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Chapter Text

“Now this is the good stuff.” Ino slammed the sake jug down on the bar counter, setting aside the bag she had used to sneak its contents into the bar. She threw back the rest of the cheap sake in her glass and then poured from the slightly cracked white jug into it. A milky white liquid sloshed out; it gave off an acrid tang that made Sakura wrinkle her nose where she sat next to Ino. “What the hell is that, Pig? And why did you have to sneak that in here…” She cast a dubious glance around them, but they were in their own bubble amidst the raucous and vibrant atmosphere of the small bar.

“It’s my homebrew special sake.” Ino’s icy blue eyes glittered beneath her thick layer of black mascara as she shoved Sakura’s glass toward her. Sakura’s gloved fingers wrapped around it and she swallowed the last sip of the sake left in it before handing the glass to Ino, who immediately poured in several finger’s worth of her homebrew alcohol. Sakura reached out to her with sweat pearling on her brow. “Pig, not so much!”

The grin on Ino’s lip-glossed mouth was decidedly wicked as she handed Sakura the generously filled tumbler, the hard glint in her stare making it clear that there was no choice involved; only demand. “Ugh, you’re going to kill me with a single sip of this crap…” Sakura took the glass, green eyes peering into the cloudy contents. When its odd tang stung her nostrils she set it on the counter with a shake of her head. “No way. Absolutely no way.”

“It’s not crap,” Ino protested, and she pushed the glass back toward Sakura with a practiced pout. “You’re insulting an old, secret, and very good Yamanaka family recipe. I made it myself and you promised you would drink it if you lost that bet earlier.”

Sakura gave a groan at the slight glisten of Ino’s eyes, knowing she couldn’t bring herself to upset her over refusing the drink, and her stomach lurched with the thought of what she was about to consume. She sighed as she settled her hand back around the glass and lifted it back toward her lips, and she shot Ino a glare. “You’re lucky I like you, Ino-pig. I’ll drink your damn sake.” She braced herself as Ino grabbed her own glass, and they held their glasses by their mouths in unison. “If you run off with Sai in the middle of tonight, though, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Same to you, Forehead.” Ino’s grin was the perfect opposite of Sakura’s frown as their drinks met their lips and they threw back a swallow. At the burning feel of the strange sake homebrew going down her throat, Sakura thoroughly regretted ever gambling with Ino.

Two hours in, and Ino had caught Sai’s eye from across the bar. She was already dragging him out of the front doors as Sakura noticed, stumbling after them in her drunken anger with full intent to make good of her earlier threat and kick Ino for running off -- but by the time she made it out into the night air, Sai had scooped Ino up and disappeared into the dark. Sakura cursed loudly as she leaned back against the side of the cheap dark wood of the bar doors. Her head spun and throbbed. She had another glass of Ino’s homebrew sake in her hand, and she considered it as her thoughts swirled through the glass she clutched tightly. She threw back the rest of the cloudy drink as she swerved back into the boisterous bar on her own.

She could feel it as she danced - with each sway, spin, and shift across the well-worn small dancefloor. The feeling lingered as she curled away from men offering sweaty hands to her and as she briefly dallianced, giggling, with other dancing drunken women. Even in her inebriated state Sakura was well aware of the feeling of being unwaveringly watched by many.

She had already known before that she’d catch the eyes of fellow bargoers here; she was a shinobi among civilans, and she was aware that she had a reputation that expanded beyond shinobi ranks and well into civilian gossip in Konoha and beyond. She was, after all, part of the legendary Team Seven, the touted “second-coming of the Sannin”. She was used to being stared at just for her unusual and unique naturally cherry-blossom hair, let alone for her well-respected status as an expert medic and Tsunade’s apprentice. She had probably treated most of the people in this bar for something or other in her medical career already.

But the feeling was stronger, sharper, like the thrumming caused in one’s sixth-sense from an intense stare, and as Sakura swerved another round on the dancefloor in the arms of a laughing drunk older lady civilian, she caught it in her peripheral vision again.

Swaying her hips under the lights and accepting the arms of another dancer, Sakura chose to ignore her increasingly blurred curiosity of whatever the golden thing ensnaring her shinobi instincts was. She was surrounded by that color here: the flashes of gold at the dancers’ throats and hands, the glittering gradients of amber and marigold of the sakes and beers and whiskeys in tumblers and glasses at the bar and tables, the humming yellow-orange glow of the low lights above her.

Sakura revelled in the colors around her, alive to the beat of the music that she no longer found tacky, glowing under the stares of those around her. She wasn’t even paying attention to who she danced with now, swinging and dancing between partners with a careless, glowing smile. She loved the feeling of being held and spun and the vibe of the lively crowd around her. It felt so good to let go for once. It felt even better to feel like she wasn’t being admired for her status, her titles, but perhaps just as a fellow drunk having a good time.

She spun in the lights and swirled over to the side, too dizzy to continue. She had felt aglow for a moment, and she allowed herself to savor that glow as she looked around, tired in the best of ways. It was not long before the back of her mind began to seep back into the bitterness she had been trying to escape, and again she sought distraction. She ignored the tugging in her chest and stumbled back toward her table she’d had with Ino, feeling her loneliness tainting her stomach like a poison that she was determined to drown out with more sake.

As Sakura strode clumsily through the dark back toward her table, she caught the slight flash of something gold at the other end of the bar.

At first, she thought nothing of it, collapsing back in her stool with a slouch. She drowned her dizzy mind moodily into her now-empty glass; she let herself spin with the circles that cascaded pleasantly through her head as her stomach stirred and churned with heat and drink. The pleasantness began to sour into a bitterness that she knew too well, and Sakura closed her eyes as she hung her head. Her drunkenness had kept it at bay but she had known it would make its return regardless.

Her body still ached from her long shift at the hospital doing surgeries for over fourteen hours. She had been pulling sometimes twenty-hour long shifts at the hospital, cat-napping between surgeries in the on-call bunks, throwing herself body and soul at her work with nearly every waking moment. It had been purely chance that she had come across Ino during one of her increasingly rare trips out beyond the hospital or her apartment, and soon enough she had found herself roped into gambling and then drinking.

Sakura knew she didn’t regret a single moment spent with Ino regardless of how dizzy and sick she felt with the drinks. She had helped her to forget her unhappiness, if just for a few hours.

She opened her eyes to stare again at her glass as the sounds of the bar loudened between her ears. There was a rakish jazz tune playing that was on the objective end of terrible; most of the other sounds of the bar were the laughs and loud, slurred rambling and shouting of other patrons. This was a civilian dive bar; where Sakura had no choice in the matter of whether or not she and Ino would be drinking tonight, she did get to choose where, and considering how exhausted as well as down she felt, she didn’t want to run into anyone she knew. This bar was her getaway from the world on her particularly bad days.

Sakura felt the exhaustion and drink exacerbating her unhappiness instead of abating it now, and she felt her thoughts spin faster. Lonely.

The word lingered. It was what spattered bitterness throughout the corners and curves of her mind and sunk deeply into her with dark stains alongside several other unwelcome words. Lonely. Empty. Bored…

Sakura picked up the glass, sipping it again to taste the last drops of the acrid homebrew sake. She desperately needed an escape from the bitterness that rose like bile up her throat. She didn’t want to think about how she worked longer and longer shifts to escape the empty darkness that awaited her at home. She didn’t want to think about how finally moving on from her interest in Sasuke had freed her and then crushed her with the deeper realization of her loneliness. She didn’t want to think about how the end of the war had given her nothing left to do with herself but work; she wanted to be happy with just healing others, paying no mind to herself, but her life was catching up to her in sharp tandem.

There was another glint in the corner of her eye, and Sakura turned her head, green eyes searching the din of the bar. It had poked her instincts this time like the sixth-sense feel of someone’s eyes upon her and she seized the distraction with greedy mental fingers. Her peripheral vision swirled with her intoxication as she blearily scrutinized the dim bar for what had caught her interest, and when she was about to set down her glass and surrender completely to her bitterness, she saw it again.

Now that she was facing the direction it was coming from, she noticed it as twin pin-points of pure yellow-gold; small in the distance and slightly aglow in the darkness. It disappeared again over the heads and chair backs and general lighthearted madness of the crowded stools and booths. Abruptly Sakura shoved aside her glass on the table and got to her feet.

She made her way across the bar toward where she had seen the flash of gold, keeping her focus on it. Her hand trailed along the wall as she swayed between people and through the din, music and laughter melting through her ears and warming her head as she stopped before a shadowed booth. Whatever she had seen was immersed in a darkness she could not see through, just beyond the table that was the final obstacle between them. Sakura narrowed her eyes into the dark, reaching out a gloved hand with a determination to satisfy her curiosity. She was too drunk to question her actions or to be embarrassed when her fingertips brushed something cool and smooth.

“What are you doing?” A silky, low voice chuckled in the depths of the booth. “Sakura-chan? You’re so drunk.”

Sakura scowled when whatever she had touched pulled back further into the dark and away from her reaching hand, her fingers plopping down unceremoniously onto the table’s edge where she stood. Her blurred mind did not register the voice as she leaned forward over the table toward the dark. “Golden… thing. Why’re you backing away? Don’t be rude.” Her words were slurred and stumbling; there was a pause before the voice spoke again, this time with amusement in his tone. “Golden thing? Have you somehow forgotten my name?”

Sakura thudded into the booth with a hmmph. Her annoyance at his unspoken rejection of her reaching hand had set off an already tumultuous snowball of frustrations within her and she felt it beginning to roll with her dizzy stomach as she reached out again, her determination unfailing as her fingers moved further into the dark booth. This time she found something that was as silky as the texture of the voice that had spoken. Her fingers glided across its smoothness as it was revealed in a dark sienna shaft of the bar’s light. It was a long lock of black hair, and she squinted down at it with increasing annoyance. “Pretty hair.” She examined it with intense focus. “Whaddid you do to make this so soft? I have used… every kind of conditioner, and none of them make my hair this nice.”

Cool white fingers appeared over hers, prying her grip gently from the hair and retreating back into the darkness. Sakura stared blindly at the dark as the voice spoke again. “You don’t want to direct your… drunkenness at me, Sakura-chan. Go back to whatever you were doing before.”

Her annoyance bulked with her earlier frustration and Sakura’s scowl deepened as she turned fully toward the person in the dark of the booth. “Whaddyou know about what I want? I can do what I please.” She threw her weight toward the dark in her attempt to scoot down the seat, drunkenly misjudging the right amount of momentum to use, and she thunked bodily against the shadow in the booth. There was a low oof when she had shoved herself up against a slender side. Sakura paid him no mind as she took a handful of the black hair strands again and inspected it, peeling off her gloves. “Smells like limes n’ something else,” she slurred as she felt the strands between her fingers, and she felt a tentative arm descend lightly around her shoulders; at the feel of his hand curling around her shoulder, Sakura jerked her head to look up at the person she had pressed herself beside.

Two piercing eyes watched her face, less than an arm’s length up from her face in the darkness. Her stomach dropped to her feet as she could see every detail of the golden eyes that had caught her attention now. There was an iridescence in the ochre-yellow hues of his distinct snake-irises, flecks of light catching and reflecting in their depths as she stared into them. She was mesmerized and not listening at all as his velvet voice purred against her. “Do you recognize me now that you’ve thrown yourself on me?”

Sakura hummed softly, letting go of the strands of black hair in her fingers as her attention fully shifted to his gaze. She watched the way the dim light glittered in his unusual eyes, completely capturing her focus. She was noticing now how his irises glowed faintly in the darkness.

Her thoughts plunked against her dizziness, alarmed instincts repeating over and over beneath the easy circles that the alcohol drew in her head. His name that she unconsciously recognized was obscured by the stirring of the drinks in her stomach and the heat in her skin. All Sakura was thinking about beyond the warm spinning of her intoxication was that it felt good to hear and to feel the warm presence of a man so close to her after so long. She breathed in unmistakeable male pheromones with the warm smells of sake and eucalyptus, a blend of scents that was unusual but not unpleasant, causing heat to pool in her lower stomach. Her body whirred with the need to pull him closer and immerse herself, to escape the bitterness that chased the tail-end of her thoughts.

Sakura’s vision tunneled as her hands reached up, threading through the long black hair that surrounded his intense golden eyes, and she tugged him down to her as she pressed her lips against his parted ones, interrupting whatever patient protest was about to depart from them.

Her kiss was soft, insistent, half-sloppy; his cool lips were still and unresponsive beneath hers for a long moment. She was lost in the scorch of the thrill that had run through her at the touch of her face against another’s, her skin singing with heightened awareness of his proximity - that thrill that reminded her she was alive, and increasingly more so.

Drawing back slightly, spinning mind sent cascading back down from the adrenaline pushing headily through her blood, Sakura’s attention shifted from his still-unmoving lips to the taste his had left on her own. There was the slight tang of potent sake and something sweet - but she was halted in her drunk curiosity as his white hands gripped her by the shoulders and all but shoved her away from him abruptly.

Sakura fell back on the rough leather seat, her brain spinning exponentially more from his rejection. She squinted up at him in the dark, her narrowed green gaze catching again on his flashing golden eyes as he leaned over where she was sprawled back on the booth. When his pale face was illuminated dimly in the dark orange light, Sakura’s mind finally picked up his name from the thundering of her blood.

“Sakura-chan. Did you not hear me earlier?” Orochimaru blinked at her from the darkness where he sat with narrowed eyes and slightly flared, slitted pupils.

She reached out, grasping the open collar of his dark blue tunic shirt, feeling her frustration rise again. She did not like that he had shoved her away. Regardless of the twisting of her gut or the clanging of her thoughts, her pride and her stubbornness would not allow him to reject her, and she wanted to taste that thrill that had brought an old spark back into the hollowness within her.

Sakura tugged where she gripped Orochimaru’s dark shirt sharply, causing him to have to brace his hands on the seat on either side of Sakura’s head to avoid being thrown violently across the booth from her drunken misjudging of the strength needed to pull him back into her personal space. His mostly shadowed features shifted into a curious but irked frown as she gripped him more tightly, the seams beginning to tear beneath her fingers, glaring up at him. His name clicked oddly in her brain, and she felt both revilement and frustration as well as a burgeoning heat in her core.

“You’ll regret this later if you keep going,” Orochimaru warned again, hands covering hers where she had grabbed his collar. His words were a statement of fact rather than a threat, and she ignored his silky admonition as she pulled him down to her.

Sakura continued to ignore the alarmed pulsing of her instincts and listened to the pull of her body as her impatient tug brought Orochimaru all the way down to where she laid back on the booth seat, aligning his body with hers. One of her hands touched his angular cheekbone lightly as she kissed him again, and he didn’t stop her this time. She opened her eyes, drowning in gold, and one of her legs slid up across the booth and against his side; she felt his arms encircle her waist as he began to respond to her lips pressing insistently against his.

Sakura could taste the sweetness on his lips more thoroughly now as he allowed her to explore him. Her mouth opened as she tilted her head. Orochimaru’s wide lips meshed with hers as she tasted his warm breath, the tang of sake and a hint of matcha registering in her brain; when she felt his cool hand trail up her side, she gave a low groan. “Don’t blame me when you’re sober tomorrow,” he murmured as his lips slipped from hers and he placed a lingering kiss beneath her ear. Her thoughts still plunked in the back of her mind, but the sensations of having his weight pressed against her, the growl in his voice, and the feel of his cool hands drove back her doubts and invoked her desires. The combinations of sights and sounds and scents spun with her intoxication and Sakura revelled in the absence of her bitterness as she enjoyed his slow touches, her skin searing where he dragged his lips along her throat and up against her jaw.

With increasing impatience, Sakura turned her face and captured his lips again. Her hands gripped his sides and she brought both legs up to clamp around his waist, adjusting so she was lying completely flat on the long booth seat. She heard a heavy scrape as Orochimaru pushed away the table, allowing them more room in the dark matted booth, and her heart thudded wildly against her chest as the simple action made her blood burn. Her legs clamped again around his waist as he settled his weight atop her completely, and he drew back enough to study her wide green eyes a moment, lips pulling back from hers.

As she beheld his hale and shadow-crossed face above hers, a brief memory flickered through Sakura’s mind, and her expression as a whole smoldered mauve as a dark idea danced on the threshold of her thoughts. Her lack of inhibitions whatsoever allowed the idea to avoid the filtration of her subconscious and she voiced her piecemeal thoughts aloud, her voice slurred and soft as her breath fell hotly across his hovering face. “Long…” Sakura squinted into his slitted golden eyes, feeling something curl in her gut as she dared ask. “Don’t you… you have a super long…” She swallowed, even her completely drunken bravery hesitating in the face of expressing her bold, implicit request. “Tongue?”

Orochimaru’s golden eyes flared wide as he processed her question, her words so slurred that it took him a moment to translate her words until they connected and he tilted his head. There was a playful yet ominous look in his darkening golden eyes, and Sakura unconsciously squeezed her legs where they were clamped around his sides. His silky voice had taken on a somewhat husky tone as he replied, and he rose a single dark eyebrow as his pupils contracted and his cheeks darkened. “What are you really asking, Sakura-chan?”

The warmth in her belly and the sensations of his weight pressed against her made Sakura give completely into her bodily desires. She gained a stab of bravery that made the words ghost past her lips as she gave Orochimaru a wicked grin. “Show it to me.”

His answering smile was wider and much more sinister than hers. “As you wish.”

Sakura let out a yip as they were then what felt like instantaneously standing outside of their booth in a swift blur of limbs. She leaned against Orochimaru’s side heavily, made dizzier from the sudden movement and still intensely drunk. She shook her head of its wildly cascading spinning, looking up determinedly toward the back exit of the bar with her intent to see that promise through, and felt more than saw Orochimaru smirk beside her as the two of them began to make their way through the din of boisterous noise and dancing and song around them.

Even in her inebriated state Sakura sensed curious eyes dragging across herself and Orochimaru. She tried to appear nonchalant as she fervently hoped in the back of her circling, blurry mind that nobody recognized him. She also noticed, as she looked up at him, that his long black hair had come loose from its tie that had been keeping it restrained behind his back. It fell as a long, perfectly straight black curtain around the sides of his face and down his shoulders, obscuring his features from passers-by. Sakura shook her own head of medium-length, mussed pink hair, hoping for the same sleek effect but still knowing she looked like a drunken fool. Orochimaru was weaving gracefully through the crowds like a cat, leading Sakura by the elbow and occasionally her shoulder as she wobbled in and out of retaining her balance.

Sakura let out a relieved sigh as they pushed through the back door. She sucked in a deep breath of the cool night air and swerved, her eyes wide upon where Orochimaru awaited her. Sakura’s blurry attention dragged up and down his slender form and loose hair and slight smile. Was that dubiousness she spotted in his expression?

Sakura swayed forward, her hands clamping around Orochimaru’s slight but toned shoulders, glaring up at him with vehemence amplified by drink. Though Sakura was gripping him like she were about to toss him across the village, he stood as steadily as a statue. He raised a single eyebrow at her, his gilded eyes slightly aglow in the darkness around them.

“Are you certain about this, Sakura-chan?”

Sakura blinked up at Orochimaru, the drunken, slurred, accusatory taunt that had been about to burst from her lips wilting. Her fingers flexed uncertainly around his shoulders, and she suddenly retracted her grip upon him, realizing now how much she’d seized and grabbed and otherwise forced contact upon him throughout this ordeal. Her drunkenness had abated just enough that she vaguely understood Orochimaru was being more than just patient with her - had someone tried upon Sakura what she had tried on him at this point, she’d have destroyed them for it long ago. Orochimaru was clearly unperturbed by, or experienced in, handling wildly violent and demanding drunks - an observation Sakura wanted to both investigate and squash out of her head forever.

His question repeated in her circling mind, and Sakura’s glower slowly returned, that hatred of feeling rejected riling up that lonely spark in her chest that had helped ignite her fire in the first place.

Sakura then matched Orochimaru’s posture, if slightly swaying and unsteady where she stood - folded arms, feet confidently flat on the pavement, her chin high as she stared challengingly up into his face. “I know whatthefuck I’m doing.” Her words slurred together despite her efforts, and her thoughts still spun with uncertainty, lust, sake, loneliness, and thrills of adrenaline, but the defiant glint in her eyes was the one thing that was absolute.

Orochimaru’s smirk slanted up across his wide lips. He reached out, pale hand gripping Sakura’s chin as he leaned in close, his obsidian slitted pupils flaring wide as his low voice became teasing. “But what about your Sasuke-kun, hmm?”

Sakura’s brows pinched together in a scowl. “I’ve been over him in that way for a while now. I’m surprised you’re even asking.” Her jaw tipped forward in Orochimaru’s cool grip and her heart pounded with another addictive spike of adrenaline as she searched his luminescent stare, using a saccharine tone she attempted to make just as mocking as his. “But oh, sorry, I forgot about him killing you once for a second.” Sakura drew close enough that her nose brushed against his and she could feel his warm breath on her face, her eyes widening in a mockingly innocent way as his pale hand gripping her chin tightened and she went on. “Are you worried?”

Sakura’s hopes to puncture that mocking, knowing look on Orochimaru’s face with her slurred but sharp words faltered as she swayed violently, a wave of dizziness dragging through her. He caught her easily and retained her from falling while shaking his head.

Sakura let out a curse. Pulling back from Orochimaru, she sent some finely-tuned chakra to her liver with a sweaty hand, forcing it to work faster to cycle the alcohol from her system. It hurt, but soon she felt the most potent waves of drunkenness ease, leaving her still thoroughly drunk but at least able to walk.

This done, Sakura whipped back toward Orochimaru, steering herself aggressively back toward him. She fisted his dark blue shirt lapels and pulled close again with clenched teeth and racing, heated blood. “Well don’t. Do you think I’d really be here? It took me…” She rolled her eyes like she was struggling to count the years. “...too long to figure out he doesn’t care about me like that or much at all -- and… anyway… didn’t you promise me - something?” Sakura glowered up at Orochimaru, and both of his eyebrows rose as he regarded her. This time, she couldn’t read what was beneath the look he gave her, but her impatience had finally broken through again, and she was done talking, wanting to keep chasing that heart-pounding thrill that she’d started to feel from the moment this risky dalliance had started. She set her jaw, making drunken mental declarations that blared over half of what he was in the middle of saying. “...not certain that we want the same things out of this, Sakura-chan---”

“Whatever.” Sakura fisted Orochimaru’s loose white yukata and pulled him abruptly toward the street, drunkenly confident despite not quite knowing where to go, and she let out another squeak as she was scooped up - she barely had time to realize that she was being carried, her dizziness drowning her again as they raced in a blur through the mostly deserted streets and alleys, her hair whipping around her face. The only thing Sakura could clearly see was the glint of Orochimaru’s luminescent eyes in the darkness that occasionally flicked down to her.

When the swaying and wind-whipping of searing through the neon-lit Konoha streets drew to a halt, Orochimaru setting Sakura back on her feet, they were already inside an apartment; she hadn’t even noticed when he’d made it into the building, nor when he’d entered it and carried her into here. She looked around at the dark apartment quickly, wide-eyed, before turning back to look at him. Her heart was beating with a frantic, maxed rhythm: accelerated by far too much sake, electrified with adrenaline, boosted with unexpected attraction, and punctuated by that same blinding need she had felt earlier in the bar. Even though the logical part of her brain (where her inhibitions and doubts tried desperately to escape) was immersed with a still potent drunkenness, Sakura knew that she didn’t need to declare it aloud. She and Orochimaru both were finished with talking.

Sakura stepped back, her eyes half-lidded and pinned to him as she fell onto the bed behind her, her expression both brave and inviting in a mocking, daring way. Her hair bounced around her face as the mattress gave in slightly to her weight, her clothes ruffled and her skin already rashing with heat and thrills.

For a moment, Orochimaru considered her. He was a black and white shadow painted silver in the moonlight before her, the two bright orbs of his golden eyes flashing beneath his loose hair.

He let out a low chuckle that became a growl as Sakura’s impatient hands flashed out and pulled him to her roughly. His limbs tangled with hers as they fell together across the bed, and Sakura let out a gasp as Orochimaru bit down viciously on the side of her neck; her fingers dug into his sides, her blood surging with renewed, intense thrills at his warning rumble spurred from Sakura’s undying, inviting defiance.

Quick cold hands pulled aside Sakura’s vest and tore away her chest-bindings. Orochimaru’s searing touch slid down her sides as he eased down her shorts. Sakura arched her back, thoughts buzzing and then imploding as his long tongue traveled down her neck and slowly down the sensitive skin of her chest. He explored the curves of her breasts, the shapes of her nipples, listening to her moans as he continued downward.

“Ah---AH!” His pointed tongue laved over her panties and she cried out, her hands threading through the silky strands of his long loose black hair. She groaned then as her underwear were cast aside and he delved his tongue into her. He gave her several undulations, watching the way she panted and cried out in pleasure; then he pulled back, and she relaxed into the sheets, her hands growing more gentle on his hair. “Well, now you’ve been shown,” Orochimaru purred, and Sakura glowered back at him, spinning mind focused on the heat that had pooled between her legs. “Why’d you stop?”

His golden snake eyes widened at her sharp question, and he chuckled as he lowered his mouth to her again, smiling as she groaned at the warm, wet feel of his tongue exploring her once more. He pressed it deep into her, laving it around her inner walls, and she gave an almost inhuman cry of pleasure at the way his wicked tongue felt like it was carving her out and searing pleasure from every microscopic pore of her. She stretched out her legs around his sides, her body trembling violently as he began to flick his tongue at speed in and out of her. He curled his tongue in a way that hit her inner pleasure center as well as her pearl and she convulsed as she came.

Then he rose from between her legs, licking his lips clean; he dragged his mouth up her skin as he did earlier. In her feverish pleasure Sakura reached out and tugged at his clothing. With ease he threw aside his shirt and rope belt; she pushed at his pants with sweaty fingers, and he paused above her. Golden eyes searched green, and in her drunken passion she reached up impatiently, pulling him down to her. Convinced by her kiss, Orochimaru kicked away his pants and pressed his weight against her. In the spinning of her dizziness and how she was reeling from her comedown of pleasure, Sakura felt her stubborn streak smolder into a passionate, angry desire for more. She reached out and gripped his pale, bared shoulders; with a huff she lurched her weight up and flipped him onto his back, pressing him against the bed with her weight. “More,” she hissed as she kissed him drunkenly, and she felt his cool fingers push through her hair as he smiled against her mouth. “So demanding, Sakura-chan.” She reached down and felt him, and he gasped as she sunk down and sheathed him with herself without warning. “Sakura----”

He narrowed his flaring slitted eyes at her, sweat gleaming on his skin, and she gave him a vicious roll of her hips against his. Orochimaru’s slim hands pressed into her sides with a sharp exhale as Sakura reached out and gripped the side of the mattress, steadying her spinning mind. She glowered into his flashing golden eyes and she rolled forward again, feeling him stretch her, and she closed her eyes as she reveled in the feeling of his length filling her. Her other hand reached up and splayed along his slender white shoulder; she felt his hands travel up from her hips to her sides as he pulled her back down to her.

Something twisted in her chest at the way he kissed her then; his lips were slow and teasing on hers. Sakura frowned into his kiss as she rocked her hips back and forth, her hands raking up his sides with lightly scraping nails. She smirked at his responding hiss; he bodily flipped her once more, and she squeaked as he began to press into her at an angry pace. They panted together as Orochimaru increased his rhythm, and they moved together, sweat drenching the sheets as the moonlight shone on their entwined skins through the windows above the bed. As she met his eyes, she stared, her spinning mind getting lost to the fury between them and the way the silver light glinted in his iridescent irises as she surrendered to the pleasure both then and hours into the night.

Chapter Text

Sakura awoke in a tangle of sheets, her face pressed into cool white skin. Her head was splitting with a relentless headache; she felt the familiar churning of her stomach that was finally getting its chance to take its queasy revenge upon her for all the drinks she’d had. Giving a sigh, Sakura stretched out a sore arm and stiffened as it fell upon the body she was realizing she was curled up against.

She blinked, focusing her vision, and her eyes traced along the smooth curve of lean shoulder that her nose had been pressed into. She pulled back, extricating her arm gradually from his side with surgical precision; silky black hair fell along his smooth and leanly muscled skin with her movement.

Laying back in the warm sheets, Sakura rubbed her throbbing temples. She couldn’t remember a thing about the night before through the enraged throbbing in her skull. With a slow inhale, Sakura probed her body with her chakra, easing her headache and calming her queasy stomach; she began to realize that she was both thoroughly sore and wonderfully sated. Whatever she and this mystery man had done, it had left her feeling something like a goddess by the humming and tingling of her limbs, even through her splitting headache and grumbling stomach.

Sakura held her breath as she returned her attention to the figure mixed up in the sheets beside her, her mind clearing of its aching. She knew she’d remember later once she’d woken up completely and shaken out of her hangover, but she had to know who it was she’d come home with and set her afire.

Releasing the breath she’d been unconsciously holding, Sakura prepared herself, lifting a hand to poke her bedmate awake; she pulled it back like she’d been burned when he stirred, his long slim body stretching languidly, his white arm rising above her head as he rolled over. The arm fell around Sakura’s bare middle and his face obscured by midnight hair sunk into the pillow with a barely audible exhale.

Sakura cleared her throat, hoping it would capture his sleepy attention. Not only did she want to know who he was, but she needed to get out of bed and go home to prepare for work, perhaps after drowning her regrets in a pot of coffee. Her tentative hand rose again and rested lightly on the head beside her shoulder, threading through the silky black strands; he gave no sign of stirring again as she slowly, gently parted the long hair to reveal who it was she laid beside.

A golden snake eye blinked open, glinting with slightly weary amusement. His slitted pupil contracted as he watched the horror and astonishment unfold across Sakura’s temporarily petrified face.

With a yelp, Sakura shoved away from Orochimaru, scrambling back on the sheets and tugging the covers up against her naked body. He gave her a lazy smile, stretching his arms up and behind his head. “I see you finally sobered up, Sakura-chan.”

“Last night… I slept with… you?” Sakura pulled the covers up over her agape expression, searching his face almost hopefully like he might not be real and that this was some kind of joke.

Orochimaru tilted his head, his long hair drifting across his shoulders. “If you remember, you insisted.”

She buried her face in her hands as she began to remember more of what had happened, regretfully recalling some of her drunken self’s brash, demanding words and actions. Flashes of what they had done as a result began to bubble up in her head. “Oh no.”

Orochimaru’s low chuckle made Sakura shiver behind her hands that shielded her from facing the situation before her. “I’m such an idiot…”

“Well, make no apologies on my behalf.” Orochimaru drew the sheets around his lower half with a wide-mouthed yawn, affixing Sakura with a glittering stare. “You should listen more closely when being given warnings, Sakura-chan. Did I not warn you that you would regret this later last night?”

Sakura glowered at him from between her fingers. “Maybe you’ve conveniently forgotten, but I — was — drunk.” She emphasized the words venomously, her cheeks vivid scarlet in her embarrassment. “No one hears about this, okay? This didn’t happen.”

His deepening chuckle made her blush burn across her blazing cheeks to her ears, and she got to her feet, hugging the sheet tightly around herself as she awkwardly looked around at what looked like an average small apartment, bare of furnishings beyond the simple bed and nightstand. “Do you… do you have a shower?...”

Orochimaru pointed straight ahead at an open door near the end of the bed, his ochre eyes following Sakura as she slouched in shame and ran on bare feet into the bathroom and shut the door. Then she ran back out, avoiding his gaze as she picked up her scattered clothes from the floor and ran back in.

“Ino,” Sakura hissed into her phone as she dropped the sheet around her feet, looking at herself in the mirror. “I’m going to absolutely strangle you! What did you put into that sake?!”

There was a giddy laugh on the other end and Sakura growled as she searched around the simple bathroom. She opened drawer after drawer, realizing they were all empty - she guessed that this must be a dummy apartment Orochimaru kept only for occasional use, and she began running her fingers through her hair, comblessly ripping through its knots with extra ferocity at the thought that she’d been among those uses for it last night.

The phone nearly bounced out of Sakura’s hand from the volume of Ino’s voice. “What did you do! Did you actually go home with someone? Who did you sleep with?!”

“Never you mind,” Sakura hissed back as she accidentally tore out a small chunk of her cherry-blossom hair. She flicked it away and kept ripping through her mussed locks, reaching back and turning on the shower to let it start heating up while she continued to work on taming her hair.

“You have to tell me,” Ino insisted, “why’d you call me in the first place otherwise? I know you want to tell me.”

Sakura’s eyes caught on her reflection in the mirror, her stomach dropping. As her hands lifted to start healing the many bruising bite-marks and slight finger indents on her shoulders and around her hips, Ino kept harping on through the phone’s speaker. “I ended up with Sai, of course, but you, I didn’t get to see who you ran off with. You’d better tell me before I come and shake the truth out of you.”

Sakura reached up with a glowing finger and healed away the fang-marked hickeys by her throat. “Don’t you dare. I’ll tell Sai about how you still hope Sasuke will like you, or even that one time you were drunk and nearly got with with Genma—”

“Shut up!!” Ino’s squeal was loud enough that she had to move the phone away from her ear. Sakura turned her nude body around in the mirror and gave a groan when she found more marks. As she healed them, she pressed the phone back to her ear, Ino’s voice still going. “So was he good? You sound exhausted. He must have been really something if he was able to catch even drunk Sakura’s attention. Is he a civilian or a shinobi? Is he someone I know? Is he —”

“Pig!” Sakura’s blush returned with her protest as she finished healing her marks and turned to the shower. “I don’t even fully remember it all yet, even if I wanted to tell you,” Sakura informed Ino, opening the shower door when she saw that the water was satisfactorily steaming hot. She opened her mouth to say a hurried goodbye as Ino’s squeal sounded through the phone’s speaker again. “I hear that shower! You’re still with him, aren’t you? Tell me who it is!”

There was a quiet knock on the bathroom door, and Sakura looked slowly over as Orochimaru spoke through the thin wood. “Sakura-chan, there’s some shampoo in the cupboard next to the shower. Yell if you need anything,” and then he padded off into a different room, leaving Sakura standing with the phone gripped in her hand and silence on the other line.

Sakura’s thumb moved to end the call but she winced as she heard Ino’s screech. “You were with Orochi—”

Sakura threw the phone aside and stepped into the shower. She reached out from the steam and took the shampoo from the nearby cupboard, giving a soft curse as she squirted some into her hand and ran it through her hair. It smells like him, she realized as the strange but not unpleasant mixed smells of lime and eucalyptus tingled in her nose. Her increasingly troubled thoughts circled around and around in her head as they sunk in. She lathered her hair and let the hot water rinse away her shame as she let the heat wash and clean her body. As she finished cleansing herself and stepped out of the shower, taking a clean towel from the same cupboard and drying off, she had another realization; she snatched up the phone and called Ino back.

“Sakura...! Did you really sleep with—”

“Yes, Pig, and the only reason I called you back is so I can tell you to never tell anyone.” Sakura hissed into the phone. “Never ever. I will ruin you if you let anyone know.”

“Fine, but you have to meet up with me and tell me what all happened to make this come about, or I’m gonna tell everyone. Just imagine their faces—”

“No!” Sakura hunched on the bathroom floor, eyes flicking about like she was being watched. “I’m not… I’m not telling you the details!”

“What inspired you to bed the snake sannin anyway? What was it like? I mean, ew, but also what the hell, Forehead?”

“It was your shitty sake,” Sakura spat, and she clutched the phone hard enough to crack the screen. She hung up again in the middle of Ino’s continuous teasing stream of risque questions and pulled on her clothes. She winced at their soiled state, their stale scents of sex and sake making her wrinkle her nose as she opened the bathroom door.

Sakura saw with a blink that the bed was made, the bare bedroom looking as if it had never been used. She pressed her clasped hands to her chest, taking in a long breath, hoping to soothe her tripping heartbeat; she could sense that Orochimaru was in the kitchen a room over, and she wasn’t ready to face him again just yet.

She didn’t know how long she stood there before shaking herself out of her exhausted, anxious stupor, the faint ticking of a clock somewhere reminding her that she didn’t have the time to hide in this drab room any longer.

Resolving herself with the old reminder of you are no coward, Sakura straightened her back and relaxed her shoulders, turning and stepping through the nearby doorway into the living room. The sun crossed her figure and fell past her to set Orochimaru alight where he was leaning against one of the small kitchen’s counters, the white fabric of his yukata glowing in the morning sun.

He glanced up from the steaming mug of coffee in his pale hand as Sakura paused, her hands twitching nervously before she tucked her hair behind her ears and steeled herself one last time; she cleared her throat, looking away from where the light touched down the exposed skin of his neck and chest where his yukata fell open. “Thank you for letting me use your shower,” she said, trying to keep her tone as casual as she could manage.

She felt Orochimaru’s eyes upon her, and she inhaled softly, forgetting what else she’d told herself to say; she brought her gaze to level with his, and she searched the way the sun glinted off his irises’ iridescent inner glow. She found his expression to be unreadable beyond his patient calm, and she let out a shaky exhale as she padded across the room and past him into the kitchen; she took a white ceramic cup and poured herself a healthy measure of the coffee.

