Black Bough

Under the shivering black veil of the forest at night, the sun deep in mourning, Sakura feels her short legs begin to quake with indecision. She grabs a black cotton fistful of the back of her mysterious guide’s shirt, the backslope of adrenaline from sneaking out of the village making her small grip weak.

He is like one of the painted dolls she stares at in shop windows, flawless and beautiful, inhuman in the precision of his heel pivoting without disturbing soil as he stops and turns his head to look over his shoulder, not a wrinkle of feeling in his porcelain face. 

For a week straight, he has come to her at night, rousing her from her fitful sleep with her back to the peeling wall to lead her out into the dark, and the fatigue is fast catching up to her. It’s getting harder to think past the praise he gives her skills while counting calluses on her hands with his nimble fingers after sparring, feeding her small corrections in between that capture her ambitions, giving advice she has never heard, things that make her scoot closer to him on logs and listen more raptly. He is unlike anyone in the village, beyond any shinobi her age in ability and ease during training—jōnin level, she suspects—and it is getting easier and easier to follow him out of the orphanage window, past the walls that protect her, and lose herself in the thrill of his promises, of which he makes many.

Promises that make her mind whirl, promises of strength, of power, of belonging. If only she makes the necessary sacrifices.

And the sacrifice will be steep.

At age eleven Sakura knows the universe gives nothing without charge, knows how every scrap of good comes with a heap of bad, how an extra ladle full of oats at dinner means letting a grown man’s hand run along the curveless planes of your body for a full minute in the musty office of the orphanage. Sakura has been getting hungrier since she began these midnight spars. The trade she once turned her nose up at is growing tempting.

Tonight, Sai has offered to take her to his teacher. To introduce them formally.

“Wait.” Her voice trembles, a whisper just loud enough to cross the space between them without succumbing to the nocturnal twittering of insects and the titters of bats that hunt them. “What will I lose? If I say yes?”

His face is a puzzle of shadows. Even his eyes don’t shine with moonlight, every eyelash, every hair on his head, too pure a black to let light escape. He measures her face, curates his response as carefully as he has every word since he first walked her into the woods and told her stories of what she could have, what he could give her.

“You have already lost it,” he says, and Sakura’s held breath flees her lungs at his words, its mist joining the thin fog blanketing the grove of ancient oaks, making it feel like walking through a dream, a place reality can never reach.

She tightens her hold on his shirt when he shifts to look forward, and his chin angles toward her once again. “And what do I gain?”

This gets his attention, reshapes his focus on her from one of indifference to interest, as he turns to face her more fully, dragging his eyes down the whole of her before snapping back to meet her fear-shimmering, wide-eyed stare.

“Anything you can take for yourself.”

It is a perfect response.

The only kind, she finds, he is capable of giving.

Her fingers slip from his shirt, left to twitch at her side as her lungs overwork. The low breeze cuts across the forest floor in a shuffling hiss of reordering, moving this leaf here, nudging this beetle there, rolling this twig to and fro. Sakura senses she is being reordered, too, nudged so carefully in a new direction.

It feels rehearsed, the way he weaves his fingers between her own, his skin bone-cold as his hand clasps hers tightly in his own, so tightly she doesn’t think she could pull away if she tried.

When he resumes their somber march, he walks backwards, knows the way well enough to traverse it blind, and keeps his eyes on her, letting her stumble ever forward on legs that want to quit, with nerves that want to freeze her in place. It’s his eyes on hers that keep her walking. The promise in them, of always being in sight, that he won’t look away. She will never be looked away from, again.

So long as she walks between the lines of his shadow.

…

The sun has taken hold of Konoha. It bears down on all with equal force, unseasonable and indifferent to rank and tenure, reddening faces behind white ceramic masks, darkening the backs of light gray training shirts in unique shapes and patterns; evidence of their humanity, she thinks, the way they all sweat differently. The fact they sweat at all.

Sakura has not moved enough to sweat.

It is midday, not yet the high heat Hound predicted for this afternoon, but still unusually warm for early April. Though it’s a nice change of pace from the steady rain of last week. Anbu operatives crowd the private training ground that borders the forest, forming pockets of specialists. There is restless energy in the air. Anticipation. For what, she’s not sure. There aren’t usually this many operatives mulling about, and the high walls that surround the grounds only make all those within appear more like animals pacing a cage.

Sakura has spent most of the day watching the others train in rotation, some spending an hour carving wooden posts with a ninjatō before wandering into the shade to meditate, then moving on to trading blows with taijutsu on the far side of the largest clearing within a wide oval of what was once gravel, now worn down into sand that is kicked up and away in small clouds of dust with each sweep of the leg and tumble of limbs.

She’s not been permitted to join them. Not that it looks particularly stimulating, with everyone holding back so dramatically, casting shifting stares at each other when their backs are turned, silently speculating on hidden faces, hidden strengths. New to black ops, she assumes. Or just timid. She imagines that could be what’s taking Hound so long, stuck in meetings underground. Deciding what to do with her now that she’s being folded back into the corps and everyone’s trying to smooth out the wrinkles the way that most benefits them—her probation not quite over, but evolving.

Yesterday she was informed by the Hokage’s assistant, Shizune, that her library access has been temporarily ‘suspended’ until further review of her memories is conducted, at which point Hound interrupted with a low whistle, turning to Sakura with a poorly timed, “I’ll admit. You had them pinned right,” which Sakura is fairly certain has only made the assistant more determined to thwart her, the stern woman seemingly as fond of Hound as she is of Sakura. That is to say, not very.

She wonders if he’s busy making things worse in today’s meetings, too. If he’s advocating for her to be allowed to train and mingle, definitely not bunk, here with the other operatives, or if he’s insisting on further seclusion and meeting resistance.

To be fair, it wasn’t all bad news yesterday. The short-haired assistant sighed like it pained her while flipping sheets on a clipboard, to lifelessly say, “Rejoice. Your masks are ready.”

It feels good, having white ceramic secured to her face once more; these recent months have been the longest she’s ever gone without. Her old mask had blacked out eyes, but apparently many of the newer masks at main branch forgo eye holes entirely. The seal she and Sai’s masks came with, designed to make the masks translucent from the perspective of the wearer, needed some light tweaking to reach Sai’s exacting standards, but it's all still very familiar.

Seated on a granite boulder in a stripped-down Anbu uniform to accommodate the heat, feeling like a reptile in the sun, reluctantly consistent with her new Anbu namesake, Sakura looks down at the single-edged sword in her hands, holding it by its wrapped handle, turning it over in the light to examine the straight blade and letting the sun run across its steel edge in a bead of light Sakura follows the path of with black-gloved fingers, up and over the smooth sides of its square metal guard.

She’s been told all Anbu are issued a ninjatō, even if not all deign to use it. Sakura prefers the shorter blade of the tantō, mostly because of her small stature. Her back is not long enough to comfortably keep a blade longer than eleven inches holstered behind her shoulder. Mobility is not a sacrifice she intends to make, and the space inside her storage seals is valuable real estate.

In front of her, Sai sits with his back to the boulder—sand dusting his pants, gathering in the folds of the seams between pockets—oiling what may be a third of every kunai he owns. He sets the fifteenth one in the pile to his right when it’s finished before picking up another, light bouncing off the blades laid out on his black towel and into her eyes, making her nose tingle with what would be a sun sneeze, if she weren’t trained in ignoring bodily urges.

She’s relieved that Sai is being inducted into Team Ro the same as her, though as a reserve, still unable to leave the village until M0-1 is dealt with. She’d worried, for a moment there, that the Hokage might not keep her word, given the trend so far.

Speaking of Team Ro:

About fifty feet away, Hound’s squad re-emerges from under the wide concrete lip of one of the four underground bunkers the bulk of Anbu operates out of. In this mole-like, tunneling behavior, at least, the main branch is similar to Root. Hound is flanked by cat masks on either side, and she can’t put her finger on it, but something about his straight-backed posture speaks to irritation.

There is a disagreement occurring, Sakura suspects.

The woman, Coyote, has her head angled toward Hound as he walks between her and the other member of Team Ro, the vertical red stripe at the top of her cat mask hard to spot in the glare of the sun reflecting off of it. She is tightening her hands into fists, and whatever she is saying seems to be making Tiger’s nervous energy compound, his chakra radiating stress like heat waves.

Their bodies are wound tight, Coyote and Tiger’s gray training shirts tied at their waists, leaving their arms exposed by black sleeveless undershirts that display the red Anbu flames on their shoulders, their defined muscles pronounced with tension. Sakura and Sai did the same with their own shirts, minutes ago, enjoying the sun’s heat on her skin despite the sideways looks she and Sai receive when other shinobi see the advanced seals inked onto their skin and the blue flames on their right shoulders where they’re expecting red. Hound hasn’t mentioned it, yet, but he’s likely already thinking of ways to cover or alter that particular difference. As if she’d let him.

