Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The green of Konoha’s leaves was nearly blinding at high noon, at least to the shinobi who thrived in the dark. Sakura was one of them, groaning silently as she strolled toward the mission desk. She’d taken the long way from her apartment, trying to absorb a little sunlight before she withered away like some neglected plant. It wasn’t really working, and was instead giving her a mild headache.

That’s what she got for working too many hours, she supposed. When Satsuki threw her unceremoniously out of the office, it was always for her own good. And it was good to see the division head practice what they were all supposed to preach. Moderation was key. Staying locked in the division was bad. Yadda, yadda.

It was surprisingly crowded this morning, though having more people in the village was rarely a bad thing. This close to the mission desk and Hokage Tower, there was a near-perfect mix between combatants and everyone else, and their styles varied wildly under the summer sun. It made it much easier to blend in, as Sakura found, not getting more than a glance as she walked through. And that was more likely to be from the pink hair than the outfit she'd thrown together.

She’d dressed casually today, slipping between civilians and shinobi alike with no one really taking notice. The combination of a civilian tee with a frankly obnoxious picture of a koi face and baggy shorts made her look younger than she was, and the cut of her standard issue boots left only a few inches of skin around her knees. She'd covered that area with ninja netting, strong as armor and a fraction of the weight. A solid sleeve of navy armor covered her left arm as well, skin-like and surprisingly breathable in the hot weather. At her hip, she’d stored half a dozen supply scrolls and all of her emergency supplies, available only because she never left home without them. Satsuki hadn't let her back into the courtyard after yelling about the pinkette fusing to her office chair. And sure, she could have snuck back in to actually prepare, but where was the fun in that?

She’d tangled the usual navy ribbon in her hair, this time tied into a temple braid that dangled near her shoulder. The rest of her hair flowed out behind her, mid-back for now. She wasn't in love with the length when it was this humid, so that would probably change soon.

Interestingly, it seemed like many of the civilians were trending toward Kumo-style open hakama and close-toed shoes and gloves this summer. Maybe it was some group prediction about the weather not holding. Sakura personally hoped for a rainy summer. The usual weather always made the Gardens miserable, sweat too heavy to evaporate properly beneath the trees, and she was stuck in several layers of formal wear too often to enjoy the dry heat of midday.

All around her, young genin were running back and forth, practically screaming in each other’s faces as they headed from training grounds to missions and back again. Most of the adults were quieter, which kept the environment somewhat tolerable, but Sakura’s eyes glossed over the teams until she spotted a unique trio trudging up from the jonin training grounds near the river. It was less usual for kids to come from that way, but they seemed to have just finished morning sparring, their faces smeared with dirt and hair out of place.

One of the kids was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, which was certainly a distinct clothing choice for a new shinobi. It took a second for her to place the kid as Naruto Uzumaki, the kid who had been stripped of his birthright for the crime of being a useful container. She’d seen him around the red light district a few times, begging for scraps and causing trouble, though he had been much smaller at the time. A smirk twitched at her lips. She’d been allocating a stipend to the girls who took care of him for a few years now, mostly as a fuck you to the Sandaime's little "protection" edict. The old man liked to pretend he was being kind, hiding the kid from the enemies of his parents by squirreling him away in the red light district with the trash. Refusing the Uchiha and Hatake requests to claim him, even though it was their right. Making the last Konoha Uzumaki functionally clanless, and stripping the failure of Uzushio from the history books so he would never know otherwise.

Sakura was sure that the yondaime's considerable wealth had nothing to do with the decision to keep Namikaze's son a ward of Konoha. All that gold, the many weapons from the Yellow Flash's armory, and all those Uzushio relics the Uzumaki matriarch had owned disappeared around the same time. Sakura was sure it was coincidence that the council estates suddenly seemed to prosper.

Well. It was nice to see the kid had grown up well since the last time she'd seen him. He looked more and more like his father every day.

The next kid was easy to identify as well. Black hair, pasty complexion, permanent scowl? Uchiha. She’d been told to watch out for the last Uchiha’s coming of age, so he had to be… twelve? Maybe thirteen by now. Just a couple more years until the village got on her ass about restocking their menagerie of red-eyed bastards. Although that might be a challenge, since the Uchiha was giving a death glare to most of the female genin around him, including his angry little teammate bringing up the rear.

This one, Sakura didn’t recognize. The girl was either some smaller Fire clan—she couldn’t recall any of the important ones having purple hair—or she was a civilian with valuable enough parents to avoid getting tapped for the seduction corps. Either way, that temper of hers was going to get her in trouble, especially since she seemed to be sweet on the Uchiha. Her face twisted into a parody of a simpering look anytime she looked the boy’s way, only to turn thunderous when she regarded the blonde. Sakura rolled her eyes at the antics.

“I see you’ve spotted the infamous Team Seven,” Genma noted from her side, appearing in a whirlwind of hot air and leaves. Sakura didn’t jump. She’d sensed him from a few blocks away, his focus on her as good as a claxon under her natural paranoia. The brunette pouted anyway, his senbon drooping theatrically.

“Team Seven?” Sakura repeated. “Doesn’t that mean…?”

“Yep. Kakashi Hatake, jonin-sensei. We’ve already informed the historians.”

Sakura snorted, trying to imagine the white-haired recluse teaching anyone anything. From what she'd heard about him, he barely tolerated his ANBU teams. Teaching kids was going to be infinitely harder. “Good luck to him,” she muttered, ignoring how easily Genma fell into step with her. “At least that keeps a few troublemakers in one place.”

Genma took a moment to catch her drift, and then nodded. “Yeah, probably better to avoid the whole team,” he agreed breezily. “Anyway, Haruno, where are you going on such a fine day? And not wearing twenty pounds of formalwear?”

Rolling her eyes, Sakura swatted at him lazily. “What does it look like, Shiranui? I’m getting bored cooped up in my office all day.” She paused for a moment before adding. "And I got kicked out."

“The truth comes out! Did you already accept a mission? You're dressed for one.”

“I'll take just about anything that gets me out of here for a few days. If I have to stamp another requisition form anytime soon, I’ll scream.”

Genma opened his mouth, likely to offer advice or his company, but he was nearly tackled by the trio they’d spotted earlier as they rushed the Tower. “Sorry!” called Naruto behind him, whisker-smile flashing. “Kakashi-sensei, hurry up!”

“The lungs on that child,” Sakura sighed, stepping out of the way instinctively when the Hatake appeared in the lobby doorway. He looked as tired as she felt, honestly, though his mask did a lot of work to hide that.

“Maa, Genma, I didn’t realize you were back in town,” Hatake noted, obviously stopping to chat because his genin wanted him to hurry. It was petty and transparent, but Sakura could respect the move. From behind him, the three children were shooting glares at his back near where they waited in line. She'd seen that look on recruits from her own department and it never stopped being amusing.

“Just got in a few days ago,” Genma confirmed. “Actually, I’m on my way back out if Haruno is looking for a partner?” The end of his sentence dipped up into a question, only a little hesitant.

Sakura raised a brow at him, waiting a beat just to watch his expression falter. “Yeah, I suppose you’d be good company,” she told him, allowing her smile to grow a little more. “I’m looking for something less than a month, more than a week. That alright with you?”

“Sounds like a fun vacation. We haven't hung out in a while.”

Hatake gave her a curious glance, apparently not recognizing her. That wasn’t really surprising. As ANBU, the guy had very little overlap with her usual work, and shinobi from the Gardens weren’t usually first choice on mixed missions. She also didn't hang around in shinobi bars or the jonin lounge, which was where most of the ninja their age tended to socialize.

“Sakura Haruno, by the way,” she told him. “I don’t think we’ve officially met.”

“Really?” Genma interrupted, surprised. “How have you never met?”

“Shiranui.” Sakura gave Genma a condescending look, just to really rub it in. “It's a big village. Why would you assume we've met?”

“You’re both friends with me!”

At the same time, Sakura and Hatake made vaguely protesting sounds. Sakura couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of her at that, and at the wounded noise Genma made in return. The man reached out to ruffle her hair in retaliation, but Sakura dodged out of the way, nearly shouldering the white-haired jonin. The man didn't seem to mind, also dodging the brunette's flailing.

“Oh my gosh, does Kakashi-sensei actually have friends?” the girl of Team Seven asked loudly, apparently tired of waiting for her sensei to join them in line. She stomped over to the group, every inch the demanding little hellion Sakura had suspected her of being. “Are you Kakashi-sensei’s friends?”

“I don’t have friends,” Sakura replied as she eyed the kid, her face wiped of the grin. Genma made another dramatic, wordless protest, gesturing to himself emphatically. Sakura glanced his way for a second, before shaking her head. "Ignore him. The heat is making him hallucinate."

“You’re funny,” the girl noted sagely, crossing her arms. “But you dress like a hobo.”

“Ami,” Hatake scolded, his tone suggesting that this wasn't the first time he'd done so.

“That’s my secret,” Sakura replied, not breaking her straight face as she eyed the girl. The key was not to blink. “I am a hobo. I live under the bridge near training ground three.”

“Ew!” Ami’s expression turned horrified instantly. “We ate lunch there!”

“I know. I was so hungry I stole one of your umeboshi. They're my favorite.” Really, the faintest smell of pickling brine had followed the girl, so it was a safe bet she’d had it for lunch. Anyone more experienced would have called her bluff, but the genin was too fresh to realize the ruse. The girl immediately fled, probably to go warn her teammates about the dangerous hobo who stole snacks.

“You think you’re funny,” Genma sighed as he watched her go. “But you’re not.”

"The kid thought I was. Besides, she called me a hobo.” Sakura gestured to herself, finally allowing her expression to soften. The shirt she’d chosen was admittedly a little eye-searing, but that was very on brand for her these days. Arguably, she was no more hobo-like than Hatake, who was wearing a startlingly threadbare flak jacket, or Uzumaki, who presumably chose to wear that orange jumpsuit. Her girls would have given him several other choices, she was pretty sure. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Act like an adult?”

“A what now?” Shaking her head slightly at his clearly nonsensical suggestion, Sakura returned her gaze to Hatake. His visible eye sparkled with humor, which was both flattering and the exact opposite of what should have happened. If anyone on the council saw that she was getting along with Hatake spawn… Well. She was generally considered too useful to play incubator, but the Hatake bloodline was vital to the village. The Sandaime would bench her in a second if they thought the clan could be revived, her own opinions on the matter be damned. Genma apparently had the same thought, because he cleared his throat to break the mood.

“We should probably get going,” he apologized, looking toward the desk. “Your team is going to plot our murder soon and we’re wasting daylight.”

“Right,” the pinkette agreed quickly. “It was nice meeting you, Hatake.”

Kakashi’s expression didn’t close off, but he must have sensed something had changed. Rather than questioning them on it, though, he just waved them off. “See you around, Haruno, Genma.”

Chapter Text

Getting out of the village was exactly what Sakura had needed, though she would never tell the women back in the Gardens that. The pinkette had pulled an infiltration mission over in the south part of Wave, which was an unusual offer, but the view of the ocean was worth the slightly demeaning B-rank mission. Apparently some mogul was about to cause a bunch of trouble for the mainland robber barons and they wanted him pinned down ahead of time.

Their job was to get into his office, copy all of his business documents, and get out without him noticing a thing. It was laughably easy, especially since this “Gato” was about as subtle as a brick to the face. He would be eaten alive by the more established court on the mainland no matter how much money he threw at the problem. The only reason this was ranked B instead of C was his penchant for hiring bandits and missing nin too weak for a bingo book entry.

The whole thing was slated for three weeks, with their return by date marked for six. Plenty of time to get the mission done and take care of various chores outside of the village. Plus, both she and Genma specialized in this kind of thing. They'd probably finish in two or three days assuming there were no big complications.

“The guy has a sadistic reputation,” Genma warned as they picked at the remains of their lunch. “Are you sure you want to do it the usual way?” Taking the shortest route avoided most of the roads, but they had stopped in a little waystation halfway through to enjoy a cup of tea and a late lunch. The place was empty enough this time of day that they hadn't seen anyone else, even other shinobi groups.

“You know I play battered victim well enough,” Sakura replied easily, sipping her tea. Her summons had already been sent out, barely needing directions to the man’s little ship. Even from this far away, the whole area he’d choked out was visible to those with the right senses. Death rode the wind strong enough it set her teeth on edge. “He's civilian, anyway. I can just put a jutsu around however many of his thugs end up getting involved. Besides, I don't know about you, but if we're going to Wave, I want to stop through Takumi on my way back. Might as well shoot for a quick infiltration and enjoy the extra shopping days.”

"Looking for something in particular?" He didn't seem opposed to the plan, but Sakura could still tell by the set of his shoulders that Genma wasn't particularly comfortable with the rest of their talk.

Sakura nodded, deciding that his feelings were his own problem. He'd agreed to come with her and he knew how she worked, so it wasn't like she was springing anything on him. "A few things. There was someone last time who did really good needle work if you need to pick up any more senbon. I'm planning to pick up hair pins if they're still around." The pinkette took another sip of her tea, circling back to the difficult topics. "How long do you think it'll take you to get the documents?"

The brunette tensed, but eventually shrugged. “Depends. At least half an hour, but a whole night would be best. Do you want to stake it out first?”

“I don't think we'll need to, but if you want to check out the boat I'll draw people into the village. It shouldn't take me long to get noticed.” Sakura’s grin sharpened as the buzz of a fly infiltrated the normal noises of the station. “Are you ready to go?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be, partner.” Genma finished his tea and they were soon off. About five miles from the town where Gato’s personal boat was moored, Sakura stopped and directed them to a clearing. Genma, used to her antics, made himself scarce as she prepared her new identity.

First came her Pupation Technique, as she had heard some of the other flowers call it. First, she had to lose the clothes, all of them packed away into her scrolls with care. It wasn't until then that Sakura realized she hadn't been wearing her identification. With the number of missions where she wasn't allowed to identify with Konoha, she had completely forgotten the headband. It was probably good that they hadn't run into any other teams on their way out, then.

The blue ribbon from her hair was used to tie the bundle of scrolls together in the small pack she had left, making them look more like love letters than storage at a passing glance. Sakura cast the transformation jutsu with ease, feeling the shift of her body under her skin, organs moving, bones growing and shrinking as her appearance changed. Rosy strands of hair fell out in clumps before it faded to ash, replaced with a pale blonde, just a couple shades off from white. Her skin darkened slightly, the tan of a traveler, and green eyes were replaced with a warm brown.

The whole process was excruciatingly slow and not particularly pleasant, taking the better part of an hour to complete, but when she was finished, Meiko had emerged and changed into a cared-for but clearly worn kimono. To complete the look, she strapped a well-loved biwa to her back. Nobody looked twice at a traveling musician, and while it was relatively common knowledge that Wave was poor, not everyone knew just how poor. Tourism wouldn’t have dried up just yet, and individual performers would be far more likely than a troupe heading through the area as they toured down Fire and up through River. It was the right time of year to use the natural land bridges between islands, hitting villages that wouldn't normally see these kinds of entertainers.

Quickly, she tied her hair up into a messy, slightly off-center braid. She wanted to look pretty, but not well off, a few scars from childhood illness and accidents littering her hands and neck as she melded her flesh into the correct pattern. A recent widow, she decided, slipping on a slightly rusted ring. Far from her own home due to marrying for love. It would help to sell why she had no support. Besides, everyone loved a good sob story.

As Sakura examined her body for any defects in her jutsu, she noticed Genma’s return, along with the buzzing of more flies. Smiling, Sakura held out a fingertip for the insects, watching as they landed delicately on her hands, the largest staring at her from the tip of her finger. There was death waiting for them ahead, for this many to be so smug.

“I’ll try and find lodging for the night,” she told the man, glancing at him for only a moment. “Did you find a good vantage point?”

“Of course. You still using the standard flares?”

Sakura nodded. That was the first thing the flower division taught their trainees. The specific signals for meeting needed, assistance needed, and immediate retrieval required were designed to be as discreet as possible for undercover missions with civilians. It wouldn’t help them if there were properly trained nin around, but Gato generally went for quantity over quality based on what their initial intel had suggested. The only ninja they were likely to run into would be washed out academy failures and cowards so desperate for cash that they didn’t mind being underpaid. No need to set up a more elaborate system, especially with such a short-term mission.

Within a few minutes, the insects all retreated, the swarm returning to the bloated corpses that they had reported further up the coast. Sakura handed her scrolls to Genma for safekeeping and made her way up the road, singing softly to herself as she walked the last few miles to the harbor. The afternoon had burned off the fog she'd expected, but the road was still too unstable for heavy carts or horses. A tradeoff with the land bridges, she supposed. When the islands were finally connected, the rivers flooded the paths to keep them isolated.

In another life, Sakura liked to think she would have loved traveling over old roads like this. One of her more persistent identities when she needed to scope out an area was a romance novelist looking for inspiration, and there was an elegant tragedy in the landscape that made her want to write something. If she hadn’t been through the academy, she would have liked to do it full-time. In the interest of keeping her identity airtight, she had published a few books after trips to onsens and scenic outposts and they did well according to her publisher. Civilians sometimes even recognized her and complimented her work, which was pretty great for her ego. Sure, her introspective love stories never did as well as the smut, but it padded the budget back home.

So many of the supposed infiltration specialists in Konoha kept sloppy identities and relied on luck or sex appeal. Sakura could argue that she was doing the same this time, but at least she sorted out the details ahead of time and the approach suited the mission. Doe eyes would get her in the door, and she needed to make sure no one was suspicious even after she left. That was the mark of a good honeypot, after all.

There was something undeniably endearing about a delicate woman in mourning clothes begging to just play in the corner of the inn in exchange for a room for the night. She was used to being tragic, twisting her ring like it would have the answers when she received her first no. As expected, word soon spread as she tried every inn in the town, each telling her the same. All according to plan, then. The village closed ranks against the stranger and Sakura trudged her way to the village center, pretending not to notice the dark eyes that followed her from alley corners.

The whole place reeked of death, as the flies had warned. All around, she could see the signs of too little food and no healthcare. With no real access to the mainland, that wasn't a surprise. There was only one road in and out of the little village, and it was too far away for most merchants to go over land. From what she had heard of Gato, he was choking off the village through the sea route, and it was alarmingly effective. These people were born for the sea, and those who had tried to escape down the road were buried in shallow graves, kept company only by the thousands of insects feasting on their corpses.

Even here, the stench of rotting meat pervaded, strangely sweet alongside the seaweed that had washed up on the rocks and attracted scavengers. Not all of it, Sakura reflected as she walked past milky-eyed old men and children with dirty bandages, was the food. She could feel the slight pull of maggots squirming beneath the cotton, feasting on disease. Maybe sending some of her fledgling medics this way wouldn't be a bad move after the mission was over. But there was time to think on that later. The mission came first, as always.

Playing the biwa had been a hobby Sakura picked up as a little girl, desperate to find something to do between missions. Most girls her age didn’t want to talk to her, and most ninja her rank refused to. So, an instrument had been a good way to fill the silence when she was stuck in the Gardens and had ended up useful on missions when she got good at it.

As she started the first hymn of the day, her biwa rang out in the sickly air. Soon, her voice followed. She’d chosen a good time. The menfolk were just finishing hunting and land-fishing for the day, and women were beginning to head home through the square before night fell. Several stood there, enchanted by the music as Sakura ran through the entire Ballad of the Sages, voice echoing in the mist that rolled in once the sun stopped burning it away. She tried not to smile to herself as she did, noticing the rough-looking men talking among themselves in a bar and grinning.

Hook.

As she prepared to run through The Tragedy of Two Lovers, one of her personal favorites, one of the people watching broke from the rest of the crowd. With her chakra tamped down to civilian levels and her focus on the instrument, she hadn’t noticed the pretty stranger come up. Even from close, she wouldn't have sensed the overdeveloped chakra coils without being ninja herself. They offered her a flask, which Sakura took a few grateful drinks from.

