Black Bough

He does not bring them to the sprawling main house with a sunken roof and time-punctured shoji, with its wings of hollow rooms like crypts in a mausoleum, all of its corpses inexplicably missing. 

He doesn’t show them its rain-damaged kitchen, its creaking wood floors with the rust-colored stain Hound keeps conspicuously covered under a once-delicately embroidered rug with all its threads rubbed loose, or its moth-eaten bookshelf and mold-logged tatami mats in which Sakura can sense the clicking susurration of red-bodied dani, lying in wait to bite. ‘They bite in pairs,’ Sakura whispered eagerly to Hound, her ear to the tatami, when he first showed her the forgotten tea room in decline. Hound’s answering cringe when he saw her face pressed to the floor was vaguely disturbed, and Sakura had the deranged thought she was becoming one of the mites laying waste to his home, gnawing away at his skin cells until her piercing-sucking mouthpart breaks vein.

Sakura has been inside two other houses on this property, both on occasions Hound busied her with monotonous tasks aimed at killing time more than restoration, but she has never been inside this small, well-maintained annex, though it sleeps beneath a similar layer of dust as all the other buildings cocooned within his low wooden fence. It borders the outer rim of Hound’s abandoned clan compound, and its wood-slatted ceiling is largely unwarped by moisture, its windows made of crusted glass that shyly display the rock garden nestled against the outside deck that wraps the modest house.

There are multiple gardens like this on the property, and Hound has tried more than once to explain to her the concept of their rugged igneous rocks and raked spirals of gravel, using words like “arching” and “reclining” and oxymorons like “low vertical” without embarrassment, but it’s all civilian nonsense Sakura refuses to allow to penetrate into long-term memory—even if Hound has busied more than one of their days with repairing the flat-rocked ‘shores’ of their neglected ‘rivers,’ making Sakura retrace her steps every time she purposefully left a boot-print in the sacred rings around Hound’s solitary charcoal mountains.

But inside, it's the dust they draw circles in. The dust clings to it all.

Dust the Uchiha has taken to swiping frustrated arcs in with his bare palm, streaking the unpolished surface of the low, square wooden table Hound dragged out of storage and into the center of the modest room, avoiding the teapot and cups in his assault, recklessly lifting fine particles into the air and making the blonde nin seated to his right cough into his garish orange collar. Sai watches dutifully from the other side of the table, like they’re putting on a particularly boring show.

Little brother’s been unwell since he laid eyes on the uninhabited interior; something about it rankles him. Sakura is maliciously curious.

“You do see you’re making it worse,” Hound says, by all outward accounts unbothered, but he can’t hide his unease from Sakura, standing inside the preserved shrine of this building. Only his refusal to have this discussion off-property or allow his former students to see the parts of this land he really dwells in, mind and body, has forced his hand to turn his rusted key in its wooden door and slide this grave open.

“You can’t just leave it like this,” the Uchiha hisses, almost to himself, and Whiskers gives a sympathetic twitch, as if just now noticing a wound in his side.

He puts a scarless, broad tan hand on the dark blue fabric covering the Uchiha’s shoulder, which the Uchiha promptly shrugs off. Little brother’s eyes keep sweeping the room, pausing on every point of closed storage, lingering longest on the sliding door of what looks like a closet. It’s all very much intact, as opposed to the main house, wherein you’d be hard pressed to find any dry storage left unmolested by time and moisture.

It’s beyond intriguing: that Hound chooses to inhabit the disrepair, the filth, the broken, now that she knows there are parts of the complex that remain comparatively pristine.

Intriguing, like the doll-faced girl with a daring grip on Sakura’s forearm, sitting considerately on closed knees in front of her while Sakura keeps the sock-covered sole of one foot to the tatami and one tucked forward, as her white eyes affix to the purpling wrist enveloped in healing emerald.

Sakura almost feels nostalgic, faced with those pearly eyes, even if the expression is all wrong: too wary, too cautious, too openly tense. M0-3 isn’t wary of anything. He’s too arrogant for that. But the right amount of general distrust keeps the muscles around her eyes taut, Sakura thinks, tilting her head and letting a few strands of drying hair tickle her cheeks as she observes the little mouse in front of her.

Her black hair has been combed obsessively smooth, but is not carefully styled, less a symptom of vanity and more an act of exerting control. She’s wearing a white, plain dress over the top of a black t-shirt and black leggings that stop at mid-calf—functional, but clinging to normalcy, to civilian life, to girlhood. There is a small amount of eyeliner emphasizing the corners of her eyes, minimal and almost reluctant in its application—feminine, but restrained, applied with a steady hand but a concerned frown, an effort to adorn herself despite some source of shame infecting the act Sakura can’t yet place.

The skin around her knuckles is dry from constant hand-washing, and she’s pale, likely spending most of her time indoors—less field work, more hours in the hospital. She’s almost as pale as Sai, the only person Sakura’s ever met who simply does not tan or burn. 

She pointedly avoids looking at the swelling burn around Sakura’s neck that she hasn’t let her heal, Sakura being unwilling to part with the electrical burns, just yet—having too much fun watching Hound self-flagellate every time he’s forced to look at them, the evidence of his failure to hold onto his precious “peace.”  

Her posture is torn between wanting to stay and preparing to run at the first sign of aggression, her lips bare of makeup and pressed tightly into a bloodless line.

She looks about as pleased to be healing her as Sakura feels to be trapped in the village. What’s interesting, however, is the fact no one ordered her to do it—the petite shinobi only able to watch the clean break darken and bruise for so long before her medical training kicked in despite herself and she was yanking Sakura to the ground without fear or comment.

Some of that healthy fear is returning, Sakura observes.

She flexes her forearm and watches the little mouse flinch, but quickly flattens her smirk when she feels Hound’s uncovered eye hone in on the action from where he leans tactically against the shortest wall with his arms crossed over his chest (forehead protector back on his head where he likes it, despite her best efforts), watching everything and everyone in the small room with enough vitriol aimed at the fact that they’re all here—Sakura included—it feels like being staked to the tatami on a very short leash.

Whiskers coughs again, this time into his fist. The Uchiha has the sense to look contrite, wiping dust from his palm into a gray smear on black pants.

For the majority of Hound’s disinterested lecturing, little brother and Whiskers have been sitting criss-cross with information-glazed eyes cast down at the cluster of small gray cups of untouched tea, full, except for the one in front of Sai, as he attempts to refill his cup once more from the squat teapot at the table’s center and announces it’s run dry, looking to Hound for more.

Hound’s eye creases dismissively, and Sai lowers the pot back to the heat pad with some disappointment.

The room is growing heavy with the type of digestive silence that only ever proceeds hard truth. Hound’s monotone, abbreviated explanation of the events preceding Sakura’s return to the village ended at least three minutes ago. Sakura expects Whiskers will comment on it, once he’s done coughing. Which he does.

“So…Sakura never…technically left?”

Hound drawls, “You could say that,” and Sakura quietly marvels at how well this line works on his audience; at how quickly Hound was able to make them look past the damning situation they’d found him in and focus where he wants them; how much deeper their faith in him runs than she ever could have predicted, for them to allow their previously riotous emotions to bleed out the second Hound started acting as if nothing were amiss.

A few indolent iterations of some nonsense phrases like ‘underneath the underneath’ and they’d let the worst of the suggestive circumstances slide. Sakura would be lying if she said she wasn’t a bit disappointed.

Only Sakura’s little mouse seems to have kept her head amongst Hound’s beguiling reframing, Hound so unrepentantly dismissive of what they witnessed at the hot spring that his attitude has infected the boys. Not to mention the ingenious distraction that is the context they’ve been clamoring for the moment Sakura was ‘found.’

“And we’re supposed to take it all in stride? That they were following orders?” She says the word ‘orders’ with a curl of distaste to those pale lips, and tightens her hand around Sakura’s healing wrist, attempting to work cells faster, tweaking and speeding the process: building cartilage and nudging it into becoming bone. She doesn’t seem to know that Sakura could have fixed it herself instead of watching Hound squirm as it swelled, if not quite as seamlessly.

The mouse works slower than M0-3, but just as cleanly. Precise. Pleasing to watch. Like sand being sorted perfectly by color.

Sakura watches carefully for signs of the Hyūga’s eyes drifting toward her chakra core; signs she’s tempted to look for something she’s seen when examining her before; signs Sakura will have to do something about her, after all. 

It won’t do, to have anyone looking too closely at Itachi’s unfortunate parting gift.

“Does it still exist?” The Uchiha’s voice is distant and low, evidently deep in thought. 

It’s Root, she imagines he’s referring to. Hound left the details of which highly classified illegal black ops compound Sakura and Sai hale from intentionally vague, but she imagines even these nin have enough of an information network that it doesn’t take many leaps of logic to figure it out, given there was only one.

Sakura pounces on the pressure-point, with a sly, “Hoping to enlist?”

The mouse—Hinata, Sakura thinks—jerks her wrist intentionally, uttering a disingenuous ‘sorry,’ and Sakura’s temper flares.

Naruto quickly distracts. “And this is why Danzō disappeared?” It would be cute, how earnestly he is trying to work it all out mentally. If Sakura found stupidity endearing. “Because he got caught?”

“What does this have to do with Itachi?” The Uchiha is beginning to look manic again—seemingly as uncomfortable in this fossil of a building as Hound is—dark eyes flicking around the dirt and neglect, and his unease is manifesting in the blonde beside him as a sort of panicked concern without outlet, making them both look over-caffeinated and paranoid.