With its warmth at her lips and soothing her throat, Sakura felt considerably less hesitant. It occurred to her that Orochimaru was probably hung-over and she turned a curious eye to him.

He moved across the counter, his long-fingered hand taking hold of the coffee pot and pouring the rest of its contents into his cup. Sakura blinked up at him as he stood beside her. The sunlight danced across Orochimaru’s features, following the lavender around his eyes and down his pale, symmetrical features, glimmering in the coffee that he brought to his lips. Her pulse beat like fluttering wings in her ears as she maintained eye contact, a thrill thrumming down her chest as his slitted pupils widened upon her. He looks fine… better than fine, like he didn’t drink at all. The thought held little weight and fell away into the back of Sakura’s mind.

“Look, I…” Sakura winced at the words she pushed herself to say, willing herself to look Orochimaru in the eye for more than just curious glances. Her heart thudded in her chest; she was a little terrified of facing this conversation. “I’m sorry about last night. I was… extremely drunk and I — want to just— apologize for throwing myself at… everything.” Sakura couldn’t bring herself to be blunt and she finally couldn’t help but to look away from Orochimaru as he gave a silky low laugh. “I told you not to apologize, Sakura-chan.”

His voice called forth a warm memory that melted through Sakura’s head — dripping words she couldn’t recall in the night but for every heated tone, his murmurs and sharp hisses of pleasure, and she felt her face beginning to burn from more than just the touch of the morning light and the heat of the coffee lingering in her mouth.

Sakura took a sip of her coffee that she hoped was nonchalant, hands shaking slightly around her cup. “...Oh,” she murmured into the cup, distracted and embarrassed.

She heard Orochimaru shift where he stood; her blood boiled beneath her skin as he leaned in. You idiot, Sakura, her thoughts screamed through her ears, run away, he’ll probably kill you now for being such a fool, or worse, and you’re just standing here dumbfounded like a —

When he set his empty mug in the sink behind Sakura, leaning away again, she breathed out slowly through her nose, one hand lifting to press over her pounding heart. He folded his arms; she felt the pressure of his eyes upon her, and she dared herself to look back up at him. He was smirking and she hoped he didn’t notice the blush on her cheeks. “So? Were you heading home now, or did you need something else?”

“No,” Sakura blurted, hurriedly swallowing the rest of the coffee; her mouth burned, and she shoved the mug on the counter. She lifted a hand to her lips and healed the mild burns. “Dammit.”

She looked up at Orochimaru with wide eyes as he spoke once more, the timbre of his voice a touch darker. “Was that a no to leaving, or a no to needing something else?”

"Something else,” she hissed, and her blush deepened at his smile. “I’ll… I’ll see you later.” Sakura cursed herself silently for not saying something rude instead as she swerved and moved toward the front door. As her hand turned the handle, she felt a sudden cool shadow looming over behind her, and she turned her head slightly to the side as Orochimaru bent his face into her hair, golden eyes piercing her as he breathed in her shampoo. “You’re welcome back here anytime.” A cool hand slipped around her hip, and she gave another shiver at his breath on her ear; she blinked a few times, and then she wrenched open the door, slipping into the hallway with a harsh exhale as she fled with adrenaline thundering in her veins.

Sakura didn’t stop her fast-paced almost-jog until she was inside of her apartment. Once the front door swung and slammed shut behind her, she immediately swerved, locked it, deadbolted it, and checked through the peephole. Of course no one was there that she could see - just an inconspicuous and rather dingy hallway - but she felt a deep sense of unease amongst all of her other writhing emotions.

She stepped back from the door and ran her hands through her hair, staring intently at the faded, cheap wood like it had all of the solutions to her problems.

None of that happened, Sakura told herself, her fingers digging into her scalp before she dragged them back down to press against her temples. That wasn’t real.

Sakura forced this version of reality into the forefront of her mind, thoughts turning between denial and anxiety, turning from the locked door and toward the rest of her apartment. Her weary, sleep-deprived gaze flicked across the scattered stacks of her notes and medical studies, their neat piles haphazardly left on end tables and couch arms and counters; a borrowed medical coat leaned across the back of her couch. Her sink was piling high with dirty dishes, her small dinner table across from it covered with old restaurant receipts, shopping lists, reminder notes, scattered spare kunai and polishing cloths, combs, and more dishes. Her apartment creaked in its sleepy quiet, the soft surrounding ambience of a large apartment building settling a little deeper into Konoha soil. She could hear that she had left the fan going in her bedroom through the open doorway by its familiar white-noise whirring.

Sakura’s body began to untense slightly. She let out a breath, her shoulders falling from where she had unconsciously hunched them. She ran a palm across her sweaty forehead and through her damp hair once more, stepping toward her couch once and then falling forward, the cushions making a soft pfff as she collapsed into them. Old stale smells of dust and missing coins, cotton and paper, filled Sakura’s nose. She breathed it in and let the sensations bring her a gentle calm.

A foreign, slightly tangy scent caught in her nose; Sakura breathed out quickly, shaking her head deeper into her couch cushions. None of it happened. She repeated the words to herself as several locks of her damp hair fell against her nose.

A blast of scents assaulted her senses, each a colorful and mocking reminder of reality: notes of coffee, traces of cotton, cascades of lime-eucalyptus shampoo, hints of stale sake, the slight lingering odors of a bar, and an ineffable scent mixed with her own that screamed his name in her ears voicelessly. A wave of both nausea and dizziness pushed over the calm that had shakily built up in Sakura’s mind and she cursed as she slammed her fists into her couch. “Dammit!”

The beaten couch cushions coughed miniscule feathers and dust in a cloud around Sakura as she sat up, her hair a wild pile of damp magenta and pink. She felt her determination dissolve into defeat as memories of last night were stirred up violently from the scents, trickling through her thoughts and leaving bright stains on her resolve to deny and forget the events of the night and early morning.

There was a twinge in her limbs as Sakura got to her feet, a throbbing soreness in some of the tendons and muscles that were stretched and tested in ways that they weren’t used to. This reminder, above all of the others, caused the redness in her cheeks as she puffed out a breath and made her way to her shower, trying her best not to think about how she was probably walking a little bow-leggedly and all the memories that went with why she was.

Sakura kept her eyes carefully away from her bathroom mirror as she gladly peeled off her odor-entrenched dirty clothes; as she neatly folded them by the seams, she paused, her eyes falling upon a long black hair that clung to her qipao’s red fabric.

She picked it up between her index finger and thumb, holding it up. It gleamed in the light of her bathroom lights, a deep and silky obsidian black, easily twice as long as her own hair.

“I’m such an idiot,” Sakura sighed as she tossed the hair aside along with her dirty clothes, turning to where her shower was running steaming hot water. She stepped in with a note of relief and began her second shower of the day.

Sakura rinsed out her hair, making sure that every trace of Orochimaru’s shampoo was out of each strand until she was thoroughly imbued with her own scents again. Sakura’s hands pressed and probed across her skin, seeking soreness; her hands lingered with healing for the aching muscles within her inner thighs, her upper arms, her neck and back. She also healed away any bite-marks she’d not found earlier quickly, trying not to think about them too much. Maybe she couldn’t deny to herself that she’d spent the night with such unexpected company, but she could do her damndest to shove it into the recesses of her memory as soon as possible.

It was over an hour before Sakura left her shower stall, and as she padded out of her bathroom, her memories easily echoed back to several hours earlier when she had exited Orochimaru’s bathroom in a similar fashion. Almost unwillingly she echoed her memory by looking to her right, into her living room; though this time there was no one awaiting her in the kitchen, Sakura shivered from her remembrances. She could still feel the sleepy touch of his golden eyes, weary in a content way, drawing across her tense form once before closing in a knowing smile as he had sipped his coffee.

“Damn smug bastard,” Sakura cursed as she turned away from her open doorway and tossed aside her towel, crawling into her unmade bed. Her body tingled pleasantly as she laid back in her sheets and blankets and pillows, her eyes drooping with her exhaustion. The shower is why I feel good, Sakura reassured herself. All last night did for me was make me tired. Did we sleep at all?

Sakura shoved a pillow over her face. She was remembering more and more of her wild and drunken night and wished she was forgetting instead. Her memory had always been fine-tuned and vividly sensory, a neat library of every subject; it was something she’d been proud of and relied upon over her years as a shinobi and as a student. Now she hated both it and how it was fetching every blurred memory back, clarifying it in detail.

A shiver wracked Sakura’s body at the ghostly remembrances of lips and teeth, hands gripping her waist, legs tangling with her legs - flashes of bare white limbs and silky tangles of black hair, hisses and gasps and groans and sighs, the feel of warm skin sliding against warm skin, and she shoved the pillow harder against her face as she let out a long exhale through clenched teeth. “Go to sleep, Sakura,” she told herself. “Stop remembering. Stop remembering. Forget all of it, it never happened.” She wrenched her eyes shut, willing herself to shut out the fresh memories pouring in as her shower-cleared mind recovered fully from her former hangover.

Sleep had almost cloaked her mind fully when Sakura remembered Orochimaru’s slightly husky, sleep-cracked words, murmured in her ear only hours ago. You’re welcome back here anytime.

With goosebumps rashing down her neck and a clenching of her thighs and her jaw, Sakura pushed Orochimaru and her night with him again from her mind, determined to catch up on much-needed sleep.

Sakura threw herself forward in her bed. The whole of her body was covered in sweat, the throbbing between her thighs matching with the high speed of her pumping heart rate, her breaths rapid and shallow. Darkness surrounded her, a dull gray shaft of moonlight pushing its dust-sheathed way into her room, and Sakura ran a hand over the cold sweat on her forehead, blinking away the intense dreams she’d had. She pinched her legs together with a deep embarrassment.

Sakura took several measured, even breaths, consciously calming her heart and lowering her spiked adrenaline. She then did a deep, thorough diagnosis of herself, checking her chakra, her vitals, her blood, searching for any changes, any foreign chakra, anything that might indicate something wrong or off. Finding nothing technically off but her own intensely aroused state, Sakura threw her sweat-drenched sheets aside and let out a groan as she stretched her limbs and cracked her knuckles. “I need another shower,” she grumbled to herself as she padded back into the bathroom.

Sakura washed quickly this time, just wanting to rinse away the stink of stale sweat and the embarrassment of her body’s now fading excitement. Her dreams were only half-remembered as of yet, and she didn’t want to linger on the thought of them; she also didn’t want to return to sleep in case the dreams simply resumed.

Sakura pulled on a fresh set of clothes, leaving her room behind, and she paused in pulling on her sandals as she noted the time glowing in green on her oven’s digital clock. It was three a.m.

She shrugged, pulling on her other sandal and getting to her feet. She shoved her keys in her pocket and hastily left her apartment. She needed to clear her head.

Sakura leaned against the railing that lined the roof of her apartment complex, reminiscing, looking out across the glowing multicolored lights of Konoha. It looked so different now than she remembered it as a child. It was slowly regaining its wild, cluttered state, though each building was still too young to have much personality yet. After all, it was an entirely rebuilt city, with nothing from Sakura’s childhood remaining but the faces of the Hokages on the distant mountainside.

She sighed, resting her chin on her hands. Her eyes flicked across each carved face, memories stirring from each one. Hashirama Senju… Tobirama Senju… Hiruzen Sarutobi… Minato Namikaze… Tsunade Senju… Kakashi Hatake. None of the carved faces did much justice to the real faces of each Hokage, especially now that she’d seen each one herself in person. She still wondered sometimes what the hell was happening that day during the war when all of the Hokages of old showed up in front of her and Naruto at once.

Sakura’s attention returned to Third Hokage Hiruzen Sarutobi’s face with a frown, and a flash of a memory seared the back of her mind, the scattered images of unconscious people littering the stadium, sounds of panicked shouts and fighting, and all of Konoha’s citizens later dressed in black, mourning. Orochimaru killed the Third Hokage.

Sakura sighed, sinking lower and tipping her head into her folded arms against the rail. “I wasn’t really myself last night,” she whispered, her voice picked up and carried away by the night breeze, her eyes darkened as she watched the glittering lights of Konoha. “I would never have… Never have approached him like that, sober.”

When would I approach anyone like that sober? Sakura sighed, finding little comfort in that thought. She was swearing off sake now. After seeing what becoming absolutely plastered did to her decision-making, Sakura was never touching the stuff again.

Sakura’s eyes moved over to Tsunade’s carved face on the mountainside, and frowned at the thought that poked through. He also saved shishou’s life during the war.

Sakura turned from the railing, rubbing at her eyes and heading back toward the stairwell that she had taken to get up here. She wasn’t going to let herself fall into a mental trap where she fought herself on a moral debate. You didn’t do anything technically wrong. And you didn’t break any laws, Sakura told herself as she turned the stairwell door handle, I think.

She paused within the stairwell, feeling like she should be remembering something, but her tired mind not catching what it was.

Another thought plunked into Sakura’s head as she descended the stairs. This one was shameless and slightly smug, resonating with the way her soreness was counterbalanced by the undeniable aftershocks of feeling thoroughly satisfied. It was quite the wild night.

Choosing to ignore her residual soreness brought back on by the stairs, Sakura continued to attempt to reassure her doubts as she reentered her apartment and found her way back into her bed, pulling a clean blanket atop her. And I kind of enjoyed it, she thought, a tired smirk curling the corner of her lips before she shook her head and turned her face into her covers. In response to this admittance, memories of Sakura’s intensely sexual dreams that had been mostly amalgamations of memories from the night before began to slip back into her head in slick images. Quickly she attempted to shut them out, shaking her head into her sheets with grumbling protests. “No I didn’t. I absolutely did not.”

Sakura breathed in, the scents of her sheets and her own strawberry shampoo filling her nose, the white noise of her bedroom fan relaxing her as she exhaled slowly. Please dream of nothing this time, Sakura pleaded her subconscious as she fell back into the clutches of sleep.

Chapter Text

The door to the office slammed behind Sakura, its hinges rattling enough that the screws became a little looser. She slumped into her chair and halted its propensity to spin with a stamping foot. Leaning back, Sakura passed a hand over her forehead and worked on easing the fourth headache that had come on that day while cursing silently at herself, at her brain.

Zero sleep. Absolutely none. Sakura had already scheduled an appointment with Shizune for later under the pretense of a normal check-up. She doubted that Orochimaru had placed any strange chakra or marks on her - she’d already checked herself thoroughly, several times - but she wanted a different medically-trained opinion, just to be sure. She mostly understood why this was happening already, and it upset her: her memories - as sharp and catalogued as ever - had become wildly overblown, overreacting from the shock of that night with Orochimaru occurring. Her subconscious seethed through every moment’s detail in the form of unending and tormenting dreams. Nightmares. Dreams? Sakura wasn’t sure what to call them. She hated them, but to her further mortification and guilt, they were mostly pleasurable to re-experience.

Sakura rubbed her eyes, wishing again that she could be at home under her bed covers rather than here at work. She had so little patience that the slightest cheeky or snarky comment from a nurse or fellow doctor made her snap. Sakura was on edge, much edgier than her colleagues were used to her being in recent months. She was not only exhausted, frustrated, and worn-out, but worried that she might walk into a patient’s room and he would be there waiting for her.

This worry took center-stage in Sakura’s head as she closed her eyes and almost finished easing her headache. It placed her image of Orochimaru in one of her familiar memories of a basic examination room… leaning against the wall, golden eyes staking Sakura through the heart as she stepped into the room and turning to stone at the sight of him. His black hair was long and loose, his white yukata pristine as usual, those long white fingers tapping along his folded arms. Meeting his luminescent eyes even just in this anxiously imagined scenario brought on flickers of that night to Sakura’s mind, like slashes through the image, fragments in both visuals and in sounds and smells.

Sakura’s nails pressed into her temples hard enough to hurt and she pushed another frustrated wave of healing chakra into her brain, seeking for the throbbing to stop already, hoping it would also purge her head of Orochimaru and her stress that he might show up. Worse, she thought, was that she had no idea what she’d say to him now, if her worry came true and she was forced to face him.

“He wouldn’t dare,” Sakura reminded herself aloud as she leaned forward in her chair, her hands falling to the desk, trying to snap out of her fatigued stupor. She forced her anxiousness away from her thoughts, making it hide in the back of her head instead. Orochimaru would have no reason to come see her. Surely, she thought, he wouldn’t be so foolish to think she would receive him well.

The hinges of Sakura’s office door made an apologetic squeal as the door was pushed open yet again, this time Shizune entering the room, and with much less violence than Sakura had done. The door closed quietly behind her, guided by the hand that wasn’t hugging a clipboard to her chest. She stopped before Sakura and eyed her sorry state knowingly. “I know you admire Lady Tsunade, but it would be best if you didn’t pick up some of her… habits.”

Sakura groaned, rubbing her temples with stronger pulses of healing chakra as her headache grew worse again. “Don’t remind me... I don’t ever want to even see alcohol again.”

“Good,” Shizune said with a smile as she passed her clipboard to Sakura, “once you’re done with that headache, you’ve three patients that are ready for you, in rooms 204, 308 and 103. Then you and I will have your checkup in 206.”

“All on different floors? You hate me, Shizune-san.” Sakura sat up, groggily regarding the clipboard. “Also, you assume wrong. I feel like hell because I didn’t get any sleep. Not from drinking.”

Shizune scrutinized Sakura, folding her arms. “Bad dreams?”

“You have no idea.” Sakura got to her feet begrudgingly. “See you later.” She ignored the way Shizune made a not-so-subtle sweeping glance over Sakura, checking for signs of a drunken night out as she passed her. Sakura shoved open her office door and heard a hinge pop as she left, her shadowed, exhausted eyes set in the direction of the first room on her list.

Sakura didn’t have the slightest idea how she had made it through one shift, let alone the next four. All proceeded in the same way: little to no sleep from her subconscious torturing her with her dreams, an eight to sometimes fourteen-hour shift where she pushed herself to her limits to make sure she still correctly and accurately did her job, and then dragging herself home afterward, feeling like a nearly inanimate shell of walking fatigue.

This time, she was going to get some melatonin supplements, or whatever the strongest thing the corner shop had for sleep aids. She couldn’t take this cycle anymore. She thought she might be going insane from the lack of sleep, and she would worry it was from foreign chakra if it weren’t for the checkup exam she’d had with Shizune, who had declared her healthy other than obvious signs of fatigue and exhaustion. She had offered Sakura some pain medicine for her headaches, but she knew they were brought on by her lack of sleep, and she didn’t want what the hospital offered for that - it was too strong. She was too likely to sleep through her alarm while under its effects and miss a shift or two.

Sakura shoved open the drugstore door. It squealed in protest much like the way her office door did; several customer heads turned in her direction where they emerged above the shop aisles. Sakura made a mental note to stop acting like Naruto in a temper tantrum if she didn’t want to draw too much attention. She dipped her head in embarrassment, hurrying over to the measly pharmacy section of the store.

She felt a little better when she found the section of pain medicines, cold and flu pills, and other supplements - she was alone in this part of the store. Sakura let herself relax somewhat as she found the sleep-aid shelf, perusing her options. There were straightforward melatonin pills, though their milligram concentrations of melatonin were lower than she knew would work for her; there were drinkable versions, similar to cough medicine, but they were all that horrible artificial fruit flavor that tasted nothing like any existing fruit and Sakura winced just thinking of it. There were also several types of melatonin gummies with a textured coating. She knew that these, too, were disgusting, but she was running out of options.

Sakura’s head shot up as her gut instincts thrummed in warning. She slowly turned her gaze to her right, her skin tingling with apprehension and anticipation. There was only a portion of the shop’s wide front window that she could see out of from the inside.

It was raining hard; the streets weren’t crowded. Clumps of people huddled along, hugging their multi-colored umbrellas closely in hopes that they would effectively shield them from the falling sheets of rain. There weren’t any fights, explosions, or other such disasters that would merit Sakura’s instincts flaring like this and she nearly dismissed them before her eyes caught upon the one figure who walked alone.

The individual was a study of contrasts against the hurried and hunched crowds that moved in waves around him. His stride was calm, straight-backed, the walk of someone entirely unconcerned by the onslaught of the summer downpour. The little of him that was visible revealed dark flowing pants and a white yukata, the tilt of the slick umbrella that a white hand held in a relaxed, casual way hiding the rest of him - but Sakura did not need to see any more to know exactly who he was.

Sakura let out a sound like she’d been punched in the stomach as she clutched the nearest bottle from the sleep-aid shelf and backed out of sight from the window, her heart thrashing without mercy within her ribcage. Sweat coated her skin in a thin sheen, dampening her qipao at the back of her collar and under her arms. Damn her pride. She could not face Orochimaru, not ever again. Her memories of the intimacy they had shared were too permanently burned into her mind, and the incidents from that night would certainly come up the next time they spoke. This was among the reasons that Sakura had determined that she would avoid him for the rest of time - and avoid him she would, as soon as she bought this precious sleep-aid.

She prayed silently to whatever gods there were that Orochimaru had no desire to enter this thoroughly unremarkable drug store as she crept past the other aisles, making her way toward the counter. This place was nothing of note on its own, but it was closest to both the hospital and the academy, making it a common stop-in for shinobi and students alike who needed a casual headache reliever, bandages, or a cheap snack from the colorful window displays. She couldn’t imagine that someone as inexplicably well-off and elegant as Orochimaru would ever step foot in a humble place like this.

Sakura stumbled ungracefully back against a rack of magazines as she heard the ding of the drugstore bell ringing to signify someone entering the shop. With a vivid curse under her breath she grabbed the nearest magazine and opened it, shoving her nose into its pages and hiding her face as she backed into a corner that was blessedly halfway to the checkout counter. Why did he come in here? Did he sense my chakra and is seeking me out? Kami, what would I ever say to him? I’d tell him to go to hell. Right?

Sakura had to admit to herself that it was a little hard to imagine looking someone like Orochimaru in the eye and telling him to go to hell. However, this didn’t stop her from trying, maintaining the image in her head determinedly as she started making her way toward the checkout counter. Hope throbbed in her veins, hope that she might escape encountering him.

Sakura found herself stabbed in the back by a prodding finger and an ear-numbing screech – “SAKURA!” – and the magazine she had been hiding within went flying out of her hands with her sleep-aid, clattering to the dingy floor.

Sakura rubbed her back and turned around, another headache coming on as Ino began her tirade, hands on her hips. “Sakura, I’ve been looking for you everywhere, and you haven’t been answering your phone. I’m going to kick you into next week if you don’t come with me right the hell now and talk to me! What the hell, I thought we were friends?! Have you totally forgotten me?!”

Sakura let out a groan of relief that it was Ino who had come to seize her attention. She bent and picked up the magazine and her box of sleep-aids; she then paused, eyes narrowing at the sleep aid; she had accidentally grabbed a bottle of melatonin gummies shaped like animals, for kids.

Ino beside her peered in, slim eyebrows raising as she regarded the magazine in Sakura’s other hand. “Woah. Since when did you get into that kind of stuff? That’s even worse than what Kakashi-sensei reads…”

Sakura noticed its borderline pornographic cover and yipped like a puppy, shoving it into the nearest rack while trying to purge the images of nearly-nude models posing all over its cover from her mind. Kami knows I don’t need any more nightmare fuel, she thought, cheeks reddening; then she groaned as Ino followed her to the counter, still talking. “...were you inspired to start reading such stuff by a certain someone?”

Ino laughed as Sakura moodily ignored Ino’s crude insinuation, slapping the children’s sleep-aids on the counter, too tired to bother grabbing the right thing; Ino then paused in her chortling, making a face. “I’m gonna take by your lack of denial that I am, as usual, totally right. In which case, that’s gross, Sakura. And I’m not even gonna ask about why you’re buying ‘Ni-Ni Nighttime Sleep Vitamins’. Why have you been avoiding me? And why do you look like hell?”

“That’ll be twenty-eight ryo,” the flat-toned, tired-looking cashier said as Sakura flinched at the price, pouting to herself as she pulled out her wallet. Twenty-eight? When did sleep-aids skyrocket in price? These had better work…

She reluctantly shelled it out onto the counter before taking her expensive cure to her dreams and fleeing the shop, trying to shake off Ino and her pestering all the while. Sakura made a turn to the left toward home while Ino gripped her arm and tugged her to the right, a fierce glint in her icy-blue eyes. “We are going to have a talk,” she seethed, and Sakura sagged back from Ino’s grip with a whine, “Now?”

“Yes, now, since you deigned to ignore me this long,” Ino hissed, dragging Sakura by the arm down the street. She pulled out her umbrella, expanding it above her own head, making sure it tipped far enough to the side that it prevented rain from soaking herself but not Sakura.

Already dripping wet with rain, Sakura grumbled, eyeing Ino and shooting out a hand to grapple the umbrella into the space between them so they’d both be dry. Ino wrenched it back, a devilish gleam in her eye, and Sakura gave it up, too tired to try and fight her on such petty grounds. Thoroughly soaked and grouchy, giving up on her brief goal to not look like a drenched alley cat, Sakura turned her attention to the side of the road before them before looking around apprehensively. Orochimaru was nowhere in sight now, having long since passed by the drugstore, but Sakura didn’t like that Ino was taking her in the same general direction that she had seen him go.

“Not a bar, then,” Sakura tried to negotiate. She shook her arm free and walked beside Ino with a hand on her forehead, easing her newest headache. “I really don’t want any more sake for the next century at least.”

Ino giggled. “Who says you’re free of it? Lady Tsunade seems to have also taught you her bad luck in betting. Maybe next time you’re drunk you’ll do something even crazier, like…”

She tilted her head of long blonde hair before eyeing Sakura. “Honestly, Forehead… I can’t think of anything crazier than what you already did. Or should I say who you did.” Ino shot Sakura an impish grin, elbowing her in the side, and Sakura batted at Ino’s shoulder with an indignant hiss. “Damn it, Ino-pig, I swear I’ll kill you! Shut up, someone could hear!” Sakura glanced around nervously and Ino shook her head as she dragged Sakura around the next street corner and then through the hanging flaps of Ichiraku.

Sakura blinked at the homey establishment. It was a place she had been visiting on and off her entire life, and she felt a tangible relief as she sank into one of the stools. She was still annoyed at Ino for preventing her from going home and hiding from the world in attempted sleep, but she was also grateful to her for bringing her to a place she had rather forgotten she loved.

Sakura lifted a hand, her bright smile catching the shop owner’s attention. “Good afternoon, Teuchi-san! Pork belly ramen, please,” she called, and Teuchi waved back with a smile. “Ah, Sakura-chan! And Ino-chan! So good to see you both. One pork-belly ramen, coming right up!”

Sakura sunk into her arms on the counter with a sigh, then, feeling her stomach twist with hunger. She’d started liking the ramen that Naruto always ordered. She had tried it one day, and then could never go back to her old preferences - the way it was made here was divine.

Ino patted her on the shoulder, her other hand hiding her smirk. “You really do look like a drowned rat.”

“Thanks,” Sakura grumbled. She eyed the sake that Ino had sneakily already ordered for them both mistrustfully and a little queasily, sitting back from it with a turn about her lips and narrowed eyes. “Nice try,” she scolded Ino, shoving the small cup of sake away and toward Ino, “that’s all yours. Now… what are you being so annoying about, exactly?”

Ino finished relaying her own ramen order to Teuchi before turning back to Sakura with that grin, looking like a tigress about to pounce on her prey.

Sakura bit her lip. She knew damn well what this was about.

“Now that you’re done avoiding me,” Ino needled, leaning in and not-so-subtly pushing Sakura’s sake cup back toward her along the bar, “you are going to tell me what the hell happened, in detail, other than the obvious gross stuff I don’t need to know. What – the hell – led to you, taking home Orochimar—”

“—Don’t say his name,” Sakura hissed, her tired eyes flicking insecurely around Ichiraku. The bar part of the stand was bigger than it had been in years past - due to the extra popularity Naruto had brought, it had expanded, including several screen-separated booths to the sides and a longer bar with more stools. There were several groups and individuals seated but no one Sakura could see that she recognized.

This now known, Sakura returned her weary gaze to Ino. “I mean it. No saying his name. Everyone knows who he is, and besides that, it’s not even supposed to be public knowledge that he just walks and generally exists around Konoha freely when he wants.”

“Walks, exists, seduces, whatever,” Ino grinned, and Sakura flushed. “He did not seduce me.”

“Says the one who took him home?”

“It was the other way around,” Sakura corrected, then flushed harder, looking away; Ino gave a tinkling laugh before both of their attentions were temporarily distracted by the bowls of ramen set before them. Sakura eagerly tucked in, feeling hungrier than she’d expected; the bowl was empty and her mood much improved by the time she remembered she was in the middle of enduring this conversation with Ino.

“So like what, to his lab? …Gross, did he do experiments on you?”

Sakura gasped, nearly choking on the broth she was drinking from her bowl; Ino giggled again as Sakura shakily set the bowl down, glowering over at her. “No.” She swallowed the salty, savory broth and sat back in her stool, feeling a little more alive than she’d felt before eating, and drew up whatever resilience she had left so she could get this conversation quickly over with. “Look, Ino-pig, I was drunk. I made a move on him, because, I don’t know. I don’t remember everything perfectly. I just – he was – hm…” Sakura’s blush was fast returning, and she rubbed her ears that were getting hot as Ino looked on with mixed delight and horror at her explanation. “He has great hair,” she remembered, the silky feel of it brushing through her thoughts. Sakura found herself smiling wryly back at Ino, resting her cheek on her fist. “I may have drunkenly demanded that he tell me what he does to make it so nice.”

With a snort, Ino rolled her eyes. “You’re terrible with men, Forehead.”

“He never did tell me,” Sakura whined, leaning into her fist and fighting off another wave of sleepiness mixed with embarrassment. Though the warmth of that brief glow of amusement at her remembered antics was a pleasant surprise, she was clamming up again - recalling anything from that night was enough mortification for Sakura to endure. She just wanted to go home and devour her expensive animal-shaped melatonin gummies and sleep for the first time in over half a week. The last thing she wanted to do was to encourage her subconscious to take hold of more moments to torment her with.

Ino wasn’t having any of Sakura’s sudden quiet, sipping her cup of sake and leaning back in with bright eyes. “So? What next? Did he laugh at that stupid question until you got mad and tackled him, or something? Or did he use some sick jutsu on you to get you thinking about things decidedly more southern-bound than just his hair?” Her teasing grin widened at the flush spreading across Sakura’s cheeks.

Sakura huffed through her nose, more annoyed at the red in her cheeks than at Ino for her questions. “No, he didn’t, Ino-pig. You should know too that Shizune already cleared me… I’m totally clean of foreign jutsus or marks or whatnot. And by the way, none of that would have happened if you hadn’t have run off with Sai again, leaving drunk-idiot me behind.”

"Shut up, Forehead.” Ino was the one to blush this time, a light dusting of pink Sakura somewhat jealously thought was much prettier than her own blotchy reddening of her cheeks. Sakura spotted guilt in Ino’s expression and she rolled her eyes as she offered her a small smile. “I’m not mad at you for it, nor do I really blame you. I kind of expected you to run off as soon as I saw that Sai was there too. And it’s okay, because I still had a good —” She stopped herself, more red staining her face, and rephrased. “I still ended up – fine.”

Ino’s grin returned and she leaned in with a churlish expression. “Go on, Sakura-chan, tell me more about the good time you had with Orochi —” She halted herself before Sakura had a chance to, tilting her head thoughtfully with a hand tapping across her lips. “We need a codename for him. Let’s see. Gross Sannin is too obvious… just ‘snake’ too vague… How about—”

“No, we absolutely do not need a codename, Ino-pig! He will not be a topic of discussion after this!” Sakura’s fists clenched and unclenched. “How many questions are you going to put me through before you’ll leave me alone about it, anyway? I just want to go to bed.”

“Lacking on sleep? Up late thinking about him?” Ino snorted at the idea, and Sakura burned bright red with anger and humiliation at the fact that Ino was unfortunately right on both accounts. She grumbled under her breath, rubbing at her hot cheeks, not bothering to deny it. Ino shot her a shocked look as she noticed this, her hand pausing mid-air amidst pouring herself another small measure of sake. “Wait. Really?”

Giving in just a little, Sakura slammed back what was in her own sake cup. “I was drunk. Alone. Feeling like — like I have for a while now. And, he was — interesting, I don’t know. …I was drunk.” Sakura waved away Ino’s offer of more sake, already regretting the small taste she’d had just now; it was bringing back more memories she wanted nothing more than to obliterate if she could. She couldn’t stop more words from tumbling from her mouth and couldn’t look as Ino as she spoke. “You’d think it’s funny, he actually rejected me at first. Drunk me wouldn’t have any of that,” Sakura huffed shakily and pulled her arms back in from where her hands had been gesturing aimlessly. “I insisted. He changed his mind and decided to entertain my — interest. I don’t know. It was so, stupid, so, risky. It was all… he was…” Hints of the dreams she’d had smoldered at the tail-end of her words, and Sakura swallowed the traces of sake in her mouth, running her gloved hands over her temples again. “I’ve been unable to get a single bit of sleep since then.”

Ino’s impish look of delight at this sloppy new gossip intensified, and Sakura let out a defeated sigh as she shoved her empty cup aside, wanting this to be over with. “Laugh if you want. I have to admit I don’t know if I regret it, Ino. That night was – damn good enough to make me unable to sleep, like my brain is forcing me to relive it, maybe because it was good, or maybe because of how much I can’t believe it’s even real. I’ve — never had a night like that before.”

Ino sat back, folding her arms, sensing that Sakura had more to say. She chose this time not to press, holding back her amusement, waiting for Sakura to let the rest of it out as she stared hauntedly into her empty cup. “I hate it. I should never have had your stupid sake. He is so far from who I would have ever wanted or expected to end up having a one-night-stand with.” Sakura drew in a breath, feeling an unexpected squeeze of pain in her chest as she went on. “I don’t want this, Ino. I don’t think it could happen in any universe, but I don’t want to ever have another experience like I did before, with… you know. I won’t survive it. Not again.”

“Sakura.” Ino’s expression had sobered, sympathy crossing her features; she set a hand on Sakura’s shoulder. She understood that Sakura was referring to what she’d gone through over Sasuke.

Sakura straightened her back, a spark returning to her eyes that had temporarily dulled with old sadness as she turned to face Ino. “I am going to avoid him for the rest of my life. Maybe then I can sleep and live normally again. For kami’s sake, Ino, I had to buy melatonin sleeping-aids because the stupid dreams won’t stop.” She shook her head. “I think maybe I’m still processing just how mortified I am at how stupid I was.”

“Not everyone is like Sasuke, you know. The majority of people would not treat you so poorly. You shouldn’t be so afraid to be with someone else just because of what a bastard he was to you.” Ino shook her head and then paused, making a disgusted face. “Though nobody is like him. Kami knows what that hell would be like, actually trying to date Orochimaru–”

“Ino! I told you not to say his name aloud! Do I need to punch that into your thick skull?! If someone hears —”

“—and anyway, it’s not like that’s something you have to worry about in this situation. You’re right, you’re being stupid. Stop fretting over nothing, Forehead.”

Sakura felt herself relax slightly. Though she was annoyed to no end by Ino’s interrogation and still upset with herself for spilling so much of her feelings in a wordy verbal vomit, Ino’s blunt assurances still brought her a sense of comfort, easing the unexpected twists of pain in her chest.

Letting out a defeated sigh, her eyes on the ceiling, Sakura conceded this one to Ino. “Fine. You’re rude, and you’re obnoxious, and you’re also a pig, but this time, you’re also right.”

Ino rolled her eyes. “Of course I’m right.” She eyed Sakura with suspicious, narrowed eyes, one finger prodding her in the chest as she slid a small stack of Ryo across the counter next to their empty bowls. “You’re going to stop avoiding me now that I’ve caught you, right? And I’m not going to let you snuff out what little social life you have by avoiding bars forever.”

Sakura glowered at Ino. “I can do what I want. That includes ignoring you and avoiding your dangerous sake.”

“It’s not dangerous! In fact, I remember you saying that you actually liked it. You helped me polish off over half that jug I had, Sakura. Don’t you pretend you didn’t enjoy that night for more than just the company you ended up with.” Ino shot Sakura a teasing wink and Sakura shook her head. “It tasted so bitter, and it was way too strong. What was in it, anyway? I don’t remember you saying.”

“It might have something to do with caffeine. Who’s to say? I’m not giving away the family recipe.”

“Ah, that explains a little,” Sakura acknowledged, then thought about it. “I’m dead on my feet this week. If you promise we’ll not go anywhere, or see anyone else, maybe I’d try it again. Maybe. If these stupid children’s sleep-aids don’t work…”

Ino leaned on her elbow, eyeing Sakura with a teasing smile. “Admit it, Sakura, you want to drink my sake again just so you’ll have the extra idiocy and guts to go relive your ‘damn good’ time. I mean, you probably just liked the risks of possibly pissing him off. Shinobi addiction to the thrills of danger and all of that.”

Sakura flushed harder, looking away. “I’m not like that at all.”

Ino scoffed. “Are you kidding? How long were you chasing after the most dangerous rogue nin of the village?”