Sage knows she humors him enough.

As he stalks toward her, she’s not surprised to see Hound has chosen to remain in full uniform, long sleeves included, and bear the heat. She’s come to see him as unexpectedly masochistic.

“Looks like the cats have their backs arched,” she says.

Tiger is looking directly at her, now, from behind his green tiger-striped mask, his blacked-out glare ornamented by red half-moons on either side. His stare prickles the back of her neck, and she gets the sense she’s being sized up.

She slides the ninjatō into its sheath and sets it aside. She will not be needing it. Not unless it proves itself useful.

Pausing in his task, Sai tilts his head back and up to look at her, not immediately understanding her meaning. Metaphors are not his strong suit.

Like her, he’s been issued a new Anbu mask to replace their Root kit. She is still getting used to it, the large red swirl where the mouth should be, like blood circling a drain, the rest of the mask an eyeless white. Sakura’s mask bears a similarly abstract design: a thick black tendril stretching from the lower right and curving up and over the missing mouth, curling back up and over to a point above where her left eye is hidden under ceramic. Sai says it looks like a branch. Hound says it’s a lizard tail. They are both wrong.

It is only a line.

Hound holds a rigid hand up to indicate silence to the two dogging his heels, seemingly pulling rank, and Coyote falls a step behind, a sulking air about her that Sakura finds distasteful in a shinobi.

Seemingly giving up on waiting for an explanation, Sai returns to his project. The left side of the small gray cloth Sai is using to oil his knives is growing saturated, and so he begins using the right. He has his gloves off, black seals stark against the pale skin on his palms and the backs of his hands. Sakura doesn’t have any over her knuckles, like he does, yet. It looks like a painful area to strike with a needle. It makes her want to try it. See if she can remain as stoic as Sai did when he did it to himself. She’s almost certain she can.

She doesn’t recognize one of the seals on his hands. Must be something new he’s working on. Sai can change them at will, able to activate and lift them from skin as chakra beasts, able to shift and remove his chakra ink from the dermal layer if he pleases. She’ll have to ask him later, or touch them to sense the shapes of the chakra they hold, she thinks, to learn what the new ones do.

She waits until Team Ro is nearly on top of them to look up from Sai’s methodical movements.

It’s her second time seeing Hound’s fox mask up close since Iron, the first being this morning, and the red slashes under the black eyes make her vision want to narrow, something more prickly than nostalgia clogging her airway before she manages to suppress the reaction.

“Chigoe, report to the Hokage immediately for housing. Gila, with me. You’ve got paperwork,” he says, pointing with two fingers at Sai and Sakura respectively as he relays the orders, and then pointing his thumb to his right to indicate direction before he continues walking.

It’s unlike him to skip introductions, even if she and Team Ro have technically met. But Sakura is more interested in what he did say than what he didn’t.

Housing.

A shallow glance shared with Sai’s cocked mask confirms he’s looking meaningfully at her, too. Team Ro is being deployed the second she’s inducted, as predicted. The Hokage has to declare where to put him, while Hound is out of the village.

Sakura picks up the ninjatō she’d set beside her and slides down the boulder. With a nod from Sai, she tosses him her short sword to pack as a spare with his kunai and leaves him to follow orders, Tiger and Coyote giving her space as she falls into step behind Hound.

The thought of Sai’s new codename, Chigoe—the smallest known species of flea, of all things—makes Sakura exhale heavily to avoid a laugh.

Hound’s bleak sense of humor is showing.

Cobra would have been the obvious choice, given it’s Sai’s favored chakra beast, but Hound has never been one for the obvious, and apparently this was simply too good of an opportunity for him to pass up.

He’s named Sai after a parasitic, blood-drinking flea that feeds off warm-bodied creatures to live. Usually you get it from walking barefoot through sands you shouldn’t, but they can also attach themselves to fur—say, the coat of a certain Hound who is still grappling with the fact he’s accidentally picked up this infestation without a plan to be rid of him. She is almost certain he would have called him ‘Dog Flea,’ if he could, but was reminded repeatedly by some poor paper nin it had to be one word, at which point he probably just chose the smallest one he could think of.

He took obvious pleasure in delivering the news, eye-smiling brightly as Sai lost a bit of fine control over his right eyebrow, the muscle twitching down in genuine irritation while he took the proffered mask with no small amount of disinclination.

Her name isn’t much better, as far as having one over on her.

Gila. Pronounced as ‘Hee-la.’

As in Gila monster. A heavy, sluggish reptile with no offensive merit whatsoever. A name selected with the pure intention of pissing her off for the rest of her Anbu career.

She never put much stock in main-branch Anbu’s little code names, but Gila? She’d rather go back to F11-6. She is still working through the insult. Every time she brings it up again it only compounds Hound’s growing joy.

The conversation with Hound this morning went like so:

‘Did you choose the names?’ she asked.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘It’s a lizard.’

‘It’s venomous,’ he offered, and then immediately undercut. ‘I hear its bite makes people mildly dizzy.’

‘It’s slow and cowardly.’

‘It does its best to survive the desert.’

‘It’s a slow little lizard that spends most of its time hiding in a hole in the ground.’

‘I thought you missed your underground bunk bed.’

The conversation ended peacefully with Sakura managing to take a small chunk of skin out of Hound’s forearm with a kunai before being disarmed and pinned to the grass with a knee in the center of her back and a firm hand on the back of her head, making her kiss dirt until she went limp, rather than get serious and force him to get serious and then accidentally kill each other.

He reacted faster than last time, his block and counter a little sharper, a little stronger. He’s been training while she sleeps, she suspects. After all, she’d been aiming to make a larger gash.

Only hours later, the knick on his forearm is already starting to scab, turning a deep rust. He heals quickly, as most nin with above average chakra reserves do. Though, Sakura has a theory that volume isn’t actually the key variable in that equation. She thinks it’s chakra density—an aspect of chakra not formally acknowledged in most schools of thought, mostly because so few can sense it. She has average chakra reserves for an elite shinobi, but she can mimic that type of accelerated healing if she compresses her chakra and cycles it more quickly, creating an illusion of density. She hasn’t had a chance to test that particular idea on anyone but herself, and she hasn’t felt inclined to share the discovery if it turns out to be universally true.

It will only make other people more difficult to kill, if her test subjects live to spread the news.

Speaking of test subjects: she now has none. Sai used to procure them for her, hide them away for her to dawdle with in her spare time.

She wonders if she would be allowed to test it on prisoners; Hound hasn’t mentioned what they do with them, outside of Root. It certainly wouldn’t fall under the purview of the Cat Division, under which Team Ro resides.

While she was handled with velvet gloves during her interrogation, she recently learned Anbu has an entire division dedicated to Torture & Interrogation, not so much a bifurcation of regular T&I but a satellite, called the Wolf Division. If she weren’t so focused on sticking herself like ink on a needle into Hound’s skin, over and over until her image blooms, she’d consider asking for a trial period over there, to disguise her research as inventive torture. She needs to start pushing the boundaries of what she thinks she knows, try uncovering those subconscious skills that are proving difficult to coax forward. If there are prisoners sentenced to death rotting away in the bowels of the building, Sakura could remove their tongues without anyone caring, and experiment without fear of having her skill-development exposed prematurely.

That’s where Orochimaru went wrong with the Leaf, she’s always thought: using tricky words like ‘research’ and ‘science’ and ‘I will become immortal at the cost of inferior lives.’ If he’d just said he was torturing enemies of Konoha, he’d be a fucking hero. Unlikely, she thinks, that the council would have stopped him from body-snatching their political opponents in Iwa or Sound, if he’d offered.

Maybe he did offer, and the council is full of idiots. No wonder Danzō branched off, did his own thing.

“I’m sensing Wrong Think,” Hound says, without turning around, and Sakura shakes off his (honestly preternatural) awareness of her moods by rolling out her shoulders, interlacing her fingers and stretching her arms up, enjoying the warm air on her skin after such a damp interlude in the season.

“Just thinking about how nice it was cuddling up last night,” she delivers flatly, and enjoys Hound’s staticky silence as he chooses not to engage her antics, his chakra charging the air as the cats’ ears perk up in affronted interest.

Hound was less than thrilled waking up to Sakura’s glowing green eyes inches from his face this morning, the back of Sai’s head resting on Hound’s bandaged shin as he laid perpendicular to Hound, whittling a chunk of oak into a leaf with a hunting knife. It’s one of their new games, proving they can touch him when he sleeps without waking him, giving him deeper bruises under his eyes and making him paranoid about where he puts his futon.

It’s endless entertainment, but it’s also functional. Hound doesn’t tense up as often when they touch him. He’s getting used to them. By showing him just how vulnerable he is to them, how capable they are of killing him, it becomes more obvious, the fact no harm has come to him, yet.