The question itself snaps Sakura alert, though she feigns only mild interest as she rapidly searches for the thread of conversation she must have missed, for the reason that connection was made.

Sai perks up similarly, no longer investigating the empty bottom of his cup, but his black eyes carry less confusion than an opportunistic gleam, when he taunts, “Would you like to know?”

Sakura doesn’t follow, but Hound clearly does, even more chipper than before as he says, “Finish that thought, and it’ll be the last pot of tea you ever drink.”

Sai considers the threat for a moment, then leans back on his palms and abandons interest in talking to the Uchiha in favor of studying the window, whose jaw tenses at being intercepted.

Calling him ‘little brother’ can’t be the only connection being drawn here between Sakura, Sai, and Itachi—but it’s the only one she’s given the Uchiha to work with. She is missing something.

Sakura signs to Hound in Standard with harsh, quick movements: ‘Explain.’

Hound replies in Basic, slow and infuriating: ‘Situational Awareness — Negative.’

It is an annoying, bullshit answer. The 'How should I know’ of black ops. Last she checked, people don’t make threats to stop other people from revealing information they lack awareness of.

With narrowed eyes, she apes his words from yesterday: ‘Still waking up?’

That’ll make his eye twitch.

“What is that?” Whiskers' blue eyes look pointedly at their communicating hands. “You keep doing it.”

“It’s Anbu,” comes Hinata’s terse answer, and Sakura has her curiosity piqued once again. Not all the mouse’s time is spent playing doctor, if she’s been around Anbu corps enough to recognize it, if not understand it. Unless it's Anbu she’s treating? She must be highly trusted by more than just Hound, if that’s the case. “They’re talking over us.”

For the meek first impression she gives, she certainly isn’t afraid to speak her mind. The picture is gaining detail, the reluctant shinobi kneeling in front of her coming into sharper relief. 

She doesn’t act like a coward, when she’s not standing behind her teammates, staying out of sight.

Up close, every inch of her speaks to attempts at discipline, if not results. And she’s dutiful, unable to ignore Sakura’s broken wrist even when she tried. She doesn’t seem the type to purposefully neglect her role in a squad.

So maybe this is her role. This colorlessness.

Maybe she doesn’t retreat from view the way she did both at the training ground and hot spring because she’s weak even by Leaf standards, Sakura muses. Maybe it’s because she needs to be hidden to scuttle around, be small to weave in and out of range, to get to her teammates when they need her and fall out of view and relevance the moment they don’t. It wouldn’t be unconventional for a Byakugan holder to take a more defensive role within a squad that has the highly offensive Sharingan to balance it.

Sage knows Whiskers and Uchiha probably lack the patience or subtlety to slip out of offense and cover each other’s openings mid-fight. The girl likely had no choice but to fill the void between her teammates. To become pure, crystal water; pour herself into all their careless gaps, if she wanted to survive.

Maybe her projected cowardice is a strategy. A convenient way to position herself in a fight without drawing too much notice. It wouldn’t surprise her, if Hound imbued one of his students with such an underhanded tactic, given his own propensity for masks upon masks, upon masks, upon masks.

She can imagine a younger Hound crouched low to the grass, rubbing his masked jaw in thought while trying to train this girl out of her fear, before having the thought: What if instead of trying to hide her fear from her opponent, she deliberately showed it?

Brave little mouse, Sakura thinks, as her grin unfurls unbidden, and the field medic stares more aggressively at the bone she’s mending.

“Are you leaving black ops?” the Uchiha asks.

It takes a moment of expectant silence for Sakura to realize it’s directed at her, not Hound. 

The Uchiha is swathed in a fire-resistant, dark blue training jacket, the collar of which climbs all the way to his chin, tucking the strange hole in his chakra snug out of view. His black eyes are easy to look at, she notes. Almost brown, when they aren’t a swirling red. Those eyes keep finding the blue flame on her shoulder, left exposed and unbandaged by her black sleeveless shirt.

Sakura severely doubts she will convince Hound to leave before her deal with the Hokage goes through. She could realistically be here for years, before spiriting him away. If she lives that long. It’s possible Sai doesn’t even want to leave, until they’ve dealt with the remnants of Root.

A quick nod from Hound says she’s permitted to share her squad assignment with them. More evidence the Leaf lacks concepts of secrecy. Of the purpose of black ops.

“I’ll be joining Team Ro,” she says, flatly, with a glance at Sai, before spotting a flash of envy on the Uchiha’s face. “We both will.” And then, sensing the spike of a similar, hard-to-place feeling infecting the other step-children—displacement, maybe—Sakura rubs salt in the wound, looking to Hound to purr, “Isn’t that right, Captain?”

It’s remarkable how clearly he can communicate with just a look, given half his face and one eye are covered: Don’t get cute.

The effect is somewhat dampened by the fact his drying shirt still clings to his skin in the shrinking shape of Sakura’s breasts, a clear line of demarcation where his pants had once been fully submerged in water.

As if reading her mocking thoughts, his glower deepens.

“Should I make it myself,” Sai says, tone stagnant like the green-tinted liquid in the two wasted cups his eyes are lethargically and repeatedly drawn to. Hound’s green tea is the best she’s ever had. It seems even Sai has developed a weakness for it.

“You’re not allowed to play with herbs,” Hound says, with false cheer that obviously chafes, if Sai’s twitching eyebrow is any indication.

“So that’s it then?” Seemingly done healing Sakura, the Hyūga drops her wrist and pushes her way to standing, the tatami creaking with the sudden shift in weight as she brushes her palms on her dress as if to remove some infectious residue that lives on Sakura’s skin. 

She healed the burn on her neck while Sakura wasn’t paying attention, her skill so fine and unobtrusive she hadn’t felt it happen. Sakura mourns its loss, very briefly.

“They get fed right back into the Anbu corps like nothing happened? Total freedom in the village, with the highest security clearance a shinobi can have? No milk spilt as long as no one’s looking?”

Sakura hasn’t seen so many questions crowding one room in her entire life. Maybe when putting the occasional foreign dignitary on their knees before they’re dispatched. A temperamental rhythm of Why? Why? Why? Why? They never seem to know the answer.

Hound tries to get out ahead of it: “They were Konoha ops, before,” he drones. “Only difference is now we get to see their shining faces.”

This mouse is outright brazen, Sakura is learning, as she throws her hands up in a frustrated flourish, white eyes wide with disbelief at her comrades’ willful denial. “They’re war criminals.”

Her seated teammates both utter a condemning, “Hinata” —Whiskers’ reprimand noticeably distracted by his untouched cup of tea being slid conspicuously away from him, Sai’s fingers bracing the rim loosely as he drags it toward himself with eyes that discourage competition—but Hound puts a stop to it before they gang up further, with an ominous rumble of “That’s enough.”

Clearly not appeased, the Hyūga scoffs, “Is it?”

Hound’s temper simmers beneath his calm, the strings of his patience already thinned from Sakura’s constant plucking, his weight more centered on his socked feet than his casual lean against the wall lets on as the mouse disregards his warning, as if still considering shutting everyone up himself.

“What’s the plan if this all goes sideways? You can’t just—just cozy up with them in your little scrap of land and hope this doesn’t blow up in our fucking faces!”

Only a Hyūga, Sakura thinks dryly, would call the sprawling Hatake forest a scrap of land.

It’s too difficult to comprehend, at times. This type of interaction between shinobi of drastically different stature and power. Sakura tries to imagine herself speaking to M0-1 the way the mouse is speaking to Hound, but all she can imagine is being forced to swallow handfuls of squeaking fire ants until her tongue swells too much to speak.

“We are cozy, aren’t we,” she taunts, thinking fondly of the scene the trio walked in on, and the mouse blushes furiously in response, gesturing at Sakura like she’s proving her point exactly. And if color rises up the Uchiha’s neck, as well, she considers it a beneficial side effect of her probing.

“What the fuck is wrong with her?”

Sakura tries not to smile too much, at how foolishly honest the little mouse can be. At how earnestly she looks to Hound for an explanation, and how crestfallen she is when he avoids her pleading eyes, suddenly busy checking the fraying edge of his sleeve. Even the blonde coughs out some dust with suspicious timing, conveniently distracted when her eyes try to find his next.

Speaking of eyes, Sakura feels Sai’s on her like a wet brushstroke. She catches his stare before he looks down at his stolen tea and back at her, left eyebrow quirking up ever so slightly in question. He partially signs, trusting the context to do the heavy lifting, with one hand forming an ‘S’ shape he gives a lazy shake: ‘Cold.’

“I’m…working on it,” comes Hound’s tempered answer, too late, and Sakura purses her lips to keep from showing just how much she enjoys Hound’s idiosyncrasies, sighing as she crawls toward Sai’s end of the low table. Nothing about how they spent their morning, she imagines, qualifies as ‘working on it.’ Whatever ‘it’ is.

At her approach, Sai scoots out to make the minimum amount of room required for her to slide in between his body and the table, uncrossing his legs to let her tuck her back into the heat of his chest accommodatingly.

Whiskers tries valiantly not to stare, not at her advanced chakra control, as Sakura presses both palms to the cool ridges of the cylindrical cup in front of her and focuses her chakra on the liquid within, breaking hydrogen bonds just enough to make steam begin to curl, nor at the way Sai drags his pale fingers over the healed skin of her neck, feeling around for any new scars, of which this time there are none—always keen to keep track. It pleases her deeply, that she can do this for Sai. Something he can’t do himself, not without accidentally breaking the cup.

