Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/3264884.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Naruto
  Relationship:
      Haruno_Sakura/Uchiha_Sasuke, Hyuuga_Hinata/Uzumaki_Naruto
  Character:
      Uchiha_Sasuke, Haruno_Sakura, Uzumaki_Naruto, Hyuuga_Hinata
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe, Drama, Romance, Action/Adventure, Dystopia
  Stats:
      Published: 2015-01-31 Updated: 2016-04-01 Chapters: 9/? Words: 39715
****** The Valley of the End ******
by SouthSideStory
Summary
     There is a place where two legends once fought, a valley that saw
     their lifeblood spilled. And in Konoha there is a monument, a stone
     face shaped out of the golden bluff, which honors the champion—the
     Second Hokage: Uchiha Madara. (AU in which the Uchiha rule Konoha.
     SasuSaku. NaruHina.)
Notes
See the end of the work for notes
***** Chapter 1 *****
                  An unjust peace is better than a just war.
 
There is a place where two legends once fought, a valley that saw their
lifeblood spilled. Years after both men are dead, statues stand in honor of the
victor and his foe. Their effigies face one another in perpetuity, a testament
to their rivalry and to the battle that shaped the future of the Leaf. And in
Konohagakure there is another monument, a stone face shaped out of the golden
bluff, which honors the champion—the Second Hokage: Uchiha Madara.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sasuke meets the child who will one day be his wife on a sunny March afternoon.
Her name is Masami, and she has large, dark eyes that promise to awaken with
the Sharingan. The youngest of six daughters, she is the pride of her family.
Beautiful in the way only an Uchiha girl can be, intelligent, already skilled
at basic kata, she shows every sign of becoming a talented kunoichi. When her
father presents her, he bows before Otousan and says, “We are honored, Hokage-
sama.”
Masami looks more nervous than honored, but she gives Sasuke a gentle smile. He
doesn’t return it, because he thinks Otousan wouldn’t like it very much if he
did.
While their parents talk, Sasuke and Masami play children’s shogi. She beats
him at first, but he wins the second game. She steals shy glances at him over
the board, although she never works up the courage to say anything to him.
Masami has glossy, blue-black hair that falls to the middle of her back, and it
catches the sunlight as her father leads her away. Sasuke thinks it’s very
pretty in the same way that he thinks summer flowers and colorful paintings are
nice to look at.
“In a dozen years, that girl will be your bride. Do you understand what that
means?” Otousan asks. 
“Yes,” he says, even though Sasuke only has a vague idea that Masami will sleep
in his room and be the mother of his children, however that works.
At night, he hears Nisan arguing with Otousan. Sasuke knows he shouldn’t
eavesdrop, but he hides outside the door to his father’s study anyway,
listening.
“He’s five,” Itachi says. “How can you do this?”
“He’s the same age your mother was when she and I were matched,” Otousan says.
“Don’t pretend to be so surprised. You know how these things work.”
“Yes, I do,” Nisan says, voice so quiet that Sasuke has to lean closer to catch
his next words. “And it’s wrong to breed children like horses.”
Otousan makes a sound that Sasuke might think was a laugh, if only he had ever
heard his father laugh before. “We are Uchiha,” he says. “We have a bloodline
to keep pure, the world’s strongest kekkei genkai to protect. What would you
have me do, Itachi?”
“Let him decide. It’s his life to live.”
“The future of our family rests on Sasuke’s shoulders,” says their father. “I’m
not taking the chance that he chooses wrongly.”
He hears footsteps—Itachi walking out on Otousan, no doubt—so he scrambles
backward, hurries down the hallway, then up the stairs, to his room on the
third floor. Sasuke slips into bed and pretends to be asleep, but when his
brother opens the door he says, “I know you’re awake, and I know you were
listening in.”
Sasuke sits up slowly and says, “Sorry, Nisan,” without meeting his brother’s
eyes.
Itachi puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. Do you understand why
Otousan and I were arguing?”
He nods. “Because you don’t like Masami.”
Nisan says, “I like Masami fine. She seems like a sweet girl. I just don’t
think anyone should be able to make decisions like that for you. Even our
father. So I want you to promise me something, Sasuke. Promise you won’t let
Otousan take away your choices.”
Sasuke frowns. For the first time in his young life, someone is telling him
that his father doesn’t know best, and he isn’t sure how to answer. But he can
tell this is important to Itachi, even if he doesn’t know why, so he says, “I
promise.”
 
===============================================================================
 
The Uchiha rule the village. This is a lesson Sakura’s family learned when her
father was sent to the front lines of the war. He was an unexceptional ninja
who never exceeded the rank of genin, but the Yondaime saw fit to place him in
the turbulent Earth Country all the same. Perhaps because Haruno is a new name
amongst shinobi, one with little history and less weight, the Hokage deemed him
expendable. Kizashi died before his child ever drew breath, and his body, like
so many others, was never recovered.
Sakura hates the Uchiha, with their arrogant smiles and their strange eyes. One
of them examines her the spring she turns six. A tall, stern-faced shinobi asks
her dozens of questions, sends her through an obstacle course, and tests her
ability to control and use chakra. She knows that this is the moment that will
determine whether she’ll be allowed to study the ninja arts, and so Sakura
tries her very best. All the while, the examiner takes notes, and at the end of
the seven-hour assessment he says to Okaasan, “Your daughter is impressive,
especially considering her lackluster lineage. We’ll be enrolling her at the
Academy as soon as the new term begins.”
“But I don’t want her to be a shinobi,” Okaasan says. “I didn’t even want her
to take this test.”
The examiner scowls. “Whether you like it or not, it’s your daughter’s duty to
serve Konoha if she’s able. Besides, every child dreams of becoming a shinobi.
Isn’t that right, Sakura?”
She nods, because she wants to be a kunoichi more than anything and doesn’t
understand why her mother would try to stop her.
That evening, after dinner, Okaasan cries and holds her close and says, “I
wanted to keep you safe, but I can’t even do that. They won’t let me.”
“It’s okay,” Sakura says, and she hugs her mother as tightly as she can. “I’ll
protect me. I’ll be the best ninja ever, the first girl Hokage! You’ll see.”
Okaasan kisses her cheek, sniffs, and says, “I want you to dream, Sakura, but
you need to understand that Uchiha become Hokage, Uchiha and no one else.
There’s only so high you can rise if you aren’t from their clan.”
Sakura starts at the Academy the next month, and there are two Uchiha children
in her year: the Yondaime’s second son, Sasuke, and Masami, the girl everyone
says he’s going to marry someday. Masami seems kind and friendly, but her
husband-to-be is conceited, standoffish, and rude.
After her third day of school, Sakura tells Okaasan, “He thinks he’s better
than everyone else just ‘cause his father’s the Hokage.”
“I’m sure he does,” her mother says, “but I don’t want you worrying about
Sasuke. You just work hard and listen to Iruka-sensei. Okay?”
She nods, and really she tries to do as Okaasan says, but it’s difficult.
Sasuke is the star of her class, and as much as she wants to dislike him,
Sakura can’t help but admire how quickly he picks up new jutsu, how every
shuriken he throws lands precisely where he means it to. She watches him, at
first because she wants to unravel the mystery behind his perfect techniques.
But then she finds herself taking note of things that have nothing to do with
Sasuke’s skills as a ninja, like the cadence of his voice and the way he frowns
with his eyebrows as much as his mouth.
She isn’t blessed with a famous name or bloodline-limit, but Sakura is
determined to prove herself, and over her years at the Academy she works hard
to master every task Iruka-sensei sets. On theoretical tests she surpasses all
of her classmates, including the Uchihas, but in practical exercises Sasuke
still outshines her—outshines everyone. She hears the words prodigyand genius
attached to his name, and she thinks it’s almost as if he was destined to be
these things. Bred for it, even.
Everyone knows that the Uchiha never marry outside the clan, and that the
children of the most prominent branches of the family are often paired before
they become genin. Sometimes Sakura watches Sasuke with Masami and thinks that
they’ll make a beautiful husband and wife. They look quite alike, with the same
black hair and pale skin and dark eyes (just waiting to turn Sharingan red).
Like a matched set. Like they were made for each other.  
Sakura might not get along with most of the Uchiha, but she can’t help but love
Masami. Gentle Masami who never lords her privileges over her peers. Who feeds
stray cats, no matter how ragged or feral, and is nice to everyone, whether
it’s shy Hinata or lazy Shikamaru or wild Naruto. By her fourth year at the
Academy Masami is her friend, and Sakura wishes they would be grouped together
on the same squad. Kunoichi are outnumbered by male ninja two-to-one, however,
and so she knows there’s no chance that they will be teammates.
Masami invites her to her home on a cool autumn afternoon, and so Sakura has
reason to enter the Uchiha compound for the first time. It’s enclosed by a
concrete wall, twenty feet high if it’s an inch. Two shinobi guard the gate,
and when Sakura approaches the elder of them calls down to her, “You, with the
pink hair, what’s your business here?”
“She’s my friend,” Masami says. “I invited her.”
The guard waves Sakura through with the warning, “Be out before curfew.”
As if she has any choice. No one outside of the clan is permitted on compound
grounds after nine o’clock unless they are on official village business of some
kind. Violators spend the night in the brig, no exceptions. Perhaps the police
would show leniency to a ten-year-old, but Sakura isn’t willing to push her
luck.
She’s struck by the size and opulence of the houses, the beauty of the people,
most with the dark good looks so common to the Uchiha. It’s such a different
world from the little flat she shares with her mother, just the two of them.
“What’s it like to have so much family?” Sakura asks.
Masami smiles. “My big sisters boss me around, and my aunts are always in my
business, and you can bet my cousins will tell on me if I get in any trouble.
It’s crazy, but I still kind of love it anyway.” She points to the largest,
fanciest house Sakura has seen yet and says, “That’s where Sasuke-kun lives, by
the way.”
“I thought he only had one brother,” Sakura says. “Why do they need a place
that big?”
Masami shrugs. “Fugaku-sama isthe Hokage. Don’t you think the Hokage should
live somewhere nice?”
Sakura thinks niceis too modest to describe the grandeur of Sasuke’s home, but
she keeps this to herself.
As if summoned by their conversation, the Yondaime and his sons are at
Masami’s. Sasuke’s older brother smiles at her and says, “Hello, Sakura,” and
she wonders how he knows her name. The Hokage frowns at her, but she isn’t
offended by this because Uchiha Fugaku is always frowning. Sakura lowers her
head in a hasty bow and says, “Hokage-sama.”
Masami does the same, except her bow is deeper and more graceful. When she
straightens, she says to her father, “I invited Sakura-chan to dinner.”
“Welcome,” Masami’s mother says, but there is a tightness at the edges of her
mouth, a tension that tells Sakura this is a bad time to be a guest.
She ends up sitting next to Masami and across from Sasuke’s older brother,
whose name she learns is Itachi. Between the su-zakana and naka-choko courses
of the meal, he says, “My little brother tells me you beat him on every exam
Iruka gives you. He seems to find it troublesome.”
Sasuke scowls, and even though he looks just like his mother, for a moment his
expression is so purely Fugaku-sama that Sakura giggles.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing,” Sasuke says. “Test grades aren’t going to
matter much when we’re in the field.”
This is a thought Sakura has had herself many times, but it stings to hear it
from her rival. “You’re just a sore loser,” she says.
“Wait till the next time we spar, we’ll see who’s a loser then.”
She doesn’t care who’s sitting at this table. Hokage or no Hokage, Sakura is on
the verge of getting up and clocking Sasuke on his pompous head. She glares at
him and he glares right back, and she vows to practice her kata all night if
she has to, so that she can finally beat him during training tomorrow.
“Sasuke, you’re being rude,” Itachi says. There’s something like disappointment
in his voice. “Apologize to Sakura.”
Sasuke sits with his arms crossed over his chest, stubbornly silent.
“I don’t want your stupid apology anyway,” Sakura says.
“Good, because you’re not getting one.”
What an awful boy!
Masami looks between them, clearly uncomfortable. “Sasuke-kun, please stop.”
When he speaks to her, he is cool and indifferent, if not unkind. “Stay out of
this, Masami,” he says. “It doesn’t concern you.”
Sakura’s temper has always easily gotten the better of her, and when Sasuke
speaks so dismissively to her friend she can’t help it. She flings her bowl of
soup across the table without thinking. It hits him in the chest and soaks his
high-collared shirt. For a moment, Sasuke just sits there, wide-eyed, staring
at her like he’s never seen her before.
Then he hurls his own bowl, and Sakura nearly falls out of her chair dodging
it. The porcelain hits the wall behind her and shatters.
“Stop!” Fugaku-sama shouts.
Sasuke freezes, his hand wrapped around a teacup, ready to fling it too. He
lets go quickly and lowers his head.
Everyone is staring at them: Masami and her parents, grandparents, and sisters,
Itachi and Fugaku-sama. Sakura knows she should say “sorry” for starting a food
fight, for ruining dinner and chucking soup at the Hokage’s son, but she just
can’t.
The Yondaime stands, walks to the children’s end of the table, and says to
Sakura, “It’s time for you to go home, Haruno.” He looks down on her as if she
is an annoyance, inconvenient and unwanted.
She blushes, nods. It takes every bit of her self-control to walk out of
Masami’s house, but as soon as she’s through the front door Sakura hurries down
the street to the compound gate, then beyond. She runs all the way home.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
Namikaze Naruto will be Hokage someday. He doesn’t have the right name or the
right eyes, but what he lacks in heritage and dojutsu, he plans to make up for
with sheer determination.
So when the class laughs at him for messing up his bunshin, Naruto says, “When
I’m the Hokage you guys’ll respect me!”
Ino rolls her eyes. “How do you expect to become Hokage when you can’t even
make a stupid clone?”
“Besides, you’re not an Uchiha,” Shikamaru says.
Naruto crosses his arms over his chest. “So what? Just ‘cause all the Hokages
since the First have been Uchiha doesn’t mean they have to be forever.”
“Enough!” Iruka-sensei shouts. “Get back to work practicing your clones.
Especially you, Naruto. Worry less about becoming Hokage and more about your
jutsu.”
No matter how hard he works, his papers come back with low marks, and when it’s
time to perform his techniques, Naruto finds that he can’t do anything right.
That doesn’t stop him from trying, though, again and again and again.
“Everyone expected me to be like Otousan or you,” Naruto tells his mother. It’s
the night before his twelfth birthday, and he’s troubled by a rare moment of
self-doubt. “But I’m not a great ninja like you. There’s nothing special about
me, and Iruka-sensei says I’ll be lucky to graduate.”
Okaasan ruffles his untidy hair and says, “I wasn’t always such a skilled
shinobi, Naruto. When I was your age I was getting into fights and failing
tests. I passed my final exam at the Academy by the skin of my teeth, and look
at me now. After Tsunade, I’m maybe the best kunoichi in Konoha.”
Naruto smiles, wide and bright. “I’m like you, then!”
His mother smiles back, pulls him into a hug. He tries to dodge, but Okaasan
catches him in her arms and peppers kisses across his cheeks and forehead.
“C’mon, stop, I’m too old for this,” Naruto whines, and he wriggles out of her
embrace.
She just laughs and says, “I’m proud of you, no matter what kind of ninja you
turn out to be. Okay?”
“Okay,” he says, and even if he is too old to be kissed and coddled like a
little baby, Naruto feels a bit better for the attention.
The next morning, he wakes to the smell of miso soup and rice porridge, broiled
salmon and tamagoyaki. He runs to the kitchen and finds his mother at the
stove, cooking, but his father isn’t there.
“Where’s Otousan?” Naruto asks.
His mother gives him a sad smile. “He was called away for a last-minute
mission. I’m sorry, Naruto, but he won’t be back for a week or so.”
“Oh.” He isn’t exactly surprised. The Hokage often sends Otousan on missions
that take him away from Konoha for days or weeks. Once, when he was supposed to
be sleeping, he heard Okaasan say that the Yondaime was afraid of him, afraid
of his influence in the village, and that’s why he always gives Otousan the
longest, most dangerous assignments. To keep him out of Konoha—and perhaps to
keep him from ever coming back.
Maybe this should be frightening, but Naruto has too much faith in his father
to be scared for him. Namikaze Minato is one of the strongest shinobi in any
hidden village, renowned across the great nations for his deadly speed. He’s
too skilled a ninja to be defeated; he’ll come home, same as he always does.  
Naruto eats his favorite breakfast with his mother, and before he leaves the
house for school, she hugs him and says, “Happy birthday.”
Nobody at the Academy knows that he turns twelve today, so he doesn’t get any
more well wishes. Nobody even talks to him, except to laugh when he makes a
mistake. He had hoped that Sakura-chan might notice him, might say “hello” at
the very least, but she doesn’t. She just completes her math test before
everyone else and practices taijutsu with Ino and Masami. It doesn’t matter, he
thinks. Someday I’ll be a great shinobi. Then things will be different.
After he finishes his own math test (last, as usual), he stands next to Sasuke,
watches how he throws his shuriken, and tries to copy him.
“Get out of my way, dobe,” Sasuke says.  
Naruto shoves him just when he goes to throw his next shuriken, and it misses
the target entirely. Sasuke steadies himself and shoves Naruto back. Pushes
turn to punches, and then they’re on the ground, fighting each other. Part of
him can’t stand the Hokage’s son, but more than that Naruto wants Sasuke to
recognize him as a rival, and even as the Uchiha blacks his eye, he’s smiling.
Iruka-sensei breaks it up and tells them to run fifty laps around the Academy.
“Just so you know, you’re not being punished for fighting. You’re being
punished for brawling instead of using taijutsu like you’ve been taught,” says
Iruka-sensei.
They race for the first twenty laps, but then both of them are too tired of
sprinting to keep it up any longer. By the time they make their final lap,
sweat runs down Naruto’s face, into his eyes; between his shoulder blades,
making his shirt stick to his back. His lungs and his legs are burning, but he
pushes harder, runs faster. It doesn’t matter though, because Sasuke rounds the
east corner of the building—their unspoken finish line—a full five feet ahead
of him.
What did he expect, really? Sasuke is the fastest student in his class and no
one ever beats him at anything.
“Way to go getting us in trouble,” Sasuke says.
“Screw you, teme,” Naruto says. “You hit me first.”
“You pushed me first, so you started it,” Sasuke says. Then he walks off before
Naruto can make up a comeback, leaving him alone in the yard outside the
Academy. Everyone else has gone home, dismissed for the day. He sits on the
lone swing and kicks the ground with his foot. Maybe he’ll make some friends
once he graduates. If he graduates.  
“N-Naruto-kun?”
He looks up and sees Hyuuga Hinata. Somehow he walked right past her without
noticing she was there. Her wide, pale eyes are impossible to read, but the
rest of her radiates nervousness. She fidgets, bites her bottom lip. “I just
wanted to say I hope you had a nice birthday.”
Naruto smiles, then says, “Thanks, Hinata-chan!”
She blushes a furious red, stammers something about needing to get home, and
hurries away.
She’s a little odd, the Hyuuga heiress, but she never laughs at him like his
other classmates. He doesn’t know if it’s because she’s too shy or too kind,
but he appreciates it all the same.
As he swings, alone again, Naruto wonders how Hinata knew that today was his
birthday.
                                        
===============================================================================
                                        
Sasuke doesn’t speak much to Sakura after the incident at Masami’s house, and
she seems content not to talk to him either. The one he can’t shake is Naruto.
The Yellow Flash’s son always challenges him to fights and tries to upstage him
in class, but the dobe is so hopeless at every kind of jutsu that he never
succeeds. It’s almost funny; Namikaze Minato is one of the most talented
shinobi in the village (there are even those who whisper that he should have
become Hokage instead of Otousan), but Naruto is dead-last in their year,
barely proficient enough to earn his hitai-ate.
Sasuke graduates at the top of his class with the highest practical scores
since his brother left the Academy. Perhaps he should be proud of this
accomplishment, but all he can think is that he has been overshadowed by Itachi
once again. Sasuke might be talented, but he is not a once-in-a-generation
wonder like Nisan.
There is a part of him that hates his brother. A small, sad, selfish part,
forever jealous of the attention Otousan gives Itachi, resentful of his
exceptional gifts. Sasuke tries to ignore this poisonous envy that breeds ill
will toward his brother, but sometimes it’s hard.
Itachi wakes him in the middle of the night, just hours after his graduation,
with a two-fingered tap on the forehead. Sasuke sits up, frowning, and asks,
“What?”
Nisan doesn’t speak for a long moment, but then he smiles and says, “You’re the
best thing in my life, Sasuke—the very best—and I love you.”
“Oh.” He’s still half-asleep and a little surprised by Itachi’s honesty. Sasuke
knows his father and mother and brother love him, but it’s not something that
is often said aloud in their household.
“That’s not the only thing I want to tell you, though,” Nisan says. He’s no
longer smiling. “Do you remember the promise you made me the day you met
Masami?”
“Yes,” he says. “I remember.”
Itachi’s eyes appear luminous in the dark, like mirrors reflecting something
back at Sasuke, but he can’t discern what. “You’re going to be mad at me soon,
but you have to keep that promise anyway. You understand?”
“Mad at you? Why?”
Nisan stares out the window, and Sasuke wonders what he’s looking for. “Don’t
worry about that right now,” he says.
“How am I going to keep my promise anyway? If I don’t do what I’m supposed to,
Otousan will be disappointed in me.”
Itachi sighs. “There’s so much wrong in this village because our father isn’t
the man he should be. There are worse things than suffering his disappointment.
Someday you’ll see that.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who always disappoints him,”
Sasuke says.
Nisan laughs, but it doesn’t sound like he finds anything funny. “You might be
surprised.” Itachi stands, ruffles Sasuke’s hair, and says, “Goodnight, little
brother.”
He lies awake long after Nisan leaves, thinking over Itachi’s words about
Konoha and their father. Sasuke touches the middle of his forehead and realizes
that this is the first time his brother has poked him there without saying,
“Another time.”
The next morning dawns as bright as any other in the Leaf, but as soon as he
goes downstairs, Sasuke knows something is wrong. The house is quiet, too
quiet, except for the sound of his mother crying. He finds her sitting in the
middle of the floor in the hallway, rocking back and forth, clutching a piece
of paper. “Okaasan? What’s wrong?” he asks.
She wipes her cheeks and looks up at him with eyes just like his own. “Oh,
Sasuke,” she says. “Come here.”
He sits on the floor next to her, lets her pull him into a fierce hug. Sasuke
hugs her back, breathes in the sweet honeysuckle scent of her perfume, and
feels dread settle into the pit of his stomach.
“Your brother is gone,” Okaasan whispers. “He’s left Konoha.”
But no one leaves the village, Sasuke thinks. Rogue nin are hunted, dragged
back to the Leaf, and executed. Itachi knows this, knows that leaving means he
might never be able to come back.
He takes the paper from his mother and reads Itachi’s note. The words wash over
him, a farewell wrapped in an apology, addressed to Otousan and Okaasan. His
brother wrote nothing to him, and he understands that this is because Itachi
delivered his goodbye to Sasuke last night, while the rest of their family was
sleeping.
“Where’s Otousan?” Sasuke asks.
“He’s putting together a search party to go after Itachi,” Okaasan says. She
pulls on her fingers, a nervous habit he’s only ever seen before when his
father or brother were on dangerous missions. Perhaps it’s something she only
does when she’s worried that someone she loves won’t make it home.
“They’ll find him,” Sasuke says. They have to. Surely Otousan would make an
exception for his own son, would allow Itachi back without punishment. He’s an
Uchiha after all; the laws that rule the rest of the village don’t apply to
their clan.
But his mother only shakes her head. “No, they won’t. There isn’t a soul alive
who could capture your brother if he doesn’t want them to. Not even Fugaku,”
she says.  
She’s right, of course. Konoha’s best trackers search for Itachi, but he is a
one-of-a-kind ninja, his skills unparalleled, and the trail turns cold before
they can locate him. Which may be for the best, because there are only a few
shinobi who would stand a chance against Itachi if he refused to come quietly:
Otousan, the Yellow Flash, the Sannin, old Sarutobi Hiruzen.
Okaasan cries for the first three days of the search, but by the fourth she’s
quiet, withdrawn, resigned. Broken. A week passes, and Sasuke can tell from the
blankness in her eyes, the emptiness of her smile when she tries to comfort
him, that the mother he knew is gone forever. Otousan is no better, always
silent and cold with his wife, and Sasuke doesn’t fail to notice that his
parents no longer sleep in the same room. He can’t stand the way his father
looks at him, like he is an inadequate remainder—as if, given the choice of
which son to keep, he wouldn’t have picked his youngest.
Itachi ruined this family, tore it apart and left the pieces for Sasuke to pick
up, and he doesn’t think he can ever forgive his brother for that.
Otousan invites him to his study, tells him to sit down, and says, “From now
on, you’re the only son I recognize. Are you ready to shoulder that
responsibility, Sasuke? Can I trust you to serve our clan before yourself,
before anything else?”
Itachi always swore he would protect him, but how could his brother do that if
he's not even in the village? Why should I keep my promise if you can't keep
yours, Nisan?
So Sasuke nods and says, “You can count on me.”
                                        
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
                 Every society has the criminals it deserves.
 