“Thank you, stranger,” she murmured, not having to force the slight hoarseness of her throat. It had been a while since she had performed properly, with intent. “Are you enjoying my performance?”

“Very much,” the brunette replied. Looking closer, she could see the callouses of ninja tools, which she expected, and clean nails, which she had not. The hakama they wore was Kiri make, not that unusual for the area but too new for a place with such rampant poverty. Not a missing apprentice, then, but someone on a sanctioned mission and not particularly trying to hide their presence in Fire. “You are a traveling musician?”

She felt her body get probed with chakra, the short-range sensing easy to miss if she wasn’t already hyper-aware of the space around her. Well, that was unfortunate for her. She’d hoped to get through the night with an easy genjutsu, but she couldn’t risk the chakra usage anymore. Sensor techniques were really the worst.

Sakura offered a small, pained smile to the ninja. “Ah, yes. I suppose I am, now.” Like it was an unconscious gesture, she twisted the ring on her hand again. “Please, call me Meiko. May I have your name?”

“Haku.” The stranger was no more than fifteen at most, androgynous in a way that some of her fellow specialists would kill for. Too young to be on their own, too, which meant a whole team was likely around the area. A fly buzzed around them for a moment before dispersing. Genma would need to know about the complication.

“Ah, I have just the song for you, then, Haku.” Sakura gestured to the bench where she sat. “Please, do you have a moment?”

Blinking slowly enough that the ninja was almost certainly scanning her as a potential threat, Haku carefully sat beside her. Sakura strummed the first notes of White Feathers, White Branches, an old ballad from up in Kumo. With Haku near her, the others seemed to press in closer, some of the children sitting on the ground nearby to listen to her story.

Haku, too, seemed entranced. One of the men in the crowd, a ninja near-covered in bandages with a Kiri headband, leaned against one of the buildings, eyes closed. If Sakura had to guess, this was the missing teacher. Unfortunately, she recognized the sword on his hip.

Hopefully they were just passing through on an unrelated mission. Sakura was pretty sure she could take down some Kiri apprentice if she had to keep her cover intact, but one of the Seven Swordsmen? Not a chance. Slipping up would mean instant death.

At the end of that ballad, the ninja approached, giving Sakura a surprisingly respectful head nod. Sakura smiled back at him, timid and frightened as a civilian normally would be when seeing a man with that many scars and bandages. “When I said to finish your shopping, I was expecting you to come back,” Momochi Zabuza told the brunette. “We have a mission to get to.”

“My apologies,” Haku replied, beginning to stand. Sakura, like a fretful mother would, immediately jumped in to defend the child.

“It’s my fault,” she volunteered, regretful. “I insisted on them staying for a song.”

Zabuza regarded her for a long moment, chakra probing lightly over her skin again, this time more thoroughly than Haku had. Sakura, for one irrational moment, swore he saw through her jutsu. But that was impossible. There was nothing to see through. Down to her genes, this was what her body thought it looked like now. Until she completed the other half of the jutsu, it couldn’t be reverted or seen through, even by something as powerful as a sharingan. His battle sense must have been spectacular, or maybe he was just that suspicious of everyone.

“How long will you be in town?” the ninja asked. And, oh, wouldn’t that be interesting prey? Arguably, keeping the ninja away from their mission would take priority over her current targets. If she could do both at once, that would let Genma stroll in and do whatever he needed.

“As long as they’ll have me, shinobi, sir,” Sakura replied, laying the bait carefully. “I’ve just arrived today.”

“Where are you staying?”

Sakura flushed, looking away. “I do not know yet. But I’m sure my performance will earn me enough coin for a night at an inn.” In a smaller voice, poor and weak, she added, “Or, if that fails, I can always wash dishes and clean rooms.”

The hook she’d laid out was a little heavy-handed, but she supposed it would do. Who would have thought that the famous Momochi Zabuza was weak to pretty brown eyes? She expected him to brush her off and pull his apprentice along for whatever mission they were doing. Instead, Sakura blinked in surprise at the coin purse that landed in her lap, an immediate protest on her lips.

“Let’s go, kid,” the ninja announced, talking over her. Haku gave her a soft smile on the way over, and the two disappeared quickly.

Whatever they were off to do didn’t concern her. Sakura put the coin purse in her kimono before picking up her instrument again. She doubted she’d have to make the choice about whether or not to use it. Given the dark chuckles that she could hear from a nearby alley, she wouldn’t make it to an inn anyway.

Line.

Sure enough, when Sakura put away her biwa for the day and started her way back to one of the inns, she was hauled into an alley. They broke the instrument, strings snapping up as she screamed against rough hands.

But of course no help came. The two ninja were off on whatever mission they had had, and the villagers wouldn’t help some random outsider after dark. The key was to struggle enough that they felt they had won, but not so much that she actually escaped. If she was going to play bait physically, there was a balance between the thrill and the effort.

The perfect moment arrived when one of them smashed their fist to the side of her head, a move that would probably have stunned a civilian. Sakura fell limp, checking for loose teeth, as they dragged her further into the alley, joking and leering all the while. She stayed down, trying not to grin to herself at how textbook all this was going to be.

Sinker.

Chapter Text

Sakura very quickly found herself thrown in front of an overweight man who smelled like sour milk and dry rot. He spouted off some nonsense about liking pretty things and threatened her life in ways she’d heard a hundred times before. Acting like the reluctant, scared victim was easy. The revulsion on her face wasn’t even fake.

The rumors about him being into sadism weren’t exaggerated, apparently. When he’d had his fill of slapping her around and nearly choking her on his dick due to the grip in her hair, he threw her to his guards, apparently content to watch the second round. They hauled her to an old bedroom, where Gato took a seat on an overstuffed chair and the strangers held her down.

Sakura wished she didn’t know exactly how to react in these kinds of situations. That she wasn’t so used to using herself as bait that this didn’t even phase her beyond pressing down the instinctive urge to fight back. She was barely twenty, but her common birth had made this kind of thing an expected mission outcome.

She’d barely been eight when the kyuubi attack happened. With both of her parents killed and the rest of her family painfully civilian, eager to earn favor with the ninja of Konoha, she was an easy choice to tap for the flower division. For better or worse, Sakura had been a very pretty child. That was useful to certain industries.

Planning her next moves, Sakura dared to send a tiny wisp of chakra around the boat where she had been thrown down, the barest net of it unlikely to trigger a sensor without an active jutsu running. It seemed like Zabuza and Haku were out of her range, off the boat and surrounding water. They could return at any moment, though, so she couldn’t risk more than a few threads that could be waved off as paranoia. Genma was near enough for his coils to warm her, probably digging through the office for all that incriminating evidence. There was probably a lot of it. After meeting Gato in person, she didn’t get the impression that he was clever.

She sent out the barest request flare, the glimmer of his masked chakra responding immediately with an affirmative before dimming again. Pulling her chakra back into herself, Sakura concentrated on the flow of her coils, meditating while some small part of her consciousness kept up the act. There was no point in traumatizing herself by weighing the mission against her own bodily autonomy. She could unpack all the new baggage when all this was over and she was safe. For now, out in the field, the mission was the highest priority.

It seemed to take hours, though eventually the group was done with her, having their fill of whatever they could make her flesh do. Sakura was left in tatters, bleeding sluggishly from several wounds across her face and arms. She’d broken two nails trying to fight the men off, and they stung fiercely. That had been when the first of them had forced two fingers - dry, the fucker - into her ass just to watch her sob at the new kind of pain. Thankfully, none of them had pushed the issue when she refused to loosen up. Too much effort for not enough thrill. Sakura didn't quite remember the details, wrapped up in the cocoon of her own mind, but she was good at weighing the two and walking the line.

“Fucking bitch,” one of the thugs spat at her as they filed out, sated for now. Gato was one of the last to leave, jerking off over her prone body. At least none of them had decided to do anything too creative. Apparently even these murderers weren't willing to fuck someone to death, at least not in front of their friends. Or maybe she had said something that made them want a second round later. Sakura had gotten very good at begging over the last decade.

“How about you stay there, darling?” Gato teased, eyeing her appreciatively. She didn't miss how his gaze lingered on the worst of her injuries, hungry. “You really do look better on your back.”

Sakura didn’t answer him, and he clearly didn’t expect her to. As soon as she was left alone and the door closed, Genma dropped from the ceiling and crouched in front of her. His face was carefully blank, non-judgmental. He’d been around the flower division enough to know that the last thing she needed was pity. The sight of him helped the pinkette recalibrate her mind, throwing off the haze. There was still work to be done, even if she'd needed a small break from it.

“Status?” he whispered, taking in the vivid bruising on Sakura's face and body. They’d done a number on her breasts, too, leaving one of them scratched to hell. Nothing permanent, but it was lucky she didn't need to wear a bra anytime soon. The cloth of her kimono would be irritating enough to the injury.

“Two broken fingers, hairline fractures,” the woman replied, forcing herself up and grimacing. “Cracked a couple of ribs. Bumps and bruises, mostly on my face. Soreness and inability to untense, at least for right now. Trauma to my vaginal canal and vulva in general, though thankfully nothing permanent. And I am horrendously sticky.” She emphasized the last sentence. It was clearly the worst part.

“Anything you need to take care of right now?” They both knew she had a medical kit in her scrolls, and it wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to reset a few bones.

“I’ll be fine.” Sakura gave him a lopsided grin. “I mean, as far as gang rapes go, this was pretty mild. Nobody even tried to strangle me.” Genma made a distressed noise, and she laughed at him, lowly. It had been a while since they’d worked together after all. He must have forgotten that she needed to joke until the mission was over or the tidy little box where she stored all her feelings would burst open. And that would be a stupid reason for them to fail a B-rank this easy.

Tying her clothes back into some semblance of order, Sakura brushed her hair out of her face and continued. “So, do we need to keep digging? I’d prefer to avoid the A-rank assault nin if we can.”

"Yeah. Trying to fight Momochi fucking Zabuza isn't on my to-do list." Genma shuddered once at the thought. “I got what we'll need to finish the mission, but did find something interesting if you’re feeling vindictive.” The man didn't even wait for Sakura to jab him, apparently as interested in the opportunity as he knew she would be. "Gato hired a bunch of people in the last couple days, mostly local gangs but he shelled out for our Kiri problem. They’re trying to take out some architect building a bridge to another island. There's a permanent crossing that would open a trade route to River, allegedly, so it would bypass the stranglehold Gato has on the place.”

“And it would be pretty embarrassing if he failed to take out some random bridge builder,” Sakura mused, humming to herself in thought. "It sounded like the bridge was almost done if the crowd was to be believed. Should only take a week or so if they have the supplies. Zabuza is a front-line specialist, not an assassin. If we can keep him distracted for a while, we won't have to face him head-on, either."

“Hey, if you need to head back to recover, we have enough to finish the mission. No need to push yourself with a game of keep-away.” Even though the brunette said it that way, he seemed to already know the answer to his silent question.

“You know I’m spiteful, Shiranui.” Sakura’s grin sharpened, rage broiling under the surface of her skin. Terrorizing whatever thugs the man sent after that bridge builder would practically be therapy. That was good for her, right? “He broke my biwa.”

“The bastard!” For all the seriousness of the situation, Genma’s tone made her laugh. Some of the tension seemed to drain from him then, and Sakura offered the barest smile.

He helped her to her feet carefully, and Sakura grimaced at the same time as the jonin when their senses picked up an uncontrolled chakra signature nearby. “Go,” she hissed, and he was gone before the words left her mouth, chakra still shielded to almost nothing. Sakura hunched down on herself as she opened the door, intending to make sure the Kiri duo didn't think to track the signal.

As a civilian, Sakura wouldn’t have sensed the two nin making their way slowly and silently down the hallway. That was why she froze dramatically when she saw them, quickly tugging her injured hand to her chest to protect it.

“Meiko?” Haku said quietly, blinking in surprise as Sakura stared at them. Haku seemed to be fine, if a little drained of chakra. Zabuza was sporting a nasty head wound and a deep scratch along his front, left shoulder to right hip like someone had tried to disembowel him. Nothing lethal for someone like the swordsman, but certainly an injury that would slow him down.

“O-oh, hello, Haku,” Sakura sniffled, using her good hand to try and comb down her hair. “Is your partner okay?”

“Are you?”

What terrible bedside matter for a victim, Sakura reflected. That kind of tone would be considered accusing rather than sympathetic. Still, as Meiko, she tried for a wobbly smile. “Don’t you worry about me, dear.”

Zabuza stirred slightly, and Haku braced him as the man opened his eyes. Sakura could see the exact moment his eyes focused, and the killing intent he leeched made her fall to her knees, a ragged sob tearing from her throat. Excellent improvisation, if she did say so herself.

“What happened?” the man growled, somehow shaking off Haku’s help. And oh, that was a fun surprise. She’d always heard Kiri nin were cold to outsiders, especially the weak. He really was a soft touch under all that reputation. How cute.

“I,” Sakura started, her voice quivering too much. Instead of answering, she choked out a few more sobs. Making herself cry had taken some time to master, but she had enough sad things in her life to really make her gut twist when needed. She went for broken, heaving sobs, like the weight of the world had become too much. It seemed fitting, and didn't need as much breath support. Her ribs were pretty sore.

“Hey,” Zabuza’s voice was stern, but not mean. A hand came down to touch her head. Sakura didn’t have to fake the flinch, too wound up still, though she did play it up with immediate and nearly incomprehensible pleas to leave her alone.

Unfortunately, Sakura had had plenty of reference material for this part of her ploy. Not everyone got mental resistance training and a handler experienced in handling trauma in the field. Until a few years ago, sometimes ninjas in the flower division didn’t even get that much.

“Hey,” Zabuza tried again, hissing in pain as he sat in front of her, far enough away not to be a threat. “That’s enough of that.”

Knowing what was expected of her, Sakura worked to slowly corral her emotions, imperfectly like someone with no training might. The cries slowly tapered off, with Sakura dabbing at her eyes delicately, whimpering at her own bruises. She knew that men tended to fold for helpless looking women, but she had thought someone from the Bloody Mist might assume the timing was too perfect and it was a trap. Or maybe they didn’t have an infiltration division of their own and assumed no one would put themselves in that situation willingly.

“You gonna cry again?” Zabuza asked frankly when she had calmed.

Silently, Sakura shook her head, unable to meet his eyes. She pulled her clothing tighter around herself, as if only just now realizing that her kimono was ruined. If the blood on it hadn’t destined the cloth for scraps, the torn hems and sleeve would have. A shame, since the design had been very versatile for her disguises.

“Who brought you in here?”

“There were…” Sakura’s voice cracked, before she forced it even. “There were several men, shinobi, sir.”

“Was Gato there?” Haku asked quietly. “An older man, wearing a suit and dark glasses.”

Sakura let her entire body shudder, curling in on herself as much as her ribs would allow as she nodded. The two ninja in front of her were silent for some time, before Zabuza apparently stood back up. Sakura wondered what the best play would be for this, wondering if she could drive them off with more sobbing, when she heard the sound of a door opening.

“Well, let’s get you cleaned up,” the man grumbled. And that was not what Sakura wanted to hear, but at least it kept the duo from patrolling and potentially finding Genma. And it was sweet of them to help some random civilian woman. Actively hindering her extraction attempts, but sweet.

The ship had working showers, which was unexpected. Sakura took full advantage when Haku pressed a new set of clothes into her hands and waved her to the bathroom. She rinsed off her wounds first, hissing quietly as she was forced to work with her broken fingers. At least she’d managed to clean herself out and get the stickiness off. That would have bothered her until they were far enough away to make camp for sure. She also washed off her other clothes, not wanting the stench of it to give her away when she took it back to Konoha. Even if storage seals didn't trap scent the same way a pack might, she couldn't help but feel like the rest of her things would be tainted.

When she slipped on the new clothes, she found that they were ninja make, and in a pretty enough Kiri style. The pink of it didn’t match her chosen skin tone, and it made the bruises on her arms and face even starker by comparison, but it would do. There was even underwear, which was strange. Neither of the ninja seemed the type to wear fundoshi often enough to store it in their packs. Maybe they’d stolen it from somewhere else? Not worth thinking about, really, since it was clean.

Haku was bandaging Zabuza’s chest when Sakura returned, hands steady over the injuries. “What happened?” Sakura asked gently. Their movements would be useful to Intelligence, at least.

“Mission trouble,” Haku replied, shrugging. The child was wearing a headband now, Sakura realized. There hadn’t been one before, in town. She’d heard that Zabuza was a missing nin, but neither of them had scratched out their village signs. That would definitely be useful to the gremlins down in T&I.

“Oh, I see. Can I help?” Sakura held out her good hand carefully, placing a careful touch on Haku’s upper arm. It was one of very few places that wouldn’t get a senbon in her neck, although Sakura was sure to make it look accidental. No sense in raising their suspicions now, after all. The mission was practically over.

Zabuza’s gaze was heavy. As a ninja, she’d never offer to get close to someone injured, not someone she didn’t know. But as a civilian, as someone as sweet as little Meiko? Sure she would. The man’s hands glanced to her hand, which was turning an impressive shade of purple thanks to the breaks, before he huffed.

Haku, apparently well-versed in his noises, offered a smile to Sakura. “Sit on the other side and help me wrap?” the apprentice asked.

It was mildly surreal to help bandage an enemy combatant who would probably cut her down with zero hesitation. It was excellent mission data, though. As she worked, Sakura noted every scar and twitch from the man as she got in close. Haku was also easier to read from up close, pretty face not quite perfectly masking the worry. Zabuza was gruff, but when Haku put the last clip in place for the bandage on his head wound, the man rested his hand on the child’s crown, fingers gently ruffling their hair.

Aww. Sakura let herself smile at the gesture for real. Haku caught the look and flushed ever so slightly, but didn’t shrink away from the affection. Zabuza was the one who broke the moment, huffing out what was probably a laugh before turning to Sakura again.

“So what do you plan to do?” he asked, like he cared.

That could have meant any number of things, and this plot had gone on a little too long already. She couldn't risk having the nin follow her when she left, after all. Sakura had been relying on tragedy for most of her story so far, so she decided to really hit the melodrama. The woman looked down to her hands, the missing ring from broken fingers, and grimaced.

“I think... I shall go on a journey,” she decided, aware of the implication. Zabuza must have been as well, given the immediate tightening of his expression. Haku was, thankfully, oblivious. “It looks like sunrise will be here soon, so I must find my ri - things.”

Neither of the nin stopped her when she stood, bowing again to the two of them. “Thank you for letting me borrow these clothes. I shall pay you back, before I leave.”

This would be a messy way to tie up loose ends, but effective, she figured as she retrieved her still-wet and ruined kimono, quickly heading back to the bedroom where her ring had been lost. Feeling a little wicked, Sakura also stole a few of the metal studs out of the chair. Sure, it wouldn’t pay more than a few coins, but it would ruin the chair visually until the man replaced it. And she was petty enough to want the guy’s furniture to look bad. If she hadn't accepted the mission on the contingency that Gato not realize he had been played, she would have stolen all his shoes and loosened the pipes for his shower, too.

After that, Sakura made her way to the morning market, playing the grave-faced victim once more. She quickly sold her hair to a lure-maker, cutting it near to the scalp and ignoring the pitying looks as she took the coins. She retrieved her biwa from the alley. Surprisingly, no one had stolen it. That may have had more to do with the amount of work it would take to restore it than anyone's good nature, though. It was probably ruined for good, but at least she could bring it back to Konoha and find out for sure. There might even be a few artisans from the Land of Rivers familiar with instrument crafting who could weigh in.

Dawn had truly started when Sakura changed back into the ruined kimono, pulling it back around herself as she folded the clothes she had borrowed. She carried the bundle back to Gato’s boat, finding her way easily to the room where Haku and Zabuza were resting. She laid the clothes down, along with the purse Zabuza had given her, now stuffed with the extra coins from her earlier bartering. Then, she knocked quietly on the door and fled.