Whiskers doesn’t stare, but the Uchiha does. The Uchiha stares at all of it, until his eyes strobe and he has to blink the red away. He lifts his own cooled cup to his lips without thinking, and grimaces over its rim at how bitter it’s grown in its neglect.

Sai’s exploration of her neck turns possessive at the same time he slides his fingers under hers to free his newly heated cup from her hand, raising it to sip over her shoulder, his palm cool against her throat as he caresses her jugular the way Hound did in the hot spring—a performance, she intuits, for the eyes tracking everywhere Sai’s fingers touch.

The Uchiha loses his grip on his cup, cursing as it clatters onto the table, green-tinted water spilling out over the woodgrains and onto the Uchiha’s lap as he curses viciously, before shoving himself abruptly from the table—making Whiskers flinch—and stalking toward the closet he was sizing up earlier.

Whiskers tentatively kneels to stand, watching the Uchiha’s back. “Do you need some—”

“It’s fine,” little brother growls, Hound tracking the Uchiha as he stalks across the room, his gray eye widening in mild offense as the Uchiha slides open the closet door and begins rummaging with vigor.

Whiskers sits back down, wearing a pensive look that doesn’t suit his face.

With a huff, the Hyūga soldiers on, now pacing the perimeter of the box-like annex. “You can’t carry on like this. It’s too high risk. If Konoha is caught harboring violators of the Kaizoku Accord—”

Too late, Sakura stifles a startled laugh with the heel of her palm, flushing the Hyūga an angrier shade of red as her sentence loses steam. But it’s Hound who Sakura lifts her eyes to speak to, teeth grazing her hand as she leans back firmly into the muscled plane of Sai’s chest, the action jostling Sai’s tea arm. He exhales out of his nose in annoyance when the liquid nearly tips over the cup’s edge.

“You’ve been telling too many bedtime stories,” she muses; if you've got them believing in that, goes unsaid.

The Kaizoku Accord of all things. The mouse couldn’t have told a better joke if she’d tried.

The Anbu captain’s jaw tenses under his mask, the tense lines around his metallic gray eye belaying his silent agreement, his reluctant acquiescence of the hand he’s clearly had in maintaining this level of naiveté, as he turns his head so the light catches on his silver hair, turning individual strands white, and gazes out one of the dirt-fogged windows.

Little brother curses again, muffled by the mixed-material shuffling of his closeted search.

“It was that or reading The Fox and The Hound again,” Hound says, with apathy, and Sakura snorts as his students’ spines stiffen slightly at their perceived abandonment to her ridicule.

Black ops are classified for a reason. It’s to be expected, that the general ranks wouldn’t be abridged of the facts of their own government’s clandestine actions, to an extent, but given whose scrap of land they’re having this conversation on, the irony is bordering on ridiculous.

Hound has been running black ops since before Sakura was recruited. He was leading a squad when she was learning how to properly tie her bootlaces and sharpen older operatives’ kunai without getting the shit kicked out of her for leaving a dead zone on a blade.

If the Hyūga thinks she’s a war criminal, who does she think Hatake Kakashi is?

She finds it impossible, not to wish for the day the poor girl finds out.

The Kaizoku Accord . Sakura has to fully cover her mouth with her hand, biting her skin and struggling to contain the quiet laughter heating her palm the longer she thinks about it. This girl is worried about violating the Kaizoku Accord.

And Hound—

Hound is the reason the Kaizoku Accord exists. The shinobi whose state-sanctioned atrocities persisted until the coastal nations said ‘uncle.’ The source of the indiscriminate violence he single-handedly strong-armed them into criminalizing.

The spilled tea drips down the edge of the table, down onto the tatami, and Hound’s crossed forearms flex against his chest with every drip, drip, drip.

“Look at you, all clammed up,” Sakura coos, as Sai sets his cup back down precisely on its own ring of condensation.

She hopes her eyes whisper the way her thoughts do: Is this why you wear that mask? To avoid your own face in mirrors? Or to hide it from others? Can you not stomach all your corpses’ haunting gazes? Are you ashamed of your sash of honor, Konoha’s most feared? Most ruthless? Most able?

If her eyes do whisper, Hound doesn’t like what they’re saying. He looks ready to put a senbon through the seal on her tongue if the next words out of her mouth aren’t carefully thought through. It makes her chew her bottom lip to stop herself from testing that heavy glare, her toes curling at the thought of finding out how capable of cruelty he truly is. He has not unwound himself from the coil she put him in this morning, and it shows.

Between her teasing, the Uchiha’s invasive searching, and the Hyūga wearing a path into the tatami, unable to stay still in her twitchy rage, Hound’s stress is mounting, and he tries in vain to ease it by pressing his back even further into his comfort-wall, sparing her a slitted eye-smile that reads as a dark promise to shut her up promptly if she doesn’t follow his lead.

“That was almost my operative name. Clam,” he deflects, but Sakura can see it, that spark of brutality in his right eye, just waiting for the right gust of wind to set it aflame, before he turns the other cheek. “Other captains shot it down. Thought it was too erotic.”

Whiskers laughs nervously, scratching behind his head, but the other two curl their lips back from their teeth in seemingly coordinated disapproving sneers.

With a placating smile, Sakura allows her weight to fall fully into Sai, damp hair splaying out over his shoulder and around her head like a funeral wreath of cherry blossoms, stretching out her lungs as she wrangles her chortles into deep, composure-cultivating breaths that expand until the bindings around her ribs beneath her shirt dig into her skin, watching daylight reflect off dust falling from the wooden slats overhead.

“You were saying, little mouse?” Sakura lets it go like dropping a bone, and knows Hound’s shoulders untense without even looking, like the air itself has lost some of its electric charge.

“Little mou—? Do you think this is funny?” She doesn’t even cease pacing to point. “She thinks it’s a joke! And the other one isn’t even paying attention! It’s not about following orders, they obviously don’t even care—”

“What would you have them do?”

Whiskers’ somber words cause the Hyūga to pause by the haggard light of one of the annex’s tarnished windows and turn her face toward him, the Uchiha halting his search half bent over, glowering over his shoulder with a rosy, moth-eaten rag in hand.

Sitting placidly with his legs crossed at the table, frowning at little brother’s overturned cup, the blonde successfully draws the eyes of the entire room save Sai, who has long lost interest in the mouse’s vapid rambling now that he has Sakura’s body to entertain him, and—as accused—has begun tracing his fingers along the lines of the taipan snakes on her arm, revisiting his own designs with a critical eye, raising one hand to feel the raised skin of the needletail wing on his neck, comparing the linework.

Shivering from the light touch, Sakura allows herself a moment of surprise that the blonde shinobi now raising his blue eyes from the table has yet more outstanding traits beyond the noxious orange of his jacket, the deep scars on his cheeks, and the anomaly of his chakra. A magnetism. Something that makes people look and listen when he speaks.

“What would you have them do?” he repeats, with a calm, rhetorical sting Sakura finds complicates her original assessment of his sunny disposition. “They were kids when they started. They fought for our village just like we did, maybe more.” Definitely more, Sakura thinks, with disdain. “Now they’re out in the open, and you want—what? To make examples of them? You want them behind bars? Executed?”

He lets that word marinate between them, and Sakura is once again struck with how green they are, for that word to still have any substance, any flavor left to tongue at.

“You want them to take responsibility for the orders they followed before they were old enough to drink? What are you even advocating for?”

There’s leadership, in that sure, even tone of voice. A confidence that allows him to meet the Hyūga’s wrathful eyes without blinking, unyielding in their promise that her outburst is over.

The Hyūga ducks her chin and looks away, dark bangs hanging over the pinch between her brows, and Sakura feels her own eyebrows quirk up, Whisker’s disapproval achieving what Hound’s could not, causing the Hyūga to sit down at the table beside the blonde, rest her crossed arms on its stained surface, and turn her chin away from the rest of them.

“I’m advocating for having a better plan than calling a deer a horse and threatening anyone who disagrees,” she says, but she’s lost her vigor, mollified by his misguided monologue.

Even the Uchiha, whose arrogance rivals M0-3’s, seems content to co-sign Naruto’s sudden truce, walking his rag over to the walnut table and reclaiming his place across from Sakura and Sai, soaking the spilled tea into the cloth until dusty rose turns red, minimal aggression in each cleaning circle.

It’s a shame, Sakura thinks, because the mouse is absolutely right, in her own way. All nations have ‘spies in each other’s pies,’ as Hound would put it. News of Root’s illegal continuation will spread fast and wide like wildfire, and when it does, there will be eyes taking notice of how Konoha plans to take responsibility for the actions committed under the sanctity of a council member.

There is sense, in foregoing reintegration in favor of public sentencing. And since they haven’t managed to arrest Danzō, Sakura and Sai are the next best thing, if they’re looking to make a statement, fast.

But where she is wrong is that Hound is not in direct charge of any of it, only throwing his weight around to shift the council’s center of gravity, like leaning over the side of a wooden boat and hoping it’s enough to force the turn. The council may condemn the method that produced Sai and Sakura, but they are frothing at the mouth to utilize them. She imagines they are already planning how they will get their hands on the rest of the zeros, in hopes some of them have blood ties to Konoha that make them easy to claim.

They’ll probably kill the ones who don’t, rather than return them to their respective villages.

