Your Whole Family

Karin was waiting for her at the entrance to the base. Sakura’s sensory range wasn’t amazing, especially after hours of running through yellowing fields of grass. The harvest had already passed, and the countryside of Grass was dun-colored and depressing - Karin’s bright red hair stood out like a beacon.  

For a moment, Sakura thought about trying a different entrance to avoid Karin. After hours of running, Sakura did not have the energy to craft a solid greeting. 

She wasn’t visually recognizable. Thanks to a judiciously applied henge, she looked like Nakamura’s deeply uninspiring cousin - an utterly forgettable medium-height teenage boy with black hair and gray eyes. 

Realistically, there was no way Karin would be fooled by a lightly applied henge. Sakura pressed on, slowing to a jog as she approached the steel door and the girl standing in front of it. 

Karin was her usual charming self. "Ugh, you smell so bad," she began, but Sakura just shouldered past her into the doorway. "Hey, wait a minute!" she huffed.  "Is this any way to greet a girl?"

Karin stretched her arm across the entrance, barring Sakura’s way. 

Sakura could shatter every bone in that arm with her pinky finger and minimal chakra. She was so exhausted from the nonstop running that she briefly considered it. It would be one way to get into the base, and the injury would be easy enough to heal. Compound fractures were child’s play for Sakura after so many hours fixing up experimental subjects and detainees. 

No. Karin was a person. They were all people, Sakura reminded herself. The dehumanization was a useful coping mechanism in Oto, but she would be home soon and from what she remembered Konoha publicly frowned on wanton cruelty and suspect ethical decisions. Even if it did get quick results. 

“Sakura?” Karin reached out to brush a tangled knot of dried grass from Sakura’s shoulder. The light from the fluorescent bulb hanging over them bounced off new patches of shiny pink skin peeking out from Karin’s lavender sleeve. 

Sakura automatically grasped Karin’s hand and pushed up the sleeve.  “Again?”

“You know how it goes,” Karin muttered. 

“What about the distribution system we discussed?” They had determined that Karin’s blood kept its freaky life-force distributing powers for two weeks under the correct storage conditions. Sakura had hoped that easy access to Karin’s blood would prevent people from vampirizing her friend and creating an unnecessary infection risk, but it seemed that hope was foolish. 

Fucking Sound ninja. 

Sakura eked out a bit of chakra from her dwindling supply to ease the lingering inflammation around the scars. Karin scoffed, but was careful to keep her hand still. “It works for most, but some people prefer the old-fashioned way.” 

Sakura was careful to keep her chakra steady as irritation curled in her stomach. The scars had already flattened and paled, but would never truly disappear. 

Karin had sat through many of these healing sessions over the last two years. For all her brashness and over the top flirtation, she was an excellent patient and Sakura’s only friend in Sound. 

Well, besides Sasuke, but he was in a category of his own. 

“Any more?”  

“A few on the upper forearms, and maybe one riiiight here,” Karin pointed to her upper thigh and made a seductive circle with her finger. 

It would be funnier if Sakura hadn’t found too-old bite marks in that exact place. She stared at Karin, and Karin pouted winsomely back at her. Karin’s exaggerated flirtation was nothing new, though Sakura wasn’t in the mood to enter into their usual back-and-forth. Still, she put up the bare pretense to keep Karin happy. 

“I don’t swing that way, you demonic harpy.” Sakura would do anything for a real bath, like the one her parents have at home. 

“Sure you don’t,” Karin retorted, but it lacked its usual buoyant perversion. “Come on, I know you didn’t sprint here from the Eastern base just to heal little old me.” 

Sakura wished for the umpteenth time for Karin to get a little stupider and less insanely talented. And maybe also to fasten her shirt all the way – the undulation of her bare abdomen was very distracting. Who gave the bitch the right to have such a cute belly button? 

“Oh my god you’re staring, something really is wrong.” 

That was how Sakura found herself in Karin’s office with several silencing seals slapped on the walls. 

“Go on,” Karin said. “Tell Mommy everything.” 

Oh gods, Sakura realized, she was a mother. Kind of. She was in a building with a possible baby that was possibly half-her and half-Sasuke, like some idiot god took a page out of her old diary and tried to make her dreams come true but fucked it so unbelievably hard. 

Sakura already had her life planned out perfectly. 

She would help Sasuke depose Orochimaru, kill Itachi, and reintegrate into Konoha when the right time came. Then they would get married, and Sakura would transition from an active field role to intelligence or jutsu research. Then, and only then were they supposed to have three children over the course of six years.  

