“What do you want?” Sasuke hisses out, grasping the wound of his shoulder, backed up against a tree.
They all laugh, and the woman with obnoxiously bright hair steps forward, a smirk on her attractive face.
“Come with us,” she says, “And then, Orochimaru-sama will give you power.”
Sasuke stares at them, not completely sure of what to say. He subconsciously grabs the curse seal on his neck.
“Well,” Sakon of the West Gate says, “What will it be?”
Sasuke doesn’t answer.
“Hmph,” he says contemptuously, “I don’t understand. Why would Orochimaru-sama want someone this weak…”
“Shut up!” Sasuke says, though his heart isn’t into it.
He wants to hear more.
They laugh again. Sasuke grits his teeth in anger, but doesn’t say anything.
“What about your goal?” Tayuya of the North Gate says, “Are you going to live your life with your friends and not get hurt? Are you going to forget all about Uchiha Itachi?”
Sasuke goes rigid. He feels like the breath has been knocked out of him and he remembers his face and what he did, clear in his mind even though he hasn’t seen Itachi since that fateful day when he ruthlessly murdered Sasuke’s parents.
“Don’t forget your aims,” Sakon continues, “Staying in this village is useless for you. However,” he says smiling, “if you come with us, you’ll obtain amazing powers. Isn’t that what you want?”
In the end, it doesn’t take a lot of persuasion for Sasuke to agree. Ever since the Chuunin exams ended in such a disappointment, Sasuke’s been questioning what he is doing in Konoha. The brief battle with the Sand (one could hardly even call it a war) was a mere distraction. Sasuke is sick of being patronized by Kakashi and the others and he is sick of Sakura’s worried glances. He is sick of not getting anywhere, of not having any interesting competition, even that idiot Naruto would suffice. But his old teammate disappeared over a year ago and Sasuke is done playing the survivor of the Uchiha massacre, the number one ninja of his graduating class from the academy, and Uchiha Itachi’s little brother. And so he makes up his mind.
Sasuke doesn’t know why he takes the picture with him. In his mind, he justifies it by the fact that he does not hate Sakura, Kakashi, or Naruto. It was nice, for a while, being with them, even though Naruto was an idiot, Kakashi was a pervert, and Sakura was absolutely infatuated with him. They were nice memories and he’s not ashamed to admit it. But that time is gone and Sasuke has a job to do. He’s put this off too long and he’s not going to miss this opportunity.
He leaves the forehead protector in his old apartment because he is not a shinobi of Konoha anymore. It doesn’t mean anything to him anymore and he neither needs it nor wants it. His time here is done and one piece of memorabilia is enough.
There is a slight hitch in his departure. He should have known really, that Sakura would have figured it out. He knows that she isn’t stupid after all and therefore isn’t surprised. But this does not cause him to falter when she cries and begs him to stay. It does not bother him in the slightest when he leaves her unconscious on a bench.
“We’ve been waiting, Sasuke-sama,” Sakon says
He is slightly unnerved by this change in personality, but he refrains from commenting on it.
“Whatever,” he says, “Let’s start.”
Sasuke doesn’t look back.
Chapter Two-
Uchiha Sasuke is tired. That’s really the only word to describe what he’s feeling. It has been three years since he left Orochimaru and six since he left Konoha and he has made no progress whatsoever. He has followed all sorts of rumors, legends, and myths concerning the Akatsuki and Itachi, but all have led to dead ends.
He has not stayed in one place for more than two days ever since he killed Orochimaru. Once a year, Sasuke visits his family’s secret weapons house, but besides that Sasuke has done nothing but search for Itachi.
He sometimes feels like he is an angry little thirteen year old again, who still has nightmares and is still weak no matter what he does.
However, Sasuke is not weak, something he proves to himself every time he encounters other ninja and especially ninja from the Leaf. If he really wanted to, Sasuke could avoid them all, but he figures that he needs all the practice he can get. He doesn’t kill them, of course, because killing-
-just creates people like himself; obsessive avengers, and one Uchiha Sasuke is enough-
-is useless to Sasuke in most situations. Orochimaru’s death was the exception, because he was too strong and had too many resources to find Sasuke after he left. Sasuke had never had any intention of giving his body away and Orochimaru’s death was in order to completely cut ties with the Snake Sanin. And anyway, at one point Sasuke almost hated the man as much as his brother.