She imagines F0-2’s blue-obsidian hair rolling away from her body with her severed head as M0-7 is spared for his Sarutobi blood, sitting underground with bleeding wrists and ankles from fighting chains, the knowledge of her execution roaring in his ears, setting his veins on fire, and feels a confusing flicker of fury at the thought of standing by as it happens.

It must not sit well with her, she reasons, the idea of these weak Leaf nin cutting down their betters.

“It could have been any of us,” the Uchiha says, logically— jealously, her mind whispers—frowning as he pinches the rag to try and reach between woodgrains, and it tickles an itch Sakura has had in her brain since the first time she laid eyes on him, wondering how hard Danzō must be kicking himself for missing his opportunity to snatch up the little brother.

Reaching out to circle the rim of the teacup in front of her with her fingers, watching its liquid saucer of light wobble, Sakura hums in thought, and feels Sai’s interest catch on the graceful movements of her hand, his own hands settling loosely on the dust-brushed thighs of her pants—unusually tactile, for him, though she isn’t complaining.

If only Danzō had known when the clan would be massacred. He could have sent someone in to collect the kid Itachi decided not to kill. Faked his death to keep anyone from looking for him. Or he could have done it later, with a little more effort. Evidently, even he’s not power-hungry enough to deprive the village of its last Uchiha asset; it would destabilize the balance between clans, to be sure. Weaken Konoha in the eyes of the other nations. Better not to put a finger on that scale, from Danzō’s perspective. But if he had… If he’d made the offer…

Something tells her little brother would have taken the proffered hand.

Maybe he still would. She coils the thought like a viper, buries it in the sand for a later ambush. 

It’s a delicate balance, she imagines, between ensuring he is trained and utilized, and ensuring he never sees the type of battle that could permanently end his bloodline.

She wonders how it must frustrate the little brother, to be so obviously coddled. It’s a wonder he hasn’t fucked off to train elsewhere. But maybe there’s a reason. Maybe that reason has something to do with the blonde shinobi with whom the Uchiha is currently sharing a long, communicating look, or with the little mouse he has subconsciously opened his posture toward, his chest angled toward her even as she pointedly ignores him.

There is more to this little collective than what she’d initially credited them with. She’ll need to understand it, if she’s going to dismantle it, to loosen any hold it may have on her longer-term target. 

In the meantime, this could be her chance to scoop up some of the scattered fragments of Hound’s weary trust.

If she can win over Whiskers, the Hyūga will be easier to conquer. And once she has the Uchiha in range, all she has to do is keep him there until it’s time to leave the village, or until Itachi comes for her. Whichever happens first.

It would be a mistake, to let those lovely red eyes go to waste.

“Leaf squads have names,” she says crisply, and lifts Sai’s cup thoughtfully to her lips, asking before she drinks, “What do I call yours?”

The familiar taste of Hound’s earthy blend floods her with warmth. She does her best not to notice.

It confirms her suspicion, when it’s not Hound—the Anbu captain still fervently avoiding looking at her in the wake of having revealed just how diligently he’s kept these nin from learning exactly why he’s so infamous—but Whiskers whose attention the question garners.

There’s a fierceness to the set of his wheaty brows, a depth to his eyes that wasn’t there the last time she looked, when Whiskers turns to face her, a curious tilt of his head that speaks to higher functioning than previously expected. 

“Team 7. That’s what we were called. As genin, I mean. But we still take missions. The three of us,” he clarifies, in the same unlayered way he says everything, and Sakura nods once in understanding.

Hound may have half-trained this group of misfits, but he is not their leader. He’s not half involved enough to lead them anywhere. A protector, for sure. But nothing more.

It’s this one.

The one with a face that something tried to claw off, blue fire in his eyes the longer and harder she looks for it.

Sitting up properly, Sakura sets down her cup and brushes Sai’s hands off of her, bracing her palm to her knee to aid her transition to standing when her hip complains. She steps silently over the tatami, aware of Hound’s heavy stare even as he stays glued to the wall, and comes to stand over the unofficial captain of Hound’s failed project, gauging the receptive nothingness he regards her with: not guarded, but blank, staring up at her from his seat like an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

“You offered to train together,” she says, and recognition brightens his eyes, followed by a brilliant smile she tries not to squint at. It’s with an echo of something she can’t quite hear, a memory just out of reach, that she offers, firmly, before Hound can object: “Would you like to train now?”

…

By the time Kakashi realizes he’s been standing motionless at the foot of Obito’s flat gravestone for more than an hour, the morning mist permeating the air has coalesced into an assault of fat drops of rainwater, catching in his hair, fusing his jōnin uniform to his skin, and pooling in the shallow words carved into sandstone that Kakashi has dutifully observed even Konoha’s gentle weather begin to erode, the edges of names and places no longer as crisp, slowly losing meaning, losing to time.

Kakashi hates rain. ‘Like a cat,’ Sakura accused, the first time she saw him twitch from a sudden raindrop hitting his shoulder, signaling a coming storm.

She takes obvious pleasure in assigning him different animals than the council dog he is. But Kakashi has been Konoha’s bloodhound too long to become anything else, despite how she holds different metaphorical masks up to his face and checks them for size.

The grass beneath his boots is softening. He’ll be scraping mud from between treads if he doesn’t move soon. 

The plan had been to drop Sakura off at T&I and then stop by the cemetery to say a few words to Rin, then to Obito, and then to force his wooden legs to carry him to the neglected grave of his father at the farthest corner of the graveyard, but as typical he has gotten stuck here. He only makes it past Obito a few times a year.

Looks like today isn’t one of those days.

But he should probably say something, to the half-crushed, eye-less face he can see in his mind’s eye, stuck beneath the memorial stone. Obito liked noise. Made enough of it for the both of them, during their brief cooperation as teammates. It was one of the reasons Kakashi disliked him so viscerally. He couldn’t hold a silence to save his own life.

Kakashi is stalling.

The rain falls in a patient curtain of sound, breaking the morning’s silence for him. It makes it easier, to do what he came here to do.

He inhales through rain-dampened cotton and starts with the first thing that comes to mind.

“She’s a terrible teacher,” he says, and tries not to look into the charred hole in Rin’s chest he sees out of the corner of his eye when he’s feeling particularly off-balance, tries not to smell her child corpse cooking— Sage, she was young. Every time he looks directly at it, it disappears, and so he looks forward, and thus the cycle repeats.

And he is, today. Off-balance. All week, he’s been, since the first day Sakura drew a circle in the soft earth of his compound and told his former students to try and push her out of it, three-on-one, taijutsu only—a consideration she added after a cautious glance at Kakashi’s tender warning to leave them intact as she found them or else suffer a tragic accident.

The first time she trounced them was to analyze them, dissect them, humiliate them, he is aware. Sakura doesn’t do anything without an initial purpose. But when they came back the next day, whimpering at the gate of Hound’s land like a pack of hungry strays, Sakura only looked put-off by their willing reappearance for a moment before drawing another circle in the dirt and waving them on.

It’s been a fucking week of this. A week of him and Sai lurking around the outskirts of this ambiguously successful intersection of worlds, spectating keenly while trying not to admit they’re not bored.

Even Hinata is reluctantly drawing closer, enticed by what he imagines must be the nearly incomprehensible growth of Sakura’s skill, given what she recalls from the academy—or maybe more so by Sakura’s egalitarian disparaging of the trio. She puts Sasuke’s and Naruto’s faces into the ground as often as Hinata’s, offers the same amount of biting critique to each of them, without bias or favor.

The disinherited Hyūga is so used to lagging behind the powerhouse duo in hand-to-hand since losing access to her clan’s training grounds and library of generational techniques—took a bit of a hit to the morale, that kid, and never fully got back up—it must be refreshing, to be made total equals in the face of Sakura’s overwhelming superiority. To be told she is failing her potential the exact same amount as the other two idiots who are so often held to a higher standard—maybe more so. To have such a powerful shinobi as Sakura look at her with disgust and say, ‘You have one of the most powerful kekkei genkai in the elemental nations. Do you plan to waste it setting bones and clumping scabs?’

He can tell Hinata’s slumbering fire has been relit, on the surface out of spite, but underneath the underneath, he suspects it’s because Sakura’s disappointment implies expectation. She looks at her and sees potential strength. Believes her capable of it. It makes Kakashi wonder how he looks at her, how he’s always looked at her, to not have brought out the same result.

If her goal is to lower Kakashi’s guard by proving she can play nice with his pups, Kakashi regrets to acknowledge the strategy is working.

He’s not positive she even realizes she’s teaching them. All of her insights are shared with a hardness, a sadistic joy at seeing them struggle, but her frustration with incompetence gets the better of her consistently, until she’s barking at Hinata to stop ‘flinching’ herself out of offensive range and at Sasuke to ‘grow some self-awareness’ and at Naruto to stop losing track of his feet unless he wants to ‘lose them permanently.’ She’s not great with words, finds it easier to wack Sasuke on the side of the head and tell him he’s a disgrace to his bloodline than to bother explaining that it doesn’t matter how powerful the Sharingan is if he lacks the physical conditioning to take advantage of it against a stronger opponent.

“We have that in common,” he tells the empty casket under the stone—empty, because Kakashi was unable to recover Obito’s body after the mission, unable to bring any of his remains home for the family’s mourning, other than the obvious. The Uchihas would have happily scraped Obito’s eye out of Kakashi’s head given half the chance, convinced as they were that Kakashi killed his teammate for sport, his eye the trophy, but the council swiftly put a stop to that witch hunt. Kakashi isn’t sure if he’s supposed to be grateful or not for the interference.