“Not for the danger,” Sakura hissed, and Ino giggled. “You didn’t deny it, about enjoying the thrills…”

“No, maybe, I don’t know.” It felt like Sakura’s entire upper half was burning at this point from how deep her blush had gotten. Ino jabbed Sakura in the side with victorious glee. “I knew it! I’m always right! Aren’t I? Look at you, you’re like a tomato.” She giggled as Sakura rubbed her crimson features with a pout, and Ino’s expression fell into seriousness, silently pushing away Sakura’s sneaking hand that had been trying to add some ryo to the stack meant to contribute to the payment for their food. “What’s your plan with him, now, anyway? Don’t tell me you’re actually going to try to seek him out, even if just to punch him senseless? What would you even say? And you know he’s still considered a criminal. He would definitely stuff you in a giant test-tube and crack open your skull or something to see why you’re so insane.”

“Oh, shut up, idiot.” Sakura laughed, too tired to get mad about Ino’s jabs at her now. “Don’t worry, I’ve no intention of drinking any more of your sake or seeking him out. Actually, I’m going to make sure that I never have to figure out what I’d say to him if we met again, because I am going to make sure that I never, ever see —”

Sakura grew very still as her eyes fell upon the back of one of the Ichiraku patron’s heads where they were seated at the other end of the bar. She hadn’t spotted them before because of the other patrons sitting next to Ino, blocking her view - but now they had gotten up and left. The low golden-white lights of the ramen bar gleamed on the silky black of the patron’s hair that had fallen forward, obscuring his face. Sakura’s gaze slid down the angle of his jaw, to the unique curved earring that hung in a gleaming slash under his pale ear, to the dark blue open shirt collar that exposed his pale neck, and then back to his obscured face.

All of the color drained from Sakura’s face. Ino prodded her, slim brows stitching together. “What’s gotten into you?”

Sakura’s gaze touched past the black-haired patron to his company. She knew it was henge that made him look like a normal human again, but she knew that purple robe and silver hair and the hint of round glasses under silver bangs and dear kami had she said all of that in earshot of both Orochimaru and Kabuto?

Ino followed Sakura’s horrified gaze and squeaked at the sight of their unexpected company at the other end of the bar. Both of their heads turned; Sakura’s heart stopped in her chest as she met Orochimaru’s iridescent golden eyes, which widened slightly at the touch of her astonished stare.

“Shit,” Sakura hissed, and vaulted herself from her stool, causing it to wobble and fall over – she didn’t hesitate to run, run as hard as her legs would allow her to, run to whatever was furthest away from the disaster she had just taken part of, Ino looking with a flabbergasted expression between Sakura’s retreating figure and the very subject of their conversation.

Sakura dashed up and over the rooftops of Konoha, letting her legs carry her at their highest speed, her experienced feet still finding traction on the rain-slicked roof tiles. Her singular focus was escaping, though she could not sense anyone or anything chasing her.

She leapt over a fence, landing on the forest floor just outside the city’s exterior border. She stood for a moment, her chest heaving lightly before she kicked off into the trees. The cool air flickered in her hair and relieved the heat from her skin as she ran.

Sakura’s desperate run became a jog, and as she wound through the trees for a long stretch of forest-scape and dipped into a gully, she began to feel as though she might be safe to slow down and stop. Something about the darkness, quiet, and peace of the Land of Fire’s woods in nightfall was inherently magical to her, maintaining an aura of calm and mystery that was both unnerving and soothing at once.

She slowed her steps, taking in the sights around her with silent appreciation. Forgotten rainwater from the passed storm rested in a jagged pool at the heart of the deep gully she was approaching; fallen trees and overgrown brambles cluttered the borders around it, giving it a hidden feel. Delicate lavender flowers hanging from tangled vines bloomed in cascading patterns, their velvet petals trailing across the water, refracting the starlight. Silvery glimmers from the water danced through the rippling blades of grass and across Sakura’s skin as she settled on her knees by the water.

She felt the cool breath of the forest sigh through her hair and murmur into the pool, bringing scents of the mid-summer blooms and the heady smells of vivacious greenery all around her. She could taste the hint of wild mint in the air, and she savored the feel of the cool damp earth beneath her weight. For a long moment, Sakura listened to the quiet symphony of sensation that the forest played around her, to the natural music she didn’t know she had missed listening to so much.

She opened her eyes, not realizing she had closed them; she leaned forward, her troubles returning to the forefront of her mind.

Sakura had escaped, this time, but she had not left behind her renewed mortification. She had said all of her truths in direct earshot of not one, but two people she had intended to fully forget. Though she hadn’t had to interact with Kabuto in a long time, she still resented and disliked him for who he was before the end of the war, and she wanted nothing to do with him. Orochimaru was at least relevant to her embarrassment, but to have someone like Kabuto overhear Sakura and know what had happened between them was even worse. Embarrassed, even mortified, were too weak of words to describe how she felt about it. It was egregious enough in her mind that she’d been honest about everything with Ino.

Sakura bowed her head, the tips of her hair trailing along the surface of the calm pool of moonlit water. She watched them grow a dark magenta hue as the cold water dampened the strands, glistening. She found her thoughts drifting back to the words she’d spoken, to the way her chest had constricted with pain unexpectedly through her admittances. She didn’t need to question it; she knew she had spoken the truth just from how much parts of it had hurt to speak aloud.

Sakura reached up and tucked her slightly damp bangs behind her ears, resting her head on her other hand as she stirred a finger in the cold water. She watched the way the water rippled and gleamed, swirling the image of the moon. You probably just liked the risks of possibly pissing him off. Shinobi addiction to the thrills of danger and all of that. Ino’s words echoed in her mind, and Sakura wished she could shed them into the deep waters of the gully.

Sakura huffed out a shaky breath as she flicked the water from her fingers and pushed back, stretching out in the slight curve of the gully’s tall grass, her tired eyes floating up to watch the bright silver moon through the criss-crossing of countless leaves in the forest canopy high above. Its beauty did little to soothe the way her troubled thoughts pooled in her head and trickled down her throat. I don’t miss taking risks. I fought in a war to achieve peace. I should be nothing but grateful to be alive, living without the necessity of risking my life in A-rank missions and hazardous battles.

Sakura was rather bored, she knew. That part, if nothing else, rang true. She was not the only Leaf shinobi to feel a conflict between gratefulness for peace and the desire to taste a good battle again. It was what they were trained and honed to do - to risk their lives to protect both ideals and people, their villages and their homes, not to sink into a complacent life of office work and watching sunsets.

The winds sighed above Sakura as they pushed through the trees, a slight redirection of the breeze; distant birds quietened, the forest growing a little darker. The gully was as peaceful and silent as it had been before, though the night felt somehow sharper.

Sakura lifted her hands and pressed her palms into her weary eyes, feeling her perceptive instincts singing under her skin, her adrenaline already beginning to spike. She willed herself to face what she knew awaited her.

You are no coward. The thought pried her fingers from her face, and she turned her face in the grass and weeds with a long, slow exhale.

Her gaze climbed up the tall blades of grass to lock on to the gilded eye that glowed like the moon in the dark above her.

After a pause, Sakura turned her head away again, her hands falling to her sides where she laid in the grass. “You have a way of showing up just when you shouldn’t.”

She heard Orochimaru hm quietly before glancing up at the moonlit forest canopy. Sakura’s attention dragged back to him, catching on his moonlit form as he bent and reclined in the grass beside her. The pale silver of the distant light dripped down his long black hair like the gloss of fresh ink, and the sliver Sakura could see of his face was paler still, his skin subtly hale in the low light.

When Orochimaru’s luminescent eye fell back upon Sakura, she looked away again, her brows tightly drawn together and a frown settled on her lips. She refused to let him see that she had been staring.

“Tell me… how is that, Sakura-chan?”

Sakura sat up on her elbows, resisting the urge to hide her face in her hands. She shot an almost beseeching look at the glittering pool in the gully like it might return to her the sense of peace she’d so briefly gained. She took in a quiet breath through her nose and quickly exhaled when she caught the subtle hint of Orochimaru’s scents from beside her. With a grumble, she turned her head to look at him once more, narrowing her gaze mistrustfully. “I’m supposed to be avoiding you for the rest of my life.”

Orochimaru blinked at Sakura without comment, his expression calm and otherwise unreadable. Sakura’s resolution wasn’t something that the two of them had mutually agreed upon.

Sakura felt a stab of renewed annoyance. Neither of them had made mutual verbal arrangements or agreements and she thought that it was best that way, assuming he thought the same thing. Surely he didn’t want her not to avoid him forever. Or was that what he was telling her in how he had tracked her here? That couldn’t be true either, she knew. If Orochimaru had a lingering interest in her, she was positive it must be for some kind of self-beneficial manipulation, or a scientific curiosity like the one Ino had joked about. It was just who Sakura knew him to be.

Sakura shook her head of her overthinking with a huff. Her damp bangs escaped from where they had been tucked behind her ears, falling over her pink-tinged cheeks. She wanted this situation that she’d tried her best to avoid to be over with already, and her hands curled into fists as she got to her feet, stepping back and giving Orochimaru her best blade-sharp glare. “Why are you here? I came here to be alone.”

Orochimaru rose, serene expression untainted by Sakura’s hostility. She was reminded how he was taller than her by almost a full head, and his shadow crossed over her in the darkness - her heart kicked up a pace like he’d prodded it with a hot iron, but Sakura stood her ground, refusing to be intimidated.

“So hostile now when last time you were so… hospitable,” he teased with a slight curl about his lips, “but my answer to your question depends on you.”

Sakura’s breath hitched and she clamped down it, her nails pricking her palms from how tightly she held her fists. Her face burned red as at his cryptic response. “What’s that supposed to mean? You already — you heard all that I blathered, back at Ichiraku’s. There’s nothing for us to talk about.”

Sakura’s face flushed when Orochimaru’s velvety chuckle confirmed her fears that he had, indeed, overheard everything she had said to Ino at the ramen stand. She clapped her hands over her face in mortification. “Damn my bad luck…”

She peeked at him between her fingers and saw the genuine amusement in his expression. With a curse, she regripped her fists, settling into a stance like she was about to throw her fists into Orochimaru’s smug face. “I’ve had enough of being laughed at. I’m not your entertainment. Leave me alone, or I’ll smash your face in.” Her veins throbbed with hot adrenaline, her body full of angry energy like she was stimulated by an absurd caffeine high. She was more than ready to vent her embarrassment by taking it out on Orochimaru in a fight.

“For someone with such bad luck, Sakura-chan, you like to gamble. Perhaps even more than Tsunade.” Orochimaru leaned in, gilded eyes flashing, and Sakura felt a thrill shoot like a burn down her chest at his proximity. She lifted a fist, reaching out and gripping his shirt collar with a low growl. “Who says it’s me taking risks? How do you know I’m not the one with bad luck?”

Orochimaru raised his slender eyebrows, and Sakura felt red in the ears before backing up her words with both of her hands fisting in his yukata, pulling him ever closer with a hiss between her gritted teeth. “You did something to me. Something just isn’t right and you are to blame.”

Sakura’s eyes flicked to Orochimaru’s responding smirk, his silky low tone making her shiver involuntarily. “Yes, we did many things, Sakura-chan. You’re going to need to be more specific if you are seeking answers in that regard.”

She flushed red and pushed him from her with a shove, her rage rekindling. “Bastard,” she spat, and she leapt at him, her blood pulsing under her skin and rushing in her ears.

Orochimaru dodged Sakura with ease. He dodged her next several punches as well, black hair swishing through the darkness as he moved with a fluid grace. Sakura didn’t hesitate, thundering towards him, determined to vent her rage with her fists. Orochimaru spun backwards, Sakura’s fists and well-aimed kicks hitting nothing but air once more. This dance of dodging drew out from the gully and into the forest, Orochimaru weaving and ducking and spiralling through the branches and trunks in a blur of movement, Sakura on the attack with the same speed and finesse.

She flipped toward him with a ferocious kick and a follow-up punch aimed in the direction she thought he’d dodge to; she hit the trunk of a tree instead, her impact of her hit causing the bark to ripple and then the entire tree to implode, bits of wood and leaves shooting out into the darkness. Orochimaru dove under Sakura as she aimed another in his direction; she surged toward him again, further enraged by her glimpses of his still-smug expression. She knew he wasn’t really trying, and her rage reached new searing heights - she let out a growl, her speed kicking up another pace as she saw an opportunity to snag Orochimaru when he dodged her double-kick. She dropped her weight, crunching her fist into where she knew him to be, and her fist sunk into leaf-covered earth instead, the slight brush of her scrabbling fingers against his clothes already gone as she thunked clumsily into the ground.

She flipped to her feet and spun toward where Orochimaru observed her from nearby.

With a roar, Sakura lifted her arm and aimed her punch downward once more, her fist slamming into the ground beneath his feet. Orochimaru leapt high into the air as the entire expanse of forest around them groaned and then buckled into a deep crater, exploding upwards, trees and massive chunks of earth flying in every direction. Sakura shot toward him in a streak, sharp eyes seeking him out, hurling herself toward where he’d landed with catlike grace upon some of the intact forest branches high above. He sidestepped her, as she had expected; she aimed her forceful grip to break the branch he perched upon. When he inevitably had to leap away, Sakura managed to ensnare his arm in her grip. She dragged him with her as they hurtled through the humid night air toward the bottom of the massive crater she had punched into the earth.

Orochimaru’s slim form beneath Sakura’s took most of the impact of their combined fall, their limbs tangling together in the violent rebound from their bodies heavily hitting the loose and shattered earth. Sakura immediately pinned him down beneath her, breathing hard, her knees clenching around his sides where her weight kept him against the ground and her hands gripping his arms tightly against the curve of the crater beside their heads. She was breathing hard, Orochimaru’s own ragged breaths hot against her face where she was suspended above him, her victory in capturing him surging through her in a waves of adrenaline that she’d forgotten felt so good.

Sakura blinked down at Orochimaru where he was pinned beneath her. She could feel from her grip on one of his arms that she had broken the bone and likely more in other places as well. His midnight hair was a wild black cascade across the ground, and there was blood smeared across his face. She registered that his breathing had a slightly harsh edge as it slowed. Sakura drew back, concern piercing through her quickly-clearing fog of joy at her small victory.

Any tinge of worry Sakura felt dissipated at the smirk on Orochimaru’s pale lips. His golden eyes that glittered at her in the darkness did not seem pained or distressed in the least - was that her own afterglow from a victorious fight reflected in his expression? Sakura’s thoughts pulsed in confused circles. Why did he seem smug, like he was the one who had her on the ropes?

Orochimaru’s gaze flicked from Sakura’s conflicted face, down to where she pinned him to the earth, and then back to her reddening expression.

A deep bloom of heat unfolded within her chest as she realized how compromising the way she had him against the ground beneath her was. Most of her body was aligned along his, her knees tight around his waist, her hands gripping his arms. Her heart was pounding harder now than during their spar; she could feel nearly every contour of his body, the body that her subconscious echoed to her soft reminders that she had already explored once. Memories of how they had tangled like this in different and more thorough ways insinuated themselves into Sakura’s thoughts, staining her cheeks crimson - red flags she knew Orochimaru could read.

Above them, the earlier rains made their return, misting over the crater they were at the heart of. The scents of petrichor and the cool hush of a coming storm sighed around them. In the jagged border of the large bowl of the crater, broken trees groaned and creaked, branches snapping and falling with the added pressure of the taunting breeze. As the raindrops began to grow more insistent, streams of water trickled down into the weeping wounds of the earth, beginning to dampen the ground beneath Orochimaru and cause Sakura’s knees at his sides to slip in the softening dirt.

“Damn it,” Sakura cursed, breaking eye contact with Orochimaru to glare around the crater like the destruction and rain were why they were tangled where they were now. She kept her eyes on the rain as it began to fall harder, unable to meet his knowing gaze, one of her hands sliding down his arm. She closed her eyes briefly, healing the bone she had broken, her other hand sliding down his side to heal a rib she had cracked.

“I went a little far,” Sakura found herself admitting, her opening eyes trailing slowly back to Orochimaru’s face; he was watching her calmly, making no move to shake her off. She caught the glint in his eyes that glowed in the dark around them, seemingly even brighter now that the moon was obscured by heavy obsidian clouds. Sakura tensed in reaction, her knees squeezing around Orochimaru’s sides where she had him pinned down; she saw the slight upturn of his lips, the smugness he expressed only deepening.

With a frustrated and exhausted groan, Sakura dipped her head and hid her face against his neck. Her hands slid away from his healed side and arm, now unsure, resting around his shoulders; her body began to fall, the tiny distance between their bodies disappearing as she no longer bothered to make sure his limbs were immobilized. The dance of fighting they’d shifted into had evolved into a new one, and Sakura was too thoroughly worn out to think it through as she sank into the damp warmth of his body beneath hers, giving slightly in to what her limbs seemed to demand of her.

Panicking internally at her lapse in hostility, Sakura tried to make her equivalent of small talk, her lips moving against the warm, rain-slick skin along the side of Orochimaru’s throat where she hid her face. “...Did I break anything else?”

“Hmm, if you’re genuinely wanting to know, yes.” One of his hands lifted and traced along Sakura’s side. The cool pad of his thumb brushed across the sensitive skin of the ribs on her left side, sending tingling rashes of sensation across her body. She shuddered against Orochimaru, wanting to protest, but the words catching in her throat; it took her a moment to realize this just was him showing her where else she’d broken his bones during their fight.

“You weren’t really trying, when we fought,” Sakura commented shakily, one of her arms sliding down Orochimaru’s chest and quickly untying his rope-belt; Sakura’s cheeks blazed red and she was glad he couldn’t see her face. She tugged open his rain-damp yukata and slid a hand under his shirt, seeking his broken ribs. She got quickly to work on resetting and healing the two that were snapped and bruising through his pale skin, her thoughts racing and her heart almost painful with its breakneck speed in her chest.

“Neither were you.” Sakura huffed into his rain-slick neck at his response, trying to ignore how his voice vibrated against her hand on his ribs and warmed her ear where his breath clouded above her in small poufs of white.

As she threaded her mint-green chakra through Orochimaru’s skin and neatly healed away the bloody cuts where the bones had formerly been sticking out of his skin, Sakura wished she was still angry. It gave her an easy excuse to explain away her heightened pulse, her adrenaline, the tightness chasing down her throat and spiking through her chest. She was unsure why her pulse continued to gallop like a frightened mare. She wasn’t afraid of Orochimaru, nor was she upset; now that they weren’t amidst a fight, either, it worried her.

Sakura felt Orochimaru’s arms lift, his hands resting lightly along her waist where she was unintentionally shielding him from the falling rain. She breathed him in where her face was pressed into his neck, the increasingly familiar scents of his skin dragging into her mind and winding through her thoughts. She tried not to absorb each sensation and failed. She knew her sharp subconscious was memorizing the tang of his lime-eucalyptus and metallic scents, the warmth of his skin, the cool touch of his earring against the bridge of her nose. She tried instead to think about the cold rain falling down her back and hair and legs, tried to think about her soaked clothes and how she should extricate herself already with a renewed resolve to avoid Orochimaru once more. She knew she could deal with haunting dreams. She did not know if she could deal with the strange draw she was starting to realize was between the two of them.

Sakura’s hand retreated out from under Orochimaru’s loose shirt, and she forced it to lift, one green and two golden eyes watching it as she curled her fingers into a fist. She willed herself to bring it down and cause more damage, this time without intent to heal. Even as she felt the heat that had bloomed in her chest spread to her extremities and whisper desires into her thoughts, Sakura willed herself to be angry again.

Her fist fell and splayed across Orochimaru’s shoulder, curling around the back of his neck. Sakura gave a shuddering sigh and pressed her face deeper into his skin, her shoulders tensing, her legs tangling with his as her knees unbent and the rain fell harder, drenching them both.

“I can’t,” she whispered into his skin, rain sliding down her cheeks like tears. “I can’t want — this. You.”

He chuckled, the velvety sound reverberating within Sakura where she laid atop him, and she gripped him more tightly in an instinctive reaction.

“But you do, anyway.” Orochimaru’s sultry murmur against Sakura’s ear sent rashes of sensation down her neck and back, and Sakura shivered.

“Why did you come here?” she repeated as they rolled onto their sides, and Sakura pulled back enough to search Orochimaru’s face, what for exactly she didn’t know. She gave no thought now to the water pooling around them in the dipping crater, the dirt and the rain that streaked their clothes and faces - he had become the single thing in her tunnelling vision, where she was determined to figure out how to either shove him from her view or decipher her desire to pull him into sharper focus.

She read a kind of patience in his eyes, a facet of the impenetrable calm that Orochimaru always had. Sakura’s traitorous hand trailed up from his healed arm to his jaw as she watched the way the light flickered in the depths of his iridescent golden irises, a fascination not unlike the one she’d felt back in the bar almost a week ago resurfacing in her thoughts. His features twitched, an echo of remembrance of that past moment in his complex stare that narrowed upon Sakura; she swallowed, the thrill in her chest resounding like strings played by an experienced hand.

“Have you changed?” Sakura whispered, a strange need to know this rising from within her core. She had to know this truth, regardless of whether or not he would not give her any of the others.

This question caused Orochimaru’s strange irises to widen before contracting into slits. “Does that matter to you?”

“It does.” Sakura’s troubled features were set in stone, and she let her hand fall from his jaw; she didn’t know why she’d allowed it to stray there in the first place. She tried to regain her senses, pulling back from Orochimaru’s form, extricating their limbs. What am I doing? She lifted a hand to her chest, feeling her rapid heartbeat and sending a concerned thread of chakra to check on why it was still so frantic.

“Hmm.” Orochimaru adjusted himself so he was sitting back in the rain-soaked earth and rocks, looking over at Sakura thoughtfully. His dark hair clung to his face in straight, glistening rivulets; he regarded her a moment before looking away, his sharp stare trailing along the destroyed landscape that surrounded them. “Yes, I suppose one could say that I have, at least in some respects. I am still here, after all.” He lifted his head, Sakura’s gaze lingering on the way that he did not blink away the rain that fell down his features. “Why do you ask?”

Sakura’s brows drew together as she absorbed Orochimaru’s words. She didn’t know why she had asked that question. It had come out of her mouth without her thinking about it beforehand, and it wasn’t one she wanted to linger on. She also supposed she already knew the answer before asking, to a point; she’d already known about his peace contract with Konoha, something his old self would never have signed. That the rest of Team Seven, especially current Hokage Kakashi, trusted Orochimaru enough that he could wander freely — that should have been answer enough for Sakura.

She shoved the subject away from herself entirely, pushing it into her subconscious and looking away from Orochimaru’s probing stare with a frown. “I— don’t really know. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Sakura drew her hand away from her chest, her chakra and diagnosis that had been underway during their conversation coming up normal.

Normal? Sakura shot a glare at her offending hand. Her heart rate was not normal. It was like a runaway train set on fire. There had to be some overarching explanation for it, now that they weren’t fighting. It couldn’t just be his proximity; she refused to believe it.

“You never answered me earlier,” Sakura bit out, looking up back up at Orochimaru with an accusatory glare and seizing the chance to be angry again, possibly shedding the strange charge in the air between them. “I had asked you to tell me what the hell you did to me. Is it like a jutsu, or some kind of invisible, undetectable curse mark? I don’t feel — like I usually would. What did you do to me?”

“You’re coming up with excuses for what has been obvious this entire time,” Orochimaru answered, his dark brows descending at Sakura’s harsh, rude tone.

Sakura gladly clenched her hand back into a fist. “Stop with the strange answers! You’re lying to me, like you probably did before, and I’m sure you just manipulated me the whole time that night, made me want you, like the sick bastard I know you are —”

In a flash Sakura found herself pinned to the forest floor, completely immobilized, Orochimaru’s flashing golden eyes above her in a falling curtain of black hair that fell around their faces. She sunk slightly back into what had become mud beneath them beneath his weight. “You are too bold,” he hissed. “Stop pretending, making up your own lies and calling them mine. You’re starting to spin stories to cover up what you are too afraid to accept.”

“There is nothing to accept,” Sakura protested, searching his flaring golden eyes with a fierce glare, struggling where he had her arms pinned above her head in the mud, “and you do nothing but mock me, insult me, circle my questions — I just need you to undo whatever you’ve done to me!” She tried again to break free, finding no success, Orochimaru’s strong hands easily restraining her against the wet ground. Sakura’s brows knit together in a pained expression as she searched his sharp, probing stare, intense and glowing bright in the raining darkness above her. “I told you, I can’t want you,” she hissed, thrashing beneath him, “and I won’t let you think that I do, and I won’t believe that you want this, either. Not in the same way — that’s why everything has to have been some kind of lie. It’s all just —”

Orochimaru silenced Sakura with his lips on hers, harsh and sudden; Sakura pushed back, her arms breaking free and dragging through his hair, pulling him closer and deepening the kiss. She reacted to him with angry fervor, edged and almost biting in the force of her physical response to his unexpected answer.

He smiled slightly against her lips; Sakura’s fingers curled around the angle of his jaw, her thumbs sliding over his rain-soaked cheekbones, raindrops streaking down her cheeks as they broke apart, Sakura breathing hard while Orochimaru smirked down at her, leaning over her in the rain and the mud with his hands on either side of her head.

“Damn you,” Sakura protested in a harsh whisper. Her heart was set afire again, her anger melted away into its desperate beats, but she still couldn’t let herself admit that she wanted this, not to his face. Orochimaru smirked down at Sakura like he’d won this argument; she couldn’t help but feel like he had as her arms curled back up around his neck, pulling him back down for another taste. Her legs dragged up his sides, her hands slipping back up under his shirt and feeling his warm skin as he trailed a kiss along her jaw, moving to her neck. Sakura let out a low groan as Orochimaru bit down savagely into her shoulder, causing her to arch up into his body. He captured her lifted waist with waiting arms, and she began to rip at the already loose and drenched folds of his yukata, beyond questioning or denying what was going on between them now.

Orochimaru pressed along Sakura’s lithe body as his deft hands caught hers, halting her heated and demanding movements; he dragged his mouth along her ear, her reactive shiver running down the entirety of her body. “What happened to being exhausted?”

Sakura tried to rip her wrists free, turning her face into his. “You just like riling me up, don’t you?” She got one hand free and ran it up through his hair that had fallen loose, grinning at how it was getting clumped and stringy with mud and aiming her smirk at Orochimaru.

She squeaked as he then hoisted the both of them up onto their feet, rain dripping freely from their drenched clothes; he blinked down at her, gilded eyes glowing in the darkness. “We should get going.”

Sakura shook her head of the rain, pulling wet locks from her wide eyes that sought out his in the sheets of rain that came down upon them. She bit her lip, disliking her reaction of gladness to his wording of we. “What? Where?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, pulling her along with him, and she followed as they began to run, the wind forcing the rain to retreat from their clothes, raindrops fleeing and scattering in a trail that disappeared across the wet forest floor that quickly became the Konoha streets. The lights of the night lit the glistening roads in every color, the ripples of water causing the glittering reflections to cascade as their soaked sandaled feet sprinted through sidewalks and alleys.

“Wait,” Sakura hissed breathlessly, “where —”

Orochimaru’s white hand curled around her waist and pulled her into a shadowy corner; his other hand clamped over her mouth, muffling her squeak as they fell down backwards through a hidden trapdoor into a dark room that led down from the rain-drenched street. They tumbled to a cold tiled floor, lips meshing again, Sakura’s heartbeat loud in her ears as the undeniable thrill pounded through her head as an unstoppable rhythm. Orochimaru didn’t stop Sakura this time as she tugged away his thoroughly ruined yukata, pulling at the rest of his clothes.

“Don’t tell me that —” Sakura gasped as his cool fingers succeeded in freeing her of her qipao, “---this is a lab of yours, somewhere —”

Orochimaru nipped at Sakura’s throat, her bared chest pressing against his, and she swallowed as her legs clenched again around his waist, desire thrumming up like liquid heat from her core. His golden eyes pierced her through the darkness, and she felt any further questions die in her throat at the ferocious expression in his gilded depths. A deep, scorching thrill burned through Sakura’s chest in reaction, and she absorbed it in its entirety, her nails scraping up Orochimaru’s leanly muscled back as she reveled in the treacherous, addictive rush that their evolving tangling gave her.

Searching, impatient hands bared them both of their ruined clothes, and again there was a slow halting as Orochimaru drew up against Sakura, skin sliding against skin. She was watching him with both hunger and a kind of reticence in the darkness, wide green eyes absorbing every detail she could see of him, her dragging, exploring touches slow and memorizing.

She parted her lips as he leaned over her, her legs hitched up on his waist and Orochimaru’s glittering eyes Sakura’s last view as she tipped her head back against the tiles and let out a deep groan, feeling him dip slowly into her. Her sweaty hands gripped tightly along his rain-slicked upper arms, demanding yet also tense, and she hissed in quiet protest as he drew gently back out; she opened her eyes and pulled him back to her, lifting her hips, one hand slipping up and ensnaring the rain-drenched hair at the back of his neck, dragging his lips back down to hers and pressing up as he pressed back down, sheathing him within her again.

He dragged his smiling lips across her cheek and up against her ear as he listened to her moans, one hand sliding up her slender side and cupping one of her sweat-dampened breasts. “What was that you said about not letting me think you want me?” He gave her a particularly rough thrust, and Sakura gasped, arms regripping him tightly; she turned her face and glowered into Orochimaru’s darkly incandescent eyes. “We aren’t done talking,” she responded before tipping her head back with another groan at the increasingly languid way he was taking her. “Don’t think you’ve won,” she managed, then flipped them both, poised atop Orochimaru where she pinned him again to the floor. She didn’t hesitate to roll her hips into his, gasping softly and tipping her head against his before glaring again into his face. She didn’t wonder anymore why her heart was pumping desperately in her chest, her blood burning and her body hot all over.

“This is the last time,” she breathed, tingling all over as his hands gripped her waist and he drove into her with harsher force; his only response was a chuckle cut short by a deep growl as Sakura bit into his lips with a ferocious kiss and a cry of pleasure, Orochimaru sliding back against the rain-drenched floor and back into Sakura’s smooth, sweat-covered body.

Sakura stirred awake gradually. Her immediate sense was that of being wrapped within warmth, and she did not need much time to recognize and remember what had happened the night before. She opened her eyes slowly, squinting; she sighed, the sound echoing oddly around her.

She rolled onto her back, shivering at the feel of the cold tiles that greeted her sweaty skin; she looked over to her left, eyes widening upon Orochimaru where he lay watching her, his golden snake eyes half-lidded with sleepiness.

Sakura opened her mouth and shut it again. She swallowed, looking away, running a hand through her wild, mussed hair; she winced as her fingers dragged through dried chunks of mud, and she didn’t want to know what kind of mess she must look like. She pulled the blanket insecurely over her bare chest, flushing with color when she realized that her blanket was actually Orochimaru’s shed yukata. Her gaze widened upon its thoroughly ruined fabric where it was damp still with rain and dark streaks of mud.

Sakura set it carefully to the side, grabbing her clothes and wincing at the thought that they also were ruined with set mud stains. She sat up with a slow, long exhale.

She looked back over at Orochimaru where he lay on his side, then got to her feet, clutching her clothes over her front, as if he hadn’t already seen everything she had to offer there; Sakura let out a long breath once more and looked around the room that they were in, realizing that it was, indeed, a small lab.

It was within Orochimaru’s usual elegant tastes, filled with scale-themed pillars, immaculate stainless-steel counters, neatly shelved books, scattered notes resting in piles across its surfaces. There were thankfully no test-tubes of things here, no apparently active experiments - a fine layer of dust covered the counters Sakura could see from the floor where they had ended up.

She shivered from the way she tingled with the same aftershocks of pleasure that had haunted her for the past week, and Sakura couldn’t look at Orochimaru, her eyes fixed on a random cabinet at the other end of the room.

Sakura was decidedly red in the face as the words came out of her mouth without her permission.

“Let’s — do this again. In the future. Just physical, nothing — nothing more.” She winced at the sloppiness of her blurted proposition.

When Sakura turned to glance at Orochimaru after the long silence that followed her words, she saw that he had gotten to his feet and was already half-dressed, stretching his long white arms and picking up his ruined yukata. Though he was unsmiling when he turned his attention back to Sakura, his eyes were glittering in the darkness of the lab. “I’ll… entertain your idea, Sakura-chan.”

Sakura felt that thrill again, and pressed her hand against her chest, angry at herself. She pressed on the door to leave before halting, her eyes low on the door. “I remembered something.” She cleared her throat, turning just enough to see Orochimaru pause to look at her from where he was adjusting his shirt a few paces behind her. “You stopped us from progressing to — this, out there in the rain…” She glanced around the lab once, feeling his eyes follow her own. A crooked smirk found Orochimaru’s wide lips and Sakura rubbed her cheeks with a sigh, forging on with what she had to say, the silent thought running round and round in her head - you should have realized it sooner, you should have realized it sooner, you idiot, you idiot. “You gave your Anbu detail the slip…”

“And my clone continues to wander Konoha as we speak,” Orochimaru finished for Sakura. He tied his yukata shut with his rope obi, and she couldn’t help but to smile a little to herself at his rather bedraggled appearance, mud and blood slashed and stained and printed all over what used to be his fine, pristine clothes. Her satisfied smile quickly faded at the sight of his somehow already mostly perfect hair, falling in glossy, neat slashes around his face; Sakura ran another frustrated hand through her own tangled, filthy locks, tipping her head against the door and turning its handle. “I won’t thank you for keeping them from seeing us… do what we did. You should have just reminded me outright that you’re followed by a security team.” Sakura reddened further. “They still saw too much.”

“Sex, Sakura-chan. That is the word for what we did that they did not get to see.”

“I am extremely aware,” Sakura hissed in return, ducking around the door and cursing as Orochimaru’s chuckling echoed in her head long after she’d fled the lab.

Chapter Text

Ino shook her head of long blonde hair as she hoisted the glass vase of multicolored roses into the crook of her elbow. She shifted the slash of her bangs out of her vision and strode from her flower shop into the crowded street. Her sharp blue eyes flicked from the familiar route to the blooms in her arms, her painted nails occasionally delving into them and plucking out the occasional petal that didn’t meet her satisfaction, releasing it to flutter off behind her into the icy sunlit road. The winter air brushed across her form and sent her long ponytail swaying behind her in a golden streak.

She lifted her head and squinted from the sun’s glare as she arrived at her destination; she pushed aside the glass doors of the entrance, paying the reception counter no mind as she made her way through the hospital’s bustling hallways to the elevators. The stares Ino drew from those around her were also ignored as she set off onto the third floor, heeled boots clicking as she made her way to the room she had in mind.

This room’s door received similar treatment and grumbled heavily as it was shoved aside, Ino’s eyes first on the vase in her hand to make sure it stayed secured in her grip and then upon the figure trussed up in the hospital bed, her brows drawing together.

Sai sat up a little straighter upon seeing Ino, a small smile twitching on his pale lips. She sat down on the bed next to him, setting the roses on his end table and growling under her breath as she snatched the brush, ink, and small sketchbook from his bandaged hands. “Idiot,” she accused, “you’re supposed to rest. Not draw. Rest.”

“I’m fine,” Sai answered evenly, “and it gets boring, sitting in here with little to do but look out the window. I’ve already drawn everything in here. Nothing changes much out there, from this view, anyway.”

Ino sighed, flipping through his sketchbook with idle hands; she flicked her attention from the ink-covered pages back to Sai, her cheeks reddening. “You drew me again.”

His small smile grew a little. “I also drew Ugly.”

“Oh?” Ino flipped through more pages and smirked when she saw that his drawing of Sakura was simpler, having been drawn with less effort than the sketch of herself. “Well. I like the one of me better.”

“Always so jealous of her. Why?” His dark eyes beheld Ino with interest, and Ino flushed. “I am not jealous of Sakura. She’s—”

“Pig!” The door to the room groaned again; Sakura stepped in, green eyes bright as she narrowed her gaze upon Ino. “You visit him so much he never rests, and he draws you when you’re not here, still not resting. Sai has to recover soon because I need this room for other patients.” She put a hand on her hip, her long white doctor’s coat swishing around her sides.

Ino rolled her eyes as she got to her feet, her hand lingering atop Sai’s before she pulled away completely. “Your bedside manner hasn’t improved, Forehead.”

Ino expected Sakura to get annoyed with her, but she only smiled, her cherry-blossom hair falling softly around her face as she tilted her head and regarded Ino with a smirk. “Don’t make me kick you out of here again, Pig.”

Ino found herself pulling back from her usual reaction to banter with her as well. She hadn’t seen Sakura in a while and noticed that she seemed different. She stood back, regarding her more thoughtfully for a moment as she tried to decide how exactly she was different.

Sakura set down her clipboard on a nearby tray and folded her arms. “What are you staring at? I have patients to attend to.” Sun from the open window fell upon her hale, slightly flushed face, her forest-green eyes catching the light; the fabric of her coat and dark red qipao was crisp and clean, her usual scents of strawberry and cotton and hospital antiseptics catching in Ino’s nose. She noticed a slight weariness around the corners of Sakura’s eyes that did not diminish how aglow they were.