Things were easy after that. Wave had enough rocky coasts that Sakura only needed to be seen walking off the cliffside by some of the villagers. The thirty foot drop was less than ideal, but the water wasn't quite as cold as she had feared. Five minutes of hard swimming, carefully rising for just enough air to swim down the coast and throw off any trackers, and bam, Meiko was out of the picture. One story thread tied off in a bloody bow.

Genma met her at the edge of the beach where she finally surfaced, holding out her scrolls. “Thanks,” she told him, grinning.

“You stole that from Tale of Two Lovers,” the man accused lightly as Sakura pulled off her soaked clothes. She'd been tempted to leave them in the water, but that was a waste of perfectly good rags.

“You bet I did. It’s a classic for a reason!” Now naked, Sakura quickly ran through the other half of her Pupation Technique. More quickly than the first time, her skin shifted, bones aligning and hair regrowing. Cutting off the long strands prevented her from having it fall out so dramatically. She decided on short hair this time, her bangs long enough to cover her forehead but the back short enough no one could get a grip. It was just as painful as the initial transformation, but at least her body knew instinctively what she was supposed to look like now. Instead of nearly an hour, the transformation only took a few minutes. Genma still cringed at the sound of bones snapping into their new positions, though.

With her original form back, it was easy to change into her more typical Konoha uniform, though she kept the loose shorts and cartoonish tee underneath the flak jacket. The tight netting she'd chosen would more than protect her legs, arms, and the edges of her wrist and palm where it looped around the tips of her fingers, and the various seals on her left forearm could still be accessed. Her throat protector was a heavy, slightly unfamiliar comfort, but if they were heading back through the borders it was necessary. Last but not least, she tied the blue ribbon back up in her hair, this time as a headband to keep her bangs out of the way while she worked.

Sealing the broken biwa and her old clothes into a scroll, Sakura adjusted her jacket until it was comfortable. “So, what’s the plan, Shiranui?” she asked, looking at the rising sun. "Stow the bridge builder until we figure out the run?”

“Hatake and his genin were assigned protection detail,” Genma replied, sounding tired. “Somehow.”

“Must have been a misclassification. Did they call for backup yet?”

“For some reason, no. They're taking it solo.”

That would explain why Genma sounded mentally exhausted at least. Sakura shrugged. “Well, let’s go see what the babies are up to. Maybe Hatake had the same idea we did.”

Chapter Text

To the shock of no one, the baby genin were not handling things particularly well. Admittedly, the Uchiha was smart enough to have set up a watch on the passed out jonin, but not tough enough to stop Sakura from scruffing him like an oversized kitten. And no one had bothered putting a guard on the builder, who was downstairs with the rest of his family. They were admittedly out in the yard, but that was hardly good enough when they hadn’t established a patrol. The two adult nin hadn’t exactly been subtle in their approach and yet all three had missed them entirely.

“Relax, we come in peace,” Sakura drawled, watching as Genma ran through the usual field checks on Hatake. “What’s the prognosis, partner?”

“Chakra exhaustion,” the brunette confirmed, sitting back on his haunches. “Something’s up with his lungs, too, but I’m not worried unless a fever sets in. He’ll be useless for at least another day or two from just the low reserves.” Genma sighed, apparently unsurprised by the turn of events. “He should be conscious in the next couple of hours, though. We can check in at that point.”

“Who’s in charge with your sensei out of commission?” The pinkette turned to the pouting Sasuke, who had clearly given up after not getting out of her hold. It was a bit surreal to watch one of the proud Uchiha act like an actual child, but then again, he was an actual child.

“I am,” he spat at her, enforcing the mental image of a naughty kitten. “Now put me down!”

Obligingly, Sakura set him back down, ignoring that he immediately took a swing at her. All teenagers were hormonal little rage demons, she was pretty sure. It was hard to take such aggression personally. “So, Uchiha, do you need an assist?” she asked, glancing toward the stairs meaningfully. It sounded like Ami and Naruto were shouting at each other from the yard. Maybe it was for the best that she didn’t have many social outings at that age. That sounded exhausting.

Like every Uchiha she’d ever met, Sasuke grumbled at her instead of answering. Genma blinked, sharing a look with his partner. Sakura raised a brow back at him, shrugging slightly. She was hardly fluent in Uchiha these days. It had been half a decade since the last time she’d needed to polish the skill, and she had hoped never to have to interact with one again.

“Tell you what,” Genma decided. “We’ll be around until Kakashi gets his feet back under him. There are Kiri nin around and it would be irresponsible for us to leave you genin defenseless.”

Unsurprisingly, the Uchiha got a mulish set to his expression. “We already beat them once,” he snarled.

“You barely injured one of them,” Sakura corrected. “Zabuza was already up and moving when I saw them last and his apprentice was in perfect health. You’re down a jonin-sensei and your teammates down there don’t even realize we’re here.”

While the kid wasn’t willing to admit he was out of his league, Sakura could tell that they’d won the argument when he hissed at them under his breath and stomped out of the room. Genma snorted when he was out of earshot, standing up once more.

“So, you want me to take first watch?” he asked. “I know you’re running on empty.”

“Oh, like you managed to sleep.” Sakura smiled slightly at him before she plopped over to a corner with a view of the door and window. “But I’m not going to say no. Have fun wrangling the kids.”

Genma scowled at the thought, but he didn’t take it back. “Have fun dealing with the jonin,” he returned, nodding toward the still-prone man. “Like I said, give it a couple hours and he’ll be conscious.”

Not waiting for the smartass reply he probably knew was coming, Genma headed back through the window to avoid scaring the civilians. Sakura leaned back on the wall, her control wavering for just a moment as she took stock of her injuries. Physically, she was fine – the transformation had molded her flesh and fixed what had been broken. Mentally, though…

It wasn’t safe, not yet, so the shaky little box she’d pushed all of that into was still locked tight. Silently groaning to herself, Sakura leaned forward and allowed her hands to block out the world for a few minutes. Sleep first, then she could worry about unpacking.

Sakura felt more than heard when Hatake woke. There was a flex of his chakra, what little of it remained, and her eyes snapped back to alertness. She hadn’t been dreaming, but she felt better after the nap anyway, senses sharper than before. If she hadn’t been so primed for the change, she might not have even sensed it, though. He had leagues more experience.

“Stand down,” the pinkette snapped, not sure how she’d noticed the kunai in Hatake’s hand in her waking haze. He must have slowed down because of the injuries or moved absentmindedly. The man stared at her for a second, disrupted his own chakra, and stared some more, blinking slowly with his one good eye.

“Genma and I had a mission in the area,” she explained, wincing as she stood up. The tension in her muscles hadn’t relaxed fully, and she stretched to try and relieve some of the soreness. “He’s handling your team.”

Cocking an ear, Sakura realized that there was no shouting from the yard. “Or maybe he killed your team,” she added. “They weren’t this quiet earlier.”

“They’re never this quiet,” Hatake confirmed. He managed to sit up and slip his legs to the side of the bed, but Sakura was on him before he could try and stand.

“You’ll break your nose trying to get up like that. Let me help.” Carefully, she reached out to pull him over one shoulder. The jonin allowed it, but it was a close thing. She could tell from the tenseness of his arm and chest that he was barely tolerating her touching him. It was admittedly a little flattering that he was treating her as a threat. Too many ninja, even knowing what she did for a living, didn't.

“Mind if we go out through the window?” she asked, hoisting him up with a slight grunt. “Didn’t exactly introduce myself to the civilians downstairs.” Sakura estimated she was still at less than a quarter of her chakra reserves, but she forced what remained to cycle a bit more through her muscles, augmenting her frame with some artificial strength. That little trick was vital to her line of work, where she was rarely allowed to train properly due to mission length and she still needed to be able to overpower an opponent at a moment’s notice.

“Whatever you feel is best, Haruno,” Hatake replied, and she grinned a little. She’d heard stories about how difficult the man was as a patient. Even if she hadn’t, he wasn’t fooling her for a second with that sweet talk.

“If you think you can stand on your own, be my guest,” she told him sweetly. “If you end up crawling all the way to your genin, it’s no one’s fault but your own.”

“Genma was right. You think you’re funny.”

Sakura couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped her. “I’m hilarious,” she muttered as she hopped out the window, touching down on the overgrown grass with barely a dent in the earth at all. It jostled the phantom pains in her ribs, but she knew from experience that those would go away with a good sleep. She just needed to kick the can down the road a little further and she'd be fine.

To her surprise, Genma was actually handling the children in a mature manner. Well, mature in the sense that he hadn’t traumatized, maimed, or killed any of them. Instead, he was taunting them from a tree and the kids were trying to hit him with various weapons. Kunai, senbon, shuriken, and a variety of improvised projectiles littered the yard around the various perches he must have taken.

The pure rage and determination on their little faces was adorable. And the constant exercise apparently kept them quiet, which she figured deserved a bit of a reward. Sakura shouldered Hatake a bit more on her left side and reached for a nearby leaf. With a quick layer of chakra to shape and sharpen the edges, she sent it straight for the man’s head.

Unlikely the easy dodges for the kids, Genma disappeared in an instant when he sensed the new attack. From another tree, one that Sakura took a second to find, he scowled at her. “You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he accused.

“I brought the kids a present.” Sakura could tell the moment the genin realized their sensei was awake, because they immediately swarmed her. Sakura braced her feet with chakra, sticking the jonin to her as well so he didn’t end up in a heap on the ground.

Genma also hopped down, though he didn’t join the mob of genin. Sakura offered him a reassuring smile, which didn’t seem to work. Well, he had volunteered to act as her handler for this one. Part of that meant seeing through her bullshit and refusing to pander to her acting when they were off-mission. Deliberately, Sakura glanced down at the kids, before raising a brow. That, at least, seemed to make Genma roll his eyes and agree with her.

Mission continues, he signed out to her. Remain alert.

Acknowledged, she signed back, settling back into her role. This one was the fun older sister, Sakura. She could act it in her sleep, practically. It slipped on with ease, familiar and well-worn, providing one more layer between her and the mission. Taking it off would be harder, but that was what Genma was for. Or, failing that, there were plenty of people back in the Gardens who she trusted for when the mission was done.

It took a few minutes for the kids to calm down enough to stop threatening to knock her over. Hatake had been hugged no less than a dozen times, mostly by Naruto, and the man was too weak to act aloof about it. Sakura tried to hold her laughter at him, but he could probably feel the way her shoulders shook at his expense.

Ami, the kid who had insulted her clothes, was the first one to step back and cast her judgmental little gaze on Sakura’s current outfit. “You really are a kunoichi?” she asked imperiously.

“So I’ve been told,” Sakura replied, gesturing at her throat vaguely, Konoha symbol visible. “It’s the pink hair, isn’t it?”

“Your hair is pretty,” Naruto interrupted, grinning when Ami scowled at him even more fiercely. “Hey, hey, what’s your name? Did you come with Genma?”

“You can call me Sakura if you want,” Sakura told him, patting the kid on the head. To her internal horror, the kid practically flinched at the touch before melting into it. If that wasn’t an indication of something terrible, she didn’t know what was. Clearly, she would need to send some messages out when she got back to Konoha.

“Is that your real name?” Ami demanded.

“My parents weren’t very creative.” Genma laughed quietly to himself but didn’t interrupt.

“So are you backup or something? Kakashi-sensei didn’t say anything about calling for more ninja.”

“Well, that depends.” Sakura glanced over at Hatake. “We’re on our way back from a mission in the area. Think you need an assist, Hatake?”

The jonin apparently didn’t react quickly enough for the genin. Naruto was apparently pro-help, even though “Genma’s a huge jerk!” and the three tweens were apparently convinced they could take out the A-class assault forces. Sasuke, predictably, was against their help, though he didn’t shout over Naruto. Ami, taking her cues from the Uchiha, did, and the two quickly got into another screaming match.

Hatake allowed it for a few minutes, probably still too out of it to properly control the team, before he sighed. “We’ll take the assist,” he decided over the squabbling kids. “We can debrief upstairs.”

“You should probably wrangle your kids first,” Genma pointed out. His grin was sly as he watched the trio arguing with each other. “Or we could leave them, I guess.”

“They’ll figure out we’re gone eventually. Let’s go somewhere quieter.”

Sakura shrugged and was the first to start walking off, easily heading back up the walls of the house. Apparently that was enough to stop the kids from bickering, because Naruto was the first to start shouting about the cool trick. Genma was quick to shunshin back into the house as well, helping to get Hatake settled back onto the bed. Sakura, in turn, collapsed against the far wall where she’d been napping previously, allowing Genma to stake out the window so they both had a good view of the major exits.

A moment later, the kids burst through the door, and they quickly spread out to fill the rest of the room. Sasuke, and by extension, Ami, took the far corner of the room away from the others. Naruto seemed to hesitate until Sakura patted the floor near her. His grin when he sat down next to her could power half the city, she was pretty sure.

“So, what’s your plan?” Genma prompted the jonin.

“We just need to keep the builder alive until the bridge is completed,” Hatake replied. “At most, a week or two. Per our intel, we were expecting bandits or low level foreign assets. The Kiri nin complicate things a bit, obviously.” Genma glanced at Sakura, raising a brow slightly. That was a significant extension of her cover.

“That overlaps with our mission dates and intel,” he revealed after Sakura’s minute nod his way, trusting she would tap out if needed. “Looks like we’re at your disposal, Kakashi.”

The masked ninja gave them one of his fake smiles, clearly spying the interaction but not pushing for the details. “Great! Let’s start with introductions, then.” The children, almost in unison, groaned, but Hatake ignored them completely. “Name, rank, and specialization. Sasuke, you start.”

Predictably, the black-haired child only glared at him before sighing. “Sasuke Uchiha. Genin. Katon ninjutsu.”

“Ami Uzuki, genin!” The girl paused for a second, before nodding to herself. “Kenjutsu and taijutsu.”

“Naruto Uzumaki! I’m a genin!” Like Ami, he seemed thrown by the last part of their introductions. “I’m good at making traps and doing pranks, I guess. And I can make clones! Uh, I think that’s it.”

A typical trio of close- or mid-range fighters, then. Odd that they didn’t have a long-range specialist on their team, but the Uchiha would probably end up taking that role when his eyes awakened. She’d never been clear on what triggered the transformation, but if they wanted him to step into the role of genjutsu specialist, it made sense to pair him up with a trap maker and someone who could pick off enemies in close quarters.

The kids were all staring at her and Genma, so Sakura politely nodded to them. “Sakura Haruno, chunin. I specialize in infiltration, interrogation, and general espionage.”

“But you have pink hair,” Ami complained.

“I can be a spy with pink hair.” Sakura put a hand to her chest, mock offended.

“No you can’t!”

Genma couldn’t contain his reaction that time, and his laughter made Ami’s expression twist into embarrassment. “Don’t antagonize the kids, Sakura,” he scolded half-heartedly. “Anyway. Genma Shiranui, tokubetsu jonin. I’m an infiltration and assassination specialist.”

“Mah, and you all know me.”

“Not fair!” Naruto groaned as the jonin rolled over the last introduction.

“Well, now that we know each other, who has a plan?”

“I can make a bunch of clones to beat up all the bad guys,” Naruto offered. “And if that Zoboomafoo guy comes back, I can warn everybody where he is and we can beat him up together!”

“Tch.” The Uchiha huffed his disapproval, but apparently didn’t have a better idea.

“We could keep Tazuna and his family here and guard the house?” Ami offered, though it seemed more like a question.

“How good are your traps, Naruto?” Sakura questioned, mulling over their lack of front line problem. “Did you get them ranked back at the academy?”

Naruto screwed up his face in thought, looking more foxlike than before. “Uh! I think Iruka-sensei said they were C-rank when he was yelling at me one time.”

“Genma, you could take Naruto out to lay traps along the bridge and surrounding forest. And I can work with Ami and Sasuke on close-range drills. We can set up a guard rotation for the builder starting tomorrow.”

“Not a bad plan,” Genma mused. “What do you think, Kakashi?”

The jonin hummed. “As long as you two are back by sunset. We can discuss keeping Tazuna house-bound over dinner.”

Quickly, Genma hauled Naruto out the window, the flailing blonde apparently already regretting the opportunity to show off his skills. Sakura hopped to her feet as well, gesturing to the children. “First things first, you should get any weapons you have in the yard picked up. I’ll be down in a second.”

Grumbling, the Uchiha stalked out of the room, Ami soon following him. Kakashi raised a brow at her before Genma returned, stretching out his arms as he hopped through the window. “You really need to work on that kid’s situational awareness,” the brunette informed the room. “He didn’t even notice I swapped out with a clone.”

“To be fair, you did introduce yourself as an infiltration specialist,” Sakura reminded him. “Do you need more time to rest, Hatake?”

The jonin hemmed and hawed for a couple of seconds before Sakura rolled her eyes and created a quick clone of herself, transforming it into a replica of the copy ninja. She could hear the kids trying to pull steel out of the trees already, so they didn’t have much time to keep them quiet.

“Swap out if you feel up to it,” she told the jonin, nodding to her partner. "We can debrief the actual plan after I wear these two out."

Walking down with a clone was much easier than dealing with a real body, and Sakura quickly found the two piles of weapons. The rest of them were still scattered around the yard. Those must have belonged to Naruto, and it looked like they were noticeably cheaper quality than the rest. At least all of them were sharp.

Sakura cracked her knuckles, looking around the place. It was time to see what these kids were capable of.

Chapter Text

“Come on, Ami, you’re faster than that,” Sakura called, tagging the child with another senbon. They were dulled with chakra so they stuck rather than pierced through, but both her and the Uchiha had clusters of the needles along their joints and at various kill points.

“Shut up!” The purple-haired kunoichi was sweating through her training clothes, sword swinging wildly in Sakura’s direction. Any semblance of technique had been thrown out the window fifteen minutes ago when the pinkette had put her down for the forth or fifth time. The dirt smear on her cheek was still there, forgotten in the heat of battle.

The Uchiha was no better, though he had finally embraced the role of mid-range striker and was harrying her from outside her unarmed strike range. Sakura was pretty sure he was trying to actually murder her, but he was so slow casting his fireball jutsus that she could dodge pretty easily. She sent another kunai his way to clip the edge of his hand when his signs got sloppy. If he was committed to his focus on ninjutsu, he’d need to start reducing his hand signs immediately.

At some point, Hatake had found enough strength to replace her clone and was reading in the shade of the house. He seemed amused by her training methods, at least, and Sakura had to admit that she rarely got to train so much in one sitting. Back in the village, she was allowed very little time to herself between her duties as division head and the wards she managed. Working up a genuine sweat was actually kind of fun, and she darted forward to ruffle the girl’s hair obnoxiously.

“Good attempt,” she complimented as Ami tried to skewer her. “Make sure to utilize your partner’s timing, too. If I’m focused on dodging his blows, I’m less likely to dodge yours.”

“Why are you so fast?” Ami complained as Sasuke spat another series of fireballs. These were smaller, more directed, and Sakura gave an approving shout as she cartwheeled back. Her thighs complained about it, but it was just more phantom pain. She did check quickly to verify she hadn’t been burned, but her clothes hadn’t even been damaged.

“I’m a ninja, remember?” Sakura shot back. She blinked at the next weak swing, raising a brow at the chakra edge that had formed along the blade. “Oh, hey, good job. That takes a lot of chakra control.”

“What does?” Ami swung again, this time sending another spark of chakra that leapt off the blade edge. She must have been lightning natured for it to be so volatile. That was rare for Fire Country outside of the Hatakes and their brood. Someone had been thinking ahead on that team placement.

Sakura stopped her with one hand, sensing the guttering reserves from the girl as she continued to channel herself into the blade. “And that’s enough for the day,” she announced, very quickly hopping over to grab the Uchiha as well. His reserves were better, though not by much. “You’re both going to exhaust yourselves.”

“I can keep going,” the boy complained, and Ami was quick to echo the sentiment.

“Your teacher just went down with chakra exhaustion. Don’t follow his bad example.”

“I resent that statement,” the Hatake called from the porch. His face never left his book, flipping a page like he hadn’t just been insulted.