All of Konoha knows about Itachi’s defection, and everywhere Sakura goes she
hears rumors about why the Yondaime’s eldest son would abandon the Leaf:
because he hated his father or envied his position as Hokage or wanted to marry
a girl from a different village. She hears a dozen theories, some so ridiculous
that she wonders who could possibly believe them. At first she expects one of
the search parties to return with Itachi in tow, but five, six, seven days
pass, and the shinobi assigned to retrieve him all return empty-handed.
Itachi is the first of his clan to forsake the village since its establishment,
and Sakura herself wonders why he wanted to leave. The Uchiha are practically
royalty here; what could have possibly driven him to give up his home and his
family?
On the eighth day since Itachi’s disappearance, Iruka-sensei calls her and
Naruto to their usual Academy classroom to wait for Sasuke and their jounin
teacher. The other squads were united and matched with their new senseis last
week, but Team 7 has been waiting to meet for the first time out of respect for
Sasuke.
“Do you think he’s okay?” Sakura asks. She might not like the Hokage’s second
son very much, but she doesn’t wish him ill.
Naruto shakes his head. “Doubt it,” he says. “It seemed like he was pretty
close to Itachi. Kinda looked up to him, yanno?”
Sasuke arrives before their sensei. He takes the seat to Sakura’s left, props
his elbows on the desk, and rests his face against his interlaced fingers.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Sakura says.
“I don’t have a brother,” Sasuke answers, cool and even. “Not anymore.”
She wonders if it’s easy for him, dismissing his own family. He makes it look
so simple.
They sit in silence until the door opens, and a tall, masked man walks in.
Sakura recognizes him, of course. Hatake Kakashi is known as one of the most
deadly shinobi in Konoha. His dark eyes crinkle at the corners, and she thinks
he might be smiling beneath his mask, but it’s difficult to tell.
He takes them to the roof of the Academy and asks them to introduce themselves,
to discuss their likes and dislikes, their hobbies and dreams for the future.
Naruto loves his mother’s cooking and hates how his father is always away on
long missions, and he wants to become Hokage.
“All right, next,” Kakashi-sensei says.
Sakura feels oddly nervous, even though she’s known Sasuke and Naruto for
years. “I’m Haruno Sakura. I like practicing my jutsu and spending time with
friends. My hobbies are reading and playing trivia games, and my dream is to be
the strongest kunoichi in Konoha someday.”
“And what do you hate?” Kakashi-sensei asks.
She steals a glance at Sasuke and wonders if she dares to be honest in front of
him. “I hate the way the Uchiha run this village.”
Naruto’s mouth falls open and Kakashi’s lazy, heavy-lidded eyes widen, looking
suddenly alert.
Sasuke turns to Sakura, frowning, and says, “I’m Uchiha Sasuke, and I don’t
like you talking about my clan like that.”
“What are you going to do?” she asks. “Run and tell your father?”
“Okay, enough,” Kakashi says. “Introductions are over.”
As their new sensei explains that their real final test will be tomorrow on the
training grounds at five o’clock in the morning, Sasuke stares at her, dark
eyes assessing, judging. Maybe she shouldn’t have said that, but the Uchiha are
harsh, unjust rulers, and Sakura can’t quite feel sorry for telling the truth.
 
===============================================================================
 
Team 7 passes the bell test, and the next few weeks are a blur of training and
D-rank missions, everything from catching cats to hunting bandits. Sasuke never
understood until becoming a genin the mercenary nature of the shinobi life.
Anyone can buy their services, contract them for an assignment of whatever
kind, no matter how dull or distasteful. He doesn’t like the idea that for the
right price he can be bought, but Sasuke accepts that some missions will be
important, necessary to the betterment of Konoha, and others will not.
Team 5—Masami, her squadmates Akanishi Sojiro and Mizushima Jin, and her sensei
Uchiha Obito—joins them for chakra control training.
Nohara Rin comes along as well, and Sasuke finds himself watching her with
Kakashi and Obito. He heard some ugly rumors about the three of them. That
Obito refused his intended, an Uchiha girl, for the sake of Rin, only for his
love to turn to Kakashi. Now Obito is the only Uchiha to live outside the
compound, disowned by his mother and father for dishonoring the clan. Sasuke
watches Rin and tries to see what’s so special about her. She’s a pretty woman,
certainly, but not beautiful, with common coloring and an unexceptional figure.
Rin seems kind, and he’s heard that she’s a talented kunoichi, one of the best
medic nin in the village. Even so, Sasuke doesn’t understand why Obito would
give up his family for this woman who didn’t even want him.
Sakura (that know-it-all) explains the balance of spiritual and physical energy
you must maintain in order to produce jutsu, and then Kakashi and Obito direct
them to climb the surrounding trees without using their hands.
Sasuke runs up his tree, five, six, seven, eight feet, until he uses too much
chakra and gets thrown backward. On one side of him, Naruto lies on the ground,
and on the other Masami struggles to climb more than three or four feet before
slipping and falling.
She stands, brushes off her clothes, and says, “This is hard.”
Obito laughs and points to Sakura’s tree. “Not for everyone, apparently,” he
says.
Sasuke looks up and sees his teammate sitting on a branch a good twenty feet
above them. She sticks out her tongue at him, and he has the childish urge to
return the gesture, but he doesn’t.
Rin calls up to Sakura, “With chakra control like that, you should consider
becoming a medical ninja. I can show you a few things while I’m here, if you’re
interested.”
Sakura walks down her tree, as steadily and easily as Kakashi had demonstrated
earlier.
How is she doing that?
“Definitely,” she says. “Thanks!”
Rin nudges Kakashi in the shoulder playfully. “What do you say, sensei, can I
borrow your student?”
Kakashi shrugs. “Go ahead. It doesn’t look like there’s much more I can teach
her here.”
Sakura blushes and follows Rin. Sasuke watches her go, watches the white circle
on the back of her red dress as she walks away, and for the first time he
notices the way her clothes hug her small waist and cling to her hips.
“Sasuke-kun?” Masami asks. “Don’t you want to practice?”
He’s been standing stock-still, staring after Sakura, instead of trying to run
up his tree. Sasuke focuses his chakra to the soles of his feet, careful not to
exert too much physical or spiritual energy, and tries again.
Obito allows Team 5 to quit at noon, but Kakashi tells Naruto and Sasuke to
keep working until they’ve mastered the exercise. It doesn’t much matter,
because Sasuke doesn’t intend to stop until he’s exceeded the benchmark Sakura
set, and he’ll be damned before he allows Naruto to beat him.
By the time Rin returns with Sakura, the sun is low in the sky, and Naruto and
Sasuke have scarred the trunks of their trees from the bottom up. Just to show
off, he thinks, Sakura leisurely strolls up the tree next to Naruto’s and takes
a seat on one of the upper branches.
Sasuke bends over, hands on his knees, exhausted. But he still hears Rin say,
“Your girl’s chakra control is perfect, Kakashi, and she has more natural
aptitude for medical jutsu than anyone I’ve ever seen. If you want, I can put
in a word to Tsunade about her.”  
Kakashi shakes his head. “Not yet. She might have the talent, but she’s not
ready to patch up dying men. She needs more experience in the field first. They
all do.”
“You’re probably right about that. These kids do seem pretty green.” Rin kisses
his masked cheek and asks, “See you at home?”
“Yeah,” Kakashi says. “As soon as these idiots figure out how to walk up a damn
tree. Speaking of which: Sasuke, stop eavesdropping and get back to work.”
                                        
===============================================================================
                                        
“Is it really our first C-rank mission?” Naruto asks. “Where are we going? What
are we doing? Should I bring—?”
“Slow down,” Kakashi-sensei says. “If you stop interrupting me I can brief
you.”
Naruto scratches the back of his head. “Sorry.”
Kakashi-sensei tells them that they will be tracking down a missing-nin by the
name of Masanobu Ryu, an experienced Leaf chunin who fled Konoha last night.
Naruto looks at Sasuke, and he wonders if it will be difficult for him, hunting
a rogue shinobi, a defector not unlike his own brother. But if he is bothered
by this, Sasuke doesn’t show it.
“Team 8 will be coming with us,” Kakashi-sensei says. “They’re responsible for
tracking Masanobu, but once we find him, everyone will work together to capture
him.”
“What’s going to happen to him when we bring him back to the village?” Sakura
asks.
Kakashi-sensei gives her a level look. “You already know the answer to that,”
he says.
Missing-nin are executed, always (although Naruto doubts Uchiha Itachi would
have suffered that fate, had he been recovered). It’s the law. He knows that
rogue shinobi are a threat to Konoha’s security, that they take the secrets and
skills which belong to the Leaf with them when they flee, endangering the whole
village. Catching a defector is necessary, and he should be happy to finally be
given such an important assignment. But Naruto doesn’t like the idea of killing
a man just for running away, and from the look of Sakura’s frown, neither does
she.
“Can we refuse the mission?” she asks.
“Not if you want to remain a Konoha shinobi,” Kakashi-sensei says flatly.
They meet Team 8 at the gate an hour later. Hinata blushes and stammers hello,
Shino says nothing, hiding behind his high collar and his sunglasses, and Kiba
brags that this is his squad’s thirdC-rank mission, so Team 7 better follow
their lead.
Naruto crosses his arms over his chest. “You’re just here to track down the
target,” he says. “It’s us who’ll be capturing him! You wait and see.”
Kiba laughs. “Like you’ll be capturing anything, dead-last.”
Kakashi-sensei catches Naruto by the back of his shirt to keep him from
pouncing on Kiba. “Save it for the mission,” he says.
“But he called me dead-last—”
“Well, you weredead-last in your year,” Kakashi says reasonably. “You can’t
beat up all your peers for telling the truth.”
Naruto pouts. “Some sensei you are,” he grumbles.
So far Kakashi hasn’t taught him much of anything useful besides the shadow
clone jutsu (the only thing he was better at than Sasuke). Kakashi always has
time enough for the Hokage’s son, teaching him new techniques and practicing
taijutsu one-on-one. And ever since Sakura outshone both of her teammates at
chakra control, he has allowed her to take medical ninjutsu lessons with Rin.
Naruto isn’t learning anything special, though, and even though he’d never say
it out loud, he’s starting to worry that maybe all of his classmates were right
to call him a loser. That he’s just a mediocre shinobi who’ll never advance
past the rank of genin, much less ever become Hokage.
But whenever he starts to think like that, Naruto reminds himself that he’ll
make up for his shortcomings in dedication and guts. I’ll show them on this
mission, he decides. No matter what.
It takes Akamaru all of a minute to pick up Masanobu’s scent, but their target
has half a day’s head start on them, and so they follow the trail for hours.
South, then east, until the sky darkens, and when Naruto glances over his
shoulder he sees a blazing sun of red and orange seeping into the dusk. Every
muscle in his body hurts after a day spent running, but it’s a good ache. A
present sort of pain that reminds him of where he is and what he’s doing.
Kurenai calls for both teams to stop just a few miles shy of the shoreline.
Naruto sits in the grass, breathing heavily, too tired to care whether or not
this makes him look weak. But then the other genin (except Sasuke) do the same.
“It looks like Masanobu caught a boat somewhere near here, so we’re going to
lose his scent,” Kurenai says. “We’ll need to split up into pairs and question
the locals to see if we can find out where he went.”
“I want to work with Sakura-chan.” Naruto glances at his teammate, hoping she
might agree, but Sakura just rolls her pretty green eyes and says, “I don’t
think we get to pick our partners.”
“Right, as usual, Sakura,” Kakashi-sensei says. “Naruto, you’ll be with me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the most likely to cause trouble,” Kakashi tells him flatly.
“Sakura, you go with Sasuke.”
                                        
===============================================================================
                                        
Before her graduation from the Academy, Sakura had never been outside of
Konoha. The Hokage’s laws prevent travel between different districts of the
country without a permit. Laws that did not apply to the Uchiha, naturally, who
could come and go across the nation as they pleased. And so the ocean to the
east of this nameless fishing village is the first that Sakura has ever seen.
She’s struck by the wide, unforgiving breadth of the waters. Waves rolling in
under the new moon, more black than blue, speckled with reflected starlight.
“It’s beautiful,” Sakura says, without really meaning to.
Sasuke frowns. “We’re here on a mission. Not to sight-see.”
“Maybe it’s not special to you because you can leave Konoha whenever you like,”
she says. “Missions are the only time I get to see new places.” She knows it’s
irresponsible, but Sakura isn’t about the visit the seaside without swimming.
She runs to the beach, feels herself kicking up sand in her wake.  
“What are you doing? The village is the other way.” Sasuke sighs, obviously
annoyed, but he follows her anyway.
Sakura stops, removes her shoes and weapons pouch, then unzips her dress and
pulls it off too. She’s still decent enough, wearing a practical bra and green
leggings. Not the best swimwear, perhaps, but it’ll have to do. The sand is
gritty against the tender skin of her bare feet, and when she draws close
enough for the waves to brush her ankles, she almost jumps at the coldness of
the water.
“This is a waste of time,” Sasuke says, impatient.
Sakura turns around so that she’s facing her teammate and walks backward into
the water. Icy ocean creeps up her calves, tickles the backs of her knees, her
thighs, her waist. She laughs and says, “C’mon, get in here!”
Sasuke looks at her oddly for a moment, almost as if he’s considering her
proposal against his better judgment. But then he says, “No way.”
Sasuke does what he pleases when he pleases, as arrogant and inconsiderate as
the rest of his clan, and normally she wouldn’t care. But for some reason,
tonight, it matters to Sakura that he does the wrong thing for once instead of
being so insufferably perfect all the time. “Five minutes, and then I promise
we’ll go straight back to work.”
He scowls and looks away, and just when Sakura is certain that he’s ignoring
her, Sasuke pulls his shirt over his head, then bends to take off his shoes.
She doesn’t understand why, but by the time he joins her, treading water where
it’s just barely too deep to stand, Sakura’s heart is beating faster than it
should. He’s close enough now that she can see his dark eyes and the lines of
his finely carved features. She’s noticed Sasuke’s good looks before, of
course, but he’s never been this close to her outside of sparring, and it
occurs to Sakura that he is perhaps the most handsome boy she’s ever met.
She feels a flash of guilt, because Sasuke belongs to Masami. She’s irritated
with herself for thinking stupid things, then irritated with her teammate for
being as brilliant as he is conceited, as beautiful as he is untouchable. So
she splashes water at Sasuke and smiles as he splutters and shakes his head.
There’s a split second where he stares at her, dumbfounded, as if he can’t
believe she’d dare, and then he splashes her back.
She knows Sasuke well enough to guess that this is just the beginning of his
reprisal, so she swims away, then wades to the shore. She doesn’t make it a
foot onto dry land before he tackles her. Sakura hits the earth hard enough to
knock the wind out of her, but she remembers from training how to push him away
before he can get her in a good hold. He’s back on her in a second, though, and
they roll in the sand, half in the surf, until Sasuke gets the upperhand and
pins her to the ground. She struggles, but Sakura is slightly smaller than him
and he’s skilled enough to know how to exploit her weaknesses.
“Fine, you win,” Sakura says. “Now get off me.”
Sasuke doesn’t let her go, doesn’t say anything, but he’s looking at her in the
strangest way, frowning even as his gaze lingers on her wet hair, her eyes, her
mouth. Almost as if he’s trying to puzzle out a difficult problem and he
expects to find the answer in her expression.
“Sasuke-kun,” she says softly—as much an entreaty as her pride will allow.
He startles and scrambles away from her, and in the moment their bodies
separate Sakura misses the warm weight of him, protecting her from the cool
night air. They dress in silence, and Sasuke says, all business, “Let’s get to
the village and start asking questions.”
“Yeah,” Sakura says. “Sure.”
They walk westward, toward the town, side by side, with enough space between
them for a third person to stand.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sasuke spends two hours with Sakura, making inquiries of the local fishermen,
hoping that Masanobu may have paid someone for the use of a boat, but no one in
this backwater village has seen any strangers in weeks, and they return to the
rendezvous point empty handed. Of all people, it’s gentle Hinata’s questioning
that bears fruit. A young woman saw a man fitting their target’s description
stealing a neighbor’s skiff, then sailing east.
“If she saw him taking it, why didn’t she stop him?” Naruto asks.
Sasuke can’t keep himself from snorting. Sometimes Naruto really is an idiot.
“Because most people aren’t that noble,” he says.
Kakashi orders all of them into a boat large enough for eight shinobi and a
puppy.
“We can’t just take this,” Sakura says. “It’s probably someone’s livelihood.”
“Get in,” Kakashi-sensei says, in a tone that commands obedience. “We’ll return
the damn dinghy before anyone has had time to miss it.”
Sakura takes a seat between Naruto and Sasuke, and Kurenai uses a wind jutsu to
fill the sails.
“Where are we going?” Kiba asks.
“There’s only one thing east of here,” Kurenai says, “and that’s Whirlpool.”
Naruto looks up suddenly. “But there’s nothing left of Whirlpool. It was
destroyed in the last war.”
“How do you know that?” Sasuke asks. Naruto usually slept through their history
classes.
His teammate shrugs and says, too-casual, “My mother’s from Uzushio.”
Sasuke has met Uzumaki Kushina a few times, and she seems like a nice enough
woman, if more temperamental than his own mother, but he considers her with a
newfound respect in light of this revelation. What must it be like to lose your
family, your home, your entire way of life? This is a hardship Sasuke is
unlikely to ever face, and he’s grateful for that.
It’s a short but boring trip from Fire to the ruins of Whirlpool. They leave
their stolen boat on the shore and continue on foot, led once again by
Akamaru’s nose. Luckily enough, he picks up the scent again. So Masanobu
ishere. Sasuke is frankly surprised. He’d expected that their target headed
east only for as long as it took to escape the sight of nosy lookouts, then
changed directions. This, after all, is what Sasuke would have done if he were
a missing-nin.
As they follow Akamaru, his thoughts drift to Itachi. Sasuke wonders where his
brother is and why he left, what could have driven him to abandon Konoha.
Itachi’s defection has hardened Otousan and broken Okaasan, and Sasuke wants,
more than anything, to face his big brother and demand answers.
He shakes off these musings and tells himself that this isn’t the time or the
place. Sasuke knows he needs to focus if he wants to complete his first C-rank
mission.
The land here is all green hills and swirling rivers and lush valleys, no trees
in sight. They pass through an abandoned town, its buildings torn down and
burnt, the blackened rubble overgrown with moss and vines. An empty shell of a
place, inhabited only by a few stray cats. Naruto lingers beside the remains of
a house, his hand pressed to the one wall that’s still standing.
“Who would do this?” he asks, his rough voice softer than Sasuke has ever heard
it.
“That’s what war looks like,” Kakashi says. “Hope you never have to see it in
your lifetime.”
Kiba pets Akamaru and says, “We’re close now, about a half-mile away.”
Hinata activates her Byakugan, and the chakra coils beside her eyes swell.
Shino crouches and presses his ear to the ground. Sasuke can’t guess what the
Aburame boy is doing, but a moment later he sits up and says, “We have a
problem. Masanobu isn’t alone.”
“How many are there?” Kurenai asks.
“Five,” Shino says.
“All right,” Kakashi says. “This changes things. We know our target’s
abilities, but his companions are wild cards. Hinata, we’re depending on your
Byakugan. When we get close enough for you to see, tell us what you can about
the people with Masanobu. All right?”
Hinata nods, and they set off again. Sakura looks worried, and even Naruto
appears subdued. This mission just got much more complicated, and possibly more
dangerous than C-rank, depending on who’s with Masanobu. Sasuke has the sense
to be wary, but he isn’t scared. There isn’t much that frightens him, and he’s
always been confident in his skills, no matter his opponent (except against
Itachi).
Hinata stops their group and says, “Three of them are sleeping: Masanobu and
two samurai. The others are keeping watch. A woman wearing a Sand hitai-ate and
an old man. He has chakra like… like Naruto-kun.Very strong.”
“An Uzumaki,” Kakashi says. “We should split up and encircle them.”
Kurenai nods. “Ambush them from every side. If we’re lucky we might be able to
subdue the ones who are sleeping before they gather themselves.”
“Team 7 will take the two who are awake.” Kakashi turns to his squad and says,
“Sasuke, Sakura, Naruto: I’ll attack the old man while you all fight the Sand
kunoichi. You’re not to interfere with my battle. Understood?”
“Yes,” they say, the three of them together, lying without meaning to.
                                        
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Masanobu and his companions are camped out in the ruins of Uzushio itself. The
four of them sneak, silent on light feet, through the broken buildings, using
fallen walls and pillars marked with the Whirlpool emblem for cover, until they
reach their target.
Hinata was right; only the Uzumaki and the Sand shinobi are awake. Naruto
watches the old man, wondering if he is some kind of cousin or great-uncle. His
long hair is as red as Okaasan’s, but threaded with grey. Naruto has never met
another relative from his mother’s clan, and now he’s expected to look on while
his sensei defeats him.
Kakashi gives the signal, and they charge into the middle of Masanobu’s camp,
shuriken flying ahead of them. Naruto can just see Team 8 ambushing the three
sleeping men from the other side, but he follows Sasuke (the bastard is fast,
ahead of him as always) and pulls a kunai as he approaches the Sand shinobi.
She’s quick, though, and easily dodges the attacks from three genin. “This is
too easy,” she says, then makes hand seals Naruto can’t follow. Dirt rises from
the ground, the very earth coming alive around them, forming into a half-dozen
giants. Men ten feet tall with dull hollows for eyes, noseless and mouthless.
“I’ll take her,” Sasuke says. “You guys get rid of these things.” And then he
rushes the Sand kunoichi, kunai drawn, but Naruto can’t wait and watch his
teammate’s fight, because the creatures under their opponent’s command are
stirring.
Sakura dodges an earthen fist and flings two shuriken at the creature. They
land precisely in the empty sockets where eyes belong, but the giant seems
unaffected. It stomps the ground beside Sakura, and she jumps backward.
“Let’s climb the rubble so we have some height,” Naruto says.
“Good thinking!”
They run up the nearest wall, and Naruto is suddenly thankful for all those
hours practicing chakra control. Then he throws more shuriken, for all the good
it does.
The giants are slow but strong, and if they land even one blow, it could mean
his life or Sakura’s.
“We need to find their weak points as fast as possible,” Sakura says. “Naruto,
use your kage bunshin to attack one all over until you find its
vulnerabilities.”
He performs the hand seals and concentrates, dividing his chakra amongst thirty
clones. Naruto feels his awareness expand, somehow taking in the knowledge and
experience of each clone. He jumps on the nearest giant, and a small army of
doppelgangers jumps with him. They stab its forehead, heart, knees, stomach,
chest, between its shoulders, the back of its neck—the earth here parts, soft
as wet clay, and Naruto’s clone digs into the dirt until his fingers close
around something hard, no larger than a marble. He rips it out and finds that
it’s a black stone inscribed with kanji for heaven and earth. The creature can
make no cry or expression of pain, but it trembles all over and falls to its
knees.
He and Sakura make quick work of the remaining giants, pulling out the stones
that animate them. By the time they finish, Sasuke has wound the Sand kunoichi
in wire from shoulders to ankles and tied her hands behind her back. She spits
at him and calls him the son of a tyrant and a whore—
“Be quiet,” Sasuke says. He makes a few quick hand seals (ox, monkey, rat) and
her lips snap shut.
“Where are Kakashi-sensei and the Uzumaki man?” Sakura asks.
Naruto looks around and sees that their teacher and his kin have disappeared.
“They went north,” Sasuke says. “Kakashi was leading him away from us, I
think.”
Team 8 was still busy with Masanobu and the samurai, and Kakashi told them to
stay out of his fight, but he doesn’t want to abandon his sensei.
“Let’s go,” Naruto says. “We have to help him.”
It doesn’t take long to find Kakashi. He’s in a valley surrounded by the
Whirlpool ninja and three enormous beasts: a falcon, ram, and snake large
enough to put the Sand kunoichi’s earthen giants to shame.
“Get out of here!” Kakashi shouts.
Sasuke charges in first, toward the enemy shinobi, leaving Naruto and Sakura to
face the minions again. Teme, Naruto thinks. How’s he supposed to prove himself
this way? It’s probably for the best, though, because if there’s one thing his
mother has taught him, it’s fuinjutsu.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sakura doesn’t know how Naruto manages it, but within a few minutes he’s sealed
all three of the summons. Before she can congratulate him or ask questions, she
hears a sound like a thousand chirping birds, and when she turns she sees
Kakashi-sensei with his arm elbow-deep in the Uzumaki ninja’s chest. His hand
is pushed throughthe old man, and it’s alive with blue lightning. She’s too
surprised for a moment, stunned by the sight of her lazy, perpetually late
sensei killing a man, to realize that Sasuke is on the ground, and he isn’t
moving.
“Sasuke-kun!” she shouts. Sakura runs to her fallen teammate, but when she
reaches him, she freezes. Blood soaks his torn, blue shirt and stains his
shorts. It looks like he was slashed with a katana, and his hands are a
horrible, awful red from where he’s been trying to keep his stomach closed.
She wants to cry over this boy she thought she didn’t even like, and for a
moment all she can think of is his beautiful face cast in silver by the
starlight, hovering over her on the beach. So alive just hours ago, and now
he’s going to die if she doesn’t do something.
Sakura uses a kunai to rip open his shirt. Dawn light creeps over the horizon,
and under its golden glow she can see the diagonal wound that stretches across
his stomach. It’s deep, but not deep enough to have caused internal damage, and
for that she’s thankful. Rin has taught her how to close lacerations, but
healing organs is a delicate business that takes medics years to learn. Still,
she has only practiced on cadavers in the hospital morgue, never on a person
whose life depends on her skills.
She summons chakra to her hands and places them over the wound. Sakura feels
the muscle and skin and sinew that parted beneath an enemy’s blade, and she
focuses on knitting it all back together. It takes five minutes, ten, but the
bleeding stops and his flesh closes, leaving a raw, pink line down Sasuke’s
stomach. Still, his face is too white and his lips are pale, and Sakura doesn’t
know the blood replenishing jutsu yet. Rin had planned to teach it to her after
she returned from this mission.
“Sasuke-kun,” she says again, and Sakura doesn’t know when she started crying,
but there are tears dripping from her chin, falling to mix with the blood.
Kakashi puts a hand on her shoulder. “You did well, Sakura. If we get him to
the Konoha hospital fast enough, he’ll make it.”
Then he lifts Sasuke in his arms and runs back to the ruins of Uzushio. Sakura
wipes her bloody hands on her dress, stands on trembling legs, and follows her
sensei.
 
