, the way he cedes to her closeness in front of outsiders, casually shielding her from the Uchiha’s wandering eyes, after trying so earnestly to fry her nerve endings like one of the wriggling eels she’s seen dipped and battered at the market.

Another sharp, reviving inhale. Another attempt to eye-smile his way out of this, and Hound finds his footing.

“You should have told me you were coming,” he says, ducking his words under a veil of normalcy and hoping it doesn’t blow off with the wind. Sakura presses her ear close to Hound’s thundering heart and tries not to laugh, measuring every vocal vibration as he adds, chillingly, “I would have made tea.”