Sakura rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t make it any less true,” she called back. “Anyway, you both did great today. Sasuke, you should keep working on mid-range attacks. Cornering and separating enemies will make it easier for Naruto and Ami to sweep in and take them down. Ami, keep working on your situational awareness. You’ll be striking most of the finishing blows during three-man formations, so make sure you work on flexibility as well. They can’t hit what they can’t hit.”

She patted both of them on the head, noticing that the Uchiha seemed just as starved for positive attention as Naruto had been. That was going to be more complicated to address, too many eyes on a clan child compared to a monster, but she did have some male flowers in the gardens that she could send out for wellness checks. It wouldn’t take much to find out where he shopped, who cleaned the abandoned compound, start replacing the useless faces with her own people. At least the girl seemed well-adjusted, huffing at the hair ruffles and quickly fixing her bangs. Nothing in her body language or fighting style suggested the kind of quiet desperation Sakura was used to seeing in kids that age.

“There’s a stream nearby if you want to cool off before dinner. I’ve got to talk to your sensei for a second and then I’ll be heading that way too.”

“You’re not even dirty,” Sasuke complained.

“The vest hides the sweat stains. You two had me running hard, I promise.”

Ami, at least, looked proud of the compliment, and she was the one to drag the Uchiha toward the river. Sakura watched them go until they hit the tree line, and then she turned on Hatake and the now-visible Genma.

“Did you have fun?” Genma asked sweetly, leaning against one of the support beams. His usual senbon glittered in the afternoon light, coated with something nasty, no doubt.

“I’m technically lead on our mission, Shiranui,” Sakura replied just as sweetly. “Are you sure you want to do this right now?”

“Point taken.” While Genma’s grin didn’t change, he did take the rebuke in stride. Almost lazily, he turned to Hatake, whose book had vanished yet again. “So, actual plans.”

“How are your reserves?”

Genma shrugged. “Pretty much full. I’m a little shorter on weapons than I’d like for an assault mission, but I can make do.”

“I’m at about a twenty percent of my stores,” Sakura added. “But I don’t use much chakra in my normal fighting style. I’ll be fine unless I get pulled into a direct confrontation.”

“I can’t use my summons to track the Kiri nin,” Kakashi told them both. “Do you know where they are right now?”

“Last I saw them they were licking their wounds on Gato’s ship. Nothing that would keep them down, but if you get into a fight with Zabuza, he’ll avoid twisting or swinging wide.” Sakura gestured across her chest to mimic the cut. “Somebody got a lucky shot. If we’re lucky, it bit into the abdominal or pectoral muscle on the way. He’ll be worried about it tearing while he fights either way.”

“Do I want to know how you got close enough to judge that?” Kakashi asked, raising a brow at her. Or maybe it was both brows. Hard to tell when he had one eye covered.

“No, you do not,” Sakura replied primly. “I’ve got summons that can be discreet. I’ll have a couple head to the ship.”

“Do you have the chakra for that?” Genma’s tone wasn’t really concerned, just clarifying. Within the framework of their mission, his job was to keep her running. She didn’t consider it nearly as insulting a questions from him compared to if coming from Hatake. The silver-haired jonin still tensed when Sakura let the question sit for a second.

“I have enough chakra to summon the numbers we’ll need, and I’m sure I can think of a good bribe to keep them on this plane.”

Genma winced, apparently imagining what kind of bribes were appropriate for her flies. “I suddenly decided I don’t want to know,” he announced, turning back to the jonin. “So, we keep them away while you recover? What happens to the bridge builder in the meantime?”

“As long as Zabuza is occupied, my summons and the kids can keep the other bandits away.” Hatake tilted his head back and forth in thought. “I should probably have enough of a reserve by tomorrow to summon part of the pack. That’ll let the builder get back to work.”

“I’ll let you know everyone’s locations over breakfast, then,” Sakura confirmed, taking a step back to disengage. “The kids’ll get suspicious if I stay any longer. Keep me updated.”

There was little doubt that the two men would continue to plan. Genma was the kind of person who wanted to go over things a dozen times, and it didn’t seem like Hatake had revealed all his plans. Fair of him, considering she hadn’t either.

The stream where she’d sent the kids wasn’t far away, but there was enough cover between the two areas that she could send a few of her flies out to investigate without worrying about the open space. The nice thing about having the fly summons was that it took basically no chakra to summon a few and they asked for very little in return. Pulling an old sake cup from her travel scrolls, she stopped just shy of the water to set it down and fill it with half-rotted fruit juice and old animal blood. She’d stolen the idea from the Aburame clan kids. Beetles preferred fresh juice and fruit, which required some extra seals on the jugs and scrolls, but keeping things fresh wasn’t exactly key for her insects.

Immediately, the flies swarmed the treat, climbing over her arms and fingertips to take their turn at the cup. Sasuke and Ami were too distracted with each other to notice her, and Sakura noted that all of the kids would need to be more aware in the field. She was literally twenty feet from them and, as Ami had pointed out, she had bright pink hair.

“Find me the injured water-nin and his frosty apprentice,” the woman commanded near-silently as some of the flies gathered around her eyes and on her cheeks. “Let me know if anyone gets too close to our camp.”

She could hear their voices, whispering and overlapping as they buzzed around her ears and tangled into her hair. One particularly brave one climbed onto her eyelashes, leaning down to stare at her from too close. The green glint of their bodies made her smile regardless. She’d always had a soft spot for screwworms, the little opportunists that they were.

“I know it’ll be tempting, but don’t strike,” she instructed her striped aggressors. “They’ll just pick your kin off and leave them to die. I’ll find you a treat tonight instead. Sound like a deal?”

More buzzing, more complaining. But unlike a number of other bugs, there was no hive mind to flies. They were independent to a fault, plagued with insatiable curiosity and the need to keep moving. They were easily bribed with food, though, and that was what she had counted on. The swarm soon broke off to find the shinobi she had described and any of the bandits that could be in the woods nearby. Sakura splashed the rest of the juice onto the nearby trees before rinsing the cup and storing it again.

Those kids still hadn’t noticed her, and Sakura took maybe a little too much glee in scaring the hell out of both of them. “Don’t do that!” Ami shouted at her, reaching instinctively for a sword she wasn’t actually carrying. Good instincts on that one. Not so much with the Uchiha, who apparently thought glaring at her was sufficient.

“How didn’t you see me?” Sakura teased. “I have pink hair.”

“You’re a chunin, though,” Sasuke defended, and Ami looked equal parts stunned and pleased by his interjection. Sakura only smiled at them both, unzipping her flak jacket and beginning to empty out her pockets. It was really only a couple of scrolls she didn’t want damaged, but the other weapons she kept handy weren’t exactly treated for water.

“Good point.” The moment the kids saw her shirt, Sakura let loose a well-timed laugh. Both of them seemed to be confused by her fashion choices, but it helped sell the act. Nobody took a kunoichi seriously when her shirt had a panda smoking a cigar on it. Even if she was bristling with weapons and could demonstrate her skill, they saw the civilian prints and assumed she was weak. Stripping off her shoes and walking straight into the water, she raised a brow at the still-frozen kids.

“What, do you want me to help you wash up?” she asked easily, sitting down in the stream so she could soak her clothes and cool off. It wouldn’t get her properly clean, but at least it washed off some of the sweat before it could stain. Lying back, Sakura let herself sink for a moment, eyes shut as she felt the slight tug of the current across her clothes.

The box where she kept her other feelings gave another valiant kick, but she kept it locked. Not now. Not yet. Sakura rose back up to inhale before her lungs had much chance to protest.

Sasuke and Ami had apparently gotten the message and they were scrubbing their clothes, Ami down to her undershirt so she could rinse out her jacket and blouse and Sasuke leaning down to rinse out his hair. Shaking out her hair and wringing most of the water out of her hair, Sakura quickly exited the water and started to wipe down her vest with more care than the rest of her clothes.

By the time she finished, the kids were soaked but reasonably free of dirt and the bugs were starting to come out. Sakura couldn’t help the instinctive scowl at them, ushering the kids away and back toward the house. Dragonflies, she begrudgingly had to admit, were more of a threat to her summons than most ninja. She’d almost failed a mission back in Rice because a dragonfly family picked off so many of her informants.

Once at the house, Sakura figured it was time for Hatake to take care of his own kids, and Sakura slipped upstairs to grab a nap. After all, she’d promised her swarm a treat and she didn’t want to disappoint.

Dinner was kind of tense. The builder’s family had clearly not anticipated any other mouths to feed, and Sakura had to nearly shove the dried meat and fish into their hands to cover their share. The kid was about as friendly as she had expected he would be, and the builder was no better. At least the mother was pragmatic enough to take the gift and welcome the protection, especially since it was free. Her clothes looked kind of familiar, too. The pink pattern on her kimono was similar enough to Haku’s that Sakura marveled at the coincidence.

Genma didn’t stop her when Sakura slipped out of the house, nodding at her once before she grinned back. He always looked a little queasy when she gave him details, so this time he just waved her off before returning to his post on the roof. She had about an hour until true dark, she figured, and that hour would need to be useful. As much fun as it would be to torture Genma, she had more important things to do.

“Shima, Shoku,” Sakura called, her largest flies emerging from hidden crevices in the trees. “Where are we striking?”

Shima, always more helpful than his swarmmate, was quick to land along her brow, whispering locations at her. His tiny chakra network molded a genjutsu, and Sakura got a map of the surrounding countryside each bandit and large mammal marked helpfully in various colors based on threat and infection level. Apparently her flies had already been busy, colonizing several dozen animals as they traveled along the road and toward town. All the better, since many of her lesser summons only lived for a few weeks.

“The water nin is patrolling the coast, no threat to us,” Shoku muttered, her gruff voice echoing in Sakura’s head and along her chakra trails. “I have kin if you have flesh, summoner. Make it quick.”

And that was great news. Sakura let the well-worn mask slip as she grinned, a touch too feral, noting a cluster of bandits with halfway-decent chakra networks on Shima’s map. “Hold on,” she instructed her flies, quick to slip through the trees in that direction. She didn’t want to waste this chance on some deer or a civilian body. Shoku was one of her best trackers, and it wasn’t often that she laid eggs anymore.

Bagging the four bandits was child’s play. Sakura left them alive, for now, but it was over so quickly she doubted they’d be able to identify her later as anything but a pale blur. She wasn't even wearing a Konoha flak jacket or headband, just a ratty tanktop and shorts she didn't mind getting blood on and a thigh pouch to hold her supplies. Nothing that would identify her from any particular village. It took a few trips to drag all of the bodies to a clearing deep enough in the woods she wasn’t worried about humans stumbling on her business. She was physically strong enough to drag them when she cycled her chakra, but they were so unwieldy that it was easier to drag them one at a time. Once they were off the road, she stacked each of them up against a tree for easy access.

Then, she called her swarm.

Maybe a decade ago Sakura would have blanched at cutting off a stranger’s clothes and looting them for anything useful. She might have hesitated when counting her gravid flies and deciding that they only needed two living hosts. She certainly would have had some opinions about the rows of senbon pricks laid in careful lines along chakra paths, soon set upon by screwworms and flesh flies. But ten years was enough to change a person, and this wasn’t the worst thing she had done for the sake of more power.

The interesting thing about her contract, Sakura had learned early, was that some members of her swarm had chakra networks and others didn’t. Her blow flies couldn’t do much with genjutsu, even if they could sense a dead body from half a country away. But if she found a decent enough host for her flies, one with a good chakra network and strong coils, her flies lived longer and were more clever. The ones that fed on living hosts could even cultivate their own chakra, more than the drop it took to become a summons to begin with. Some of her best individuals had even learned to copy seals or kanji, the perfect spies after a few generations of targeted husbandry. The price, of course, was helping her relatively weak flies infest the shinobi she needed for the process. It was rare for someone to volunteer, after all.

As Sakura moved to the second victim, she weighed their odds in her mind. The bandits would probably live through the flystrike. Sure, a fair amount of their flesh would be eaten for the sake of her new maggots, but it would grow back eventually. And their chakra networks would be left in shambles, as unrefined as they were and as many larvae as she implanted. But that felt like a fair trade for what they had done so far with their abilities.

Sakura rubbed her left arm where the familiar itching of long-hatched maggots still tingled sometimes. More phantom pains, but harder to dismiss compared to the usual hurts. She’d experienced many worse things than parasites over the years, and she knew she could have been much crueler than this in her pursuit of power.

With particular care, the pinkette finished prodding the last of the tenketsu she intended to utilize, avoiding the face and head. The maggots closest to the chakra network always turned out the brightest, and she needed the intelligence and chakra-enhanced longevity, but the comparably denser chakra came at a moral price she didn't feel quite up to paying. Natural-born summons could live for decades, but the rest of her swarm could only live a few weeks, maybe a year at most. The added week or two wouldn't make that much of a difference when she had already changed the game so drastically.

Now that the living hosts were taken care of, Sakura stripped the dead bandits of their clothes and examined them for anything too concerning. Chakra was a tricky thing to imbue into flesh, especially after death, but hosts that had used chakra often during life tended to be the best suited for her purposes. Sakura ran her kunai down the center of the first corpse’s bicep, ignoring how Shoku had already staked a claim on the body’s mouth, nose, and eyes. A well-fed bottle fly could lay about four hundred eggs at a time, and she wasn’t going to waste any of them.

The less influential insects in her swarm, smaller blow flies, her more timid flesh flies and secondary screwworms, soon set upon her incisions. With luck, she’d have two corpses teeming with powerful maggots in a few days and in the next week or two she would have hundreds of new flies to command. As Sakura dug into the chest cavity of the second corpse, she paused, glancing around the clearing. Something didn’t feel quite right, but none of her flies seemed to sense anything amiss. Maybe it was general paranoia, but she moved a little faster.

Pulling viscera to the side to collect the bile, sinew, and blood was easy. Between her profession and her summons, the gore didn’t phase her anymore. Perforating the bowels on each body still made her grimace, though, the immediate and raw stench of feces driving the flies into a frenzy. “The things I do for you,” she muttered, glad that the bodies were fresh, at least. Prepping a corpse that had been sitting a few days was even worse, and her swarm usually had to eat their way through the competition by that late. When she sat back, cleaning her tools thoroughly, she looked around. The uneasy feeling had only grown, some nebulous sense of doom that made her skin prickle.

“Something is wrong,” Shima muttered on her earlobe, and Sakura could feel his claws tapping nervous rhythms into her skin.

“I feel it too,” Sakura replied, wiping off her hands and listening as her flies spread back out to settle down for the night. It was almost dark, after all, and very few of her summons worked after sunset. Shoku, her eggs laid and implanted, landed on her other ear, sitting in uncharacteristic silence as she scanned the surrounding air.

The strangeness in the air made her stand, and Sakura instinctively backed to the nearest tree to get some coverage for her blind areas. It wasn’t as good as the trees further north, but she could at least climb the bark and avoid whatever beast was in the woods. If she was lucky, it was just a rabid bear or something that her swarm had missed. Another kind of summon, maybe, or a bird that her flies would have no use for. It was possible that some ninja had been hiding their chakra from Shima, but given his range it was unlikely.

Unfortunately, "unlikely" had happened too often for Sakura to dismiss it. Not for the first time, the pinkette wished she had gotten more from her parents than a pretty face. Was it too much to ask to have been born an Inazuka?

“It smells like death,” Shoku eventually decided. Shima sneered from Sakura’s other side, casting some kind of sensing jutsu. Almost the moment he sent out the net, Sakura had to duck under a kunai that lodged deep into the tree about two inches away from her face.

The flies that hadn’t dismissed themselves or found a hiding place to sleep for the night immediately rose up in a startled wave. They provided a little cover and distraction as Sakura leapt into the trees and masked her chakra down to a whisper. She scanned the trees where the kunai had emerged, trying to spot who had hit her, when Shima indicated one direction.

“Water and death,” he told her, buzzing quietly. Apparently not quietly enough, though, because another kunai quickly followed. Whoever it was had impressive ears, or maybe they were throwing kunai at every bug within throwing distance.

This time, Sakura could see the flicker of movement, masked by the shadows of the trees and a fog that had rolled in with the sunset. The pinkette blinked at the haze, narrowing her eyes slightly. “Not natural,” Shima confirmed, not needing her to voice her suspicions. Sakura glared at the fog—no, it had to be mist—for another few seconds before two entirely too familiar figures seemed to emerge from the cover.

“Oh, fuck.” Sakura dropped from the tree just before the hail of senbon skewered her, running at full tilt in the opposite direction.

Chapter Text

It was times like these that Sakura regretted not being more in shape. She’d always wanted to be strong growing up, but defined muscles, especially those gained by tree-walking and climbing, were a sure way to get pegged as a foreign asset. In a best case scenario, that would lead to a failed mission. The worst case scenario generally resulted in death.

Not that being waif-like was helping her now. Sakura could feel the chakra in her system trickling away with every leap from a tree branch or a kick away from the ground. Even with her exceptional chakra control, it still left a little bit of her behind, and each shuriken whizzing near her ears made her grimace in concentration. If she got hit even once with that power, they’d catch up for sure. She’d seen how deeply the steel had penetrated into the wood around her. Assuming it didn't rip straight through tendons and muscle fiber, she doubted her bones would hold that much more of a challenge.

The only plus side of the chase was that the Kiri nin weren’t exactly subtle. Sure, the civilians might not have heard them crashing through the brush like a herd of wild boars, but other ninja certainly would. Sakura sent another pulse of chakra through her system in an alarm flare, a little stronger than before. She should have been close enough for them to sense her by now. Even if the kids were a little bit useless at it, she was sure Genma was on a hair trigger. Even if she’d gone a little further out of range than she normally would, she was blasting her chakra in the widest area she could without risking depleting her reserves even faster.

Shima, the wonderful little servant that he was, weaved genjutsu after genjutsu attempting to throw off their pursuers. It didn’t work particularly well. The best he could do was overlay a branch where there had been none or shift the sounds Sakura made slightly to the side, but it probably saved her a few times already. Anything more complicated had quickly been discarded. It didn’t even seem to phase the duo and neither of them had enough chakra to keep trying. She couldn’t even manage a D-rank ninjutsu at this stage, not if she wanted any power left to flee.

The exercise burned her lungs, her muscles protesting loudly. Or maybe it was just terror tapping a drumbeat into the back of her skull along with her heartbeat. If she dodged the wrong way even once, she'd lose the bare lead she was managing to keep. It was only the foliage that kept her two steps ahead, her Leaf upbringing allowing her to best twist around tangling thorns and over twisted branches that the Kiri nin had to cut through. She was a flexible and small and clever, and that would have to be enough.

She was given a slight reprieve when the weapons seemed to run out. Instead of waves of shuriken or senbon aimed at her vital areas, the attacks had gotten more precise, conserving steel. Sakura managed to rip a few leaves out of one of the trees on her way past, sharpening it with her carefully rationed chakra before twisting to throw it back at the duo.

The brief glimpse of the two nin behind her, too close, grim with determination, made Sakura swear loudly again. “Why me?” she demanded to the air as she dodged a kunai swipe aimed for her eyes. Thankfully, Shima had placed her head a few inches to the left of where it actually was or she would have been blinded.

Zabuza, in stark contrast to the gruff and thoughtful man she'd seen in private, only laughed at her as he chased. And sure, it wasn’t professional, but Sakura swore profusely between panting breaths. She couldn’t waste the air for much longer than that, though, quickly pulling herself around another tree as she ignored the protesting of her ankles and thighs. She’d burned too much chakra through them at once, forcing her body to reclaim every drop possible when she landed. That would be agonizing when the adrenaline tapered off later.

And of course she’d picked up an array of cuts and scrapes from the trip through the forest. Any tracker would be able to follow her for miles, and she didn’t have the chakra to seal them over. Even if she didn’t get some kind of infection from all the running around, her body was eventually going to need to replenish that lost blood, too. If she lived, she was going to be miserable later.