Sasuke knows that he is on the S-class list and that he is a wanted criminal and that showing himself to other ninja is dangerous. But he knows that they’ll never catch him now, not when he has studied under Orochimaru for three years. If they had really wanted to stop him, they should have gone after him when he first left Konoha. He was very surprised that no one that he knew of was sent to prevent him from joining Orochimaru. He is not trying to be arrogant, however, the Uchiha were one of the oldest and prominent clans in Konoha and to lose the last Uchiha without a fight was odd for Konoha. But then again, Konoha had just appointed a new Hokage and were still trying to reconcile themselves with the Sand.
Sasuke is in the Mist Country due to strange rumors about a deadly sickness. There was no mention of Akatsuki, but Sasuke is so desperate (determined, not desperate) for a lead on Itachi’s whereabouts he goes to observe the situation. It is not that unbelievable that Akatsuki would attack a village and if they had somehow obtained a way to contain the deadly sickness they could achieve whatever they wanted.
However, when Sasuke arrives the village has been razed to the ground. Burnt by the looks of it. Sasuke doesn’t get too close, but he can tell from a distance that it was a small village and it doesn’t look any different from the thousands of other villages that Sasuke passed in order to get here. There is a small chance that if this was Akatsuki’s work, they were just testing the disease, but this is unlikely. Sasuke is forced to admit defeat and makes the trek back up north where he will start all over again, sitting in bars and taverns listening to gossip for any hint of the illegal organization’s activities.
He is on his way back, following a river which he knows leads to the ocean, where he’ll take a ferry back to the mainland. When he sees a flash of pink from between a few reeds on the other side of the riverbank, he is instantly on guard and tenses himself for battle. When nothing happens Sasuke doubles back a bit and crosses the moving water skillfully. He grasps the handle of his sword that is concealed within his cloak with his right hand and moves slowly forward, his eyes trained for any sign of movement. When he gets close enough he realizes it is a person with strangely familiar looking pink hair. To tell the truth, Sasuke’s first thought was that it is Tayuya, but that is impossible because Kimimaro killed her years ago.
And then he suddenly recognizes her. She is half naked in the shallows and while the water is bloody around her, he can see no sign of any wounds. He looks dispassionately down at the scars that run down her body and face with slight curiosity.
Sasuke would have been lying if he said he thought much about the people he’d left behind in Konoha. Once in a while, he might’ve seen something that reminded him of them, but mostly he had concentrated on forgetting his life there.
Sasuke has no idea what she is doing in the Mist Country. As far as he knows the Fire Country hadn’t allied itself with them, however Sasuke hasn’t really been paying attention to politics since, well…ever. Sakura isn’t dead, as far as he can tell, and Sasuke unemotionally looks around at the possessions that are bobbing around her unmoving form. He sees a ruined book, soldier pills, and her shirt, which from the looks of it was probably cut from her body with the kunai lying half-sunken underwater near her hand. She’s wearing two odd looking necklaces, one with a simple ring around it, and the other with differently shaped stones as the pendant. Sasuke vaguely wonders if she knows anything about the Akatsuki, but immediately dismisses the point. He cannot see a Chuunin or Jounin vest floating around her meaning she must not be still a Genin and therefore not high enough in rank to know about anything. Sasuke only feels a slight curiously about what has happened to her in the past six years, but it is not a good enough reason for him to linger. He turns to leave when something shiny catches his eye. He immediately thinks of kunai and Sakura’s teammates from Konoha coming to find her and immediately tenses. However, when he turns around he only sees a forehead protector, presumably Sakura’s, floating in the water.
…Wait, a second…
Sasuke walks through the shallows, not even bothering to use his chakra to stay afloat. He picks it up and examines it, but there’s no mistaking the slash through the symbol. His eyebrows furrow and he looks back at her, still unconscious in the cold water.
“A traitor?”