But he’s not talking to Obito about that. He’s talking about Sakura.

It’s been a destabilizing process, watching her give the barbed feedback he purposefully held back during their genin training, stunting their growth, slowing their progress in the name of keeping them psychologically intact through their teenage years.

He doesn’t regret it. No amount of strength is worth breaking a child. None. They were an underbaked batch of traumatized (mostly) orphans when the council gave them to him. They needed to learn how to do laundry, how to shop for groceries, how to clean and cook a fish, before learning how to find an artery or set up a pincer to encircle an enemy. He did his best to keep them off missions that tweaked his nose as suspiciously easy or potentially tricky. He kept Akatsuki at a firm distance at the cost of his own blood and sweat, almost all of his time off-village back then spent ensuring the brats at home wouldn’t be crossing paths with anyone they couldn’t handle for a very long time.

Though they gave him a bit of a scare, coming back to the village after a four-month deployment to learn not only had the Uchiha given the missing nin life a try in his absence, but the fucking Jinchuriki ran right after him, both of them traumatizing the poor bastards guarding the front gate when they returned three months later looking like reanimated corpses.

He made their climb to chūnin and jōnin a steep one, one that would take years of grinding instead of field promotion. He refused to give the elders what they wanted, made them just good enough, made sure they had each other, and then completely neglected them. He did his job, ensuring they survived adolescence.

He doesn’t regret it.

But the way Sakura looks at him when one of his former genin does something particularly unimpressive… Makes him occasionally question his prior convictions.

His fingers have gone cold and stiff inside his pants pockets. He’s always had poor circulation. If he doesn’t keep active, keep his blood flowing through his limbs with daily runs and katas and missions and purpose, he turns into a corpse. Rigor Mortis sets in.

By contrast, Sakura has been running unbearably hot. There is more raw energy pulsing under her skin than any other living creature Kakashi has been forced to stay in proximity to for longer than an hour. More than Naruto, and that’s no small achievement. It’s increased noticeably, since the day she triggered that latent technique just over a week ago and did the impossible, though she still seems unclear as to how she achieved it. Or maybe since that day he found her soaking smugly in the hot spring she reservoired on his land without permission. 

He has the brief thought it might not be her temperature that’s changed, but his sensitivity to her warmth. After an awkward silence with himself, Kakashi decides that thought gets to go live in the ‘no-no’ box for the foreseeable future.

The rain falls harder, dripping off his eyelashes, nearly flattening his hair and sinking his boots into the earth underfoot, dragging him ever slowly down into Obito’s hollow grave. That’s how death tempts you, he thinks absently. How it got his father. Millimeter by millimeter.

On a brighter note. “It’s her birthday, today. Turned twenty.”

The drumming of the rain drowns out his attempt at optimism.

Kakashi is bad at small talk. Always has been. He remembers his father trying to ask him how his day was sometime after the academy, and responding, with the underlying suspicion his father may be a moron, ‘Does this conversation have a point, or are you just bored without a mission?’

The conversation had a point. One Kakashi drove between his father’s ribs on a daily basis. One more bitter exchange in a parade of bitter exchanges, until his father planted his white flag and stopped walking, leaving the parade altogether.

Kakashi trudges on.

“The kids want to celebrate.”

He can’t seem to stop calling them kids. They’re the same age as Sakura, only five or six years behind his twenty-five, and the idea of calling her anything but a peer at this point is simply an impossibility. She’s seen too much, done too much. She’s aged fast and hard, like her handler. Like Kakashi.

Speaking of Sai.

Kakashi has no idea how long the former Root operative has been standing there.

“I thought you’d still be waiting for Sakura,” he says, and crouches low to the grave to pull a few weeds growing in sparse clumps up from the grass, because he might as well.

Kakashi isn’t due to collect her for another thirty minutes. Sai hadn’t seemed willing to move from the metal chair in the concrete hallway of T&I outside the room where her mind-sifting procedure was being conducted. And yet here he is, where Kakashi would least like to see him.

He hovers his hand over a dandelion, deliberating on if it’s a weed or a flower.

Sai matches his level, sinking into a squat beside him. Always right at his elbow, these days.

It’s in this way that Sai is like a paralysis demon, in Kakashi’s opinion. Often hovering menacingly in his periphery, dressed in dark tactical fatigues like reapers’ robes, the faint light that makes it past the gathered clouds reflecting dully off the steel plate of the leaf insignia Sai has strapped around his thigh like a weapon, already sick of wearing it on his head.

Sai stares down at Obito’s grave clinically, black eyes glazed with boredom.

“You’re talking to a rock.”

Kakashi presses his tongue to the backs of his teeth and keeps his hands busy yanking out a burgeoning foxtail to avoid breaking Obito’s gravestone with Sai’s thick head. He leaves the dandelion. “It’s easier to talk to people when they’re dead,” he says, and tosses the uprooted weed to the side.

That was a little too honest.

Beside him, Sai lifts his brow and tilts his head consideringly. In a rare moment of abstract thought, he doesn’t outright reject the sentiment. It doesn’t warm him to the operative.

Pakkun found the elaborate trap seals Sai placed throughout the village in diabolically strategic places while Kakashi was drooling into his mask from untraceable poison, carefully crafted to detonate when triggered by the right conditions. Places Kakashi would not have found them, if not for his summons. Places that could have destroyed the fabric of Konoha in the span of a night, setting the village aflame with blast after devastating blast.

The worst part is Kakashi understands, intuitively, why such precautions would feel necessary in the wake of Sakura’s partially revealed ability. But he cannot tolerate it.

He handled it quietly, in his own way. Sai has most certainly yet to notice. But it is hard to treat him with kit gloves, hard to see him as a victim of circumstance, knowing this nin took deliberate steps to threaten everything he holds reluctantly dear.

“What does it entail?” Sai asks, neutrally. “A celebration.”

But then he says shit like that, and Kakashi’s anger deflates like a party balloon in a belligerent hiss. Obito’s sunken face turns judgemental. Rin’s apparition creeps closer, just out of focus. Kakashi clicks his tongue against his teeth, wet soil clinging to his fingers as he rests his forearms on his knees, and forces an answer.

“Cake, mostly.” That, or occasionally seaweed soup, in the coastal regions. It’s been a long time since Kakashi has celebrated his own birthday, or anyone else's. He’s made a few slight appearances at Genma’s, or one of Team 7’s, but not consistently, and usually not willingly. “Sometimes a song.”

“A song?”

“It’s…not a good song. But it’s short.”

“She won’t like it.”

“No one really does.”

“Then why include it?”

He’s got him there. The rain is starting to chill his skin through his sopping clothes. It makes him blink every time some drips off his hair and into his exposed eye.

“The same reason we do everything we don’t like in this village,” he says. The reason they start wars and end them. The reason they ostracize outsiders and ignore orphans. The reason they turn their kids into weapons, pit them against one another in crowded arenas like alleyway cockfights and take bets on which ones will make it into adulthood. The thoughts flow unbidden, his veneer of indifference damaged by proximity to rows upon rows of child graves. It tastes like blood in his mouth, the only word to slip past the pitch-black mask melting into his face in the rain. “Tradition.”

The silence bears down with the deluge, trying in vain to flood the graveyard, lift the bodies from the soil and wash them into the streets of the village below like a mudslide and sweep Kakashi and Sai away with it. It occurs to him, with a slitted glance at his unlikely companion, at the emotionless lines of his pale face, not even blinking the rain away from his eyes, but letting it gather in the corners and stream down like tears he’s likely never shed: Sai is just as miserable in the rain as Kakashi. He’s just less aware of his misery.

Like a recording stuck on its last line, Sai repeats, “She won’t like it.”

Kakashi is tempted to agree. But he suspects it’s a bad habit to pick up. Agreeing with Sai. So he says instead, “You seem so sure.”

He sees what looks like the spidery head of crabgrass he must have missed during his last visit, and makes quick work of pulling it up and out, adding it to his growing pile of upheaved and unwanted.

Sai slowly slides his pupils to meet Kakashi’s challenging stare, his visage wavering in the disruptive lines of rainfall between them, distorting each other’s silhouettes and faces. “I know what she likes. And I know what she does not.”

“Really?” Kakashi is intentionally wry, and watches it further narrow the stoic operatives eyes predictably. “Because the way I see it, thanks to you and the rest of Danzō’s Merry Murder Club, even Sakura has no idea what she likes.”

There’s annoyance, in the subtly activated muscles of that otherwise lifeless face. “What she knows is irrelevant.”

And there’s the issue, Kakashi thinks, with vindication.

After a tense moment, Kakashi refocuses his stare on the worn out words of Obito’s gravestone. They’re nearly illegible in the rain, but Kakashi has them memorized. They’re generic enough that it's not an impressive accomplishment. ‘In loving memory.’ Simple. Brief. Exactly as Obito would have liked it. Only no one who actually loved Obito is left alive. Kakashi remembers, but not lovingly. More like morosely, with a steady ache in his left eye socket, and occasionally with a bitter scowl at being forced to carry his red-spinning torch inside his skull.

“Okay. Here’s an example of what I mean. Sakura has never eaten a strawberry. We can infer she will like it, based on what we already know. She likes sugar. She likes most fruits. She’ll probably like the strawberry. But we don’t know. Maybe she won’t like the seeds in her teeth. Maybe it’s too sweet. We don’t know until she does. Understand?”

“Does the celebration involve strawberries?”

“That’s not the point.”

“But you said—”

“It’s about if she likes strawberries or not. It has nothing to do with birthdays.”