Chapter End Notes
     An action-packed chapter (and action is the bane of my existence),
     but I hope you guys think it turned out well. Thank you so much to
     uchihasass and tall-girl-in-a-small-world, my fabulous betas, and
     thank you to everyone who left kudos or comments on the first
     chapter! I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. :D Also, the
     quote at the beginning of this chapter is by Emma Goldman.
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Notes
     Trigger warning for child abuse.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
            Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
 
Sasuke wakes and wonders why he isn’t dead. He remembers jumping between
Kakashi and the Uzumaki ninja, feeling the enemy’s katana slice through his
flesh. Pain, worse than he’s ever felt before. Falling, grasping at his
bleeding stomach, and then darkness. A wound like that should have killed him.
He ought to have bled out under the dawn sky, just another genin lost in the
line of battle.
Now it’s nighttime, and the moon outside his window is waxing. By its fullness,
he’d guess he has been asleep for two days. Sasuke sits up, ignoring the ache
in his abdomen. It feels like someone sewed him up with a needle and thread,
that his insides are bursting at the seams.
“Be careful,” Kakashi says, and it’s only then that he realizes he isn’t alone.
His sensei sits in a chair in the corner, legs propped up on the windowsill,
reading one of Jiraiya’s lewd novels. Naruto is curled up in his own chair,
passed out, snoring quietly. Okaasan rushes to him and presses a light kiss to
his cheek, as if afraid he’s too fragile to touch.
“Where’s Sakura?” he asks, oddly disappointed that she isn’t here.
“Her mother made her go home,” Kakashi says.
Sasuke has a hard time believing that anyone could make Sakura do anything,
stubborn as she is, but he lets it be. So what if she didn’t care to sit by his
bedside and watch him convalesce? He doubts he would have done the same for
her.
What truly hurts is his father’s absence. He has done everything Otousan has
ever asked, and yet the Hokage still doesn’t have time to visit his only
remaining son in the hospital. Something of his thoughts must show on his face,
because Okaasan fusses with his hair and says, “Your father was here earlier,
Sasuke, but once the medics assured him that you would be fine he had to
leave.”
To do what? Paperwork? He almost says it, but Okaasan doesn’t deserve the sharp
side of his tongue.
Kakashi closes his book. “Sakura saved your life, you know.”
“But she hates me,” Sasuke says.
His sensei laughs, stands, and says, “No, she doesn’t. And if you need proof of
that, just wait and see; she’ll be back to check on you before the sun is up.”
By the time Sakura arrives, Naruto, Kakashi, and even Okaasan have gone home to
sleep. She’s wearing an outfit he’s never seen before, a dark green dress with
short sleeves, and he can tell from the shadows beneath her eyes that she
hasn’t slept well. She smiles as soon as she sees him sitting up in bed, and in
a second she’s on him, arms thrown around his shoulders. Sakura is careful not
to upset his injury, but she isn’t overly gentle the way his mother had been.
Without really considering why, Sasuke puts an arm around her back and buries
his face in her short, pink hair. She smells wonderful, like freshly mown grass
and flower blossoms, like spring personified.
He’s alive because of this girl, and even though the words are usually
difficult for Sasuke to say, today he has no trouble whispering, “Thank you.”
His father never does come to the hospital again, but the day after he’s
released, Otousan is quick enough to order Sasuke back to the training grounds.
He’s tired and the place he was wounded still hurts, but he knows his father
has no tolerance for excuses, so Sasuke says nothing except, “Yes, sir.” He
spends the morning running, throwing shuriken at targets, and practicing his
techniques, all under Otousan’s watchful eye.
“You’re slow,” his father says. “Pick up the pace.”
Sasuke pushes harder, moves faster through his kata, ignoring the soreness of
his stomach, until a sharp pain makes him miss a kick, and he falls to the
ground. Lands on his side in the dirt, and Sasuke can’t help it, he curls in on
himself and tries not to make any noise.
“Get up,” Otousan says. He doesn’t sound angry or impatient, just dully
disappointed.
Sasuke regains his feet, if slowly. His stomach throbs and he feels nauseous,
light-headed. If he keeps going he might fall again, or worse, faint, but he
can’t give up. Not in front of his father. So Sasuke takes a deep breath,
steadies himself, and moves through the forms. He will do this until it’s
perfect, until Otousan is proud of him.
He works for another hour, and by the end he’s shaking and sick and on the
verge of passing out. But when his father claps him on the shoulder and says,
“I knew you could do it,” Sasuke doesn’t care how awful he feels, it was worth
all the pain for this rare moment of praise.
They return home, and when his mother sees the condition he’s in, she pushes
Otousan’s chest and says, angrier than he has ever seen her, “What are you
trying to do, kill him?”
“I’m fine,” Sasuke says, because he doesn’t want them to argue. He’s growing
used to cold silences, the lack of speech in their once warm household, but
he’s yet to see his parents fight.
“You’re not fine,” Okaasan says, “you nearly died less than a week ago, and
Tsunade herself said you shouldn’t train for at least a few days.” She rounds
on her husband again and asks, “It’s not enough that you already ran one of our
sons away? Do you want to make Sasuke hate us too?”
His father’s face remains expressionless, but when he speaks his voice shakes.
“If you weren’t a woman I’d—”
“You’d what?” Okaasan asks. “Hit me?”
Sasuke leaves before he can hear the rest. His mother and father stop arguing
long enough to order him back into the house, but he doesn’t care. He runs down
the street, through the compound gates, and into the thick of Konoha traffic.
Sasuke doesn’t even know where he’s headed, only that it has to be a better
place than the home he just left.
He has understood for a long time that he sometimes says biting things simply
because he’s angry or cornered or scared, and he always assumed that he picked
this up from his father. That’s wrong, though, because Otousan never says a
thing without thinking it through. No, it’s from his mother that Sasuke learned
how to say hurtful things he doesn’t mean.
He’s standing outside Sakura’s little apartment building on Kaede Street before
he realizes that’s where his feet have carried him to. Sasuke knocks and waits
for her to answer.
A moment later, Sakura peeks around the door and asks, “Sasuke? What are you
doing here?”
He can feel his wound beginning to bleed again, oozing beneath its bandages,
and he supposes that’s as good of an excuse as any. “I need you to heal me.”
“Oh, well, um, come in then.” She lets him inside, if a little reluctantly.
Sakura’s home is unlike anything he’s ever seen before. Tidy but tiny, and the
mismatched furniture has seen better days. There’s a lumpy, green couch and an
armchair which looks grey but might once have been blue; the upholstery on both
is worn, threadbare, and dingy. The den and the kitchen share one small space,
and he doesn’t see a dining table anywhere (there isn’t room for one). Sasuke
wonders where they eat. Perhaps at the shabby coffee table? He tries not to
stare, but it’s difficult, and Sakura’s too sharp not to notice this.
He expects her to be angry, but instead she just sighs and says, “Let me guess:
this is the first home you’ve seen outside of the compound?”
Sasuke nods, a little embarrassed by his own transparency.
“Come on,” Sakura says, “I can patch you up in my room.”
He follows her to a bedroom that looks more like a large closet. Sakura’s space
is spartan, whether out of necessity or preference he isn’t sure. Empty of
adornment except for a mirror on the wall, and the only accession to her
interests is a line of books on top of her dresser: three medical tomes, a
trivia text, and several novels. Sasuke picks up the one off the end to see if
he’s read it, only to find that beneath its dull literary jacket is a copy of
Icha Icha Violence.
“I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about,” Sakura says hurriedly. “I
didn’t even finish it.”
“Right,” Sasuke says, smirking. “I’m sure.”
She blushes and laughs. “Okay, fine, I did finish it. It was truly awful,
though. The writing’s not bad, but Jiraiya really doesn’t know a thing about
women. What kind of self-respecting kunoichi falls in love with a rogue ninja?”
“That isn’t really the plot?” Sasuke asks. He puts the book back where he found
it, takes a seat on her bed, and pulls his shirt off.
Sakura frowns when she sees his blood-stained bandages. She takes the dressing
off of his stomach with careful, steady hands and asks, “How did this happen?”
“Training,” Sasuke says.
Sakura gets a wet washcloth from the bathroom, sits next to him, and wipes away
the blood on his stomach. It’s cold and he jumps a little under her touch.
“You’re supposed to rest for four days,” she says. “One, two, three, four.
You’re a genius, so I know you can count.”
“My father didn’t give me a lot of choices in the matter.” Sasuke doesn’t know
why he’s confiding in her. He’s not even sure if they’re friends, but Sakura
didsave his life, and that has to count for something.
She takes a moment to focus, then puts her hands over the reopened skin. The
pain instantly recedes, dulled by her soothing chakra. “He made you train when
you’re still hurt like this?” Sakura asks softly.
The honest answer is yes, but it seems like a betrayal to say as much outright,
so Sasuke says nothing.
“I’m sorry he did that to you,” she whispers.
He pulls back, breaking the flow of her chakra. “You make it sound like
something awful.”
Sakura ignores him and scoots closer. She continues healing until his skin
threads back together, leaving no mark but a faint pink line. “There. Take it
easy for the rest of the week and you should be fine,” she says.
“Thanks.”
Her hands linger on his stomach for a moment longer than necessary, and there’s
something about her touch that makes him feel warm and unsteady, nervous and
eager to lean closer all at once. Part of him wants to savor this feeling, the
deliciousness of contact, to keep hold of it long enough to examine.
But then Sakura pulls away, and Sasuke feels oddly bereft. Deprived of
something he knows he shouldn’t want in the first place.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
Team 7 has been different since the mission to Whirlpool. Naruto argues with
Sasuke every other minute, and Sakura still questions Sasuke whenever he needs
it, but fighting together has changed things between them. There’s a subtle
shift in their dynamic, an easiness borne from trust that wasn’t there before.
Today, the three genin are sitting in a meadow on the outskirts of the village,
enjoying the waning autumn sun. They often come here when they’re off duty, and
Sakura is beginning to think of this spot as their own special place. She and
Naruto eat sticks of dango, but Sasuke turns his nose up at the dumplings.
“Just try one,” Sakura says, “you might like it.”
“No, I won’t. I hate anything sweet.”
“Fine. More for me then.” She nibbles on her dango and lies back on the blue
blanket she brought from home.
It’s always warm in the Fire Country, no matter the time of year—they have wet
springs and muggy summers and mild winters, but it’s the autumns that Sakura
likes best. Lazy, pleasant days like this one, all the more lovely for their
fleeting nature. She always has had a soft spot for ephemeral things.
Naruto lies next to her and covers his eyes with an orange-sleeved arm,
blocking out the afternoon sunlight. Sasuke remains sitting up, stiff-backed
and solitary, until Sakura takes his hand and tugs him down to her other side.
She threads their fingers together, half-expecting him not to tolerate this,
but he does. Then she grasps Naruto’s hand too, linking them all together by
touch. She isn’t sure how or when, but somewhere along the way these boys
became herboys, and she knows she would do anything to protect them.
They stay this way for a long time, just lying side by side, Sakura bookended
by her idiot (beautiful, brilliant) teammates. Until Naruto breaks the silence,
saying, “I’m glad you guys are my friends, yanno?”
“Me too,” Sakura says. She gives his hand a gentle squeeze, and Naruto squeezes
back.
Sasuke doesn’t say anything at all until Sakura nudges him with her foot
ungently, if not quite a kick. Then he grunts and says, “Yeah, whatever. I
guess we’re a pretty good team.”
She smiles, lays her head on his shoulder, and asks, “Is that the best we’re
going to get out of you?”
Sakura can hear the smirk in his voice when he says, “Yes, it is.”  
With her cheek pressed against him, she can smell whatever laundry detergent
his mother uses on his clothes, but beneath that soft, clean scent is a trace
of smoke and fire, something that is wholly Sasuke.
He untangles their fingers, stands up, and says, “We should get going.”
Sakura shakes the grass off of her blanket, folds it, and follows her teammates
back to the heart of Konoha. The boys are arguing about what to do next—Naruto
wants to follow up their dango with ramen, but Sasuke refuses to eat Ichiraku
for the third time this week—when she notices that a crowd of people lingers in
the village square, an assembly of some kind in front of the Justice Hall.
There’s a mix of Uchiha, other shinobi, and civilians, all gathered together.
  
“I wonder what’s going on over there,” Sakura says.
“Let’s find out!” Naruto catches her by the hand and pulls her toward the
crowd.
She looks over her shoulder to see Sasuke following, if unenthusiastically.
Naruto, forward as always, taps a woman on the arm and asks what everyone is
waiting to see.
She nods toward the stage that has been set up in front of the Justice Hall.
“That missing-nin’s being executed for desertion.”
Sakura’s stomach twists, and for a moment she thinks her sweet dumplings may
come back up. In the weeks since their mission she has ignored Masanobu’s
capture, caught up first with Sasuke’s recovery, then with daily
responsibilities, missions and chores and training. It was Team 8 who caught
and restrained Masanobu, after all. Sakura’s concern on the way back to Konoha
had been Sasuke, and Sasuke only. She gave little thought to the man whose
death awaited him at home.
Two Uchiha police officers escort Masanobu Ryu to the stage. He’s a slight,
ordinary looking man, no more than twenty-five, with short brown hair and pale
eyes. Now his hands have been bound behind his back, and from the sluggish way
he walks, Sakura suspects he’s been drugged. Something to keep the captive calm
and docile as they lead him to the slaughter.
The Hokage may have ordered Masanobu’s death, but it’s his underlings who carry
out the deed. The Police Chief himself, Uchiha Ando, calls out to the crowd,
warning the shinobi there of the penalty for defection.
“Does he really deserve to die?” Sakura asks.
“He’s a deserter, and he knew the consequences when he left,” Sasuke says, but
he sounds less confident than usual.
For once, Naruto says nothing. His sky blue eyes are trained on the stage,
where a police officer now stands behind Masanobu. He’s taller than the runaway
by a good foot, so it isn’t hard to see that he’s placing his hands on either
side of the man’s slender throat. Sakura knows what’s coming, and she
desperately wants to look away, but she’s sure that if she does she’ll never
forgive herself. The officer jerks his hands, hard and fast. She’s too far from
the stage to hear the sound, but Sakura sees the unnatural angle of Masanobu’s
neck as it snaps.
We did this. Not just Team 7 and Team 8. The police officers and the Hokage and
every person standing in the crowd who looked on and did nothing. They are all
responsible, in one way or another.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
Naruto can’t sleep. Every time he closes his eyes he sees the missing-nin’s
execution. The policeman’s thick, brutal hands. How Masanobu’s whole body went
limp after the officer broke his neck. A clear sky above them, the taste of
dango still on his tongue. His own voicelessness, just another silent witness
watching a man die.
He gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen. Takes a drink of milk straight from
the carton (a habit Okaasan hates), wipes his mouth, and sits at the table.
Did Masanobu have a family? A wife or children or parents? Had his mother been
somewhere in the crowd outside the Justice Hall?
Naruto hears light footsteps, then Otousan is there, wearing his striped blue
pajama pants and a t-shirt, spiky blonde hair sleep-rumpled. “Naruto? Why are
you up? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he says.
His father walks over, takes the chair to his right, and asks, “Is something on
your mind?”
He didn’t tell his parents about the execution. It’s not a thing they would
have wanted him to see, and he understands well enough why. But now Otousan is
looking at him with shrewd blue eyes, the same color as Naruto’s own. Namikaze
Minato is a sharp man who misses little, and he’ll know if his son is lying.
So he tells the truth. “I saw the police kill that missing-nin, and now I can’t
get it out of my head.”
Otousan makes a worried face, but it’s his thinking-frown, not his
disappointed-frown.
“I didn’t mean to see it, I swear.”
His father says, “I believe you.”
“Then I’m not in trouble?” Naruto asks.
“No, you’re not in trouble,” Otousan says. “But, Naruto, if seeing a man die
bothered you this much, you’re going to have a hard time in the field. To be a
shinobi is to be a weapon, and you know what weapons are for.”
“I do, but what if that isn’t what it really means to be a ninja? What if we’re
supposed to be something else, yanno?”
His father is quiet for a long time, and then he asks, “Do you know how many
people I’ve killed for Konoha?”
Naruto couldn’t begin to guess. His father graduated the Academy at ten, was
promoted to chunin by the time he was twelve. He probably started assassinating
enemies before most of his classmates earned their hitai-ate. “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. I’m not the kind to keep count, but it’s in the hundreds. Men
and women and even children,” Otousan says. “Are you prepared to do that? Do
you think you could end someone’s life to protect this village?”
“Maybe,” Naruto says. “If it was really to keep Konoha safe. But I don’t think
that’s what killing Masanobu was about.”
“Well, what do you think was happening?” Otousan asks.
“I’m not sure.”
He’s close to something, on the verge of a better understanding of this world
around him, and with it, the desire to make things different. He knows, and has
known for a long time, that life in Konoha isn’t as it should be. It’s not
right that the Uchiha hold every position of power in this village—the Hokage,
the police, the council of elders. It’s not fair that Sasuke makes twice as
much money as Naruto and Sakura for the same missions, simply because he’s an
Uchiha. It’s wrong that people outside the ruling clan have to pay higher
taxes, and are restricted to their districts, and get executed for desertion,
while the Uchiha are above these laws.
Naruto knows all of this, and until now he’d always assumed these things were
set in stone, as immutable as the faces on the Hokage monument; but what if
they’re not?
“I thought I had to wait until I was Hokage to change Konoha, but that’s
backwards, isn’t it? I have to make our village better first. And if I can’t, I
don’t deserve to lead.”
“You can’t say things like that to anyone but me or your mother,” Otousan says.
“Not even to Sakura, and especially not to Sasuke. Do you understand?”
“I wouldn’t say that to Sasuke anyway. It’d just make him mad.”
His father smiles, but he looks more weary than happy. “Sasuke seems like a
good boy. It’s a shame he’s Fugaku’s son.”
Naruto certainly wouldn’t want the Yondaime for a father. He’s jealous of many
things that belong to Sasuke, but his family isn’t one of them.
“Go back to bed and try to get some rest,” Otousan says.
Naruto nods and tells his father goodnight. He falls asleep almost as soon as
his head hits the pillow, and he dreams of a different Konoha. One where people
are treated the same, no matter what clan they come from.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
His cousin Saiyuri gets married as October slips into November, and Sasuke
takes Masami to the wedding. She looks nice in a deep blue kimono, her long,
dark hair pulled away from her face. After the ceremony, he walks her from the
shrine to his uncle’s house, where there’s a banquet laid out for a hundred
clansmen. Masami sits to his left, and every move she makes is graceful,
delicate, predictable. Sasuke finds her company comforting. She is familiar to
him, a stable factor in a world that has given him too many variables lately.
Itachi is gone and his parents’ marriage is falling apart, but Masami is still
patient, still gentle, and in four or five years she will become his wife. 
But for some reason, as he watches Saiyuri with her new husband and considers
his own wedding someday, it isn’t Masami he thinks of. Sasuke remembers the
springtime scent of Sakura’s hair when she embraced him in the hospital. The
warmth of her fingers entwined with his own. The feel of her beneath him when
they tussled on the beach, all slender lines and subtle curves. Sakura does not
possess the dark beauty he has been taught to admire, but he finds her lovely
all the same.
It doesn’t much matter, though, because Uchiha never marry outside the clan,
and Sasuke is nothing if not a dutiful son.
Still, he can’t help but notice that Saiyuri seems more solemn than happy, that
her smiles are too strained to be genuine. He wonders if this is what he will
look like the day he becomes a husband.
“Sasuke-kun?” Masami asks. “You seem distracted. Is something wrong?”
“No,” he says.
She smiles at him, and the expression is so soft on her kind face that it
soothes him a little. Perhaps he will grow to love her someday. And if not,
then they will at least have a peaceful marriage.
As the reception carries on into the evening, Sasuke and Masami take a walk in
the garden behind his uncle’s house. Night-blooming blossoms are beginning to
open shy petals, and the air is redolent of flowers and woodsmoke. The harvest
moon looms full and golden overhead, and the stars wink into view as the
cloudless sky darkens from dusky blue to violet to black. It’s a perfect autumn
night, and Sasuke wishes, for a moment, that Sakura were here to enjoy it with
him. This is her favorite season, and in a few weeks it will give way to
winter.
Masami touches his hand and asks, “What’s wrong, Sasuke? I’ve known you long
enough to tell when you’re unhappy.”
He can hardly say that he’s yearning for the presence of another girl, and
though there’s plenty else that’s bothering him—Itachi’s desertion, his
parents’ disintegrating relationship, the brutal execution of Masanobu
Ryu—Sasuke finds that he can’t confide in Masami. She would never share his
secrets, he’s sure of that, but he doesn’t trust her the way he trusts Naruto
or Sakura: absolutely and without reservation.
So Sasuke says, “You’re mistaken. I’m fine.”
They return to the reception just as Saiyuri is leaving with her husband.
Sasuke watches his cousin accept final well-wishes with grace and composure,
but he can’t help but think she is lying with every breath, same as he lied to
Masami.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
Sakura finds a note under her pillow exactly three weeks after Masanobu’s
death. It is written in a sharp, unfamiliar hand, neither like Sasuke’s neat
script nor Naruto’s chicken-scratch scrawl. The message is short and forward,
and reading it could cost her her life.
Come to the abandoned warehouse on Cho Street at midnight if you seek justice.
This is a rebel missive, some insurgent’s idea of recruitment. She should burn
it and pretend she never saw such a thing. It is no surprise to Sakura that
there are revolutionaries in Konoha—every year or so the Uchiha convict some
poor soul of sedition and make an example of him—but she never imagined that
any would bother to contact her, a thirteen-year-old genin with little
experience and no influence.
Sakura does burn the note, scatters its ashes in the yard behind her apartment
building, and goes about her business. She meets Team 7 for training, shadows
Rin at the hospital, plays shogi with Masami (wins twice, loses once), and
comes home in time for dinner with her mother. Sakura goes to bed early,
determined to sleep through the rendezvous that she was invited to. But she
tosses and turns, thinking about Sasuke’s grand house and the father she never
knew. The high taxes her mother can barely afford to pay and still keep food on
the table. Civilians who toil building Konoha’s roads and bridges and running
its businesses for a fraction the money even a genin makes. The children of the
Hyuuga Clan who are branded before they can read, caged birds every one.
This is stupid, Sakura thinks, even as she slips out of bed and puts on her
street clothes. I’m stupid. Her clock reads twenty minutes to twelve; she has
time to make it if she hurries.
Cho Street is located on the south side of the village in one of the civilian
quarters. Sakura tries to move quickly without looking like she has any
particular place to be. It must be past midnight by the time she finds the
warehouse, a great metal building that sits on the bank of the Naka River, but
surely rebels aren’t overly concerned with punctuality. She lingers outside,
considers leaving now and returning home. Before cowardice can overcome her,
Sakura opens the door.
There’s no one inside. The warehouse is utterly empty of anything besides old
boxes, dust, and scurrying rats.
At least, that’s what she thinks, until she feels someone standing behind her.
Sakura turns around, kunai in hand, and comes face to face with Uchiha Obito.
“I see you got my note,” he says.
“Your note?” Of all the people she might have expected to be the author of that
message, Obito was not one of them.
He smiles and says, “Guilty.”
“Why did you contact me?” Sakura asks. “And what is it you want?”
“Because Kakashi has told me enough about you that I guessed you might be
sympathetic to the cause, and we need more talented shinobi, no matter how
young.” He pats her on the shoulder and says, “Come with me, Sakura. I want you
to meet the revolution.”
She follows him to a hatch at the back of the building, then down rusted iron
stairs to a dank basement where there must be a hundred people gathered. Half
of them are civilians, but she sees a number of familiar faces, shinobi high
ranking and low. The red-headed chunin, Kazue, from two classes ahead of hers
at the Academy. Shizune, Tsunade’s assistant at the hospital. Yamanaka Inoichi,
Akimichi Chouza, and Nara Shikaku. Even Jiraiya, one of the legendary Sannin.
And at the front of the room, speaking to the crowd of insurgents, stands
Naruto’s parents: Namikaze Minato and Uzumaki Kushina.
 
Chapter End Notes
     Thank you guys for all your feedback; every comment and kudos makes
     me smile. Many thanks to the lovely uchihasass for her awesome beta
     work, as per usual.
     And the quote at the beginning of this chapter is by Albert Camus.
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
                       Each betrayal begins with trust.
 