In her panic, she had forgotten one major thing, so intent on getting back within range of her strikers. And that was the river. The big, slow-moving, currently right in front of her river. She'd managed to weave downstream of the actual house, a few miles from where she and the kids had washed off earlier, but the river didn't get any narrower in this part of the woods.

Sakura dismissed her flies with a thought and hesitated only a split second before trying to leap across the water. And if her enemies hadn’t been Kiri nin, she might have gotten past it. Unfortunately, as soon as she stepped both feet on the surface, just for a split second, it reached up and pinned her in place. She probably should have seen that one coming, but some part of her had hoped she was fast enough.

Sakura did try and twist her way out, sharply enough to send another warning creak through her bones. But she’d take a broken foot or two over whatever these ninja were planning. And where the hell was Genma? He should have been preparing a trap if he wasn’t willing to run out into the dark to help save her. If she survived this, she was going to have a number of choice words for him.

“Well, what do we have here?” Zabuza crowed as they emerged from the fake mist. Sakura couldn’t properly face them, not with her ankles and calves held so tightly, but she twisted as best she could. It made her spine protest fiercely, but she propped a hand on the back of one hip to keep her gaze trained on their hands.

Zabuza was selectively merciful, weak to crying civilian women, and neither of them seemed overly cruel to their enemies. From what she’d heard about the Demon of the Mist, he was more of a reactive fighter, not very interested in torture, so maybe if she broke down to beg it would buy her some time. Sure, it was demeaning but it meant she would live. Gritting her teeth, Sakura forced her urge to fight back down. She needed to be weak but not meek. She’d shown too much skill to be a total pushover. How to best play this?

“If you’re going to kill me, can you at least let me see your sword?” Sakura asked, not entirely sure why her brain decided that joking would be the best way to win the enemies over. Maybe it was some minor trigger she hadn’t consciously noticed? It was already out of her mouth, so she supposed she was going to have to roll with it. “I’ve heard it’s very impressive.”

The missing nin’s face was still covered in bandages, but she could see the leering grin flash across his features. “Oh, really?” he drawled. It had the intended effect, at least. Some of the tension in his weapon dropped, and Haku followed suit, alert but not intending to skewer her at that exact moment. Sakura took a slow breath, thoughts running too fast.

Not the first time she’d been this close to death. Not the first time she’d flirted or begged her way out. She could do this.

Genma really needed to hurry the hell up wherever he was.

“I mean,” Sakura started, forcing a blush up to her cheeks. She didn’t really have the chakra to waste on these kinds of tricks, but it took only a flicker of increased circulation and it was worth the risk. “You know what I mean!”

“Do I?” The Kiri nin’s jutsu apparently loosened, because the pressure on Sakura’s legs faded. She looked down at the retreating water and then back up at the shinobi. Zabuza’s brow raised, taunting, and Sakura contemplated how quickly she could run. Not quickly enough, for sure. Not with the way the sweat had started to coat her back, muscles trembling from the break. She was too low on chakra to outrun two people who already had her outclassed. Judging by the glint in Zabuza’s eye, he knew it too.

“If I’m going to die, it’s going to be on dry land,” she decided out loud, walking carefully back off the edge of the river at an angle. It put her about ten meters out from the duo on the same shoreline, which did make her feel a little better about her consistently dropping chakra reserves from out on the water. And it let her relax a few of the muscles she’d been abusing, made too tense by the screaming horror she had locked in the back of her mind.

“Why are you here?” Haku asked, their mask making the words slightly tinny. There was an amplification seal on it somewhere to prevent the muffled noise, but it wasn’t a very good one. Probably not a real hunter mask, then. Or if it was, it desperately needed some fuuinjutsu updates.

“Had a mission nearby,” Sakura replied slowly. “Decided to rest up before heading home. Apparently my luck is pretty bad, huh?” She tried for a wobbly smile, letting some of the natural fear she’d kept locked up slip back through. She couldn’t seem too nonchalant, after all. This Sakura would be… cocky, but in over her head. Confident in her skills but way out of her league.

It was too close to how she was really feeling, but she was a professional. And while the box that held her feelings was still kicking and thrashing in her chest, she kept a iron grip on the urge to bolt twitching in every muscle of her body. She tapped out another emergency code in her chakra, letting it stutter and flash like a nervous tic.

“And what mission was that?” Zabuza prompted, his hands very slowly relaxing. Sakura didn’t look like a threat in oversized old clothes, her petite figure making her seem younger from that distance. The ugly light of hope started to pierce through the rest of her feelings, making her giddy with the possibility that this was working. But it was all balanced on the point of a needle. One wrong move in any direction would mean death.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you that.” The pinkette let her voice crack with nerves, let the two see through her bravado. She was just a weak little chunin, maybe an older genin. Practically a civilian compared to an A-rank ninja like him. Not really worth the effort of silencing.

The ploy clearly didn’t work, because in the next instant Zabuza was on her. The force of his hand on her throat threw her back to a tree, nearly weightless. Sakura’s hand twitched to her thigh pouch but he easily snapped out with his other hand to capture her wrists. She didn’t have the chakra left to put up even a token resistance, overwhelmed by the raw power of the swordsman. The instant fear on her face was unfortunately genuine, too powerful a reaction to lock down.

“I think you’ll tell me exactly what I want you to,” the missing nin warned, squeezing just tight enough to make his point. Sakura grimaced but struggled to nod, furiously recalculating her chances when the grip loosened. She swallowed hard to try and clear some of the pain but it didn’t really help. The haze of terror had clawed up through her guts to numb her fingers and squeeze her heart, but she forced it back down ruthlessly.

Haku was impossible to read, body language neutral when Sakura’s gaze flitted to them. No help there in gauging how serious the man was, then. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d cheated death. She could still survive this. Somehow.

“Just needed to get some information from some old guy’s records,” Sakura told him, quickly spinning a few lies into the truth of the matter. If she could drive a wedge between Gato and the missing nin, they would have no reason to kill her, right? And if she didn’t survive, at least her team might have a chance. Her voice shook but she didn’t bother trying to hide that. It was obvious she wasn’t much of a head to head fighter and not being nervous would be even more suspicious. “Rich guy, moored nearby. Client’s baby sister was contracted out as a servant to his ship. Didn’t respond to his last couple letters and he got worried.”

Sakura didn’t have to watch closely to see the story take hold of the man in front of her. They both knew damned well there were no women on that ship, that there was no sign of a servant or slave anywhere. “Rest of my team was supposed to check out the villages nearby, see if she just quit and planned to come home,” the pinkette continued, like she wasn’t driving the nail deeper. “I really hope they found her shacked up with some sailor in town.”

She could only hope he was thinking of dear little Meiko. Daring to tug her neck a bit away from the man’s hand, she was quietly pleased when he let it drop. She didn’t let it show on her face, but she hadn’t completely screwed it up. “I’ll give you a copy of everything I have if you let me go,” she told the two, desperate bargaining leaving a sour taste in her mouth. Or maybe that was just bile from the panicked run. “I’m supposed to meet my team tomorrow and you don’t want a bunch of shinobi on your tail, right? Not worth killing one measly kid for all that trouble, right?”

She sensed the immediate change in the man’s demeanor, and she let the fearful babble rush up to try and soothe his ego. “Look, I’m really not looking to die today. And you have a very big sword and your friend nearly turned me into dango earlier so I think it’s pretty clear you can beat me in a fight. I’ve been putting out an emergency flare to my team basically this entire time and they’re obviously not coming so I would really appreciate it if you just looked past whatever I did to piss you off just this once. Okay? We pretend we never met each other and you don’t need to spend the extra time cleaning blood off your sword?”

The hand on her throat was so much faster than her attempt at a dodge, crushing force on top of the new bruises. Sakura let the breath croak out of her lungs, scraping for whatever chakra she had left to fight with. She let herself burst into silent tears she knew entirely too well as she was forced up the tree behind her, held in place only by his arm. Strangulation was not the death she had envisioned going up against a swordsman, but she supposed life was funny like that.

“Stop talking,” Zabuza advised, almost kindly. Sakura let her jaw snap shut, hoping her eyes had done the ugly thing where her eyelashes clumped together even as she pushed back at his hand before her wrists were pinned again. She was really scraping the bottom of her reserves to gather strength into her fists, and Haku stood too far away for her to reliably hit. She could try to slow her body’s metabolism down and fake her own death, but any halfway decent ninja double tapped a body for that exact reason. And since Genma was apparently off doing something more important, she was very quickly running out of other ideas.

Her feet could just barely press the ground, but any relief to the pressure was welcome. Even the burning pain of her sickled ankles and toes under the weight was better than having that same weight on her neck.

Sniffling as much as she could without being able to breathe, Sakura stared at the ninja in front of her. He didn’t look particularly bothered by her, except for the smallest twitch of one of his eyes, discomfort reading clear as day to Sakura’s trained gaze. Upping the ante, Sakura squeezed her eyes shut, mouthing a prayer as she let her body go limp. She didn’t have a gambit to get her way out of this one. Just her own desperation to live overriding the urge to fight. If flight, fight, and fawn had failed then freeze would have to be her saving grace. To be so pitiful, so unlike a trained ninja, that she could tap into that weak point she’d identified.

It made her pride chafe, but Sakura was a survivor. She would use every disgusting tool in her arsenal if it meant seeing the sunrise. Even if it lost her all the respect in the world. Even if she could barely look at herself in the mirror tomorrow. It meant that there would still be a tomorrow.

And after an eternity, when her mind had gone fuzzy and she had coiled her chakra tightly around her organs to keep them running even a few minutes longer, it seemed to. Zabuza’s grip loosened enough to let her take a shuddering breath as she crumpled to the ground. It was almost immediately accompanied by a rush of noise and the thudding of several weapons near where her face had been. More shuriken?

Opening her eyes blearily and taking a few seconds to focus, Sakura realized that they were senbon. Her mind didn’t connect the dots right away, didn’t realize she had been saved until Hatake pushed a hand against her bruised neck, checking for her pulse. She hissed at him weakly, strength flooding back to her limbs as she took a few more seconds to just exist.

“Haruno?” Hatake prompted, sending Sakura into another spiral. She wasn’t supposed to be Sakura Haruno out on the field, her dizzy mind reminded her. But the box wasn’t locking right with her thoughts so off kilter. She was still sending out an emergency flare, she realized, the pattern frantic under her skin. Her mask was off, too. She was out in the field without even her field persona to protect her.

“Where were you,” she bit out, forcing everything down. It was sloppy, temporary at best. Her tone was too flat, eyes too hard. But it was this or everything came out, and she was on a mission. She had to get it together.

“Dealing with another issue across the forest,” Hatake replied, his tone cautious. He moved back, giving her space, and Sakura realized distantly he had taken her thigh pouch. To prevent her from attacking him? Or maybe to prevent her from getting anything sharp later on. He’d been a ninja long enough to sense when someone was on the edge. At least when she made it obvious.

“What issue?” Sakura managed to make it sound like a question, though barely. “Is your mission in danger?”

“Party of rogue nin to the north. They’ve been taken care of.”

The careful way that Hatake spoke only made Sakura’s feeling roil behind the shield she had placed. She didn’t dare to inspect them, but she suspected it was rage. They'd let her nearly die for some party of misfits? She scrubbed a hand across her face, finding more bruises at her wrists that would likely turn painful when she bothered feeling things again. Everything was going to hurt, but at the moment it was distant. Held back by her panic and not much else.

“Kakashi,” Genma said from somewhere behind her, his return marked by the slight disruption of the dirt and a whisper of a landing. “Check on the kids?” It didn’t sound like a request, even though it was phrased like one.

The jonin nodded once, soon disappearing back across the water and out of sight. Sakura quickly found the man replaced with Genma’s crouching form in front of her. It took a moment for her to recognize his chakra, to feel the familiar flare of acknowledgment.

Her handler had finally arrived.

Sakura burst into tears, punching him in the chest as hard as her battered wrists would allow before she wrapped her arms around him and sobbed into his chest. All the fear she had bound up was loose, all the disgust in herself for her weakness and the rage of needing to make herself less because her best was not enough. The horrifying awareness that she would do this again, willingly, because it stopped someone else from doing the same. Because she was good at it and she knew she would survive.

Genma only held onto her, one palm rubbing a firm circle between her shoulder blades and the other resting on her hair, never daring to catch or pull. So loose a hold she could easily pull away, leaned over so she wasn’t on his lap or between his legs. Muttering something soothing, but generic as she struggled to breathe in a consistent pattern. He didn’t know her needs, they hadn’t discussed them, and she was too hysterical to communicate it properly. Too disjointed, feelings both too much and too far away until she let the storm she had delayed roll through her.

It swept her from her body. She let herself go.

It was the better part of half an hour before Sakura had cried herself out, leaning her face into the man’s collar and inhaling slowly. The scent helped to bring her back, sweat and warmth and Konoha poison. “Pressure,” she instructed, voice cracking as she finally came back to herself. “Please.”

Obligingly, Genma picked her up and maneuvered her into a too-tight embrace, his arms pinning hers to her sides as he pulled back to his chest. Each of his legs wrapped around her shins, pinning her into a near-fetal position. It helped to ground her further, and Sakura hummed against the weight, letting her chakra finally settle out of the emergency flare. This was a good hurt. She could focus on it, and the warmth, and the rush of her blood because she was alive.

“How are you feeling?” Genma asked, his tone quiet compared to the sound of the night wind and the river.

“Weak,” Sakura replied, equally soft. “Dirty. Hollow.” It took a second for her mind to conjure up the right words. “I’m still dissociating, I’m pretty sure.”

Genma hummed, and she could feel it through her back. “Talk me through it,” he instructed. Textbook grounding, if a little vague. As if he could sense her judgment, he continued. “Let’s start with physical injuries.”

This, Sakura could do. She forced her eyes open, to watch the river instead of getting lost in her thoughts. “Throat hurts a lot. Probably burst a few blood vessels in my face. Eyes are sore. Bruised my wrists.” She stopped, feeling that overwhelming rage and weakness threaten to sweep her away again. Genma squeezed a little harder, a reminder that she was there, and warm, and alive. “Pretty sure I gave myself chakra burn. I’ve definitely got splinters all over but I can’t feel my skin.” She drew a breath, scanning her body again. It was still too vague, too out of touch to pinpoint anything less than a bone-deep ache.

“You didn’t get hit with anything?”

Sakura shook her head mutely. She’d been lucky in that regard.

The man ran his hands along her sides and up her legs briskly, as if verifying she wasn’t bleeding. Sakura didn’t even mind it, the friction of his palms helping to stave off some of the chill that had settled into her muscles after being soaked in volatile chakra. She had started shivering, despite the mild temperature, and Genma quickly opened his flak jacket to pull her closer to his own warmth. “Chakra exhaustion,” Sakura chattered. “I have a blanket in my storage scroll.”

“Relax, Pinkie, so do I,” Genma replied, not mentioning the lack of storage scrolls on her person. Hatake hadn’t been that subtle. With a flick of his chakra, a blanket poofed into existence around them. Sakura felt him tuck it around them both before he pulled his arms back around her. “See? Nice and cozy.”

Genma kept up quiet chatter as the darkness deepened around them, occasionally prompting her to describe her feelings, or the scenery around them, or to find what hurt the most. Small things that kept her mind from drifting again. It wasn’t therapy—wasn’t designed to be—but it helped her empty her mental box and pick up the pieces enough to finish the mission.

“You didn’t answer,” she accused quietly after a while, when they had lapsed into silence to watch the river in the moonlight. “I called and called, but you weren't there.” She ignored that her voice caught on the last few words.

“I’m sorry.” And he was, Sakura could tell. “I’m real sorry, Haruno.”

“I know you were too far away to sense me, but I’m still mad.” Sakura let her lips twitch into the barest hint of a smile. “You have to make it up to me in Takumi.” It wasn’t much of a peace offering, but she had to trust her handler out in the field. She had almost died, but there were a lot of almosts in real life. The fact of the matter was that she didn’t die, and Genma had talked her through her breakdown like he was supposed to. She would make it back to Konoha and that was enough. It had to be enough.

“You drive a hard bargain,” Genma murmured. “How about I buy you those hairpins and we call it even?”

“You’ve got yourself a deal, Shiranui. But I warn you, I have expensive taste.”

Sakura leaned her head back to press against his shoulder, letting her mouth widen into a better smile. “Let go,” she instructed, inhaling slowly as he dropped the hold. On her exhale, the Sakura mask was back in place and the box was sealed. “My throat is killing me,” she informed him, hopping up and only losing her balance a little bit. The sharp pain in her foot was worrying, but it still held weight if she forced it. Unlikely to be broken then, but definitely not fit for running around the forest anytime soon.

“Not the first time you've said that on a mission, I bet,” Genma shot back. His expression clouded over for a moment, before he coughed awkwardly. “So, next time?”

Touching her neck gingerly, trying to feel where the bruises were the worst, Sakura glanced back at him. “Don’t go for a full-body restraint to start,” she told him, watching the night bugs buzzing over the water. “A firm rubdown or tapping is fine. Pain is better.” Genma clearly looked like he was going to object. “Field treatment, Shiranui. Different rules.” Back in the village, where it was safe, she was generally on harm watch after a mission. Out here, pain was an old friend and the objective could trump whatever dark thoughts lingered behind her eyes. She had enough experience with it to be sure.

“And if I can’t get close enough for that?”

It was rare that a handler couldn’t make contact, but Sakura figured this was as much to get him fit for service again as it was for her. The man looked rattled enough to need a handler of his own, watching her like she might collapse again at any moment. She moved to examine each section of her skin, finding a few messily clotted cuts and about as many splinters as she expected.

“I have too many verbal triggers to reliably work my way out of a spiral that way. Just reinforce my cover and let me go. I’ll find my way back.” There was a particularly nasty cut on her elbow, and Sakura tried to figure out where it had come from. From the corner of her eye, she could tell Genma had another protest on the tip of his tongue.

To her mild surprise, he bit it down after a second and nodded, getting up and digging through his vest until he found a pair of tweezers. “Why do you not have these sealed somewhere?” Sakura asked, taking them when they were offered so Genma could continue rummaging around.

“I lose them constantly either way,” the man replied next pulling a scroll to retrieve ointment and bandages. “Do you want to do this here?”

“The light will be better at the house.” Sakura was unsurprised when Genma offered an arm, sweeping her up into a hold to cross the river. There was no chance she would have been able to do it herself, but at least he wasn’t babying her for her aching limbs. Her toes and the bottoms of her feet burned with chakra over-saturation. It reminded her a little of the time a mark she'd needed to seduce had gotten creative with a flogger, the stinging weirdly identical to that bit of kink. The larger muscles groups she’d subject to the same pain were also aching, but the brief moment of not needing to walk really drove home the damage she'd done to her soles and arches.

Either the kids had been told not to come out or they didn’t hear the duo return. When Sakura stumbled onto the porch to take advantage of the house light, there was no accompanying screaming. Stretching out her legs immediately, the woman went back to work with the tweezers.

“I’m surprised you didn’t end up with any ticks,” Genma noted as he cleaned the cuts on another part of her body. “Who wears shorts in the woods this time of year?”

“The kind of girl who has tick wards and fuuinjutsu specialist friends who can make more for cheap.” Sakura smirked at the affronted expression on the man’s face. “What, you think Anko walks around like that in the forest of death without anti-bug seals?”

“Did you learn this in kunoichi class or something?” Genma wiped another cut, gentler than his tone. “I feel like my education was a sham.”

“I don’t know. You went to about as many kunoichi classes as I did.” Or maybe that was wrong. Sakura only vaguely remembered the two years of academy classes she had managed to get before her parents died. Maybe they had started earlier than she thought to prime the civilians for their potential future.

The banter was nice. Sakura had well and truly locked her emotions down but it helped get her body back out of the stress response. The sharp sting of antiseptic and the rhythmic tearing of field tape for the larger cuts was practically wired into her body as something that meant safety.