“Sakura?” Karin asks, concern saturating her pleasantly deep voice. “You’re not going to try to hit me or yell or anything?” 

“What?” Sakura was distracted by the thought of heritable illnesses and how she never got to ask her parents if there was any history of cancer, or neurocognitive disorders, or god forbid alcoholism, if the baby survived was it going to grow up and be an addict? What would that say about her? 

“Never mind,” Karin muttered. “Just tell me what’s going on.” 

Sakura liked Karin a lot. The other girl was tough, clever, funny, and wrote clear and detailed lab notes. Still, their friendship was decidedly superficial compared to the soul-baring intimacy she used to have with Ino. Sound wasn’t a place that rewarded vulnerability. 

Karin was a friend, but she was also a resource. Her appointment at this base was relatively new, but Karin was talented at rising through the ranks. 

“What’s your security clearance?” Sakura asked, going for casual and failing miserably. 

“I run this place, Sakura-chan, I can access whatever I want.” 

That simultaneously made Sakura’s life much easier and much harder. Karin would be able to locate the baby and all of the files pertaining to it, but Sakura would need to explain at least the bare minimum. 

“Cool, cool. Listen, can I get the files on all subjects between the age of 6 and 18 months?” 

“Sure, but you’ll owe me.” Karin pushed off the ground with her feet, letting the momentum carry her office chair to a row of filing cabinets in the corner.  It took her less than a minute to locate severa chunky manila folders.  “Are you sure you don’t want sub-6 months? There’s at least ten of them, but there’s only one between 6 and 14 months. There’s also two 18 month olds if you need that.” 

“No, I’m sure. Can I get the file for 6 and 14?” 

“Coming right up.” Karin scooted back with two bulging files. Sakura reached out for them, but Karin held them out of reach. 

“Oh no. You get these once you’ve brushed your teeth and showered. You can use my bathroom.” 

“Ok, but don’t read that till I get back.” 

Ten minutes later, Sakura was back in the office. 

“You’re much better company when you don’t smell like shit, you know,” Karin said, not even bothering to close the folder or pretend she hadn’t read it. 

“So nosy,” Sakura muttered. 

“You would be too in my situation. Anyway, all the good stuff is either redacted or omitted.” Karin slid the folder in Sakura’s direction. 

There were 13 months of daily reports on a baby, complete with monthly checkups and invoices for childcare costs and supplies. They weren’t keeping the baby in a vat, at least. Sakura hated looking at the children Orochimaru kept floating in fluid-filled glass tubes, no matter how many times Kabuto explained that they weren’t in any pain. It was never easy to forget who she worked for, but some reminders were more vivid than others. 

In the back of the folder there was a paid invoice for 80,000 ryo - about what she would make for a solo C-rank mission. The services rendered were 9 months of incubation time, five months of lactation consultancy, plus medical costs. The name of the person it was made out to was blacked out by heavy ink. 

The mother. A hot wash of shame rolled over Sakura. In all of her agonizing about how the thing affected her place with Sasuke, she’d forgotten about the woman who had gestated and birthed the infant. The baby had a real, actual mother out there who had been paid next to nothing. Would she still want it? Didn’t mothers always want their babies? 

She could make this right. Maybe the baby wouldn’t look like Sasuke, or develop the Sharingan. She could just give the baby back to its mother and leave it at that. It probably wasn’t even really hers, anyway. 

“How do you feel about going with me to run some tests?” she asked Karin. 

“You seem more cheerful,” the other girl remarked. 

“It’s amazing what a shower can do for you,” Sakura responded, trying to suppress the bubbling feeling of hope. 

This could still be solved. 

Sakura looked at the agarose gel, and then looked at the baby. Karin was holding it with surprising competence, sort of jiggling it whenever it got fussy. It had started crying when Karin dismissed the attendants, two cringing women who spoke with a local dialect, but she was able to calm it down with some kind of pacifier and some expert handling. 

It looked like a regular baby, the kind Sakura would see getting pushed around in a stroller on sunny days in Konoha. It had dark wispy hair that tended to curl up in chaotic cowlicks and the correct number of appendages mostly concealed by  a standard-issue onesie. 

Unfortunately it also had Haruno Mebuki’s eyes.

Sakura, never one to half-ass things, was waiting for the results of a last-ditch DNA test. The results did not look promising, but there was still a little time left for a miracle to occur that would exonerate her of responsibility. Maybe the mother had green eyes. It was an uncommon color, but not unheard of. 