“Nothing,” Ino replied finally, her mouth twisting to the side as she regarded her friend. “Let’s catch up later, okay?”

“Oh, I can’t today,” Sakura replied, fighting off her smile. “Busy. I’ve already got some plans. But we could have coffee over lunch this week or something?”

“‘Busy’,” Ino quoted, raising her slim eyebrows, and Sakura flushed red in the cheeks before turning from her to Sai. “Sai. What have I told you about drawing? Where did you even get that? You were badly injured in that last mission, especially your hands. You need to let the healing fully set and finish. You’ll never recover if you keep irritating your injuries. Do I need to have someone in here policing you twenty-four-seven?”

Ino opened her mouth to volunteer and Sakura halted her with a lifted hand, rolling her eyes; Ino’s curious stare moved from the offending gesture to the clipboard Sakura’s hand moved back to. She saw the text by Sakura’s name and peered closer. “What? Since when did you get your official doctorate degree? I thought you put that off because you were working too much to study, before.”

Sakura straightened her back, looking over at Ino; Ino’s eyes widened at the wide, genuine smile on her face. “Yes, it just arrived in the mail, the other day. I can wear my doctor’s coat with pride now. I already hung up the diploma on my office wall, if you want to see later.”

“Of course.” Ino blinked as Sakura whipped her focus back to Sai with her sternness back in full force. “Now, as I was saying! You had better tell me now if you have any more brushes or ink hiding in this room…”

Ino took her leave, shooting Sai a look before stepping out of the room. She took a turn away from the elevators, wanting to confirm what was circling within her head.

She looked left and right before stepping into Sakura’s empty office, closing the door behind her; the hinges were well-greased and silent as it clicked back into the frame securely. Ino ran a hand across the back of the relatively new leather chair, looking around slowly.

The office was bright and sunny, the windows cracked open and letting in the cool late-winter air, breaths of midday white light sighing through and rippling across the desk. Ino’s gaze touched across its neatly stacked contents. Papers, stapled and organized, lined its surface; a glass of brushes and pens accompanied a vase of fresh magnolia flowers from Ino’s shop. Books with long, technical titles Ino didn’t bother reading out made a small wall along the right side of the surface. The desk itself was clean and neat, not a mote of dust on it; the desk chair was pushed in. Photos lined the walls, and between a pair of overflowing bookshelves, Sakura’s doctorate hung framed beneath the clock. Ino’s stare lingered upon it, her pale irises wide.

Sakura’s office itself was not remarkable. Ino hadn’t spotted anything particularly of note, and she had gotten good at finding suspicious or gossip-worthy items after years of visiting friends’ homes and teasing them for their poor house-cleaning skills. Even Sakura’s cleanly-printed and framed new doctorate was not such a surprising thing - everyone who knew her had a latent expectation that it was something she would naturally achieve eventually, as Tsunade’s apprentice and as a brilliant student of medical science in general. Her cleanliness, her organized and intelligent nature… that too was not so shocking, but Ino knew Sakura well, and she knew that this was a 360-degree turnaround from how her friend’s office had been the last time she had been in here.

Ino pulled out the desk chair and reclined in it lightly, bringing her neatly manicured hand to rest across her cheek as she pondered Sakura’s office. The last time she was here, those papers were scattered across surfaces and chairs, the flowers in the vase wilted and dead, pens scattered over open book pages, dust floating through the air in the small beams of light that managed to push through the haphazardly shut blinds. Thick books of medical jargon were gathering dust, untouched; there were even crumpled notes Ino had spotted from Tsunade and from Shizune, warning Sakura to pull her head out of the dirt and shape up in her job or face disciplinary action.

Ino let out a long sigh, ears picking up the patient ticking of the clock behind her head above Sakura’s doctorate. She had a flower shop to attend to.

She got to her feet and adjusted the magnolias in their vase before moving to leave; she glanced once more at the bright and vivacious office around her. I should have noticed when she was depressed so much sooner, she thought, is he the reason she’s not anymore…?

Ino shook her head with a derisive snort at the idea as she tugged open the door and let herself back out of Sakura’s office, scribbling a mental note in the back of her head to take Sakura up on her offer of coffee this week as soon as possible.

Sakura let out a sigh as she stepped into her dark office, stretching her arms. Her shift was finally done… she didn’t want to count the hours of this one. A team of genin had been ambushed during a D-rank mission away with their sensei that ended up skyrocketing to A-rank when rogue nin had attacked their group, and they’d returned barely alive, ragged to the bones. She had thrown herself entirely at her work, assisting in surgery. It had taken heart-wrenching hours of steady-handed, involved work, but she and her fellow surgeons had managed to save their lives.

But what should have been an eight to ten hour shift became… what… thirteen? She glanced over at the clock on the wall. Shit. Nearly fifteen.

Sakura hurried to her chair, setting down her keys and her phone as she looked around for her jacket - it was too cold to head home without it, the winter’s chill still deeply entrenched in Konoha with spring still some time away. She cursed her absent-mindedness for not bothering to turn on the light.

Sakura’s eyes adjusted to the low light of the moonlit room, her attention finally snagging on the neatly folded jacket awaiting her atop the papers on her desk.

She lifted it, her thumbs running over the seams. A small smile tilted her lips. She let it unfold in her hands, the dark fabric slithering through her fingers. She shrugged it on and straightened the collar before patting her pockets to make sure she had her keys and wallet and phone. Satisfied by the jingling sound they made, she willed her tiredness to hold off a little longer for her walk home.

Sakura waved at fellow nurses as she passed them in the fluorescent-lit hospital halls. She heard Shizune call a farewell and she flashed her a smile from across the hall. She took the stairs, a habit she’d developed from her wish to keep her knees and back in shape; three flights later and she was pushing out the back exit door into the cold night air, the darkness soothing to her weary form. Her eyes fluttered shut at the feel of the snow landing in tiny cold kisses across her face and exposed neck.

The air left streaks of cold across Sakura’s cheekbones as she then forged on, her boots crunching through the layer of snow that smothered Konoha in a heavy white blanket. It muted the noises of the night, the shouts of distant drunks and whispering trees and buzzing lights hushed under its crystalline white expanse. The tracks she left in the snow were soon erased as the night wind breathed life into the snow, reshaping it endlessly.

Sakura looked up, blinking away the snowflakes in her eyes; she could still see the moon, a sliver peeking through the relentless clouds. She smiled at the sight, her cold-tinted pink cheeks lifting as she slid her hands into her pockets to rest among her keys and wallet. She dipped her head and listened to the quiet of the snowstorm blowing around her for the rest of her walk home.

She stopped at her apartment door a short while later, her hand pausing over the handle. When it didn’t give at her touch, locked mechanisms demanding her key, her lips twisted to the side. She unlocked it with fumbling cold fingers and stepped into the expected dark of her home with an exhausted sigh, prepared for solitude for the first time all day.

She walked up to her counter after kicking off her boots and letting down her tied-up hair, her pink locks falling in damp loose gleaming strands around her face. She pulled her wallet and phone from her pockets; then she reached in again, feeling something else. She pulled it out as she switched on the small studio lights above her kitchenette, her fingers red as they thawed from the cold, numb where she pinched it between her thumb and index finger. Her eyes widened slowly, pupils expanding as her blood slowed in her veins, her heartbeat audible in her ears.

The key flashed in the dim lights, plain, silver. Unlabelled.

Sakura shook her head, setting it on the counter next to her keychain and wallet before turning and reaching into her cabinet, her outstretched hand brushing against the bottle of unopened sake there, a film of dust coming away on the pads of her fingers. Her heart was beating harder as she stared blankly at it.

She shrank back, shutting the cabinet and shaking her head again. She leaned back against the counter’s edge, swallowing the conflicted emotions that were crawling repeatedly up her throat.

Sakura turned her head slightly, her eyes immediately falling back onto the glinting key lying on the counter near her hand.

“It’s a mistake,” she informed her anxious thoughts aloud. She reached out and picked it up gingerly like it might come to life and bite her. “Someone put it there, accidentally, for some reason. Or — it’s a prank.” Her voice echoed softly in her dark apartment, the sound falling into the cushions of her couch and dying against the thin walls.

Sakura examined it closer. She searched for a locksmith signature, a branding, some kind of marking to hint to her that this was, indeed, a key she had somehow palmed from the hospital, something she could easily return during her shift tomorrow.

Her thumb moved across its jagged, patterned edge, sharp like it had been cut in recent memory. The base of the key was slightly embossed, slightly shiny. It wasn’t remarkable nor unusual, and she knew that it wasn’t out of the norm for keys to lack branding, but she knew her hospital and its every crevice; this didn’t belong to any of its doors.

Sakura’s voice lowered to a whisper, barely audible even to herself. “That can’t be it…”

Her eyes closed, the dreadful knowledge sinking slow and deep through her chest like a choking blockage. She had already known the moment she saw her elegantly-folded jacket on her desk that he had left it there for her, a thoughtful gesture to express that he had come by, expressing implicit understanding that she was working late. She had left her jacket behind with him by accident, and now it had made its return, folded by practiced, elegant hands in a way Sakura could never seem to properly imitate.

Sakura’s smaller, sweaty hands lifted and pressed hard against her face. “No,” she whispered into her palms, her features twitching with anguish under her fingers. “No. No no no. It’s still some kind of mistake,” and she swerved, pushing away from the counter and pulling off her jacket, stamping quickly toward her bathroom and shutting herself in, the shower handle giving a squeak as she pushed it to its hottest setting and got in under its spray of water.

Sakura leaned in under the increasingly boiling spray, pressing her palms against the slick tiled wall and bowing her head under the pressure. The steam rose from her sore, soaked skin, the bathroom air growing densely humid.

She reached up and rinsed her skin, trying to ease the soreness in her muscles, to ease the tightening of her throat. She sent healing through her neck, her shoulders, her sore wrists and arms; her probing, chakra-lit fingers paused over a healing bite-mark across her other shoulder, and she sighed in a cloud through the steam.

It cannot mean what I think it does.

Sakura lifted her head and drank in the scorching heat of the near-boiling shower spray; she revelled in how it streaked down her face and her body in soothing, burning rivulets. She healed away the mark and searched for others, one hand pausing over her rising pulse.

The dark with the falling shower water felt like rain, and Sakura shook her head, eyes opening, the flickers of memories of lips in the summer night shivering down her mind. She rushed to rinse her hair and escape the shower stall; she toweled off, combing through her hair and avoiding her reflection as she stumbled over to her bed and fell forward into the covers. Her face sunk deep into her pillow as her thoughts padded back into the kitchen and fixated once more upon the key lying there on the counter.

Sakura’s expression twisted as Orochimaru’s familiar scents rose from her pillowcase; she turned her face and stared at the wall, more memories rising up in the back of her head, tens becoming hundreds that seated themselves and stared baldly at her, the vast inner audience to her battling thoughts. Not any particular one stood out to explain what was going on. Nothing could penetrate the incoming crescendo of her swelling panic.

Surely I have not read things so wrong? Her brows pulled together tightly as she tried to decipher the key’s meaning. Surely he doesn’t want…

Sakura felt tears streaming down her cheeks as she turned and laid on her back, her hands resting over her rapidly beating heart. Denial, conflict, denial, and she couldn’t break free of how her thoughts turned over and over, theory warring against theory. It came down to the fact that she simply didn’t know what it meant. She didn’t know what his true intent was, and she didn’t know what to do nor how to feel about any of the possible implications that it might have.

When Sakura emerged from the bedroom, wrapped in a long white towel, she saw Orochimaru hunched over on the floor in the living room with his back to her. He was in a half-sit with one knee on the floor, dark hair falling forward.

Sakura rushed over, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder over his loose robe. “Are you all right?”

When he didn’t immediately reply, Sakura bent onto the carpet next to him, and it was then she saw what he was doing. Orochimaru’s pet-companion, a long and slightly translucent white serpent, was curled in his hands; he was easing his hand up its neck and down its side, and she saw with decreasing concern and increasing curiosity that he was helping it shed its film of old skin in favor of the healthy, gleaming white skin beneath. It had been freed of most of it already, but there was a layer over its head and neck that seemed to be stuck, and his long pale fingers were gentle as he caressed the small and sensitive scales with practiced ease.

Sakura had never seen anything like this before. Her dislike of snakes had lessened, and she found herself feeling neutral toward the serpent in his hands. Her voice was quieter as she spoke again, fingers curling lightly around his shoulder. “Is he okay?”

Orochimaru’s golden eye touched upon Sakura from the side under his silky black strands of hair. “Are you actually interested?”

She blinked back at him, noticing the seriousness in his gaze, and she settled on her knees beside him. “Yes.” She crossed her hands in her lap and gave him an attentive look as she straightened her back, glancing down at the snake in an indication for him to continue.

Sakura watched as Orochimaru dipped his fingers into a bowl of warm water that was next to him on the floor. He gently rubbed a thin layer of moisture along the snake’s head and upper body where the half-shed skin was still clinging. He matched Sakura’s quiet manner as he commented on what he was doing. “It’s too dry in this apartment for him; sometimes he doesn’t shed quite as easily as normal.” They both kept their eyes trained on the serpent as his hand moved along its upper body. “He will be fine. I am just easing his discomfort.”

With the light friction, the shedding skin began to come loose, and Sakura watched as Orochimaru gently peeled away part of it. All that remained was a light film over its head and eyes, and he held the white serpent out toward Sakura, watching her carefully.

She frowned down at the snake with quiet trepidation, her tentative hands hefting its surprisingly heavy weight. The snake moved its head toward her, and she stilled as it watched her curiously, its long form relaxed in her hands. Tentatively, she lifted one hand and traced an experimental finger along its side; her green eyes widened at the glossy, smooth feel of its scales, and though its skin was initially cool to her touch, it warmed beneath her fingertip. The rest of her fingers descended as she stroked its side, and the snake lifted its head slowly; she watched it move, remembering what it needed as her gaze touched on the translucent film over its face. Supporting its weight carefully with her arms, she lifted her other hand from where she had been caressing its side and gingerly touched the last piece of film over its eye and head. It held still for her as she dipped her fingers in the warm water and gently rubbed at the loosening skin; it unstuck from the new skin beneath, and with two fingers Sakura lightly pulled away the film. It lifted cleanly away from the snake’s head like a veil, revealing light iridescent gold eyes that were set on her as she set the shed skin aside.

The snake’s head descended toward her arm, and Sakura watched as it rested its head gently against her skin, its small eyes dilating as it relaxed its weight on her. She smiled softly down at it, running an affectionate finger along the pure white scales of its head and down its back. “I think it likes me,” she murmured.

Sakura looked up slowly. Orochimaru was watching her, ever unreadably calm. He slightly inclined his head with a closed-eyed smile. “I believe that all things have thoughts.” He cleaned off his hands, picking up the snake’s shed skin and the bowl of water. “Will can be expressed in more than just words.”

Her sleepy mind skipping over his words, Sakura was distracted, feeling an insecure urge to relinquish Orochimaru’s snake back to him; she moved to give it back, but it curled slowly up her arm, her skin tingling where it ascended. It moved up her shoulder and then slowly across the back of her neck, relaxing around her like a scarf. It tightened its hold around her warm neck enough to hold on but not so tight that it constricted her, and she felt it bump its head against her throat as it rested once more, small snake-tongue flicking out in a yawn.

Orochimaru’s smile widened at his snake’s apparent ease, golden eyes flicking between her and his pet. Sakura was transfixed by the intensity of his gaze, and she swallowed as she tried to right her thoughts from the racing of her heart. She reached up and touched the snake that had curled around her, blushing red.

She watched him as he moved about the kitchen, his back turned to her, and with a smile Sakura lifted a hand to the warmth in her chest. She turned toward the window, one hand lifting to pet the snake curled comfortably around her shoulders as she gazed out at the sunny morning. Her mind and body spun pleasantly; affection and contentment flowed through her like liquid fire from her mind and heart to the soles of her feet.

Tears glistened on Sakura’s cheeks as she woke from her dream that was a memory, her hands clenching the covers around her as she curled into herself, shaking with silent sobs. She thrashed in the sheets and kicked them off, her nails digging into her scalp where her arms shielded her face and her fingers dragged through her wild hair. She reviled herself with gritted teeth and stinging eyes, fighting against the unavoidable descension of sleep and haunting dreams of memories that returned to douse her in her realizations once more.

Chapter Text

Sakura slowed as she saw the small scroll that rested nonchalantly atop the flat door handle to her apartment, her feet scuffing as she drew to a halt in the middle of the dingy hallway. She clutched her hands into fists within her pockets. She had been wondering… it had been a week since that night in the forest, a week of oddly fitful, mostly dreamless sleep and mostly focused work, which was no thanks to those melatonin gummies that had been lost somewhere in the events of that madness-filled day.

She swallowed, sweat pearling on her forehead. Could that scroll be from?...

Gingerly, Sakura picked it up, not bothering to look at what she was doing as she quickly unlocked the handle with her keys and pushed the door open, her eyes regaining their gleam as she ran her fingers over the scroll’s dark seal. She slammed the door behind her as she unrolled it, delving her attention through its contents.

There was a neatly brushed X on the map that told her which hideout he would be in. It was marking a spot she vaguely recognized not far outside of Konoha.

Sakura pressed a hand to the small lift of her lips. Damn him and his weird ways. She felt both dread and excitement pulsing through her blood as she tucked the scroll into her nearby bookshelf and sat on the edge of her couch, running her hands through her hair. When? she thought. Does Orochimaru expect me to drop everything and go now?

Sakura had just ended another fourteen-hour long shift at the hospital and every inch of her ached. She had been planning on having a glass of whatever alcohol was left in her cupboard and willing her headache to quieten until she fell asleep. She had not expected Orochimaru to contact her quite yet.

If I don’t go now, am I rejecting his invitation? Should I even go?

She asked herself those questions several more times as she got to her feet, undressing and showering before pulling on darker, more slim-fitting clothes and tying back her hair. She was pulling on her boots when she halted, staring down at her fingers on her laces like she’d lost control of her own actions.

His map scrawled across her mind again, black lines blurring across her doubts. Sakura imagined Orochimaru smirking as he sent someone to shove the scroll into her door with the full expectation that she would immediately come to him after discovering it. He was certainly waiting for her there now as she sat and debated, and the thought of his smugness was almost enough for Sakura to kick off her boots and go to bed.

But she knew, as she tied the bow and got to her feet, that she would be going. She’d known it before she even opened the dark invitation left at her door.

It had taken Sakura a half hour of running through the forest until she neared the X in her mental map. She slowed to a trot, her adrenaline muting to a throb in her core as she regained her breath, brushing away the sweat from her brow and looking around the dark trees with uncertainty. She had never been to this hideout of his; she’d heard of it and passed it before, but that was during the war, and she hadn’t paid any mind to it. Sakura wished she had thought to bring his map and kicked herself as she walked quietly beneath the breeze-touched black tree canopy, her lithe form criss-crossed with broken silver shadows as she went.

Sakura was beginning to wonder if she was lost when she sensed a familiar presence nearby.

She leapt up into a nearby tree so that she could look down at whomever she had sensed. Peering through the moonlit leaves, Sakura spotted Yamato standing guard outside of a cave that jutted out of a small mountain emerging from the forest into the night; she cursed softly under her breath. She never, ever wanted to face Yamato, now that she had learned he was assigned to the Anbu detail that followed Orochimaru around. She could still sleep at night knowing that some faceless Anbu members knew about her fight and reunion with Orochimaru earlier that week in the forest - they were all trained to keep Konoha’s secrets, practiced at keeping quiet about the things they witnessed in the line of duty. But the thought that Yamato might have been among them… Sakura shuddered. She fervently hoped that he somehow had no idea what had transpired between herself and Orochimaru at all, the first or the second time. Perhaps naively, Sakura chose to believe that he wasn’t there either time and didn’t have any idea of what had happened.

Sakura sunk deeper into the leaves of the softly rustling oak tree when she saw Yamato look around with bored but sharp eyes, his distant figure leaning up against the side of the cave entrance. She prayed he had not seen her. She didn’t know what sort of legitimate excuse she would have to be visiting one of Orochimaru’s hideouts on her own at all, let alone at this time of night, and Sakura wracked her brain for a good lie should he spot her. Seeking information about an enemy he once knew? Asking about the history or whereabouts of an extremely rare or forbidden medical ingredient or jutsu? She knew that they were shaky excuses without detailed information to back them up, and Sakura hoped fervently that her stealth skills were enough to somehow get past Yamato without needing to use her flimsy cover story ideas.

Perhaps there’s a secondary entrance. Sakura scanned the rocky crags of the small mountainside, finding no obvious other openings. She gripped the branch that she was balancing on hard enough to make the bark creak in protest as her annoyance rose.

Sakura flitted across the treetops just out of Yamato’s sight, keeping her eyes on him as she zig-zagged her way through the whispering trees and closer to the craggy entrance that he guarded. When he looked into the opposite direction that Sakura perched from, she took her chance, becoming a blur as she soared through the air and landed gracefully atop the cave. She made no sound as she settled into the rocks and underbrush, green eyes fixed intently on Yamato as she waited to make sure he had not sensed her. If I can fine-tune my chakra just right… I’ll make my own entrance into this cave, and I’ll accomplish it silently.

“Hello?” She heard Yamato’s boots crunch in the dirt a stone’s throw beneath her. Sakura held her breath. His senses were as sharp as ever, and she avoided voicing her curses as she moved not so much as a single eyelash, sitting more rigidly than the rocks she perched on. Don’t sense me. Don’t sense me. For the love of all that is holy don’t sense me.

“You there.”

Sakura closed her eyes slowly, remaining where she was with her last shred of hope that he was talking to someone else.

“I see you in the bushes… come on out.”

Thinking quickly, Sakura focused, and using henge ninjutsu, she altered her physical appearance. From the bushes stepped a wavy-haired girl with auburn hair, bright ochre eyes, and tan skin; with a theatrical sigh she leapt down from the rocky bushes and boulders above the cave and down near Yamato. Though he appeared calm as Sakura brushed herself off, focusing hard on maintaining her henge, she could see how he was tensed where he stood with one hand hovering over his kunai and dark eyes narrowed.

“Yo, Yamato-taichou.” The familiar greeting was already out of Sakura’s mouth before she could catch herself. She winced at her slip, and he stared at her with increasing interest. “Who are you and why are you here?”

Sakura took in a breath as she came up with a random combination of names. “Yua Saito. I’m here to deliver a message to Orochimaru-sama, which is rather urgent. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

“I know you,” Yamato commented casually, folding his arms as he apparently sensed no danger from her. “I don’t remember your face but I know you from somewhere. Yua… hmm.”

Under Yamato’s scrutiny, Sakura felt sweat beading on the back of her neck. There were a lot of reasons he had become captain long ago and his intelligence and observational skills were among them. She didn’t doubt that he was seeing through her lies easily, and it wouldn’t be long until he recognized that she was wearing a henge. Sakura was again quietly furious at Orochimaru for not warning her about Yamato - but she also knew that he trusted her to handle getting past him.

Yamato stepped toward her, and Sakura backed toward the cave entrance with an uneasy smile. “What’s your message?”

"I don’t want to tell—”

“Any message he receives from unknown parties has to go through us, particularly me at this moment. What is the message.” Sakura’s eyes widened at his sharpening tone; she had never been spoken to by Yamato with anything less than courtesy, and she reminded herself that she was disguised as she answered him. “I’m here on behalf of — a medical ninja. I’m asking about a rare healing jutsu that Orochimaru may have intel on. It’s rather urgent, like I said, and I can’t stand here and chat long—”

“At this hour? And how do you know me? Are you from the Leaf?”

Sakura stood more confidently, eager to get on with this and escape into the dark cave behind her. “Yes, I’m a chūnin and apprentice. I’ve heard of who you are before, who hasn’t?”

The shadows caught in Yamato’s face, his features growing hawkish and intimidating, and Sakura grimaced when he went on, “Which medic ninja are you here on behalf of?”

“Er — Haruno… sama.” Sakura felt exceedingly odd using such an honorific on her own name and she tried hard not to let how awkward she felt show as she withstood Yamato’s scrutiny. She went for a verbal jab, hoping to push him into letting her pass. “And she wouldn’t be pleased to know that you are delaying me in retrieving the vital information that she needs. I’ll have to inform her if I go back empty-handed.” Sakura made a face as if she were imagining her master’s rage. She was secretly pleased to see that the veiled threat had an effect on Yamato, who raised his dark brows and twisted the corner of his lip at her words. It seemed that the invisible threat of Sakura’s invoked rage was still enough to sway some of the most respected shinobi in Konoha.

But her secretly inflated ego was quickly punctured at the way his dark eyes hardened in a knowing way, and she took another step back toward the cave entrance as he spoke after a pause. “If I were to give Sakura-chan a quick call and verify your identity, would she confirm that you are who you say you are?”

Sakura inwardly screamed. Her phone was in her pocket and the ringer was on. If Yamato were to call her, it would ring loudly, and her entire gambit would be over with. She gave a defeated sigh, hanging her head. Letting go of her focus, she allowed her henge to fade; as her curly auburn hair simmered into cherry-blossom pink and her eyes melted into green, she heard Yamato inhale sharply. Sakura looked up at him with a glare. “You have to be so damn thorough, Yamato-taichou.”

“Sakura-chan?!” Yamato’s expression was stricken, and Sakura could not help but to laugh as she gave a sigh and tried to think of new excuses. Her henge failing in front of him, him seeing her using henge at all, was a very large new problem. Any excuses she might have had before were now blown to bits and she had no idea what she would tell him.

Her head lifted as Yamato cleared his throat, and Sakura’s sharp eyes caught on the way he was reddening with embarrassment. “Sakura-chan, I’d say I’m surprised to see you. But…”

“No.” Mortification twisted her features, heating up her ears. “You were there, weren’t you?”

“Yes, unfortunately.” He ran a hand through his choppy brown hair with an uneasy laugh. “You uh. You had us going for a second, when you, you know, destroyed several training grounds and Orochimaru nearly too.”

“There was more than one of you?!” Sakura’s screech echoed in the night, and she brought her voice down to a harsh whisper, her eyelids twitching in her anger. “I’ll have you know I was unaware I was also entertaining an audience of shinobi while I was — figuring things out with Orochimaru. I swear, Yamato-taichou, if you tell anyone outside of Anbu —”

“Sakura-chan…” Yamato’s expression fell back into seriousness, his brows lowering over his dark almond-shaped eyes. “Are you all right? What happened after the two of you ran off? We found him again later, he showed up and dismissed his clone, looking thoroughly… beat-up. It was clear his real self had been with you. But what happened? And why didn’t you immediately report his suspicious actions? Why did you and Orochimaru fight? It didn’t look like a friendly spar.” His face pinched a little. “And I had to clean up the mess you made of the forest.”

Sakura’s face bloomed red. “I… we… um. Thank you for your concern, but, we were… I am fine. He wasn’t doing anything… suspicious.”

Yamato’s eyebrows skyrocketed into his metal faceplate. “...and you two did what, exactly, that wasn’t suspicious?”

“What!” Sakura growled, stepping toward him with her fists raised. “Do you not believe me?!”

Yamato waved his hands defensively in front of himself, shaking his head, but unable to keep the look of disgust and shock off of his face. “Oh no no. That’s – I was just asking, Sakura-chan. Knowing what Orochimaru is up to at all times is part of my duties now.” He took a small step back from Sakura’s red-faced, fist-clenched figure and cleared his throat again. “We didn’t intervene when you fought because it looked like you had it handled.”

“I did have him handled.” She folded her arms, willing her face to cool off. “Everything’s fine.”

“Then why are you here, poorly disguised, seeking him out?” Genuine curiosity shone in Yamato’s perceptive stare, and Sakura shifted from foot to foot self-consciously, unable to look at him all of a sudden. “Well, I didn’t want you to see me as me, some stranger would be less conspicuous, I don’t know, I’m here to, resolve… our last… discussion.” Sakura bit down on her lip before giving Yamato a pleading look. “No more questions. Please.”

Yamato was blinking back at Sakura with renewed astonishment. “I’m sorry, I have to ask… Sakura-chan, are you and Orochimaru—”

“Yes.” She glowered at him, done with dancing around the subject. “Anything else?”

Her blush sunk through to her bones as Yamato’s neutral face crumbled into a comical, squished expression, far worse than his earlier version. “Really?”

At the reactive deadly look on Sakura’s face Yamato quickly reverted his expression. He shifted where he stood and then frowned, stepping in-between her and the open mouth of the cave. Sakura spotted the concern in his eyes and heard it in his determined tone. “I can’t allow you to pass.”

“What? Why?”

“I have to make sure you’re not being manipulated,” Yamato went on, “this isn’t like you. He must have —”

“Please, what do you think we fought about?” Sakura brushed past him, her weariness returning; she didn’t look back, waving as she descended into the darkness. “I already had a thorough medical check with Shizune. I’m cleared. Go look at the records if you don’t believe me. And I had better not hear rumors start spreading about all that’s happened,” she called in a warning tone, Yamato’s grumbling echoing and bouncing down the cave walls as Sakura finally made her way into Orochimaru’s dark hideout.

The cave walls gave way to tall, lined pillars with stone snake-head sconces that flickered with dim yellow light. Shadows clung and danced along the walls where the ceiling sloped and the floor stretched into smooth, expressionless stone.

Sakura walked at a slowing pace, one hand trailing along the wall, her gaze pensive as it traveled across the grooved tunnel in sweeps. She remembered this place, or, it incited memories of a place very similar; she had once run through halls like these with none other than Yamato, along with Naruto and Sai, searching for Sasuke.

Sakura dipped her head with the redness still fading from where it stung her cheeks and ears. That was years ago, when she was somehow even more foolish.

Her hand caught around the round shape of a pillar, and she paused, another remembrance brought on by it. She’d come to a place like this with Jiraiya and Naruto once, too, in search of Sasuke yet again. It was longer ago, long enough that the memory wasn’t sharp, the details faded somewhat.

Sakura shook her head. It seemed she was no stranger to Orochimaru’s hideouts already.

She continued to reminisce as she walked, figuring that she would eventually come across him or that he would find her. What had she thought she could do against Orochimaru back then? Had her fool little chūnin self thought she stood any sort of chance against even Kabuto? He’d have probably tortured her before killing her, had Orochimaru not told him otherwise.

Sakura grimaced, not liking that thought. She hated the thought of Kabuto even more now that she knew he’d overheard her embarrassing confessions in Ichiraku.

Sakura’s trailing hand along the tunnel wall slid down, her other hand pushing moodily through her hair as she recalled more. She had been petrified by Orochimaru’s very presence back then. All he had done was casually walk through the shadowy, pillared room, sparing the terrified Sakura a pitying glance like the scrap of powerless skin and bones she was. All the courage she could muster was only enough to embolden her into directly asking him about Sasuke.

This somewhat courageous move had maintained Orochimaru’s interest long enough for him to tell Kabuto to explain, and not to let dear Sakura suffer, before he left her behind with a glittering glance and smug smile.

Sakura shivered. Orochimaru did have quite the presence, especially back then - all dark aura and power, his silky voice harsh and gripping or dripping and seductive, depending on his mood. She couldn’t remember the words he’d said, but she remembered his velvet tone.

Seductive? Sakura snorted, the sound looping in circles into the darkness; she suppressed a bout of laughter in her chest, one hand over her smirking mouth. She must be tired. The reminiscing wasn’t doing her nerves any good; her heartbeat was already rising, the seemingly endless walk into darkness heightening her anticipation of when she would encounter Orochimaru.

Her thoughts took advantage of her anxiousness, shoving embodiments of her fears forward. I was stupid to ask for us to do this again. What if he’s not actually here? What if it’s a trap? What if…

Sakura lifted her head, straightening her back where she had begun to hunch with her nervousness, returning her stride to confidence. She was not the trembling coward she was as a child. Now, she was a confident fool, walking into danger without fear. Idiot, her thoughts whispered, and she took her hand from where it had trailed along the grooved wall and placed it over her beating heart, a glint in her eyes as she continued to venture forward.

She was here for a reason. She was here for that scorching thrill that she’d tasted, to feel alive again, the desire for which was why she had managed to push through her doubts and fears to get here. She wouldn’t let her apprehension turn her around now, not when she had gotten this far.

Her nails twitched into her skin when she felt the darkness shift slightly behind her; Sakura halted her quiet steps, taking in a breath.

“Sakura-chan.”

Heart thundering like a drum, Sakura turned slowly toward where she had heard Orochimaru speak, her searching eyes catching upon his luminescent pair of golden eyes hidden in the shadow cast by a nearby pillar. He stepped forward, sandaled feet almost silent on the stone floor, and Sakura forced her hands to fall casually to her sides rather than clutch over her chest. She could not help but to imagine him before her as his old self for a moment - longer hair, different clothes, darker aura. Sakura’s brows twitched together, her wide eyes touching across his lean shadowed self with the hint of a thrill.

Sakura tried to reset herself, knowing she was probably gaping at him like her chūnin self once did. She folded her arms and cleared her throat in a manner that she hoped was casual. “You didn’t make this easy for me.”

“It only shows how determined you are.” White teeth flashed in the dim light as he fully emerged from the dark, and Sakura appreciated Orochimaru’s appearance; his white yukata flowed down around his slender form, the teal shirt complimenting the lavender lines around his iridescent golden eyes. He looked young, his smooth white skin flickering with a healthy glow in the dim light, and Sakura willed her heart to slow its increasing beats. She furiously reminded herself that he was youthful because of amoral past experiments and deeds, because he’d possessed many different bodies and transformed them, because he’s some kind of monster, or was — she willed herself to view Orochimaru with revulsion, but failed to prevent the smoldering thrill within her as he stepped closer.

Sakura reached out before she thought about it, her hand clasping lightly around one of the folds of Orochimaru’s yukata. He watched with an unreadable expression as Sakura’s face twisted before calming, her inner turmoil surrendering to a resolution; her hand lingered a moment along the cool white fabric before it retreated just as suddenly. “Perhaps,” Sakura finally agreed, meeting his eyes, “but if I have to see Yamato’s reaction every time I come to find you…”

“Mm.” Orochimaru moved forward, Sakura slipping her hand around his arm as she moved with him into the dark of the hall. She wouldn’t look at him when he eyed her curiously, red tingeing her determined expression; he looked ahead with the slightest smirk, and Sakura silently berated herself for taking his arm like this was some kind of date.

Her mental scolding was almost successful in cowing her to the point of pulling her hand back until Sakura realized in a quick self-awareness check that she had indeed dressed up as if she was on a date. She wore long black slacks and a fitted dark green qipao top instead of her usual red vest and shorts. They were the dressiest things she owned that weren’t dresses, and they were all courtesy of Ino bullying her into buying something that wasn’t red and strictly practical.

Sakura bit down on her lip. He probably hadn’t noticed her different clothes, anyway, so it didn’t matter. It’s not a date, she reassured herself, just an… arrangement. She wasn’t sure what to call it; she didn’t want to label it, wanting to keep it as forgettable as possible.

As she and Orochimaru made a turn down a hall that looked identical to the last one, Sakura unconsciously tightened her grip on his arm, her nerves singing under her skin. Not knowing what to do with her hands anymore and her mind bouncing against endless, useless what-ifs, Sakura glanced at Orochimaru with her questions armed and ready beneath her tongue. “What’s the plan?”

He raised a slim brow at her. “What do you think?”

“I have no idea what you have planned.”

“Mm.”

Sakura narrowed her eyes, her fingers tapping along the folds of his sleeve. “Tell me it’s at least kind of normal.”

“What do you mean?” Orochimaru feigned offense, his slitted pupils widening comically. “Are you implying that I don’t plan ahead?”

“Yes, exactly that,” Sakura accused, folding her arms. She tried not to express her muted surprise at his unexpected sense of humor and wondered how far she could push it. She smirked as she used a joke Ino had weaponized on her not so long ago. “I’m hoping you aren’t planning on shoving me in a test-tube and doing experiments.”

Orochimaru narrowed his sharp golden eyes at her; Sakura wondered if she had genuinely offended him, but she pressed on, gaining a catlike smile as she teased him. “Oh, did I just ruin your date plans?” The word date echoed between them and Sakura bit her tongue with annoyance at herself.

He bent toward her then, slowing his walk to a stop, and her heart thundered at the way his eyes glowed unnaturally in the dark with a dangerous edge. “You like trying to provoke me, don’t you, Sakura-chan? Just like you accused me of doing to you so recently.” Orochimaru’s tone lowered to a purr and his hand slid around her back, gripping the fabric of Sakura’s qipao. “Perhaps I’ll make some changes and do as you suggested instead. The lower labs of this location are currently unoccupied.” He flashed Sakura a wild grin. “Shall we head there and begin research preparations? Or do you have more suggestions?”

“Try me,” Sakura shot back, stepping closer to him, her gripping hand sliding up his sleeve. “You don’t scare me. You’re bluffing. And even if you’re not, I’ll break your entire hideout into pieces just like I broke your bones last week.”