He immediately thinks of Akatsuki, but banishes the thought from his mind. This is Sakura he is talking about. The girl who had clung to him like a leech for the better part of his twelfth year. But the mark is still there and there is no mistaking its meaning. Sasuke stands there for a while, thinking, weighing the pros and cons carefully, fully knowing that a single mistake could be irreparable. It was true that she could have information, but it was even more likely that she would despise him for leaving. But the strange curiosity took over again and the desire to talk, really talk, to someone was suddenly overpowering. So Sasuke doesn’t think about what he’s doing when he gathers up her things. He ignores all the doubts he has as he grabs one of her scarred forearms and drags her from the shallows and throws her over his shoulder. And he most especially disregards the fact that what he is doing is irrational, impulsive, and downright stupid.
Sasuke finds a dark, damp, cave and leans her form against the wall before gathering a few green branches to start a fire with. Dry branches cause smoke and Sasuke would rather not attract visitors. After a while, he remembers that Sakura is still wearing wet pants and with slight annoyance strips her of her remaining clothes, revealing more scars, and hangs them to dry along with the contents of her bag. At the last minute he throws a blanket over her, remembering that waking up completely naked probably won’t make her any more likely to tell him anything.
If Sasuke were a normal teenage boy, the idea of an unconscious naked girl (or maybe a woman, Sasuke is unsure of the criteria) might have excited him to some extent. However, in the past six years Sasuke’s done a bit of growing up and found that his complete lack of interest in women really didn’t have much to do with the fact that he wanted to kill his elder brother, but more because of things beyond his control. This didn’t really bother Sasuke, because it was highly unlikely that he would survive to repopulate his clan anyway, therefore hardly mattering who he screwed with in his free time.
Sasuke leans against the opposite side of the cave Sakura is against and doesn’t really think of much as he unwraps a two pieces of onigiri and eats them slowly, drinking traditional green tea that has long gone cold from a bottle in his traveling pack. The sun sets and Sakura has still not awoken. Sasuke is slightly annoyed by this fact, but pulls up his hood and closes his eyes, comforted with the knowledge of his standing as a light sleeper.
***
When Sasuke wakes, it is dawn. Light streams thorough the tops of the surrounding trees into the cave and he sits up and stretches, rotating his stiff neck gingerly. He looks up and sees that Sakura is still unconscious, or maybe asleep, he can’t tell. Sasuke digs out a map of the Mist country and scans over it while he waits for her to wake up. He frowns slightly as he traces the river on the map with his index finger, noting how long it will take him to the ocean and back to the mainland. Sasuke is about to put the map back into his back, when he hears a groan from the girl opposite him. He looks up sharply and watches impassively as her face contorts and she groans again, lifting her hand to rub the sleep out of her eyes. She pushed herself off the ground, facing the rocky wall of the cave. The blanket falling to her waist, revealing two huge scars on her back. They look the same age and from the same weapon. She puts one hand against the rocks and the other grabs at her necklaces, making sure they are still there. Sakura leans her forehead against the hard stone, coughing.
“Fuck,” she groans out and then looks down to see he blanket.
She immediately stiffens and pulls it tighter around her waist and turns around. Her eyes dart calculatingly towards the dying fire first, then her clothes that Sasuke hung out to dry, and then finally towards him. Sasuke can tell just by her facial expression and her posture that she has changed immensely since he last saw her. She is no longer the weak little girl with a crush on him and he must not underestimate her.
Her eyes widen slightly in surprise, but then her face goes blank. She merely looks at him for a few seconds and he looks back at her, revealing nothing.
“Sasuke,” she says finally.
It is not a question, so he doesn’t say anything.
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s my question,” he says, speaking for the first time.
Her mouth twitches in amusement and Sasuke stares.
“What was that?”
“I asked first,” Sakura says, all semblance of amusement gone.
“I saved your life,” Sasuke counters.
“Touché,” she says indifferently, “I was following a rumor about some strange disease that struck a village near here.”
Sasuke does not like her attitude.
“The village was destroyed,” he tells her, “There’s nothing left.”
She frowns slightly, “How do you know?”
“I was there two days ago.”
Neither of them says anything for a few seconds.
“What is your reason for this?” he asks her, holding up her forehead protector.