Sakura felt a great big buzzing nothing, which upset her. She kept looking at the baby and trying to plumb the depths of her emotions for something. Haruno Sakura always felt things, especially love. She’d abandoned Konoha for love, which she still privately felt was rather noble of her. Feeling things was her niche, and she was very good at it. 

She has seen so many unimaginable things in Oto, gone so far past the bounds of normal morality, but surely being confronted with her own progeny would provoke some sort of response. Sakura wanted the catharsis of tears. She could cry and rage and punch something, which would make her seem more normal. There was nothing.

The baby made a sound that was all vowels and spit, and Karin jiggled it some more. It quieted immediately.

And Sakura – tried to feel something.

What kind of monster felt nothing when they looked at their baby? 

“How did you get so good at that,” Sakura asked dully. Karin had tried to pass the baby off to Sakura, but took it back when it immediately started crying. 

“Refugee camp,” Karin muttered, and Sakura felt embarrassed and itchy in her own skin. Karin never revealed personal details.

“Agagagaga,” the baby said, and tried to stick its fat little fingers in Karin’s mouth. Karin shifted it to her other arm, and the baby redirected to sticking its hand in its own mouth. 

Sakura returned her attention to the DNA test. Even though the memo had been clear about who the… gene donors were, there was always room for mixups. Oto’s labs were full of poorly labeled samples of human tissue, there really was no telling - 

“Uhhh, Sakura? Is this normal?” 

Karin was holding the baby at arms length, holding it with her hands under its armpits like it was a misbehaving stray cat. The baby was cheerfully babbling and waving its arms around, which would have been cute if it wasn’t for the glowing red eyes.

Sakura’s first major feeling about the baby was crushing resentment. 

There was no way she could return the baby to its mother. She wouldn’t know what to do with a sharingan user, especially one that couldn’t turn it off. Word would get out that some defenseless village in bumfuck-nowhere Grass Country had the elemental nations’ most valuable kekkei genkai, and the vultures would descend. 

Sakura imagined the two women that looked after the baby turned into pincushions by Kiri hunter nin, or electrocuted by Kumo’s bloodline retrieval squads. No, she was stuck with the little life-ruiner.  

“That’s not supposed to happen for another few years.” It wasn’t supposed to happen at all. “Is it normal otherwise?” 

“She’s got a weirdly well-developed chakra system and surprisingly deep reserves, but other than that she’s normal.” 

Sakura and Karin looked at each other, and shrugged simultaneously. Babies with developmentally abnormal chakra were a dime a dozen in Sound. 

“At least it doesn’t have, like, caudal spines,” Sakura said.  

There was a variant of the cursed seal that did cause caudal spines and, indirectly, nightmares. 

Karin didn’t immediately respond. 

“Wait – there aren’t any caudal spines, right? Right?” Sakura asked

“No, you idiot, there aren’t any caudal spines.” Karin placed the yawning baby back into the cheerfully painted cot. 

The baby’s quarters were a study in poorly concealed contrasts. The room was half lab, half daycare. It had the usual cold tiled floors and stainless steel benches. The heavy machinery had been pushed to one side of the room, creating an awkward obstacle course. 

The baby’s half was cordoned off by a plastic baby gate. There was a yellow cot with a duck mobile next to an open bookshelf with picture books and wooden toys. A rocking chair in the corner was piled high with plush blankets. 

There was no natural light in the room, which meant no naturally occurring source of Vitamin D, which in small children means rickets. Sakura buried her head in her arms. She did not look up when the alarm went off. The DNA tests were done, but she knew what the results would be.

Karin turned the timer off to prevent it from shrilly ringing into the night. Kabuto had put lab techs on the experimental roster for leaving the lab timers on for more than a few seconds. 

The resentment was starting to turn into rage. Sakura gathered the material of her sleeve into her mouth and bit down.

“Sakura?” Karin’s familiar hands settled on her shoulders and stayed there. 

“So you and Sasuke, huh?” 

“What, no erotic massage?” 

Karin didn’t respond. Sakura turned her head so her cheek was pillowed on her arms and glared at Karin. 

“You’re so fucking nosy.” 

“Look, I can only play stupid for so long,” Karin snapped. “Also, you labeled the gel with your shinobi ID numbers.” 

Sakura glanced at the DNA test and confirmed that she had flawlessly followed lab protocol on autopilot. 

“Have I ever told you that nothing is sexier than good documentation,” Karin purred, and gently kneaded Sakura’s shoulders. It was nice to receive human touch outside of fighting, healing, and work. 