“Oh?” Orochimaru’s eyes flashed, and Sakura squeaked as she was pressed against the wall in a flash. He bent over her, his hands sliding up under her arms and pinning her wrists to the cold stone wall, his breath flickering across her red face. “I can think of plenty worthwhile experiments to perform upon a willing volunteer. Who’s to say, it might involve test-tubes…” He leaned in closer, golden eyes glittering. “...but I was under the impression you weren’t here for the joys of my research, Sakura-chan.”

The fierce gleam remained in Sakura’s glare that she aimed at him, and she mirrored his smirk. “I told you to try me,” she hissed, her heart pounding in a roar between her ears. She parted her lips as his dark hair fell down around her face, the silky strands brushing across the sensitive skin of her cheeks and jaw, her eyes already fluttering shut from the feel of his breath across her lips.

She nearly fell back against the wall as Orochimaru drew away, releasing Sakura’s arms. She caught herself and straightened, her blush having spread from her face to her neck; she shot him an accusatory look, and he chuckled as he pulled back into the darkness. “So impatient, Sakura-chan. We were almost there.”

“Bastard,” she hissed back, brushing herself off before stalking after him with a shaky huff. She glowered at his calm, straight-backed walk, embarrassed and frustrated and excited all at once. Deciding that she wouldn’t follow after him like some kind of puppy, Sakura caught up with him, walking at his side with a set glower on her face.

The ferocity of her expression faltered when she felt Orochimaru’s hand brush along her lower back, and it softened into an uncertain stare into the dark when it remained; she heard him hm beside her when she let out a long, unsteady exhale.

A few paces forward and they arrived at a dark and tall door, unremarkable in design, but halting Sakura’s heartbeats all the same. She looked between the swirls of the wood and Orochimaru beside her, knowing this was some kind of precipice where she had the choice to teeter into the unknown or turn back for the last time.

Sensing Sakura’s hesitation, Orochimaru’s hand disappeared from her back as he rested it on the handle; he eyed her calmly. “Last chance to change direction,” he commented, “if you wanted to go downstairs and become one of my subjects.” He flashed Sakura a smile, and she raised her eyebrows at the hint of genuine desire behind that suggestion; she snorted, shaking her head and feeling some of her nerves dissipate under her heated skin. She felt a quiet note of gratefulness that he’d pulled her mind away from her worries for the moment. “That’s funny,” she managed, “I thought we resolved that discussion, back there…”

“I don’t believe we have resolved anything, Sakura-chan.”

Unable to think of a response through the throbbing of her pulse, Sakura chose to move forward nonverbally instead, determinedly reaching out and resting her hand over Orochimaru’s. She shot him a daring look as she pushed his cool fingers aside, pressing down on the heavy handle and leveraging her weight against the door. With a creak, it fell open; Orochimaru followed Sakura inside, shutting it behind him with a click.

Sakura paused where she stood, frowning.

The room was simple and drab, a queen bed in its center with a plain wooden nightstand and a small bathroom to the side. The same smooth stone made up the walls, ceiling, and floor; twin sconces lit the air above the bed, casting that soft yellow glow across the bare room.

Behind her, fabric shifted as Orochimaru moved to untie his rope-obi. Sakura turned, her small hands resting on his and stopping his movements; he tilted his head quizzically, and she swallowed, barely eking out the words. “This… isn’t quite… what I expected.”

A stab of unexpected guilt crunched through Sakura’s chest and she tipped her head forward with a sigh, her hair falling across the front of his shirt. “I think we should talk first.”

She startled when Orochimaru’s cool hand drew across her chin, tilting her face up to his; she was disarmed by the gentle patience in his expression, the guilt making another stab through her chest in reaction. “If you don’t want to be here, Sakura-chan, then you should remember that you do not have to be.”

There it is, she realized as she searched Orochimaru’s calm amber-ochre eyes. The old image she’d remembered of him earlier - memories of his old self - this is where that person broke away and was someone else entirely.

With slightly trembling hands, Sakura reached up and took hold of the white hand that held her chin. “Thank you, but I intend to make good of what you promised me.” The attempted flirtation in Sakura’s tone wavered, and she winced at her lack of tact, pulled lightly at Orochimaru’s arm and leading him to the bed behind her. She questioned herself silently on why realizing he really was different now made her heart pound even harder.

Orochimaru reclined gracefully beside Sakura at the end of the bed, leaning forward and resting his chin on a hand while looking over at her. Sakura got the sense that he was both boundlessly patient with and entirely weary of her hesitation all at once - but she forged on with her words, feeling again the need to know more before she allowed herself to indulge in the thrill-seeking she’d come to accept was the theme of their strange new arrangement.

“You need to do more,” Sakura tried to explain. “This — it’s too— practical.”

Orochimaru raised his eyebrows at Sakura, and she bit her lip. How was she going to explain this? How did he not just inherently understand it already?

“If we’re going to have a thing going on like this, it implies… I don’t know… other parts of the set up. Not just showing up and doing it and done.” Sakura rubbed her crimson cheeks. “Like — normal people will go drinking first, or see a film, and get dressed up and go out, or — other stuff like that. Even for strictly physical — arrangements.”

“Hn.” Orochimaru tilted his head where he rested it on his hand, watching Sakura thoughtfully. “These are things you expect and want.”

“Yes,” she agreed, feeling thoroughly foolish, and he blinked at her oddly. “You stated that you want our meetings to be ‘just physical’, Sakura-chan.”

“I do want that,” Sakura blurted, and she knew that she was contradicting herself. “Well, it’s just so clear to me that you don’t know what you’re doing here, and you’re supposed to know everything. You’re trying to be a normal citizen now, anyway, which you’ve never been, so it makes sense you don’t know what you’re doing with seeing other people beyond just doing the deed. Maybe you need me to show you.”

Orochimaru’s eyes widened in response so Sakura’s declaration; she swallowed, knowing she’d blurt out the stupidest excuse she could have. Showing him how to date like a normal person? She wanted to punch herself.

He laughed, then, a rich, velvety laugh that took Sakura aback enough that she was half as offended as she would normally be. She glared at him half-heartedly under her lashes. “I wasn’t joking."

He was still chuckling, white teeth gleaming in his crooked smile, and Sakura’s blush stained deeper as she swerved and fisted his yukata, her legs swinging over his lap. “Stop laughing at me... Give me your answer,” she hissed, and his hands pressed around her back; she turned her face into his jaw, his dark hair falling loose around her in midnight waves; her hands slid up his chest to curl around his neck, seeking skin, and she sighed into his cheek as he murmured into her ear. “...If you want.”

“But…” Sakura frowned as she breathed him in, her heartbeat dragging into a slow, deep rhythm. “is that what you want?”

“I’m willing to experiment.”

Sakura exhaled softly, smiling where her lips met his skin. Orochimaru pulled her back with him, their slowly entwining figures falling onto the covers; she sat up, one hand pressing lightly against his chest. She searched his face with a tentative half-smile. “Well, I know that about you.”

Sakura drew up across his body, hovering over his face, ever-searching, Orochimaru’s dancing golden eyes flicking to her parted lips. She bent slowly over him, still uncertain; she whispered words of next time, next time you need to slipping out as her lips parted and her blood rushed. She felt his hands sliding gradually under her fitted shirt, and her hips pressed into his in response; the addictive burn of adrenaline was deep and gradual as it smoldered like embedded flames between their bodies. With the sharpening gleam of interest in Orochimaru’s slitted eyes, Sakura gave him her surrender, her eyes falling shut as she felt him smile against her lips.

Chapter Text

The night danced into the morning in a blur of tangling limbs and lips slipping over lips, and Sakura didn’t remember what led to her eventually dragging herself away, melted thoughts finally simmering down into the begrudging realization that she needed to get to her hospital shift. Her sleep-drenched and pleasure-wracked brain was caught in between having to leave warm sheets and warmer embraces or face the cold air and disciplinary action from work.

It hadn’t been enough to get her to resist temptation at first, however – not for another uncounted push of time that whispered unnoticed past them both, and it was when Orochimaru also sat up with a dawning regard to the time that Sakura took her groggy remembrance more seriously.

Breathing a little hard where she stood outside the door to the bedroom in the cavernous hall where she’d thrown herself, Sakura tugged her clothes back on in decided, hurried motions. She had never been late to work, not once, making today her first time being tardy - and significantly so. She couldn’t guess the time accurately without seeing the sun or a clock, but she felt the pressing urgency of needing to leave thumping under her skin.

Sakura adjusted her collar and guessed that they had arrived here from the right. She launched herself in that direction, ignoring her body’s pleasant and harmonious afterglow humming. The dark grooved hallway recalled twice as many memories now than it had last night, and Sakura pushed a moody hand through her damp hair as she tried to shove her reminiscing away, the tangy citrus scents catching in her nose and causing her to blush. It brought reminders that the bathroom attached to the bedroom had been just as drab and boring, purely functional; it also reminded her that the company she’d had in the shower was the opposite of those things. She had been heavily delayed in getting clean; she was sore through the singing of her every muscle.

Sakura lingered on her new memories of what had happened only minutes ago, doing her best to walk normally as she strode toward the distant cave exit, her cheeks lifting slightly as she went.

Sakura was disgruntled by the reminder that she’d been with Orochimaru sober again as she turned on the showerhead of the small but lavish bathroom, running a hand through her hair as she waited for the water to heat. If it weren’t for the way she felt physically well-sated along with the soreness, she would call herself clinically insane and check herself into Ino’s office for a thorough head examination. She half-considered doing that anyway.

As she stepped into the warm water and tugged the curtain over the stall, she heard bare feet pad into the bathroom. Sakura tried to ignore the question nagging in her head as she rinsed her hair, using the familiar shampoo of his on the shelf; she heard the sink run briefly, and then the bare feet moved across the tile floor quietly as a white hand drew aside the shower curtain, answering her silent thought.

“Hey!” Sakura blushed as Orochimaru stepped into the shower with her, and her wet hands hit lightly on his chest in protest as he closed the curtain again. He reached over behind her to increase the heat of the water a small increment. Sakura wanted to shove him back out of the small shower stall, but when his hand landed on her waist and she felt his lips on her neck, she groaned. “I came in here to get clean…”

As he ignored her words, she felt Orochimaru’s other hand curl around her waist, and Sakura hmmphed as she rinsed her hair and he pressed another biting kiss into her wet skin. Steam rose between them; her hands moved from her hair to his sides, pressing in gently against his toned skin. Sakura turned the two of them around in the shower, keeping her eyes shyly away from his lower half as she reached up, her fingers running through his wet hair.

Pausing in his marking of her throat, Orochimaru tipped his head back to give Sakura a questioning look as she then deposited a squirt of shampoo into his hair from the nearby unmarked bottle. “You need to get clean too,” she grumbled as she ran her fingers gently over his scalp, lathering his long black hair. He continued to stare at her in bewilderment, but as her fingers massaged gently, he closed his eyes in a catlike smile. Encouraged, Sakura kept going, thoroughly entreating his long hair to the white foamy lather of lime-eucalyptus shampoo, and she smiled slightly. “You know… you never did tell me what you do to make your hair so silky.”

“Hmm?” Orochimaru kept his eyes closed to avoid getting the lather in his eyes; Sakura rinsed her hand and wiped the shampoo that had fallen onto his face, and he blinked down at her wearily. “I just clean it frequently.”

“You don’t use some kind of magical conditioner?” Sakura pressed him slightly further back into the full stream of the showerhead; she felt his hand rest on her lower back, and she shivered as she began to rinse out the shampoo. “Truly,” he answered, raising a brow at her frown as she focused on his hair, one hand squeezing out the shampoo lather as she cleaned it out, the citrus scents and steam filling the room.

“Bullshit.” Sakura narrowed her green eyes at Orochimaru, blinking water droplets from her eyes. “I don’t believe you one bit.”

He mirrored her expression, golden eyes clashing with green as his hand pressed against her back and drew their fronts together; she ignored the heat within and around them as she maintained her challenging look. Orochimaru’s voice was slightly cracked with sleep, deeper with a rough edge, and Sakura shivered against him. “I’ve never used it, Sakura-chan. You have such a fascination with my hair.”

An idea crossed her mind, and she ignored his ire as her eyes brightened. “Wait, so if you’ve never used it, what would happen if we did?” Sakura finished washing the shampoo from his tangled black locks, her hands slipping to rest on his shoulders, and she swallowed as she suddenly realised their water-soaked embrace in the small shower; with a dark grin Orochimaru bent his head closer to her, pressing another kiss to her neck. “Hey, none of that,” Sakura grumbled, running her hands down his arms, her eyes touching briefly again upon winding patterns of summoning tattoos around his arm and beneath his other shoulder. “I’m so sore.”

“It was just a kiss, Sakura-chan.” His tone deepened with the clear implication that it was going to become so much more, and Sakura pressed her nose into his shoulder with a hiss at the pleasant tingles his lips left in her skin. “Let me finish getting washed.”

“No.” He pressed her up against the shower wall, the hot water making their skins steam, and she caught a glimpse of his flashing golden eyes before he kissed her fiercely; she couldn’t help but to wrap her arms tightly around him, one leg dragging up his waist, moaning as one of his hands cupped one of her breasts and the other descended. She gasped sharply when he slipped a finger into her, teasing her in slow circles, and her moan became a sleep-cracked groan of pleasure; she tipped her head into the crook of his neck as his finger pushed deeper and was joined by his teasing thumb on the sensitive bundle of nerves at her core. She made pleased, broken croons into his ear as he pleasured her.

“Bastard,” she murmured as he tortured her slowly, making another throaty sigh as she gripped his shoulders more tightly. “Oh, hell—” She inhaled sharply as his fingers disappeared, replaced by the head of his erect member, and she pressed her face into his neck with a groan as he now teased her with that instead. “You talk too much,” Orochimaru murmured into her ear as he slid into her with one harsh buck of his hips; she gasped against his wet skin, scrabbling for a grip on his slippery skin, her thoughts obliterated by the feel of him within her.

“Yeah—well—” She shuddered as he withdrew slowly, and he grinned into her ear as he began a slow rhythm, taking her against the shower wall. Her moans matched his rhythm, deep and sighing; she moved her face back from his neck as he pressed her shoulders to the smooth wall, and they held each other’s eyes while he thrusted. “—I’m going to—test that conditioner theory,” Sakura managed.

With an impatient glint of his eyes, Orochimaru dipped down and kissed her again, silencing her as he increased his rhythm from torturous to merciless, supporting her weight against the wall and her moans turning to pleased cries as her words were finally forgotten amidst their shared waves of elation.

It was much later before Sakura again realized the time and they unentangled as she panicked, pulling on her clothes with red-faced embarrassment while he looked on with a weary but satisfied crooked grin. Before Sakura moved to leave, she walked up to where he leaned nude by the bathroom doorway. She was about to reach up to his face, but withdrew to fold her arms instead, giving him a half-hearted glare. “You better have been serious last night, when you agreed to my demands,” she said, “if I’m going to… show you how to do this right, I want you to at least pretend that you care.”

“And you should try to remember that you are still a student and fledgling kunoichi. You forget your position, Sakura-chan.” Orochimaru leaned over Sakura with a half-smile; she read a mix of annoyance and humor in his gaze, accompanied by a gleam that played a thrill through her nerves.

“Fledgling! I’m a ‘second-coming of the sannin’, which you know damn well.” Sakura stuck out her lip. “Do you actually expect me to call you ‘Orochimaru-sama’? I only said that to Yamato last night because I was in disguise in that moment.” Sakura grinned up at him, one hand lingering on his chest and amusement warming her. The old title sounded silly to her now. “We’ll see if you can ever get me to call you that again, Orochimaru-kun,” she teased, dancing back from his outstretched hand with a blush at the dually playful and foreboding look in his eyes. Then she turned, pushing through the door into the hallway, his gaze following her as she went.

Sakura was smiling as she lifted her head and let the memory dissipate from her mind for now, refocusing her attention on the tunnel before her. She shook the smile from her face as soon as she realized it was there. She knew she’d have her doubts and her self-flagellating thoughts later on, but for now, she felt better than she had in as long as she could remember.

All of her thoughts flew away when she noticed the light at the end of the long hallway. She picked up her pace, jogging toward it - thoughts of how angry Tsunade would be if she heard of her apprentice’s extreme lateness came to mind, and Sakura’s jog became a sprint.

She burst into the fresh early-summer air, skidding to a halt when she noticed Yamato leaning against a tree near the entrance; clouds of dust rose from where her sandaled feet disturbed the dirt. His weary eyes swept over Sakura’s wet hair and flushed skin and narrowed. Sakura stood confidently in front of the dark cave mouth with a daring smile and dagger-eyes, the sun glittering in her damp pink hair. “Have something to comment on, Yamato-taichou?”

“Well…” He averted his gaze from her, a tinge of pale color in his face as he looked queasy. “I’m glad to see you looking so happy for once, Sakura-chan, but I’m not going to ask what you did in there… for nearly twelve hours.”

“Hmph.” Sakura rolled her eyes and cleared her throat, tucking her hair behind her ears as she decided how to phrase what she wanted to ask. “I’m already late to work, so I really have to go. But…” She let out a slow exhale through her nose before turning searching eyes back to Yamato. “Are you going to tell anyone outside of Anbu about this?”

Yamato watched Sakura pensively for a long moment. The longer he waited to give her his response, the heavier her heart grew with fears that he’d say no - that he’d go straight to the Hokage, that everyone would learn whatever Yamato and the Anbu’s take was on what her and Orochimaru’s recent rendezvous were. Sakura unconsciously gripped the fabric of her dark green qipao at the center of her chest, feeling her pulse throb and a coldness spreading through her ribcage. Was it all over already? Had he submitted some kind of report to the Council? He’d certainly consider Orochimaru to be manipulative and committing atrocities to Sakura rather than anything else. Whatever Yamato relayed to Konoha administration, it would probably be considered a breach of Orochimaru’s peace contract with them. Sakura’s lungs constricted as she wondered if her question and implicit request that Yamato keep their secret had come far too late.

Her breath hitched as Yamato’s mouth twisted wistfully with resolution.

Sakura let out her exhale in a willowy sigh of relief when he slowly shook his head. “I won’t go out of my way to report you two, no.” He shifted where he stood, folding his arms and staring Sakura down sternly. “I did check the medical records you mentioned, and I’ve known you long enough to sense when you’re being manipulated or trying to lie. So, for now, I’ll let you have your… whatever this is you’re doing with Orochimaru, as long as you remain happy and unharmed.” He folded his arms. “But I’ll be watching the both of you closely.”

Sakura let out a shaky sigh, green eyes piercing Yamato once more before she shot off into the sunlit forest.

Sakura hugged her clipboard with her hastily-scribbled apology note to Shizune to her chest and moved along down the hall to the break room. Her mind trickled back through her stony resolutions to focus and pooled into the murmurings of the night’s remembered sensations, causing her eyes to drift and slowly close as she sipped lukewarm coffee in a paper cup. Sakura smiled into her drink as she felt the ghostly cool fingers in her memory trailing down her back, hot breath on her shoulder, warm weight pressing against her front; her muscles held a deep, pleasant ache that twinged in every move she made.

Her cheeks had warmed to a temperature rivaling her coffee by the time she threw back the rest of it, her heartbeat a little faster as she tossed the cup into the recycling bin. Her body thrummed with the refreshing spike of caffeine; Sakura had reasonable hope that this fourth cup of the day would carry her through a couple more hours of work until she could go home.

She shivered as she tightened her coat around herself. The thought that Orochimaru might actually humor her blurted declaration to show him what proper courting was like for normal people was both amusing and a little daunting; she thought at first by his laugh that he was dismissing her, but then there had been that serious hue in his darkening eye that told Sakura that he fully expected her to make good of her promise. She didn’t know for sure if he was going to make more efforts like she’d wanted, and she didn’t know if perhaps she’d overthought his expression, and he’d really been laughing her off – she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Sakura also didn’t want to admit to anyone, nor herself, that she took an egotistical pleasure in having something to teach someone else. It flattered her ego that whatever she might have to express was of interest to someone like Orochimaru, who had a reputation for knowing everything already. She was quick to quash that little anticipatory thrill and reminded herself that he was very likely not taking her seriously.

Sakura was disgusted with herself again as she washed her hands in the nearby sink, running a damp hand along her brow. What am I doing with someone like him? She forced her library of memory to skim down the long list of Orochimaru’s crimes in a self-guilting attempt to feel worse about the undeniably memorable and enjoyable night and morning she had shared with him yet again.

One of the nurses Sakura regularly worked with had joined Sakura in the break room at one point, and had been watching her out of the corner of her eye as she’d wiped away the sleep from the corners of her eyes and adjusted her hair net. Sakura had felt her stare but had chosen to ignore it; feeling the curious eyes linger on her a moment too long, she looked over at the nurse with a quizzical look.

“Oh, sorry, Haruno-sama.” The nurse bowed slightly and averted her eyes, long dark hair shifting, and Sakura laughed at the overly respectful title. “Please. Just Sakura at least, don’t call me by my last name. Can I help you with something?”

The nurse shrugged, a small smile on her lips as she turned and poured herself a half-cup of cold coffee. “Well… I’m glad you’re feeling so… good today.”

Sakura adjusted her clipboard in her arm, blinking at the odd comment. “What?”

“You should maybe,” the nurse said, sliding back out of the room with a giggle, “look in the mirror…”

With a pop, Sakura’s mouth fell agape as she turned to the small mirror over the sink, the temporary want to pummel the nurse for laughing forgotten as she lifted her hands to her neck. “Damn it! That bastard!” she cursed, slamming her fists down on the sink, and it gave a plaintive crack as she furiously started healing the visible hickeys on her neck and collarbone.

“You know that I don’t buy your excuse,” Shizune was telling Sakura as they walked together toward the elevators later into the evening at the end of Sakura’s shift, Sakura’s coat thrown over her shoulder and her face somewhat haggard with exhaustion. “You might be able to convince Lady Tsunade with excuses about too much sake and a rough morning but it won’t fly for me anymore when it comes to downturns in your work at the hospital, and now, you’re letting it make you late.”

“Mm-hmm,” Sakura hummed, rubbing her eyes with a yawn; she stretched her arms as they arrived at the elevators, and Shizune pressed the button for ground floor while unwavering in continuing her lecture. “And it’s only going to get worse now! Don’t make me bring Tsunade into this. You know how busy she is, and she’s crankier than ever, even without Hokage duties in her way.”

“Yep,” Sakura agreed, thinking with increasing joy about the virtues of easygoing people and also blessed silence, and that Shizune’s lecture was only making her want to go get drunk on sake more, and she really didn’t want to be forced to listen anymore as Shizune followed her into the elevator, finger waggling in the air with her well-intentioned but sharp-tongued chastising. “...but I’m glad you finally found someone. That’s definitely one of the minor good points here, even though the way you announced it with your ahem, love bites, really is distracting the staff—”

“What!” Sakura snapped to attention. “I haven’t — how did you? — I don’t have any — ugh!”

Shizune laughed, her clipboard shaking against her chest; she raised her dark eyebrows at Sakura in a knowing way. “Come on, everyone in the hospital has heard by now. I do hope you’ll tell me about it more soon, because I’m dying to know who managed to leave hickeys on you, of all people.”

“No one,” Sakura hissed as the elevator doors dinged and shuddered back open to reveal the ground floor. She took her escape from Shizune, who was still giggling, calling behind her as her blood raced under her blushing skin. “And I’m not going to tell you, or anyone else, and none of you will ever know a single thing about any of it!”

Sakura stomped past the doors into the reception lobby and then slowed again when the receptionist waved at her urgently; she let out a long-suffering sigh, walking over to the half-circle reception desk and slumping against the nearby wall before fixing sharp eyes upon the young man working at the counter whose name she couldn’t recall. “What do you want? I need to go home and sleep for the next age. I’ve been here the entire day. What time is it now? Ten?”

“Dunno, really,” the receptionist replied, bored eyes flicking between Sakura and the lobby that stretched out ahead of them. “but your… escort? Driver? Some guy’s here for you.”

Sakura looked over to where the receptionist was looking and raised her eyebrows as she beheld a sleek reddish-gold haired man in a suit, leaning up against one of the lobby walls with his arms folded. Her gaze trailed up his sharp, polished shoes, trim-cut dark slacks, and fitted suit jacket. It was fitted, expensive, and modern; she could see from where she stood that the material was silky and well-tailored.

Her curious attention shifted then to his face and every instinct she had singed with warning. Something about this visitor was off, something that told her she should know who he was but didn’t.

Sakura got up off the wall with a huff. She was annoyed twofold: first that she was cast again into a strange situation she had to deal with under the stresses of being exhausted, and second that she found the man objectively attractive. As she decided whether or not she wanted to approach him, she tried to file through her mental records of who he might be, searching his slightly smirking face where he waited for her patiently. The stranger appeared hazel-eyed and handsome with even, tanned features, his medium-length auburn hair hanging in wild ringlets that spilled around his face and over his shoulders; nothing particular about his suave suit or glinting stare stirred red flags of who he might be other than the stirring in her chest that she absolutely, somehow, had known him somewhere before. Suna? Sakura wondered, appraising his tan skin, or… some other foreign traveller?

She tilted her head back toward the receptionist, never taking her eyes away from the unwavering stare of the red-gold stranger. “Did he say who he was?”

“He just said he knew you and that you were expecting him. I guess you weren’t expecting him, huh.” He played idly with his pen, and Sakura didn’t like the way the receptionist had a gossipy look hiding behind his stare that he was turning to her; with a grunt she stepped away from the desk, striding toward the stranger.

Sakura felt conspicuously underdressed as she approached him, wearing the same dark green qipao from last night with the one pair of at least somewhat clean shorts she could find in the disastrous mess of her apartment that morning, carrying her dirty scrubs and coat under one arm. She hadn’t had time to dig for better clothes or a different top, too busy trying to jet her way to the hospital before Shizune posted a bounty for her head.

Sakura’s mouth went dry as the stranger stood up from where he had been leaning on the wall and offered her his arm, flashing her a wide-lipped grin that stretched over white teeth. She saw the glint of gold earrings hidden in the riotous yet magazine-worthy falls of his wavy auburn hair and breathed in the scent of starchy clean clothes and fresh air along with a subtle tangy scent; Sakura shook her head of the details she was noticing, annoyance flaring again within her. “I apologize but I don’t know you. Did we have an appointment?” She pointedly stepped back from the stranger’s offered arm, eyeing it suspiciously.

He leaned toward her, glittering eyes intense beneath his slender auburn brows. Sakura noticed that his eyes were not just hazel, but ochre, with flecks of other color; she felt her blood thrill from the intensity of his stare. “You don’t recognize me at all, Sakura-chan?”

“You… you’re vaguely familiar.” Sakura frowned, shifting uncomfortably where she stood, feeling oddly guilty. She eyed the stranger, giving him another quick once-over and then shaking her head tiredly. “Am I supposed to know you?”

He leaned down and took her arm anyway, his tan skin paling under the fluorescent lobby lights as he drew close; Sakura was petrified for a moment as he dipped his head and spoke with his lips against her ear, his once-flat and average voice deepening into one that was velvet and all too familiar. “You called me golden thing at one point.”

Sakura’s gasp tangled with his low chuckle. Her hands gripped his razor-straight lapels as she hissed in a harsh whisper into his warm cheek. “Oro—! What are you doing here! Oh, damn it all!” Heart pounding in her chest, she gripped his arm tightly, pulling the both of them out the hospital’s front double-doors and out of her coworkers’ earshot as quickly as she could without looking too suspicious.

Sakura swerved to face Orochimaru, releasing his sleeve and then resting her twitching hand on her hip, red-faced. Gripping her scrubs tightly with her other hand, she tamped down on her astonished expression and rapid pulse. “What was all of that! What the hell?!”

He grinned at her, and Sakura’s ears tingled as his voice retained his normal silky timbre, no longer disguised as flat and average. “Good evening, Sakura-chan. I thought I might show you how henge disguises are done correctly.”

She blinked rapidly at his appearance, her remaining tugs of annoyance tightening as she wondered how she didn’t realize it sooner: Orochimaru had assumed the appearance of the male version of Sakura’s own henge that she had done just a day before, the one she had used to try and fool Yamato. She recognized the wavy, bouncing auburn mane, the amber-ochre eyes, the tan skin.

She narrowed her eyes at him, hiding her smile with the hand that had been moodily tapping on her hip. “Jerk.” Her attention fell from his strange, disguised face, dragging up and down his body. “What’s with the suit…?”

Orochimaru raised his dark brows, his whiskey irises glinting as they melted into illuminated gold, and Sakura snatched his arm as she dragged him away into the dark and completely out of the hospital windows’ view. “If they recognize you I am done for,” she hissed as they walked in shadow. “Do you have any idea how stressful it is already having probably the entirety of Anbu know that I’ve been with you? And those hickeys you left –! I’m going to be the gossip at work all week…”

Orochimaru finished reverting his appearance, the auburn ringlets of his mane uncurling and darkening into arrow-straight black locks that fell around his shadowed face. Sakura swallowed her words as she looked him over once more. She had been trying and failing in her efforts not to devour how he looked, and now that he was himself again, she couldn’t help it; her grip on him loosened, becoming light, tracing touches across the smooth fabric of the formal suit-jacket and silky dress shirt beneath.

“You need to improve your skills in deception then, Sakura-chan. You are a kunoichi, after all,” he replied in answer to her earlier griping, his pale hands slipping into his coat pockets.

Annoyance thoroughly forgotten, Sakura’s gaze magnetized back to Orochimaru’s fitted suit. It was nice, it was expensive; her eyes lingered on the smooth and slightly glossy razor-sharp lapels, the simple silver cufflinks, the neatly pressed slacks. It was something one would wear to an upscale wedding or formal party rather than to pick someone up from the hospital lobby. Sakura felt sweat dampening the back of her neck as she returned her attention to Orochimaru’s face. He was smirking; he hadn’t been missing the way she was giving him several thorough once-overs. “You like it.”

Sakura bit her lip. “It’s a bit much.”

He tilted his head, gleaming black hair falling loosely around his slender shoulders. “Does it soothe your… expectations?”

Something in Sakura’s responding smile made Orochimaru’s golden eyes widen, slitted pupils dilating and catching the light. She blinked at him, memories of their rendezvous the night before warming her stomach as she enjoyed what he was wearing. Damn him…

“You know I’m exhausted, don’t you?” Sakura addressed the silent question between them as she shifted in her sweaty clothes; her eyes flicked down his suit and back to his pale face under his dark hair, pink tinting Sakura’s cheeks as her body thrummed in weary but eager anticipation. “Aren’t you tired?”

“I’ll take that as a yes to my question,” Orochimaru hissed as he pulled her toward him, and Sakura shuddered as his hand slipped up along her neck and angled along her cheek. His dark hair fell in straight black lines around her as their noses brushed, and she was transfixed by his unwavering stare as his grin hovered over her slightly parted lips. “Are you going to invite me in?”

Sakura realized with a jolt that they had reached the outside of her apartment complex, and with a deep flush of heat Sakura turned from him and pushed open the doors to the small building. She heard him follow behind her, dark shoes clicking on the hard floors, and her heart beat angrily against her chest as he followed her through the empty lobby into the elevator. He joined her as the door slowly closed, the dim yellow lights flickering on his dark clothes, and Sakura wasted no more time as she pulled his face back down to her, tasting his lips. Orochimaru mmmed into her kiss as the doors dinged and reopened; she tugged him down the hall to her apartment, not bothering to unmeld their faces as she unlocked the door with practiced hands behind her. She pulled him into the dark of her home and wrapped her arms around his neck as he pushed them through toward her bedroom. She fell back on the bed and watched as he shrugged off his dress clothes in the blackness. “Be nice to those,” Sakura murmured as he continued to peel off layers, “I want to see those on you again. And… you don’t need to dress up that much for me…”

Orochimaru’s chuckle rumbled deep through her as he leaned over her then, pale body gleaming in the slight light of the dark windows, and Sakura surrendered to him once more as they curled into the sheets.

Chapter Text

Sakura sunk into her office chair, hiding her face under the musty pages of a forgotten book that she picked up from a nearby pile of clutter on her desk. She inhaled the pleasant scents of the text’s old glue and faded ink, finding an ounce of solace in the familiar smell but not as much as she needed. When had she last tasted peace and quiet? When would the daily madness end? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

The door shuddered in its frame under the successive pressure of a thundering knock, the frequently-abused hinges groaning nearly as loudly as Sakura. She shoved the dusty book higher over her face, grumbling into the pages and not bothering to hide the threats implicit in her growling tone. “Come back later!”

Sakura flinched behind the safety of the hardcover when the door banged open with the kick of a not-so-dainty foot and shrill shout. “Forehead!”

With a second and much more miserable groan, Sakura slid back deep enough into her chair that she was almost under her desk. “For the love of all that’s holy in this world… leave me in peace, Pig.”

“What are these rumors I’m hearing!” Ino stomped up to Sakura, hands on her hips, her aggressive ire lessening slightly with the arch of her eyebrow at the sight of how Sakura was slouched. She snorted upon seeing what she was using as a makeshift shield, shaking her head. “...You’re not a shelf. Ditch the book and talk to me.”

“I’m whatever I need to be in order for people to give me some space.” Sakura sighed into the comfort of the book before exhaling and setting it aside, lolling her head back against the headrest of her chair and eyeing Ino’s moody pose with apprehension. “What rumors?”

“You know damn well,” Ino sniffed, wrinkling her nose as she looked around, her sharp gaze narrowing with offense as it touched upon the dead flowers in a dried-out vase teetering on the corner of the desk. She picked up the crumbling bouquet of disintegrating brown leaves and wilted blooms between two pinching painted nails, tossing it into the nearby trash can before turning her expression of disgust onto Sakura. “You live like such a pig that you’re totally hypocritical in calling me one.” She folded her arms. “I came to check on you after I knock some sense into you for avoiding me again. And after hearing all that I’ve heard this past week...” Ino leaned forward, an insatiable curiosity sparkling behind the annoyance in her expression. “Explain to me everything that’s going on with this swanky businessman that you’re suddenly dating!”

Sakura blinked at Ino blankly before reaching over, picking the book back up, and thunking it over her face with a grumble that became a whine as Ino plucked the book back out of her hands, tossing it back onto the desk. “I’ve heard, Forehead, that he’s some hot reddish-haired rich guy from Suna or some other different village—” Ino began counting off on her fingers as Sakura ran a hand over her sweating forehead, “—that you’re a gold-digger engaged to him after a fling —” Sakura waved her ringless fingers furiously at Ino as she continued, “—that you’re pregnant…”

“I am not pregnant!” Sakura stood up, her chair screeching against the floor, and she felt her stomach over her qipao, feeling a little panicked. “Do I look pregnant to people? Have I gained weight? Why would people say that? Oh, these rumors are so much worse than I thought they were… and after being out with him in public just the one time!”

Ino gripped the edges of Sakura’s desk, the inquisitive look on her face intensifying. “What! So you are dating some rich hot guy now! What’s his name? I’ve heard you call him ‘golden thing’. Where is he from? How did you meet? And what’s with you and your controversial taste in men lately? Did your one wild one-night-stand really make you that much more adventurous all of a sudden?” She snickered as Sakura reddened, exhaling sharply through her nose and burying her head in her hands. “No, I’m not dating anyone. I was just — walked home by — someone recently. Those damn gossipy nurses… they told everyone in the hospital.”

“Not just the hospital.” Ino raised her eyebrows as she cleared the mess of papers off of a spare chair and pulled up near Sakura, feet tapping expectantly on the floor. “Everyone has heard these rumors at this point. And don’t think that you can get away with lying to me, Sakura, I know you better than anyone…. and by the way, one of the interns was telling me when I got here that you had hickeys earlier this week.” Ino giggled. “Said you nearly destroyed the whole break room when someone pointed them out to you.”

“Tell me you’re joking.” Sakura cringed in her chair. “I can barely deal with my coworkers already. Every day it’s been golden thing this, golden thing that, and they won’t leave me alone. Why do you think I was in here instead of the cafeteria for my break?” She simmered, scowling with clenching fists. All week, she’d heard that nickname she had once drunkenly called Orochimaru, tossed around in laughing jibes and in probing curious questions from people she barely knew, something that apparently everyone present in the lobby that night had heard him teasingly croon into her ear.

“Easy solution. Threaten to break their faces. Haven’t you done that yet?” Ino shook her head disapprovingly; Sakura shook her head. “I’d get in trouble, Ino. I can’t let Lady Tsunade hear these rumors. I’m on the ropes as it is already.”

“Well, maybe you’re caught up in this mess because you haven’t let your best friend in on what the hell is happening.” Ino folded her arms tightly, her tone growing bitter. “It’s like you don’t trust me anymore. I’ve been so worried about you. You stopped answering your phone… again… I don’t know why you even have one! And I still don’t know what happened after that evening at Ichiraku’s, which we definitely need to talk about.”

Sakura paled at the reminder of that day, and went white at the idea of telling Ino what happened in the forest and afterward. She cleared her throat and looked away, her hands sweaty as she adjusted her shirt and looked nervously toward the door. “Oh… it was nothing. I mean, yeah that was embarrassing! I went home, afterward.”

“Uh-huh.” Ino rolled her eyes. “You ran off in the opposite direction of your apartment, and I didn’t see you come back.”