Sai used the same grooming tactic on Sakura during her early training, if with less cheek. Back when she’d required more frequent upkeep and coddling, struggling to find her bearings among the other recruits. She’d fall asleep alone in her bunk and wake up with her face nuzzling his chest and his arm around her back, breathing in his elusive scent and wondering how he did it. She wishes he’d kept doing it, even after achieving his desired results. He used to touch her so often, back then, before gradually weaning her off his constant and calculated physical affection.

Letting her hands fall from her stretch down behind her head, elbows up, supporting some of the weight of her skull with her palms to the back of her neck below where she’s tied her hair, she allows her eyes to stray from the scab on Hound’s arm, to the silver hair on the back of his head, to the growing cluster of operatives gathering around the largest sand pit at the center of the training ground Hound appears to be leading them past in a suspiciously wide arch, before her gaze drifts to Hound’s back, watching his shoulder blades shift beneath the material of his vest while he walks.

He’s better at hiding it than most, but Sakura has spent the last eight years—or, nine now, she supposes—learning to recognize bad news before it makes its way down the short chain of command to her, and something about the way he’s over-controlling each movement of his body gives the impression he’s having control taken away somewhere else. Butting up against authority and being forced to carry down the order.

He’s probably been fighting this deployment all morning. But as Sai planned, he didn’t fight hard enough, part of him wondering if this might be an opportunity to get her alone, get her thinking ‘independently.’ Now he’s bearing the consequences of that internal struggle.

She doesn’t attempt to disguise her glance as she angles her head to look behind her from the corners of her eyes, sizing up Coyote’s agitation as she ties back her foolishly long, straight purple hair in a pony with a subtle lack of ease. Sakura had thought she was angry, but now that she’s studying the pace of her breathing, the reduced grace in how she shifts her weight as she walks, the way she lets her hands fall back to her sides a touch too carelessly—Coyote is anxious. Wrong-footed.

It seems to be getting worse, the longer Sakura openly assesses her.

A quick look at Tiger, as the tall brunette fidgets with untying and re-securing his training shirt around his hips, does not alleviate the team’s overall appearance of unease. 

She is a bit disappointed, what with the rumors of Team Ro being so ghoulish. Turns out Hound was the only one to be feared. In that sense, Sakura and Sai are much better suited to Hound’s team than the current members. It makes Hound all the more impressive, she’ll admit; the fact he was able to build such a fearsome reputation lugging this much dead weight—though, the best oral histories of his actions in the field are from the days he only worked alone. Now she sees why. Maybe during this next mission, Sakura can help trim the fat. He’d suspect, sure, but he wouldn’t be able to prove it was her, if Tiger or Coyote—whichever proves least useful—turns out to have high cholesterol and suffers a heart attack while deployed.

“Eyes forward, Gila.”

It’s becoming uncanny, his growing sense for sharp turns in her thoughts. She has to double-check her chakra, just to confirm none of that killing intent slipped out.

She follows orders without fuss, taking to staring at the black fabric of the mask visible around the back of Hound’s neck, predictably present even under his Anbu kit, but she doesn’t need to turn around to feel Tiger and Coyote flinch when she summons a senbon into her hand and begins to twirl it idly behind her head between fingers to sate her boredom the way her favorite Tanuki is prone to doing during his night surveillance shifts—the only mask who doesn’t attempt to hide his presence from her—both cats’ paws twitching a little close to their weapon pouches to play off.

Jumpy.

“Hound.”

The deep voice cuts across the remaining distance between Hound’s approaching team and the outskirts of the gathering bodies he was obviously trying to casually avoid.

The man who the voice belongs to bears an impressive stature, broad-shouldered, dressed similarly to Hound, only compromising even less on formalities. Where Hound has his black sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his gray flak jacket open, this man has his sleeves down, his jacket zipped up to the chin, every inch of skin covered by either clothing or the white bandages binding his lower legs. Even his hair is covered beneath a black headscarf. Worse, he’s holding a brown clipboard. Sakura inherently dislikes anyone with a clipboard.

Hound’s entire demeanor shifts artificially as he leads his team closer to the man, his movements finding their usual lethargy as he raises two fingers in a flippant wave. “Yo.”

“Commander,” Coyote greets from behind Sakura, dipping her head at the same time Tiger does.

Commander. There aren’t many of those in Anbu, to her knowledge. Maybe seven, total. Sakura tilts her head and slides her senbon back into her palm, lowering her arms and stopping when Hound does, staying to his back right and enjoying the way it makes the cats’ hackles rise, that she’s naturally assumed what Sakura learned during this morning’s orientation lecture is the vice-captain’s position in where she stands behind him; that Hound lets her do it, is another matter entirely. Coyote bristles the most. Could mean that place is technically hers.

For now.

The commander’s attention quickly moves on to Sakura. “This is her?”

Hound sweeps a lethargic hand toward her, palm up. “Gila,” he says, “meet Mamba, Commander of the Wolf Division.”

Oh. She was just thinking about him. It puts good humor in her voice when she angles her head down in a brief gesture of deference, greeting him with a clipped but mannerly, “Commander,” that Mamba returns with a nod.

Her respectful tone makes Hound angle his mask skeptically to look over his shoulder at her, a silent, ‘So you do know how to speak to superiors,’ passing between them unacknowledged, before he refocuses on Mamba.

As Hound runs through some flippant small talk with the commander, Sakura memorizes his mask in case she needs to recognize him in the future. It’s as abstract as Sakura’s, a thick green line vertically bisecting the middle.

“I’ll see you all downstairs, then,” Mamba says soon after, turning to leave, but Hound’s raised hand stops him.

“Actually, as I was just explaining to Dog, Gila will be sitting this little exercise out.”

Fighting more than the mission this morning, sounds like.

Mamba looks down at his clipboard, lifts a few sheets of paper bearing tables of information, and lets the pages fall from his black-clad fingers. “She’s participating.”

“That’s still under review,” Hound says, lightly, and Sakura steps closer to his right shoulder, interest piqued. “Chigoe hasn’t been called to participate. Seems unfair to only ask Gila to prove her worth, yeah? You have to treat the young ones fairly or they might feel cheated.”

She hears the muffled breath the commander takes behind his mask, and feels her mouth try to quirk up at the exasperation she hears there. Hound must make trouble for this one, often.

“Chigoe is a reserve. There are no grounds for Gila’s exemption. She was placed in your squad temporarily by order of the Hokage, without going through selection, bypassing all the proper channels. Under normal circumstances this would neve—”

“Is this conversation going to run long? Because if I’m going to fit in my thirty-six-hour pre-mission self-care routine before we’re deployed, I’ll need to start now.”

“Anbu squads are deliberated on internally. With all due respect for the office of the Kage, this is highly unusual.”

“Well.” Hound tilts his head as if thinking it over. “Now that you mention it, she is a bit unusual. You know I just found out she’s double jointed?”

Sakura is not, in fact, double jointed. Which is just as well. Hypermobility could be considered a weakness, in the hands of the capable.

Mamba sounds about as tired as Sakura is starting to feel just listening, his clipboard hand sagging. “All new active recruits participate.”

It’s a shockingly cold sound, Hound’s breathy laugh. Sakura wishes she could see his face. “How convenient, that after years in the field she somehow qualifies.”

After a deliberating pause, Mamba tables the argument in the most combative way possible, stating, “Next cycle, she’s participating. We’ve been tolerant of the situation, more than was required of us, but we can’t have a recruit whose skills have not been confirmed, and she will be evaluated for other squads.” He ducks his mask closer to Hound’s to speak at lower volume. “The council is ill at ease. Some of the other captains have voiced their concerns about the…uncharacteristic favoritism you’ve displayed. Unless you have a valid reason I’ve yet to hear?”

Hound seems to consider this.

“She’s shy around strangers,” is what he comes up with, and Sakura feels the cats behind her cringe with second-hand embarrassment. She finds this side of Hound endearing, if only for how quickly it sucks the life out of those around him. It borders on forbidden jutsu.

Mamba finds it less endearing than Sakura does. “I’ll see her in the Box next cycle, or I’ll see you dragged into Dog’s office signing your resignation as captain of Team Ro.”

The exchange makes Sakura’s thoughts whirr. Resignation as captain. That’s an interesting threat, given Hound’s widely appreciated value. On the surface, it’s an empty one; the only immediate benefit of which appears to be access to Sakura without Hound’s hovering authority in their way by stripping his rank. But even Konoha is a hidden village, built by shinobi. The surface is rarely where you find answers.

It begs the question: Where else does the council want him, if not leading a squad?

Narrowing her eyes behind her mask, Sakura can take a guess.

She isn’t the only one who's had the thought Hound’s skills would be better utilized without saddling him with extra weight. Hound has kept a tight lid on her and Sai’s true abilities, so the true potential they hold as a squad could slip the council’s notice; what hasn’t slipped their notice, is his monopolizing of them, his overprotectiveness. He’s taking too long to deliver her and Sai to the council. From that lens, Hound is an obstacle to utilizing Sakura and Sai, and they are an obstacle to utilizing him.