Karin’s constant innuendos used to dye her face bright red for days, but now they were welcome background noise. Sakura knew Karin meant nothing by it because she also flirted with Sasuke, though those efforts had more giggling and blushing. 

Karin’s hands left, and Sakura briefly mourned the loss of warmth. Sound’s subterranean labs were always freezing. 

“It’s not really me and Sasuke,” Sakura said. “Orochimaru used my technique for somatic cell nuclear transfer to create it. I think he’s trying to make some sort of Sharingan farm. That’s the prototype.” She waves her hand vaguely at the sleeping baby.

“Well shit. Does Sasuke know?” 

It was an innocent question from Karin, but it took Sakura’s insides from a simmer to a rolling boil. Her inner voice pantomimed grabbing Kabuto by the hair and smashing his face into the sharp corner of a table until it resembled strawberry jam. 

“No.” 

“Are you gonna tell him?” 

“Yes I’m going to fucking tell him.” Sakura hoped the look on her face adequately conveyed to Karin how stupid her question was. 

Karin threw up her arms and backed away. “Alright, no need to be such a bitch about it.” 

Sakura flexed her fingers and rolled her jaw. Sasuke needed to know, no matter how much she didn’t want to tell him. Telling Sasuke would make the whole wretched ordeal real. She wanted someone stronger than her to take responsibility for this mess - a Naruto or a Lee to rescue her from this situation, a Kakashi-sensei to ruffle her hair and tell her it would all be ok, that someone else would would fix it. 

But it was her choice to be here, and no one could save Sakura from her own bad decisions. 

It was tempting to leave the problem of telling Sasuke for later. She could sleep at the base, pick up Kabuto’s bodies tomorrow, and let Sasuke know about his brand-new relative in person 36 hours from now. 

Sakura didn’t want to. Every second that elapsed between the present and the moment when she had to look Sasuke in the eye and tell him he had a new family member would be torture. Trying to explain why she left a defenseless baby alone to be experimented on would be even worse. She could perfectly picture the sneer that would distort his handsome mouth while he called her an idiot.  

No, it had to be now. 

On the outside, Sakura’s pack looked normal enough. It was an inconspicuous olive drab affair with strategic leather reinforcements. On the inside, it was a trans-dimensional nightmare filled with enough supplies to provision a small army. 

Sakura grabbed a senbon from an interior pocket and quickly pierced the side of her left index finger. An observer would think she was rooting around for something in her bag, not trying to find the correct storage seal without dripping blood and accidentally summoning a person-sized battle ax.  

Unsealing the two-way scroll and stationary supplies was easy. The hard part was figuring out what to say. Next to her, Karin was spinning lazily around in her office chair. Each slow revolution was accompanied with a piercing squeak. Sakura grit her molars together and thought about breaking the chair with a well-placed kick. 

The blank scroll stared accusingly at her. Sakura stared back at it, and thought about smashing Karin’s chair into its component molecules and then incinerating the scroll. 

The squeaking stopped. “You ok there? Your chakra looks extra murderous.” 

If Sakura ground her teeth much harder they were going to crack.

“Do you want a snack? Hot makeout session? Some drugs?” 

Sakura leaned back abruptly. “You know, that’s not a bad idea.” 

“What, you want to make out?” Karin sounded so taken aback that Sakura was nearly insulted. 

“No, the drugs.” Sakura gestured for Karin to sit back down. “I have some, don’t worry. Never go anywhere without them.”

In addition to their medical uses, tranquilizers were useful in espionage and honeypot missions. They tended to loosen targets up and make them more likely to talk.  

Faced with telling the love of her life about their test tube baby, Sakura dearly wanted a little loosening. When she crushed the tranquilizers between her molars, the stomach-churningly bitter powder nearly made her gag. Despite Kabuto’s enthusiastic personal improvement regimen, she’d never gotten used to the invariably awful taste of most medical compounds.  

The syrupy haze of the tranquilizers clarified some aspects of the situation. There was no way to sugarcoat the situation to Sasuke. Even if there was, Sakura was terrible at diplomacy, and now wasn’t the time to develop new skills.

For a second, she wondered what Naruto would say. Sakura thought about trying to channel her orange former teammate, before remembering he was singularly gifted at making Sasuke mad. 

She looked at the baby’s side of the room, and saw how badly the anodyne sterility of the lab was hidden. At the end of the day, the baby was an experiment and she was a scientist. She could just act like this was a writeup – no need to get emotional. 