“That’s hardly any of your business,” Sakura answers him, but she looks tenser than she did mere seconds ago.
“And anyway,” she continues, “I thought my reasoning would be obvious.”
Sasuke frowns in confusion. What was she talking about?
“You haven’t been paying attention to politics, have you?” she says almost amusedly and Sasuke inwardly scowls at her tone.
“There have been several power struggles in Konoha,” she says standing up, letting the blanket fall to the floor.
Sasuke is taken aback by this blatant disregard of modesty and the expression must have showed on his face because Sakura begins to laugh.
She picks up her underwear and pants and pulls them on, reaching for a wire undershirt that Sasuke found among the other contents of her bag.
“The Fifth Hokage was killed and I deemed it prudent to leave,” she says casually as she wraps a length of bandages tightly around her breasts, flattening them as much as possible.
Sasuke is not fooled by her casual tone, but says nothing.
She pulls the wire undershirt and another long-sleeved shirt over her head and starts fastening her shuriken pouch to her right leg, “And I’ve been wandering around for the past two years.”
She looks up for a moment and studies him intently, “You really did kill Orochimaru, didn’t you?”
Sasuke narrows his eyes, “Yes,” he says, “How did you know?”
She looks surprised at this, “Everyone knows,” she says, “Did you really think that no one would find out?”
Sasuke knew he should have killed Kabuto when he had the chance.
“It has been three years, you know,” Sakura says, looking at him oddly, “I’ll have that back, now, if you please,” she says, gesturing towards her disfigured forehead protector.
Sasuke sees the opportunity. He pushes a little chakra to his hand and throws the forehead protector twirling toward Sakura like a shuriken as hard as he can. She catches it a centimeter before it hits her face with two fingers.
“That really wasn’t necessary, you know?” she tells him, “You could’ve just asked my rank before I left Konoha. I was a captain of my own ANBU team, by the way.”
“Why were you unconscious in that river?” Sasuke asks, angry with himself for forgetting the entire reason he bothered to bring her here in the first place.
Sakura doesn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“I made a mistake,” she says finally, and begins to repack her bag.
She pulls a small paper from the pages of a ruined book that Sasuke found with her stuff and slides it into her bag.
Sasuke is incredibly annoyed that she trusts him enough to look away from him.
“What kind of mistake?” he asks.
“I ran into a couple of jinchuuriki,” she says looking up at him again, as she ties the forehead protector, not like a headband like she did when Sasuke knew her, but like most ninja wear them, “You do know what they are, don’t you?” she adds.
Sasuke stiffens, “I have been following rumors of Akatsuki for three years,” he says irritably.
To tell the truth, Sasuke doesn’t really know all that much about jinchuuriki. He knows that they are humans with demons sealed inside and that Akatsuki is searching for them for an undoubtedly foul purpose, but he’s never met one, though he’s heard many rumors concerning them.
“They attacked you?” Sasuke clarifies.
“Yes,” Sakura says, “One of them, the holder of the Nibi, could smell I was from Konoha. And I was wearing a mask, so she must’ve thought I was in the ANBU.”
Sasuke furrows his eyebrows, “She attacked you because you were from Konoha?”
“Yes,” she says again, “All the main countries have agreed to kill jinchuuriki on sight. A precaution against Akatsuki. But it hasn’t been working very well, because they haven’t been able to find any.”
She looks like she is about to say something else, but changes her mind and keeps her mouth shut.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, after another long silence.
“Following rumors,” Sasuke says, slightly reluctant to tell her anything.
She raises her eyebrows, “Here?”
Sasuke merely shrugs.
Sakura sits down on the other side of the fire, her scarred face expressionless. She is a lot shorter than Sasuke remembers her. Of course, the last time he saw her, she was only inches shorter than him, but now he’s taller than her by more than a head.
Sasuke is still trying to work out his feelings on the matter. She is the first person he’s recognized from Konoha ever since he left. In reality, he had never really wanted to see any of them again. His life was complicated enough already, and seeing any of them, particularly someone he knew well, would just make things harder.
Suddenly she smiles, something Sasuke is not expecting and is slightly suspicious of.
“How have you been, Sasuke?” she says.