Sakura’s first seditionist meeting teaches her many things: there are rebels
all over the country, not just in Konoha, ready to oppose the Hokage’s hard-
handed rule; there have already been small uprisings in the outer districts,
although these were quickly squashed and kept quiet; the Fire Country once had
its own daimyo, and if they can oust the Hokage from his position of power over
the whole nation, they can reinstate a political leader, a just man who rules
without the might of an army behind him. Perhaps the most important lesson she
learns, however, is that people are hardly ever what you expect. She would
never have guessed that Naruto’s parents were disloyal, much less the leaders
of a brewing rebellion.
As the meeting disperses, Kushina and Minato walk over to Sakura, both looking
irritated. At first she thinks they’re angry with her, but then Kushina pokes
Obito in the chest and asks, “What did we say? No one under fifteen.”
“I thought we should make an exception,” Obito says. He turns to Minato. “She’s
a talented girl, sensei. Rin told me that she healed a major wound after only a
few weeks of medical ninjutsu training. Not many genin could have done that,
and we’ll need good medics when the war starts.”
The war? Sakura doesn’t see how a room of a hundred discontented civilians and
shinobi could hope to wage war on the Uchiha, but she thinks it’s probably more
prudent to keep this to herself.
Kushina pokes Obito again. “Look at her! She’s half a child.”
“I’m not a child, Kushina-san,” Sakura says, as respectfully as she can. “I’m a
ninja of Konoha.”
Obito laughs. “She’s right about that. Childhood dies the day you earn your
hitai-ate, no matter how young you are.”
Kushina sighs and scratches the back of her head (a gesture that is so like
Naruto that Sakura almost smiles).
Minato looks at Sakura and asks, “Are you sure you’re ready for this? We’ll ask
you to do things that are dangerous, things you may find distasteful. Do you
understand?”
She nods. “Yes, Minato-san. I want to help however I can.”
“Good,” he says. “Because I think Obito is right. You can be a great asset to
us, Sakura.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s already something you can do,” Minato says, and Kushina looks at her
husband sharply. “Sasuke lives under the Hokage’s roof, and he’s privy to
things that Fugaku would tell no one else. Find a way to get him to share that
information.”
“You want me to spy on Sasuke?” she asks.
“Yes,” Minato says flatly. “It shouldn’t be difficult. Naruto tells me that
he’s opened up to you since you saved his life.”
Sakura thinks of Sasuke, her teammate, whose trust is so hard-won. It would be
the deepest violation of their friendship if she betrayed him in such a way.
“If you can’t do this, we have no use for you,” he says simply.
She always thought of Naruto’s father as a gentle man, but she supposes there
must be some measure of unkindness in anyone who can kill as easily as Namikaze
Minato.
Yet, there is a detached and logical part of her which understands the
importance of this task. So she nods and says, “I’ll do it.”
Sakura sneaks back home and climbs into bed, too tired to think much about this
decision she’s made. The ramifications of taking the side of rebels over the
side of law and order. The consequences she’ll face for choosing her ideals
over her friendship.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
They’re lounging in the grass, drinking bottles of water after a long training
session, when Kakashi says, “I’m signing all of you up for the chunin exams.”
“What?” Naruto asks. “Really?” He sits up straighter, ignoring the stitch in
his side and new bruises from six hours of taijutsu practice.
Kakashi smiles and says, “Yes, Naruto, really. The exams are in a month, in
Suna, so you three better get to work if you don’t want to humiliate
yourselves.”
“But we’ve only been genin for, what, half a year?” Sakura asks. “Isn’t it sort
of early for us to be promoted?”
Kakashi waves away her questions with a lazy flick of his wrist. “You’re not
going to pass,” he says. “Hardly anyone does their first time around, but it’s
good experience all the same.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Sasuke says.
Naruto smiles. “I’m gonna pass! I’ll get Otousan to teach me the rasengan! Then
nobody will be able to beat me.”
Kakashi chuckles. “Says the boy who almost failed his Academy graduation.”
Naruto throws his empty water bottle at Kakashi. “You’re a bad sensei.”
Kakashi catches the bottle, pops Naruto on top of the head with it, and says,
“I know.”
After they’re dismissed, Naruto drags Sasuke and Sakura to Ichiraku. They
complain all the way there, but his teammates eat their ramen eagerly enough
once Teuchi serves it.
“Do you really think we’re going to fail?” Sakura asks.
“I can’t afford to,” Sasuke says. “My father would skin me alive if I
embarrassed him like that in front of the Kazekage.”
“We’ll pass,” Naruto says around a mouthful of noodles. “We’re the best team in
Konoha.”
Sasuke snorts. “Ever heard of a little group called the Sannin?”
“Course I have. My father’s sensei is one of them, yanno. But we’re gonna be
even better.” Naruto adjusts his hitai-ate, and then he turns up his bowl to
drink the broth.
Sakura laughs. “Right. I’ll exceed Tsunade, the best kunoichi in Konoha.”
Sasuke shrugs. “You might.”
She grins, and Naruto feels the slightest pang of jealousy. Sakura cares for
him as a teammate, he knows that, but she does not smile at him the way she
smiles at Sasuke.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
Otousan is in a foul mood. He complains about Okaasan’s rice porridge at
breakfast and snaps at Sasuke for opening his study door without knocking. Then
he pinches the bridge of his nose, as if warding off a headache, and says, “I’m
sorry, son. Come in.”
Sasuke takes a seat in one of the stiff-backed chairs his father favors. “Is
something wrong?” he asks.
Otousan taps his pen against a pile of paperwork on his desk. “You don’t
breathe a word of this to your mother. Understood?”
“Of course,” Sasuke says.
“There have been disturbances in some of the outlying districts recently, and
I’ve just received a report that there was another riot in Rokagita last
night,” Otousan says. “Civilians broke the windows of the police station, and
some of the shinobi stationed there refused to keep order.”
“What are you going to do to them?” Sasuke asks.
“I’m going to let the local authorities deal with the civilians, but I’ll strip
those shinobi of their hitai-ates and jail them for two months for
insubordination. But that’s not all, Sasuke.” Otousan rubs his temple and says,
“Your brother was there in Rokagita. When the police tried to contain the riot,
he killed three of their officers and incapacitated a dozen more.”
Sasuke sits stock-still in his father’s uncomfortable chair, quietly searching
for a way to justify his brother’s actions. Perhaps the police had used
excessive force on the crowd? Whatever his reasons, Itachi has destroyed any
possibility of returning to Konoha without prosecution. Now he’s more than a
mere missing-nin; he’s an enemy of the state, a traitor to their clan.
Later that day, Sasuke meets Naruto and Sakura on the roof of a bakery near the
northeastern edge of the village. They can see the Konoha gates from here, and
so they spend the cool afternoon watching shinobi come and go, trading weapons,
and eating fresh bread. Sakura sits between him and Naruto, as she often does,
and he finds himself looking at the long line of her neck, the curve of her
cheek, the hollow at the base of her throat. Her eyes, he thinks, are the exact
color of the pale underside of a leaf.
“I’ll give you two shuriken for that wire,” Naruto says.
Sakura smiles her most charming smile. “I’ll give you three.”
It’s the finest wire from among a set of weapons his father gifted him last
year, but Sasuke has a weakness for good shuriken, and Sakura keeps hers in the
best of shape. They shine under the winter sunlight, highly polished and
perfectly sharp. “Hn. Fine.”
They make the exchange while Naruto mutters something about Sakura’s pretty
face getting her whatever she wants. She just laughs and asks if her pretty
face will get her one of the Yellow Flash’s famous hiraishin kunai.
“Not for every shuriken you own,” Naruto says. “Otousan won’t even let me touch
one of those kunai.”
Sakura offers Sasuke a small vial of aconite in exchange for some of his
senbon, and even though it isn’t the best deal (he has a dozen different kinds
of poison at home), when she bites her lip and looks at him with her clear,
green eyes, Sasuke agrees.
Perhaps Naruto has a point about Sakura using her looks to bargain.
Spending time with his team distracts him for a while, but as the sun sets
lower in the sky and the prospect of home looms closer, Sasuke can’t stop
thinking about Itachi. He wonders where his brother is today. If he’s inciting
another riot in some outer district of the Fire Country, undermining the order
their family has worked so hard to maintain.
“Hey,” Naruto says, “are you listening to me at all?”
“No.” Sasuke plays with one of his new shuriken, turning the razor-edged star
over and over in his hand, until one of the points pricks his palm.
“I said I have to go. Otousan is teaching me the rasengan.” Naruto smiles
proudly, packs up his things, and says goodbye, leaving Sasuke and Sakura alone
on the roof.
They sit side by side, watching the sun dip beneath the western horizon, red
and orange and gold sinking into the blue. The smell of bread, of yeast and
warmth, wafts up from the bakery below, and Sasuke hears the bustle of people
on the street quieting as night falls. His mother and father will worry if he
doesn’t come home soon, but Sasuke wants to stay here. To listen to crickets
chirping, owls hooting, the evening breeze rustling through the leaves. Sounds
that belong to the darkness.
Sakura leans her head on his shoulder—a habit she has developed of late, one
which Sasuke doesn’t quite have the discipline to correct. But she must know
it’s not appropriate to rest against him so closely, so intimately, because she
only does this when they have a rare, private moment together. Still, he enjoys
the soft burden of her body pressed close, the springtime scent she carries on
her skin. Sakura’s presence soothes Sasuke, makes him feel the slightest bit
better. Less worried and more at ease.
“Don’t you need to go?” Her breath tickles the sensitive skin of his neck, and
Sasuke shivers.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to,” he says. “What about you?”
“There’s nobody waiting for me. Okaasan’s on a mission.” Then Sakura asks, “Why
don’t you want to go home?”
He thinks of his mother, who has barely left her bed in three days. Every time
he comes to her room she’s buried beneath the covers with the lights off and
curtains drawn, and when he asks if she needs anything Okaasan pretends not to
hear him. And then there’s Itachi.
He should lie or say it’s none of her business, but this is Sakura, the girl
who saved his life, and Sasuke knows with a certainty borne from trust that he
can confide in her safely. So he tells her about the riot in Rokagita and what
his brother did there, the men who died by Itachi’s hand.
“He can never come home now,” Sasuke whispers, and saying it out loud somehow
makes it more real.
Sakura wraps her arms around his waist, pulling him into a gentle hug. “I’m
sorry,” she says.
He feels her fists grasping the back of his shirt, her apology warm on his
throat. Sasuke puts a hand in her cherry blossom hair and cradles her head
against his shoulder. It’s getting cold, and Sakura burrows closer, until there
is no space between them—until he’s tempted to just haul her into his lap and
hold her for as long as she might allow. He doesn’t do it, though, and Sasuke
isn’t sure whether it’s cowardice or self-control that holds him back.
When Sakura pulls away and says, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sasuke-kun,” he can
see her breath fogging in the winter night air. An evanescent promise that
dissipates a heartbeat after the sound of her voice.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
It’s cold and dark now, the crescent moon hanging overhead amidst a sea of
stars, and Sakura already misses the heat and comfort of Sasuke. She tries to
push away that thought, to not even consider him, this boy she quietly adores
more and more every day.
She walks around Naruto’s block once, twice, three times, circling her own
indecision, before she goes to his house and knocks on the front door, three
quick raps against the wood that she half-hopes no one will hear. Then Kushina
answers, her long red hair piled on top of her head in the largest bun Sakura
has ever seen, and invites her inside.
“Naruto isn’t here right now. Minato took him to the training grounds to
practice—my husband thinks I don’t know that he’s teaching our son the
rasengan, but I do.” Kushina smiles and says, “Men. They think they’re so
sneaky.”
Sakura twists the fabric of her skirt between trembling hands. “I’m not here to
see Naruto.”
“Oh.” Kushina’s smile slips. She tucks a fallen lock of hair behind her ear and
says, “Let’s sit down then.”
Sakura perches on the edge of a living room chair, ready to jump up and leave
at the first provocation, because she knows she shouldn’t be here. That
whatever greater good it might serve, if she betrays Sasuke’s confidence she
will regret it for the rest of her life. Kushina doesn’t push, doesn’t ask any
questions. She just takes a seat on the couch and waits for Sakura to speak.
If I’m doing the right thing, why does this feel so wrong?
She opens her mouth and finds that she has no words, stillborn treachery
stalled on her tongue. She starts gasping, quick and shallow, and for some
reason Sakura remembers the acting classes she took at the Academy. How she
learned to conjure a counterfeit smile. To laugh, to flirt, to frown. Crying,
Iruka-sensei said, never starts in the eyes. Tears are born in the breath.
She’s sobbing before she knows it, tastes the salt of guilt and grief on her
lips, and wraps her arms around her middle. “Sasuke-kun said something,” she
whispers, so softly that Kushina leans forward to hear better. Sakura wipes her
face, knuckles away her tears like a child, and tells Naruto’s mother
everything. When she finishes, it feels like the pit of her is hollow, as if
she gave Kushina more than Sasuke’s secrets. As if she threw away a part of
herself, some vital piece of her person that she’ll never get back.
“Thank you,” Kushina says. “That’s useful information, Sakura, and it helps us
sort out who our allies are outside of Konoha.”
Good. It means her betrayal has meaning, at least. A purpose and place among
the things to come.
“I know that wasn’t easy for you.” Kushina stands, walks over to Sakura, and
puts a hand on her shoulder. “It probably doesn’t feel like it right now, but
you made the right choice.”
Did I? She isn’t so sure.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
Thirty genin, their senseis, the Hokage, and a dozen jounin escorts leave
Konoha at dawn. They head west, the rising sun at their backs, running through
frosted forest. Silver rime coats the green grass, and it’s just cold enough
that Naruto can see his breath misting in the early morning air. He stays with
Team 7, but he looks over his shoulder every so often, checking to see if
Otousan is still at the back of the group. It takes the whole day to reach the
border, to go from the wooded Fire Country to the rolling hills and winding
streams of the riverlands. The Hokage pushes them through dusk, into the early
hours of the night, and by the time he calls for everyone to make camp the land
has changed again. Now there is nothing but flat, brown savanna, endless
grassland that stretches in every direction.
Naruto doesn’t draw first watch—that honor goes to Rin, Hinata, and one of the
Uchiha jounin, who each take a point on the perimeter of the camp to keep a
lookout from—but he realizes quickly enough that he can’t sleep. He turns over,
trying to find a comfortable spot on the hard ground, but he keeps thinking
about his impending exams. The first test starts the day after tomorrow, and he
still hasn’t mastered the rasengan. I’ll figure it out before the finals. All
he has to do is make it past the first two rounds, then he’ll have more time to
practice. At least, that’s what his father said.
Naruto gets up, brushes the grass off his clothes, and walks toward the edge of
the camp. He’s silent on light feet, but Hinata still knows he’s there. Without
turning around, she asks, “What are you doing up, Naruto-kun?”
He sits next to her and stretches out his legs. “Nervous about exams,” he says.
 
With her Byakugan activated, the pupils of Hinata’s wide eyes are more distinct
than usual. Naruto thinks there is something both terrifying and beautiful
about the Hyuugas’ dojutsu, and he wonders what it must be like to see
everything, inside and out. To know at a glance the inner workings of a clock,
the mechanics of a shinobi’s chakra network, the secrets of a human heart.
Perhaps this is why her clan is such a calm, collected bunch; nothing ever
surprises them.
“Me too,” Hinata whispers. “I’m afraid I’ll hold back my team.”
“No way. You’re going to do great, Hinata-chan,” Naruto says. “What do you
wanna bet we both get promoted?”
“You—you really think that will happen?” she asks.
Naruto grins and says, “I do.”
Hinata fidgets, bites her lip, then says, “I wish I was more like you. You
always…”
“I always what?” he asks.
“You always believe in yourself, and in other people too.”
Naruto shrugs. “It’s no big deal.”
Hinata looks at the ground instead of at him. When she speaks, her voice is so
soft it could be lost on the wind. “I don’t think you know how special you are,
Naruto-kun.”
He scratches the back of his head, a little embarrassed, and says, “Thanks.”
Naruto and Hinata don’t talk much after this. They just sit, side by side,
looking out across the great grass plane before them, and for once, the quiet
doesn’t bother Naruto. It’s more natural to Hinata than speaking, he thinks.
She seems less anxious when conversation isn’t required of her, and when her
watch is up, she even smiles at him.
“Goodnight,” he says.
She whispers, “Thanks for sitting with me.”
Naruto returns to Team 7, settles down in his place to the left of Sakura, and
falls asleep right away. He dreams of home—the four carved faces of the Hokage
monument, the singular swing at the Academy where he so often sat—until Kakashi
wakes him by upending a canteen of water over his head.
Naruto sits up, hair soaking wet, shocked by the cold, and shouts, “What was
that for!”
Sakura laughs as if this is the funniest thing she’s ever seen, and even
Sasuke, that humorless bastard, is smirking.
“You wouldn’t get up,” Kakashi says simply. “Now grab your things. We’re
breaking camp.”
There are times, like now, when Naruto thinks he might hate his sensei a little
bit.
It’s still twilight when their group sets out again, and by full sunup the
morning light shines not on savanna, but on a sea of sand. Golden waves rise in
every direction, and the sky is a clear, cloudless blue. The desert is vast,
unchanging, each mile ahead identical to the mile before. There are no rivers
or trees to break the monotony, only the endless stretch of land that hasn’t
been kissed by rain in a generation.
The white sun above is relentless, over-bright. Naruto has grown used to long
trips, to pushing his body beyond its limits, but running in this arid heat is
unlike anything he’s ever done, and he finds himself wishing that every league
will be the last.
Night is encroaching by the time they reach Suna, a village cradled in a canyon
and bathed in dying daylight. Everything seems impossibly small from the
cliff’s edge, ribboned streets winding between thousands of sand dollhouses.
It’s a wheel, Naruto thinks. Suna appears almost perfectly circular, triangular
segments of the village divided by arrow-straight roads, like spokes.
Their party circles around to the west side, the only place where there’s a
natural opening in the rock. A pair of Sand shinobi open the gate and let them
through. A lackey of the Kazegake’s waits for them. He bows to Fugaku-sama,
welcomes the Leaf contingent to Sunagakure, and leads them into the village.
Naruto can’t keep up with where they’re going. This monochromatic village
couldn’t be any more different from colorful Konoha, and every building they
pass seems to look the same as those around it, nearly as disorienting as the
desert itself. Finally, they come to a stop before a tall inn, and their Sand
guide says, “Make yourselves comfortable here. The exams begin tomorrow
morning. Please report to the second floor of the Academy promptly at eight
o’clock for registration.”
No sooner than they’ve settled into their room, the Hokage fetches his son to
attend a dinner with the Kazekage’s family. His teammate’s shoulders
stiffen—Sasuke hates this sort of thing, Naruto knows, formal occasions where
he is seen as nothing but the second child suddenly thrust into an heir’s
position—but he follows his father obediently enough.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sasuke is seated across from Temari and Kankuro, who eat little and say less
throughout the meal. The kages speak of war, taxes, and politics—things more
alike than not, Otousan told his sons on many an occasion—and although they are
civil enough, Sasuke gets the distinct impression that, allies or not, his
father and the leader of the Sand don’t like each other very much.
Between the third course and the fourth, Otousan asks, “Gaara couldn’t join
us?” There’s something almost purposefully provocative in his tone, as if he
knows precisely why Rasa-sama’s third child is not present.
The Kazekage smiles sharply. “My youngest is a wayward son. I imagine you’d
understand that better than most, Fugaku.”
Whatever amusement briefly lit his father’s features is extinguished. He scowls
and tries to turn the talk back to taxes, but Rasa-sama interrupts him, saying,
“What’s this I hear about riots in the Fire Country?”
Sasuke stills, a spoon of mushroom soup suspended in the air between the fine
porcelain bowl and his mouth.
Otousan waves a dismissive hand. “Minor incidences, undoubtedly blown out of
proportion by rumor.”
The Kazekage shrugs, takes a bite of rice. “But there are no rumors, are there?
Your people have done a remarkable job of making sure the matter stays hush-
hush.”
“Clearly not remarkable enough,” Otousan says, “if the news has reached Suna.”
Rasa-sama laughs. “Don’t go firing your Ministers of Misinformation, or whoever
it is you have working to keep your people in the dark. I have friends in Fire
who owe me favors, just as you have your own friends in Wind, I’m sure.”
Friends. What a nice euphemism for spies.
Otousan takes a breath. “Rest assured that Konoha’s rule remains as stable as
ever.”
Sasuke is beginning to hear the words beneath the words. What his father means
is that Konoha is strong, and that Suna had better not double-cross the Leaf,
unless they want to face the might of the Uchiha.
“I won’t lose sleep over it,” the Kazekage promises. “Though how you keep a
firm grip on a whole country I can’t imagine. One village is quite enough for
me.”
“The Fire daimyos were a selfish, corrupt series of politicians without any
sense for what it takes to protect a nation. My ancestors had little choice but
remove them. It was that or see our homeland fall apart.”
“I’m sure,” Rasa-sama says.
On the walk back to the inn, Otousan curses the Kazekage, too quietly for
anyone but Sasuke to hear. “He’s a foul man whose arrogance killed his wife and
made a monster out his own son. If we didn’t need this alliance with Suna I
swear I’d have him assassinated.”
Sasuke’s father catches him by the shoulder, stopping him in the middle of the
street. “You have to pass these exams. You have to show Rasa and all of his
people that the future of the Leaf, of the Uchiha, is not a legacy to be
trifled with. You understand?”
He nods. “I’ll do it, I promise. I can make you proud.”
I’ll be the best because I have to be, Sasuke thinks. There isn’t any other
choice.
 
Chapter End Notes
     Thank you uchihasass for being the world’s most awesome beta! And
     thank you to everyone who’s reading this for your patience. The quote
     at the beginning of this chapter is from the Phish song “Farmhouse.”
***** Chapter 5 *****
                The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable,
               Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.
 
Because Sasuke is a relentless bastard, Team 7 wakes early and reports to the
Academy at quarter to eight. They’re alone for a little while, but then others
begin to show up: the rest of the rookies, older Konoha genin, and a number of
shinobi from Suna, Ame, Tani, Iwa, and Taki, all with their foreign hitai-ates.
By eight o’clock, there must be close to two hundred shinobi gathered in Room
201. The proctor takes all of their paperwork, and she doesn’t wait another
minute after they’ve registered to lead the assembled genin out of the Academy
and back into the village.
“Where d’you think she’s taking us?” Naruto asks.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Sakura says.
They follow the proctor to a tall building with boarded-up windows, where she
divides the genin into two groups. She gestures toward Team 7’s side and says,
“You are the Tsuki Faction. Your job will be to infiltrate and take this base,
using whatever means necessary.”
Then she turns to the second group and says, “You are the Taiyo Faction. You
are tasked with holding the base, no matter what.”
The proctor smiles at them, but there’s a sharp edge to her expression that
Naruto doesn’t like. “This test lasts two hours, and at the end, whoever holds
the greatest territory within the base passes.”
“What about the other faction?” Masami asks.
“The losing faction fails the chunin exams.”
“What!” Naruto shouts. “But that’s not fair! What if you do really good but
your faction doesn’t—”
The proctor shrugs. “Well that’s just too bad, isn’t it?”
Naruto starts to say more, but Sasuke catches him by the arm and whispers,
“Shut up, you idiot. Want to piss off the proctor before we even start?”
There’s more sense in that than Naruto would like to admit. He rips his arm
from Sasuke’s grasp and says, “Fine.”
Team 8 is on the Tsuki side, same as Team 7, but Teams 5 and 10 are Taiyo. No
matter how this stage of the exams goes, half the Konoha rookies will fail.
The Taiyo faction are given thirty minutes to man the building and set traps.
While they work, the Tsuki squabble over leadership and strategy.
“I should be in charge,” says a thirty-something man wearing a Waterfall hitai-
ate. “I’m the most senior genin here.”
“That doesn’t exactly recommend you highly,” Sasuke says. “How many times have
you failed the chunin exams anyway?”
The man flushes an ugly red and says, “I suppose you think you should be our
leader? Some brat barely out of the Konoha Academy.”
“Nobody should lead us,” Sasuke says calmly. “We’ll all have to split up anyway
if we want to secure as much of the base as possible, so we’re better off
moving in smaller, independent groups from the beginning.”
A red-haired boy with dark shadows around his eyes looks to the Suna genin. “Do
as he says.” The Sand shinobi hurry to create nine-man squads by combining
their existing teams, and the remaining villages follow this example. Sasuke
says to Naruto and Sakura, “Let’s ally with Team 8 before anyone else does.”
“That’s smart,” Sakura says. “We worked well together when we captured—well, on
our first C-rank mission.”
Sasuke pushes through the crowd and says, “I just meant there are only two
Byakugan wielders here, and we better snag Hinata before someone else does. Her
sight could make the difference in passing and failing these exams.”
Naruto doesn’t like the way Sasuke said that, as if the Hyuuga heiress’ value
lies in her kekkei genkai alone. “Hinata’s more than her dojutsu.”
Sasuke shoots him an irritated glance, then says, “You ask her to team with
us.”
“Why me?"
“Because she won’t say no to you.”
Whatever Sasuke’s motives, Naruto would rather work with Team 8 than anybody
else, so he asks Hinata, Kiba, and Shino to join them. An odd-man-out Ame squad
fills in the rest of their nine-man team.
Hinata awakens her Byakugan and tells them there’s a weak point on the fourth
floor where only two shinobi are keeping watch. When the half-hour for prep is
up, they scale the back side of the building—and run into a team of genin led
by an older Hyuuga boy who obviously saw the same thing Hinata had. He frowns
at them and says, “Look for another place to enter. This is ours.”
Naruto expects Hinata to say something, but she looks anywhere besides at her
kinsman.
“There’s no reason we can’t work together,” Naruto says. “We’re on the same
side.”
The Hyuuga boy stares at him like he’s dreadfully stupid. “I’m out for myself,
and so is every other ninja here with half a brain.”
“Whatever, you can have it,” Sakura says. “Maybe you need to take the easy way,
but we don’t.”
As their group continues climbing, Naruto asks Hinata, “Who was that anyway?”
“My cousin Neji.” He can tell from the careful tone of her voice and the way
she won’t meet his eyes that there’s much more Hinata isn’t saying.
The tallest and strongest of the Ame ninja turns to her and asks, “How many are
on the top floor?”
“There are three teams,” Hinata says, “same as us.”  
For all his talk about not wanting leadership, Sasuke sure gets bossy once they
reach the roof of the building, deciding how they should enter and which teams
should take which opponents once inside. Naruto challenges him because someone
ought to question the plan, and Sasuke glares at him. “Have you got any better
ideas, dead last?”
“Yeah,” Naruto says. “I think we should all move in together. We’ll be stronger
that way, and it will make them come to us instead of the other way around.”
Sasuke scoffs. “That’s a great plan if you want to get us surrounded and
captured, moron.”
“Better than separated and captured!” Naruto shouts. “Bastard.”
“Dimwit.”
Naruto determines to punch his teammate right in his smug face if he calls him
stupid just one more time. “You think you’re so much better than everybody
because you’re the Hokage’s son, but you aren’t. Besides, the whole village
knows it’s my father who should have been the Yondaime.”
“The great Namikaze Minato,” Sasuke says dryly. “Son of a bricklayer and a
housewife.”  
Naruto flushes, because it’s true that his grandparents were civilians, and
he’s angry that Sasuke would even bring it up, like this is a thing that should
matter. “At least I’m not inbred. What kind of cousin is Masami to you anyway?”
Sasuke draws back to hit him, but Sakura jumps between them and catches his
fist. “Don’t,” she says, “please.”
The tension seems to leave Sasuke’s body, as if all it takes is Sakura’s touch
and the sound of her voice to calm him. “Fine. Let’s go.”
Still, he looks at Naruto coldly, promising reprisal as surely as if he’d
spoken aloud.
 