Someone wants to bring back the glory days, when Hound didn’t have anyone to protect, or the limiting awareness of his subordinates' eyes on his every move in the field.

Someone wants what Sakura wants.

Hatake Kakashi, at his full potential.

But this isn’t how Sakura plans to get it.

Oblivious—for once—of her churning malcontent, Hound watches Mamba’s wide back for a good thirty seconds as the commander pushes through the crowd of operatives, checking names on his clipboard as he goes, before turning to Sakura with forced levity, an iciness to his demeanor that seeps past his fox mask and makes her heart race. “Well. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

…

In the time it takes Ino to design and construct a simple stone water feature—consisting of a bowl-like reservoir cupping a sphere with a hole down its center, up which a seal pumps water from the bowl to run down its curves—Shikamaru has only taken out two pink azalea shrubs and one hydrangea to pot and move far away from the garden backing up to the guest room she’s spent most of yesterday and this morning analyzing and rearranging.

Stepping carefully around the piles of loose dirt and torn roots behind where he’s crouched with soil-darkened hands and a half-burned cigarette held loosely between his lips, his leather sandals bending at the toes, Ino sets the stone water feature down in the grass and backs away from it, wiping her hands on her light blue pants to admire her work.

“Not bad, right?” she asks.

Shikamaru shakes some of the dirt off one hand and pinches his cigarette between his index and middle fingers, exhaling a thin cloud of smoke into the clear air of morning while glaring into the hole he just made in the ground digging up the roots of a third azalea.

“I shouldn’t be doing this.”

Ino rolls her eyes, not surprised by the sentiment. Shika feels about gardening the way she feels about shogi. It’s all well and good that he enjoys it, but that doesn’t mean she can get through a game without rolling around on the floor and groaning any time he asks to play.

“Well, if you weren’t taking your sweet time—”

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” he interrupts, smoke-parched and restrained.

Ino lets her parted lips fall closed, hesitating only a moment before she pivots barefoot on the grass and walks a few feet to the guest porch, climbing up onto its mahogany-stained deck to avoid being forced to meet his gaze.

He’s had that stern look on his face ever since he stepped foot in her two-bedroom house last night to see her rolling up the plush beige rug in the guest room, sliding it out through the hallway like pushing a sled.

Shikamaru may be a genius, but it takes him hours at times, to trace his fingers down every strand in his complex webs of thought and arrive at the words he wants to say. To weigh the merit of saying them at all.

It was only a matter of time, she knew, before he found the words to give her what for.

Dusting dirt and pebbles off the bottoms of her calloused feet before leaving the deck, knowing she’ll be cleaning the floors anyway, Ino pads into the stripped-down bedroom she’s been prepping for Sai since leaving the Hokage’s office yesterday, pushing up the long sleeves of the charcoal black shirt Shika was wearing under his vest last night before it ended up on the floor, the way his shirts often do when he shows up unannounced and crashes on her couch after a particularly trying mission, overheating in the middle of the night and throwing his shirt at the wall, where she finds it in the morning.

He’d given her a long, evaluating look when he caught her sliding her arm through the sleeve of the arguably-disgusting, post-mission garment at dawn, but Ino hasn’t been sleeping well, or bathing as often, or eating, and the strong scent of his sweat permeating the fabric she noticed when picking it up off the floor is the first thing in days that has cleared her head, made it easier to think. Her ego traded places with the shirt, and now rests solemnly on the hardwood.

He chose not to mention it, instead treading slowly around her in search of fresh clothes. The gray sweats and olive-green loose-collared shirt he pulled from her bedroom closet—pieces of two civilian outfits and a jōnin uniform he keeps here for nights he’s too lazy to go home, right next to Ino’s dusty jōnin fatigues that rarely see daylight since she established herself in T&I—is now peppered with soil and ash in her peripheral vision, as Shika rinses his hands in her new fountain and shakes them mostly dry. He leaves his sandals on the deck and follows her inside.

After wiping her hands on her pants again, Ino picks up a velvet brown pillow off the exposed wood where there used to be an area rug, running her fingers over its gentle texture.

“I know what I need to do differently,” she says, steeling herself for an argument. “I’m prepared, now. He won’t catch me off guard again.” It’s a gross exaggeration, she thinks, but she’ll be damned if she admits it.

This pillow is too soft, she determines. It’ll have to go. Before she can leave the room with it, Shika plucks it from her hands. She turns too fast to retrieve it and ends up face-to-face with him, with his chocolate brown eyes and rich tobacco breaths that smell like summer nights drifting off to sleep with her head on his shoulder, and his reliable, slightly damp, stupid hand gripping the stolen cushion up and slightly behind his head.

“Redecorating isn’t going to change the fundamental problem with this situation.”

“It’s not redecorating,” she snaps, snatching back the pillow that now has a wet thumbprint and stomping out into the hall, though, it sort of is.

She’s had ample time to sift through every detail she can graze from that horrific series of moments inside Sai’s twisted head, and she plans to use every scrap of detail to correct everything she did wrong the last time she had him under her roof.

She’s taking out the flowers because they clearly anger him, replacing them with a water feature to soothe him subconsciously with the element he most closely associates with memories of Sakura. She removed the rug because he dislikes most synthetic textures. She dragged her oak-framed guest bed out through the sliding doors that lead to the garden and gifted it to her nearest neighbor in the compound, replacing it with a firm futon for the same reason she tosses this brown cushion onto the living room couch instead of leaving it against the wall in Sai’s temporary room. Anything too plush triggers a strange surge of predatory instinct, like he wants to tear anything soft open and see what’s inside. Freak.

“You don’t need to prove yourself. You don’t need to prove you aren’t afraid of him.”

His voice has deepened with frustration. With stale fear. The kind he chews through when Ino’s taken a mission off village and is fighting where he can’t see her, the kind that makes him wait up all night pacing the Kage’s office halls waiting for a status update.

Ino dodges Shika’s attempt to grab her arm, slipping past him into the hall, but doesn’t hold his anxiety against him. Ino does the same fucking thing, unable to relax no matter how many times he comes back unscathed. Because they were too relaxed as children, and one day Sakura waved goodbye at the training grounds and slipped quietly from their loose grasps seemingly forever. Sakura did not come back on her own. She did not come back unscathed, and for years they thought she wasn’t coming back at all. They hold onto each other the way they failed to hold onto her. It's their unspoken mutual agreement, not to let their fists loosen for even a second.

And now Ino’s taking risks.

“He didn’t choose this,” she sibilates, checking that none of the pictures hung in the hall are of flowers, and pulls a sketch of a purple tulip her mother gave her off the wall, tucking it under her arm. Sakura didn’t choose this. She has to believe that.

“Just because he didn’t choose what was done to him, doesn’t mean he won’t choose to do bad things to you.”

“He’s smart enough not to rock the boat beyond what he already did. He won’t risk his position in the village again like that for a while,” she retorts, hoping it’s true, bracing a palm on the wooden doorway and turning into the sun-warmed guest room, having slid its back doors open earlier to air it out, removing any lingering odors that could darken Sai’s mood. “All he did was try to scare me. He could have done much worse.”

“But he wanted to,” he says, practically breathing down her neck. “He wanted to do worse.”

She tries not to let the words strike fear in her. If he’s going to crowd her, he may as well make himself useful, she thinks, and hands him the sketch from the hall. “Take this,” she says, but Shika grabs her wrist instead of the frame, trying to get her to look him in the eyes.

“I’ve seen how he looks at you,” he says, slow and imploring, and Ino keeps her eyes on the toughened skin of his hand. “He wants to hurt you, Ino. He’s being careful, but he wants to.”

“He wasn’t exactly batting his eyelashes at you, either,” she drawls, but she knows exactly what he means.

She knows, because Sai showed her how she looked to him, emptying her stomach contents and wailing childlike on the floor of the flower shop; how easy he thinks she is to break; how that frailty tempts his instincts; how he’d wanted to keep breaking her until she stopped making noise altogether. How he’d refrained.

Shikamaru’s hand tightens on her wrist, and Ino sighs.

“I know,” she concedes, feeling sick, but she can’t let it stop her.

Because on Sakura’s birthday, Ino saw something Sai didn’t want her to see.

She saw Sakura’s sunlit face warmed with playful joy in the fragile breath before her eyes met Ino’s. She saw that Sakura’s eyes still glitter with mirth. She saw that Sakura’s nose has greater clusters of freckles across its bridge than when they were young. That those freckles crease up when she’s smiling just the same as they do in Ino’s memories. That Sakura is still capable of smiling at all.

Sai purposefully misrepresented her. She’s not just the hollow mask of cruelty he forced into Ino’s head. She is full of life. And she is home.