Hatake was loud when he opened the front door. Well, loud for a ninja. He hadn’t muffled his footsteps and he let the door creak on its hinges, which might as well have been a klaxon for a trained fighter. It was almost certainly for her benefit. His eyes glanced first to Genma’s careful hands on Sakura’s thigh, tutting over a cut. Then to Sakura’s smile, polished and so genuine he seemed even more on edge.

“Gave you a scare, huh Hatake?” she teased, noticing how his gaze darted across the injuries but never lingered. Polite of him, not to stare. She knew she looked like shit.

“What happened?”

“Got caught out in the woods while I was with my summons.” One of the cuts twinged unpleasantly and Sakura hissed, fighting the instinctive urge to kick the man. Genma gave her a flat look before he continued to treat the cuts, poking and prodding at her muscles. The strain of chakra had burst several of the smaller blood vessels, leading to a rainbow of bruises and freckle-like dots of blood beneath the skin. “It looks worse than it is.”

“It’s still pretty bad,” Genma sighed, deftly realigning what must have been a dislocated metatarsal. The pinkette yelped, slapping his shoulder quickly before wiggling her foot. It actually felt a lot better, but she shot him a dirty look anyway. He could have at least warned her.

“I lived, didn’t I?”

Hatake was giving her a cautious look, but the tense way he had appeared was slowly melting into a more casual professionalism. He was still suspicious, clearly, but he tossed her thigh pouch back to her and crouched down to join them.

“Is the house compromised?”

Sakura shrugged, leaning back against one hand and ignoring the bruises on her wrist. “We couldn’t see any sign of it from the river, so unless they scouted the area we’re probably still fine.” She looked out to the darkness of the trees rather than toward the men as she continued, not wanting to see their expressions. “I managed to plant a cover story that didn’t include the builder, but if they recognized you they’ll figure out there’s a connection.”

Genma was the one to make a questioning hum, and Sakura stayed limp as he grabbed her other leg to check her likely-sprained toes and continue treating the many cuts. “Tried to drive a wedge between Gato and Kiri by playing off his weakness for civilian women. I overplayed my hand, though.” Sakura used her free hand to gingerly trace along her neck. “I think I hooked him right at the end, but I wouldn’t bet on it working twice.”

“You didn’t pull another scene from Tale of Two Lovers, did you?” Genma questioned, clearly trying to lighten the mood. Sakura snorted, holding out her last limb for his inspection, hand limp.

“I’m a professional, Shiranui. I have more than one old ballad to steal ideas from.” She couldn’t quite keep a straight face, grinning at the man and sure she looked ghoulish with the all those facial injuries. “Besides, I don’t have the chakra to jump off another cliff.”

After dabbing the last of the antiseptic on her cuts, Genma let her arm drop back down. Sakura scowled at the purpling bones of her hand. Those would take the longest to heal, assuming she didn’t get enough rest to perform her pupation technique anytime soon. She’d never managed to figure out bruises when studying medicine. She’d had just enough practice with iryojutsu to do damage control, to stop bleeding long enough to get to a real medic. Getting to a higher level than that would require time and dedication she couldn't devote to the art.

“How critical are you?” Genma questioned, squinting slightly as if that would let him distinguish her chakra levels. Even sensors had trouble with that, so it was a bit of a moot exercise. The density was an Uzushio technique to throw off dojutsu users and other sensors, and Sakura had blatantly copied it after reading up on their history. As it turned out, constantly dampening her chakra and forcing it down meant her relatively diminutive coils could hold a surprising amount of energy when compressed.

“As soon as we’re done here, I need immediate rest and food, in that order,” she replied, taking stock. The chakra that had protectively coated her organs hadn’t spread out much, leaving her arms and legs too cold and her body too hot. The downside of such a technique, unfortunately. “I’m at… ten percent, maybe?”

Hatake jerked, apparently more familiar with chakra exhaustion statistics than Genma was. Sakura smiled again, this time with more teeth. “I’m also ranked ninety-five percent on chakra control.”

It wasn’t something she generally disclosed, but the jonin’s posture relaxed a fair amount when he ran the new calculations in his head. At a score of ninety-five, her lethal zone was exactly ten percent. Hatake clearly realized she was understating her control, especially with the new wariness in his visible eye when he saw her lack of symptoms, but he was polite enough not to call her out on it.

And fancy that, a clan-born ninja as famous as Hatake was wary of her.

Genma was the first person to shift, breaking the moment. Silently, he offered a hand to his teammate, and Sakura took it gratefully. “I’ll keep watch,” he told her, as if she had any doubt he would be watching like a hawk for the remainder of their mission.

“Good, because I’m about to sleep like the dead.” Sakura rummaged through her pouch for a second. “Grab my blanket for me, will you?”

Obediently, the man powered up the seal the pinkette pointed out and she wrapped the dark, fluffy thing around her shoulders. It was deceptively protective, woven with more seals than the average field blanket and soft as sin. When she made her way into the house with it dragging slightly on the ground behind her, it didn’t take long at all to find a defensible spot in the kitchen. Sure, it would probably be noisy once the kids woke up, but she didn’t think she could make it up the stairs.

Genma seemed like he was going to protest for a moment, but only sighed. The second he started to drag Hatake back up the stairs instead, Sakura let her eyes close.

Chapter Text

Somehow, in her rest—more like a coma, honestly—Sakura had missed breakfast and lunch as the kids roared through the house. She’d very nearly missed dinner too, but Genma made a clone that very carefully shook her awake while the table was being set.

Popping it with one of her kunai had been very satisfying. Not quite as good as slamming her alarm clock’s snooze button, but close.

Sakura was quick enough to get up after that, though, stretching out her sore muscles and wincing as her chakra churned too low to help. Hopefully after more food and rest she’d have a bit more to play with. The risk of her chakra network outright rejecting the boost of a soldier pill was too high with how weak she was, so she’d have to ration very carefully. If she was lucky, she could work her way up to forty or fifty percent of her stores and mitigate the worst of the side effects with a pupation technique.

The civilian family had been bustling around in the living room and froze when Sakura strolled out, offering them her most winning smile. “Sorry about that,” she told them, her knuckles cracking as she finished the last of her hand stretches. “Pretty rude of me to take a nap in your kitchen, Miss Tsunami. I hope I didn’t scare you this morning.”

“You’re okay?” the kid prompted, his hands paused over whatever he had been making with the builder.

“I’m not going to die anytime soon, if that’s what you mean,” Sakura confirmed. She glanced over to the real Genma, brows raised. “So, am I in danger of being mobbed?”

“Oh yeah,” the man confirmed, nodding toward the doorway. “Coming in hot.”

Sakura had exactly seven seconds to brace herself before she was unceremoniously tackled by a blur of orange. She grimaced as she fell into Genma’s shoulder, cursing silently as every bruise on her body flared up in protest. Naruto babbled out loud curses at her, and Sakura could only make out about half of it as she patted his shoulders awkwardly.

“You look like a corpse,” Ami told her flatly, arms crossed as she glared at the woman. The rest of the group had been much more cautious in their approach, which was greatly appreciated.

“Wow, thank you,” Sakura replied sweetly. “You know just what to say to a girl, Ami.”

Sasuke had stopped just behind her, eyes scanning her for further injury. The bruises had probably gone dark by now, and she knew the chakra exhaustion had probably turned her skin more gaunt than usual. But she offered him a reassuring smile and raised an arm in a silent offer.

More sedately, and with significantly more care for her injuries, the two tucked themselves under her elbows. Sasuke in particular seemed comforted by her heartbeat, even if him resting up against her meant she was in very real danger of tipping over.

Kakashi was the last one to stroll in through the door, sparing the group hug a single glance before he turned to address the civilians instead. “We delivered the beams as directed. Are there any other supplies that need to be pulled before work starts tomorrow?”

“Just the usual shipment of rivets and bolts,” the builder muttered. “If we’ve got all the supplies in place, we should be able to finish in a couple of days.”

Sakura raised her brows at Genma, and he thankfully understood her question immediately. “No sign of the Kiri nin so far. We’ve been combing the area in the usual squares. Hatake and I did a dry run of the formations today.”

“We were awesome!” Naruto added, and his enthusiasm made the pinkette smile a bit.

“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m going to be out of commission for a couple more days so you kids will need to protect me and the client.” Her eyes flashed to Genma for a second, a quick stutter of requested assistance. The man swooped in immediately, cajoling the kids to the table alongside Hatake. When she was no longer being squeezed, Sakura rolled out her neck, fingering the tender bruises again. She had cream for that somewhere, didn’t she?

“You good, Pinkie?” Genma asked when he returned for her. Apparently that nickname was going to stay. It did help, to have one more step between who she was in the village and who she needed to be now. She wasn’t quite sure she was up to being Haruno just yet, even in the relative safety of a civilian house.

“I’ll be fine. I’m just really sore.”

“Well, you do look part-Hoshigaki with all the bruises.” Genma dug around his vest for a second until he could produce a mirror. When Sakura caught sight of herself, she grimaced.

“I always did bruise easily,” she assured the man as she pressed a hand to her face. The marks that throbbed the worst were a swatch of blues, purples, greens, and yellows. Ami hadn’t been entirely wrong comparing her to a corpse, given the dark circles around her orbital sockets and the red staining within her sclera. She’d seen prettier cadavers for sure.

“I’ve seen you walk off worse.”

“Generally I have more chakra than a civilian when I do.” Sakura handed the mirror back as she straightened up her hair a bit. Her ribbon had come loose and her clothes were rumpled, but it was a simple matter to get at least that part of her appearance back under control. “I’ll need at least a day and a half to get back to working condition. Two days at least if I need to act as short-range support.”

“Could be better. Could be a lot worse.” The silent question within their interaction was obvious, the answer equally so. They were going to stay long enough to help finish Team Seven’s mission, even if it meant she was side-lined for a while. She’d always been stubborn that way.

The man nodded, thankfully trusting her judgment on the matter. Dinner was a more pressing matter anyway.

Not at all surprisingly, the kids clung to her like limpets as Sakura excused herself from the table. Sure, the two quieter kids were more discreet about it, but Sakura couldn’t help but notice that the duo seemed to move out to the porch at the same time as her and Naruto and they kept her in sight when she paced the yard.

“When you end up beat up like this,” she told the blonde, and by extension the other two genin, “it’s important to know how to diagnose your own injuries. I look pretty beat up, but it’s really not that bad.”

“This counts as not that bad?” Naruto demanded, pouting when she poked his forehead. “Hey, that hurts!”

“It does not,” Sakura replied, though she did stop. “And as far as field injuries go? This isn’t bad at all. No broken bones, no internal bleeding.” Sakura shrugged one shoulder, ignoring how it pulled on a sore muscle in her neck. “Those can kill you before you even realize you’re dead.”

The little blonde screwed his face up in thought. “How can you tell?” he asked, apparently deciding that a lesson in medicine was perfectly acceptable at this time of night. And it was something to take her mind off how itchy her muscles were without chakra running through them. Sakura shivered a little when the wind blew, wishing her reserves would hurry up and grow already.

She forced herself to finish the slow set of stretches as she spoke, cataloging areas that were especially tender. As she did, she pointed out areas of deep red, still-rising bruises, chattering idly as Naruto asked entirely too many questions. He seemed intent on memorizing everything she said, which was adorable, and the other two on the porch were clearly listening as well.

A still-wrathful part of her wondered what Hatake had been teaching the kids if they were so eager for any other kind of stimulation. She wasn’t even a good teacher, stumbling on some of the descriptions as she got to the corners of her own knowledge fairly quickly. They had questions – good ones, even – but she was no medic and it wasn’t as if she could demonstrate any of the techniques with her chakra so low.

Genma had disappeared after dinner, though she could still vaguely sense him nearby. He probably would have been better at answering some of this than she was. But since both jonin were apparently working behind the scenes, she was left keeping the children entertained. She could feel the mask cracking as she talked, and she mentally slapped herself. If she couldn’t deal with kids, how was she supposed to finish the mission?

Apparently the little blond was sharper than she thought, though. While Naruto seemed eager to continue picking her brain, he took a few steps back after a bit and gave her a bright grin, a practical mirror of her own mask. That was a red flag if she’d ever seen one.

“You know, it’s getting pretty late!” he announced loudly, interrupting her worrying. “We should probably turn in. Big day of moving bridge stuff around tomorrow, you know?”

“It’s barely dark out,” Ami replied, rolling her eyes from where she sat on the porch with a set of kunai and a sharpening kit.

Naruto opened his eyes wide dramatically, silently gesturing in what he probably thought was a subtle way. “Well I’m heading up to bed,” he told her emphatically, hopping up onto the porch and tugging on Sasuke’s arm. “Come on, teme!”

Sasuke snarled at him wordlessly, but did get up. His eyes glanced back toward Sakura, and she tried not to smile at the trio as Ami scrambled to follow now that both boys were going to leave her alone. They had the makings of a good team, as long as they managed to work out their issues. That was special in their line of work.

Once the trio scrambled back into the house, Sakura wandered out to the woods, eyes closing as she listened to the settling noises of the forest. The bats were just starting to come out, their wing beats practically silent against the backdrop of rustling leaves and rushing water. Most of her remaining flies would be hiding beneath leaves or inside cracks, just out of sight.

The fastest of her flies would start dropping off the bandits tomorrow. The already-implanted animals in the surrounding miles would have already been relieved of their burden as the flies dropped to the forest floor, taking shelter beneath dead leaves and in the dirt. If she was lucky, they would be ready for her to utilize around the same time she declared herself fighting fit. Every bit of extra intel helped when it came to missing nin, and she wasn’t going to be caught unaware again.

How the duo had managed to evade her network was something that she still didn’t have an answer for. Shoku’s skills had never failed before. She was able to pinpoint most ninja from miles out and keep track of multiple sets of signatures. Shima was rarely misled when he cast a genjutsu. Admittedly, they didn’t do their best work in wet environments, but if the missing nin could make themselves invisible, it meant other Kiri nin might be able to do it as well.

Thankfully, brainstorming didn’t take chakra, even if it felt a little strange to do her thinking with both feet on the ground. Back in the village, it wasn’t that unusual to find her perched on a wall or the ceiling, splayed out in a variety of positions as she combed through the day’s paperwork. Sakura walked slowly toward the river, one hand on her chin as she hummed.

Some time later, Sakura looked up from her spot near a tree to find Genma and Hatake looking slightly confused at her location. Sakura smiled from where she’d wedged herself between two overgrown roots, hopping up and immediately hissing in pain as it pulled her overworked muscles. She did feel better with the stretch and rest, but it would clearly take a bit longer for her nerves to get the memo.

“It must be late if you came to hunt me down,” she joked, wiping the bits of dirt from her clothes and erasing her scratched out notes in the dirt with a foot.

“Figured you might want to sleep in a house instead of the woods,” Genma replied, not at all subtly looking her over. “What were you working on?”

“Zabuza or his apprentice managed to misdirect my tracker.” Sakura let her expression settle into a fierce scowl. “It couldn’t have just been olfactory misdirection, because he managed to fool my sensor, too. They accidentally created a perfect counter to my techniques.”

“Well, that’s no good. Do you have any idea which one it could be?”

The woman shook her head. “I won’t know until I have enough chakra to summon the swarm and ask. It has to be a technique that limits sensing capability at minimum, so I’m guessing it’s something to do with either water or mist. It’s rare for clones to have a smell, though. They were paranoid to use them, but I guess I would be too in their situation.”

“Water clones can carry smell,” Hatake offered, his eye crinkling into a smile when Sakura raised a brow at him. “My pack has been misled before.”

“Water clones would make sense, all things given.” The pinkette put a hand to her mouth, wondering exactly how to train her swarm for that little issue. Her flies found targets primarily by the scent of rot, confirming them visually. If a clone passed both of those checks, she might have to start breeding specialized trackers. That would mean a lot more homework when she got back to the village.

Genma seemed to be in a hurry, only giving her a minute of dead silence before he coughed awkwardly. “Well,” he announced, trying to clear the air. “All of this sounds like tomorrow’s problem. You need all the beauty sleep you can get and I’m bushed.”

“Wow, rude.” Sakura smacked his arm theatrically as she walked past him. “I’m going to bleed you dry when we get to Takumi now. Before, I figured I’d be nice and get something with a budget in mind but I see where we stand.”

She didn’t see Genma’s expression, but she did get to listen to him sputter as he followed her. Sakura didn’t let her smirk show, instead making her way back to the house and ignoring his protests.

The next day passed fairly uneventfully. When Sakura woke, she found the genin trio already out and practicing in the yard, a clone of Genma supervising as they ran through combat drills. The two men were gone again, and Sakura just shrugged to herself. It was one less problem for her to deal with, probably.

She felt better after another hot meal and some of her bruise cream. Her muscles still ached, but she’d recovered enough chakra to perform her summoning jutsu, climbing up to the roof to get some privacy as she pinged Shima and Shoku.

The two landed on her fingertips delicately, each staring at her for a few moments before making their own judgments. Shima, unsurprisingly, moved to groom himself, unperturbed by her appearance. Shoku took a few moments longer, wings moving erratically as she decided if she was more worried or irritated.

“You survived,” the tracker noted eventually. It sounded a bit like a question, though obviously they’d all know if she ever left the mortal plane.

“I always do,” Sakura replied, leaning back on the tiles as she regarded her two swarmlings. “I’ve got a few theories on how the water nin managed to fool both of you. Do you have anything urgent from the swarm before we talk shop?”

“Nothing that won’t wait until you recover,” Shima informed her. “How did that prey fool the swarm?”

Oh, the little fly was mad then. Sakura let the vicious feeling in her gut twist and warm her. Shoku also settled, staring at her with the same intensity. At least they were all on the same page.

“So it starts with a water clone,” the pinkette began, using her free hand to gesture as she spoke. “What do you say to learning to recognize jutsu?”

Chapter Text

Between the kids darting around impatiently for the bridge to be finished and her summons buzzing, agitated, from the moment the sun rose for the day, Sakura was actually pretty happy to be on guard duty for a while. Her chakra network had replenished to about half, helped along mostly by the nearly neurotic amounts of food the civilians had forced her way and the slivers of soldier pills she’d begun to dissolve between her lip and bottom teeth over the last day. She could still feel the unpleasant nausea she’d always associated with chakra rejection, but at least it seemed like her coils were generating a halfway decent amount of chakra now. Recovery was, unfortunately, not an exact science out in the field and it always made her a bit nervous to push too hard.

The Kiri nin were still nowhere to be found, and Sakura’s flies had struggled to recognize chakra patterns needed to help find their hiding spot. That wasn’t a surprise, really. Training a whole new type of fly out in the field had been a long shot anyway, and only a few of her flies were chakra-sensitive enough to even tell ninja from non-ninja, much less sensitive enough to recognize jutsus or types. Shima had gotten a decent feel for when Sakura was casting a jutsu, but when she sent the creature out to stalk the children during their training, it was a total bust.

Her arm itched fiercely when she thought about what she’d need to do for a crop of decent chakra-sensors. If she wanted strong stock, she’d have to start entirely new genetic lines. Something for later, she supposed. T&I was sure to have a few prisoners to experiment on, right?

Discarding the thought for now, Sakura took stock of her progress in other areas. Sakura would die before admit it, but she was thrilled when she could finally count herself back among the combatants. It happened to coincide well with the final touches for the bridge, her excitement easily dismissed as general impatience.

Genma probably knew better, but he was also smart enough not to question it. Instead, he and Kakashi circled around her and the kids like they were plotting something. As someone far too used to men who thought they were clever, Sakura ignored them entirely. She and the kids had gone to help with the last of the heavy lifting on the bridge, with her on guard duty. The guys could catch up when they were done with whatever secrets they thought they needed to keep.

Rocking back on her heels occasionally, there wasn’t much for the pink-haired assassin to do. The bridge builder was doing his job as well as she expected, and she was barely combat-ready enough to finish a real patrol. Instead, she had to guard in place, sending flies out half a dozen at a time to map the field for her. The kids were absolutely wild with energy, though, carrying everything from rivets to small pieces of steel and jogging them to various workers. At least they were having fun, Sakura supposed.