Yeah. Professionalism. All she needed to do was convey the most information with the best economy of language. She was so good at that. Sakura rolled her back to get some residual muscle soreness out and got to work. 

Sasuke-kun, 

Orochimaru has created an infant using our combined genetic material. It is currently housed in an experimental facility in the Southern base. The infant is a 13 month old female, 

Shit, how much did it weigh? 

“Karin,” Sakura called, “can you check the logs to see how much the baby weighs?” 

“Is that really what you want to focus on?” Karin muttered, but obligingly located the charts. “About 8.7 kilos,” she called out, “but the last weigh in was a few weeks ago so it might have changed. Do you want me to weigh the baby?” 

“Nah, you’re good.” 

and weighs approximately 8.7 kilos. It has green eyes and black hair. 

This did not paint a very vivid picture. Sakura scooted her chair up to the baby gate, and did her best artistic rendition of the now-sleeping baby. Sakura could make a very accurate diagram, but the rounded complexities of a human infant escaped her. The tranquilisers also weren’t doing much for her fine motor skills. Eventually Sakura created what she felt was a pretty decent drawing. Who was an artistic disgrace now, Ino? 

It sort of looks like this. 

She tapped the pen against her lip and wondered if there was anything she’d left out. “Karin,” she called, “can you read this and see if I’ve forgotten anything?” 

“Haruno Sakura is asking me to double-check her work,” Karin muttered, gingerly reaching for the scroll. “What pills did you take?” 

“Oh right, the Sharingan!” Sakura yanked the scroll away from Karin. 

The baby also has a sharingan with 

“Did you see how many tomoe the baby had?” Sakura asked. 

“Should I have?” 

“Yeah, there should be up to three arranged in a ring around the pupil. Actually, don’t worry about it.” The fact that the baby had the sharingan at all was more pressing than the number of tomoe.  

an unknown number of tomoe. 

How to sign it off? By now, the pills had really and truly kicked in. Sakura had never taken two tranquilizers before; she barely ever needed one, but this situation had called for a little extra. 

She looked back at the baby, and thought about what exactly Kabuto needed to do to get a toddler to access the Sharingan. The well of hurt that rose up was surprising.

Even though she knew Kabuto was rotten from the inside out, he was her mentor. He’d done nothing but invest in her skills. Sakura felt betrayed and angry in a way that wouldn’t stay buried under her carefully crafted veneer of competence and reserve. 

Plans to deal with Sound’s leadership may need to be reprioritized. Kabuto can’t survive if you decapitate him and destroy the body. When you burn the place down save some barbecue for me. 

Sakura smirked as she wrote the last sentence with a little extra flourish. Hopefully a joke would break the ice a little bit. Sasuke wouldn’t actually depose Orochimaru and kill Kabuto on the basis of a letter, but it made her feel better to write it down. 

The letter finished, Sakura went through the necessary hand seals. The writing vanished from the scroll, leaving the faint scent of burning ink behind. 

“Pretty cool jutsu,” Karin said. 

“It’s quite simple,” Sakura said. “You just need to dimensionally align two scrolls and basically seal away any message so it appears on a corresponding scroll. It only really works with ink, though? Also it’s keyed to my chakra, so only I can send information on this scroll. Likewise, the other scroll only responds to the recipient’s chakra.” 

Karin craned her head to get a look at the scroll. “That’s a surprisingly elegant solution. Can I see the sealwork? When are you supposed to be back?” 

Sakura had proved her loyalty to Sound enough that she had a good deal of leeway. She could also need a day for the tranquilizers to wear off. Metabolizing them would take chakra she barely had. 

They spent a languid hour going through sealing techniques and ignoring the life-altering problem sleeping away in the crib. No one at the base would recognize Sakura through the henge and report back to central command, so she was safe. 

Sasuke never responded to the message. 

The most relaxing afternoon Sakura had ever had since defecting was ruined when a piercing stench suddenly invaded the room, and the baby started to cry. 

It all happened so fast. She had succumbed to a nap in the lab while Karin kept watch. It was hard to tell how many hours passed. Then, Karin was shaking her awake and whispering that Sasuke was approaching the base. It must have taken Karin by surprise, because she was still clutching a handful of blueberries from the baby’s meal. 

It hadn’t been easy to rouse the baby enough for a snack. The sharingan hollowed Kakashi out every time he used it. It was a wonder the baby’s precocious dojutsu hadn’t killed it yet. 