He’s not sure why he’s fixating on the strawberries. Maybe because Sakura refused to eat the ones he bought her last week. She didn’t like the look of them, and has been less trusting of food he tries to give her in the wake of her own tampering with his unsuspecting stew. Kakashi was sure she’d like it. As sure as he’s accusing Sai of being.

Sai stares hard at the stone marker in front of them, before asking, finally, “Which ones are strawberries?”

Kakashi lets rain sting his sclera, and considers just digging his way down into the earth now. Get it over with. Lie down for the long dark. It makes his head hurt, talking to Sai. More than it used to. They interacted extremely little before the collapse of Root, but when they did, it was easy to see Sai’s callousness for conditioning, to keep his head level when Sai said or did something strikingly out of line.

He’s not sure when he stopped viewing Sai as a victim, but as an abuser, when truthfully, he’s both. Neither of which by choice.

That’s a lie. He knows exactly when it happened. The moment he learned Sai is the one who personally dragged her down below the village like a wraith. The moment he bragged about it.

He’s made no attempt to break through Sai’s opaque intentions since then. It doesn’t seem to help as it should, the fact he’s also the one who got her out; that he collapsed the entire cage he was born into, seemingly to pry the bars open wide enough for her to slip through. At some point, Kakashi subconsciously recategorized him as a lost cause and focused his efforts on controlling Sakura. Molding her, the way Sai did, to suit his purpose. Hurting her, his traitor mind provides, the stomach-turning memory of Sakura’s uncovered body tensing against his in waves of pain now a fresh source of gastric acid his inner demons like to set to boil whenever he briefly, blissfully, forgets the fact he’s lower than scum.

And she wants him like this. She has made it overly clear in her cooperation this week, that he has finally raised the ante high enough for her to play. It doesn’t surprise him. He’s known from the beginning, that he would have to bite an ear or two, dominate her with pack mentality, if she’s going to last long enough in the village to outgrow her habits. He knew. But he’d hoped. Maybe that’s the thing she’s trying to train out of him.

It’s making him physically ill, thinking of how happy it’s all made her. He jumped through the ring of fire she held aloft like a circus dog, and all week she’s been clapping.

But he’ll do it again, if it keeps the village safe, keeps all his birds in hand and out of the bush.

Kakashi is no better than the operative crouching numbly beside him, both of them adrift, both soaked to the bone, and both too stubborn to admit it when they want to go inside and dry off.

“We’ll get some. On the way to T&I,” he says, stiffly, and allows himself the barrier of avoiding eye-contact, staring resolutely at the imaginary rotting remains of the first teammate he ever failed, but definitively not the last. The fruit stalls should be open by now. He should rinse the dirt off his fingers, first. His hands are filthy. “If they look fresh.”

Sai doesn’t offer any complaint, and Kakashi nods once with a weighted sigh, before standing and turning his heel in the mud, starting back down the hill, boots slipping along the slimy decline toward the gaping gates of the cemetery as he refuses to waste chakra on easing the process. Back down toward the village and its stirring, rain-muffled sounds of life after dawn. Back into it all.

That’s where he went wrong, he thinks, as he listens for Sai’s footsteps suctioning in the muck behind him, and doesn’t hear them; it doesn’t mean he isn't following, he tries to believe. 

He only offered the strawberry to Sakura.

He should have offered it to Sai.

After another few seconds, his low trust makes it impossible not to check, and so he does, turning his head to see Sai (alas, not following) standing in front of Obito’s grave, holding something up to the cloudy half-light and looking down at Kakashi oddly.

“You missed one,” he says, and Kakashi blinks rain out of his eye, focusing on the weed in his hand, its pale head quivering in the downpour.

It’s the fucking dandelion.

…

The procedure passes without ceremony.

Outside T&I, Hound flicks his two-fingered salute with an enthused “Yo” that doesn’t match the soaked and overall doleful states of both him and Sai’s…everything. Sai licks a mysterious line of red juice from his ungloved thumb, inquiring, “Complications?” To which Sakura says, “Negative.”

And that appears to be that.

They take advantage of the break in the rain to wander, stretching their legs instead of striking out directly toward the Hatake compound to await further orders. Boots smacking along the wet cement thoroughfare that extends most generally in the right direction, Sakura notes the rain has thinned the usual morning crowds. Hardly anyone is around to flinch when she meets their eyes, or stare curiously at the whites of Sai’s teeth as he tears the flesh of yet another strawberry from its leafy calyx. Hound has tried more than once to tell him not to eat the white-fuzzy pith, but Sai doesn’t seem to care.

Hound doesn’t seem to care much, either. He’s unusually pleased with himself, a pep in his step every time he dips his head slightly down and to the side, looking over his shoulder at her, then at the cluster of strawberries cradled in his bare palm like tiny peregrine eggs rolling around in a pale nest, then at Sai’s satisfied chewing, and then back to her, his right eye a smug slit of, See that? See how he appreciates my efforts?

Sakura rolls her eyes and does her best to disguise the way it makes her head pound vengefully. It’s typical, for the senses to revolt after that level of mental strain; the task of curating an investigator’s experience in her head without anyone the wiser, erecting walls and guiding them around them so they never touch the edges, always proves a demanding one. The blue light washing out the peach, orange and white facades of the still-opening shops that narrow this walk strains her eyes more than she’d like to admit, like she can feel every minute muscle around her eyes inflame and tighten when she tries to look anywhere but dead ahead.

She briefly considers tugging the black mask around her neck up over her eyes and walking blind; there’s enough moisture in the air that she could easily navigate without that particular sense. But that might raise the few civilian eyebrows scurrying past every few minutes—their faces periodically upturned with paranoid eyes at the dense clouds overhead—a little more than is wise.

“Did you have fun?”

She’s not sure why he’s bringing it up again now. Hound sounds bored with his own question, but she doesn’t read into it. He’s always bored with his own thoughts, thoroughly sick of himself. It’s why he lets her get away with so much, she suspects, stepping directly in the center of a puddle that looks inconveniently deep, feeling its reactive splash grasp at her pants, darkening charcoal to true black.

Any stimulation is good stimulation.

“I cooperated,” she says placidly, squinting into the thin fog forming at the roofline of the unending reel of storefronts rolling out before them, clothes and weapons and specialty herbs, most of which still have their shutters drawn.

“I don’t doubt.” He very much doubts.

She almost smirks. One of the stores on her left displays a wine-red qipao in the window. It has fine silver embroidery around its seams. It has a soft look to it, the way its skirt falls, but appears tightly woven. She hasn’t bought any civilian clothes, yet. Hound hasn’t offered. She hasn’t thought about it at all, to be truthful. But on some occasions the benefit of blending in may outweigh the benefit of shinobi fatigues.

Hound is looking at the dress too, because that’s where she’s looking. “How do you feel?” he asks. Direct. No humor. It makes her want to be honest. She almost tells him her head hurts. She wonders if a dress like that would lower his guard even further. If he would be tempted to run his hands along its silver borders, the way she is.

“I am accustomed to the procedure.”

“And how do we compare? To your previous experience?”

Sakura thinks of M0-4’s colorless voice, talking her through vomiting for the fourth time in three hours. “Pathetic.”

“I was hoping you’d factor in the free snacks.”

She did like the snacks.

“Kindness is the consolation of the weak.”

“Easy on the cult mantras between meals. You’ll upset my delicate constitution.”

She exhales her humor, thinking wistfully of Hound’s beautiful blade work back in Wind, the way desert sun danced on his blades as he severed enemy fingers at the joints before they could reach for their kunai and shuriken. Delicate constitution, her ass.

It takes her a second to realize Hound has stopped. When she pivots on her heel, Sai is finishing off another two strawberries, wiping his fingers clean on his pants beside Hound, who has paused by a store with an overhanging porch that intrudes on the sky over the street, shielding a beige-painted metal shelf positioned outside its window. Hound looks at the tempered glass door like he wants to go in, but settles for thumbing through the three levels of worn spines of books left in the cold with the hand not harboring the last two strawberries Sakura is starting to take an interest in, as she eases up next to him.

“That’s a prestigious little library card you just earned yourself,” Hound says.

His fingers pause on the spine of one titled The Great War, but continue past as he finds interest in The Buxom Thief of Degarashi instead, which he plucks from the shelf and pries open with one hand. There are micro-scars on his index and middle fingers, thin and faintly pearlescent in the strange light of the morning. Sakura watches him leaf through the paperback one-handed with ease, something he does often even when his other hand isn’t occupied, and finds it inordinately satisfying—hypnotized by competence.

She responds, “Assuming my memories don’t offend their Leaf sensibilities beyond reasonable doubt.”

Sakura’s eyes catch on The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Single-Edged Weapons, and she reaches for it with the intent of storing it in the seal on her palm, but Hound sheaths The Buxom Thief back onto the shelf in time to swat her hand away, fully aware of her feelings on vendors leaving their goods in easy-access places.

‘Don’t steal from your neighbors,’ he usually chides, which makes pretty much any other village okay to steal from. Too bad they’re always hanging around this one.

Sakura twitches her nose and sniffs, letting her hand drop. Without her mask up, the cold air has chilled her face, and she can feel her sinuses wanting to run.

“The seeds are inconvenient.” Sai has been struggling to dislodge one from between his front teeth for a minute now, inherently disinterested in reading for leisure about anything but fūinjutsu.