“So,” the builder ground out during a particularly dull lull in the construction. “No sign of those assassins of yours?”

“Not yet,” Sakura replied, holding up her hand to let several of her summons land delicately on her fingertips. “But I’m sure we’ll see more of them soon enough.”

“You think so?”

Sakura let herself smile a little more bitterly than her mask might have allowed for. “We’re rarely that lucky in this line of business.”

“The boys could finish it without me at this rate anyway. Hardly worth killing me now except to save face.” The man snorted, looking over the slightly foggy bridge with annoyance. “Storm’s coming in just in time, too.”

“A storm?”

“Yep. Fog’s not usually due for another hour.”

“Shit.” Sakura flared her chakra like a war drum, taking off like a shot toward the edge of the bridge. “Stay there!”

The bridge builder startled, but Sakura barely saw it, hopping off the edge of the bridge to rush out to see. Sure enough, when she managed to break into the bank of thick mist, she found a veritable army gathering on ships on the other side. At this point she couldn’t even be that angry. This was just how this trip out of Konoha was going to go and there was no avoiding whatever curse had been activated by their appearance.

Hopping back on the water was at least an easy task. No one had seen her from the ship so it was a matter of hopping over the worst of the waves and hopping back up to the support beams. Flies were summoned in the hundreds, tagging each of the civilians as Shima took his place at her ear. Vanishing her chakra down to nothing, Sakura quickly grabbed the nearest civilians and started ushering them off the bridge.

Most looked like they were going to argue, but Sakura’s expression must have convinced them of the necessity. The kids had frozen, awaiting orders, and Sakura sent out three more of her screwworm flies, ordering Shima to maintain their chakra points on his map. If the Kiri nin were there…

Sakura shook herself. There was no time for doubt. “Off the bridge and into the trees,” she barked, milling with the crowd as she pulled her tools from her pouch. Six dozen senbon remained in the pouch, but the rest were staged at various points, poison dip uncapped but still covered in the wax seal. She could easily recoat the needles during a more drawn out fight if needed.

“Haruno,” Genma murmured at her shoulder, appearing from a whirl of leaves. Kakashi wasn’t far behind, darting in front of the civilians to survey the area with that Sharingan of his.

“There’s at least two ships of fodder,” Sakura reported, disappearing easily into the trees as the civilians were herded into a relatively tight circle of leaves. “I’ll need to play defense for at least part of this.”

“Kakashi and I can handle the first wave,” Genma confirmed. “The missing nin?”

“Haven’t seen them yet.” Sakura twitched, sensory information coming in from one of the flies on Shima’s map. “Hold that thought.”

Sakura folded herself against the tree a bit more firmly, tilting her head toward Shima. “Hm?” she prompted, waiting for the fly’s whispers to start up again.

“A blank area here.” On the genjutsu map, the area showed up as a gap where her flies avoided, the many flies all somehow missing a fifty square foot area near the water. “Suspicious.”

“Very good job.” Sakura leaned back to Genma, her hands flashing into a basic visual genjutsu. “Here’s a blackout area that’s raising some suspicion. Be careful.”

Genma flashed her a lopsided grin, one hand already gripping half a dozen senbon. “You too, Haruno.” Without another word, he disappeared.

Sakura settled down against the branches, hiding her body along the lines of leaves and branches. The flies came and went at regular intervals, most of them checking in for new orders or to report information to Shima and the other flies she’d designated as information sorters. The pinkette remained lax, tracking the civilians as they nervously paced within the area that had been designated their safe zone.

The first of the thugs to break land made plenty of noise about it. Kakashi and Genma seemed to think the kids could handle it, and her spies reported that the men had headed out on the water, sinking the second ship without hesitation. That cut down the amount of fighting significantly, assuming the rogues didn't know how to water walk.

Grimacing, Sakura was forced to watch as the trio struggled with the bandits and washed out ninja wannabes. While they’d certainly improved some since she’d last sparred with any of the kids, they were still painfully new genin. Every hit caused a silent wince, and it certainly made the builders nervous. She couldn’t exactly help, though. Conserving her energy for a big fight was more important, and she’d definitely give away her position if the kids saw her.

Silent cheering for them would have to be enough.

One low-level opponent managed to make it to the circle and Sakura struck silently, a senbon aimed for the coratid artery. While the man screamed blue murder, he was quickly incapacitated by the powerful muscle relaxer hitting his throat and heart, the accompanying potassium compounds instantly doing their work in the bloodstream. She lowered her hand slowly back to the bark, ignoring that the builders had huddled even more uncertainly with the sudden death. Thankfully, these were hard folks, used to seeing death and violence. They didn’t give her away.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have the luxury of being kind. Suffocating to death certainly wasn’t a noble way to go, but she couldn’t exactly break cover for the sake of mercy. Anyone who got past the kids, or who she though she could reliably hit from that distance, was going down.

It wasn’t anything in particular that gave the game away. Sakura had stayed dead silent, barely even breathing, when she felt that same twinge of paranoia. Her flies hadn’t reacted, but then again, they hadn’t the first time either.

Narrowing her eyes slightly, Sakura considered their mission. The Kiri nin wanted to assassinate the bridge builder. One of the weapons that would avoid an all-out assault happened to be senbon, and Sakura was sure the kid was at least B-rank in their usage. If she were going to pick a vantage point to kill a target standing beneath this tree, where would she strike?

Whipping out a row of the needle-sharp objects, Sakura’s world exploded into a hive of activity. Haku burst from the shadows, arm pierced with a likely-nonlethal dose if it managed to penetrate the cloth at all. The rest of the row had ripped a straight line through one sleeve, so the kid must have been preparing to strike at the same time.

Donning her most feral expression, Sakura gave chase, her swarm providing a number of updates as she headed toward the main battle. Haku was quick, she would give them that, but they were still a child. Dodging around the rest of the kids and the fighting from the bigger hitters, she eventually caught up and managed to cut off the easy access routes for the kid to flee.

“I’m really sorry about this,” Sakura murmured as she swapped weapons for something a bit more close-range. The kunai wasn’t anything special, but it was useful enough for both offense and defense in case the kid had something else.

“What a coincidence,” sneered a voice behind her, and Sakura sighed when she felt the knife at her kidneys.

“Oh my, shinobi, sir, is that a kunai or are you just happy to see me?” she drawled as she put her kunai away primly. Her heart had kicked up again, panic thrumming beneath her skin as she assessed her options. Both of her teammates were nearby. They had to be, if the noise was anything to go by. So she didn’t have to play quite as conservatively as she had before. The problem was that there were two of them now, and the kids might also stumble on the fight end end up hurt. Not as much of a problem for two of the three, but who knew how Naruto would react to foreign attack in the heat of battle?

“You’re cute,” Zabuza drawled back, pressing hard enough that she knew he meant business. “Haku, are you hurt?”

“My arm is numb,” Haku replied, and Sakura must have nicked the skin after all. Even in small doses, her stuff could work pretty quickly. She’d discovered some of the relaxants doubled as powerful analgesics in the right proportions. Sure, they were mostly compounds isolated from various brothel drugs, but they worked alarmingly well out in the field to both disorient and weaken an opponent.

“Yeah, it’ll do that,” she mused, hoping that someone would get there sooner rather than later. The knife dug in a hair deeper and she tried not to twitch. “Would really appreciate if you stopped stabbing me. I get the picture.”

“Where’s your antidote?” Zabuza breathed near her ear, bodily hauling them both out of the way of another brawl. Haku was quick to follow, and Sakura found herself pinned against yet another tree with Zabuza’s hand around her throat.

“Antidote’s not going to do much for the numbness,” she replied, regarding the kid. They’d make for a decent assassin when they grew up a little more. Well, if they grew up a little more. She hadn't even noticed they were down an arm. “You just have to wait for it to wear off.”

It was impossible to see the kid’s expression from behind the mask, but they nodded after a moment, cradling their apparently numb limb. Zabuza’s hand tightened around her throat a little more, and Sakura didn’t bother fighting him off this time. She just glared out at him, less terrified with the change in circumstance. She could feel her flies swarming at the edges of the trees, alarm and irritation in the buzz of their wings. Shima had climbed behind her hairline, hidden from sight as she was moved. If needed, she had a senbon hidden where he could dab a bit of poison on one of the man’s open wounds. With all those bandages, he had to have one or two exposed enough. It might not kill him, but it would certainly buy her time enough to get one of the heavy hitters.

“You know, you’re not bad for a tree climber,” the missing nin complimented, and to her surprise his grip loosened just a hair. “Your team is getting on my last nerve, though.”

“I only claim one of those people,” Sakura replied, smiling as Genma came through with a hail of weapons to drive the ninja off her. “That one, specifically. Good save, Shiranui.”

“Always,” Genma asserted, tossing her a sword. “Got you a present.”

Sakura regarded the weapon. “I can’t use a sword,” she told him flatly, looking to see where Zabuza had retreated. Unfortunately, the mist was everywhere and she couldn’t sense the man.

“Stab people with the pointy end. You’ll figure it out, Pinky!” Genma wisely made himself scarce after that, back into the fray as he killed a few of the thugs pressing in on the genin. Sakura carved her way through the crowd as well, quickly locking on one of the men with a particular scar she recognized. He was one of the ones who was in that room, she remembered. Well, if she couldn’t have the pleasure of tearing Gato limb from limb, she could take a bit of a mental health break and rip this guy’s arms off, right?

Slicing viciously through the man’s guard, she used her relatively slight mass to climb up and over his shoulders, body weight pressing the sword deep into the man’s shoulder and down toward his heart as she knocked him off balance. The man’s scream of agony was deeply satisfying as she ripped the sword through the rest of the muscle, very nearly severing the man’s entire shoulder on her dismount. The metal groaned against the bones, threatening to crack but it wasn’t like it was her sword. She didn’t mind it snapping.

“What did that guy do to you?” Kakashi asked as his fight brought him nearby. He didn’t seem perturbed by the brutality, but he was certainly surprised.

“He didn’t know how to treat a lady,” Sakura replied lightly. “Where’s Zabuza?”

“Genma has him. Can’t find the apprentice, though.”

Sakura clicked her tongue, abandoning her torture to let the man bleed out in relative peace. She even left him the sword, not willing to drag it with her if she needed to hunt down a hidden teenager.

Unfortunately, she found her possible worst case scenario waiting across the field. When she managed to punch through the mist, she found all three kids heavily injured, a fatigued Haku still standing with several senbon prepped in hand.

Without thinking about it, Sakura pulled a hail of senbon herself, grimacing as a wound on her palm made itself known. She’d handle it later, pushing through a series of what looked like glass mirrors surrounding their battlefield in various states of broken. Something sour had settled into her gut when she cleared the mist, and Shima made a nervous buzzing noise at her ear.

Ignoring him for now, Sakura took a guard position for the kids, looking around the mirrors and wondering exactly what they did. Clearly it was something the kids didn’t want to have happen since many of them had been punched out or cracked. There were whispers of genjutsu around them as well, which she really didn’t want to see.

“Back off, kid,” she warned, looking around to see where she could spot the apprentice. Thankfully, the kid had slowed down and didn’t have the benefit of a dedicated jutsu. She could just barely sense the whisper of chakra moving quickly behind the mirrors, invisible except for the occasional shadow on the ice.

“Sasuke’s dead,” Ami whispered up at Sakura, voice trembling as she also tried to stand.

“No, he’s not,” Naruto snapped back, voice layered with something that made Sakura’s hair rise. “I promised I’d protect you two.”

If she’d been sensitive to chakra manipulation, Sakura was sure the wave of fresh, boiling chakra would have knocked her onto her ass. The fact that the chakra was visible at all, red and angry, made the pinkette purse her lips. This was not in her mission parameters. She wasn’t about to deal with a potential release of kyuubi chakra in this battlefield when she was already dealing with way too much.

“Shima?” she prompted, blocking an attack by shattering a mirror before the kid was ready.

“Alive,” the fly confirmed.

“Uchiha is alive,” the woman announced to Naruto, trying not to shiver when she saw that instead of blue eyes full of adoration the kid was sporting red. “But he won’t stay that way if you don’t buckle down and stop fighting each other.”

She really hoped those would be the magic words. Unfortunately, Sakura was forced to dodge another number of attempts to turn her into a pincushion. More mirrors shattered, many of them revealing an irritated little apprentice for longer and longer periods. Sakura could only hope that it was draining to jump from mirror to mirror since she couldn’t rely on the shadows for her reactions. She’d managed to crack the mask, but she was running low on weapons.

It was going to be a competition to see who could hold out longer, and Sakura wasn’t feeling all that confident in her chances. As she palmed her last few kunai, she grinned at the howling of dogs in the distance. There was no chance that was anything other than Hatake’s summons and the mirrors dropped when the creatures began to mob the place, finding the hidden apprentice with unerring accuracy.

Finally feeling confident enough to turn back to the kids, Sakura found the trio in a tight group hug, Naruto shielding the other two with the majority of his body. “It’s safe,” she told them, her fists unclenching slowly as she looked around. “Get to the civilians while we take care of this.”

“They’re a kid,” Naruto whispered, looking up at Sakura. He looked heartbroken.

“Yeah, sometimes they’re kids,” she agreed as she pushed the three lightly. Ami had shouldered most of Sasuke’s weight, and she set her expression to one of grim determination. Naruto scrunched up his own face with a complicated frown before helping his teammates retreat.

Four dogs had Haku by each limb, jaws clamped firmly on too-thin arms and legs. Haku’s expression was frozen in uncertainty, eyes darting toward where Kakashi and Genma were still tag-teaming their fight with Zabuza. Sakura could sympathize with that feeling of terror, of wanting someone to come help. She sighed, hating this part of her job.

“Hold still and I’ll try not to hurt you any more,” she muttered to the kid, before ripping their head back and holding a kunai to their throat. Much louder, she shouted above the sounds of fighting. “Hey, Zabuza! Found something of yours.”

Watching that man stop, his eyes lighting up with rage, was weirdly satisfying as Sakura and four growling dogs became the subject of his hatred. Kakashi and Genma were smart enough to back off when the man stopped, although they stayed alert in case he decided to change his mind.

“So now that we have a second to chat, how much is that garbage can paying you?” Sakura continued casually. The lack of fighting made the battlefield eerily silent. The fog muffled things even further. It made things seem more intimate than they were, and Sakura kept her knife pressed just shy of drawing blood in case anyone got any ideas. One twitch and the kid would be dead.

“Why do you care?” Zabuza questioned, straightening out of his fighting stance carefully.

“Can’t be enough to sacrifice your kid, can it?”

“Just kill me,” Haku hissed, and Sakura offered one of her business smiles. It probably didn’t look very appealing since she was pretty sure she’d covered her shirt with blood when she stabbed that guy with a sword.

“I don’t kill kids on B-rank mission pay.” She tried to avoid killing kids at all, but sometimes the orders came down with her name on them. She returned her attention to Zabuza, but unfortunately it was going to be one of those kinds of days, apparently. The piece of shit himself decided to roll up on a boat, this time with two dozen more of his thugs.

Sakura didn’t pay attention to his gloating. She’d managed to pretty thoroughly tune the man out already, and she had no intention of letting the man get her attention again. The one fidgety guy in the back of the pack, though. He was familiar.

It took her a bit to place him. All the men seemed to take a moment to posture like this was a dime novel, and Sakura ignored them too. Ninja could never resist the urge to be dramatic, especially jonin types. She’d learned to roll with the punches.

The guy’s face was just very familiar. And sure, there were a couple of them that she was going to skin if given the opportunity, but this guy… Ugh, this was going to bother her for ages if she couldn’t figure it out.

Eventually, Shima made a noise of recognition. “He broke the biwa,” the fly murmured, and once it had been triggered the memory slotted back into place. The man had ripped the biwa from her hands and thrown it against the wall.

“Set the swarm on him once he’s dead,” Sakura commanded, feeling the other flies in the area respond to the orders eagerly. Surely at least some of the bodies could be used for more flies, right? Even if they weren’t for any particular bloodlines, she knew there were flies out there looking to colonize the flesh.

It seemed like the men were done being dramatic for a few moments. Shima filled her in on the highlights. Gato was planning on not paying the missing nin, figuring they’d be too weak from the fight to put up resistance to his non-ninja thugs. Then he was planning on killing the rest of them and then the bridge builder.

“This guy is an idiot,” Sakura noted, her hold on Haku’s life loosening. “Kid, if I let you go, are you going to stab me or my teammates?”

“Not for free,” the kid snarked back, and Sakura grinned.

“You’re going to be fun in ten years. Hopefully your dad over there feels the same.”

Silently, Sakura withdrew the blade, and the dogs somewhat hesitantly let their grips loosen. They gave Sakura questioning looks, but she just smiled, coating the last few of her senbon in poison and quickly taking out half a dozen of the men in quick succession. She would have done more if she had more stores, but she’d been running low on weapons to begin with.

It drew the correct amount of chaos anyway, with Genma springing to action and taking out a few more of them with whatever weapons he had left. Zabuza and Kakashi started fighting again, though whether it was with each other or against the goons was difficult to say. Sakura resisted the urge to join in and instead made her way back to the kids and workers.

Someone had put up some rudimentary traps, but Sakura simply walked up the sides of the trees to avoid them and landed back in the clearing with a smile. “Looks like we handled our missing nin problem,” she announced. “Anyone with a decently strong stomach can come out now. Otherwise we’ll be working on cleanup for at least another hour or two.”

From there, it was unfortunately easy to get the kids to help move bodies. Something about character building, if Kakashi was to be believed. Sakura didn't like it much, but she also wasn't their teacher, so she let it slide. She and Genma got out of most of the cleanup by reason of 'it's not our mission, Hatake, and you can't make me' so that was also a win. The few bodies her flies had laid eggs into were collected discreetly, Sakura's hands already stained with blood. If anyone noticed her carving strips of flesh off of some of the corpses, they certainly didn't say anything about it.

"I think we can probably leave tonight," Sakura noted, walking straight into the sea to wash off some of the bloodstains. Genma lounged by the beach, opting for the more practical approach of washing off the worst of it and just changing his clothes.

"You feel up to it? I'm kind of wiped." The man laid back dramatically on the rocks, his usual bandana replaced with a similar black one for now.

"I can stand another night if you want, but it's only a day's run to the nearest onsen up in Rivers." Sakura dunked her hair into the salt water, scrubbing her scalp vigorously. It stung all the little hurts and scrapes she'd gathered, but at least it didn't break anything open.

"You had me at onsen. Still wanted to make a trip to that needle maker?"

Sakura grinned, turning back as she wrung out her shirt. "You do owe me a pair of hairpins. I intend to collect on the debt."

Chapter Text

The onsen was great. Sakura took the opportunity to fix her hair, trimming the split ends while she lounged around the warm water. The scalp cream had done a lot to help heal the damage from all their running around, but unfortunately she was used to dealing with her hair breaking during missions. It was an unfortunate reality of being a kunoichi on the active roster.

“Pretty sure you’re not allowed to do that in here,” Genma noted, slipping into the water with hardly a glance in her direction. Both of them were nude, but the man hardly spared her a glance as she draped herself over the rocks, mirror propped up on a nearby bench. It wasn’t like shinobi had much use for modesty anyway, especially not the ones who worked in the flower division. She was pretty sure half of the village had seen her naked at one point or another.

“Who’s going to stop me?” Sakura replied, snipping another split end as she pursed her lips at her reflection. She still looked a little rough, even with the night’s rest. Thankfully, she hadn’t taken much physical damage in the fight, but the bruises across her neck were going to be annoying. She’d just healed the last ones, and it brought out the darkness under her eyes in a very unflattering way. She could wear the 'tired but hot' look, but this was a bit beyond her usual.

“Fair point. You know they have real mirrors and an actual table inside, though. That can't be comfortable.” Genma shifted in the water, stretching out just outside of Sakura’s range of vision. She absently kicked the floating table his way with her closer foot, and his wordless hum made her smile to herself. She’d already stocked the thing with plenty of drinks and snacks, intending to soak until the threat of heat exhaustion forced her out.