Sakura’s head pounded. She ran her tongue around her teeth and felt the scum that had built up. She’d barely managed to drink the rest of her water and metabolize the remaining tranquilizers before Sasuke appeared in the doorway. He was smoking gently and smelled like old sweat, blood, and barbeque. 

The thing about Sasuke was that he tended to interpret things very literally. Fortunately he was a competent fighter with a formidable doujutsu so he could usually electrify his way out of problems. Between his compassion and his straightforwardness, he would probably never have a career in intelligence. 

Sakura had her own character faults; namely that she was not very funny. 

“They’re dead.” Sasuke’s pronouncement sounded through the room like a temple gong. “I did what you asked.” 

“Who’s dead,” Karin asked. 

“Orochimaru and Kabuto. The Western base has been destroyed, and everyone has scattered.” 

Karin made a little noise in her throat. Sakura heard the small fleshy thumps of blueberries falling to the floor. A shame; fresh fruit was expensive. 

“How did you -“ 

“I absorbed Orochimaru and killed Kabuto.” 

Sakura shook her head. “There’s no way you killed Kabuto, he’s too - you couldn’t possibly have -“ 

“I electrified Kusanagi and decapitated him. Like you told me to,” Sasuke said. “Then I cut off all of his limbs and burned them separately. I didn’t get what you meant about the barbecue” 

Sakura felt herself take an involuntary step back. “That was technically a joke,” she mumbled. Her voice sounded phlegmy and disused. 

Sasuke’s glare was withering.

She knew she should feel happy - Kabuto had tortured her physically and mentally in his quest to mold a medical genius. She should hate him for that, and she did, she really did - but it worked. She was the best, better than anyone in Sound, better than him. 

He was the only adult who had ever focused on her and he was gone, because she’d given Sasuke the tools to do it. The tears finally made their appearance, and Sakura hated herself for crying over the bespectacled psychopath. 

Sasuke looked confused. “I thought you’d be...” 

Sakura smiled tightly and waved him off. “We have more important things to worry about.” 

Sasuke stiffened at the reminder. “Where is she?” He looked hesitant and frightened in a way Sakura had never seen before. “Can I see her?” 

“It’s back there, in the cot.” Sasuke started forward unthinkingly and was nearly clotheslined by Sakura’s outstretched arm. “You're filthy, Sasuke-kun. Please wash your hands and change into a clean shirt before you touch the baby.” 

Sasuke threw an impatient glare at her, and then at the baby. 

“You don’t want to make her sick, Sasuke-kun,” Karin added. “We don’t know how well her immune system is functioning.” 

Sasuke nodded jerkily. He ripped off his dirty white shirt and washed his hands in the lab sink thoroughly, going over every finger and checking each nail. 

Finally, with a tenderness Sakura could never have imagined, Sasuke picked up the sleepy baby and cradled it gently in its arms. His sharingan flicked on. 

“Sasuke-kun, your eyes,” Sakura said, suddenly desperate to contribute something helpful. This was stupid, her inner voice reminded her, since she had already helped by contributing half of her genetic material to Grass country’s most stressful infant. 

Incredible. She was jealous of a baby.  

He turned away from Sakura so she couldn’t see his face. 

“She’s not waking up.” Of course Sasuke made an expression of concern into a statement. He held himself stiffly. 

“She’s just tired from activating the sharingan earlier,” said Karin, who had wedged herself defensively in the corner of the room. “Her chakra is low, but she’s perfectly healthy otherwise.” 

The muscles in Sasuke’s back rippled as he began gently rocking the baby back and forth. It burbled slightly at first but then subsided into silence.  

“Is everyone here better at holding babies than me?” Sakura groused. 

“I had a little cousin my mother used to babysit. She used to let me hold him.” Sasuke didn’t notice that he was talking freely about his family.

Sasuke gently readjusted the baby, and its fat little cheek came to rest on his shoulder. The mouth and nose were still baby-round and indistinct, but the shape and color of the eyes were all Sakura. When her parents cooed over neighbors’ babies, they always mentioned shared features. The parents were always totally delighted. 

Sakura felt like something had been stolen from her. Prickly irritation crawled over her skin and mingled with the dull throb of terror. Her teeth hurt. When she spoke it felt like someone else was talking. 

“What are we going to do now? News about Orochimaru’s death will reach the base soon. We need a plan, and we need to get the hell out of here as soon as possible.” 

Sasuke didn’t turn around. “The plan is still viable.” 

Karin made a “what plan, bitch?” face at Sakura, which interrupted her fantasy of backhanding Sasuke into next week. She responded to Karin’s question with a prevaricating shrug and a mouthed later. 