===============================================================================
  
In the end, the Tsuki faction holds most of the base, winning the first round
of the chunin exams. Sakura is relieved to be on the passing side, but she
feels sorry for Masami and Ino who have both been disqualified. Like Naruto,
she thinks this is unfair, but there isn’t a thing she can do about it.
After she dismisses the Taiyo, the proctor reveals that each individual team’s
performance was also being judged. She assigns a number between one and ten to
every squad, and when she approaches Sakura, Sasuke, and Naruto, she says, “You
didn’t do too bad for Konoha kids. Seven.”
“What does this score matter anyway?” Naruto asks. “The first test is over.”
The proctor laughs and says, “You’ll see tomorrow.”
Sakura doubts that this warning bodes well for the second test.
Naruto and Sasuke are still angry, and on the way back to the inn they refuse
to speak to each other. Sakura rolls her eyes and says, “This is so childish.”
When they reach the ryokan, she leaves the boys alone to brood in their room
and searches out Masami.
She finds her friend on the first floor, sitting on a couch in the common room,
staring at the fire blankly.
“Hey,” Sakura says. “You okay?”
Masami doesn’t look at her, but she says, “My father’s going to be so
embarrassed when he hears that I didn’t even make it past the first test.”
“It’s not your fault,” Sakura says. She sits next to Masami and puts a careful
hand on her shoulder. “You just had the bad luck to be put in the losing
faction.”
“I guess, but I doubt Otousan’s going to care for the details,” Masami says.
“Did you know that all of my sisters passed their chunin exams the first time?”
“You shouldn’t compare yourself to your sisters,” Sakura says. “Their
accomplishments have nothing to do with yours.”
Masami sighs, pulls her legs up and hugs her knees. “I wish I could hate you,”
she says.
“What?” Sakura asks. “Why would you wish that?”
Masami finally looks at her with dark eyes so much like her cousin’s. “You’re a
stronger kunoichi than me,” she says softly. “And I think—I think Sasuke-kun
likes you.”
Sakura’s heart beats harder, faster, but she makes herself laugh a little and
say, “That’s silly. Sasuke barely even tolerates me and Naruto.”
Masami shakes her head. “You don’t hear the way he talks about you,” she says,
and her voice is defeated.
Sakura thinks about the stolen moments she and Sasuke have shared, the
tentative touches and lingering looks, and guilt burns in her belly. “You
shouldn’t worry,” she says, and this is true enough, because there’s nothing
for her and Sasuke. He’s promised to Masami, and she’s giving his secrets to
the rebellion. Even if Sakura wanted to, what sort of future could they
possibly build based on lies and betrayal?
Besides, I don’t want him, she tells herself. I don’t.
“I think I’m going to go to bed,” Masami says. “Goodnight.”
Sakura returns to Team 7’s room only to find it wrecked beyond recognition.
Every stick of furniture is broken—the beds, the tables, the dressers—and in
the middle of the wreckage sits her teammates. Naruto cradles his left arm,
hissing in pain, and Sakura can tell at a glance that it’s broken. Sasuke sits
silently, eye swollen shut and lip busted, breathing so evenly that, if he
wasn’t black and blue all over, you’d never guess he’d just been in a brawl.
“I can’t believe you two!” Sakura shouts. “Look what you did to this room—look
what you did to each other!”
Naruto opens his mouth to say something, but Sakura gives him the sort of
warning look one had better heed, and he shuts up.
“You should go find Rin,” she says to Naruto. “I could probably mend your arm,
but she’d do a much better job.”
Then Sakura turns to Sasuke and says, “You I can fix.”
Naruto grumbles something about blackening another eye, but he leaves all the
same.
Once the door closes behind him, Sakura sits on the floor and asks Sasuke,
gently now, “What were you thinking?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
His father is going to kill him when he sees this room.
She summons chakra to her hands and touches his split lip. It’s easy enough to
heal, but Sakura finds her fingers reluctant to move away from his mouth. She
makes herself tend to his purpling eye, and she uses extra care with this
injury, because Sasuke’s sight is worth more than her life. He takes off his
shirt, and she sees the smattering of bruises across his chest and stomach. She
remains steady as she works on him, until Sakura reaches a mark on his lower
abdomen, just below his bellybutton, and then her hands begin to tremble. For a
moment—just a moment—her jutsu falters, but she recovers quickly.
Sasuke is perfectly still; he might even be holding his breath. Sakura heals
him as efficiently and swiftly as she can and says, “There you go. Good as
new.”
“Thanks,” he says.
Kakashi-sensei opens the door without knocking. When he sees the condition of
the room, he sighs and says, “I leave you alone for half an hour…”
The innkeeper is most displeased with Team 7 and expels them from her
establishment with the promise of a heavy fine to come. They have to find a
room at a nearby minshuku, and Sakura does not sleep well in a too-hard bed in
this foreign village. She thinks of Masami, Sasuke, and Naruto, and she worries
about the second test looming on the morrow.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sasuke wakes his team early and drags them, yawning and cursing, to the
checkpoint where yesterday’s victors were told to assemble. It’s a desolate
looking spot on the outskirts of Suna, near a golden cliff-face riddled with
crevices and caves.
Today’s proctor is a tall shinobi with red paint streaked across one cheek. He
introduces himself as Kamenashi and says, “There’s a temple at the heart of
this cave system, and the first ten teams to reach it move on to the next
stage. You’ll be released in the order of your scores, highest to lowest.”
“Dammit,” Naruto says. “Now I really wish we’d done better than a seven.”
Sasuke notices that Hyuuga Neji’s squad and the Kazekage’s three children are
the only tens.
Then the nines and eights go ahead of them, and Sasuke feels his adrenaline
pumping, preparing him for whatever obstacles there are to overcome soon.
“Sevens!” Kamenashi shouts, “Go!”
Sasuke hurries into the nearest mouth of a cave, and he finds that it’s pitch
black inside, impossible to see. For a moment, he’s stunned—because blindness
is the thing an Uchiha fears most—but then Sakura performs a quick jutsu,
summoning blue flames that seem to emanate light without heat. She cups the
brilliant fire in her left hand, and it illuminates enough of the space that
Sasuke can see their surroundings again.
They rush deeper into the cave, only to come across a duo of oversized,
summoned beasts. The hawk and white tiger attack, but Naruto quickly seals them
both, and they move on.
“How big is this place?” Sakura asks, after a half-hour of wandering through
twisting passages.
“Maybe we’re going the wrong way,” Naruto says.
“There’s no way to tell,” Sasuke says. “Keep moving.”
When they round the next corner, Sasuke steps right into a silver mist, and for
a moment he’s disoriented, lost, confused, but then he closes his eyes, and
when he opens them he’s no longer in the cave at all.
Konoha is bright and colorful, peaceful and pleasant on a bright summer day. He
sees Itachi, smiling with Shisui, and Sasuke knows this isn’t real. It’s a
genjutsu, he tells himself, but everything feels so true, so perfect, that he
doesn’t want to leave. There is his brother, and he knows somehow that in this
world, his father is proud of him and his mother is well.
And he has a wife, waiting at home, with their daughter.
Sasuke runs, and his feet carry him down a familiar street to a grand house in
the middle of the Uchiha compound. He opens the door, and there’s Sakura, much
older than he knows her in real life—she must be in her mid-twenties, and so is
he—playing with a toddling little girl with round cheeks and chubby legs.
Sakura brushes a loose lock of short, pink hair behind her ear and smiles at
him. “You’re home early,” she says.
Sasuke doesn’t say anything. What is this place?
Sakura stands, walks closer, and hugs him. He allows himself a moment to enjoy
the sweetness of contact, the warmth of this woman wrapping her arms around his
waist. And while he’s letting her hold him, Sasuke realizes exactly what sort
of genjutsu he’s trapped in: this is his ideal world. A place where his brother
is welcome in the village, his parents are at peace with one another, and his
father approves of him.
And Sakura is his wife.
Sasuke wants to stay, to linger in this false dream as long as he can, because
all the broken things are fixed here.
No, he thinks. This isn’t real, this isn’t real.
He wakes to a sobbing Sakura, throwing herself across his prone body, clutching
his shirt.
“You’re heavy,” Sasuke says, because her closeness reminds him of the genjutsu,
the world where she was his (the world he wants most, but he won’t allow
himself to think on that further).
“What happened to you?” Naruto asks.
“Genjutsu,” Sasuke says. He sits up, stands on shaking legs. “It took me a
little while to break it.”
Sakura hastily wipes away her tears, gets on her feet, and says, “We didn’t
know what happened. You just collapsed and nothing I did could wake you.”
“Well I’m fine now,” Sasuke lies, because even though that genjutsu shook him,
he has to get himself together if they’re going to pass this test. “We need to
move.”
They continue on, but all Sasuke can think about is the counterfeit world he
left behind in the silver mist.
They run into a Sand team, but they’re able to incapacitate the Suna nin easily
enough. When their squad finally reaches the temple, a monkey wearing a Noh
mask sits before the entrance. It’s huge, a giant black-furred ape, and when
Naruto tries to seal it, the creature only laughs and pushes him back.
“Answer my riddle correctly and you may pass,” the monkey says, and his tone is
surprisingly soft, a whisper of a voice. “If you have me, you want to share me.
If you share me, you haven't got me. What am I?”
“How many chances do we have to answer?” Naruto asks.
“One,” the monkey says.
Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura huddle together and quietly throw out every answer
they can think of, no matter how stupid or strange.
“Maybe a meal?” Naruto says, then he runs his hand through his hair. “Nah,
cause who wantsto share their food?”
Sasuke ignores Naruto. “Money?”
“No,” Sakura says, “It’s not anything like that. Think less concretely.”
“Love!” Naruto says. “That could be it.”
Sasuke resists the urge to hit him upside his blonde head. “You still have love
when you share it, moron.”
“Oh,” Naruto says, “I guess that’s true.”
“What about power?” Sasuke asks.
Sakura shakes her head. She closes her eyes, and then a moment later she smiles
and says, “I’ve got it.”
“You know the answer?” Naruto asks. “What is it?”
Sakura approaches the temple’s guardian and says, “A secret.”
Sasuke is on the verge of shouting at her—because why didn’t she run her answer
by he and Naruto first?—when the monkey speaks. “That is correct,” he says.
“You may pass.”
 
===============================================================================
 
Team 7 is the tenth to reach the temple, just barely scraping their way into
the next stage of the second test: one-on-one matches.
“Go, Sakura-chan!” Naruto shouts.
She smiles up at him, then focuses her attention on her opponent. It’s a long
and bloody fight, but in the end Sakura stands over Kankuro, the Kazekage’s
son, victorious. She heals herself casually while they watch Sasuke’s match
against another Sand shinobi. Naruto half-wants his arrogant teammate to fail,
but of course he doesn’t. Sasuke moves fluidly through his kata like he was
born to win, and in the end, the Suna nin lies unconscious at his feet. He
isn’t even out of breath when he returns to them and says, “Beat that, dead
last.”
He hopes that he gets to face Sasuke before these exams are over. Their brawl
last night came to a draw, and Naruto won’t be satisfied until he’s beaten him.
His own match is against a Rain shinobi. Naruto doesn’t fight with the sort of
ease Sasuke displayed, but he does win. Afterward, Sakura hugs him and says,
“Now we’re all going to the third test!”
Before he can celebrate much, Hinata is called forward to fight against Neji,
and Naruto can tell right away that something is wrong. Hinata never seems
confident, but now she looks downright cowed, and her cousin is staring at her
like he hates her. It’s an ugly fight from start to finish. Neji beats her
down, first with words, then with gentle fists, and by the time it’s over,
Hinata has to be carried away, coughing up blood, hanging onto life by a
thread.
No, no, no, Naruto thinks. It isn’t fair! She fought so hard…
Neji has the gall to tell him that he’s a failure and always will be. Naruto
gets down on one knee and runs his fingers through the blood on the
floor—Hinata’s blood—and vows to win when he faces Neji.
The next morning, he goes to the Suna hospital to visit Hinata. Sakura told him
he should bring something, so Naruto stops by a florist on the way and buys a
potted sunflower.
“Hey,” he says. “How you doing?”
Hinata gives him a gentle smile and tries to sit up straighter, but she coughs
and falls back against her pillows.
“Don’t strain yourself, okay?” Naruto he sets the sunflower on the table beside
her bed.
“Thank you,” Hinata says. Her soft voice sounds weak, strained, and she doesn’t
look well, but at least she’s stable and on the mend.
“I’m so glad to see you doing better, Hinata-chan.” Naruto sits in the chair by
the window and says, “I was really worried about you yesterday.”
“The medics say I’m going to be fine. It’s just—just going to take a while
before I can get back on my feet.” Hinata coughs again, covers her mouth, and
blushes.
“Neji shouldn’t have hurt you like that,” Naruto says, and the anger he felt
watching their match comes back all at once. “He’s your family.”
“I-It’s complicated.” She fidgets with her thin blanket, looking at her hands
instead of at him.
“How can you defend him? He almost killedyou!” Naruto realizes he’s shouting
and lowers his voice. “All I mean is, he doesn’t deserve that. What he deserves
is to have his ass kicked.”
And I’m the one who’s gonna do it, he thinks.
“Neji’s life hasn’t been easy, Naruto-kun,” Hinata says patiently. “There’s
more to it than I can explain.”
“What do you mean? Why can’t you tell me?”
“It’s—um—it’s clan business,” she says.
It’s always like that with the Hyuuga. They have their own little world in
Konoha, a compound with rules apart from the rest of the village, and outsiders
are never welcome. Naruto supposes friendship only goes so far when it comes up
against clan loyalties.
“Right,” he says, standing. “Well, I hope you feel better soon, Hinata.”
“You’re—you’re leaving?” she asks, and he doesn’t think he’s imagining the
disappointment in her voice.
“Yeah, I’ve gotta train for the next stage of the exams,” Naruto says. It’s
gonna take a lot of work if I want to beat Neji or Sasuke.
 
===============================================================================
 
The next two weeks are full of training, learning the chidori and practicing
new taijutsu forms. Sasuke works from dawn to dusk every day, and he knows his
teammates are equally busy. Sakura hones her medic skills with Rin and pesters
Kakashi for new genjutsu and ninjutsu to work on, while Naruto is with his
father, trying to master the rasengan—and for his own chances in the third
exam, Sasuke hopes he doesn’t succeed.
He’s kept his distance from his teammates since the second test. Sasuke avoids
Naruto because he’s irritating and Sakura because he doesn’t know what to think
since he saw her as his wife, as the mother of his child, in that genjutsu. He
tells himself it wasn’t real and it means nothing, but whenever he sees her he
remembers the vision of their family, and it makes him feel uncomfortable and
guilty.
On the morning of the third test, Sakura wishes both he and Naruto good luck,
and Sasuke nods at her.
The final exam takes place in an arena on the eastern edge of the village. It’s
big, much larger than the one in Konoha, nothing but unrelenting sand and high
walls. Sasuke sees his father, sitting to the left of the Kazekage, frowning
down at the proceedings.
I have to win, he thinks. Nothing less will be good enough.
The first round goes by quickly, and Konoha’s genin represent their village
well. Neji defeats his own teammate, Lee, while Shino beats a Sand shinobi, and
every member of Team 7 progresses to the next level as well. Naruto’s match
against an Earth ninja is a close call, but the knucklehead pulls through.
The final eight comes down to the five remaining Konoha shinobi, Gaara and
Temari, and a Rain nin who has been moving through the exams with efficiency
and cruelty in equal measure. His name is Ikematsu, he’s the oldest and largest
of the remaining genin, and Sakura faces him in the next match.
“Go back to Konoha, little girl,” he sneers.
“Not a chance,” Sakura says, and then she rushes him.
Ikematsu performs a jutsu too quickly for Sasuke to follow the hand seals, but
a moment later he’s summoned a cloak of water about himself. Tendrils of it
reach out and slash at Sakura like a whip, but she dodges the attacks. She’s
fast and clever, and Ikematsu can’t seem to touch her. Sakura summons earth
giants, just like the ones their team fought on their first C-rank mission.
(Kakashi must have copied the technique and passed it on to her.)
It doesn’t take Ikematsu long to discover how to incapacitate the creatures,
but while he’s busy dealing with them, he can’t avoid the rain of shuriken that
Sakura sends his way. One blade scrapes his cheek, and another lodges in his
shoulder. He shouts, and a moment later there’s a trio of ice shards shooting
at Sakura, sharp as daggers. She avoids two, but the third hits her in the
thigh, digging deep into her flesh, and she cries out. It’s the most pained
sound he’s ever heard from her, and there’s so much blood that it terrifies
him.
While Ikematsu fights the last of the earth giants, Sakura pulls the ice shard
from her leg and starts healing herself, staunching the flow of blood and
repairing muscle. She gets back on her feet, limping, and the fight continues.
“Come on, Sakura-chan!” Naruto says.
She holds her own for a good half-hour, despite her injured leg, but Ikematsu
is bigger and stronger and more experienced, and Sasuke can see already where
this is headed.
He gets her on the ground, stabs a kunai into the half-healed wound on her
thigh, and Sakura screams. Tears streak down her cheeks, and still she hits at
Ikematsu’s chest, tries to shove him off of her. He punches her, hard, and for
a moment she’s too dazed to do anything.
“Give up!” the Ame ninja shouts.
He’s got Sakura pinned, her wrists captured in one of his strong hands, and
there’s not a thing she can do to defend herself—but she spits in his face
anyway. Ikematsu punches her again, once, twice, three times, again and again
until Sasuke loses count, and Kakashi has to grab him to keep him from going to
help Sakura.
The match ends when she loses consciousness, her right cheek purple and
bloated, her eye swollen shut, and Sasuke has never been so angry in his life.
As soon as Kakashi releases him, he jumps down into the arena and runs at
Ikematsu, summoning lightning to his left hand. The young man’s grey eyes go
wide, and he’s too slow—maybe from his injuries, perhaps from surprise—to avoid
the chidori that takes him in the stomach.
Sasuke feels his fist penetrating flesh, searing through skin and muscle into
the guts beneath, and he doesn’t care how the bastard screams, he deserves it
for nearly killing Sakura.
“Sasuke!”
He hears three distinct voices shouting his name, Kakashi and Naruto and
Otousan, and there’s a whole crowd of horrified spectators, but Sasuke doesn’t
stop.
Three Sand nin have to pull him off of Ikematsu, who drops to his knees, blood
dribbling past his lips, clutching at his stomach to keep his own insides from
spilling out.
***** Chapter 6 *****
  No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.
 
“What were you thinking?” Otousan asks. He doesn’t raise his voice, but Sasuke
can hear the anger in his words just the same.
He’s standing in his father’s room at the inn. Sasuke crosses his arms over his
chest and says, “That Ame ninja could have killed Sakura.”
“And youcould have killed him,” his father snaps.
“It’s too bad I didn’t,” Sasuke says, stubborn and refusing to show remorse he
doesn’t feel.
Otousan shakes his head. “You’re a stupid, careless boy,” he says. “Do you have
any idea the position you’ve put me in with the Rain village? My own son almost
slaughtered one of their most promising young shinobi. They’re not going to
take kindly to that.”
“Who cares about Ame?” Sasuke says. “Rain would never dare to pick a fight with
us. We’d crush them and they know it.”
“All of this mess, and over what?” his father asks. “Some worthless girl who
isn’t even from our clan.”
“Sakura isn’t worthless,” Sasuke says, before he can stop himself. “She’s a
great kunoichi and a good person.”
Otousan narrows his eyes and walks closer. “If she’d been more powerful, strong
enough to take care of herself, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Now you’re
disqualified from the exams.”
Sasuke wants to say that isn’t Sakura’s fault, but he knows that the more he
defends her the worse this whole situation is going to look.
“Is there anything going on between you and that girl?” his father asks. “And
you better tell me the truth, Sasuke.”
“No, she’s just my teammate,” he says.
(Once again, Sasuke thinks of the genjutsu, his vision of the future with
Sakura as his wife, but he pushes it away.)
“Good,” Otousan says. “Keep it like that.”
Sasuke nods. “Yes, sir.”
He isn’t allowed to watch the rest of the matches, but he finds out later that
Naruto ended up fighting Neji after all, and won. Gaara defeated Shino, then
his sister, and so the final fight came down to the sons of the Kazekage and
the Yellow Flash. Sasuke can barely believe it when he hears that Naruto—his
idiot teammate, bottom of their class at the Academy—mastered the rasengan and
won the chunin exams.
He can’t bring himself to say congratulations. Not when Naruto is sure to be
promoted, while Sasuke remains a genin.
He wants to visit Sakura, but he’s already on thin ice with his father. So
Sasuke waits for her to be released, waits three long days, until she shows up
at their shared room, looking pale and tired but otherwise healthy. She hugs
him, and Sasuke can’t help it, he puts his arms around Sakura and holds her
tight. Buries his face in her soft, pink hair and breathes in the scent of her.
“I heard what you did,” Sakura whispers, “but I don’t understand why.”
Sasuke can’t begin to give her a truthful answer, to explain what she means to
him, so all he says is, “You’re my friend.”
She lets go and steps away from him. “I’m sorry you were disqualified. If it
makes you feel any better, I didn’t make chunin either. So I guess we can
retake the exams together.”
The Konoha shinobi return to their village with three new chunin in tow:
Naruto, Neji, and Shino. Otousan doesn’t speak one word to him throughout the
whole trip back to the Leaf, but that’s all right, because he doesn’t have
anything to say either.
At home, Sasuke is surprised to find Okaasan in the garden, pulling up the dry,
dead weeds that she had neglected all summer. She smiles when she sees him and
asks, “So, how did the exams go?”
“Not well,” Sasuke says, but he can’t be irritated about this because it has
been so long since he saw his mother looking this happy.
“That’s okay,” she says. Okaasan stands, takes off her gloves, and runs her
fingers through his hair fondly. “You’ll pass next time. Most shinobi fail
their first chunin exams.”
Itachi didn’t, Sasuke thinks, but he keeps this to himself. “You seem better,”
he says.
His mother smiles again. “I feel better.”
 