And she walked away from Ino without a backward glance.

Ino spent the evening of Sakura’s birthday chain-smoking on her back porch and crying silently in embarrassing intervals while Shika watched over her like a sentry, rubbing her back through every frame-shaking realization, because Sakura’s eyes are still the purest green Ino has ever seen, refracting light like it’s coming from inside her instead of the sun. Her hair is a slightly lighter shade of pink than in girlhood, like the frosted edge of a cyclamen’s petals. Her bone structure has thinned out her face, cheekbones lifting with age until her face resembles a woodland fairy from the storybooks they used to read more than a shinobi, even with the scar on her jaw.

“What is she, a model?” she’d said caustically, exhaling another burning cloud of smoke to fog the night, hoarse from anguish and joy and too many cigarettes in a row, because the girl she knew isn’t gone. Only changed. Only wounded. Only stronger. Only here.

Sakura is still in there. She’s not a monster. She’s a woman. A powerful one. And Ino has to get closer.

And the only way to do that is to change Sai’s mind.

After a breath, Shika takes the framed tulip from her hand.

Brushing his other hand from her wrist and walking further into the brightly lit room, she seeks out the low wood table in the corner to check if she’d remembered to put out the ink and paper she bought for Sai to entertain himself with. She did. Good.

There’s the soft wooden sound of the frame being set down, and Ino tenses all over again.

The crackling sound of Shika taking an aggressive pull off his cigarette tickles her ears, and she looks from the corners of her eyes at how he nicks the shrinking stick from his lips and pinches the sun-darkened bridge of his nose with his other hand, leaning back against the unadorned wall from which she already removed every piece of art, knowing now how exacting Sai’s standards are, and how irritable he is when forced to stare at ‘sloppy’ work for hours on end.

“You live alone,” he says, eventually, and Ino can’t roll her eyes hard enough. If one more man points that out to her this week she’s going to scream. If her mother were still alive, she’d tell her to dig her heels in and stand her ground, and so that’s what Ino does.

She’s not sure the white-painted wood dresser is a good idea. Closed storage likely makes him distrustful. More distrustful than he already is. Nodding once, she starts pulling the dresser out from the wall on the right side while trying not to knock the small blue ceramic ashtray off its top, the wood making an unpleasantly high, rumbling sound as it’s dragged against the floorboards.

“Nothing gets past you,” she grunts, and starts on the left side. The ashtray slides toward the edge, and she nudges it back toward the center.

“You’re brave,” he says, like he’s starting a fight instead of giving a compliment. “You’re strong enough to feel your emotions in full. You’re intuitive, and resilient. You’re a good shinobi and a proud Yamanaka and everyone respects you. Now stop being a fucking idiot and tell the Hokage to place him with someone else. Someone who has other people around to stop him if he decides those qualities aren’t enough to keep him from turning you into abstract art.”

Finished getting it away from the wall, Ino glares at Shika’s narrow brown eyes, burning almost as hot as the glowing orange tip of the final dregs of the cigarette he takes another punishing drag of. “I do have people. An entire clan, actually.” That's the point of living in a compound.

Not that it will make a difference, she thinks. Sai isn’t that type of shinobi. No amount of roommates will save her if he snaps. She just has to trust herself not to let that happen.

Getting on the other side of the dresser, Ino begins to shove it toward the doorway, trying not to feel Shikamaru’s desperation mounting. A tan hand on the other side of the dresser stops her progress, and Ino blows blonde bangs out of her face in irritation, meeting his severe expression with her own.

“So did Sasuke,” he says, and Ino flinches from the comparison. His cigarette is burning close to his fingers. He’ll have to put it out soon.

She flips rapidly through the mental brochure of responses she’d prepared for this in advance, but none of them feel solid enough under the glare of Shika’s judgment. If Sai wants to stay in the village, which by all outward signs he does, he won’t do something rash. He doesn’t seem like the type to lose control, not inclined toward the type of violence that lashes out indiscriminately at whoever is nearest, but she doesn’t know him well enough to say.

She is putting her clan at risk.

But after spending those fraught seconds inside Sai’s head, Ino is certain of one thing, even if the council treated her like a hysterical girl when she tried to explain it: if Sai really decides to turn on the Leaf, it won’t matter which clan’s compound he sleeps in. He wouldn’t even need to kill anyone, if he didn’t feel like it.

He’d destroy them from the inside out.

He’s smart enough to do it. Like Shikamaru without moral guardrails.

Besides, she just spent days convincing Lady Tsunade to let her try one more time; let her correct her mistakes, now that Sai has dropped all pretenses with her. The council was enticed enough by the intel she managed to provide despite Sai’s unaccommodating invitation inside his head they decided it was worth risking her life, despite her father’s silent, brooding condemnation. Too proud to admit he doesn’t want to see her in harm’s way. Too aware of the greater benefits to stop her.

“I asked for this,” she says. “I’m not begging off.”

“I see that now.”

“Okay, then it’s fucking resolved.”

“It’s not resolved.”

With a huff, Ino lifts her hands from the dresser and combs her nails through the natural oil on her scalp that’s helping slick back her pony, about two days late for a shower. “What do you want?”

Shikamaru crushes his cigarette in the ceramic dish, a wisp of smoke curling in protest, and leans both vascular forearms on top of the dresser where she tries not to stare at them.

“Half your closet, two drawers, and one of the weapon walls,” he says gravely, and Ino has to brace her hands on the dresser again to steady herself as the words begin to form meaning.

“What are you—”

“Half the closet,” he repeats, groundingly firm, and Ino’s heart malfunctions with a sudden and poorly timed thud.

She stares. He stares back.

She opens her mouth, and then closes it.

Over time, her relationship to Shika has shifted around and hovered everywhere between childhood friends, former teammates, bickering siblings, young adults with one-sided unresolved sexual tension, and an old married couple who’re sick of each other’s faces. Maybe even divorcees.

None of these feelings make cohabitation a good idea.

It’s bad enough for her muddled hormones when they occasionally take missions together and lie on their backs under stars in tense quietude, side-by-side, centimeters apart. Well, tense on her part. Only her part. There is not a bone in him that is unnerved by Ino’s presence, she thinks, at the risk of being crass. He’s seen her in every state of undress, out of mission necessity and because, if he happens to be around, Ino often asks him to accompany her any time she has to bathe outside—after a few slightly traumatizing experiences bathing during away missions, she’s felt safer stripping out of soiled clothes where Shika could see her and could react quickly if the need arose. She thinks she would have noticed, if he felt the kinds of insatiable bouts of attraction, little slips in sanity, she feels and tries to hide from him.

And for all her mental bitching, she’s happy with things as they are. It’s a compliment, that he feels as safe around her as she does around him. Maybe more so, considering he doesn’t even need the excuse of a mission to peel himself out of dirtied cotton in the middle of his living room, without caring if Ino nearly chokes to death on her tea at the sight of the well-sunned musculature that proves he’s not half as lazy as he pretends to be.

Clearly, he does not see her as a woman.

Which is, to be honest, completely fine with her.

Shika has been kind enough throughout her adolescence and new adulthood to pretend he doesn’t notice when she briefly loses her mind and considers the sculpted feel of his bicep in-hand, or the way maturity has emphasized the virile downward angle of his flat brows over narrow eyes when he glares at her for flicking one of his knights off the board when he’s playing shogi with himself.

But that kindness can’t pad their friendship if he does shit like this. What he’s suggesting… It’s completely insane. It’s not the answer to his fears. It’s not the answer to anything. These are Yamanaka clan grounds. He can’t just unilaterally decide to become literal room-mates because he thinks Sai is going to decorate his guest room with her mangled corpse. She resolves to tell him so.

“You can’t just—”

“Half,” he says, again, tapping his finger on the dresser, “Until he leaves,” and Ino proceeds to gape in silence until she finds herself breaking it in the worst way possible.

“You better mean half the chores,” she says, because tempting fate is what she’s best at.

Shikamaru smiles, languid and pleased and unfairly masculine, and Ino sends up a prayer to the Sage for a meteor to fall on her house while she sleeps.

After Shika leaves to pack his belongings, Ino falls backward onto her mattress with a springy bounce, pressing her cold fingers into her overwarmed face. He’s right about one thing. She’s being a fucking idiot. And now her idiocy has infected Shikamaru, roping him into her risky play.

Lying perfectly still in stunned repose, Ino takes a deep, soothing breath and reaffirms her purpose, peeling her hands back from her eyes and staring up into the wood slats of her home overhead, at the underside of the roof that shelters her from the elements, the type she has always had overhead. A home to come back to.

She failed Sakura. She let her parents’ clan pride and her own self-doubt make her keep her distance when she was supposed to stay right beside her, protecting her, doing what friends are supposed to do. 