“I think I might keep the short hair,” she murmured to herself, finishing the last of her trimming. She’d kept the clippings isolated to a handkerchief, which she rolled up and set aside wordlessly. She’d pick up in the morning when she wasn’t as worn out. “At least until the next operations meeting. What do you think, Shiranui? Do I look better with long hair?”

“You’re always pretty,” the man replied diplomatically. Sakura rolled her eyes as she slipped into the water, propping her feet up against his outstretched calf. The onsen itself was small enough he couldn’t float in it without touching the sides, so he really shouldn’t have jumped the way that he did. It wasn’t like she stabbed him.

“Your toes are like icicles,” the man complained, shooing her away ineffectively. He quickly gave up when he realized it was a lost cause, though.

“Oh, don’t be a baby. We left the icicle back with their father, remember?”

“Don’t remind me. I’m just glad Zabuza backed down. He had us on the ropes. Who knows what he would have done if you killed his kid.”

And wasn’t that the truth. Sakura had spent most of the run to the onsen grateful that the mercenaries had seen reason. She’d seen plenty of missing nin who were committed to a cause rather than to the cash, and almost all of them had been a nightmare to kill. If a jonin and tokubetsu jonin couldn’t take down the man, she doubted blinding the man with grief and rage would have helped their case any.

It didn’t bear thinking about for long. Sakura didn’t want to imagine how close she’d been to death any more than she had to. It would be bad enough unpacking everything back in the village.

“So, a day or two in Takumi and then back to Konoha?” she asked instead, letting her eyes close as she breathed in the warmth of the water. It helped to ground her senses, ever so slightly sulfuric.

“Unless we run into any other trouble.”

“Don’t you put that curse on us again. I am trying to relax here.”

Genma only laughed, pushing the tray back toward Sakura. She opened her eyes when it bumped her shoulder, and gave him a halfhearted glare as she popped a few of the dried fruits into her mouth. The water was doing wonders to soothe the usual aches and pains, and she slid down to cover her chin and mouth, breathing through her nose as her eyes closed.

“If you fall asleep in the bath, I'm going to let you drown,” Genma warned, warm and amused.

“No you won’t,” Sakura replied, though she did raise her head a little more. “Why doesn’t the flower division have a natural bath? I could definitely get one routed to the courtyard, right? We’re in Fire Country. There are plenty of underground springs.”

“I think you’d have to go through the council for approvals.”

That was probably why she hadn’t done so yet, she thought with a sneer. The less time spent around the civilian council, the better, and that was to say nothing of the Hokage’s meetings. She spent more than enough time in those as a participant.

As the two of them soaked in the pool, Sakura relished in the evening banter filtering through the air from further in the town. Drunks were singing loudly and off-key. The smell of fried food wafted up, just faint enough to avoid making her too hungry. It made the unease finally let up a little bit, a chance to relax in neutral territory where the danger was minimal.

Taking a second to breathe, Sakura found her thoughts drifting back to that last battle. She was too relaxed for it to bother her much, so she let the questions bubble up to the surface rather than locking them away.

“Was Gato still alive when you left?” she asked, thinking back to their mission. They’d been told not to let him know he was investigated, but in their defense, he probably didn’t have the time to go through his office while half the town wanted his head on a pike. Without his guards bullying them into silence, she wondered if he’d get far enough to investigate the unusually large cell of Konoha shinobi that just to happened to be there.

“Ran with his tail between his legs,” Genma confirmed. “Besides, we wouldn’t have been the ones to kill him. What happens on Kakashi’s mission is his own business.”

“If we put in all that work just for him to die before it’s useful, I’m going to have a chat with Hatake.”

Genma just shrugged. “If you think the council won’t notice, be my guest. He deserves to get his ego checked every once in a while. Just don’t let the old cronies think you’re flirting.” Sakura made a noise of disgust but didn’t disagree. The last thing she needed when getting back was another missive ‘encouraging’ her to find a good mate for the Hatake heir.

Their small talk was comfortable, and the fresh water flowing from the springs kept the onsen circulating comfortably without getting too hot. Sakura really did almost fall asleep in the bath, though Genma only lifted her, grumbling, out of the bath rather than letting her fall in and choke on the water. They tumbled in the general direction of their futons, though Sakura was hardly dry and certainly not properly dressed when she fell back asleep, ignoring how the tokujo threw a blanket over her. She would make sure he knew he was appreciated once they got back to the village, after the mission could run through her and she had her head on straight.

For now, she was still bone-tired and recovering.

Takumi was always a delight, although Sakura was disappointed to see that none of the instrument makers could do anything to help her. Most made sympathetic noises and offered condolences for the well-loved instrument, but that didn’t really solve her problem. Genma seemed slightly mystified by all of the mourning, especially when one old woman nearly brought Sakura to tears by offering to craft a new instrument from what could be recovered of the wooden body. She declined, but took the woman’s contact information and vowed to make the woman’s wares famous in the local brothels. Anyone with that much compassion and skill deserved her endorsement.

They did find the needle maker, eventually, and Genma’s pale expression when he saw the prices made her grin to herself. Clearly, he hadn’t seen that her latest batch of senbon had required basically no maintenance and remained deadly sharp. The quality spoke for itself.

Luckily, a few demonstrations of how balanced and light the needles were convinced him to purchase a set of senbon for himself. (Sakura knew when she saw him pepper a nearby tree with a cluster of them that she’d earned the craftsman another loyal customer.)

Their trip back was almost leisurely, more of a jaunt than a sprint back to safety. Sakura found herself in a decent mood, even if she knew she was going to be loaded down with paperwork and health checks for the next few days. But the weather was nice, and she had a shiny new biwa sealed in her scrolls after much deliberation.

The old one wasn’t a complete lost cause, hopefully, but she figured she should keep her options open and this biwa had a good sound. It grumbled like an old man when she played a poor note, and it made her smile to herself in the shop where she had picked it out. The journeyman who ran the store had grimaced and offered her something of higher quality, but she didn’t want something worthy of the daimyo’s court. The fickle instrument would do just fine.

There were an unusual number of civilians at the gates when the duo returned, but Genma didn’t seem as confused about it as Sakura was. She blinked at the number of merchants and caravans for a little while before deciding that it probably didn’t concern her or her group. If the village was ramping up for some festival or another, one of her assistants would end up letting her know where to stand and smile.

Genma broke off after they entered the village proper, bowing to her mockingly as she turned toward her home district.

“Always a pleasure working with you, Haruno,” he told her with his trademark grin.

“You’re not bad for a mission partner,” Sakura replied, shrugging one shoulder. “I’ll send my copy of the mission report your way after I’m done with it. Drop it off for me?”

“Of course. See you around, Pinky.”

And then he was gone, disappearing to his apartment or the bar or maybe even a lover’s house. Sakura only had one destination in mind, and knowing how quickly gossip traveled, they would be expecting her already.

Her office hadn’t changed much from when she left. The girls had taken some time to clean up the paperwork and keep things running, but the demands of her station never really stopped. Sakura shrugged off her pack and weapons and flopped on one of the many comfortable chairs she kept around the place, closing her eyes.

Reconditioning for flowers wasn’t the same as for other ninja. Now that she was back from a mission, she would need to go through the whole gamut of checks to make sure she was ready to be released on the rest of the village or go on other missions. It was tedious, annoying and slightly patronizing, but it wasn’t optional even for the highest ranked among them. She would know. It became a requirement the second she got the seduction division recognized as an actual specialty.

Even the strongest among them had moments of weakness, and Sakura wasn’t foolish enough to think she could bury all of her thoughts forever. The average life expectancy for a jonin or higher was thirty. The trauma of missions, no matter the type, lingered in the joints and behind the eyes until it was forcibly exorcised. She wondered how many of those deaths were preventable and decided that ignorance was probably bliss in that regard.

Satsuki, the traitor, sent her down to the cells before allowing Sakura to even greet the rest of the flowers. The pinkette endured being prodded, examined, and having blood drawn. While their natural immunity seals would have given her plenty of resistance to civilian illnesses, there was always the risk of pregnancy or some disease not covered by their rather extensive inoculations.

The doctors were brisk but unerringly polite, as Sakura had demanded of them. Most were civilian midwives and healers collected from the hospital when they were edged out by those with higher chakra or more bombastic techniques. The flowers had no need for trauma specialists or miraculous surgeons. A calming voice, a gentle touch, and some basic human empathy would get them further than clever jutsus when it came to most acquisition patients.

The hardest part was taking off the masks and letting herself be weak in front of one of the therapists. It was mandatory, she reminded herself as she let all the feelings from the mission wash over her again. They poked through her thoughts and put her on harm watch for a few days and refused to let her train until they had pounded the self-worth back into her and made sure she wouldn’t snap at anyone in the division if they let her resume her duties. Standard fare, compared to more complicated cases they dealt with.

She’d been through the process often enough that the second the sharp candles were lit, reminders that she was here and no longer there, Sakura felt it all unspool. She was safe. She was home.

The intimacy tests, the soft missions, the required contact with people who understood – all passed in a bit of a blur. Sakura had designed the protocol for all returning flowers herself. She knew what the purpose of it all was and appreciated it after the fact. The isolation within the division helped to filter out the worst thoughts, prevented her from taking out her feelings on some unsuspecting partner. Violently or sexually would have been a tossup, honestly.

And she’d only slipped once, that first night, when she caught sight of a mirror ended up with shards of glass between her knuckles. That was pretty good, all things considered. They added an extra day to her required rest, but she still got cleared in under a week. That counted as extremely well-adjusted given the nature of their work.

Meeting up with Genma once she was released from the division was a pleasant surprise. Sakura had sent him a sharpening kit and a few ounces of a poison her division had been working on as a thank you gift for the mission, and she’d fully expected to go a few months without seeing him again. Instead, she bumped into him and the pre-genin academy teacher whispering furiously at each other near one of the division entrances.

“Hello, boys,” Sakura greeted loudly, watching them both startle like guilty children.

“Wow, Haruno, you look so formal today,” Genma noted, taking in her kimono with raised eyebrows. She’d done her makeup with extra care for the day as well, a small celebration to herself. “Special occasion?”

“Just a meeting with the Hokage. It’s unusual to see you in our neck of the woods, Umino-sensei.” Sakura smiled thinly, aware of how most of the teachers felt about her. She was the villain that pulled civilian kids from their classes, after all. Iruka was one of the good ones, at least trying to understand that she didn’t have a choice, but he always seemed on edge with her anyway. Even now, he shifted uncomfortably, not quite meeting her gaze.

“Genma mentioned you recently ran into Naruto,” the man began awkwardly. “He’s one of my former students.”

“Aren’t all genin your former students these days?” Sakura interrupted, hiding the teasing smile behind a politely curious expression. Genma knew exactly what she was doing, and seemed equal parts proud and smug about it.

“Well, technically yes. Naruto is a bit of a special case.” The teacher dared to meet her eyes for a second or two before looking away again. Embarrassment was a good look for him, she had to admit. Whether he was embarrassed at being caught or coming over at all remained a mystery.

“I apologize, Umino-sensei, but I can’t stay all day and chat. Was there something you and Shiranui wanted to talk to me about?” She didn’t mind being a little late to a meeting, but it did seem to strengthen his resolve. Sakura flipped the fan in front of her face, allowing the prettily painted cloth to hide her grin.

“Naruto is interested in learning some medical techniques. The hospital already said they wouldn’t teach him.”

Sakura blinked, tilting her head. “And?” she prompted, connecting the dots fairly quickly. Well, she had intended on following up on the kid, but this wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind. Most kids were kept well away from the compound, especially ones from clans or important bloodlines. It really went to show how little they respected the Uzumaki matriarchy once Uzushio couldn't defend itself anymore. To say nothing of the disrespect of having the son of their fourth Hokage hanging around. Sakura had pride in her people, but it didn't change the fact that most people thought they were a whorehouse.

“The… acquisition division has a medical team, doesn’t it?” The teacher seemed mortified to even talk about it, his face flushing as Genma had to physically pinch himself to stop from cackling.

“I recommended he ask about lessons from your crew, Haruno,” Genma drawled, grinning like an asshole. “Since you and the kid hit it off so well while we had our mission. Who knows? He might have a talent for it."

Sakura pretended to think about it for a while. “Well, I suppose I could have Uzumaki stop by a few times a week as long as he promises not to bother the patients,” she murmured, fluttering the fan in front of her face. “He’ll need supervision, of course. Maybe one of his guardians? Or you’re always welcome, Umino. You’re quite a popular topic of conversation, you know.”

The teacher flushed a bit more, but he didn’t say no. Sakura snapped her fan closed, offering a pleasant expression. “Well, either way, let Uzumaki know he’s welcome to come by sometime next week. I’m sure there are a few tasks that demonstrate the field.”

“That sounds great,” the man agreed, bowing shallowly. “I’ll make sure he shows up on time and ready to work." The man's blush faded only slightly when he met Sakura's eyes one final time, though at least he didn't look ashamed of the request. She would have turned him down or made an excuse if he had. "I’ll leave you to your errands, Miss Haruno.” He hardly said goodbye before fleeing up the street. Sakura waited until he was out of earshot to break into laughter.

“You’re a dick, Shiranui,” she scolded walking at a far more leisurely pace toward the tower. “What did that poor teacher do to make you drag him along instead of just letting me know the kid would stop by?”

“Well, you seemed like you needed some cheering up,” Genma replied, falling into step easily. “And Kakashi might have cashed in a favor for me to distract the guy for an hour or two while he filed their mission report. So really, everybody wins.”

Sakura shook her head with an undignified snort. “Sure, if you say so.”

The path was fairly clear this morning, and despite the weight of the formal kimono, Sakura felt like not much had changed since the last time she and Genma had walked this route. Kids were still screaming as they tried to get through missions and down to the market. Civilians still milled around aimlessly, either on their way to or from some of the government buildings. It really hammered in that Sakura was a cog in a much larger machine. It would turn with or without her, but she was stuck inside it either way.

It was probably a testament to the efficacy of their treatment program that she didn’t burn it all down. The urge to scream about the hundreds of children thrown into the meat grinder for the sake of money and power had been reduced to a mere intrusive thought. Sakura batted it away with practiced ease as she watched the lines move quickly in and out of the mission desk entrance.

Genma walked her to the door of the tower like a true gentleman, kissing her hand with a wink before he sauntered off to continue his business. Sakura rolled her eyes at his actions until she saw that some of the other jonin in the area were giving her dirty looks. She hadn’t missed that while out on missions, she had to admit.

The tower hadn’t changed a bit since she had been there last. For better or for worse, the intricate wooden carvings were the same ones she had traced as a child on her way up the stairs and offered some nostalgic comfort. No doubt the meeting would be exactly what she expected, but at least it got her out of the compound for a while.

When Sakura entered the old man’s office, she was proven right. Their beloved hokage, highest power in their village, had brought her in to essentially stand and be scolded for whatever perceived slights had happened while she was out on her mission. His personal council were seated around him, each looking as severe as always.

She’d long since learned to tune them out, studying the man’s office instead of bothering to internalize whatever they thought she’d done wrong. Generally, these little sessions required very little input. The old bastards were happy to wind themselves up and then blow it out on whoever had the misfortune of being next on their list. She doubted the more powerful clan heads got the same treatment, but Sakura had commiserated with the quartermaster and logistics experts a few times about how little was accomplished during council meetings.

A few pieces of mail were stacked on the corner of Sarutobi’s desk, wrapped in ribbons indicating they had come through intelligence and might have contained foreign secrets. She supposed that the chunin exams were coming up in the next few months, so planning those was probably high on his list of things to do. The latest crop of genin folders had been filed on the shelf with the other active ranks, which was unusual. The old man tended to procrastinate on assignments, especially with the spring crop.

The shinobi up in the rafters were signing discreetly back and forth, though Sakura didn’t know exactly what they were talking about. Probably something to do with her lack of attention, she supposed. Sakura only blinked, careful to keep an eye on whoever was talking even as she ignored the contents of said talking. Eventually, it petered out into nothing and Sakura could safely tune back in.

“I shall take that under consideration,” she mocked, sounding as sincere as anything. “Is there anything else you require of me, Hokage-sama?” The old man only smiled, more amused than offended while the council squawked at her insolence. It was the same lecture she’d heard a thousand times before, and it wouldn’t change if she heard it a thousand more times. The only one who seemed to realize that was Danzo, who glowered at her from his seat at Sarutobi’s right hand. She only smiled as sweet as anything his way, aware that it made him livid.

“Ah, you’ve received mail from Kiri,” the kage noted, gesturing to one of the items in his pile. “I had intended to have a runner deliver it this morning, but since you and I had a standing meeting anyway, I hope you will forgive the delay.”

“From Kiri?” Sakura repeated, momentarily genuinely confused. “I don’t believe I was expecting anything from another hidden village.”

“Our intelligence operatives did say that it was safe, though they were confused at the contents. An inside joke, perhaps?”

Sakura reached out to take the mail with hesitant hands. It was a package, it looked like, held together mostly by the ribbon since they had carefully carved the contents open to avoid any tag bombs or cursed seals. As she opened up the paper properly, Sakura frowned. She didn’t recognize the handwriting on the letter, and as she tipped the package over entirely, a small wooden item fell out and nearly hit the floor.

Blinking, she inspected the item for a moment, turning it over in her grip. “It’s a bachi,” she noted, admiring the inlay on the handle. It was mother of pearl if she had identified it correctly, shining in various colors. It was a little big for her hands, but it was light as anything, and it seemed like it would be plenty strong. She loved it, but it didn’t explain why or how someone had sent it to her. Most people didn’t know she played an instrument, and the only people she knew from Kiri were…

Wait. No way.

Sakura casually pulled out the letter, expression still bland and confused. It wasn’t a long letter, and there was no name at the end of it. The characters were surprisingly neat, almost artistic.

See you in ten years, tree-climber.

“Intelligence doesn’t know what this means?” Sakura asked, her voice perfect. She twisted the bachi over a few times, trying to glean meaning from the random gift. “Can they at least tell me who it’s from?”

“We’re afraid not.” Sarutobi clasped his hands on front of himself, eyes crinkling in the way that showed he didn’t quite believe her. It didn’t matter if he didn’t, though. No one could prove anything, and Sakura was an excellent actress. Nobody but Genma would make the connection, and there was no way he was going to talk, especially if she showed him the gift.

“Is it a threat?” Sakura looked at the letter, tilting it as if the angle might let her recognize the handwriting. She wondered how missing nin had gotten such high quality paper. And how someone like Zabuza had been sloppy enough to send it from Kiri. Though, thinking about it, she supposed it was less suspicious than some random village. Quality like this didn’t come from many places, and there was no way the man could trace her contacts that quickly, even if he had somehow recognized her.

“I would advise you stay on your guard, Miss Haruno,” the hokage told her, tone as serious as the grave. “We will, of course, offer extra protection if you feel you need it.”

“I appreciate that as always, Hokage-sama,” she replied, bowing. “I will investigate our recent acquisitions and report back with my findings. If it is a threat, please rest assured that it will not remain one for long.”

The usual goodbyes and promises for follow-up were a blur as Sakura held the bachi and letter. She was tone-perfect, of course, the right amount of distracted and concerned, but it wasn’t until Sakura left the tower that she really looked at the little pick.

“Should I treat this like a real threat?” she mumbled to herself, staring at the letter. “Do I lock down the division for a bachi of all things?”

It really was a pretty thing, though. Sakura couldn’t help but play with it as she walked back to her division. Satsuki was going to be incandescent with rage at the lockdown notice, but they did have to play their part.

Maybe she could figure out where he was and send him and Haku some new clothes. It was an innocuous enough gift to make it through any inspections while still making a point. After all, she couldn’t help but notice the man could use a new shirt.

This seemed like the kind of passive-aggressive battle of gifts that Morino would just love. Sakura changed her course to T&I, humming to herself. She needed to see the man anyway to arrange for more test subjects. One more errand in the same direction would do her some good.