Sakura scowled. “Did you try to follow me or something?”

“No, you ran out of there so fast, and I tried to call you, but I guess your phone was dead?” Ino got to her feet and stood pointedly between Sakura and the office door. “You’re not leaving until you tell me what happened. Ugh, Forehead, it was so embarrassing when you ditched me! Orochimaru disappeared like you did and I was left there with Kabuto.” She made a face. “It was so awkward.”

“I can imagine…” Sakura shifted uncomfortably where she stood by her desk, wiping her palms on her shorts. “We can catch up about the rest later. I should probably get back to work.”

Ino was still thinking, a frown pursing her lips as she eyed Sakura. “Come to think of it, were you okay? Are you okay? Orochimaru didn’t go after you, did he? He did overhear all the stuff you babbled, after all. He was probably… well, I don’t know. Upset, maybe.” She blinked at Sakura, peering at her more closely. “You’re not denying that he came after you.”

“I’m fine! I was fine!” Sakura backtracked, her cheeks tinting with color again as she waved her hands in the air defensively. “And he didn’t come after me. I just took a walk. It was a nice night.”

Ino narrowed her eyes at Sakura. “...It was raining.”

“Yep,” Sakura amended, and she scooted around the desk, picking up the clipboard on the wall and hugging it tightly to her chest, fully intent on escaping; she jumped when Ino’s manicured fingers flashed out and gripped her arm, tugging her back from the door as she swerved with a hiss, “He did come find you then! You’re such a terrible liar! What did he say? What did you say after all that stuff you’d already admitted to me? He didn’t hurt you, did he? Oh, I swear, I’ll kill that snake if he so much as touched you —”

“Of course he didn’t!” Sakura lied, shaking her arm from Ino’s grip with a glare and red cheeks. “He was — he didn’t — I…” She let out a huff, tripping over her excuses that had become a conglomerate of confused and broken phrases. “Look, I’ll update you later on what happened. We… talked. Everything’s fine.”

“Everything’s fine... everything’s fine?!” Ino waved her arms at Sakura. “Hello! Earth to Sakura! He’s Orochimaru! Nothing is fine if he’s seeking you out like that. And — what in the world did you guys talk about, exactly? And who’s the guy you’re dating that everyone saw you with this week? Does Orochimaru have something to do with him?”

“We’re not talking about this anymore,” Sakura shot back, backing up to the door and wrenching it open. “I told you I’ll tell you everything later! I promise.”

Ino narrowed her eyes. “You had better mean that, Forehead. If you try to put me off for the third time and avoid me, I swear I’ll —”

Sakura was a pink-red streak out the door and down the hall as she escaped the rest of Ino’s threat, head aching with all that she knew she’d have to inevitably admit to her someday soon - something she fully intended to put off as long as possible.

Sakura walked home that evening with her head down and her hands shoved in her pockets. The streets were cast in a dark gray pallor by the pensive storm around her, its woolen expanse heavy with impending rain. As she turned the usual corner to her apartments, Sakura’s shadowed eyes strayed to the darkness that clung to the building and swathed the nightscape, wandering, searching.

Failure, stung the reminder that stitched through her thoughts, and Sakura let out a shaky breath as she pushed open the doors to her apartment complex and stepped through, rubbing the weariness from her eyes with a palm. The need for distraction arose within her, more urgent now that she was closer to home - distraction not only from the hollowness in her chest, but from the sorrow that flooded her now.

Sakura reflected, as she dragged her feet over to the elevators, that she hadn’t heard from the golden thing who had sparked all of those tumultuous rumors since last she had seen him over a week and a half ago. She had been unable to stop herself from anticipating his return, pausing in the hospital lobby before leaving after the end of her shifts with a hated little thrill of hope. Each night, she had pushed through the doors and left alone, doing her best to ignore the curious stares of fellow nurses and doctors who happened to be nearby and knowing that the way she looked for him would only add to the rumors. The widespread gossip had worried her; she’d been chagrined and ashamed by her colleagues’ whispers that followed her seemingly everywhere, Ino’s endless pestering buzzing in the form of text messages in her pocket. Tonight, however, Sakura felt little but a seeping dark void within.

He’s lost interest in you. The thought broke through Sakura’s head and settled heavily in her stomach. You, and your idiotic demands from before. Like the past… always a burden, left behind.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said aloud, hitting the button for her floor on the elevator’s control panel and rubbing her temples in the way she had unconsciously picked up from Tsunade. Her troubled thoughts retreated unwillingly to what had violently resurfaced her feelings of incompetence, her head tipping back as she listened to the hum of the elevator and tried to fight back the tears she knew were coming.

Knowing from the moment she’d laid eyes on the emergency patient that he would die didn’t ease her feelings of determination and then grief when she and Shizune had done their best and lost him anyway, two hours ago. Memories of his young bloodied face twisted in anguish flashed through Sakura’s head and her expression twisted with anguish, her hands running up to cover her ears at the memories of his fading cries, of the heart monitor’s beeping becoming one long, dead tone. He was just a genin.

The elevator doors opened with an announcing shudder. Opening her eyes, her hands sliding down to fall limply at her sides, Sakura stepped into the compartment. Her hands and wrists twinged with their muscle-strain and she felt a sudden and overwhelming despair wash through her as she leaned against the side of one of the paneled walls, her throat and chest tight.

You’re why that genin died from his injuries. You can’t even do well in the one job you know how to do. He was twelve years old.

Slight and thin reassurances in the back of her mind that sometimes patients die, sometimes they cannot be saved, went ignored and forgotten as Sakura stepped out from the elevator into the dim hall of her floor, making her way slowly to her apartment door. She stared at it with a blank expression, a creeping cold like frostbite spreading down through her body. She knew what awaited her there in the darkness and the quiet; she knew how she would fall asleep, choked with her tears and the endless glasses of sake that always silently promised to wash away the pain of losing a patient. She always knew, too, how it never would, making the pain progressively worse until she eventually faded into a dreamless, heartsick sleep.

Sakura didn’t know how long she stood there before she finally lifted her trembling hand and set it upon the handle of the door, taking out her keys. She tried to kick herself from her grief, wiping at her face with a shake of her head. She had gotten through losing patients before. She knew that her way of dealing with her losses was unhealthy, though she was going to do it anyway, because she didn’t have any other way.

She stuck her key in the lock and turned the handle before realizing, with a shock, that it was already unlocked.

Sakura shoved the door open, panic seizing in her chest, her wide eyes adjusting to the lights of her well-lit apartment that she knew she’d left turned off when she left this morning; she slammed the door shut behind her, poised for a fight with whomever had dared break into her apartment, heart pounding with angry adrenaline.

Orochimaru lifted his head from where he’d been peering down at the contents of Sakura’s living room bookshelf, calm golden eyes catching on Sakura’s tense figure. “Ah, Sakura-chan.”

She searched the sight of him, standing casually by her couch in front of the shelf, his usual flowing white yukata a cream color over his dark shirt in the yellowish lights of Sakura’s apartment. He tilted his head at her frozen state with an arching brow, the slash of his metallic earring flashing under his obsidian-black hair.

Sakura slowly began to relax, her taut muscles untensing and unknotting under her warming skin as she exhaled gradually. Her thoughts poured back through her skull like someone swirling the contents of a wine glass. Where has he been? Why is he here? What is he doing?

Shaking herself out of her stupor, she walked up to Orochimaru’s side, narrowing her eyes at his slight smile and commencing her inquisition. “What are you doing in my house without an invitation? And why are you digging through my books?” Sakura wiped away her cheeks in a quick motion, not wanting him to see her drying tears.

Orochimaru returned his attention to said books, perusing them with a long white finger that slid along the spines of scrolls and hardcover medical texts. Sakura bit on the inside of her cheek as he selected a rather fat book and pulled it from the shelf, deft hands sliding over its cover and hefting it before apparently deeming it satisfactory and tucking it under his arm. “I was seeking something interesting to read,” he answered, regarding the book thoughtfully.

With a soft snort at his obvious statement, Sakura slid her hand over Orochimaru’s arm; he paused, giving her a sidelong glance. She looked away from him as her words were akin to a mumble. “Um. Well… there’s nothing that isn’t boring in that bookshelf. I don’t really keep books meant to entertain guests or — somehow-welcome intruders.” She squeezed Orochimaru’s arm before releasing him abruptly, her head lifting into a different mindset as she wondered what to cook; she needed dinner and she had no idea what she had in her fridge that could constitute a meal.

Sakura kicked off her sandals and padded into the kitchen, cracking her knuckles and stretching her arms as she watched Orochimaru flip through his chosen book’s pages. She had noticed that he’d taken out the first volume of one of her well-read tomes, Human Gut Flora and their Microbiome Relationships with Chakra Natures. “There’s nothing intriguing in that one, either,” Sakura went on while she tugged open the door to her dishwasher, feeling glad that she kept her personal journal in her nightstand and not in her living room bookshelf, thanks to having endured Ino’s snooping during her occasional visits. “Unless you like intensive medical texts, anyway.”

“Actually, I do.” Orochimaru’s response made both of Sakura’s eyebrows rise as she stood up from where she’d been hunched over the dish rack. She watched as he took the book with him to the couch, sitting down and opening it, settling it in his lap and beginning to read.

“If you’re trying to flatter me, that’s a weird way to do it,” Sakura replied, continually glancing over at him as his curious golden snake-eyes pored through the pages; she smiled wryly to herself while she loaded piles of dirty dishes from her sink into the dishwasher’s metal racks. She heard Orochimaru give a non-committal hn to her words as he delved into the text, and she found with a shake of her head that it very much flattered her. No one she knew other than perhaps one or two fellow doctors would have any interest in touching that book and they wouldn’t read it recreationally.

Sakura grimaced as she leaned on her open fridge door and scanned its contents. Of course my weird medical texts would interest him, Sakura remembered. He loves science and experimentation. She tried not to think about Orochimaru’s past experiments as she grabbed a pack of raw hamburger from her fridge, slapping it onto the nearby counter. Taking a small bag of rice and a handful of onions and carrots, Sakura began to cook, her gaze touching on Orochimaru’s dark head of hair dipping over the pages of the open book as he read quietly on her couch.

She reached over to the small cheap radio on her counter that had been a present from Ino one year for her birthday, nodding her head to the beat as a lively song came on; she caught the slight upward lift of Orochimaru’s lips while he read and Sakura swayed and hummed, her earlier sorrows slipping away as she cooked a meal for two.

Sakura made a dubious hmm under her breath as she held the two bowls in her palms, weighing each like she was judging them against each other. The amalgamation of rice and meat and vegetables in the bowls looked nothing short of tortured – cut-up, bruised, and scorched. The smells her cooking lamented to her flaring nostrils didn’t fare better either, reminding Sakura of burnt rubber.

She cleared her throat uncertainly in announcement of the food she dubiously dubbed dinner as she walked over to the couch, setting the steaming bowls on the coffee table and sitting down. She reached out and took her bowl gingerly, lifting her chopsticks and peering into the bowl. Hesitant to eat, Sakura glanced over at Orochimaru, who was still poring through the book; she watched the way his eyes flickered with illuminated gold as he read the lines of text before she returned her attention to her bowl with a twist about her mouth.

It won’t kill me, she decided, taking a bite. “Won’t you eat?” she choked out as she somehow managed to swallow.

Orochimaru glanced at Sakura from the side, amused at her struggles. “I’d rather not.”

She glowered back at him as he turned the page; she took another stubborn bite of her cooking, stabbing the contents of her bowl with her chopsticks. “It’s rude not to eat the host’s food.”

He paid her no attention as he lifted a sheaf of loose lined papers from between the book’s pages where it had been lodged and began to read; Sakura’s bowl nearly fell out of her hands as she caught herself, setting the bowl back onto the coffee table next to Orochimaru’s untouched one before she rushed back over to try and take the loose pages from his possession. “Don’t mind those — I forgot those were in there! Don’t…”

Orochimaru was already finished reading the first several pages and was most of the way through the fourth of five; Sakura let out a defeated sigh, her hands retreating to her lap as she sunk back into the cushions. He tilted his head to the side at something he read and Sakura scowled. “What?”

“These notes are mostly terrible, Sakura-chan.”

“Yeah, I know,” she bit back petulantly. “They’re so old. They were forgotten in that book for a reason. They’re worthless.”

“Hmm… I said ‘mostly’.” He blinked down at the back page, golden eyes touching along Sakura’s old writing; one white finger rested upon the page, trailing across the black ink of a crossed-out passage. “This interests me. You think that natural-born wind-nature users have a higher likeliness of a propensity for debilitating intestinal syndromes and resultant chakra-nature duality difficulties rather than water-nature chakra users? You directly contradict the author of the text as well as this edition’s commentators in the fourth and eighth footnotes.”

Sakura tapped along her lips thoughtfully. “Well… I thought that they were making incorrect assumptions. The points they made in the water-nature section were vague at points, lacking legitimate source-references tied to the facts they listed, and based on that and some other inconsistencies, I wondered if the whole idea of that part was conjecture rather than from the cumulative data from legitimate studies at all…”

“I happen to agree.” Orochimaru tilted his head, his eyes shifting from the text to Sakura; she sat up on the couch, resting her chin on her hand and meeting his stare more attentively. “Oh? How is that? I was mostly guessing. I didn’t take the time to look too deeply into the sources that actually were referenced; it was a hunch. And I care little for this particular edition’s footnotes. The previous editions were way better, but I don’t know where I put the better versions.”

Orochimaru leaned back in the couch, his half-smile mostly hidden by the dark hair falling around his face. “You were close in your theories here, Sakura-chan, both with the chakra-nature duality issues and and a few other points, but you missed several key things.”

Sakura shifted to sit more comfortably, the tops of her knees brushing against his leg as she adjusted herself, her green eyes bright as her initial embarrassment faded into a stirring of old determination. She leaned in eagerly, her growling stomach and weariness from the day forgotten. “Okay… then tell me what you think those things are.”

The lamp beside the couch flickered once, its lightbulb buzzing in a tiny, high-pitched sound that carried through the apartment and became white noise with the rest of the building’s natural humming; the fan whirred above the cooled-down stove, the dishwasher sighing and clicking as it finished its long cycle. The walls creaked nearly inaudibly, and outside the wide windows across the spanse of the living room, the warm night winds moved through the streets, sighing and groaning against the cheap wooden window panes. Somewhere distant, an alley cat howled, and someone shouted something too far to make out from the street; the window-unit of Sakura’s air conditioner clicked noisily in the bedroom nearby as it cranked to life.

Orochimaru glanced down at where Sakura had fallen asleep, her face tilting to the side as she fell slowly deeper into his side, her nose pressed into his shoulder and her hands splayed half across her lap and into his. Her skin was pale even in the golden light of the nearby lamp, washing out the colors of her blush-colored hair and the lavender diamond mark on her forehead; shadows clung beneath her eyes in the features that were relaxed in an expression of peace.

Attention moving back to the notes in his lap, Orochimaru rested his hand upon Sakura’s that had fallen and covered them. He pushed her limp hand slowly aside, his hair falling forward as he returned his attention to the now-unobstructed pages.

Sakura shifted in her sleep; with a sigh, she turned her face into the folds of Orochimaru’s yukata. She winced in her sleep, curling up closer to the warmth she was sinking into, the couch cushions indenting under their combined weight. His incandescent eyes touched upon her face, lingering there as he shifted his arm to allow her to sink completely into the crook of his shoulder and side. Sakura’s expression grew serene again, her features relaxing and her breathing slow and steady.

With a soft exhale, Orochimaru lifted his other hand that was not pinned under Sakura’s weight and reached over, pale fingers temporarily illuminated as he felt under the lampshade and switched off the light, his slitted pupils widening to adjust to the darkness as he read. The shadows that cast over the two of them painted them both in the same dark navy-blue shade of the velvety sky outside.

The morning light pierced through, awakening Sakura with its cheery, sharp light shaking her back into consciousness. She hissed under her breath at the painful crick in her neck; she rolled her head around her shoulders as she sat up with mussed hair and blinking, sleep-crusted eyes, rubbing her hand through her mussed hair. She blinked groggily at her couch where she’d been sprawled over several cushions. She’d fallen asleep here? No wonder her neck and back were shooting complaints up to her brain.

Right, Sakura remembered as she stared at the empty cushion to her side. We debated medical theory until… she blushed, shaking her head at herself. Until I fell asleep against him like an idiot.

Sakura got to her feet, picking up the forgotten bowls of last night’s dinner and shuffling into the kitchen. She wasn’t surprised Orochimaru had left her here alone after she’d pulled such an embarrassing move.

She set the bowls onto an empty shelf in her fridge with a decided clink. Today she would be less thoughtless. Today, she would get things done: she would stick to her convictions and boundaries more carefully, she wouldn’t malinger on problems at work, and she wouldn’t be late to work, either.

Sakura glanced over at the digital clock in her stove and startled, gasping and stumbling into her bedroom, stripping her clothes and rushing into her bathroom to shower in a blur of limbs and curses. She was already teetering close to being late in a Kakashi-like fashion, and she was dressed and back out in her living room in record time; it was only when she spotted the closed book and sheaf of papers sitting beside it on her coffee table that she slowed to a halt.

Sakura walked over to the stack that was illuminated in the sleepy clouded gray morning light, picking up the pages and skimming them; she inclined her head with a slight smile. She folded them in half, sliding them into her pocket before swerving, slipping on her sandals, and taking off in a sprint in the direction of the hospital.

With a glint of determination in her eyes, Sakura slid the pair of sealed letters into the mail slot beside the front reception desk, feeling the sound of them falling irretrievably into the closed box resound in her core. The corner of her lips lifted in the slightest smile, images of what would happen should her letters be well-received lighting the dark in her subconscious like a candle at night.

As she walked away from the front desk, she heard the pair of receptionists murmuring to each other where they sat behind the desk; Sakura side-stepped and flattened against the wall, listening with a frown. Was she still the brunt of everyone’s jokes?

“...new bar opened up last week, off of Main and Third,” the bland-faced girl was telling the young tousled-haired kid that Sakura recalled had been working the reception desk before. “It’s kind of a fancy place, my friend works there, says it’s like a club, all dancing and drinking. Want to go with me after work?”

Relieved that she was not the subject of what was rapidly becoming their awkward conversation, Sakura walked away as the other receptionist stuttered back at the girl, clearly teetering upon the precipice of a painful rejection. Sakura smirked to herself, glad to not be in such a situation; she strode through the bustling hospital hallways to the break room, unaccosted by any curious coworkers.

She took her fresh steaming cup of coffee to her office in hopes of peace and quiet for what remained of her lunch hour, pulling the sheaf of folded papers from her pocket and spreading them across the cleaned-off surface of her desk. Her gaze snared upon where new writing scrawled in beautiful script beneath her own comparatively sloppy notes; she flipped to the next page and saw more fresh additions in neat lines across her old writings. Sakura lifted a hand and rested her cheek on it, eyebrows twitching together as she felt a tugging in her chest, a conflict of iciness and warmth.

Eyes glued to the pages’ contents, Sakura reached over and tugged on the cord to her blinds, the heavy shutters giving off a cough of dust as they withdrew to hide at the very top of the window, allowing the bright early afternoon light to breathe through the dirty windows and cast buttery-yellow light upon what she was intent on reading.

A tranquility settled across Sakura’s office as she read, the tinge of heat in her cheeks retreating as she grew focused, studying both her old notes and the new ideas that Orochimaru’s calligraphic commentary expressed. She occasionally reached over and took a sip from her hot coffee, never removing her intense gaze from the pages until she reached the notes’ end; she took a pen from the overflowing cup at the other end of her desk, scratching her own new notes on the quickly overcrowded pages.

Sakura sat back in her chair after a while, eyes narrowing upon the pages in her hands; she turned, tapping the end of her pen against her teeth thoughtfully as she regarded the cluttered bookshelf beneath the window. She hunched forward in her chair as she studied the titles and made a hushed sound of victory, grabbing the volume she wanted and slapping it onto the desk, sending the pages flying; she cursed as she grabbed them out of the air, and then she turned back to the shelf, taking out another book and adding it to the stack.

The ticking of the clock behind Sakura’s head pulled the hum of her thoughts back to the present, compressing into a mental screech as she realized that she’d gone over her break time. She shoved back from her chair and onto her feet, her hair falling around her head in frizzed locks that her wandering hands had been twirling through during her reading. Her gaze lingered on the books and pages with a viridian glow before she adjusted her clothes and strode out of her office, throwing herself back into her shift.

Sakura paused as her hand fell upon her doorhandle and it gave way without her key, already unlocked for the second night in a row, and she inclined her head slightly, her cherry-blossom hair falling around her face and hiding her smile.

She adjusted the stack of books and her cluttered pages of crowded notes under her arm, feeling her heartbeat climb up into her throat. Was this going to become some kind of habit? It was more subtle than left scrolls, easier than a long run to a hideout after a shift, and the stealthiest way to meet secretly without drawing attention and suspicion from others, but it stirred and gnarled something in Sakura’s gut too deep to drag up into words.

She let out a deep breath before opening the door once more. Everything’s fine, she assured herself, and she stepped into the light of her apartment, knuckles whitening where her hand tightened against the books she held.

Sakura first felt relief upon seeing that Orochimaru was already seated on the couch, his attention unleashed upon another book - leaving Sakura another chance to change her mind and hide the notes she held - and second, a resurfacing fear at the sight of the snake curled up on his shoulder, its small pearlescent head lifting as it turned two tiny gilded eyes to look at her. She stood perfectly still as she had an unintentional staring contest with it.

She quickly lost, blinking at the calm white serpent several times as she inched into her kitchen, setting down her stack of papers and books on the counter while maintaining eye contact.

“You brought a friend,” Sakura commented, coughing lightly in an attempt to smother the tremor in her voice and her rattled state; Orochimaru turned his head. She felt sweat on her palms with two pairs of slitted golden eyes now set upon her, and she resorted to the familiarity of mild indignation as she shifted her attention to the dirtiness of her apartment. She quickly broke eye contact with Orochimaru and his companion as she swept her gaze over the dirt on her floors, her cheeks heating when she noticed some of her dirty laundry scattered in clear sight along with various clutter and dishes littering her kitchen. She set to work, focusing on finding her broom while grumbling. “You could give me some kind of heads-up before breaking and entering my place,” Sakura complained as she dug around in the shoe closet, “so that I can make sure it’s not a pigsty when you visit. It’s embarrassing… especially since you live in such immaculate palaces…”

“Would you rather I visit you again at work, Sakura-chan?” His chuckle made Sakura redden with memories of his impromptu, suavely-dressed previous visit as she wrenched her broom and dustpan from the back of the closet. She coughed from the dust her cleaning had kicked up before setting to work on sweeping the floor in hurried movements, ignoring his teasing with another grumble while avoiding looking at the snake calmly resting on his shoulder.

Once done with the floor, Sakura’s gaze strayed back to her notes on the counter. With a twist about her lips, she reached over and set a stack of her dirty dishes atop it, obscuring it from view; she then turned back to where Orochimaru read on the couch with a shaky exhale. “Let’s go out,” she blurted, and a gilded eye slid over to where she walked up to stand beside him from the volume he read, one slim eyebrow arching. “Oh?”

“He can’t come with though,” Sakura went on, gesturing with her chin toward the snake upon Orochimaru’s shoulder and folding her arms tightly.

He set the book aside; Sakura noticed that it was the second volume of the medicinal series the two of them had discussed the night before. He turned to face her, arms folded, his companion snake a glittering white under her apartment lights, and Sakura found that she was becoming more interested than afraid as she couldn’t help but to keep glancing at it with curiosity. “Bars don’t allow pets,” she went on more quietly, and Orochimaru tilted his head at her, dark hair falling around his face to the side. “He will be staying here, then.”

“We’ll be back,” Sakura replied quickly, then reddened, images of what they might be up to upon returning from a night out coloring her thoughts in burning hues. She cleared her throat. “I don’t mind – finding you here. It seems… most discreet, but, humor me, please?” She turned from him, hand trailing across the couch arm as she moved toward her bedroom. “I need to go out. Reset my brain. And I think I mentioned before that going out places is what normal people do, anyway.”

Orochimaru bent to allow his snake to slide off of him; it slithered along the back of the couch, the length of its body stretching along half the couch’s upper cushion. It settled silently, tongue flicking, and he walked into the kitchen as sounds of drawers screeching and slightly off-tune humming came from Sakura’s bedroom where she had retreated.

“There’s this bar I heard about,” she was saying as he blinked at the lopsided piles of dishes on the counter, “it’s in the civilian district, so we won’t see anyone we know. I figured, maybe we could go there?”

Orochimaru drew a white hand down the corner of one of the books hiding beneath the dishes, flicking away the dried-up grain of fried rice that had been resting upon its cover. “I don’t frequent Konoha bars.”

Sakura snorted in the other room in response, and he smiled slightly as he lifted the pile of dishes away from the books, setting it beside the sink. “But if you insist, Sakura-chan… It might be entertaining enough for the evening.”

“How did you even encounter me then, that first night?” she called, swearing under her breath as she shoved a drawer back in her dresser that she had accidentally wrenched off its track. “If you, quote, ‘don’t frequent Konoha bars’?”

Orochimaru glanced over at the half-open bedroom door, golden eyes catching on a brief glimpse of tan skin and tangled clothes as Sakura finished pulling away her shorts along with her qipao, stepping into clean, matching green underthings. His gaze lingered until she hopped behind the door, fighting with her other sock. “Coincidence,” he answered at last, returning his attention to the stack of papers and volumes revealed on the counter.

“Coincidence? Do you even believe in coincidence? If you don’t ever go to bars, why did you go that night? Weren’t you seeking me out, then?”

“Of course not.” Orochimaru tugged the sheaf of tiny, detailed notes from between two of the books, scrutinizing its contents. In the bedroom, Sakura frowned as she crossed over to her closet, pushing through endless hangers of clothes she hadn’t so much as glanced at in years. “Well… that’s good,” she murmured as she chose her outfit, unhooking it from the hanger and fingering the fabric that was like new as she’d never worn it beyond the day Ino had coerced her into buying it, “but… so then you just… it was whimsy? You didn’t go with anyone?”

“Hm.” Orochimaru smiled as he turned the page, the paper dimly illuminated from where he stood beneath the studio lights in Sakura’s kitchen. “You were not the only one who left that place with different company than you came in with.”

“Oh?” Sakura felt a thrum of curiosity that was soon followed by her vivid curse as she fought with her chosen dress, and she struggled as she tried to pull it up from where it was firmly strangling her hips. She groaned and rolled her head over to look at Orochimaru where he had turned with folded arms to look at her, giving him a half-glaring, half-pleading look. “Help me out with this stupid dress? There’s a zipper I just can’t get, and it’s also trying to kill me.”

Sakura bit down on her lip as he chuckled with a shake of his head, her eyes trailing along his elegant stride as he entered the bedroom and smirked at her ensnared state. She scowled at Orochimaru’s unabashed amusement; her skin rashed out with goosebumps where she felt his eyes wander. “It’s not funny,” she grouched, wiggling with futile effort to right the dress, “I just haven’t worn it in forever, maybe it’s too small, or just poorly made… if I fight it any harder, it’ll rip.”

Another wiggle allowed her to tug the dress up another inch over her hips, and Sakura hugged the unsecured front of the dress over her chest self-consciously as Orochimaru drew up behind her. She held her breath, shivering when she felt the smooth, glancing touches of his cool hands moving up her sides, fingers adjusting how the dress hugged Sakura’s curves in precise, measured movements. The tiny zipper glided upwards as he eased it up along her spine; the dress melted into place over her waist and front.

Sakura shrugged into the small sleeves that hung off her shoulders, letting out the breath she had been holding. She turned around, her cheeks tinting to the shade of her crimson dress from the touch of Orochimaru’s gilded eyes.

Sakura stepped back, smiling slightly and catching the pale hand that he was withdrawing from the curve of her hip. She reached back and held toward him what she had found in her closet beside the dress she’d chosen, neatly pressed and just as sleek as she remembered; Orochimaru blinked down at her, accepting it as his eyebrows rose. Sakura’s smile grew as he gave a long-suffering sigh, and she was grinning with her victory as he began freeing the dark suit from its hanger.

Sakura was silently determining that she’d shake an answer out of Ino as to why she’d removed all of Sakura’s sensible flat dress shoes and replaced them with high-heels next she saw her. She was doing her best to walk steadily beside Orochimaru down her apartment hallway, holding on to his arm just tightly enough that she wouldn’t fall over. She eyed his unencumbered and graceful gait enviously.

She was quick to look ahead once more as her ankle nearly rolled. She did her best to ignore the curious brush of Orochimaru’s gaze upon her from the side as she lifted her head and exhaled, willing her thrilling heartbeat to slow. I’m a kunoichi, Sakura reprimanded herself. I should be able to handle some hellish stilettos for the sake of enjoying a Friday night out. She did her best not to look over at the suit she was still surprised he’d assented to wearing again; she also wondered if the two of them were overdressed, but found that it was difficult to care as her stare magnetized to the way the dark fabric shifted over his frame as he led her into the opening elevator.

Sakura turned to Orochimaru to ask which disguise he’d use when her words died in her throat. He was already someone else, the same auburn mane from before glimmering in mauve-gold as it melted down his straight black hair in waves, falling in glinting ringlets just above his shoulders. His golden irises slid over to Sakura as the heavy metal doors shut, flickering as they darkened in hue; she watched as his pale skin tinted into a summer tan, his features changing slightly in shape, and she was quietly mesmerized at the strange sight of his slitted pupils shrinking into round, normal ones.

Orochimaru blinked at Sakura with his new henge-face, and Sakura looked away from him quickly, throwing her gaze to the floor. “So… you’re going as the ‘golden thing’ everyone teases me about now,” Sakura observed while adjusting her dress self-consciously, “did you intentionally recall that nickname loud enough for my coworkers to hear, that night in the lobby?”

He smirked slightly, his smug silence loud enough to Sakura that she peeked and saw the upturn of his strange new lips, and she shoved at him lightly with a gasp before he could respond. “They’ve been giving me so much hell! Don’t you know what kind of rumors are going around about us – well – about me, now? They think —” Sakura stopped herself, not wanting to repeat what Ino had told her, her cheeks burning instead. “Well, never mind what they say. We’re going to a place where there shouldn’t be other shinobi anyway.”

Her grip was unconsciously tight on Orochimaru’s arm again as the elevator doors slid back open and she had to focus again on walking as evenly as possible; he led her easily forward.

“Does what others think matter to you?”

Sakura lifted her head from where she’d been carefully monitoring her feet to look at Orochimaru, considering his question before looking forward with a tilt about her mouth. “I want to say no. But I’d be lying if I did.”

“Hm.” They pushed through the glass doors of the ever-empty apartment lobby, Sakura finding that her feet found better purchase on the street, and she took in a breath of the humid summer night air, letting it out in a sigh and feeling her heart lift with the inexplicable pleasures of being dressed up and out on a weekend night. She walked more comfortably beside Orochimaru, her shoulders relaxing gradually. “You don’t care what others think?”

She felt his luminescent eyes on her in the dark of the velvet night, and she kept her eyes forward; he returned his attention to the road before them. “No. Appearances don’t matter; the opinions of others don’t, either.”

“Hmph.” Sakura plucked at his fitted suit sleeve. “You say this, while wearing that. And you always look so refined all the time anyway… you put effort into the way you appear.” She felt her cheeks sting from giving him the unintentional compliment, but she held her head up confidently as she walked. “So, you clearly care about others’ perceptions of you, if just a little.”

“You are the one who asked me to wear this, Sakura-chan.”

Sakura was smiling as they turned a corner. “You didn’t deny what I said.”

“Putting thought into visual appearances does not imply caring about what others think of it. It’s what’s within someone that expresses their true nature, not their exterior. This is why appearances are irrelevant.”

“Yes, it does. One’s ‘exterior’ is everything!” Sakura gestured with her free hand, growing passionate about her point that she was committing to. Old memories of freeing herself with her kunai through her once-long hair as a genin flickered in her mind, deep convictions related to how she always kept her hair at a medium-short length running like a current beneath her words. “So many people base their judgment of someone based on how they look, which can affect how they treat them. Appearances just – inherently express at least some elements of who someone is, what drives them, efforts or not.”

Sakura glanced over at Orochimaru as she trailed off, embarrassed that she’d gone on a tangent. She noticed a thoughtfulness in his expression, which looked both strange and interesting to her atop his rearranged features. Pleased she’d invoked any kind of point he’d pause to consider, her thoughts drifted briefly back to the notes she had left on her kitchen counter.

“You yourself have not made many such efforts,” Orochimaru commented, and Sakura opened her mouth to argue when he cut her off, meeting her eyes with a tilt of his head. “Until recently.”

Sakura turned her face from him, feeling her stomach tighten beneath the snug fit of her dress at his undeniable observation. “It… doesn’t mean anything.”

Orochimaru didn’t need to point out that Sakura had just contradicted her own argument. She also had the feeling that their discussion had veered away from what she'd intended to talk about, though she didn't want to linger on it; abruptly, Sakura tried to clear her head of the unexpected conversation, adjusting her light grip on his arm. She refocused her thoughts toward the night that was ahead of them.

Darkness cut with shifting patterns of colorful lights, resounding and surrounding pulsing of a booming beat, and the feel of crowded shadowed strangers undulating in near-synchronized rhythms immersed Sakura in the moment as she swayed and dipped her head to the lilting and pounding melody that rose and fell like an ocean through the bar. She was warm with drink, a pleasant spinning behind her eyes, her heels left behind with her empty glass at the booth she and her auburn company had briefly continued their discussion in. He was in her arms, moving with her with mirroring motions, gilded hazel eyes following her as she pulled him with her in sways and turns barefoot through the crowded dance floor. Her heart beat in time with the bass until she met his stare in the near-dark, when it rose to a frantic rhythm.

She drew closer, a moth to a flame. Her arms crooked around his neck; his hands slid around the lower back of her silky dress, and she tilted her head against the side of his with a smile as the rhythm paced faster, moving with the beat. His disguised whisky-tinted irises were subtly incandescent in the near-dark of the crowded dance floor. Several times, Sakura nearly forgot who she was really with, her eyes flickering with the conflict between confusion and recognition several times upon looking at his face in the flashing and spiraling lights.

She slid her hands down his jacket as his hands pressed in around her waist; she closed her eyes at the crux of the rising song, everyone around them shifting in patterns, feeling his breath warm on her cheek, sensing through their shared touch the distant but present throb of his pulse beneath his skin.

Sakura’s arms bent and her hands slid back down his chest as they moved together to the deep, surrounding bass and tangle of music that shuddered through all that danced. She tilted her lips and spoke into his ear, her words flickering the burnished wavy hair her nose brushed against. “So the knower of all things doesn’t know yet another thing… how to dance?”

“Is that what you call this?” She shivered at the feel of his mouth moving along her ear and she pressed closer, the thrill in her blood searing deep, the song darkening and tightening the feeling in her chest. Sakura slid her arms down to curl around his middle, her embrace a pretense of dancing. She looked away from the flash of his eyes upon her face, smirking at what she was mostly sure had been his sarcasm, her teasing reply nearly lost in the pounding of the bar-shaking song around them. “It’s funny when I get to find out the few things in which you don’t know what you’re doing…”

Sakura’s heart leapt up into her throat as Orochimaru’s hands reached down and glanced across where she had wrapped her arms about his torso; he murmured into her ear, fingers sliding up along her bare arms and over the satiny folds of the dress sleeves that had fallen loose around her shoulders. “I think… that it’s you, who does not know what they’re doing.”

Sakura woke alone, running her hands over her temples and sighing into her hands.

She sat up, the sheets falling; she bunched them up to cover her bare chest, and she exhaled slowly at the silence in her apartment. She covered her face again, her shoulders hunching; she curled into herself for a long, silent moment.

Upon the faint echo of doubts and fears whispering from the edges of Sakura’s subconscious, she lifted her head, blinking sleepily as the morning sun tumbled from between her half-drawn blinds and burned through her sleep-heavy eyes. This time, she found it easier to dismiss the old darkness from within the back of her mind, relaxing as the echoes faded away once again.

Upon the sudden and merciless stabbing of a headache, Sakura shook her head of chaotic, knotted pink hair and threaded glowing viridian-colored chakra into her temples, easing the throbbing with a scowl. “Stop being a baby about this,” she chided herself aloud, kicking her feet out from the tangled covers and sheets and swinging out across the unoccupied other side of her bed. She got to her feet and pushed a tangled lock of hair from her face, her groggy moue roving along the mess of clothes strewn across her floor – black suit-sleeves sticking out beneath pile of sleek crimson fabric, green underwear slung over yesterday’s shorts, and a deep blue tunic-shirt, bent in half by the wall.

Sakura’s expression softened upon the sight of it. She hugged the sheet around herself as she padded nakedly into her bathroom, fighting the little smile off of her face. It persisted as she showered, wavering somewhat upon noticing the scattered little fang-pricked bruises across her shoulders and neck, which she didn’t bother healing.