===============================================================================
 
When Sakura opens her front door, she finds one of the Sannin standing on the
steps.
“Can I come in?” Tsunade asks.
“Yes,” Sakura says, and she hurries to step aside. “Would you like anything to
drink? Water or tea?”
“No,” Tsunade says. She takes a seat on the couch, and Sakura is mildly
embarrassed by the shabby state of the living room. “Is your mother home?”
“She’s on a mission,” Sakura says, “but if there’s a message you want to leave
with me for her—”
Tsunade shakes her head. “I’m here to talk to you, not Mebuki.”
“Oh.” Sakura can’t imagine what this legendary woman might have to say to her,
but she sits on the other end of the couch and waits, attentive and quiet, for
Tsunade to speak.
“I was at the chunin exams,” she says. “You fought well against that Rain
shinobi.”
Sakura feels her cheeks grow warm. She’d known Tsunade was in the crowd, had
seen her watching, but she never would have expected one of the Sannin to be
impressed by her performance.
“I lost,” Sakura says. “And I didn’t even get promoted.”
Tsunade waves her hand. “The examiners are a bunch of pigs who never pass girls
their first time around, unless they’re Uchiha. You should be proud of your
performance. You made it to the final eight, and not many new medics could heal
a wound like the one you sustained in such a short amount of time.”
“Thank you,” Sakura says.
“I want you to be my apprentice,” Tsunade says bluntly. “I’m not going to lie;
it’ll be hard work, much harder than what you’ve been practicing under that
lazy Copy Ninja. And I’m not half so patient as Rin. But if you agree, I’ll
make you the best medic and strongest kunoichi of your generation.”
It takes a moment for Sakura to catch her breath. “Of course I’ll be your
apprentice!” she says. “I’ll do my best to deserve your teachings.”
Tsunade nods. “Then meet me at the Tenth Training Ground tomorrow at noon.
Don’t be late.”
Once Tsunade leaves, Sakura runs across the village to Naruto’s house. Her
newly-promoted teammate lets her inside and asks, “What’s up, Sakura-chan?”
“You’ll never guess what just happened!” Sakura says, and her cheeks almost
ache from smiling so widely. “Tsunade just asked me to be her apprentice.”
Naruto laughs, picks her up, and spins her around. “That makes all three of
us,” he says, laughing.
“What do you mean ‘all three of us’?” Sakura asks.
Naruto sets her back on her feet and says, “Jiraiya just asked to be my new
sensei—you barely missed him—and Sasuke told me this morning that he’s starting
an apprenticeship with Orochimaru. So we’re all studying under the Sannin!”
“Wow,” Sakura says. “That’s really something.” She hugs Naruto again, just
because she can, and asks, “Um, is your mom around? I need to ask her a
question.”
“Yeah, she’s in the kitchen, making dinner. What do you want to talk to her
about?”
“Oh, nothing important,” Sakura lies, “just girl stuff.”
She finds Kushina spooning sticky, white rice into three bowls. She smiles when
she sees Sakura and makes a fourth. “What brings you around today?”
“Well I was going to gloat about becoming a student of one of the Sannin, but
Naruto told me he and Sasuke got the same offer. So I guess that kind of
diminishes my bragging rights,” Sakura says loudly. Then she approaches Kushina
and whispers, “I’ve got information. Sasuke told me yesterday that his father
is planning to give the police new responsibilities. I’m not sure what all it
entails, but it sounds like the Hokage’s going to be cracking down on us.”
Kushina puts a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you, Sakura. I hadn’t heard this
from any of our other sources yet.”
Sakura nods. She feels sick, the way she always does when she chooses the
rebellion over Sasuke’s trust.
“There’s a meeting three nights from now,” Kushina says softly. “This time
we’re gathering at the Thirteenth Training Ground at eleven o’clock.”
“I’ll be there,” Sakura says.
After dinner with Kushina and Naruto (Minato is on a long mission to Water
Country), she goes to the Uchiha compound. Sasuke’s mother answers the door,
and Sakura is pleased to see that Mikoto appears well and happy for the first
time in a while. “Sakura,” she says, “come on in. Are you looking for Sasuke?”
“Yeah.” She ignores the guilt twisting in her stomach, reminding her that an
hour ago she was selling her friend’s secrets.
“He’s in the backyard, training,” Mikoto says, and she rolls her eyes. “That
boy doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘rest.’”
She tries to sneak up on Sasuke and surprise him, but she’s still ten feet away
when he says, “I know you’re there, Sakura.”
“How did you know it was me?” she asks, pouting.
“Only you or Naruto would try that, and the idiot would have been louder,”
Sasuke says. He throws a trio of shuriken with an almost lazy flick of his
wrist. Each one lands at the center of its target, despite the waning winter
sunlight. One, two, three, a little line of razor-edged stars, right in the
bull’s eyes.
“I hate you a little bit,” Sakura says, half jealous and half impressed. “You
can do that without even activating your Sharingan.”
Sasuke looks at her, dark eyes curious. “Why are you here?”
“What, I can’t make a social call?” Sakura asks.
“You could,” Sasuke says evenly, “but you never do.”
Was that an invitation to visit more?
“Ok, fine, I heard from Naruto that you’re going to be Orochimaru’s student,
and I wanted to say congratulations.” She toes the dirt with her boot and says,
“And I wanted to tell you that, starting tomorrow, I’m Tsunade’s apprentice.”
That surprises him, she can tell, even though Sasuke’s features remain almost
perfectly neutral. “Good for you,” he says. “Wanna train?”
“Not really. Let’s do something fun for once.” She takes him by the hand and
leads him around the house to the front yard.
“Where are we going?” Sasuke asks.
Mikoto is on the porch, so Sakura calls out to her, “I’m making your son take a
break. Is that all right?”
“Feel free,” Mikoto says, and she waves them away.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sakura takes him to the Festival of Lights.
The parade processes right through the middle of the village. Floats go by,
decorated with lambent paper lanterns and tapestries and gilded wood carvings,
accompanied by civilians playing music. Flutes fill the air with a high-pitched
melody, while the drummers’ beat seems to reverberate through the ground.
There are stands selling all manner of festival foods. Yakitori, dango,
takoyaki, candied strawberries, and more. Sakura buys a bag of pink cotton
candy almost the exact color of her hair. It’s on the tip of his tongue to make
a joke about it, but he doesn’t. She plucks a piece of spun sugar every minute
or so and pops it into her mouth, and Sasuke has to make himself look away from
the soft fullness of her lips.
It’s a bitterly cold winter night. The grass beneath their feet is coated in
frost, and he can see his foggy breath every time he exhales. They’re both
bundled up in coats and scarves, as warm as they’re like to get in this
weather, but Sasuke is still freezing. When they pass a stall selling amazake,
he stops to buy two cups of the hot rice wine.
“Beat it, kid,” the vendor says. “You’re what, fourteen?”
“It doesn’t matter what age I am. I’m Uchiha Sasuke,” he says, and the man is
quick to apologize and supply two steaming cups on the house.
“I’ve never had anything alcoholic before,” Sakura confesses. “Have you?”
Sasuke shakes his head. “No, but I’d drink just about anything right now so
long as it was hot.”
She laughs, takes a sip of her amazake, and says, “It’s kind of sweet.”
The fireworks start at eight o’clock. He and Sakura find seats on a grassy
knoll to watch the colors bursting across the night sky. Red and gold and
green, bright amongst the canvas of star-speckled blue.
“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?” Sakura asks.
“Sure,” Sasuke says. He steals a piece of her cotton candy; it tastes like
fleeting pink sugar, quick to dissolve on his tongue.
“Thief,” Sakura says dryly, but she holds out her cotton candy so that he can
take another bite.
The amazake burns a path of fire down his throat and into his belly, but it’s
worth the warmth it brings to the rest of his body. Sasuke likes it enough that
he gets a second cup, and by the time that one is empty he feels a little
unsteady and too hot under all his layers. He unwraps the blue scarf from his
throat and drapes it around Sakura’s slender neck. His hand lingers longer than
it should, thumb just brushing her pulse point, fingers tangled in her hair.
You’re beautiful, he thinks, and it’s only when Sakura’s green eyes widen that
he realizes he has spoken aloud.
“Um, thanks,” she says, blushing.
He drank too much rice wine. It’s made him loose-lipped, and he can’t afford
that. Not around Sakura. Even when Sasuke is fully sober, she has a way of
stripping away his discipline, of making him want to abandon honor and filial
loyalty, to indulge in sweeter things. He might love her a little, this girl
that some part of him secretly wants for his someday-wife, but this is not a
thought Sasuke can afford to entertain.
But with the amazake giving him counterfeit courage, he entertains it anyway.
Imagines what it might be like to kiss Sakura, to come home to her every day
and sleep beside her every night. It would be a good life, husband to the
strongest kunoichi in Konoha (because he’s certain that’s who Sakura is going
to grow up to be).
She takes his hand and threads their fingers together. It’s the first time
she’s done this in public, and maybe Sasuke should be worried, but they’re
surrounded by a sea of civilians. He feels anonymous, nameless, no longer the
Hokage’s son. Just a boy with a girl, watching fireworks paint the darkness
with strokes of brilliant color.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sasuke said I’m beautiful.
Sakura turns over the compliment in her mind, allows herself to bask in the
warmth that it brings her every time she thinks about it. He likesher, she’s
almost certain.
Not that it matters, because Sasuke is promised to Masami and he would never
disobey his father.
I need to stop thinking of him that way. It can’t lead to anything good.
She spends a lazy Saturday studying a book on poisons and venoms that Tsunade
gave her. Dry language aside, it’s a fascinating read, and Sakura is a third of
the way through the tome before sunset. She stops only for basic necessities
and to write in her medical journal, taking note of difficult to procure
antidotes and the symptoms of various kinds of poisoning.
She finally puts the book away as eleven o’clock approaches. Then Sakura
dresses in dark, nondescript clothes, performs a simple henge to turn her pink
hair brown, and sneaks out of her window. If she ran through Konoha’s quiet
streets she could make it to her destination in no time, but she wants to
appear as inconspicuous as possible, and so she walks.
The Thirteenth Training Ground isn’t as large as the Forty-Fourth, but it still
takes Sakura a good fifteen minutes to locate her comrades at the heart of the
forest. She’s immediately struck by the size of the gathering, twice as large
as any meeting she’s seen yet. For Kushina to risk summoning so many people at
once, something very important must be happening,
Or something very dangerous.
But it isn’t the number of rebels that’s the greatest surprise. No, the thing
that shocks her most is seeing her teacher’s head of grey hair amongst the
crowd.
She runs up to him and asks, “Kakashi-sensei?”
He turns around, and she’s rarely seen so much expression on his masked face.
“Sakura? What are you doing here?”
“Helping,” she says.
Kakashi shakes his head. “You’re too young. I can’t believe Minato allowed
this.”
“I’ve been useful,” Sakura says, a little defensively.
Her sensei frowns, but Kushina calls for quiet before he can say anything
further.
Naruto’s mother says, “I’ve asked you to come here to plan our boldest move
against the Uchiha’s regime: a month from tonight we’ll attack their compound
and kill the Hokage.”
The clearing erupts with the noise of dissent, and Sakura sees fear written
boldly across faces foreign and familiar. “We’re not strong enough yet!” one
old shinobi shouts. Kazue says, “They outnumber us ten to one,” and Ino’s
father asks, “How do you plan to counter the power of the Sharingan?” Even
Kakashi—one of the bravest men she knows—looks skeptical.
“It’s time,” Kushina says, in a tone that brooks no argument. “The longer we
wait, the longer the people of Fire suffer—”
A white-eyed Hyuuga woman interrupts her, saying, “Someone’s coming! Anbu, a
lot of them, headed right this way!”
Sakura doesn’t hear Kushina’s instructions, because Kakashi takes her by the
arm and says, calmly but firmly, “Run, Sakura.”
She starts to argue, says, “I want to fight—”
But her sensei won’t hear it. He pulls her from the clearing, rushes her away
from the insurgent meeting, his hand gripping her forearm so hard that it
hurts. A masked Anbu officer comes across them, but before Sakura can do
anything, Kakashi stabs him in the throat with a kunai. Blood squirts around
the blade, splatters the front of her shirt, warm and black under the new moon
darkness. Sakura doesn’t have time to listen to the man’s desperate, gurgling
attempts at drawing breath, death rattles she thinks she might never forget the
hideous sound of, because Kakashi is running again, pulling her onward.
Once they’re out of the training grounds, he takes her down a narrow, winding
road she’s never seen before. They stop before an apartment building, and
Kakashi takes her upstairs to the third floor, opens the door to number 310,
and says, “This is my place. You’re going to stay here tonight.”
“Okay,” Sakura says. She feels too dazed with fright and worry to ask
questions.
Inside, she finds a sight so unexpected that it breaks through her numbness:
Rin, in a short nightdress, and Obito, wearing nothing but pajama pants, curled
up on the living room couch together. When they see her and Kakashi, bloodied
and breathing hard, they jump to their feet and hurry over. “What happened?”
Rin asks. “Are you hurt?”
“We’re fine,” Kakashi says. “It’s not our blood.” If he was surprised to find
his two teammates so intimately entwined, her sensei isn’t showing it. “The
meeting was attacked by Anbu. I need to get back there and help fight them
off.”
“We’re going with you,” Rin says. “Let me get my clothes and gear—”
“No,” Kakashi says. “Someone needs to stay here with Sakura, and you’re the
best suited for that job.”
Rin bites her lip, tears welling in her brown eyes, and says, “You can’t just
leave me behind while you and Obito go fight.”
Kakashi swears, cups her cheek with his gloved hand, and whispers, “Please.”
She pulls his mask down, and Sakura gets the briefest look at her sensei’s
handsome face before Rin kisses him.
When they part, Obito hugs her, and the embrace is just as loving as the one
Rin shared with Kakashi a moment before. She kisses him as well, a quick brush
of lips, and says, “Both you idiots better come back to me.”
“We always do,” Obito says.
After the men leave, Rin gives Sakura a fresh change of her own clothes and
tells her where the bathroom is. She strips out of her bloody things, steps
into the steam-filled shower, and washes herself under the spray of too-warm
water. Sakura scrubs until her skin is pink and tender and she feels
lightheaded from the heat. While she shampoos her hair, she thinks about this
night: the barely formulated plan to assassinate Sasuke’s father, the Hokage’s
officers attacking, Kakashi killing that man, and now this strange glimpse into
her sensei’s personal life.
Sakura remembers the blood spurting out of the Anbu officer’s throat, wet and
still hot on her chest. She wonders how many people are going to die tonight,
if Kakashi or Ino’s father or Naruto’s mother will be one of them. Will the
revolution itself die tonight too? She stands there until the water runs cold,
then gets out of the shower and puts on overlarge borrowed clothes.
She finds Rin at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Her eyes are red and puffy,
but she isn’t crying anymore. “Here,” she says, “have a cup.”
Sakura accepts the mug of warm tea and says, “Thank you.”
They sit in silence, drinking, with nothing to keep them company but their
worries.
It’s one of the longest nights of Sakura’s young life, waiting to see if
Kakashi and Obito come back.
 
===============================================================================
 
An Anbu officer jerks Naruto awake in the twilight hour between night and day.
“Get up,” he says. “The Hokage has orders for you.”
“Huh?” he asks, confused and still half-asleep. Naruto looks around and sees
five more masked shinobi in his room, and his grogginess disappears in a
heartbeat.
“I told you to move,” the Anbu officer snaps.
Naruto stands, changes into his usual orange and blue clothes, and asks, “What
does the Hokage need with me?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Konoha is just beginning to stir, and as the Anbu escort him across the
village, Naruto sees a handful of people out and about, beginning their day
early. They head toward the western outskirts of the Leaf, to a densely
forested area far away from the urban bustle. The shinobi lead him to a shrine,
down steep steps into darkness. It’s an ancient place, Naruto can tell, maybe
older than Konoha itself. At the base of the stairs, an officer opens a door,
and he walks into an underground room lit with the soft, ruddy glow of
torchlight. Ten Anbu stand guard, and there are a half-dozen other, unmasked
shinobi there as well.
And that’s when he sees her. His mother lies, unconscious and wounded, on a
stone altar in the middle of the room, her long hair spilling around her,
bright as blood.
“Okaasan!” Naruto shouts, but before he can run to her, he feels a sharp little
pain at the nape of his neck. Almost like a wasp sting, except that this is
followed by a strange lethargy. Quite suddenly, he feels slow and impossibly
tired, barely able to keep his eyes open. Naruto attempts to fight, but the
Anbu carry him to an empty altar, identical to the one his mother rests on, and
hold him down.
Whatever they drugged him with is strong, and no matter how he tries he can’t
break free. “Okaasan,” Naruto whimpers, and when he turns to look at her, he
sees that a web of fractured black lines has spread across his mother’s body,
bleeding from the seal on her stomach to her limbs and face. No one needs to
restrain her, because the lines themselves stretch from her body to the stone
columns, tying her to the table.
“Let her go.” Naruto wants to shout, but the words come out slurred and
whispered.
A mantle of red chakra covers his mother, roiling and bubbling, something like
water, and there is a sound to it that permeates the whole shrine, chilling
Naruto to his bones. He can feel a horrible energy emanating from Okaasan’s
body, and now he can see the outline of three tails. Five of the unmasked
shinobi make hand seals at the same time, and the mark on his mother’s belly
turns wholly black, spills like ink from a broken bottle. That ominous chakra
runs forth from her stomach, and it heads toward Naruto. For a moment he sees
it—the foxlike face of a demon—before the red engulfs him, drowns him.
And then Naruto can feel it coursing through his body, the presence behind the
scarlet chakra, something ancient and evil now tied to his bones, bound in his
blood. Chained against its will inside of him.
***** Chapter 7 *****
         Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
 
Kakashi-sensei and Obito return as dawn breaks. Sakura hangs back while Rin
hugs and kisses the men she loves, as they cling to one another in a three-
sided embrace. Perhaps she should think Rin selfish or find her relationship
with Kakashi and Obito unnatural, but she can only feel thankful that the men
made it back home. (Besides, she has no room to judge anyone for who they love
when she’s falling for a boy that has been promised to another for years.)
Kakashi breaks away from Obito and Rin and walks toward Sakura. He’s a mess of
sweat and blood, and he smells like death incarnate. But she’s so relieved to
see her sensei alive and uninjured that she has to keep herself from throwing
her arms around him anyway.
“Are you all right?” Kakashi asks.
“I’m fine, but what happened? Did anyone get captured?”
He frowns and says, “They ganged up on Kushina, poisoned her, and took her
away.”
No. Naruto’s kind mother is almost certain to face execution for leading a
seditionist meeting, and it takes every bit of Sakura’s strength to hold in her
tears.
“What if they saw you?” Rin asks. “They could be coming for you and Obito.”
Kakashi shakes his head. “We took masks from two dead Anbu and wore them the
entire time we fought, so we should be safe.”
Sakura fidgets with the hem of her borrowed shirt. “Who else?”
Obito says, “Inoichi and Shikaku were injured, Chouza killed. There were
others, people I didn’t know: two Hyuuga boys, hurt badly, and that schoolmate
of yours, the red-haired one, was cut down.”
“Kazue?” Sakura asks. She hadn’t known the girl well, but she was only fifteen.
Young to die, even for a shinobi.
“I need to go home,” Sakura says. “My mother will be up soon, and if I’m not
there, she’ll worry.”
“Wait another hour,” Rin says, “so the village bustle will hide you on your way
back.”
Sakura nods, even though she’s certain waiting will mean Okaasan will find her
empty bed; but better to be caught by her mother than an Anbu officer.
Kakashi and Obito take turns showering and changing clothes while Rin cooks
breakfast.
“Usually this is your sensei’s job,” Rin says. “He cooks better than me and
Obito put together.”
“Really?” Sakura asks. “I have a hard time picturing Kakashi in an apron.”
“He pulls it off surprisingly well,” Rin says.
If there’s something a little forced in their humor, she forgives them both for
it. After the sleepless night they shared, it’s hard for Sakura to find much
funny.
The four of them sit around the square table, eating fried eggs on rice and
miso soup. The food is delicious (Rin is a much better cook than she let on),
but all Sakura can think about are her classmates. Shikamaru, Ino, and Chouji,
who don’t yet know that they’ve lost their fathers. And Naruto. Sweet, loud-
mouthed Naruto who will soon be motherless, if he isn’t already.
“What are we going to do?” she asks, picking at her egg until the yolk runs,
yellow and slick, into her white rice.
“I don’t know,” Obito says. “Without Kushina…”
“Most of our people got away,” Kakashi says. “And Minato will know what to do.
He’s the strongest ninja in this village. As long as we have him, the rebellion
stands a chance.”
 
===============================================================================
 
“Jinchuriki.” Naruto tastes the word, turns it over on his tongue, and finds
nothing but bitterness.
He’s at home, utterly alone. The Hokage himself came to visit, and if he hadn’t
had a half-dozen Anbu guarding him, Naruto would have tried to kill the
bastard. Fugaku-sama explained that his mother was a leader of the resistance,
that she had been caught conducting a rebel meeting last night, and this is why
she was captured. Why the Kyubi was extracted from her and housed within Naruto
instead.
“The Nine-Tails’ jinchuriki must be loyal to Konoha, and to me,” the Hokage had
said. “You will be loyal, won’t you, Naruto?”
His response had been colorful—the kind of language Okaasan always scolded him
for using—and Fugaku-sama left Naruto with the promise that he could be as
easily replaced as his mother if he proved treacherous.
It’s hard to care much about his own safety when he knows Okaasan is dead. Even
her strong body was too frail to survive for long once the Kyubi was withdrawn
from it, and now Naruto holds within himself the same demon she carried for
years.
I never knew. His mother was a jinchuriki and a revolutionary, and he’d had no
idea. He wonders how much Otousan knows, whether both of his parents have been
lying to him for years.
Naruto listens to the echoing quiet of his empty house, and every moment of
silence serves as a reminder of what he’s lost. When he closes his eyes, he
sees Okaasan as she was in her last moments, unconscious and bloodied,
fractured black lines spreading across her skin like an ink spiderweb, cloaked
in that horrible chakra.
Now he feels it inside of himself, a great well of power, impossibly ominous.
It’s like there’s something just underneath his skin, a coppery taste on the
back of his tongue, that does not belong.
She got what she deserved, thinks some inner voice, and Naruto knows it’s not
his own. He would never think that about Okaasan. He loved her, and she loved
him.
Then why did she lie? This time he isn’t sure whether that’s the Kyubi’s
thought or his own.
Naruto puts his hands over his ears, as if that will block out the demon’s
influence. But the voice is coming from inside, not outside, and it does
nothing to help.
He’s angry, because his mother is gone, murdered, and suddenly Naruto can’t
stand the quiet a second longer. He screams, turns over the coffee table,
throws a bookend across the room, punches out the glass panes of a cabinet. His
fist stings, and he feels blood running down his fingers. He falls to his
knees, breath coming quick and staggered, and it’s only then that he realizes
he’s sobbing.
After he’s worn himself out, Naruto sits in the middle of his half-destroyed
living room, cheeks wet with tears, and plucks a piece of glass out from
between his knuckles. It hurts, but the pain is dull and distant, like it
belongs to someone else. He goes to the bathroom, searches out bandages, and
wraps up his hand. Red stains the gauze, bright as Okaasan’s hair.
Naruto goes to his room and sits on the edge of the unmade bed. Was it really
only a few hours ago that the Anbu dragged him out of the house? That he was
pulled from dreamless sleep into a nightmare?
He doesn’t want to be here, alone with the Kyubi and memories of his mother, so
he leaves. Wanders across the village to Sakura’s apartment. He knocks with his
left hand, to spare his bandaged knuckles the impact, and Mebuki answers the
door. She frowns, the lines beside her mouth deepening, and asks, “Are you all
right, Naruto?”
There’s no way to answer that honestly without saying more than he wants to, so
he ignores her question. “Is Sakura home?”
“Yes,” Mebuki says. “Come on in.”
The Haruno apartment is small, threadbare, and cheap, but Naruto has been here
too many times for the shabbiness of the place to surprise him. He finds Sakura
in her spartan bedroom, reading a book that must be half a foot thick. “What’s
the encyclopedia for?” he asks.
She looks up, sets the book aside, stands, and hugs him. Sakura is warm and
soft and she smells faintly of vanilla, and Naruto has never loved her as much
as he does in this moment. She rubs slow circles on his back, comfort given
through touch, and he feels the overwhelming urge to kiss her. But this day has
been so strange and horrible that he doesn’t want to taint something like that
with its tragedy. Besides, he’s almost certain that Sakura isn’t interested in
kisses—not from him.
“What happened?” she asks. “You look awful.”
“My mother is dead.” Saying this out loud only makes it more real, and now he’s
crying again. He hugs Sakura tighter, buries his face in her pink hair, and
grips the back of her shirt with shaking hands. “She’s dead and I don’t know
what to do.”
She makes soothing noises and says, “You’re gonna be okay, Naruto. I know it
doesn’t feel like it right now, but you will be.”
They stay like this for some time, until he pulls away and says, voice thick
with tears, “Um, I kinda punched a cabinet. Can you heal me?”
“Sure,” she says, and the beauty of her gentle expression makes Naruto feel
just a little bit better.
Sakura tells him to sit on her bed, and she unwraps the bandages from around
his right hand with a medic’s thoughtful precision. Carefully, she summons
chakra to her fingertips and begins to stitch up his knuckles with ninjutsu.
“Must have been a mean cabinet,” she says lightly.
“Yeah,” Naruto says, and a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. Only Sakura-
chan could get him to smile on a day like this.
Once she’s done, Sakura goes to the bathroom and comes back with a wet cloth.
She swabs his hand with it, washing away the sticky blood. “Try not to get into
another fist fight with an inanimate object, okay? Medic’s orders.”
“You got it,” Naruto says. Then, he can’t help but ask, “Sakura, what’s it been
like, growing up without one of your parents?”
She looks down, away from him, and says, “Not so bad, really, but I never knew
my father. It’s different for you. You had a wonderful mother, Naruto-kun, and
she loved you so much.”
He nods. “I know she did, just…”
Sakura tilts her head to the side. “Just what?”
“I found out she lied to me. About a lot of things,” he says, running a hand
through his hair, frustrated. “Important things. I don’t know how to—how to
match that up with the Okaasan I knew. And I’m not sure if it matters now,
because she’s gone.”
“Maybe she was just trying to protect you,” Sakura says, and she places a
calming hand on his shoulder. Through the layers of his jacket and shirt, he
can still feel the warmth of her touch.
“I guess. She was involved in some bad things,” Naruto says, even though he
doesn’t know enough about the resistance shifting beneath Konoha’s placid
surface to judge whether it’s good or not. “She was a rebel. That’s what the
Hokage said, anyway. Can you even imagine that? My mother, leading a bunch of
insurgents?”
Sakura remains quiet for a long moment. Then she says, “I need to tell you
something, Naruto, because you deserve to hear the truth.”
“Okay,” he says, as wary as he is worried.
“I—I knew about your mother,” she says, “because I’m a rebel too.”
“What?” Of all the things he thought Sakura might say, he never would have
guessed this. “But why?”
She looks at him with pleading green eyes and says, “You know why. Our village
isn’t what it should be, and if we don’t fight the Uchiha Clan, it’s going to
stay this way forever.”
Naruto thinks of the execution of Masanobu Ryu. How all the faces on the Hokage
monument are Uchihas, except for the First. The way his mother’s hair spilled
over the edge of that stone table, red and bright, and how it felt to have the
Kyubi forced inside of him.
“But what you’re doing,” he says, “it could start a war.”
“I know.” Sakura takes his newly healed hand, grasps it between her own. “But
I’d rather fight for what’s right than watch corrupt shinobi destroy everything
that’s good about this country. That’s how your mother felt too—and that’s what
she died for.”
 