Any hope that Sasuke would elaborate given the chance was brutally crushed. Sakura used to find his taciturn tendencies attractive; now they incited her to violence. “Are you suggesting we bring an infant on the hunt for Uchiha Itachi?” she ground out through a bright smile. 

“No.” 

“Then who do you propose is going to look after it? We won’t have access to Sound’s daycare facilities, and we can’t just leave it with some stranger.” 

“You’re going to look after it.” 

Sakura laughed. There was no other way to respond. 

This was probably how people felt when they went insane. Here Sasuke was, casually disregarding one of the core features of her reality. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, the entropy of an isolated system always increases, Sakura follows Sasuke. It would have been less confusing if Sasuke told her that the moon had been blown up and lunar shrapnel was about to cause the apocalypse. At least then she would know what to do. 

“Can you clarify what you meant by that, Sasuke-kun?” 

Sasuke was staring dead ahead at the wall, not looking at her. “It’s too dangerous for you and the child. You will both go back to Konoha, where you can be safe.” 

Sakura felt all logic and reason seep out of the universe. “Safe? Safe? Sasuke, you don’t get it. I’m a traitor who abandoned the village, and that baby has the most valuable bloodline limit in the world. Safe?” She laughed incredulously. “If I show up without you, I’ll be sent to the bowels of T&I and then executed once they wring every drop of information from my head.” 

Not to mention that no one would believe the child wasn’t actually hers. She had fantasies about returning to Konoha. Coming back as an unwed teen mother did not figure in any of those. They would all think she was a total slut, and her parents would be so disappointed, and Ino would laugh. 

Sasuke finally turned around. “This isn’t your problem -” 

“It became my problem the minute Orochimaru and Kabuto involved me in their research! What do you think I was doing while you were studying kenjutsu?” 

Sasuke’s throat worked ferociously. If his hands weren’t tied with the baby he might have gone for a pre-emptive strike to the back of Sakura’s neck. 

Sakura laughed again, unable to stop in the face of the sheer absurdity of the situation. “Let’s just all go to Konoha with our Uchiha baby in our arms and set fire to the Hokage tower next! Is that the kind of excitement you’re looking for?” 

“Sakura, I’m sor-“ 

“Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry, Uchiha Sasuke. I made my choices and I’m living with them. I don’t regret coming with you because I love you, I’ve always loved you, and I’m always going to love you no matter how fucking stupid you are.” 

Sasuke looked slightly horrified, which did nothing to improve her mood. “Still?“ 

“Yes! Obviously still! Gods above, you dense fucking idiot, of course still I love you! I abandoned everything I had for you and I would do it again!” 

If she didn’t love him, then it was for nothing - all the sleepless nights, the nightmares, the rolling eyes of bound and gagged test subjects. If it wasn’t a love that could withstand anything and everything, then what had she tossed away Ino, her team, and her family for? 

“I love you, I really do,” she repeated, hoping that he wouldn’t hear how she was trying to reassure herself more than anyone else. 

Karin took the moment to slowly approach Sasuke, hands outstretched in the universal give-me-the-baby gesture. He didn’t acknowledge her, but his arms tightened slightly around it. Karin held out her hands for a few moments before awkwardly folding them behind her neck, trying to pass it off as a stretch. 

“Don’t we have an escape to plan?” she drawled. “Sasuke, you know you can put the baby in the crib without it dying.” 

Sasuke’s lips thinned. The baby was fast asleep on him. One of his hands supported the legs, while the other was curled protectively around its downy head. For a moment he looked like he would rather shunshin out of the base and face Sound’s combined wrath than simply let the thing go. 

Karin cleared her throat. Sasuke finally, reluctantly placed the baby back in the cot with breathtaking tenderness that made Sakura want to rip out his eyelashes one by one. The baby didn’t even react - it just turned over and snuggled into the worn yellow flannel blankets. It looked like a scene from a formula commercial.  

She could feel the threads of her self-control unraveling, and she wasn’t about to let Karin see her explode. “Karin, I need you to go provision us for a long term mission. We have 15 minutes to gather what we need and go.” 

Karin left without even a minor protest about how bossy Sakura was. The sound of the regulation steel door closing was like a sword hitting bone. Sasuke was standing next to the cot, one hand grasping the edge while the other rested on the hilt of an unfamiliar chokuto. 

“New sword?” Sakura asked. “Did you steal it from Orochimaru’s rapidly cooling corpse?” 

Sasuke, of course, nodded. She didn’t feel like pointing out that was also supposed to be a joke. The floor suddenly became very interesting to her. 