“Give us some credit,” Hound replies to Sakura, but reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out a small box of toothpicks, its cardboard edges roughed up from use. “They keep trying to promote me. How sensitive can the council possibly be?” Hound holds them out to Sai with a lifted brow, gesturing for him to take them. “Don’t give them to Sakura.”

They move on shortly after that, Hound looking longingly at the door to the bookstore once more before ultimately ushering her and Sai away with his free hand to their backs, one at a time, until they get the message and walk.

Turning the corner of a cross street, a brave ray of light sneaks past the clouds enough to warm her face, but it harasses her aching eyes just the same. The few groups of civilians meandering nearby all seem to gain a punch of energy from the temporary break in the gloom.

Hound’s upturned hand sways a small amount with every step, forward with his left leg, backward with his right. There is only one round red berry left now, cupped delicately in the center, staining his skin pink as it rolls around, darkening the lines of his palm, speckling it with petite seeds and dark fibers. Hound notices her stare, and holds his hand out, offering once more.

That steel-gray eye shines like a tantō freshly oiled.

It feels like losing a game, to take the strawberry after refusing so many times, so after a moment of pondering she finds a way to make Hound feel like he’s losing too, pulling him to a stop in the center of the walkway by pinching his sleeve, trying not to look too spry as she says, self-assured, “Feed it to me.”

Sliding his boot out to even his stance, Hound only looks surprised for a blink in time before he’s back to looking put out. His decisive, “Not a chance,” comes easy.

But so does Sakura’s, “It could be a bonding opportunity.”

Hound looks vaguely tempted, beneath his irritation.

“Why not ask your favorite? I’m sure he’d oblige.”

They both turn their heads to look at Sai, who has indulged them by not wandering off, but is unintrigued by their stalemate, busy testing the pointed tip of a toothpick against the skin of his forearm between a cobra’s expertly shaded scales and the interlocking seals he’s drawn into its background, seemingly having rolled up his black sleeve for this purpose. When he does look at Sakura, it’s with slightly impressed, raised eyebrows, most likely thinking of what Hound told him she did to that Hidden Rock nin’s eyes back in Wind.

Sakura whips her face back to Hound’s, and it’s her turn to curl her smug lips and say silently, See that? At least Sai appreciates her artistry.

It doesn’t take Hound long to deem this battle not worth fighting, and he rolls the berry in his palm down to pinch between his index finger and thumb, motioning her closer with a flick of the wrist, sighing. “Come’ere.”

Not letting him think better of it, Sakura wastes no time wrapping her lips around the delicate fruit when he holds it up, trapping Hound’s smokey eye fast with her own, the small victory making her heart pound and her nerves vibrate with pleasure, sinking her teeth into its meat and bursting sugar onto her tongue. Hound’s hand is below her mouth, and gravity drips rose-tinted juice from her bite down between his fingers. His digits don’t so much as twitch at the sensation. Neither does his intensifying focus on her, his entire body a still life grayscale painted under a melancholy sky.

A boisterous cry of Hound’s given name breaks their stasis, and she swallows her small bite of fruit, partially chewed, as Hound flicks the stem and pith away, both of their attentions shifting to the group of familiar shinobi dotting the outside of a pale blue-painted shop around the corner they just turned, Whiskers standing on a wooden ladder leaned against the wall below a sagging sign that reads ‘Yamanaka Flowers,’ the blonde sticking out from the misty background like an accidental smear of orange and yellow on the canvas, waving his arm wide, his grin pulling his face open.

Behind him, her little mouse is dressed to patrol the walls in her gray chūnin flak jacket, and has a black bin of large-headed pink and white roses hiked up against her hip, blowing black strands of hair out of her face to glare impersonally in Sakura’s general direction. The Uchiha hovers just behind her like a ghost with a wooden broom, looking comically fascinated by her berry-stained mouth, and so she grabs Hound’s wrist before he can withdraw and licks the juice from his fingers, savoring Hound’s sharp hiss of displeasure while watching the Uchiha tense up with obvious and delectably conflicting emotions.

Her tongue caresses one of the fine ridges of his scars, and Hound’s entire hand jerks in her hold, a coy glance at his concealed expression revealing a static charge to the black look he’s directing at her lips. 

“I’m starting to think you skipped workplace harassment training.” His voice is low and hostile, the words only for her, and they cause ripples of pleasant tremors through her abdomen.

Sakura pulls off his fingers with a satisfied pop that makes his glare turn fiery, and smiles around the words, “I’ve been training my whole life to harass someone like you.”

His eye spasms, and Sakura releases his wrist to face the others with a sly grin, feeling Sai’s arm brush hers as he comes to stand on her other side, flanking her between his body and Hound’s as one of the glass doors to the shop swings open, revealing a lean woman around her age wearing a green apron over dark purple shinobi pants. Her long hair is as pale and fine as silk, gathered into a high pony that swings when she backs her spine into the door to keep it open, her hands overfull with a heavy-looking bucket of florals that her arms let slip loose the second her cloudy blue eyes follow the others’ stares and land on Sakura.

Sakura’s grin evaporates like condensation in the sun as the bucket hits cement with a plastic thud, water pouring out into the already saturated street, flooding the leaves and petals of honey-yellow daffodils and fleshy pink stocks of hyacinths. The sloshing commotion summons a shinobi in jōnin fatigues from inside to the doorway, a young man with black-brown hair tied back from his face into a bouquet of spikes who is initially wholly focused on questioning the woman whose cheeks have lost color, ungloved hands hovering over her trembling ones in search of a wound or reason for her to have fumbled her grip, before his narrow brown eyes snap to Sakura, and he loses color, too.

Hound curses softly behind his mask, and it doesn’t escape her notice how his right hand finds her low back and twists her cotton shirt into his fist as a precaution, nor the way Sai’s boredom dries up when he spots the newcomers, black eyes lit first with recognition, and then with something darker, more viscous, as the corner of his mouth curls a hair’s width down.

It’s the earrings she notices first. The jōnin has brushed silver studs in both earlobes, and they keep catching the light. He has flat, thin brows low over his eyes that make every expression look severe, and a cigarette caught between his teeth, smoke curling lazily up from its burning end.

The woman has the same silver studs in her ears. Drops of water cling to her fingertips from rinsing stems. She looks out of place in that apron covered in water stains and green clippings, like she belongs in something else, something with an open midsection that lets her twist and move through graceful arcs and sweeps, dancing taijutsu.

Touching her fingers to her unpierced earlobe, Sakura notices for the first time the faintest bead of scar tissue when she rolls the skin between her finger and thumb.

Right where an earring would be.

Her headache has reached splitting, her vision crowding with aura, too much of her head shuffled around during her mind sifting, like raking a comb through sand underwater, churning it toward the surface. She feels feminine hands put the needle to her ear, feels a boy’s palm on her shoulder, a lazy grin flashing at the nervous way she wrings her hands in her small lap despite the soothing girl’s murmured assurance—

Sakura doesn’t realize she’s trembling with indiscriminate rage until Hound steps in front of her closer than otherwise typical, looking down at her contorting face with blank assessment, swapping his hold on her shirt for a grip on each shoulder.

Sakura stares at the red spiral on his shoulder, and forces the words out cold. “Who is that?”

Hound doesn’t hesitate to answer, doesn’t test her patience. “Female is a Yamanaka. Male is a Nara.” He doesn’t ask her if she recognizes them, the way he sometimes does when her eyes snag on a face. He doesn’t seem to have to.

It has been years, since something turned Sakura’s stomach like this. Hound shifts his weight, and in that second she gets another glimpse of the Yamanaka taking a shallow step toward her despite the Nara’s arm blocking her at the waist, her misty eyes blown wide and seeking, before Hound’s body once again obscures her sight. But it’s enough. Sakura is beginning to recognize that expression, by now. 

These two knew her.

But it’s different from the others. This isn’t brightening her day with the potential to ruin someone else’s like it usually does, when someone from her alleged past foolishly tries to strike up a conversation. This is hard to breathe around, like that strawberry didn’t go down properly and is lodged in her throat.

It makes her chakra flare like white fire, making everyone but Sai and Hound take a step back.

Worse, Sai is watching the twitching muscles on her face with dissecting discernment, his gaze a scalpel teasing her right cheek. She refuses to show how her spine wants to bend forward, how acid claws up her throat from her chest. She will not show him her weakness, not when it’s all she can do to make sure he doesn’t regret sparing her life in Iron, knowing what she is hiding from him about Itachi’s continued interest in her.

And so she looks up at Hound with her expression wiped clean, and says, crisp and succinct, “I don’t feel like babysitting, today.”

A series of wooden creaks precede Whiskers popping into her field of view, only a few paces away as she and Hound step apart enough to open their chests to the shinobi wiping his hands on his flame-orange flak jacket. “We’re all getting ramen later if you want?” He looks at Hound for some reason, whose jaw tenses beneath his mask.

Sakura looks over the top of Whiskers’ head and unfocuses her eyes. “Pass.”

“But it’s…” He looks at Hound again. 

It fans her anger, until she snaps, “What?”

“Your birthday.” Sakura whips her head to look at Sai in question, who has both hands tucked into his pockets and his head cocked at an angle, looking at her the way he does when she’s acting strange, which is basically the way he looks at her all of the time.

“Birthday?” she parrots, instead of, What the fuck does that have to do with anything?