As a result of that error, Sakura is no longer who she was. Ino understands that. She can tell from the cool disdain Kakashi regards her with that he does not see Ino as a friend of truth; he sees her as a spoiled clan brat who can’t accept loss, who can’t accept Sakura as she is and so should not be allowed to try.

But after lying awake every night since Sai invaded her mind, since he tried so hard to crush her hopes, she has reached an unshakable conclusion:

Sakura is not a monster. She is a survivor.

She did horrible things, but she did it to keep breathing. She performed as demanded, and it’s the reason she’s alive for Ino to judge in the first place. Time has contorted her nature, molded her nearly beyond recognition, but that does not have to be the end.

Because the fact Sakura survived the process of being reforged is proof that she’s able to adapt in the most extreme sense of the word. She fought her way through that hellscape of death and distortion, and now she is finally home, finally in a place where she has a chance at healing, a chance to change once more, to give this village a chance to change her again, a chance to atone. Is Ino really going to let her fear of Sai take that chance from her?

When Sasuke succumbed to the cursed seal’s influence, when he abandoned the village for Orochimaru, Naruto didn’t cry and rage like Ino did when Sakura disappeared. Those first few days, he spoke to no one. It was as if his entire body went silent, his eyes so full of hollow depth no one knew where his mind was, let alone what to say to him.

And then he disappeared. For months.

It was like the entire village hitched its breath in unison, when Naruto reappeared at the colossal gates to Konoha, walking past the hiragana for ‘hermitage’ on the doors with labored steps, a line of damp soil trailing behind him as he dragged his best friend’s broken body back into refuge by the back of Sasuke’s gore-stained robe, blood covering every inch of Naruto’s face and orange jumpsuit, something rabid about the loyalty in his bloodshot eyes.

When Sasuke lost his way, Naruto searched the ends of the continent and dragged him back to safety without a thought of the cost. Of risk. 

Naruto is an idiot.

And it’s the reason Sasuke is here with them now.

Ino should have chased after Sakura. She should have dragged her home, bloody and broken, fuck the consequences. Being a genius didn’t help Shikamaru prevent this mess. No.

Ino is ready to be a ‘fucking idiot’ now.

…

As the blood-orange sun slips lower between the warped boards of the walls with peeling wallpaper, Sakura slips a spare set of winter fatigues into the nearly-full canvas rucksack she set down on one of the wooden crates that fill the storage room she, Hound, and Sai have been laying their futons out in since the rain dried up, enjoying the effervescence of stored teas and incense he never burns boxed up tightly inside.

Team Ro will leave in the small hours tonight, and Sakura spent all of today mulling over strategies for separating Hound from the group to help her fulfill the objective given to her by Sai; to retrieve the scroll he asked for while the other zeros hunt her—something she’s finding difficult to construct a plan for when she’s still waiting to be briefed on Team Ro’s mission objectives, aside from what to bring.

Sai called this an ‘escort’ mission, but for all of the main branch’s civility, it’s still Anbu. After the orientation talk she received from Hound, it’s clear to her that, like Root, they simply don’t do escort missions. And if they did, they wouldn’t send in a team from the Cat Division. Team Ro specializes in Assassination and Stealth, not espionage, so it’s not likely they’re infiltrating the caravan undercover. Sai is intentionally mislabeling the mission for some unfathomable reason, leaving critical details out, but Sakura is unfortunately accustomed to the habit.

Hound is being similarly cagey. To protect confidentiality, he is having his squad make the trek into Hot Water, hold camp preceding the mission’s true start, and then hash out a strategy on-site after scouting around, sizing things up in-person.

Sakura opens the sack wider to count her rations again, just in case. She will need double, to make up for the calories burned in the cold, once they head further north.

A cluster of well-hidden chakra signatures and one not hidden at all, a familiar metallic tang in the air she associates with the Tanuki, pace idly on the roof, guarding her and Sai in Hound’s absence, whose presence has been required at HQ for most of the day.

The sun is low. Hound is usually cooking dinner around this time. Finishing counting out soldier pills in her palm, Sakura wonders if he’ll be skipping a meal this close to deployment.

A shadow darkens the open doorway, and Sakura funnels the pills back into their little cloth bag, cinching the drawstrings and tossing them back into the ruck.

“I might actually die this time,” she says, only half facetious, angling her chin to peek at Sai’s unsympathetic expression.

His tattoos shift over the muscles of his crossed arms, his shoulder pressed into the doorframe as he leans into it. She does prefer him in short sleeves. “That outcome is unlikely.”

With a distracted hum, Sakura tips her head side-to-side, as if she can weigh the circumstances by how heavy her thoughts feel sliding around inside her skull. “But not impossible,” she says, and walks away from her rucksack in search of the kunai she threw playfully at Hound earlier for suggesting she take a nap before they head out. He’d dodged by a hair’s breadth, looking slightly harrowed by the speed with which she launched it at him, before he was back to being a smug bastard.

‘My, my,’ he’d said, rolling syllables sensuously off his tongue, ‘How irascible you are when you haven’t slept.’

Sakura threw another kunai to chase him out and avoid admitting she doesn’t know what the word irascible means. He caught that one by its tang and slipped it into the bandages wrapped around the thigh of his pants while crossing the threshold into the hall, presumably his now forever.

But that first one should still be around here somewhere.

Her efforts to disguise her unease in plain sight are failing, she senses, as Sai's dark eyes track her around the room while she steps carefully over futons, craning over the tops of crates, kneeling to look between boxes. She has a bad feeling about this mission, and it’s infecting her usual pre-mission calm.

“You’re tense.”

Sakura nods, no point in posturing. She needs to deal with it before she leaves. She needs to stay level-headed, or her neuroplasticity suffers. Ah. She finds her kunai buried three inches into the wood between crates stacked two levels high.

“You can handle old friends,” he says, mocking her earlier wording. “You’re not an inferior fighter.”

Sai has too much faith in her, at times.

She doesn’t understand Sai’s nonchalance. Doesn’t understand why he’s denying the axe swinging closer to her neck every minute that ticks down before her deployment. She doesn’t understand why he is asking her to do this without him.

But Sakura doesn’t live to understand. She lives to be utilized. Sai knows that as well as she.

Sai has said this scroll contains the best technique he could find for subduing M0-1. Like it was made for taking him down. It’s worth the risk.

And so she looks over her shoulder at him neutrally while sticking her arm into the gap, feeling around for the metal loop of its handle. “How many do you think he’ll send?”

One zero is a lot to handle in a fight. Two of them could be life-ending.

“Nothing you can’t handle.” He steps into the room, shutting the wooden door behind him. “You’ll fight or talk your way out. You are capable of both.” He pulls the top of her ruck open further with a finger dipped into its opening, looking down inside. “And Hatake will be with you.”

Recently, Sai has taken to referring to Hound by name instead of his Anbu moniker. Sakura is, as always, tempted to follow his lead, but she’s having trouble making the change.

“You will make sure Hatake is with you,” he rephrases as an order, black eyes bearing down on her with sudden pressure. “You will make sure.”

She nods with vigor to show she caught the urgency—not as laid back about all this as he likes to seem, she thinks with a small thrill—just as her fingers hook the back of her lost kunai. With a hard jerk, she pulls it free from the wood.

“If he sends M0-1—”

“He won’t,” he cuts her off. Which is fair. She’s been saying it a lot.

“You’re certain.”

After one more glance inside her packed bag, Sai drifts around the room’s perimeter, orbiting away from her as she returns to her ruck. “I am certain.”

Almost dropping her naked kunai into the bag in her distraction, Sakura hastily covers her uncharacteristic mistake by activating the storage seal on her palm, sucking the recovered kunai inside, and pulling out a white cloth face mask from the ruck to examine needlessly for moth-holes like that was always the plan, as she nods numbly again.

After a pause, she wonders, “You don’t think he’ll send F0-1?”

Sakura feels a prickle of adrenaline in advance, at the thought of F0-1’s bones erupting from her body in whip-like blades, graveyard urumis, and trying to decapitate her. Of having to fight without touching, like fighting a wasp. Sakura has sparred with her before and survived, but that was a spar, and before she returned from that infamous mission in Kiri two years ago, alone. M0-5 and F0-3 didn’t make it out of that massacre, and Sakura was not permitted details as to why. But it took days for her hair to lose that pink tint from blood and return to its usual bone-white, and F0-1 has had a different look in her eyes ever since. Colder, if that were possible. Or maybe the opposite. Hateful.

If Shimura is serious this time, he’ll send one of the older four zeros, if not the first, than F0-1, M0-4, or M0-3. Decisions decisions.

Wood boards creak pleasantly as Sai takes a seat on top of a crate on the other side of the room, the heel of one of his boots resting in the gap between slats, the sole of his other boot flat on the floor. Sakura is barefoot, for once, and feels suddenly too sensitive to the floorboards, like splinters are beginning to prod at her feet.