“Fine,” he says stiffly, still looking suspiciously at her.
“That’s good,” Sakura says absently, “I haven’t been fine at all,” she continues sadly, rubbing a scarred cheek absently.
“I don’t blame you, really,” she says when he doesn’t say anything, “In fact, you left at the right time. Just a year before things started getting bad.”
Curiosity fills him up again, but he restrains himself.
“Where are you going from here?” she asks him, standing up again and picking up her pack.
“Back to the mainland,” he answers, “Probably to the outskirts of the Fire Country and then to the remnants of the Sound. It’s a good place to start.”
The words ‘all over again’ go unspoken.
“You taking the ferry from Kiri-Machi?” she asks, slightly surprised.
“Yes,” he says.
They look at one another for a while, sizing each other up.
“Well,” Sakura says smiling again, “There are strange stories going around about the northern mainland, after all.”
“What kind of stories?” he asks, interested.
“I heard some tell about a lot of people moving away from up there for no apparent reason, but that’s all I know. I’m sure we’ll hear more when we get up there.”
Sasuke is halfway through nodding his head when he realizes what she just said.
“…We?”
Sakura raises her eyebrows at him, but doesn’t say anything. She walks halfway out of the cave and turns around and looks at him.
“Well?” she asks, “Are you coming or not?”
***
Later, Sasuke will blame his actions on momentary insanity, lack of sleep, and intoxication…without alcohol. They make a strange pair, especially after Sakura buys a mask and a cloak (she lost her old ones) though Sasuke can’t really complain, because somehow everything seems easier if you don’t have to do everything all by yourself. Sakura’s a lot quieter than he remembers as well and doesn’t constantly hit on him, which probably adds to his good disposition on the subject.
They reach the ocean within three days and then board the ferry and stay there for another thirty-six hours. They get a lot of strange stares because of their dark cloaks and hoods, as well as Sakura’s mask, but Sasuke knows they would get many more stares if she didn’t wear it and the less attention they get the better.
After the day and a half is up they smuggle themselves through the customs between the two countries and make there way north. They pass within 17 kilometers of Konoha, but neither of them says anything. Sasuke hasn’t asked what exactly brought about the circumstances that made her a traitor. The Sakura he knew before had always been loyal and she must have family and friends still living in the village of her birth. But he out of anyone knows that some wounds are too deep to be healed, and knows better than to question her further about her reasons.
They didn’t really talk much, to each other or to others. So it was only when Sakura secures lodgings for them the first day they reach the mainland by selling a prescription to cure the hotel owner’s rheumatism, that he found out that she is a medic-nin.
The first few weeks pass quickly and without strife and it is a shock to Sasuke when he looks at a calendar and discovers that he has been traveling with Sakura for more than a month. Time had always been oddly distorted ever since he left the Sound and stopped paying attention to the days, but usually he had some sense of it. He had also learned to work around some of Sakura’s strange habits, including the fact that she always bathed and went to sleep at the same time, and that she would sometimes go quiet for hours on end and stare blankly ahead no matter what he did. She also had a habit of holding onto both her necklaces whenever her hands were free. But it wasn’t like before, when all Sakura did was try and win him over and always ended up having to be protected. Indeed, in the purely physical sense, Sakura was now stronger than him, something he only found out when he walked in on her lifting a boulder the twice her size ‘for practice.’
When they were not on the move they hung out in seedy bars and quietly listened to gossip and rumors going around, trying to dissect fact from fiction. They kept to the sidelines and really didn’t do anything that Sasuke hadn’t done before, however Sasuke couldn’t help but notice that he seemed in higher spirits than before. And he decided that maybe having a teammate wouldn’t slow him down, and that maybe, just maybe Sakura could be off some help to him. If not in tracking down Itachi, then at least her presence would mean that he wouldn’t be so lonely anymore.
And Uchiha Sasuke smiles.
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Chapter end notes: And before you ask, this fic isn’t going to be Sasu/Saku. They’re just friends, really. Next chapter will be called ‘Maelstrom,†and hopefully you can guess who's P.O.V. it will be. Hint: Prepare for excessive swearing.
Thanks to my wonderful beta Sleeping Soundly
and please review!