“Sakura…” she heard him say, and because it was Sasuke he managed to make the ellipsis explicit. He would be a wonderful character in one of the romance novels she read behind Kabuto’s back. In real life, he was just infuriating. 

It was at this point, the nadir of her constant and nearly pathological love for him, that Sasuke finally chose to make a move. His feet edged closer until they were toe to toe with hers. A callused forefinger curled under her chin while a thumb came to rest at the edge of her jaw. 

She waited until he brought her face up to meet his before she neatly snapped his left radius in two with a careless flick of her wrist. To his credit, he barely even flinched. 

“If you ever suggest leaving me behind again I’ll break both your legs and kill Itachi myself. Are we clear?” 

This had much more of an effect. For a moment, Sasuke looked like he’d been hit over the head with a brick. It felt good to see the flash of hurt that rippled over his face before it was cloaked with disdain. 

Sasuke’s lip curled. “Like you could,” he scoffed. 

“You don’t know jack shit about what I can do.” Sakura knew perfectly well she could never hope to defeat Uchiha Itachi, not even if every major and minor god took her side. She was a strong fighter and a brilliant scientist, but Sasuke could trounce her with his eyes closed and his hands behind his back. 

Sakura knew that killing Itachi was Sasuke’s sacred mission. Threatening to take that away wasn’t only unfair; it was cruel. In the aftermath of Sasuke threatening to send her away like an unruly pet, she wanted to let him know just how vicious she could be. 

For a moment they just looked at each other. Greasy ash coated Sasuke’s hair and face, coming down to form a v on his chest where his shirt collar left skin exposed. Every breath he took emphasized the tendons bracketing the hollow of his throat. The oppressive silence was only broken by his suppressed wheezing.

Sakura probably didn’t look much better. Her hair was still damp after her shower. She hadn’t bothered to plait it, so it hung in a tangled ponytail to the middle of her back.

This was their first real fight, and Sakura didn’t know what to do. Normally, she would reach out when things got tense. She always took it on herself to placate and soothe, even if Sasuke tried to swat away her efforts. 

The role she had chosen for herself demanded that she apologize for her outburst, heal Sasuke, and let him take the lead in planning their next steps. 

She opened her mouth to say the necessary words, but they wouldn't come out. Her feet were rooted to the floor. Normally, Sasuke wasn’t threatening to spit in the face of everything she stood for. If she yielded now, he might take that as acquiescence. 

So they stood there until Karin re-entered the room dragging a laden sack behind her. 

“Are you guys done fighting? I heard some of the sentries muttering about a disturbance in the eastern base, so we might want to get the hell out of here.” She dragged the sack to the center of the room, carefully avoiding the various displaced appliances that littered the room. “I’ve got sleeping packs, rations, some emergency first aid kits, basic weapons, and a few uniforms in case we need to change. I just need to get stuff for the baby and then we’re good to go.” 

“I’ll give you some empty sealing scrolls,” Sakura offered, reaching for her pack. “How fast can you get everything packed up?” 

“Five minute and we’re ready to go. Do you want anything from the lab?” Karin nimbly caught the storage scrolls Sakura tossed at her. 

It was tempting to grab some of the larger machines, but throwing delicate machinery into pocket dimensions tended to screw with the calibration. 

“I’ve got what I need,” Sakura called out to Karin. The other girl was now bent over, shoving everything from the cabinet on the baby’s side of the room into a scroll. Diaper cloths, tiny dun onesies, and miscellaneous tins all vanished into the ether the minute they touched the scroll. 

Sasuke’s left arm was already turning a nasty shade of blue. Sakura sidled up next to him and silently proffered a clean shirt from the pack. He put it on without protest, gritting his teeth as his left arm reached through the sleeve. 

With a small grunt of irritation, Sakura snatched his injured arm, ignoring Sasuke’s hiss of pain. Healing the fracture took her mind off of how badly she still wanted to deck the love of her life. 

The green healing chakra flickered out when she was done, and Sasuke tried to take his hand away. Sakura held firm to it. 

“Sasuke. Look at me.” This close, she could see the spidery threads of broken capillaries in his eyes. “I won’t let you leave me behind.” 

Sasuke inhaled deeply and inclined his head, which was the closest thing Sakura would get to an enthusiastic invitation. “It will be safer for the baby once we retrieve Suigetsu and Juugo.” 

“What,” Karin and Sakura chorused in unison. At the steep rise of killing intent, the baby finally woke up and started to cry.