===============================================================================
 
“I want you to keep an eye on the Namikaze boy,” Otousan says. “After what
happened last night, he can’t be trusted.”
“Then why did you entrust him with the Kyubi?” Sasuke asks.
“Because Kushina’s son is the only person in this village with chakra strong
enough to suppress the Nine-Tails. If we’re lucky, once his anger wears away,
he’ll learn from his mother’s mistakes. We can’t afford another rogue
jinchuriki.”
Sasuke doesn’t say it, but he thinks his father made a permanent enemy of
Naruto the moment he sentenced Kushina to death.
He probably hates me too.
“Watch him closely,” Otousan says. “If he does anything suspicious, you report
it to me immediately. You understand?”
“Yes, sir,” he says, even though he isn’t sure he can do that. Naruto may be
obnoxious and outspoken, but he’s also Sasuke’s friend—his best friend.
At Team 7’s next training (the day before Kushina’s funeral), Naruto doesn’t
speak one word to him, and when Kakashi tells them to pair up and practice
their taijutsu, he refuses.
Kakashi sighs and takes Naruto aside. Still, Sasuke can hear their
conversation.
“I told you that you didn’t have to show up today,” their sensei says.
“I don’t need special treatment.”
Sasuke throws shuriken at targets (one bull’s eye, two, three) and tries not to
listen, but it’s difficult.
“It’s not about special treatment,” Kakashi says. “And if you won’t work with
your teammates, then what’s the point? Go home and get some rest.”
“I’ll train with Sakura-chan,” Naruto says.
“Fine. Let her give you a chakra control lesson.”
At the end of their session, Sasuke approaches Naruto and says, “Hey.”
His friend doesn’t answer, doesn’t even look at him.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says, because he is. Sasuke understands why
his father had Kushina killed, but that doesn’t mean he thinks it’s right.
Naruto turns, and he looks angrier than Sasuke has ever seen him. There’s an
unnatural thinness to his pupils, a strange sharpness to his teeth, when he
says, “Your father’s a murderer!”
That stings (maybe because it’s true). “Otousan did what he had to do,” Sasuke
says, as calmly as he can.
“So you’re defending him?”
Before he can answer, Naruto punches him in the mouth. It’s in Sasuke’s nature
to hit back, but he manages to keep his temper in check.
His mother just died.
He tastes blood and feels it dribbling down his chin from a busted lip.
“Enough of that,” Kakashi says, and he grabs Naruto by the back of his orange
jacket.
Once he calms down, their sensei releases him, and Naruto says, “I’m going
home.”
Sakura, who’s been quiet for this whole exchange, walks up to Sasuke and puts
her fingers on his split lip. He feels the familiar soothing sensation of her
chakra, repairing broken skin. She heals him, but he can tell from the way
Sakura won’t meet his eyes that she’s disappointed in him.
 
===============================================================================
 
That night, she sneaks into the Uchiha Compound, then into Sasuke’s third-floor
room. Sakura sits on his bed and patiently waits for his family to finish
dinner. When he finally walks in, Sasuke looks surprised to see her.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I want to talk to you,” she says, “about what happened to Naruto’s mother.”
Sasuke frowns. “What’s there to say? She was a rebel.”
“So she deserved to die?” Sakura asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Sasuke snaps. He starts to pace. “I liked
Kushina, and I’m sorry she’s dead. She was a kind woman, so I’m sure she had
her reasons for what she did. But just the same, our village can’t afford to
have a traitorous jinchuriki. That could spell disaster for everyone.”
She shakes her head. “And what about Naruto? Don’t you think he deserves better
than to be forced to carry that monster?”
That’s harder for him to explain away, Sakura expects. Naruto was innocent of
his mother’s crimes, but he was still punished.
Sasuke sighs, stops pacing, and puts his hands in his pockets. “Naruto is the
only one who could handle the Nine-Tails—something about his chakra makes him
special, I don’t know what exactly. But my father didn’t have any choice,
Sakura.”
“There’s always a choice,” she says.
Sasuke smirks. “You sound like my brother. Itachi was always saying things like
that.”
“You should apologize to Naruto,” Sakura says.
“What?” Sasuke asks. “He hit me, in case you didn’t notice.”
“He lost his mother, and all you had to say is that your father did what was
necessary?” Sakura asks, and now she can’t keep her temper out of her voice.
“What kind of friend says that?”
“How else was I supposed to react?” he asks. “Naruto called my father a
murderer.”
Sakura bites her tongue to keep from telling Sasuke exactly what she thinks of
Uchiha Fugaku, but it must show on her face anyway, because he says, “So what,
you agree with him?”
“What does it matter what I think?” Sakura asks.
“It matters,” Sasuke whispers. “It matters to me.”
She can’t meet his eyes when she says, “I think that what happened to Kushina
and Naruto is wrong, and if you can’t see why, then I don’t know what to tell
you.”
Sasuke sits next to her, close enough that their shoulders are touching, and
she can feel the heat of him. He’s always so warm, like the fire his clan is so
famous for burns just under his skin.
“I don’t want you to be angry with me,” he says quietly. “It’s not my fault,
what my father did, and if it had been up to me… well, things would have turned
out differently.”
“I know that, Sasuke. You’re a good person.” She takes his hand and gives it a
gentle squeeze. “I just don’t want our team to fall apart, and after what
happened today, I’m not sure how we’re going to get through this.”
“I don’t know either,” Sasuke says.
 
===============================================================================
 
Since Otousan is still away on his mission, Kakashi helped Naruto plan the
funeral. He’s glad he had his sensei’s assistance, because he doesn’t think he
could have organized it on his own. It’s a small affair, only Naruto, Kakashi,
Sakura, and a handful of his mother’s peers. Okaasan was a popular woman, but
most people are too afraid to honor her when they hear that she was executed
for treason. Laying her to rest without his father present feels wrong, but
there was only so long they could wait.
Naruto doesn’t rage and he doesn’t cry. He’s shed enough tears in the last few
days to last him a lifetime, and his anger has turned inward, caught somewhere
in his heart, tangled up with his grief. He no longer wants to destroy
furniture or punch his teammate—even though Sasuke deserved what he got. Now
his fury is concentrated, focused, and he knows exactly where he wants to
direct it.
His father returns a week later, and Naruto knows as soon as he walks in the
house that someone already told him about Okaasan. He isn’t crying anymore, but
Naruto can tell from the puffiness of his eyes and redness of his cheeks that
he only recently collected himself.
He rushes to his father and lets Otousan wrap him in a strong embrace. His
father smells like winter wind and the dust of the road, and Naruto grips the
back of his vest maybe a little too hard.
“I wish I had been here,” Otousan says.
“I do too.” Maybe he could have saved Okaasan and she’d still be alive today.
Instead, ashes are all that remains of his fierce, beautiful mother.
“We can’t bring her back,” Otousan whispers, “but we can avenge her.”
Naruto nods against his father’s chest.
Otousan releases him and says, “The Hokage told me that you were made into the
new Nine-Tails jinchuriki.”
“Yeah,” Naruto says. His hand strays to his stomach, where the black seal marks
him as the keeper of the Kyubi.
“I’m sorry, Naruto. It’s a heavy burden to bear. One your mother—” Otousan’s
voice breaks, but then he takes a steadying breath and continues. “She
struggled with it for as long as I knew her.”
“If she could do it, I can too,” Naruto says.
They talk well into the night. Otousan answers all of his questions about the
rebellion, and Naruto tells his father he wants to help. He expects some
resistance, but Otousan just nods.
Two days later, the thirteen rebels who were captured by the Anbu are put to
death. Naruto doesn’t see it, but he knows Shikamaru’s and Ino’s fathers were
among the shinobi executed.
Now that he’s a chunin, Naruto starts to lead missions. Some with Team 7 alone,
some with new squads made up of various Konoha genin. Whenever he’s in the
village, he trains with his father or Jiraiya. He sees less of Sasuke and
Sakura now that they’re all apprenticed to the Sannin, and things are different
in the wake of Okaasan’s death. Ever since his discovery that Sakura is a
rebel—that she’s been passing information on Sasuke and his family for
months—he sees that Team 7 was never as united as he imagined. Like fault lines
beneath the veneer of their friendship, their squad has always been fractured.
He just couldn’t see it until now.
***** Chapter 8 *****
                    We accept the love we think we deserve.
 
Winter turns to spring, spring to summer. Sakura and Sasuke retake the chunin
exams, which are held in the Mist, and they both get promoted. On their last
night in Kiri they sneak downstairs to the inn’s common room. It’s dark and
deserted at this hour, and they sit on the floor by the hearth, enjoying the
warmth of the flickering firelight.
Sasuke looks impossibly handsome, even with his features cast half in shadow.
Now that it’s past midnight, today is his fourteenth birthday, but Sakura has
nothing to give him. She tells him this, apologetic and embarrassed, but he
cuts her off, saying, “Don’t worry about it. I have everything I want—well,
almost everything.”
There’s an honesty in the way he looks at her, with such sudden hunger, that
tells Sakura he’s thinking of her. She’s the one thing Sasuke wants that he
doesn’t have, and she’d need to be a fool not to notice.
In the months since the Festival of Lights, the night he called her beautiful,
there have been dozens of small incidents like this. When Sasuke’s touch or
gaze was overly familiar, or lingered for seconds too long. Always in private,
he makes sure these things happen away from prying eyes and judgment, so that
they’re safe from repercussions. They’ve put forth the effort to make more time
alone together, so that they can savor these stolen moments, like tonight.
Sakura knows she shouldn’t, but she leans against Sasuke and kisses his cheek.
It’s a darting show of affection, over almost as quickly as it began, and just
perfunctory enough for her to pretend it’s purely platonic.
Except Sasuke doesn’t seem interested in pretending. He runs his fingers
through her hair, almost a caress, and the sensation sends a shiver through
her. He’s a boy who is used to getting whatever he desires, whether it’s a cup
of amazake or a girl, and she understands well enough that Sasuke might want
her simply because she’s a challenge, because she’s forbidden. But it’s hard to
care about his reasons when he’s looking at her like this.
He closes the space between them, until there’s only a breath separating their
lips, but then he just presses his forehead to hers and whispers, “Sakura.”
The way he says her name, full of so much need, makes her heart beat harder
beneath her breast. Sasuke cradles the back of her head and kisses her cheek,
almost the same way she kissed him moments ago. Except this touch is slower and
warmer and so close to the corner of her mouth that she feels herself blush.
Sakura can’t help it; she presses her lips to his, swallows the warmth of his
gasp. Sasuke is utterly still for a long moment, but then he pulls her into his
arms and kisses her back. It’s closed-mouthed and soft, as chaste as a kiss can
be, really, but it’s the sweetest thing Sakura has ever known. She winds her
arms around his back, lets herself melt against him, so that her small breasts
are pressed against his chest, and kisses him more fiercely.
They stay this way for what could be minutes or hours, until Sasuke finally
breaks away from her and says, breathless, “We should stop.”
“Why?” Sakura asks, too drunk on the taste of him to think clearly.
“You know why,” he says.
Of course she does. Sasuke belongs to someone else, and slumming it with her
won’t change that.
They return to their respective beds, but Sakura doesn’t sleep for even a
minute. Her mind is too full of Sasuke for rest.
The next day, on the boat that takes the Konoha shinobi back to the Fire
Country, Sakura is so tired that she spends most of her time asleep in the
cabin she shares with Masami. Her friend wakes her for dinner and says, “You
must have been up late last night.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep,” Sakura says, and she looks anywhere besides at
Masami.
 
===============================================================================
 
Sasuke avoids Sakura for weeks. Now that they are chunin alongside Naruto, Team
7 has all but officially disbanded. Kakashi no longer calls them together for
mandatory training sessions, so he only has to see his teammates when he
chooses to. He keeps himself busy training with Orochimaru and sparring with
Naruto. (Things haven’t been right between them since Kushina died, but his
best friend is more eager to fight him now than ever before.) He skips his
team’s lunches at Ichiraku, which he used to attend religiously, and after he
gets a minor injury on his first solo mission, he goes to Rin instead of the
hospital, because he’s afraid he’ll see Sakura there. Tsunade has her taking
shifts alongside medics twice her age, he’s heard, and he doesn’t want to risk
running into her.
But there’s only so long he can stand to go without talking to her, without
touching her. And so, on a hot and humid day in the middle of August, Sasuke
breaks down and goes to Sakura’s apartment. Mebuki is gone on a mission, but
his teammate is home, and she lets him inside without a word.
They go to her room, and it’s as plain and neat as always. There’s nowhere to
sit except on the bed, so they take seats beside one another on Sakura’s too-
firm mattress, a foot of space between them.
“I’m sorry,” Sakura says. She blurts the apology suddenly, without context, and
he has no idea what she’s sorry for.
Sasuke says as much, and Sakura bites her bottom lip. An innocent enough habit,
but it draws his attention to her mouth, and makes him think about how much he
wishes he had really tasted her that night in Kiri.
“I’m sorry I kissed you,” she says. “I assume that’s why you’ve been dodging me
since the exams.”
It isn’t really that he regrets sharing those kisses with her in the Mist
Village, so much as Sasuke is afraid he won’t have the discipline to keep from
repeating the experience. To indulge his desires once is excusable, but to keep
Sakura on the side while he courts Masami is unfair to both of them, and he
doesn’t want to be the sort of boy who takes advantage of and lies to girls.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” Sasuke says, “but it would be
smarter if we didn’t…”
Sakura nods, looking down at her clasped hands, and says, “If that’s what you
want.”
It isn’t what he wants, but just the same, it’s the way things have to be.
 
===============================================================================
 
Naruto carries the Nine-Tails with him wherever he goes, like a parasite. A
heaviness in his bones, a hatefulness that lurks in the back of his mind.
Jiraiya and Otousan try to help him, but he feels alone, isolated, hopeless—and
he misses his mother.
Oddly, the person he finds he can talk to about these things most easily is
Neji. If anyone understands the burden of being branded against your will, of
having a destiny you never wanted thrust upon you, it’s Neji. He doesn’t judge
Naruto for being a jinchuriki, and he doesn’t fear him either.
Today, after training, he sits beside Neji, breathing hard, and drinks half of
his bottled water in one go. It’s lukewarm from sitting in the summer sun for
two hours, but Naruto is too thirsty to care.
“How’s Hinata?” he asks.
Naruto hasn’t seen her in weeks, since their last mission together, and he
worries about her sometimes. Not because she’s weak—in many ways, Hinata is
stronger than anyone he knows—but simply because she matters to him.
Neji says, “She’s well. No thanks to me.”
There was a time when Naruto hated this boy for hurting Hinata, but now he
better understands why he took out his rage against his clan on the Hyuuga
heiress. “Has she forgiven you?” he asks.
Neji smiles, but it doesn’t look like he’s happy. “Of course she did. Hinata
couldn’t hold a grudge if her life depended on it.”
“Then you should forgive yourself,” Naruto says.
“How can I do that?” Neji asks. “I was supposed to protect her. And instead…”
Instead you almost killed her.
That doesn’t need to be said, however, so Naruto keeps his mouth shut.
Neji looks at him and asks, “Are you getting used to the Kyubi?”
Naruto shrugs. “Not really. I don’t know if I ever will.”
“You might be surprised,” Neji says. “It’s easier than you might think to grow
accustomed to a cage.”  
That isn’t a thought Naruto particularly wants to entertain. “Can you do me a
favor?” he asks. “Can you not tell Hinata about what I am?”
“If that’s your wish,” Neji says, “but just so you know, I doubt she’d care.”
Maybe this is true, but for some reason he can’t quite puzzle out, Naruto
doesn’t think he could stand it if Hinata feared him.
“Thanks for keeping this quiet,” he says.
Neji nods. “Of course.”
On the walk home, Naruto thinks about the Kyubi. He hates the Nine-Tails, and
the beast doesn’t like him any better in return. He feels like a walking
prison, and now his dreams are haunted by images of Okaasan on that stone
table. How red chakra cloaked her until she looked like she could be drowning
in it and those fractured black lines crossed her body. His mother died because
of this creature, and Naruto can’t forgive the Kyubi for that.
 
===============================================================================
 
Konoha’s rebellion was hit hard by the Anbu attack. So many people killed or
captured, and others are afraid to come back. Minato says they’re back to
square one, but he isn’t defeated, and as long as there’s hope Sakura will keep
fighting.
She insists on being given more work than spying on Sasuke, and now that the
revolution is so short on men, Minato can’t refuse. He tasks her with passing
messages to ninja across the Fire Country and foreign shinobi while she’s away
on solo missions.
So after she finishes stealing kinjutsu scrolls from a Wind shrine, she stops
at a noisy River Country inn to meet a contact. Minato didn’t tell Sakura who
this ally is, but she knows as soon as she sees Uchiha Itachi sitting at a
corner table—relaxed, high collar shielding the lower half of his face, holding
a stick of half-eaten dango—that this is the person she’s seeking.
It’s been many years since she last saw Sasuke’s older brother, and he’s doing
an excellent job of deflecting attention, as any smart missing-nin would.
Still, it’s impossible not to notice him, because Itachi was a good-looking boy
who has grown into a very handsome man.
Sakura takes the seat across from him, steals his cup of sake, and drinks it.
“Aren’t you a little young for that?” Itachi asks.
“I’m fourteen,” Sakura says. “Old enough to risk my life for Konoha. Old enough
to hurt other people. But if I want a drink of sake, I suddenly get treated
like a child. Well, I’m not a child. Not anymore.”
“You’re a fierce girl. I can see why Minato let you join so young.” Itachi
smirks, takes a bite of dango, chews thoughtfully, then says, “Of course, it
probably doesn’t hurt that you’re two-faced enough to report on my brother.”
Sakura feels herself blush, but her voice remains steady when she says, “I
don’t like doing that. Sasuke is my friend, and—”
“No need to defend yourself, not to me. You just picked up where I left off.”
Itachi shrugs, as if this admission is a small thing. The least of his sins. “I
spied on my family for years before I left the village, so I’m not judging
you.”
Maybe this is supposed to make her feel better, but it doesn’t.
“I have a message from Minato.” Sakura hands over the letter. Just blank pages
to the naked eye, but the right jutsu will reveal its secrets.
Itachi nods, pockets the missive, and says, “Tell him that we have friends in
Suna. The Kazekage hates the Hokage, and Raza told me himself that he’d be
willing to field shinobi in a fight against my father.”
“Why?” Sakura asks. “Why would he risk his own people in a foreign civil war?”
“Because the Uchiha greed knows no bounds,” Itachi says, “and he’s afraid that
my clan will make the Wind Country its next conquest if left unchecked.”
She frowns. “Do you think he’s right to fear that?”
“I think my father is the sort of man who is always unsatisfied. Nothing is
ever enough.” Itachi twirls the empty dango stick between graceful fingers. “So
yes, I believe the Kazekage is smart to anticipate war with Konoha.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Sakura says.
Itachi smiles, but the expression is too subdued to look anything but sad. “I
hope I’m wrong too.”
She stands, straightens her skirt, and says, “Goodbye, Itachi.”
But before she can turn away from him, he’s caught her wrist, his grip firm but
not ungentle. “Wait, Sakura. I want you to promise me something.”
“What?” she asks.
“Look out for Sasuke. Help him. My brother lets his love for our clan blind
him, but he’s smart and good-hearted. He may be misguided, but I think that
Sasuke will see the truth in time. Just be patient with him.”
Sakura wants to say no, but there’s something in the way Itachi is looking at
her that makes his request impossible to refuse. So instead, she nods. “I’ll do
my best.”
She leaves the inn, goes back out into the rainy night, and heads home.
If her mind wasn’t so full of Sasuke and Itachi, Sakura might have noticed the
two Suna nin tailing her. But her attention is focused on a promise she’s sure
she can’t keep, and so she hurries into the forest, distracted and alone, with
enemies following behind her.
 
===============================================================================
                                        
Sasuke wakes him in the middle of the night. Naruto is angry at first, because
he doesn’t want to see his teammate, doesn’t want to talk to him either, but
then he notices his bloodless, rigid expression, and he knows something is
wrong.
“What happened?” Naruto asks.
“It’s Sakura,” Sasuke says. “She’s—she’s in the hospital.”
Naruto hurries to get up, changes out of his pajamas, and pulls on a t-shirt
and shorts. “Is she hurt bad?”
“No, her injuries are pretty minor. Nothing she couldn’t have easily healed
herself, if she’d had any more chakra left.” Sasuke runs a hand through his
hair, and the gesture is so different from what Naruto has come to expect from
his cool, collected friend that it worries him even more.
“Then what’s wrong with her?” he asks.
Sasuke takes a deep breath. “Sakura was attacked by Suna shinobi on her way
back from Wind Country. She incapacitated one, but the other… she had to kill
him to get away.”
On the run the hospital, Naruto says, “I’m kinda shocked that you bothered to
get me.”
Sasuke glares at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Naruto glares right back. “You and Sakura, you’ve got your own little world
where I don’t belong. And yeah, I’ve noticed how you two look at each other.”
“I don’t look at her—”
“Yes you do,” Naruto says.
“Whatever. I woke you because Sakura needs our team right now. Our whole team.
So we need to set aside our problems for a minute so we can help her.” Sasuke
gives him a sideways look. “Think you can do that?”
Naruto says, “For Sakura, yeah, I can do that.”
They find her on the third floor of the hospital in a private room. Mebuki,
Kakashi, and Tsunade are already there. Naruto is surprised to see her still
dressed in her blood-stained travel gear. He looks to Sasuke, and the question
must be written plainly across his face, because his teammate whispers, “She
won’t let anybody clean her up. We’ve all tried already.”
Sakura is sitting on the bed with her knees pulled up to her chest, barefoot
but otherwise fully clothed, still as a statue. Tear tracks have cut a clean
path down her cheeks, leaving two lines of bare skin in the midst of the mud
and blood all over her face. She stares ahead, pale eyes glassy, pink hair
dirty and disheveled, ignoring everyone.
“Can we have a minute alone?” Naruto asks. Mebuki frowns, but Tsunade and
Kakashi lead her out of the room. Sasuke follows, and then it’s just him and
Sakura and the blood of some Suna ninja.
Naruto sits on the edge of her bed. “What are you thinking, Sakura-chan?”
She doesn’t answer, doesn’t even glance his way.
“Sakura?” he asks, gentler now.
They sit in silence for five minutes, ten, but Naruto is patient, and he waits
for her to speak. When he puts his hand on hers, Sakura finally looks at him.
“I killed a boy,” she says. “He was only fifteen or sixteen, so I can’t even
call him a man. And I killed him. Kunai to the throat. I must have hit the
carotid artery, because he bled out in seconds. At least it was fast.”
“You had to protect yourself,” Naruto says. “You didn’t do anything wrong,
Sakura.”
She shakes her head. “Yes, I did. That boy didn’t have to die. I could have
knocked him out, but instead I murdered him. I did it without even thinking.
Because that’s what I’m trained to do. To kill without question.”
“I’m sorry,” Naruto whispers, and he squeezes her hand. “I wish there was
something I could say that would make you feel better.”
Maybe, before his mother died, he could have thought up something reassuring to
tell his friend, but now he knows exactly what loss like that means. The boy
Sakura killed was someone’s child, maybe someone’s brother, and there’s nothing
he can say or do that will make her forget this.
Naruto says, “You’re strong, Sakura-chan. You’ll get through this.”
“You think so?” she asks, and he’s never heard her sound so tired.
“I know so.” He smiles. “Now how about you let someone clean you up?”
She nods and asks, “Will you send Sasuke back in?”
He kisses her cheek, sticky with dried mud, and says, “Sure.”
 