Sakura regarded the pile of shed clothes by the bed once more as she threw off her towel and put her hands on her hips. It was only a moment’s worth of consideration before she shrugged, pulling on the blue tunic-shirt and kicking into a pair of her shorts after finding a clean pair of underwear, determining that the shorts weren’t all that dirty yet. She adjusted his shirt that was too long on her, feeling both angrier at herself than earlier and also pleased like a cat sitting in the sun. It’s fine, he already left, so he won’t see me wearing this anyway. Subtle scents of lime-eucalyptus rose to her nose from the shirt’s fabric, and Sakura smirked as she padded out of her bedroom, wondering if she still had any coffee beans with which to make her morning brew.

She paused as she stood before her coffee maker. It was already finished brewing, and half of its dark steaming contents were already gone, one of the clean mugs she always kept near it missing.

Standing up a little taller, adjusting the open neck of the tunic-shirt, Sakura turned and then yelped when she nearly stepped on the white snake that was blending in to her off-white kitchen floor tiles. She huffed as she bent and gently picked it up. “Don’t hang out there, I don’t want to accidentally hurt you,” she admonished it, and she tensed as it curled around her arm; when its grip remained light, she tried to relax, one-handedly pouring herself a mug of the remaining coffee with her free hand. The snake lifted its head, blinking and then yawning; Sakura watched it with hidden fascination, not previously knowing that snakes yawned at all. It flicked its pink tongue and she held her coffee away from it before moving out of the kitchen. “Coffee’s not for snakes,” she informed it, proud of herself for holding a serpent without squealing like a frightened genin.

Her pride was quickly vanquished when she recognized the head of loose black hair tilting back against her couch’s headrest, luminescent eye nothing short of highly amused as Orochimaru glanced back at her. “Is it not?” he commented, taking a sip from his mug, and Sakura blushed as she came around the couch, sitting down slowly as she set her coffee aside and held out her hand toward him; the white snake slid off of her and onto his shoulders, curling loosely about his neck like a scarf, white scales contrasting against his long black hair.

Sakura cleared her throat and sipped her coffee, blaming her stinging cheeks on its heat. “Well, clearly that doesn’t apply to you. You drank all my coffee already.”

Orochimaru’s gaze touched upon the shirt Sakura wore, his slitted pupils widening slightly as he recognized his own shirt that fell in dark blue folds along her curves. Sakura’s cheeks flushed with heat as she took another sip of her drink, her attention drawing to what he was reading; she nearly choked on her coffee and coughed, tapping her chest before shooting him a glare. “I wasn’t going to give you those, I thought against it last-minute… I felt that I got too carried-away.”

His golden eyes slid up and down Sakura once before returning to his reading, one hand rising to stroke along his snake-companion’s head that rested across his collarbone. “I know.”

Sakura sighed, sinking back into the cushions and watching Orochimaru continue to read. The sun was dancing in the subtle iridescence of his irises, glittering each time they flicked back and forth over new lines of Sakura’s cramped handwriting on the pages in his lap.

Knots tangled up in Sakura’s stomach, tugging sharply, and she turned her gaze from him, reaching out and picking up a book from the coffee table; she began to read, turning a new page from where her bookmark had been before. She dismissed and denied whatever conflicted emotions were rising through her insides about the future and of where this strange new companionship would end, using a ferocious and determined trio of thoughts: This means nothing. Everything is fine. I know what I’m doing.

Chapter Text

Sakura tapped her finger along her lip as she glanced at the brown-haired chunin sitting with dangling feet on the exam table, a pout over the bandages patching his face. One tan hand scratched at the cast over his left arm, then fiddled with the sling keeping it against his chest. “But I want to train more! I have to train more! I can’t let this injury get in my way!”

“You will rest for three weeks,” Sakura reiterated, “No training with that arm. You can ask your sensei for ideas on how to keep training, and you can still do running, as well as —”

“No!” The chunin slammed a small fist on his thigh, eyes shining with unshed tears. “I’ll get behind my teammates! They’re all practicing jutsu and I need to be able to perform signs so I can too —”

“Kid,” Sakura cut him off, getting to her feet, “Stop your whining and making excuses.” She set her clipboard under her arm, regarding the impatient boy with a false smile and a warning in her stare. She had an extremely stressful day ahead of her and she’d been out of patience for this before she’d even woken up this morning. “You will rest and let your arm fully heal, or I’ll tell Gai-sensei that you’re feeling down about your injury and really need encouragement in the form of one-armed tai-jutsu training. For the next month. Or maybe the whole summer.”

The chunin paled, and he waved his good arm at her. “No no, there’s uh, there’s no need for that—!”

“Too late.” Sakura was already writing a note on her clipboard to send a short request to Gai about this kid. She knew he’d love the opportunity to instill a love for The Power Of Youth in someone other than Lee, and she smirked to herself as the mouthy kid was suddenly so respectful.

The kid quickly defaulted to whining. “But there’s no point in training in one-handed stuff… I’ll have my other arm back soon… It’s impossible to do anything one-handed…”

“I’ve seen shinobi weave signs one-handed and perform extremely powerful jutsu.” Sakura tilted her head, tight grip on her clipboard’s edge flexing. “I’ve also seen shinobi effectively take down Kage-level masters while both bleeding all over and blind, and others who could incapacitate enemies without use of his hands at all.”

“Really?” The chunin’s expression unpinched as he stared at her. “When? Who?”

“Our enemies in the war were quite powerful.” She adjusted her coat and opened the door to leave, gesturing for the kid to get up as well; he jumped off the exam table, wide eyes fixed on Sakura as she went on, “You won’t let some enemies outdo you, will you? Now go on and find Gai-sensei. If I don’t hear back glowing reports from him on your Youthful Spirit, then I’m going to assume you’re not trying, in which case, I’ll hunt you down, kid, and make you wait three months instead of one before the cast comes off.”

Properly terrified, inspired, and chastised, the kid nodded his head vigorously and ran off, one hand clutching his cast-covered arm and a determined expression on his face. Reminded of Naruto, Sakura smiled a little as she watched him go.

“Haruno-sama?”

Sakura turned, seeing no one at her side until she looked down, her brows raising. She gave a confused blink upon seeing the black-haired girl who was tugging at her sleeve. “Haruno-sama,” she said again.

“Um, hello,” Sakura replied, turning to face her. “Can I help you?”

“This is for you,” the girl said, offering Sakura a paper-wrapped rectangular package. Sakura accepted it cautiously, and the girl gave her a polite bow before turning and leaving; when Sakura noticed the clan symbol on her back, she stood up straighter, holding the paper-bound package tighter.

Without hesitation, Sakura set off to her office, hurrying in and shutting the door behind her before tugging off the paper and setting aside the twine that had held it together. She held her breath as she paged aside the wrapping, heart beating hard like she’d run a marathon, her stresses about her day on hold.

Reverently, Sakura gazed down upon the fragile, thick tome that was revealed. Its cover was subtly iridescent with colors hand-painted upon its thick leather binding. Her fingers lightly traced along the hand-woven stitching that bordered the cover’s edges and led down its spine. Her thoughtful touches moved over the intricate forest scene that dripped from the cover’s exterior to within, and she let out a slow exhale as she opened the tome, wide and admiring green eyes drawing across the slightly rough pages and tiny, beautifully etched lines of text. The same symbol the delivery girl had worn was stamped on its inner cover, proud and unmistakable.

She glanced at the pair of approval letters still sitting on a neat pile across her desk, one of them signed and sealed with matching symbols - she’d known she was approved for access to this exceedingly rare book, but she hadn’t expected to be able to have it on her own, delivered to her by a clan member. She had clearly garnered some respect among more than a few clans and higher-ups over time; this was no small sign of respect and trust.

Sakura carefully rewrapped the book in its paper packaging, tying it neatly with a bow and setting it on her chair of her desk before pushing it in so it wasn’t openly visible in her office. She didn’t have time to read it now, but it would be all she focused on once she did. She stood up straight, pinching the bridge of her nose as she glanced back down at her clipboard and saw the dreaded surgery scratched in for a little over an hour from now, the one she had been dreading since a day and a half ago when the case had come in. The surgery was extremely likely to fail. The weight of that responsibility was already unbearable upon Sakura’s shoulders as the expert in charge of it.

She flipped the page over and read her tightly-scrawled plan for the hundredth time. She had stayed up all night thinking it out and writing it. She had some hope that it would work, but dread punched through her stomach, leaving perforated holes. Bloodied images of that dead genin-patient’s face flickered through her mind and she flinched, one hand flashing out and gripping the desk as she ran a hand over her sweating forehead. I won’t lose this one.

She forced the thought to remain rather than fade, holding it in her mind as she steadied herself once more and strode out of her office and back into the rush of her work.

"What!” Sakura slammed her fists on the steel counter, her fists leaving slight dents in the metal. “Tell me this is some kind of prank? You have to be kidding. Not even a half an hour until this starts and both of them called in sick?!”

The intern backed up another step, looking ready to run with eyes wide and face drained of color. “I’m so sorry, Haruno-sama, but it’s true…”

“What about Lady Tsunade or Shizune?”

“They’re not here either. We looked, but they aren’t in their offices…”

“Dammit. Must be some kind of virus going around.” Sakura furiously wrenched her hair up into a ponytail, elastic snapping around her fingers as she secured the knot. She glared at the terrified intern. “Stop looking so peaky. I’m not angry with you. Go see if any other surgeons are available or on call and tell them to get here as soon as possible.”

“Right away,” and the intern was gone again.

Sakura let out a miserable sigh and sunk into a nearby chair as she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. She had been afraid of today, afraid of this surgery, and now everything was going wrong around her before it even started.

She picked up her clipboard from a nearby stack and read through her cramped, detailed notes once more, re-memorizing her plan of attack for this difficult surgery. She felt a pang of guilt for scaring the intern, whom she knew was fresh from the academy and eager to train in healing others; she didn’t want to frighten off a prospective new medic ninja, but today was turning out to be so much worse than she’d feared it would be.

Sakura read through her plan again, and realized that she wasn’t even absorbing the cramped handwriting anymore, just nervously rereading the same lines without taking in the information. She tossed it aside with a clatter, dropping her head into her hands. Her studying last night hadn’t helped today’s anxiety about the surgery at all. She’d done nothing but pore over this case’s details and had barely said anything all evening.

Sakura felt another pang of guilt, regardless of her recollection that Orochimaru hadn’t appeared to mind her silence. He had read beside her as usual with his endless calm quietly bleeding into her. She had been so wholeheartedly focused upon her surgery plan that she forgot about hers and Orochimaru’s usual arrangement. She had instead fallen asleep hunched over her notes without so much as announcing she was too tired to partake in the usual tryst that was the mutually expected result of being in each others’ company.

The temporary borrowed calm that Orochimaru’s quiet company had given Sakura quickly dissipated as time ticked by and she found herself where she was now, staring down at the ground as fears and doubts roiled in her gut with a sickening pull.

She tried and failed to feel tranquil again, urgently attempting to quell her apprehension-induced nausea. Deep breaths. You can do this.

Sakura heard the hurried, pattering footsteps of the intern returning. She lifted her head, her hands falling, a false expression of calm on her features as she looked over at the door to where the intern stood with a tentative smile. “Haruno-sama, there was a surgeon on-call we were able to get ahold of, they are already in the building.”

“Excellent.” Sakura felt a touch of relief before pausing and looking back up at her. “But no luck getting a second one?”

“No, I’m sorry, Haruno-sama.”

“Shit.” Sakura didn’t notice the nurse’s rippling look of surprise at her infrequently-used swearword, and she ran a hand through her hair, trying to think how she could adjust her surgery plan to accommodate only two surgeons in total. “Stop calling me that,” she added petulantly, growing weary of the overly-respectful title, “You can go do whatever else you need to do. Just make sure to send Lady Tsunade or Shizune my way immediately when you find them.” Her head fell back against the chair with a deep sigh; the intern hurried away once more, leaving Sakura in peace.

She got to her feet, taking in a deep, slow breath and letting it out through her nose. She stepped over to the prep counter and tugged out a pair of rubber gloves from the box, pulling them on one-by-one and seeking an apron from the nearby wall-hook as her apprehension smoldered sickeningly in her core.

She worried for Tsunade and Shizune. Tsunade was not one to be swayed from checking in to make sure the hospital was running by a simple cold or virus. Even with the help of either her or Shizune, the chances this patient had were still dismal, and Sakura had little hope especially now with only one last-minute aide and both of her prepared, veteran surgeons having called in sick.

She looked up at the clock mounted high on the wall and flinched at the time before hurrying to pull on a hair net and apron as well as a mask and clear safety glasses, slipping protective covers over her shoes and clearing her throat as she began to make her way toward the operating room down one floor. Her heart beat hard beneath her fitted clean apron.

Sakura pushed through the double-doors, lowering her clipboard and setting it on the nearby tray. She dimmed the lights with a hand as she entered. A large, heavy-duty lamp illuminated the patient where he lay upon a long stainless steel table, covered by a sheet with patterned black markings that kept him in a kind of stable stasis. An oxygen mask covered his nose and face. He was sound asleep, deeply medicated. Any skin Sakura could see was red and the rest bandaged. Tools were neatly arranged in trays near the table on both of its sides; fans hummed quietly in the walls where they filtered the air and kept the room cool and clean of particulates. Smells of antiseptic, steel, and clean cloth rose in a familiar, sterile bouquet in her nose.

Sakura stepped forward, her eyes shifting from the patient to the surgeon awaiting her from the other side of the operating table. She acknowledged him with a nod, unable to make out anything about him through his surgeon’s hair net, mask, goggles, scrubs, and apron. “I’m glad you could make it here so quickly to assist.” She tapped her fingers along her clipboard nervously. “This is going to be a difficult surgery with very low chances of the patient’s survival, so I hope you’re not inexperienced.” She sighed through her mask. “I still can’t believe both of my aides called in sick today. And Lady Tsunade and Shizune missing. This never happens.” She shook her head, handing a scalpel to the other surgeon and adjusting the angle of the large square lamp above the patient before glancing up again. “Where are you from?”

“Otogakure.” He accepted the scalpel, the sharp-bladed tool glinting between his gloved fingers. Sakura frowned as she lifted her clipboard and paged through it, removing the copy she had made of her detailed plan for the surgery from the clip. “Oh? I wasn’t aware we had any contract-hires from the Hidden Sound. I’ve never heard of any medical experts associated with them.”

She handed the papers to him, blinking when her own words echoed in her head through his pause, and she ran a hand over her forehead as he silently accepted the pages with his other hand. “...Sorry, I didn’t intend any offense.”

She heard him hm under his mask, his voice muffled behind the papery fabric, and Sakura reasserted her attention to her notes, trying to ignore the endless churning of her worsening anxiety that had risen to constrict her chest. “Well, these are my notes for the plan for this patient. I don’t know what level of medical ninja you are, I know nothing about the Sound’s medical training programs, but if something confuses you, don’t be afraid to ask. Now, about how we’ll start…”

Sakura paused as her aide folded the copy of her notes in half and set it aside, putting down the scalpel and picking up a much finer, smaller one. He looked up at her, and she felt another strange stab of anxiousness through her chest. She moved slightly back, this time more trusting of her instincts as he leaned forward; she felt her heartbeat kick into double-time and leap up into her throat as her surgeon aide reached up, pushing his safety glasses up to rest on his forehead, and she stopped breathing when slitted golden eyes upon her glowed through the dimness of the room. “Are you certain you don’t know any medical experts associated with Otogakure?”

Sakura inhaled sharply, her fingers around the edge of the table tightening and the metal creaking in complaint as her shoulders hunched and her eyes widened like a cat raising its hackles in alarm. She quickly recovered herself, letting out a hiss and looking side-to-side like the two of them were being watched. “Orochimaru! What are you doing here?!”

He smirked to himself as he slid the safety glasses back into place; Sakura was fuming, face tinting to a shade matching her hair. “Why are you here! How did you know my aides called in sick, how were you just conveniently available and somehow on the on-call list? Wait, were you the reason they called in sick in the first place? I swear, Orochimaru—”

Orochimaru lifted a gloved hand and Sakura paused, her eyes narrowed and her face red, feeling ready to explode. She could tell he was smugly smiling at her without being able to see past his surgical mask. “Before you raze this place in your anger, Sakura-chan, know that your ‘sick’ surgeons will be fine.”

“Dammit!” Her nails pricked into her gloves from her tightly-clenched fists, and Sakura cursed again as she peeled the gloves off; she stalked past the operating table to grab a clean pair from the row of countertops beyond, and she came up to Orochimaru, prodding him in the chest as she pulled on one of the gloves. “They had better be! What the hell! Why? Why did you do this to me?!”

He tilted his head to the side, and Sakura could see the glint of his eyes beneath the glasses from her close distance. “Did you not want assistance with this surgery that you are certain to fail alone, Sakura-chan?” His gilded stare narrowed upon her. “I wouldn’t mind simply sitting back and watching you work if you are so confident in your success.”

Sakura searched Orochimaru’s face for a long moment before her finger poking into his apron bent, her hand flattening against his chest; she bit her lip beneath her mask, glaring up at him. “Are you here to actually help me with this… or are you here to simply experiment on an interesting case and laugh as I struggle?”

“Hmm.” He blinked down at her. “Both.”

“Dammit,” Sakura cursed again, her hand sliding away from Orochimaru as she moved back from him and returned to her place at the other side of the operating table. She remembered, as her eyes flicked across her cramped notes on her clipboard, how his perceptive attention always seemed to absorb what she was doing. She didn’t doubt that he knew what she had been so stressed about the night before, nor did she doubt that he’d seen her notes about her surgery plan, though he hadn’t said anything about it.

She recalled now, as she pressed her lips together and felt sweat pearling on her forehead, that Orochimaru had been calmer than ever. He’d been just as quietly knowing and smug, perhaps a touch more so, and Sakura looked back up at him with a conflicted expression. “But why would you want to help me? You don’t give your knowledge for free. There’s always some kind of trade, and I don’t want to just blindly accept your help, no matter what our other… arrangements might be.”

Orochimaru pulled his gloves tighter on his hands, the rubber snapping into place. She found herself unable to read the expression within his iridescent eyes. “Call it a favor, Sakura-chan. Details can be discussed at a later date. Now… did you want to help your patient, or let him die?”

Sakura adjusted her unruly pink locks again, her hands steadier as she slipped her ponytail back under her hair net and pushed her sleeves higher on her arms. “All right, fine. Let’s do this.”

They both leaned over the patient then, Sakura’s heart slowing to a determined, set beat. “You know the details of the case already, right?”

“Naturally.” Orochimaru began to pull back the paper sheet and Sakura took hold of the sheet’s other side, pulling in tandem and folding it neatly as they revealed the patient’s bare upper half from the midriff to head. “I’ll review in brief just for habit’s sake,” Sakura went on, her green eyes darkening as she beheld the burnt and bandaged man on the table. “This patient is a newly-jonin shinobi who damaged his chakra pathways extensively from overextending himself on a C-rank mission against a rogue nin after some overambitious training, apparently trying to master a dual-nature jutsu of combining fire and lightning that he didn’t have the capacity to handle, and it backfired on him. It burnt not only his skin in most places to the third degree, but also his chakra pathways, and it threatens not only permanent disfigurement, but total chakra blockage where many chakra-flow points are crippled and damaged, likely causing a slow and painful death…” She swallowed, feeling her doubts stir again. “Unless we can find a way to heal the damage.”

She moved her glowing hands to the patient’s chest, doing a quick diagnostic. She listened with a focused expression as Orochimaru spoke. “I’ve already looked. He’s close to hopeless. If it were up to me, I’d let him die so the Leaf has one less useless shinobi. To think that this fool gained jonin status and made a mistake like this…”

Sakura shot him a sharp look, and he raised a brow at her expression. “I said if it were up to me, Sakura-chan.” He glanced over at the patient’s pale face. “He’ll have learned a healthy fear of overextending oneself, should he survive.”

“He will survive,” Sakura replied, scratching notes on the chart lying on a tray next to the table and lifting a scalpel, “so I can knock some sense into both him.” She held up the scalpel, straightening. “So my take is that we heal the areas around and within his main chakra points first, focusing on revitalizing the nodes and obviously the main structure of his chakra network as we go. This, before threading back together the worst of his chakra-pathway burns, so that he’s much more stable once his chakra is flowing throughout all of his body once more. Then we focus on his exterior burns.”

Orochimaru shook his head, and Sakura frowned at him, protesting his disapproval before he could explain it. “What? I’ve been up all night thinking about this and I know how it all works. I’ve tried a surgery kind of similar to this before.”

“Similar, Sakura-chan, but not the same. Look at where his pathways are damaged.” He swept a gloved hand over to point at a particularly charred swathe of skin between the patient’s shoulder and arm. “If you were to first heal the main chakra points such as here and here, you will cause more damage rather than mitigate what is already burnt. If —”

“—but I thought of that!” Sakura drew her finger over several more charred areas that led past where Orochimaru pointed, her voice rising in her frustration that Orochimaru did not agree with her careful plan. “If you revitalize the main points and therefore the main structure first, it will redouble the overall chakra flow of what he has left, which will help shift back the smaller blockages, increase the body’s natural healing rate, and lessen the remaining burns’ severity. It’s the best plan, with exaction of precise chakra control and selective planning for which points are first…”

“Still pointless. Look.” Orochimaru pointed to a section of the patient’s chest where there were dark lines visible through the red, burnt flesh; he peeled back a layer of bandages, pointing along a chakra pathway leading from the worst of the charred areas. “The damaged pathways are degrading quickly. You have forgotten that your experiences before were in-field, upon injuries that had happened nearly immediately before you began healing. Here, this patient has been damaged extensively with little healing for over a day and a half before he was found and brought to the hospital. If you look closer…”

Sakura drew up beside him, leaning in and listening with determination and concentration. Orochimaru’s golden eyes shifted from the burns to Sakura. “The pathways themselves are already extremely weak from having no chakra flow whatsoever. They are fragile, like bits of paper. If you increased his general flow to start with… these fragile, smaller networks will crumble, disintegrate beyond healing. You have to take this more delicately with a kind of backwards approach.”

Sakura’s eyes widened upon him as she understood what he was explaining to her. As she took it in, her brows drew together in a grim, set expression. “Right. I understand. Then… we start on the smallest pathways, the smallest blocked points - threading fine-tuned healing chakra through the tiny pathways, then using one of the smaller scalpels to remove the burnt skin that’s causing blockages, heal those areas, suture what’s needed, and when all the smallest points are done, move on to the larger chakra network damages?”

“Exactly.”

Sakura set to work immediately, handing Orochimaru one of the finer-bladed scalpels from her tray and then taking up her own, their fingers brushing as he shifted to work on a part of the patient’s abdomen and she moved to work on points over the patient’s heart, one hand carefully cutting with her other glowing with healing chakra. “Remember your chakra control has to be precise and fine as a thread or the damaged pathway will break instead of heal with your chakra,” Orochimaru murmured as he worked, and Sakura hummed in agreement as her hands glowed green over the patient’s skin.

After nearly two hours of focused, intense concentration and controlled movements made with absolute and unwavering precision, Sakura took in a sharp breath, standing back, her eyes sweeping over the gently beeping instruments surrounding the operating table. She held the breath, watching the patient continue to breathe peacefully in his medicated sleep, and as Orochimaru drew back, setting aside his bloodied scalpel, his weary gaze lifted to rest upon Sakura.

Suspense wound between them as Sakura ran a practiced palm over the patient’s body, doing a diagnostic check upon his general condition and chakra network.

“Yes!” Sakura shouted, her bloody glove-sleeved hands thrown up in the air as she jumped up with joy. “He’s stable! His network is flowing normally! We did it!” Her face was aglow as she turned her joyous expression to Orochimaru, and he smiled back at her.

His eyes widened as she spun around the operating table in a blur of movement, crashing into his arms, the scalpel falling from her hand and clattering to the floor. Her face buried in his bloodied apron, hiding her streaming tears as she laughed and cried against him. Orochimaru reacted slowly, his arms sliding slowly around her in return, his chin resting in her hair and his weary eyes half-lidded.

“Thank you,” Sakura whispered into his clothes. “‘Maru… thank you.”

“Hmm.” His smile tilted a little wider at the nickname. He drew back, blinking down at her wearily. “I will see you later on, Sakura-chan.”

“Yes,” she agreed. Her eyes were bright and lively as she reached up and touched his cheek; when her hand fell back, there was a red smear on his white skin. He arched a brow at her as she blushed and took off her gloves, wiping away the blood with her untainted hands, and he chuckled quietly as she tried to be thorough, her thumb stroking it away. She stepped back then as if to halt herself from any more embarrassing impromptu actions. Breathing hard, Sakura wiped her forehead with her arm and smiled warmly at him. “Thank you for helping me. Honestly… This was going to fail, even with those original two surgeons… they wouldn’t have thought of what you did, and I’d have continued with my – faulty plan.” She peeled off her gloves as she searched Orochimaru’s face with a more serious expression, floating high on adrenaline. “It’s a shame… if only we worked together like this more. I could do this all the time. Just imagine something beyond this,” she gestured at the surgery suite, her gaze hazy with a vision, “bigger, with more research, with so much more — what if we…”

Sakura caught herself, and she turned quickly away. “...I’ll see you later.”

Sakura left the surgery room walking tall and with a smile on her face that stayed there for the next several hours into her shift. She eventually felt her cheek-muscles complaining, and she lifted a hand to her lips, closing her eyes as she let herself finally process the day. Addictive joy from saving a patient from the brink still made her edges softer and her whole being warm.

Her joyous haze brought images of her co-surgeon, making eye contact with her occasionally over the hours he worked beside her.

Was I too mistrusting? Sakura opened her eyes, frowning at her clipboard. She made herself recall the echoes of Orochimaru’s past. No. I was right to question his offer to help.

She remembered the surgeons and her missing mentors; she put her hands behind her back, hands squeezing together anxiously. Had Tsunade been present in the hospital, she would have come down and checked on the surgery at least once if not lending a hand as well. Surgeries that intensive and risky were rare these days and Sakura knew that she, too, felt a similar restlessness for action, even if she dealt with it in a different way. Sakura felt a flash of gladness that she had not picked up on Tsunade’s intensive gambling habits.

But it was also extremely fortunate that she was mysteriously absent today. Had Tsunade come down and seen Sakura working quietly alongside Orochimaru, Sakura imagined she’d have a heart attack from the shock of it. She didn’t want to imagine what Tsunade would think of that, let alone the rest of Sakura’s secretive dalliances with him that were of a decidedly less professional nature.

Sakura refocused her attention on the papers she had been blankly staring at and sighed at the spaces she had yet to fill out. It was the report on the surgery, and she hadn’t yet filled in the spots for details about her fellow surgeon, including name, rank, etcetera.

Rolling her eyes, Sakura wrote in Dr. Haru, of the Sand. No one read these reports, but she wasn’t about to write that he was from the Leaf or the Sound, as those were too close to the truth — though she wasn’t entirely sure. She frowned as she wondered about Orochimaru’s origins, realizing she didn’t actually know them.

In writing the rest of the report, she was sure to credit “Haru” with the surgery’s success, writing a lengthy paragraph of praise for him being timely, prepared, skilled, and resourceful. She went on to write that not only was he the reason the patient survived and would fully recover, but that he is a vital asset to the Leaf as a resource, and that it was a shame he lived and worked in a different village, because she wished she could work with him on a daily basis.

Sakura’s smile returned, shuffling the papers as she prepared to file them away, her glowing words never to see daylight again. She’d never say them to his face, but she meant every one.

Sakura’s already sore cheeks ached even more as she beamed at the auburn-maned man awaiting her patiently against one of the glass walls of the hospital lobby, arms folded and whisky-eyes catching the late evening light. She tucked the paper-wrapped bundle more securely under her arm as she walked up to him, schooling her expression at the raising of his eyebrows. She didn’t acknowledge the hushed giddy whispering of the receptionists as she walked with him out into the amber-drenched streets.

“So…” Sakura tucked her hair behind her ear, looking at the disguised Orochimaru from the side. “Are you going to explain to me how you pulled that all off? Or are you going to leave me guessing?”

“Hm.” He smirked as there was a shouting down the street; Sakura paused at his side as the two of them looked ahead, lifting their hands to shield their eyes from the setting sun.

They had stopped in time to witness Shizune pulling at Tsunade, who stumbled angrily from the small bar with a shout; her cheeks were flushed, eyes spinning toward Shizune in a dizzy way, and Sakura frowned. “She’s very drunk,” she observed aloud as she and Orochimaru watched Tsunade berate Shizune.

He hummed in agreement, solemn as he and Sakura watched the scene unfold, and Sakura watched him with quiet concern. Lady Tsunade doesn’t get drunk on weekdays anymore, she thought, frowning. This is unlike her. Did he upset her on purpose somehow so she’d be off-premises and away from our surgery?

As if sensing Sakura’s concerns and suspicions, Orochimaru’s amber-tinted eye slid over to Sakura, his expression unchanging as one of Tsunade’s slightly hoarse, very slurred shouts became more audible. “I can drink as much as I damn well please today! Hands off me, Shizune, I’ve got at least another round in me!”

Sakura blinked back at Orochimaru as Tsunade’s shouts carried through the street. “I won’t be deterred from winning at least once in his honor! Or twice! Or three times! Now move aside, we’re going back in.” There was a hurried, humble protesting as Shizune tried and failed to stop Tsunade from storming back into the bar, and then the streets were quiet again, the sunset light shimmering in the dying throes of the ending summer’s heat.

Understanding now, Sakura lightly placed her hand along Orochimaru’s arm, her expression falling. She dipped her head and began to walk with him again in the direction they had been going before. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“It’s all right.” He lifted his head, watching the sky, and Sakura’s troubled eyes traced the ground as they walked. Today is why Tsunade drinks, both to remember and to forget. Today is the anniversary of Jiraiya’s death.

The silence between them was peaceable, and Sakura found herself grateful Orochimaru was not prone to small talk or chatter unlike most company she kept. She found her thoughts drifting as they walked and the evening light melted into hues of lavender.

As they turned the corner that would lead to Sakura’s apartment complex, she gave voice to one of her more pressing questions, unable to keep the slightly teasing tone out of it. “So, are you going to poison my surgeons every time I’m stressed out about a surgery?” She nudged his arm, and Orochimaru glanced down at her; he had a mockingly offended look, golden eyes narrowing. “Poison? How little do you think of me? It would be inconvenient for the hospital to have two fewer surgeons.”

“Oh, because that’s the dilemma,” Sakura scoffed, shaking her head. “What did you do to them, then? What would keep experienced and dedicated surgeons away from such an important surgery? They knew and liked Master Jiraiya, but not enough to take the day to drink in his honor.”

“Hm.” His offended expression cracked with a smirk. “It was your own fault. I would avoid the food I so generously left out in the surgeon’s breakroom if I were you.”

“Food?” Sakura was confused, tapping her fingers over her folded arms. “What food? How is that my fault?”

Orochimaru barely hid his smirk as he looked ahead to where he walked with her. “Leftovers from your cooking.”

After a pause, Sakura remembered the asparagus bake she had made a day or so ago, something Orochimaru had carefully avoided while Sakura had managed a bite or two. It had been particularly revolting and had played hell with her intestines later that night.

Sakura looked slowly over at Orochimaru, her eyes widening as she fought back the ripples of laughter in her chest. “What!” She tugged at his arm, shaking her head with disbelief. “You didn’t. Did you? That’s so — so nasty!” At Orochimaru’s impish grin, Sakura laughed heartily, one hand over her mouth as she tried to fight back her peals of giggles. “That’s terrible. You’re terrible.” She shook her head again before adjusting the paper package under her arm and giving him a light look of disapproval. “How did you know the um, laxative effects of that particular cooking fail of mine? You didn’t even eat any.” She looked up at Orochimaru, raising a brow. “Though you could have done worse. I don’t think that was even technically illegal. Was it?” She shuddered, thinking of what even a few bites had made her suffer, and Orochimaru shrugged nonchalantly.

Feeling suddenly awkward, Sakura straightened herself, clearing her throat. “Er, well, we’re almost to my place. Are you hungry? I could try to cook again…”

Orochimaru looked over to Sakura with narrowed eyes. “Your ‘cooking’ would make me your next surgery patient.”

She gasped before fisting his yukata and dragging him close to her, glowering at his increasingly amused expression. “You take that back,” she hissed, and he chuckled, slipping cool hands around her gripping fists as she blushed a hot and angry red. “I swear, Maru —”

“FOREHEAD!”

All the color went starchy white on Sakura’s face at the sound of Ino’s distant yell, and both hers and Orochimaru’s heads turned to see Ino stomping toward them from the distant apartment complex several blocks down the street.

“Change of plans,” Sakura squeaked as Ino let out a roar, “AND IS THAT HIM?!”

“You know she’ll catch you eventually,” Orochimaru commented as Sakura snatched his arm. In a flash, the two of them disappeared down a side-street. “Yeah, but not today!” Sakura puffed out a breath as they easily vaulted over a fence and took off down another street, Ino’s yelling behind them relentlessly following. Sakura rolled through some bushes while Orochimaru leapt over them; she hissed as the two of them rounded another corner, “where — your hideout?”

“Certainly,” he replied while vaulting from wall to wall until he was atop the roof of one building. Sakura followed in a hurry, looking back to see Ino storming down a nearby street, fists clenched and the steam nearly visible coming out of her ears. “She’s really going to kill me this time,” Sakura observed as she followed Orochimaru’s lead over several rooftops, heading in the direction that the sun had disappeared into the horizon.

“Probably,” he agreed, spanning the distance between the road and a distant building in one leap, Sakura following with more determination and less grace. When the two of them landed upon the forest floor and took off into the trees, she let out a breath she’d been holding, knowing Ino would be unlikely to catch them now, even with her sensory abilities.

Sakura looked down suddenly and relaxed upon seeing that she still held tightly onto the paper package under her arm. She began to enjoy her nighttime jog, keeping up easily with Orochimaru as she followed him through the darkness of the forest. She felt reminders of the last time they were here together whispering through her memories, incited by the way the rising moon lit his lithe figure in silver, the shadows slicing over them both in dark stripes that became a repeating pattern as they ran through the trees side-by-side.

When they leapt up from the trees and onto the flat surface leading into the mouth of the hideout, all of Sakura’s exuberance from the run and thrilled adrenaline from their escape deflated upon the sight of Yamato, standing with his arms folded and eyes narrowed. Orochimaru stood unruffled and sleek in the silver light, regarding Yamato with an ever-calm expression as his henge melted away; Sakura landed beside him, hair a wild wind-whipped mess and clothes caught with leaves and twigs and dirt. She brushed herself off, unconsciously standing close to Orochimaru’s side as she offered an embarrassed half-grimacing smile to Yamato.

She looked between Orochimaru and Yamato, realizing in an odd moment that Yamato was logically younger than Orochimaru, but looked decades older. The war had not aged him well, especially contrasting against Orochimaru’s apparently eternal, unnatural youth.

Sakura shifted uncomfortably as Yamato addressed them, his glare shifting into a concerned look as he looked from Orochimaru to Sakura. “You all right, Sakura-chan?”

“Perfectly fine,” she answered, and Orochimaru turned to walk into the mouth of the cave; she hurried to follow him, feeling Yamato’s worried stare intensify upon her back as she reimmersed into the darkness.

Sakura didn’t think about it as her hand slipped back around Orochimaru’s arm. She glanced around at the familiar cavernous hall as the two of them walked through it. “How many labs do you have, anyway?” she asked, and she felt the brief touch of his golden eyes upon her in the near-darkness. “A few.” Sakura plucked a twig from her hair; she continued to rake out a leaf from behind her ear where it had tangled there during their run. “If you don’t mind, I’d love somewhere well-lit and comfortable to sit down and rest a bit. I’m exhausted and would like to clean up and recuperate before we…” She coughed shyly, looking away. “...I have some reading to do.”

“That is not an issue.” Sakura recognized the door that Orochimaru had led her into once before as they walked, but he went past it, and she followed him further into the dark, feeling confused at where else they would go.

They turned and then walked past several more sets of doors on either side of the hall before this stretch of corridor ended at a tall, arched doorway. An ornate chandelier decorated the vaulted ceiling here, the rough-edged but elegant aesthetics of the first endless hallway beginning to give way to brightly-lit, elegant, clean tastes as she and Orochimaru pushed through these doors, leading through a new set of hallways that were different enough to feel like they were a new building entirely.

She followed him through another hall, turned again to a new corridor, and then finally through another set of arched double-doors that led into a cavernous room nearly the size of an auditorium. Cement walls curved around wide steps, leading to the central point at the back of the room, a large circular ottoman lined with green fabric that was set before a large painted wall. White cylindrical lights mirrored each other at the tops of the steps, the smooth bulbs protected by dark blue snakes carved around them in curved shapes. Distant light wood-paned screens decorated the back walls. Sakura got the sense that this was some kind of regal meeting-chamber, and she felt distinctly out of place as Orochimaru led her to the side where another door led to a different room.