Sai shrugs, but doesn’t elaborate on his sudden interest in civilian customs. In the ensuing silence, Sakura casts around for the faces of the others seeking an explanation, noting her mouse’s pensive frown, having set her own bucket of flowers down on the porch and begun to busy herself with arranging them for display, and then the Uchiha’s tense stare as he massages his shoulder self-soothingly with a hand slipped under his blue collar, still clutching his broomstick, all while trying to appear nonchalant by leaning on the wall beside the empty ladder.

They look vaguely nauseous. It doesn’t clarify the issue.

Keeping her gaze firmly away from the two nin in the doorway desperately trying to catch her eye, Sakura is about to tell them all where to stick those flowers, when Hound cuts in from beside her with a flatly delivered: “They bought a cake.”

‘Cake.’

The word exists along the same ephemeral plane as things like ‘rainbows’ and ‘natural deaths.’ She knows they exist somewhere, even catches sight of them once in a while, but has had little to no interest or experience in them, and has certainly not been close enough to either to touch.

In the following silence, a few droplets hit the bridge of her uncovered nose, and Sakura sniffs, letting the petrichor ground her pulsing senses. Sai is staring with frightening focus at the Nara who Sakura refuses to look at, back to playing with toothpicks, twirling two of them between his knuckles like the coin game Hound taught them last night. She turns on her heel very slowly, until Sai is at her back, Hound at her front.

She considers it. She does.

She thinks about the mythical cakes and pastries of Hound’s midnight rambles, desserts he likes to talk through every buttery detail of when they’re lying on their backs failing to find sleep as easily as Sai does, trying to drown out the sounds of fights long ended, or in Sakura’s case, unable to close her eyes without seeing a carnation sky that bleeds time into pain without end. It’s inane, but it keeps the worst of it at bay, keeps her from startling awake as often or as violently.

Licking her teeth behind her lips, she notes her mouth still tastes faintly of strawberry. Hound has that patient look on his face she hates. The one that hides his pity. She feels the pull, the temptation, of the foolish. The indulgent. She’s been humoring Team 7 too much, funneling too much energy into appearing to settle into Hound’s normalcy, to contrive connections between her and the others in hopes the Hokage stays off her ass later. But she refuses to be tainted by their weak bodies and minds, their frequent pleasures and sugary, complacent lives.

And so she takes the part of her that wants to say yes, and kills it. Stabs a kunai through the heart of it the way she does anything else that makes her lose track of the mission. Makes her soft.

She’s not like them. She refuses to be like them. Which is why Hound’s eye pulls down at the outer edge before she even speaks, her keeper as keen of her moods as she is becoming of his.

“Tell them they can keep it,” she says, cool as the rain beginning to fall in hard pellets, and body-flickers onto the slick red tiles of the angled rooftops, a fine layer of chakra beneath her boots keeping her from sliding off. Keeping her footing sure.

She’ll make the rest of the walk the shinobi way, she thinks, as the rain picks up speed.

It’s not good, too much time spent on civilian side streets.

…

She does her best to forget about the cake.

She holes up in Hound’s land for the day and rejects all enticements. She rebuilds her atrophied discipline by fasting, turning her nose away from every morsel Hound tries to tempt her with. She reacclimates herself to stasis, to sitting in stillness for hours until every muscle and joint aches, and refuses to participate when Hound convinces Sai to join him in a game of ‘footbag,’ kicking around a small crocheted bag filled with sand in increasingly ridiculous exhibitions of skill. She ignores Sai’s cautious attempts to acknowledge the date or what it means to anyone else, avoids his probing looks and silent curiosity. She stops herself from rubbing her earlobe when she thinks. She stops herself from thinking, at all. She retreats inside herself so far that Hound willingly offers to hand-feed her bites of pan-fried saury, in hopes she’ll ingest something other than water.

She refuses that, too.

But that night, when the vermillion wheels in her head are spinning too fast for sleep, and she is left staring at the inside of the forest-green, waterproof tent they erected in one of the less moldy rooms of the main house to protect them from the leaky roof, Sakura whispers into the darkness in an atrophied rasp born of hours of silence, “Tell me about frosting.”

Sai is in a light sleep on the futon to Hound’s left near the entrance of their tent, all of his weapons still strapped to his limbs save the sheathed tantō lying parallel to his head, his worn blue blanket thrown indifferently over his midsection. In between her and Sai, Hound stares up at the tarp like her, flat on his back with his hands under his head and his boots crossed at the ankles. None of them dress down for sleep. None of them—even Hound—believe in a night that passes without risk, no matter how many this village seems to have on hand.

After a moment, he gets up wordlessly, stealthily navigating past Sai while lifting the flap of their tent open with unnatural silence, the rain outside seeming louder while the flap is raised, and disappears into the thinner black of the house’s interior at night.

When he returns, ducking back inside their shelter, it’s with something in hand.

Their futons are closer together than usual because of the tent, giving him less room to walk as he lowers the boon down to the sliver of wood floor between his futon and hers. Sakura sits up into a cross-legged position facing what looks like, without any chakra directed into night vision, a white lump on a ceramic plate. A dull metal fork rests with its prongs pointed toward the plate’s center.

Hound settles down on his futon with his back to her, laying on top of his blanket the way Sakura does—its feeble warmth not worth the potential nuisance it poses in the event of sudden attack.

The lump takes form the longer she looks, until it’s not a lump but a slice, with pillowy layers of sponge and frosting. She doesn’t know how or when or from where he acquired it; if this is what she thinks it is, or something else. It makes her teeth ache and her lungs shrink. It makes her eyes jump from the ominous slice to Hound’s broad shoulders, to the slice, back to his shoulders.

Brushing the pads of her fingers along the fork’s spine, she hesitates, but he’s not looking, and here in the murky shadows of their sound-muffled tent, it’s easier to let herself take the fork in hand and scrape a line down the side of the slice, gathering frosting like a folded ribbon, and lift it to her salivating mouth. She closes her eyes, smearing the whipped sugar and butter onto her tongue, savoring its silky texture, its vanilla warmth and slightly stale sweetness.

“I didn’t think you’d live past sixteen.”

Sakura freezes in place at Hound’s tacit tone, his intentions bottled up neatly. Metal prongs press down on her tongue, absorbing heat inside her mouth.

“Updates on your status were infrequent enough I rarely knew if you were alive or dead. So—” He pauses to swallow his discomfort, and it makes Sakura swallow, too, sugar burning her dry throat.

He tries again.

“So,” he repeats, “once a year, I’d light a candle. I told myself, if you were alive, it was a birthday candle. If you were dead, it was a memorial candle. Kind of a win-win, never wrong, kind of deal. And then at some point, I’d find out what kind of candle it’d been.”

Hound seems to chew on his next words, reluctant to spit them out where she can see them. She leans forward unconsciously, when he lets them roll off his tongue.

“When you turned seventeen, I started thinking you might make it out. That you were harder to kill than I’d thought you’d be. I thought, this one’s a birthday candle.”

Hound rolls onto his back, tugging his forehead protector down over both eyes and blocking out her only guiding feature on his masked face, before resting his interlaced hands on his chest. 

“Then I found out you’d almost died that spring in River. And the candle thing…lost appeal.”

Her heart pounds insistently in her chest at this extended, strange admission, at all its confounding implications, and she bites down on her fork to steady her hand, sending pangs of discomfort into the roots of her teeth. She wonders if that’s the end of it, but Hound goes on, still lying blind on his back.

“I was getting antsy, waiting to extract you. I started asking for more information, and to shut me up Tsunade gave me every after-action report with your identifier Sai had given us thus far. She told me to brace myself. That your record was, and I quote, ‘monstrous.’” His low voice nears humor, but doesn’t quite reach. “And to be fair it is. Not trying to call the kettle black, here, but… You know.”

She wishes she could see under the black barrier of his blindfold and mask, to see if his mouth curls up or down, if that was a wince or a grin, or if the corners of his eyes are creased with feelings she only catches whiffs of in the smoke of his voice.

“And I was relieved. Because it was…outrageous.” That was definitely a grin. She can hear it in the shape of his words. “I thought Sai was fucking with us. But if even half of it were true, I thought, Sage, she’ll outlive me.”

Her lungs expand, rushing oxygen to her brain and making her lightheaded, her knuckles creaking from how tightly she holds the utensil in her fist, trying not to skewer her tongue.

“What I’m trying to say is you met the brief,” he concludes. There’s a pained sort of pride underlining the statement. A respect for ruthless persistence. An acknowledgement, she thinks breathlessly, of all they have in common. Of how they’ve survived.

It elicits chills, upon chills—the sudden velvet stroke of Hound’s approval.

“You did your part,” he affirms. “Now let me do mine.”

It takes her a second to understand what exactly he’s asking. For her to let him lead, just for now. To let him guide the end of her blade the way Sai did when she was at her worst, and trust him not to blunt or dent its edge.

Her stomach twists as she slides the fork out of her mouth, swallowing granulated remnants of frosting, and she can’t tell if its contracting pains are from hunger, or something else.

Probably hunger.

“You could have just wished me Happy Birthday,” she deadpans, and enjoys the way it sparks rare laughter in Hound’s chest, even if the unfamiliar sound startles Sai awake, the seasoned operative unsheathing his tantō before his eyes fully open. It only makes Hound laugh harder.

It’s a smoldering, warming sound, she thinks, and immediately tries to think of anything else.

While Sai is distracted by the bizarre sight of Hound’s completely covered face, Sakura dips her fork back into the frosting and licks it clean, eyes burning from staring unblinkingly into the dark, and allows the heat of Hound’s praise to dissolve within her like sugar on her tongue, until its sweetness makes her smiling jaw ache.