A long look between them affirms: he’s not answering that question.

“You need to refocus.” His thin brows weigh heavy over his eyes, a simmering severity to him she can’t place. “You can’t deploy like this.”

Rubbing her thumb into the tight thread count of her winter mask, Sakura shakes her head. She isn’t so weak as to need help preparing for a mission, to need help clearing her mind. “I’ll be ready.”

That is, of course, until she hears the words, “Let me help,” like cold silk sliding across her skin.

It freezes the motion of her thumb, freezes her lungs, freezes her thoughts, but it does not freeze her eyes. She looks slowly up at him from the mask held loosely in her hands, and her heart clenches at the sight of his unguarded posture, left forearm resting on the raised knee of the left leg he’s braced between boards, left hand hanging limp from a relaxed wrist while his right hand splays comfortably on his right thigh. She can see the wing of a needletail on his neck above the black collar of his short-sleeved shirt, and follows the way it points her eyes until she’s caught up in the smooth lines of his face, the paleness of his skin against the consuming darkness of his irises.

“You asked for something,” he says, meticulously neutral in tone, like threading a needle. “Would you like it now?”

It takes her a moment to recall the only thing she has asked him for in weeks, maybe months. She recalls that night on Hokage rock, her plea, her lips catching his for precious seconds before he forced them apart.

The unfed muscle in her chest clenches, her voice breathless in her utterance. “I thought you forgot.”

Tilting his head to his right, he lets the atrophied muscles in his face pull his eyebrows just slightly toward one another, like being cinched taut by a too-short string, as he says, “I’m not the one who forgets.”

Dust circulates suffocatingly inside the shrinking room. She hadn’t noticed before. Sakura’s lungs burn from the clouded air, thickened by the perfumes of tea leaves and incense. Her mind races, urging her to think before she acts, because this… This is rare. This is an offer to indulge her in ways Sai is extremely sparing in, always careful not to humor her beyond what keeps her at peak performance, perfectly balanced in every way to act optimally in all situations.

But something about the timing unnerves her. She suspects he has an objective she can’t see, a purpose to this beyond releasing her stress; it makes her paranoid. Makes her wonder why, which is the most dangerous question a shinobi can ask.

At her inaction, that loose wrist of his rotates to face his tattooed palm to the ceiling, as he curls his fingers toward himself once, and then twice. His eyes say what his mouth doesn’t.

Come here.

Heat pools inside her with force, and Sakura decides she doesn’t care why he’s offering. It’s enough, she thinks, feeling the mask slip from her tingling fingers, to be welcomed by him at all.

The mask falls to the floorboards, and Sakura steps over it carefully, tentative at first, drawing toward him like a moth mistaking a flame for the moon, and then with less hesitance, less choice, pulled into his arms like being swept beneath dark river waves at night, into the undertow. Into the firm hands on her hips, guiding hers to his as she straddles him on his crate. Into his lips, his tongue, his teeth. It is hell, the way her body instantly aches, the way no amount of close is close enough, no pressure bruising enough, her hands incapable of joining them the way her fractured mind believes she needs.

It is hell. It is Naraka.

It is the stripping of shirts over heads, the gasp that escapes her from the intentional sting of Sai’s chakra cutting open the flesh over her ribs as he cuts through her bindings, letting her blood flow from the shallow wound as her bandages fall away and she drags him off the crate with both hands.

It is his bare skin against hers, making her want to finish what he started, flay the skin of her chest to feel him against every exposed nerve, feel the agony of him as acutely as possible.

It is Sai’s controlling touch heating her neck like a burn as he guides her past each of their futons toward Hound’s. She looks down at his choice with curiosity, but has no time to question before his ankle hooks hers, taking her weight off her feet as his palm shoves her back at the sternum, Sakura’s back hitting the futon in a thud that knocks the breath from her lungs.

His careful fingers make no mistakes as he unfastens the front of his pants, standing with her blood smeared over one side of his abdomen, looking down at her coldly as she wriggles out of her own, unwilling to concern herself with motive while her pulse roars so sweetly in her ears.

He makes no mistakes. And so Sakura is faultless. Without err, when she’s close enough for him to touch, to guide. With him, she is perfection.

The thought has her arching before he is pressing her into the futon, biting the earlobe she’s formed a habit of massaging when she thinks, his teeth digging in so hard she thinks it’ll puncture. She pulls his mouth to hers with pale fingers that have gone cold, lost all their blood, and kisses him until her lips lose friction. She bites his mouth and breaks skin without making him flinch, tastes him on the mineral level, coats her tongue with the evidence of his red-beating heart while he digs his fingers into the wound he made on her side painfully, causing her jaw to slacken and release his lower lip before she can gnaw it clean off.

He stains everything. He leaves bloody fingerprints everywhere he touches. His red lips color hers as she sucks the cut in his bottom lip like the blood-sucking parasite Hound foolishly named him after without considering it might be the other way around.

Sometimes Sakura wants it to be the other way around.

Sakura wants to be the one with her teeth in him, in both of them, she thinks, as Sai forces her cheek to the futon so punishingly the sides of her nose and lips sink into an impression, and she is enveloped in Sai’s and Hound’s mixing scents, Sai’s burnt, solvent-like notes sharpening the charcoal and pine of Hound’s natural musk, heightening the sensation of his teeth at her neck, until her eyes want to roll back into her head. She never realized how appealing Hound’s scent is, how utterly primal, until this moment. Until Sai showed her. Until she experienced it diffused so sublimely within Sai’s, the way pain unlocks pleasure.

Like it was created for this purpose.

The way Sai moves with her. Against her. Within her. Until the ways they are connected outnumber the ways they aren’t. Her body follows his without effort, without thought. He has never led her wrong.

Sakura was made to fit against him, he was made to fill her gaps, she was made to be inhabited. This is what it is to be consumed by a god. To be held by her creator, strung along by her master puppeteer.

She wants to die caught between strings.

When her ecstasy mounts and her gasps sharpen into cries, a flicker of metallic chakra above her from the Tanuki politely alerts her to the Anbu still walking the perimeter in case she hadn’t known, his signature unruffled by the carnal acts happening below, every inch the detached shinobi he should be while guarding a subject.

Sakura is light-headed from sensation, from being filled, held, perfected.

Her lips tick upward as her slow mind grasps the Tanuki’s gentle warning. Too gentle for an unbreakable puppet like her. His consideration sparks opportunity.

Pulled upright in Sai’s lap, his imbrued hands tangling in her hair as his lips drag across the arched column of her neck, Sakura grows intentionally loud in her appreciation, rolling her hips harder to tighten the petals around the flower of pleasure budding inside her as she releases a theatrically wanton mewl of “Genma” —a name she only learned recently; and she laughs full-bodied with her head thrown back, eyes closed in bliss, when she hears someone lose their footing on the roof and tumble tragically off.

It’s Sai’s teeth scraping her left cheekbone in the wake of her mischief, a breathy laugh hot against her skin, a half-formed wicked smile meant not to be seen, but felt, that makes that eager bud bloom.

…

When Kakashi gets back from HQ, its with a plastic bag full of bok choy, fresh ginger, bruised garlic, hand-folded pork wontons, and hard-haggled chicken bones hanging loosely from his fingers, a headache pounding out a stale beat with his pulse from too many hours arguing with too many people who formally outrank him without letting his right eye lose its condescending curve.

He has an unambitious plan for the evening:

Cook dinner.

Make sure Sakura hasn’t done anything insidiously petulant like pack a deck of exploding tags just because he explicitly told her not to bring any—avalanches are decidedly not part of the mission brief.

Ignore Sai’s misleadingly benign questions about the other members of Team Ro.

Sleep a few hours while Sakura stares forebodingly at the side of his masked face.

And then get the fuck out of Konoha for as long as is reasonable. 

He’s come dangerously close to ruining his charming reputation today, Tsunade’s manicured hand on his shoulder almost not warning enough to stop him from flipping a few fancy hats from their empty heads.

This is how Sakura feels all the time, he thinks, and then joylessly discards the comparison.

It’s a small ask in Kakashi’s opinion, for such a simple plan to pass unmolested by the general fuckery of the universe. But Kakashi has never had anything easy, anything simple, and today is shaping up to continue the trend.

As he ambles through the evergreens toward the flat deck of the main house he really should do some maintenance on now that he’s spending so much time there (or not, probably best to let the whole building sink in on itself until the roof collapses), Kakashi takes stock of his surroundings and suspects his plans are in danger of going sideways.

There is a murmuring tension among the four Anbu guards Kakashi somewhat callously abandoned to test their luck with Sakura and Sai’s moods when he was called back to HQ.

He spots the red and white tanuki mask he’s looking for affixed to a nin sitting on the rotting deck looking haggard, Genma rubbing the back of his own head with a gloved palm as if hurt.

The other Anbu standing or squatting nearby are snickering.