This room was not quite as spacious and was much more homey to her. Several shelves lined the walls, filled with neatly-organized books and scrolls; a desk near them was similarly immaculate with dust-free shining surfaces and a stack of blank scrolls near a sleek quill and pot of ink. Several more shelves lined the rest of the room, some of them with scrolls and literature, some with jars and vials and curious objects that she wanted to explore. She reddened as she could not help but to notice the dark, round bed in the center of the room, sheets a velvety dark color that was a violet-indigo. She could tell how soft it was without touching it; the lights flickering from ornate, carved sconces around the high borders of the walls shed a golden-white light across the surprisingly well-lit room, glittering in silky shimmers along the covers.

Sakura hugged her paper-wrapped bundle against her chest, tearing her attention from the room to Orochimaru, who had been watching her perusal. His eyes were on the package, slitted irises intent and curious; Sakura hugged it a little tighter, defensive. “I have some reading to do, like I said,” she explained under his questioning gaze, “is this… your room?”

"One of them,” he replied. “New book?”

“I — maybe.” Sakura couldn’t help but to be cagey, and she hurried over to the desk, setting it down and glancing over at Orochimaru. “I didn’t say I was sharing this one with you.” She narrowed her eyes at his increasingly interested expression. “I haven’t seen you touch the third tome of Human Gut Flora Microbiomes Relationships with Chakra Natures yet.” She waggled her eyebrows. “It gets really fiery in the discussion about microflora interacting with temperature changes in dual-nature chakra users that drink excessive alcohol. I bet you’ve already read it, so we could talk about it, when I’m done reading this, in private.” She put emphasis on “in private”, her hands covering the wrapped package and her eyes narrowing.

“Mm, but that doesn’t interest me in this moment.” Orochimaru moved closer, gilded eyes glittering. “Remember that you owe me a favor now, Sakura-chan.”

“You want to use up your favor on this?!” She huffed, annoyed that he was already bringing up their agreement from earlier. “How do you know it’s even worth it? No. I’m not sharing this.”

“That is exactly why I’m curious. You are never this guarded, so it is clearly of value, and it is likely something that you are relatively certain I do not already have or know about.”

Sakura cursed under her breath and hugged the bundle back to her chest; she froze when she realized Orochimaru had drawn quite close, teasing eyes dancing over her, one cool hand on the small of her back, and she couldn’t help but smirk to herself. She shivered at the feel of his warm breath against her ear. “Let me see it, Sakura-chan.”

“I never see you even a little riled,” she commented as casually as she could, glancing up and shivering again from the desire in Orochimaru’s expression, and she had to look away again quickly, wondering if he intended to make her question if he wanted her or the book more. She felt his cool hand draw up her spine; she arched into his touch with a sigh, “and you certainly know how to rile me…”

She turned enough to look him in the eye, leaning close enough that her shoulder brushed against him; she felt his other hand ghost over the bundle she held. “You just can’t stand not knowing something, can you?” A catlike smile, knowing and smug, curled Sakura’s lips as she looked up into his darkening expression. “Does it help to ease your curiosity that this is, possibly, maybe… a tome you have never had access to before? That no one… beyond myself… before today… has been able to read, beyond a certain clan?”

“Sakura-chan…” There was both a purr and a warning in Orochimaru’s tone, and Sakura grinned devilishly back at him, seeing the spark in his eyes that told her he had easily surmised from her vague hint what the prize in her arms was. She danced suddenly back out of his reach. “— and you won’t simply sweet-talk it from me!”

Orochimaru turned toward Sakura, his hands falling loose by his sides; he slowly narrowed his eyes, and Sakura thrilled at the dangerous look he was regarding her with. She took another dance of steps backward, her smile daring him to approach. He looked mildly torn between several ideas she couldn’t read behind his narrowed eyes, causing her pulse to kick up its speed. When she saw his sandaled foot turn where he stood, creating a subtle stance, her adrenaline spiked, and she was ready for this spar, stepping backwards once more, delighting in the way his pupils flared and his irises flashed from her taunt — “Yes, a rare Nara clan tome, hand-bound and painted, fresh from their extremely private and well-guarded clan library, with hundreds of fine pages of decades and decades of pristine, forbidden knowledge!”

Orochimaru leapt toward Sakura in a blur, and she barely managed to dodge in time, rolling over past the round bed and then vaulting over it, laughing at his growl as his fingers brushed her ankle and she rolled to her feet. She didn’t hesitate to duck from the room, racing into the neighboring room and yipping as he nearly caught her again, his movements fast enough that she could barely read them in time before dodging. She flipped over one of the platforms and dashed to the side; she managed to just barely evade him once more as she backflipped over the round ottoman, ducking behind it and rolling into another direction, sliding down the steps and then flattening herself against the cement half-wall in a hunched poise, breathing hard and her blood pumping hot through her veins.

Silence and a chuckle somewhere behind her; Sakura waited, ready to dodge, but no movement, no new attempts to catch her for several more heartbeat-pounding moments. She glanced over her shoulder, feeling disappointed.

“Have you gotten bored already?” she called teasingly, “well, I guess the Great Snake Sannin is less tenacious about knowing everything than I —”

A white hand clamped over her mouth and another over the paper-wrapped bundle in her arms; Sakura squeaked, startling where she was pressed up against the cement wall. She frowned beneath his hands. She was still safe behind the half-wall, Orochimaru nowhere in sight near her, and it was physically impossible for his arms to curl around that shape to restrain her like this. How had he…?

Sakura’s eyes widened as she heard Orochimaru’s voice above her; she looked up to see his head slide up above her over the back of the half-wall, upon the ottoman above. His neck was elongated and stretched in a distinctly serpentlike way, golden eyes flaring above Sakura as he grinned. “You’ve lost. Give me the tome.” His fingers twitched over the paper-wrapped bundle, tightly enough to encourage its weight into his grip but not so much as to tear the wrapping, his elongated arms clear to Sakura now as her eyes flicked all around and reconnected them in her mind to where Orochimaru leaned casually upon the stairs.

Sakura blinked rapidly up at Orochimaru’s extended head, and he tilted his head slightly, his extra-long neck bending and his dark hair falling in a shifting curtain over his face. “Sakura-chan?” His extremely extended right hand slid away from Sakura’s mouth, and she burst out laughing, clutching the tome to her chest, rocking against the back of the wall in her peals of giggles. Orochimaru’s mouth slanted to the side and his neck retreated as he returned to his usual form, walking around and down the steps to crouch beside Sakura and watch her uncontrollably laugh with confused, narrowed eyes.

“Oh — oh — I had forgotten,” Sakura breathed, wiping a tear from her eye, “I had somehow forgotten that you can do that, and it looked so — so funny. It surprised me.” She pressed a hand over her stomach that ached from her laughter, and Orochimaru blinked at her unexpected reaction, golden eyes flicking between her flushed features and the paper-wrapped package in her arms.

Sakura looked up at Orochimaru with sudden seriousness. “But how do you do that? How does it affect the bones and nerve structure and veins in your arm? How does it work with blood flow and circulation?” She reached out and took one of his arms, tugging him toward her as she began to examine it, probing his skin with the gentle but firm hands of a practiced medic. He had to catch himself from stumbling as Sakura tugged him closer, threading her chakra through his skin, searching and exploring.

“Sakura-chan, the book.” She paused in her fervent fascination of his limb and looked up at Orochimaru, smirking at his uncharacteristically impatient reminder. “Oh, right.” She squeezed the package she held with a hint of doubt in her expression. “It’s… technically supposed to only be me, the only non-Nara, who is allowed to read it. I’ve been granted special permission.” She searched Orochimaru’s vivid, intense stare, her heart beating hard and fast at the intensity of his gaze upon her. “You really are passionate about knowledge,” she went on, “but what would you give me in exchange for me possibly letting you read this and… perhaps more books that I may have been approved to receive in the future?”

His eyes glinted at the prospect of more precious tomes and Sakura giggled again; the sound was cut short when Orochimaru bent in close enough that his nose brushed hers, iridescent eyes capturing her attention wholly. His cool hand slipped around her waist and his other hand over her book. Wordlessly, Sakura searched Orochimaru’s mesmerizing stare as he spoke in velvet tones. “There are many things I can give you in a trade, Sakura-chan. There is no end to all that I could give you. But…” Sakura squeaked as the book was plucked from her grip, and she tried to snatch it back; she huffed as Orochimaru easily kept it away from her, his arm extending unnaturally just out of her reach. She glared at him then, annoyed that he’d used his intensity to draw her in and distract her and then take away her prize. He leaned in a little closer, and Sakura’s cheeks dusted red at the feel of his lips mouthing his words over hers, almost a kiss. “But you chose to make this a kind of… scuffle, which you lost. So it is mine.”

“No… no!” Sakura reached out and gripped Orochimaru by the shoulders, pushing him back to the cement floor and pinning him down with her weight, her reddening face hovering over his. “No. You cheated by using your unnatural abilities to stretch, which, by the way, I still fully intend to explore the details of.”

“Oh?” Orochimaru arched a slender eyebrow, and a full-body blush heated Sakura as she realized what else her words could mean. She stared at him a moment as she took that possibility in with both apprehension and anticipation. “That too,” she amended softly. There was a pause filled with growing tension between them before Sakura returned to her main argument with a shaky huff. “But! You’re not taking that tome and lording it over me! I earned it, and you didn’t.”

Orochimaru chuckled beneath Sakura, one hand slipping along her waist, and she slid her hands up his chest, glaring into his eyes. “What did I just say about you choosing to scuffle rather than have a diplomatic discussion, Sakura-chan?”

She bent and kissed him, a furious edge to her lips, and he smirked against her lips as he pulled her closer, his extended hand placing the package on the nearby steps lightly before retracting and resting on the back of Sakura’s head. She rolled her hips against his, causing him to inhale sharply through his nose; she sighed unevenly before kissing him again and then violently pushing backwards, diving toward the steps and snatching the package. In her frenzied movement, she accidentally fractured the surrounding cement with the force of her impact against it, her bracing hand causing the step to crumble from the slight overuse of her strength in the process.

Orochimaru sat up, blinking at where Sakura was curled up around the wrapped tome amidst the pieces of cement rubble. Her green eyes shone victoriously. “A trade, then,” she decided, and he was the one to laugh then, the silky sound shaking his frame. Sakura scowled through her red face as his laugh became full and rich, echoing against the far walls. “Fine,” he agreed, returning smoldering eyes to Sakura, and she sweated under the weight of his intense look, standing up without breaking eye contact. He joined her in a single graceful shift to his feet.

“Your knowledge for access to this tome,” Sakura offered, a slight waver in her tone. “You have endless medical studies that perhaps no one but you and some of your subordinates have seen. I want… I want to learn it, some of it, whatever isn’t terribly unethical, whatever you think is of the same value as this book and the future ones coming after it.” She straightened her back, reasserting herself as she saw the surprise ripple through Orochimaru’s expression.

He stepped toward her, smiling slightly. “I’m not sure the value equates, Sakura-chan. You yourself don’t actually know what is within the Nara volume you have.”

“Then you decide as we go,” Sakura went on. “We’ll study it, the both of us. And you can tell me what studies and knowledge you have that might translate in value.”

“Hmm.” Orochimaru bent over Sakura, his dark hair falling around her face, and she tightened her grip on the book reflexively, searching his eyes before dipping up and meeting his lips in a chaste kiss. His eyes were wide open as hers closed, absorbing her, before his closed too.

“I’ll assent to those terms,” he murmured, gently taking the book from Sakura’s hands; she released it carefully. “But I’ll warn you this once… those studies, many of them, are not pleasant reading.”

Sakura laughed softly with a shake of her head. “Medical research is rarely pleasant.”

Orochimaru pressed a hand around her waist and turned them both around, walking with her back into the bedroom; he set the paper-wrapped package on the desk and then placed both hands around Sakura. She pulled back from his face with a confused look. “Aren’t you more interested in reading it right away?”

“I have a different ‘interest’ at this moment.” He bit down into Sakura’s shoulder with a growl, and she gasped with the pleasurable pain, arching into his body. He shuddered as she raked her hands under his yukata, seeking his skin; he pulled her toward the bed and she pushed him backwards onto it, falling forward and tangling into his lap. Breaths pushed and pulled hotly between consuming mouths and insistent fingers, the beautiful Nara tome soon buried beneath shed stained surgical scrubs and dirt-scuffed fabric.

Chapter Text

Sakura awoke with her nose buried in a mess of black hair. She kept her eyes closed as her mind emerged slowly from the murk of her dream’s leftovers, breathing in the scents of eucalyptus and warmth that surrounded her. Without thinking about it, she brought her fingers through Orochimaru’s obsidian tangles, running them over his scalp and feeling him purr in his sleep where he was buried against her neck and chest. Her distant, disjointed thoughts were nothing but passing images and sensations, and she remembered the first morning she’d ever awoken with his company – his back had been to her then, and she’d created distance between them at her first chance.

She shifted her legs where she laid on her back in the silky covers. Her skin slid against his, their tangled legs warm and slightly sweaty. She dipped her head deeper and exhaled his scents slowly. I shouldn’t feel like this.

She swallowed a bout of nerves that constricted her throat, and she felt Orochimaru’s nose pressing into her neck turn slightly, his body stiffening slightly as he awoke in Sakura’s arms.

“Hey,” Sakura murmured into his hair, her voice dry with sleep. She told herself to pull away and her arms secured around Orochimaru’s lean back instead. “We should get up.”

“Then why are you holding on so tightly?” Orochimaru asked, his voice vibrating against Sakura’s skin. She sighed, tilting her face into his hair and drawing a hand up his back. “I don’t know.”

Sakura’s stomach rumbled against where their fronts were pressed together, and Orochimaru lifted his head, his amused stare half-lidded with sleep. Sakura shoved away from him lightly. “Yeah, so I’m hungry,” she excused the growling of her stomach. She stretched her arms and sat up on the side of the bed, peeking from the side as Orochimaru stood, the sheets falling from his bare shoulders and pooling in his lap. He glanced at her while taming his mussed hair with a long-fingered hand. “There is a kitchen down the hall to the right.”

“Excellent.” The thought of breakfast had Sakura on her feet in moments. She searched the floor and found what she was looking for before pulling it over her head and tugging it on. Orochimaru raised an eyebrow at her before shrugging, taking folded clothes from a nearby table and shrugging them on himself.

Sakura adjusted Orochimaru’s blue shirt after tugging on her shorts. She liked the colour, and the fabric was smooth and comfortable; she shot a disdainful glance at her usual red qipao that was strewn over the back of the desk chair. She could smell it from several feet away.

Orochimaru led Sakura down a pair of well-lit white halls and into a wide, extravagant kitchen. It boasted lavender-tiled granite islands and pristine, tall white cabinets, its glinting metallic fixtures and sterile surfaces not unlike the laboratories a small connection of rooms away. Sakura ogled it, groaning while slapping a palm against her forehead. “You’ve had this at home and you’ve been hanging out at my place?!” Her home kitchen looked like a dingy dump compared to the elegant, high-class one she stood in now, and Sakura couldn’t help feeling then that she and Orochimaru must make a similar analogy: elegant, beside dumpy.

Decidedly put-out, she stalked over to the sink and poured herself a glass of water, being sure to give the fluted glass a scowl before gulping the cool water down.

There was a conspicuous lack of things, Sakura noticed as she leaned against the cool counter and looked around some more. Any usual person’s kitchen would be alive with magnets, notes, appliances, perhaps some dirty dishes and folded towels by the half-priced soap from the corner store and a jar of pens, but Orochimaru’s kitchen was as clean and bare as the halls and meeting room she’d seen already. The counters shone with no hints of food having been on or near them. The stainless steel handles of the cabinets lacked fingerprints. Even the fridge was vast, pristine, untouched.

Orochimaru accepted the glass that Sakura handed him and took a sip, eyeing her. “I’ve never seen someone so offended by a kitchen.”

She folded her arms. “It’s too nice. Too empty. Do you ever eat?”

“Not while at your apartment, no.” He avoided the water Sakura flicked at him, her scowl growing stormier as she stomped over to the fridge. “I’m changing that. I’m going to cook, and you’re going to eat it, do you hear me?”

“Is that a threat?” Orochimaru cocked an eyebrow at Sakura, and she ignored him as she dug around in his fridge. “Well, at least you stock your kitchen with something other than water,” she grumbled, taking out a carton of eggs and examining it, half-surprised it wasn’t expired. She started plucking item after item from the fridge and setting them on the nearby counter, arranging an idea in her head.

With a grimace, Orochimaru resigned himself, perching at the counter island. He pulled out a scroll from seemingly nowhere and began to read while Sakura bustled around his kitchen. She caught him glancing at her as she began chopping and whisking and stirring, and she couldn’t decide if he was checking on her out of concern for his kitchen or to see what concoction she was creating that he would soon be subjected to.

The peaceful quiet of the kitchen was soon filled with the sissling of eggs and bacon in the saucepan Sakura dug from one of the high cabinets. She threw in several spices she found as well, feeling creative, and she took the bowl of green onions she’d chopped and tossed them in as well, enjoying the medley of smells rising from the pan. Behind her, Orochimaru’s nose wrinkled.

Sakura picked up the pan and tossed the omelette in the air, hissing a yesss when it landed the way she wanted, its other side sissling against the hot non-stick metal. She lifted it to toss it again and nearly dropped the pan on herself upon hearing, “Oh boy, what’s for breakfast?!”

She stood simmering in silence at the counter as she heard Suigetsu stride into the kitchen; she could hear his toothy grin edging his voice. “Who’s this? Hire a new cook?”

“Definitely not,” Orochimaru answered smoothly, and Sakura scowled, scooping the omelette from the pan and onto a nearby plate. “You’d be so lucky,” she retorted, turning her head just enough to shoot him a serrated glare.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when Suigetsu materialised beside her, bright-eyed and beaming. “Whatcha makin’? Can I try — oh?”

Sakura quickly looked back down at the stove with a swirl of her pink locks about her reddening face, knowing her hopes he hadn’t already recognised her were in vain.

“Be careful,” Orochimaru warned Suigetsu. Sakura slammed the pan back onto the stove with an angry pfff. “I’ll kill you,” she threatened, making him chuckle, “Your cooking might.”

“It’s not that bad anymore! I’ve had practice! And not just on the poor surgeons you poisoned,” Sakura protested, shooting another significant look at Orochimaru over her shoulder before cracking several eggs into the pan and stirring in more ingredients she had prepared. With a huff, Sakura aimed her acidic gaze at Suigetsu and his increasingly inane, knowing grin. “If you try it, you have to clean up after yourself. I’m not the maid.”

“No, and you’re not dressed like a cook, either,” Suigetsu teased, his violet eyes touching upon Orochimaru’s shirt that clung loosely to Sakura’s shoulders and curves. Sakura flushed pink and focused hard on the new omelette she was making. Suigetsu folded his arms, cocking his head with his ever-wider toothy grin. “So… you guys didn’t just have a one-night stand.”

“Suigetsu,” came Orochimaru’s warning while Sakura stirred harder, hyper-focused on the pan. Suigetsu hid his laugh with his hand. “Wow! So you’re what he’s been so busy with all this time. You know, when Karin and I dragged him out to that bar with us, we didn’t expect him to snag any lady, let alone you.” His fingers tapped along his arms as his expression brightened. “Karin’ll love this. KARIN!”

Sakura’s entire face was redder than the spirals of the stove eyelet. She took in a deep breath, flipping the omelette and exhaling slowly before closing her eyes in a moment of forced calm. “It’s none of your business,” she managed evenly.

“It’s burning,” Orochimaru commented from behind his reading, and Sakura gave a curse, opening her eyes and flipping the half-burnt omelette onto a nearby plate. She gave it a cross look before picking up the plate and shoving it towards Suigetsu. “You can have the first one if you shut up.”

As Suigetsu cheerily accepted the plate, Karin’s answering shout echoed from far down the nearby hallway. Sakura cringed further over the stove with her embarrassment burning the tips of her ears.

Suigetsu dug a fork from a nearby drawer and sat next to Orochimaru, cheerily stabbing into his breakfast. “This is nice! Pretty girl in the kitchen cooking us breakfast, sending nice smells into the whole place…”

Suigetsu shovelled a bite into his mouth and then paused. Orochimaru’s knowing eyes glittered as the colour drained from Suigetsu’s face.

Unaware, Sakura tossed more spices onto her new omelette, focused over the stove. “How is it?”

“What’s going on here!” Karin stomped into the kitchen and gestured at Suigetsu and Sakura, furious eyes bright upon Orochimaru. “We’re having a big breakfast get-together and you didn’t tell me?! I could do without Suigetsu here but where’s my breakfast?!” She pouted, and Suigetsu quickly piped in, shoving his plate toward Karin. “I’m so sorry I forgot to invite you! Here’s my food as an apology.”

Karin eyed Suigetsu. “Well, aren’t you being nice all of a sudden?” She accepted the plate. Suigetsu looked significantly between Sakura and Orochimaru, waggling his eyebrows at Karin, who snorted. “What? You think this is surprising? I’ve known about this going on since that night at the crappy bar months ago. They couldn’t have been more obvious.” She glanced at Sakura’s back with sudden giddiness. “This means Sasuke’s all mine now, right?”

Sakura coughed a laugh into her hand before stirring in more eggs. “Sure, Karin. Good luck with that.”

With a happy hum, Karin lifted a bite to her mouth, pausing when she noticed the way both Suigetsu and Orochimaru were regarding her with knowing looks. Karin narrowed her eyes. “What? Is it poisoned?”

“Of course not,” Sakura thundered, turning around. Three sets of eyes moved from Sakura, to the plate in Karin’s hand, to Karin, who shrugged. “Can’t be that bad.” She shovelled down the bite of eggs in the same way Suigetsu had.

She made a face before swallowing the bite and swerving to face Suigetsu. “Did you already eat off of this fork?! Gross! What the hell’s wrong with you? Get me a new one.”

“Like you haven’t had my germs already,” Suigetsu grumbled, getting up and digging another fork out of the kitchen drawer by the stove; Sakura resolutely turned back around with a hn, setting about making another omelette.

Suitgetsu handed Karin the fork and folded his arms. She wolfed down the rest of the omelette in double-time, Orochimaru and Suigetsu watching her with mild disgust. Karin glared at them both. “What?” she frothed through a mouth full of food.

Sakura couldn’t stop her cut-short giggle. Karin dragged her dagger-eyes to her; Sakura’s answering smile was grateful. “Glad you like it.”

“More!” Karin demanded, taking Suigetsu’s spot at the counter island and sitting with her empty plate, flicking the crumbs from her mouth. Suigetsu shook his head; Orochimaru sighed as he returned to what he was reading, and Sakura smiled to herself as she prepared the rest of the eggs that were left.



Sakura leaned against the counter with her arms folded and her expression stormy. Orochimaru read his scroll while keeping a safe distance from the plate of eggs in front of him; Suigetsu tried to ignore his food with the same easy grace, but his eyes kept shifting from Sakura to Karin, who was busy horking down the rest of her third omelette.

“Never mind these two,” Karin belched as she got to her feet, taking both Suigetsu’s and Orochimaru’s untouched plates of eggs and placing them along an arm as she swayed up to Sakura and put her other hand on her hips. Behind her, they visibly relaxed with the food no longer staring them in the face. “I’ll gladly eat this while I work in the lab.” Karin offered Sakura a sunny smile that made her straighten, taken aback; she wasn’t used to Karin being friendly to her. “Thanks, Sakura.”

Karin left the kitchen with a wave and both plates, already eyeing them hungrily before disappearing down the hall with a dismissing call, “I owe you a favour, come get me if you need something!”

“Me?” called back Suigetsu with his smirk returning, only for Karin to shout back, “No, I mean Orochimaru’s girlfriend, idiot!”

“Well, I better join her,” Suigetsu added quickly upon seeing Orochimaru and Sakura’s matching slack expressions. “Uhh, thanks, Sakura.” He vacated the kitchen before Sakura could point out that he never had more than a single bite of food.

Orochimaru set his scroll aside, his golden eyes settling on Sakura. She turned from him, colour dusting her cheeks; she set her dishes in the sink and washed them quickly. “Sorry you hate my cooking so much,” Sakura sighed while rinsing away the evidence of her food crimes into the drain.

“It is a skill like any other.” She heard Orochimaru rise to his feet, cracking his knuckles. Sakura felt her skin tingle as he leaned beside her. “What is your plan for today?”

“I have to do some shopping.” She turned to him with a swirl, green eyes bright. “Come with me?”

Orochimaru shook his head, smiling slightly at Sakura’s crestfallen look. “No, I have some things I need to do during the day as well. However, I am available once more in the late afternoon.” Sakura heard the silent question that followed his words and nodded her head in response. “I’ll see you at home,” she affirmed, brushing an embarrassed hand over her lips at her slip but not bothering to correct herself. She turned to leave, squeaking as Orochimaru caught her by the waist, pale hands pulling her to him and tilting her head back. Sakura smiled against his lips, tugging at his yukata. “Enjoy the book. Bring it with you, I want to read it later.”

She saw the spark in Orochimaru’s gilded stare, and she rolled her eyes, pulling back from his arms and gesturing. “Go on, I know it’s all you’ve been thinking about all morning.” Her smile was wry. “Thanks for sitting with me through breakfast.”

Orochimaru ran a hand through Sakura’s hair affectionately before striding down the hall toward his quarters, leaving Sakura with a stinging red face and mussed pink hair.



Sakura had a spring in her step as she walked down the sunny street, holding her paper bag of groceries against her chest and enjoying the touch of the summer sun that was warm across her head and shoulders like a blanket. Occasionally, she adjusted her fitted asymmetrical jacket over her loose cobalt-blue shirt, flattening the edges unconsciously. “I want it back by the end of the week,” Karin had told Sakura, “and damn you, it looks good on you.”

Sakura hummed to herself as she walked, liking the snug feel of her borrowed jacket, grateful Karin had been willing to lend it to her in exchange for this morning’s breakfast. She hadn’t commented on the shirt she wore that was clearly Orochimaru’s, but Sakura had seen the smirk Karin had directed at her when she thought she wasn’t looking.

Sakura paused in front of the book shop, her humming ending in a questioning note. There was a display of cookbooks creating a splash of bright colours and mouthwatering images of savoury cooking. A determined expression gripped Sakura’s face as she adjusted her hold on her bag of groceries and pushed through into the shop.

Making her way to the cooking section near the back of the bookstore, Sakura ran her finger along the spines of the many multicoloured books high on the shelf, narrowed eyes searching along the titles. Her finger paused over “How To Make Sushi”; after a thought, she pulled it off the shelf, cracking it open and thumbing through the pages.

After a thorough skimming, Sakura shoved the book back into its place next to the others, shaking her head. Much too high-level for her just yet.

Letting out a sigh, she moved lower on the shelf. Her eyes caught on another book, this one being about making ramen from scratch. Feeling encouraged by the thought that she already knew how to make instant ramen, Sakura took it out and began to read.

This is stupid, a small thought in the back of her head nagged her as she flicked through the colorful recipes and instructions. He won’t eat your terrible cooking, ever.

Sakura shook her head at herself, flipping to the other half of the book with impatient fingers, careful not to rip the pages. This was something she was doing for herself, not anyone else, she informed her doubts.

The section on making ramen noodles from scratch was just starting to intimidate Sakura when she heard a very familiar hmm and accompanying turning of book pages from nearby. She lifted her head, looking around the small bookshop she was in, every sense alert. She couldn’t see whomever it was she had just heard, but she heard them still; she searched over the bookshelves, her attention passing through each sign that hung over each section. Nobody in the Fantasy section, nor the Nonfiction area she was in. Her stare scattered over the Creative Nonfiction and Romance sections until it stopped on a familiar shock of silver hair, poking out just beneath the Erotica Section sign.

Sakura felt an instinctive relief upon identifying the nearby peruser to be Kakashi. She rolled her eyes at the section she had spotted him in; of course he would be there, probably ogling the Icha Icha series he loved so much. However, Sakura’s relief was short-lived as she inhaled through her nose, the slight sound loud in the quiet bookstore.

Her eyes widened with what her nose registered, scents all on her own person — eucalyptus, burnt omelettes, sweat, Karin’s faded perfume on the jacket, a slight metallic tang, and that warm scent of Orochimaru’s mixed up in it all that Sakura couldn’t put exact words to other than it being definitively his.

Someone with a wolf-hound nose like Kakashi’s would recognize Orochimaru’s scent in moments. Sakura let out a silent curse, kicking herself.

She backed up against the shelf, every sense heightened as she became extremely aware of how little distance there was between Kakashi behind his shelf and the exit to the bookstore. Keeping her eyes fixed on that shock of silver hair just beneath the Erotica sign, Sakura inched toward the exit, clutching the ramen cookbook in her hands like it was her ticket to staying undetected. She hoped against hope that Icha Icha was keeping him so enthralled that he wouldn’t notice her making her stealthy escape.

Sakura couldn’t stop background thoughts from throbbing behind her eyes like headaches. If he found out about us, would he tell everyone? Would he tell Naruto and Sasuke? Would he assume the worst of Orochimaru? With sweat pearling at the back of her neck and down her back, Sakura’s fingers slipping against the ramen recipe book, she made her way faster toward the exit in silent creeping steps.

She straightened as she realized she was hunching and creeping along with her book in her hands like some sort of demented bibliophile. She caught the eye of the cashier, who was eyeing her oddly. “Can I help you, ma’am? Were you looking to buy that?”

Sakura looked down at the book in her hands with surprise like she’d forgotten it was there. “Uhm…” She glanced back at the erotica section of the bookstore with panic, then back at the clerk. “Sure. Fine. Yes.” She hurried up to him and slid the book across the counter, digging out her wallet as fast as she could. “How much? How much? Sorry, I’m in a hurry. I, uh, I have to use the restroom.”

The clerk blinked tiredly at Sakura’s stammering before picking up the book and turning it over, scanning over its back to find its listed price. He reached over and picked up his scanner, running it over the book’s back cover once. It didn’t register the code; he ran it over again, and again, Sakura hopping from foot to foot all the while.

“Gonna have to input it manually,” the clerk informed her in flat monotone. He thudded over to an ancient-looking monitor and punched in the string of numbers beneath the book’s barcode.

Sakura kept glancing back at where she had seen Kakashi, just managing to keep herself from hopping from foot to foot like an anxious rabbit. Her shifty gaze jumped to the door, the thought just go looping loudly in her head, but the recalled image of Suigetsu and Orochimaru’s untouched plates made the sting of embarrassment burn in her cheeks, staying her feet where she waited by the counter.

“How much is it?” Sakura repeated. The clerk shrugged. “The computer will say.” He hit enter, and the old monitor beeped, showing LOADING…

Sakura groaned and rubbed her temples. “It’s too slow. Just give me an estimate. I’ll even tip if you just hurry up...”

The clerk shrugged and pushed up his glasses. “I dunno, give the system a second. It’s in here somewhere.”

“Why the hurry, Sakura-chan? Don’t want to catch up with an old friend?” A gloved hand patted Sakura’s shoulder, and Sakura squeaked as she met Kakashi’s smiling eyes above his mask. “Hokage-sama! I didn’t see you come in! Welcome!” the cashier exclaimed, bowing, and Kakashi gave a lazy wave. “Yo.”

Sakura’s mouth opened and closed before she shut it with a scowl. He hasn’t noticed anything yet. Just be yourself and get the hell out of here before he does.

Sobering her expression, Sakura set a smile on her face, putting her hands on her hips and stepping a conspicuous pace away from Kakashi. “I didn’t want to interrupt you in your perverted section back there,” she teased as Kakashi slid a new Icha Icha book onto the counter with a small stack of ryo. While the clerk scrabbled to ring it in (ignoring Sakura’s book), Kakashi slouched comfortably, blinking down at Sakura. “So… what’s new? I haven’t seen you around the Hokage tower in what seems like months.”

Pushing away her thought of I know, I’ve been avoiding you and your nose, Sakura smacked his arm with a glare. “I told you to stop slouching so much, ‘Kashi-sensei. You’ll wreck your back.”

“My back has been through much worse than poor posture, Sakura-chan,” Kakashi wheedled before he stood up a little straighter, “you would know. You’ve healed it however many times.”

“Damn right I have. So, that means I know exactly how easy it is to damage it further by slouching!” Sakura folded her arms with a stern expression, preparing to launch into a full lecture on posture – before suddenly remembering her predicament, her green eyes widening comically and her hard expression going blank. Kakashi raised a brow at Sakura as she suddenly swerved back to the clerk, slapping down the twenty ryo left from her wallet. “There’s no way the book costs more than this, so just take it. I have to go.” She clutched the ramen cookbook to her chest before flashing an apologetic smile towards Kakashi. “Later sensei, I have to —”

“Ramen? You’re trying to get better at cooking?” Kakashi blinked down at Sakura’s cookbook with both brows lifting into his silver hair. “Also, what’s with the new getup? You look like you’re dressing as Sasuke with that shirt and vest.”

Sakura backed toward the door a step. “The clothes are uh, borrowed! Yep! And I’m really bad at cooking! Gotta get better for — reasons! You should have tasted what I made this morning, it was awful! Now – I really, really have to go!”

“Hm, it’s not like you to admit your poor cooking.” Kakashi’s eyes glinted with amusement. “Did you have a recent food-disaster? I think I can even smell it on you, still.” He audibly sniffed, and Sakura let out a deflated noise as his sleepy eyes widened.

Sakura burst from the store and onto the street, shedding her bag of groceries and sprinting at full speed. She thundered down a side-street, her blood rushing desperately through her veins, dread that Kakashi might guess everything now the terror she ran from. She turned down another side-street and dove into a shadowy doorway, flattening herself up against a wall and trying to mute her rushed breathing. She stayed alert, looking around and listening, her thoughts thrumming. How many times must I run from people I know to hide this secret?

The slender, shadowy street had few people mulling about and was mostly quiet. A stray cat passed by, her black tail held high, and Sakura could hear the distant calls of a street vendor a block or so away. She half-expected Kakashi to pop up out of nowhere and give her a heart attack, and the longer that he didn’t, the more nervous she got.

Sakura dared to peek out from the doorway she was in. She couldn’t see Kakashi anywhere. After a prolonged moment in which she hung still, looking around cautiously, she decided that he must have shrugged off her odd behaviour and not quite detected the scents of Orochimaru all over her. With a relieved exhale, she stepped back out onto the street, letting herself relax as she made her way home.

The beautiful day made Sakura untense another notch as she let herself remember the book still tightly clutched against her chest. She glanced down at it with a chagrined twist about her lips. Making ramen from scratch… that was going to be difficult, but worth it.

Sakura turned onto her street, her attention pinning to her apartment complex near its end. Her attention caught upon Yamato, who was leaning up against a tree by the gate; there was a suspiciously convenient bend in the trunk he was reclining on as he read a book of his own. Sakura eyed the tree – she didn’t remember it being there before. She was chuckling as she approached Yamato. “Did you really grow that just to sit on? Are you on duty here that often?”

Yamato scowled at her. “Yes, I am. That’s entirely your fault.” He cleared his throat, looking paler than usual, and Sakura’s medic-mode pinged her to step closer, tilting her head with concern. “Are you feeling all right?”

He waved her off. “I’m fine, thank you. I appreciate you asking. But uh, go ahead to your apartment.”

“Um… okay.” Sakura shrugged, adjusting her grip on her recipe book and calling back to Yamato as she entered her building. “You had better not be lying about not feeling well!”

Sakura pondered the strange look on Yamato’s face as she made her way through the apartment building’s doors and got onto the elevator. She puzzled over it more as the elevator ascended. Hung over? Ate bad berries?

Sakura got off of her elevator and walked up to her apartment door. She touched the handle; when she saw and felt that it was already unlocked, she closed her eyes and smiled.

The thought dented her smile a bit as she pushed the door gently open. Yamato looked guilty.

The first thing she saw was what she half-expected already: Orochimaru, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pot he’d just brewed with Sakura’s coffeemaker, the steam rising in swirls and the scent filling the air. He turned to her with a slight smile and an expression that Sakura could only interpret as warm. “Welcome home, Sakura-chan.”

Sakura felt a sharp twinge somewhere in her chest at Orochimaru’s domestic greeting. She set the cookbook aside on the nearby counter after dashing her eyes shyly from his. Standing closely beside him, she pressed her nose affectionately into the side of his neck, closing her eyes once more. She took in a deep breath, absorbing the clean scents of his yukata with the fresh coffee, mildly perturbed but not surprised by how glad she was to see him.

“So… the Nara tome,” Sakura murmured, feeling Orochimaru’s gently thrumming pulse. “Anything particularly of interest so far? And have you thought of a study to trade me for it yet?”

“As much as I would love to go into that, Sakura-chan,” Orochimaru answered, taking a serene sip of his coffee and sliding a hand up Sakura’s back, “we have other matters at hand to attend to first.”

“Hmm?” She lifted her head, her eyes dipping into his coffee and watching as it lingered on his smiling lips. He drew it away, his golden eyes burning into her, and she reached up, touching his cheek and pulling him to her.

Orochimaru skimmed past Sakura, dodging her kiss, his lips ghosting over her warming ear. “My dear, we have a guest.”

She froze.

Slowly, Sakura fell back from Orochimaru, her wide green eyes ripping from his to look behind him. Kakashi stood in the middle of Sakura’s apartment, a stricken look on his face, his kunai drawn.