===============================================================================
 
From time to time, Sasuke has thought about seeing Sakura in her underwear, but
he never expected it to happen like this. With her sitting on a hospital bed,
covered in dirt and and a dead ninja’s blood, dressed only in her bra and
panties, shaking like a leaf in the wind. He washes her arms, legs, and
stomach, even her chest, and yet there’s nothing sexual about it. No, nothing
sexual, but it’s maybe the most intimate moment of his young life, seeing his
friend (his Sakura) this raw. Bare, hurt, and vulnerable.
If he’s honest with himself, Sasuke knows he’s jealous. He spent over an hour
trying to convince Sakura to open up before he resorted to dragging their
teammate out of bed. And it took Naruto less than fifteen minutes to get her
talking.
Sasuke wipes at the mud and blood encrusted on Sakura’s face, washing away all
the filth until she’s clean and the damp towel in his hand is smeared with a
rusty red.
“There,” he says. “How do you feel?”
“Cold.”
A fresh hospital gown sits on the counter by the sink, so he picks it up and
gives it to her. Sakura clutches the garment to her chest, still trembling.
“Will you kiss me?” she whispers.
Sasuke knows that they decided not to do this again, that Masami deserves
better than an unfaithful fiance, but with the way Sakura is looking at him, so
needy and desperate for solace, he can’t say no.
It’s different from their first kiss. He tries to go slow, to kiss her softly,
but she won’t have it. Sakura grips his shirt in clenched fists, bites his lip,
opens her mouth to him so that he can truly taste her this time. (He finds the
flavors of rain and girl and blood on her tongue.) And Sasuke can’t help it, he
kisses back, every bit as hungrily as she kisses him.
Until she sobs against his mouth, and he realizes that Sakura has started
crying.
Then Sasuke cups her cheeks, wipes away her tears with his thumbs. “It’s okay.
You’re going to be okay, Sakura.”
She pulls back, sniffs, and says, “I think I might love you, Sasuke.”
“I think…” He steels himself to tell the truth. “I think I might love you too.”
“What are we gonna do?” Sakura asks.
“I don’t know,” Sasuke says. “I don’t know.”
He leaves the hospital as dawn breaks over Konoha, the bright colors of morning
spilling across roofs and sidewalks and streets. Sasuke wanders around the
village, going in no particular
direction, just letting his feet carry him while he worries over Sakura. The
girl who, in his sweetest dream, becomes his wife. Except his wife has already
been selected for him.
This choice isn’t mine to make.
He has a responsibility to his clan to keep their bloodline pure, an obligation
to honor his father’s agreement with Masami’s family. His own selfish wants
don’t factor into the equation, no matter how much he cares for Sakura.
As if he needs a reminder of this (and clearly he does), Otousan invites Masami
and her parents over for dinner that night. After dessert, the adults retire to
the sitting room to discuss village politics, so Sasuke and Masami go to his
room. They sit on the bed, not talking much, but it’s a comfortable quiet.
Things are always comfortable with Masami, and he supposes he should be
thankful for that. His intended is smart, pretty, and kind, and they like one
another. Perhaps if he can learn to let Sakura go he could even come to love
Masami.
“Can I kiss you?” she asks.
It seems wrong to do this when he was confessing his love for Sakura just hours
ago, but Sasuke knows it’s better for everyone if he forgets about his teammate
and tries to care for his future wife.
Their kiss is chaste and sweet, not unlike his first with Sakura, but it
couldn’t be more different in all the ways that matter. Even though it’s
pleasant enough—Masami’s lips are soft, and she’s pliant in his arms—Sasuke
barely feels it.
 
===============================================================================
 
Things are different between Sasuke and Masami. They touch one another now.
Sakura sees him brush a stray eyelash from the apple of her cheek, hold her
hand, wrap a strong arm around her shoulders. Masami smiles more—smiles all the
time—and she looks at Sasuke like he hung the moon. And what a beautiful pair
they make, same dark eyes and blue-black hair and pale good looks, like
matching bookends.
When Masami confides that Sasuke is a very skilled kisser, it takes every bit
of Sakura’s self-control not to tell her that she knows first-hand just how
good he is. Instead, she smiles and pretends to be happy for her friend. And
when she goes to the training grounds she destroys a dummy, sits down, and
allows herself to cry, just once, over the boy she loves that will never be
hers.
She hates Sasuke a bit, for saying he loves her too, for giving her hope and
then turning to Masami. It hurts a little less, informing on him to Minato,
when she’s angry with him.
Sakura doesn’t see much of Sasuke these days, though. She leads missions out of
the village as often as any chunin, and Tsunade keeps her busy through the fall
and winter, training and clocking in endless hours at the hospital.
By the time Sakura turns fifteen, she has killed two more shinobi. One Kiri
missing-nin and a kunoichi from Iwa. Neither of them haunts her the way the
Suna boy does. She dreams of him sometimes, his scared face as he chokes on a
river of blood. Something she never told anyone is that she tried to heal that
ninja from the Sand, to save his life, but by the time she sealed his wound he
was already dead.
She isn’t so foolish with her other enemies. When she kills the Iwa shinobi,
Sakura leaves the corpse behind and doesn’t look back.
She hears from Masami that Mikoto is starting to plan the wedding, which will
take place the summer Sasuke turns seventeen. If she had any more tears to
shed, Sakura might have cried over this news. Instead, she takes an A-rank
infiltration mission to Snow and spends the next two months under cover, as far
from the Leaf and Uchiha Sasuke as she can get.
***** Chapter 9 *****
 My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control
                                   of them.
 
She is on the eighteenth hour of her shift at the hospital when Akiko, another
chunin medic, finds her and says, “You better come quick, Sakura. It’s Naruto
and Team 8 and they’re banged up pretty bad.”
Tsunade is already working on Hinata when she reaches the trauma wing, and
Sakura can tell right away that her classmate is barely alive. She looks around
for Naruto and sees him unconscious, being worked on by a senior medic-nin.
“Is he—?”
“He’s fine,” Tsunade says. “Get over here and help. Hinata is bleeding
internally and she has a compound fracture. You deal with the arm while I get
this bleeding under control.”
“Yes, shishou.” She pushes the bone back into its proper place and starts
knitting the skin together with her chakra. While she works, Sakura steals
glances at Tsunade, who’s sweating and cursing with every other breath.
Please live, she thinks. Please live, Hinata.
Sakura isn’t particularly close to the Hyuuga girl, but it’s impossible not to
admire her after the fight she put up against her cousin at their first chunin
exams. Besides, she’s important to Naruto, and he’s lost far too much already.
She fixes the broken bone before Tsunade finishes dealing with Hinata’s
internal bleeding, but her shishou won’t tolerate her hovering and sends her to
heal Kiba’s burns.
“What happened out there?” Sakura asks.
“I don’t even know,” Kiba says. “We were ambushed—definitely by shinobi, but
none of them were wearing a hitai-ate—and Hinata got hurt so bad. I tried to
get to her, to help, but we were so outnumbered, I had three of the bastards on
me and couldn’t reach her. And when Naruto saw, he…”
Sakura keeps her flow of chakra steady, a healing balm that slowly renews the
skin of Kiba’s burned back. “He what?” she asks.
“I don’t know how to describe it. He changed. Turned into some monster. I’ve
never seen anything like it.”
Oh, no. The Kyubi.
Kiba shivers under hands, whether from the cool of her soothing chakra or the
memory he’s recounting, she can’t be sure. “He killed the four he was fighting
like they were nothing, Sakura. After that, the others went running, but—but
Naruto chased them down.”
“I don’t need to hear the rest,” she says, because she can guess what happened
next easily enough.
“How’s Hinata?” Kiba asks, and his voice breaks on his teammate’s name. “She’s
gonna live, right?”
“She has the best medic-nin in the world working on her,” Sakura says, and she
hopes that’s reassurance enough.
“But is she gonna be okay?” Kiba asks.
Never promise that someone will live, Tsunade-shishou once told her. Nobody has
the power to promise life.
 
===============================================================================
 
He opens his eyes and sees sunshine and Sakura, sitting in the chair beside his
bed. It takes a moment for Naruto to place where he is, and why, but when he
remembers—Hinata, hurt, maybe dying—he moves to get up.
“No you don’t,” Sakura says, and she plants herself in front of him, hands on
hips. “You need to rest—”
“What I need is to see Hinata. Where is she? Is she all right?”
Sakura grips his shoulders, maybe as a comforting gesture, but more likely to
keep him from standing. “Hinata’s going to be fine. I helped Tsunade-shishou
heal her, and I promise you, she’s okay.”
The relief is so palpable that Naruto feels it throughout every inch of his
body. A calming relaxation of tensed muscles, the release of a breath he hadn’t
realized he’d been holding. “I still want to see her,” he says.
Sakura shakes her head. “No way. Your body has gone through an awful ordeal
today. The last thing you should do is be up and running around—Hey!”
Naruto stands, ignoring her lecture, and finds himself so close to Sakura that
he can smell blood and hospital soap and the vanilla shampoo she uses on her
hair. Her eyes are wide with concern, short hair pulled into a sloppy pink
ponytail that’s losing the fight against gravity. She has never, he thinks,
looked more beautiful than she does right now.
But that doesn’t stop him from saying, “I’m going, whether you like it or not,”
and he pushes past her.
It doesn’t take long for Naruto to find Hinata’s room. She’s propped up by a
small mountain of pillows, lustrous dark hair framing her too-pale face, awake
but weak. Still, she’s alive, alert, and whole, and all the words Naruto
thought he might speak get caught somewhere in his throat. He’d worried that
his loss of control might have injured her further, perhaps hurt her even more
than the enemy shinobi. Seeing her sitting up, a little wan but mostly fine,
brings stinging tears to his eyes. Naruto doesn’t know when this girl became so
important to him, but somewhere along the way she has.
He takes the seat closest to her and asks, “How do you feel?”
“A little sore,” she says, “but the medics say I’ll be fine.” Hinata looks at
him, and there’s a wariness in her pale eyes that he’s never quite seen
directed his way before. “What happened to you?” she asks, and there’s some
trembling, fragile emotion in her voice. It takes a moment for Naruto to place
it, but when he does, he goes cold all over. He feels distant from himself, as
if this body isn’t his own; and in a way, it’s not.
“You’re afraid of me,” Naruto says, and this hurts more than he could have ever
anticipated.
“No, I’m not!” Hinata sits forward and coughs a little. “I’m afraid foryou.”
He frowns and asks, “What do you mean?”
“It did scare me, the—what you turned into, but only because I didn’t know what
was happening to you, or if you’d be all right.”
He’s not supposed to talk about it, Naruto knows, but she’s already seen the
destruction he can wreak, so what does it matter if he shares the truth with
Hinata? He tells her about the Nine-Tails, what it is and what heis now, a
vessel for a creature so despicable that no one has the courage to remember its
name. Without really meaning to, he says, “It scares me sometimes, that he’s a
part of me. That I’m carrying around a hateful thing like that. And… I miss
Okaasan.”
Hinata reaches over, takes his hand, fair skin against tanned, and Naruto
suddenly realizes that he has never, not even once, seen Hyuuga Hiashi’s wife.
“What happened to your mother?”
She says, softly but calmly, “Okaasan was very kind. Her name was Himawari and
she smelled like rosemary. She killed herself when I was eight.”
Naruto probably shouldn’t, but he asks, “Why?”
Hinata looks down. “I don’t really know. But I think it was because she was
from the Branch House, and she couldn’t stand to see one of her daughters
branded like her. Maybe that’s why Otousan hasn’t given Hanabi the seal yet.”
She shrugs and says, “That, or he’s trying to figure out how to break tradition
and make her the heir over me.”
He frowns, because it’s bad enough to see Neji caged, but the thought of Hinata
with that foul mark on her forehead is intolerable. “Someday, when I’m Hokage,
there won’t be a Main House or a Branch House anymore. There’ll just be the
Hyuuga,” he says.
Naruto wishes he could offer more. That he could promise change now, for her
and Hanabi and Neji, but he can’t.
Even so, Hinata squeezes his hand and says, “I believe you, Naruto-kun.”
                                        
===============================================================================
 
Sasuke has barely spoken to his teammates in months. They’re all busy studying
under the Sannin and leading their own missions. He and Naruto spar regularly,
but Sakura dropped out of these informal trainings last year. Around the time
he started courting Masami properly, he can’t help but notice.
She hates me, he thinks. Sakura hates me.
With good reason. He confessed his love for her only to spurn her in favor of
his bride-to-be. Sasuke thinks he did the right thing, that carrying on with
Sakura would only hurt both of them (and Masami too, should she ever find out).
It’s better this way.
This is what he tells himself, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting her.
Sasuke had hoped that if he disciplined himself, if he kept his affections in
check, that eventually his love for Sakura would fade. But it’s been a year
since they kissed in that hospital room, and he cares for her just as much now
as he did last summer. If anything, the months apart have only deepened his
desire to see her, touch her, taste her.
Sasuke knows now that no amount of time away from Sakura will erase his
feelings for her. That, no matter how hard he tries, he isn’t going to come to
love Masami the way a husband should love his wife.
Regardless, his wedding looms just over the horizon. Two years might as well be
two weeks for how quickly the time seems to be passing. Sometimes Sasuke
imagines calling it off, telling his father that he won’t marry Masami, and
making Sakura his wife instead (if she’ll still have him)—but these are the
sort of thoughts a dutiful son should not entertain, and he pushes them away.
Nothing he does soothes the ache of Sakura’s absence. If they can’t be
together, he can abide that—he hates it, but he can abide it. It’s the prospect
of losing her friendship, losing his place in her life entirely, that he truly
can’t tolerate.
So on a sunny morning in September he looks for Sakura. She’s isn’t at home or
Naruto’s house or the hospital, but he has a feeling that she may be at one of
Team 7’s old haunts. After checking the roof of the bakery and their favorite
weapons shop, he finally finds her in the meadow where he, Sakura, and Naruto
used to spend so many afternoons.
She’s lying on her back on a blue blanket with her eyes closed, but she asks,
without even looking at him, “What are you doing here, Sasuke?”
He sits beside her. “We need to talk.”
Sakura turns on her side, facing away from him. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I know you’re angry with me,” he says, “and I understand why.”
“If you understood you’d just leave me in peace,” she says.
Sasuke puts a hand on her shoulder and says, “Please, Sakura.”
She’s still and silent for a long moment, but then Sakura sits up and looks at
him, green eyes fierce and challenging.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Apologies have never come easily to Sasuke, but he owes
her this much at least.
“For what?” she asks. Sakura plucks at the grass, carelessly uprooting blades
and dropping them back to the ground.
“For hurting you,” Sasuke says.
Sakura bites her bottom lip, then asks, “Do you love Masami now?”
He shakes his head. “No. I can’t. I’ve tried, but I can’t.”
“That’s not what it looks like,” she whispers. “You seem so happy together.”
Sasuke wants to tell her she’s the only one he wants, because it’s true and
because he’s been holding it in for so long. But he knows this would only
complicate matters and confuse Sakura more, so he keeps it to himself.
After this, things with Sakura go back to something like normal. She stops
skipping Team 7 lunch dates and training sessions, and she agrees to meet him
alone, sometimes on a rooftop or the training grounds. Most often, though, they
just sit together in the meadow, drinking hot tea from the same thermos,
talking and laughing, as if nothing ever came between them.
 
===============================================================================
 
It’s been almost two months since he lost himself to the Kyubi, and Naruto
can’t stop thinking about the men he murdered. He killed those unmarked
shinobi. Hunted them down like a wolf with its prey and ripped them apart.
Naruto feels like he could scratch his skin off, if only he could get to the
ugly thing inside of himself and dig it out.
He doesn’t have time to wallow in self-disgust, though, because Otousan and
Jiraiya are keeping him busy, both with rebellion work and training. Now that
Sakura has rejoined his and Sasuke’s get-togethers, he’s spending more time
with Team 7 too. He misses the simplicity of their days as genin, but there’s
no going back, so Naruto looks forward.
The resistance had cooled and almost fallen apart in the last year, but his
father refused to give up, and those efforts are finally starting to pay off.
Those who were frightened by the raid that got Okaasan killed have largely been
replaced by new faces, and the reports from foreign fronts are good. The
Kazekage and Mizukage have both agreed to field soldiers against the Uchiha
Clan if it comes to war.
When it comes to war, Naruto thinks. It’s only a matter of time, really, before
the village he loves is thrown into chaos.
On his birthday, he meets Hinata at Ichiraku. They’ve barely spoken since that
morning at the hospital, but he thinks about their conversation all the time.
He wonders what it feels like to lose your mother in such a way. Okaasan’s
death was hard enough, but at least he knows she would have fought for her life
if she could have. If it hadn’t been stolen from her.
“Hi,” Hinata says softly.
There’s something soothing about her gentle presence, and Naruto finds himself
smiling widely. “Hey. Saved you a seat.” He pats the stool beside his own.
Hinata sits next to him and says, “Thank you.”
They both order tonkotsu, and Naruto is surprised to see Hinata eat every bit
as much as he does.
“You sure can put it away for somebody so small,” he says, impressed.
She blushes, a pretty pink flush that colors her cheeks and throat. “Um,
thanks?”
“It was a compliment,” Naruto says, grinning.
They go back to eating their ramen, and in the quiet between them, he can’t
help but consider his precarious place in this village and what Hinata would
think if she knew all of his secrets. She’s a good person, maybe the very best
person he knows, but Hinata is still a daughter of the Hyuuga Clan. If she was
aware of what he and Sakura were doing, passing messages and informing on a
friend, all on behalf of the rebellion, would she approve of it or hate them
for it?
 
===============================================================================
 
They’re in the meadow again, this time huddled under a thick blanket of
Sasuke’s, bodies pressed close enough to share heat. Winter came to Konoha with
a suddenness that sharpened the wind and frosted the grass. It’s cold today,
and she buries her face in Sasuke’s sweatered shoulder, seeking his ever-
present warmth.
He surprises her by cradling the back of her head, then threading his fingers
through her hair. Emboldened, Sakura nuzzles closer, breathes in his scent, and
without much considering the repercussions, presses a light kiss to his neck.
She feels his pulse thrumming beneath her lips. Sasuke’s whole body tenses and
his grip on her hair tightens, pulls a little bit, but she doesn’t mind this
small hurt. She knows she shouldn’t, but Sakura kisses his throat again, and
once more. He’s so quiet and stiff that she’s afraid she’s gone too far, so she
starts to pull away—but then Sasuke says, “Don’t stop.” He sounds as confident
and commanding as ever, if breathless. Sakura wonders how he can be so certain
when she’s a mess of guilt and confusion, of desire and love for this boy who
isn’t hers to want. Except that right now, as she kisses his jaw, his cheek,
Sasuke turns so their mouths meet, and she thinks that in this moment, at
least, they belong to each other.
It starts out soft, chaste, their lips barely brushing, and Sakura is too dizzy
with nervousness and want to press for more. Sasuke seems to have no such
reservations. He maneuvers them both to the ground so that she’s on her back
beneath him and kisses her harder. Sakura wraps her arms around him, grasps his
broadening shoulders, opens her legs so that he can settle between them. She
likes the weight of him, the pressure of his lips on her own, and she
instinctively opens her mouth to him. Sasuke stills for the briefest measure,
holding himself above her. Then he kisses her again, tastes her, and Sakura
feels a rush of warmth despite the cold. They stay this way for a long time,
Sasuke’s body caging hers, trading kisses that grow hungrier and more
desperate.
Part of her is afraid they’ll get caught, and as much as she’d like to, Sakura
can’t forget that Sasuke is intended for Masami. She’s ashamed of herself for
using him like this even as she’s using him to feed information to the
rebellion. Loving him with the same mouth that voices his secrets. She should
stop this, but it feels so good to witness him as he unravels, the perfectly
guarded Uchiha Sasuke losing control. Abandoning discipline for pleasure and
honor for need, forsaking promises to his clan because of simple, selfish lust.
So instead of doing the right thing, Sakura slides her hands beneath his
sweater, touches the taut flatness of his stomach and traces the faintest ridge
of scar tissue, a souvenir from his fight with the Uzushio ninja. She remembers
how close she came to losing him that day, how frightened she was before she
even understood what this boy would someday mean to her.
Sasuke kisses the hollow of her throat and plays with the zipper on her shirt.
“Can I?” he asks, and he sounds so ardent and honest in his desire that Sakura
nods. She wants him to look at her, to touch her.
This confidence dwindles as Sasuke undresses her, exposing her from the waist
up. She didn’t wear a bra today, so as soon as he opens her shirt, those keen,
dark eyes of his can see everything. Sakura fights the urge to cover her small
breasts and tries not to wonder if Sasuke has gone this far with Masami, if
he’s comparing her to the lovely girl who will someday be his wife.
Then Sasuke sits up on his knees and cups her breasts, rubs her nipples with
his thumbs until they peak. Sakura can’t help it, she arches her back and says
his name. He’s awakening feelings in her that she’s only ever explored in the
privacy of her bed, when she touched herself and pretended it was him. Now his
hands are on her body, and Sakura discovers that her self-restraint and modesty
are disposable things, easily sacrificed.
“Touch me,” she whimpers. “Please, Sasuke-kun.”
He smirks, that arrogant half-smile she knows so well, and says, “I am touching
you.” He squeezes her breasts a little to emphasize his point.
“Not there,” she says. Sakura takes a shaky breath, puts her hand on his, and
guides it lower, down her stomach. To get what she wants she’s going to have to
be brave enough to tell him, to show him. She pulls up her skirt, hesitates to
gather her courage, and tugs down her tight shorts. She puts his hand between
her legs and whispers, “Here.”
Sakura knows she’s blushing furiously, more embarrassed than she has ever been
in her life, but she doesn’t have long to consider these feelings, because
Sasuke yanks her shorts down her legs, impatient and rough, and tosses them
aside. Then he does the same to her plain, cotton underwear, and Sakura snaps
her legs shut.
Sasuke kisses her, and her body weakens, relaxes. He spreads her legs, gently,
and sits back again to get a good look at her. She wishes he would say
something, anything, but he doesn’t, so Sakura asks, “Do you… do you like what
you see?”
She has never felt more vulnerable, opening herself up to the judgement of a
boy who is brutally honest. She half-expects Sasuke to respond sarcastically,
to mock her attempt to draw a compliment from him. Instead, he says, almost
dismissively, “Of course, Sakura. You’re beautiful,” as if this is a fact.
He touches her sex, at first a little too forcefully to be pleasurable. He
doesn’t know what he’s doing, no more than Sakura does, but when she tells him
to slow down, to be gentler, he listens. Sasuke always has been a quick study,
and within a few minutes he’s found the rhythm that undoes her. She lifts her
hips, trying to get closer, to diminish this aching desire to be filled, but
there’s nothing for it. Sakura knows what her body wants, and she’s just
curious and frantic enough in her need to say, “You can have me, you know.”
Sasuke stills, stops touching her, and draws away. He’s breathing heavily, and
there’s such heat behind the look he gives her that she almost thinks he’s
angry. “What are we doing?” he asks, as if it’s only just hitting him, the
impropriety and irresponsibility of all this. “We should stop.” He turns his
head, maybe because the sight of her nakedness is too much a temptation. Sakura
sits up, cups his cheek, makes him face her, and his gaze roams from her mouth
to her bare breasts.
She should listen to him. The cool, logical part of Sakura knows that it would
be better, safer, if she put on her clothes and returned home and pretended
this never happened. She won’t, though, because she loves Sasuke and she has
wanted him for too long to let this opportunity slip through her fingers. It
won’t take much to convince him.
She straddles him, and Sasuke says her name, tone cautionary, but it’s a half-
hearted warning at best.
“I know you want me,” Sakura says. She presses herself against his lap, against
the hardness there. “I can feel that much.”
“You know that this is—is complicated.” But he’s gripping her hips now, burying
his face in the crook of her neck. Still, he says, “I don’t want to hurt
Masami.”
Sakura freezes, her need quelled by the mention of her friend. Shame wars with
want, and she’s on the verge of relenting when Sasuke says, “Fuck, Sakura,”
voice broken. He pushes her to the blanketed earth, unbuttons his pants and
pulls them down. He takes his cock in hand, and a moment later she feels him
against her sex. She’s as wet and ready as she’s ever like to be, but when he
pushes inside her, it hurts. A sharp, stinging pain that makes her cry out,
that dispels the pleasure Sasuke brought her earlier. She closes her eyes and
clings to him, lets him thrust into her as he likes. Lets the boy she loves rut
on top of her, hoping that he finishes quickly, and tries not to cry.
Sasuke stops, and the pain tapers to discomfort. “We’re going to try something
different.”
He pulls away, sits up on his knees, changing the angle, and when he pushes
back inside of her she finds that it hurts less like this. That when he moves a
certain way it even almost feels good, and before she knows it, Sakura is
pushing back against him, meeting his thrusts. It still hurts, but now it’s
more of a dull ache, and there’s pleasure laced with the pain. Sasuke picks up
the pace, but she keeps up with him, and it’s not another minute before his
fingers are bruising her hips, losing his careful rhythm entirely, and then
he’s coming inside of her.
When it’s over, they lie side by side, fingers loosely entwined, both breathing
heavily. Night fell sometime while they were making love. The sky has greyed to
twilight, and the air is cool against her flushed skin. Sakura shivers, half
from the cold and half from unfulfillment. Sasuke pulls her into his arms, and
she burrows against him, searching for warmth.
We should never have done this. Sakura knows it in the same way she can predict
precisely where her shuriken will land when she throws them: instinctively,
certainly, without room for other possibilities.
She thinks of sweet Masami, innocently believing that her husband-to-be is
waiting for her, just as she is waiting for him. And then there’s Sasuke, the
boy whose confidences she sells to his enemies. If he knew, he would never
forgive her. Never want to speak to her, much less touch her, again.
But Sasuke knows nothing of the truth; he is ignorant about the secrets that
make up the girl in his arms, and when he kisses her, Sakura can only kiss
back.
This was a mistake, but she suspects it’s the kind she’ll be making over and
over. A lapse of judgement she’ll repeat until the consequences catch up with
her.
                                        
End Notes
     So, I’m back, with a brand new story! I hope everyone enjoys The
     Valley of the End as much as In Times of Peace, even though this fic
     is likely going to be quite different and possibly much longer.
     If you have any questions about the story, since the AU-ness of it
     might be a little confusing, feel free to drop me a review here, or a
     PM on tumblr or fanfiction.net. Of course all feedback is welcome,
     whether it’s a glowing comment, constructive criticism, or a simple
     kudos.
     Thank you so much to uchihasass and tall-girl-in-a-small-world for
     all their help. You ladies grow more fabulous by the day!
     Also, the quote at the beginning of the chapter is by Marcus Tullius
     Cicero.
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