Kakashi doesn’t ask. He’ll learn soon enough.

He goes inside and drops the bag in the entryway, fingers loosening of their own accord.

He smells blood.

He finds Sakura in rumpled black fatigues standing at the main room’s worn bookshelf, sliding books from their shelves, flipping through their pages quickly, and then dropping them onto the creaking floor. There are enough well-loved spines discarded carelessly on the floorboards that she has likely been at this for a while.

When she sees him, she stops what she’s doing and stares like a cat caught with a paw in the fish bowl, waiting for him to let his displeasure be known. Sai sits with his back to the bookcase in the same black shirt and tactical pants he was wearing earlier, leafing through a loosely bound treatise on fūinjutsu Sakura probably dropped with interest. He doesn’t look up. Doesn’t acknowledge Kakashi’s presence at all.

This type of behavior isn’t alarming, in itself.

But Sai has a severely split lip, barely scabbed. There’s blood under his nails and in the lines of his fingerprints, faintly staining the thin paper as he reads. There is blood poorly wiped off Sakura’s neck and jaw. Blood at the base of her hair by her neck, and in the corner of her mouth as she curls her lips in a taunting smirk. He doesn’t immediately smell a third person’s blood on them, but the pit of dread that just opened up in his chest says he can’t be too sure.

He slips a hand into his pocket to hide how it just twitched. He is calm. He is the dust in the air, floating untouched. He is nothing that doesn’t serve his purpose. Once he’s certain his ego has sunk deep beneath the surface of his actions, he speaks.

“I thought we agreed to wash our hands before meals.”

With a lurid glaze to her smile, Sakura rolls her shoulders against the bookcase until she’s leaning back against it, her hips lifting away from its shelves in a sensuous curve Kakashi is careful not to notice.

“I already ate,” she purrs, and Kakashi loses patience with the farce, loses a bit of that calm he worked so hard for, because he can smell more blood coming from the west wing, and while cannibalism wasn’t something he expected from her today, it’s never been entirely ruled out.

Feeling her stare prickling the back of his neck, he abdicates the main space in search of signs of a struggle in the wing he smells the blood coming from, examines every floorboard, every door, every wall, checks the interior of every room until he reaches the room they’ve been leaving their futons in since the sun started coming out on a regular basis.

His nostrils flare behind his mask with the lingering scent of sex, eyes fixating on the bloodstains on the futon—his futon, because why wouldn’t it be—for halting seconds before his brain kicks back on and he lowers down into a squat to sit in a complicated moment of stasis, occupying a liminal space in time, pinching the bridge of his nose to stop the blood rushing to his head, making his headache worse.

Not that type of cannibalism, then. 

He didn’t miscount the number of Anbu he left them with. There is no fifth guard digesting in her stomach after falling victim to a nightmarish stew brewed with the explicit purpose of further robbing him of sleep. But this is, irrationally, almost as bad.

He’d suspected.

He’d noticed the way her mossy eyes darken like shade passing over a leaf when Sai is physically near. Just like he’s seen the way she leans into Sai’s hands in rare moments he initiates physical contact, a trained, instinctive response. Like she has no choice but to melt into his touch. No will of her own.

Kakashi feels this knowledge under his skin like a hiss of steam, cooking him with pressurized outrage that he can’t let escape his body. It sickens him. Infuriates him. Makes every hair on his arms and neck flex, repelled from one another by the static energy of his disturbed chakra.

It’s coercive.

The power imbalance here makes consent functionally impossible, regardless of how enthusiastic a participant he does his best not to imagine Sakura is in any situation that involves Sai’s attention. She can’t tell the difference between pain and pleasure, when they come from Sai. Every touch is a good touch, if Sai is doing the touching. She does not use the word no often enough, when it’s Sai doing the asking. Kakashi isn’t certain she knows how to refuse him. Isn’t certain she’s ever wanted to.

And if she did—if she tried to deny him—would Sai allow it? Or would he slip the noose around her neck tighter, make her yield? Make her submit.

Bolts of light break from the barrier of his skin, cracking and hissing before he brings his chakra back under control.

Easy, he chides, and feels his shoulders artificially relax, his chakra leveling off, cooling down.

There is more blood on the futon the longer he looks.

A we-need-to-have-a-fucking-talk amount of blood.

Kakashi forces himself to breathe deeply, get some oxygen to his brain, despite the heady cocktail of hormones and iron overpowering the earthy smells of patchouli and dried tea leaves coming from the sealed boxes shoved against the walls.

It’s her blood. 

He can tell, his nose far more sensitive than the average nin, due to his canine summons. That crime scene is almost entirely hers.

He tries not to blow this fact out of proportion.

He knows her tendencies. She can barely do anything without disfiguring it into something she finds more palatable. She could have initiated all of it. Even the wound of origin could have been self-inflicted. Sai bled, too, if not as much. She certainly looked pleased, sated, with the pink tip of her tongue swiping dried blood from the corner of her wicked mouth—

Kakashi redirects.

The violence displayed on his futon—his mind still rails against that provoking violation—doesn’t automatically equate to Sai’s general sadism. Not with Sakura. Sai is almost as obsessed with Sakura as she is with him. He wants to believe Sai would never hurt Sakura in ways that would make her fear or resent him—but is there such a thing? Would Sakura reject anything he gives her? She took his beating in the training ground without complaint, letting him choke the life out of her until Kakashi stepped in. Sai said so himself when advocating for her surprise extraction from Root; not only would Sakura take her own life to ensure his mission success if she knew, she would have happily let him drive the knife between her ribs, himself.

He fails utterly not to consider what else she would let Sai drive inside her, whether it hurts her or not. Whether it’s good for her or not. Whether it’s cruelly done or not.

Kakashi pinches the veins throbbing below his brows harder, fighting a migraine.

For fuck’s sake.

Sai is a manipulator, a masterful one, and Kakashi is hard pressed to see this as anything but hard evidence of another handhold he’s carved into her, another point of control, of possession. Even if he does experience something as human as sexual attraction, Kakashi doubts he is capable of acting on it without several layers of ulterior motive.

Kakashi is suddenly double-glad for the mission he just spent most the day trying to get out of—in between meetings spent justifying his continued authority over the two former members of Root—a chance to put physical distance between them, and a distraction from the questions about when this feature of their dynamic first formed, under what circumstances and for what purpose, making his stomach acid roil more than the insinuous scents crowding his airway.

It’s not that he’s convinced Sai would force himself on Sakura. It’s that he wouldn’t have to. His control over Sakura is too complete. Her instinct to please overrides self-preservation. Whether she wanted Sai this way or not, Kakashi fears she wouldn’t know the difference.

He doesn’t startle, but it’s a near thing, as Sakura drapes herself over his back, one arm across his chest, her lips to his ear.

“If you stress this much over a spot of blood,” she says, tangling her fingers in his hair and pulling his head back onto her shoulder with a gentleness that evokes a cold sweat, “no wonder you’ve gone gray so young.”

Her pastel hair falls over his right shoulder, caressing the exposed quarter of his face, fine strands catching in his eyelashes. Her warmth at his back is intoxicating. Sai's sharp scent is mixed into hers, a flower dipped in ink, and he hates it viscerally. Enough he has the urge to drag her outside and scrub her clean. Shuck off his vest and rub it all over her until she smells like she usually does, like the smoke from the fires he builds by hand, the herbs in the garden he nurtures despite how they’ll inevitably wilt during his extended absences. 

Kakashi does neither of these things.

Releasing the bridge of his nose, he reaches his left hand across his body to push her off him with his palm to her face, Sakura making a muffled sound of shock into his hand and stumbling back as he stands.

She’s trying to get a reaction from him.

He withholds it. 

“Go wash the rice.” His words fall indifferently from his lips, to his relief. “Unless you’d rather do some missions around town to pay off the futon you just ruined? Paint some fences, find some lost cats before we leave? You’ve still got time.”

She scrunches her nose, and Kakashi stares too hard at the folding freckles that humanize her, before dropping his gaze to the thin scar on her jaw that reminds him she isn’t as fragile as the delicate bones of her face imply. She hates any mission that doesn’t get her blades wet, and she hates that he threatens her with them at every opportunity. Kakashi hates that she hasn’t bathed, that he now knows how she smells after the bloodsport she calls sex. No one is happy. Everyone loses. Such is their way of life.

Over dinner, Sai watches him closely from across the fire while Kakashi keeps his broiling bloodlust in check, looking for something specific, a crack in Kakashi’s composure, while spooning a boiled wonton past his masticated lips and into his mouth, biting straight into it unflinchingly despite the burning steam the bite releases.

It’s hard not to show him what he wants to see, Kakashi laments, pinching a white clump of glutinous rice between chopsticks and lifting it to his masked face, sniffing the grains Sakura washed for bitter notes of poison, when he can’t pin down what he’s supposed to be hiding.