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A shinobi wasn't allowed to indulge in softness.
It wasn't a lesson he had been taught in the academy, but one he had learnt in the dredges of battle, blood-soaked and exhausted and not yet a teenager. It was one he had learnt when his father decided death was a mercy on his son's future. It was one he had learnt when he was too slow to save Obito and too reckless to save Rin and too weak to save Minato-sensei.
But for the last five weeks, he had fallen into an endless pit of softness made of milk-white skin, flower-pink hair, and crimson-dyed silk.
It was a rather straightforward, if not tedious, mission.
The Sandaime had sent Kakashi to dismantle a minor drug trafficking ring operating in towns on the border of the Land of Tea. They had caused enough local unrest for the town leaders to band together and hire one of Konoha's best—him—to completely eradicate the issue.
The okiya had been the ideal stakeout point for the mission, intel suggesting the higher-up members of the criminal group frequented it almost nightly.
So Kakashi had played the part of a weary traveler from the south, a man with coin to spend and time to waste. He took the same seat each evening, in the same shadowed corner, entertaining the geisha here and there to keep up the illusion of patronage.
She began appearing beside him with the same quiet grace on his fourth night at the okiya. A soft shuffle of fabric, a fresh pot of tea, a polite tilt of her head.
From that night on, she made a habit of him.
Replacing his cooling tea and asking mild questions, filling the space with the gentle, unobtrusive chatter expected of geisha. She introduced herself as Ayaka, a name befitting the warm pink coloring of her hair and bright green of her eyes. She never pried about his mask or why his hair always covered his left eye. A small grace.
He replied with short, forgettable answers, lies wrapped in just enough truth to pass.
But she kept coming back.
Some nights she played the shamisen, fingers dancing with disciplined artistry. Other times, she coaxed a huff of laughter from him with sharp-witted observations about regulars. Often, they shared a silence that felt, somehow, comfortable.
It might have stayed that soft, undemanding thing - if not for the night a drunk merchant grabbed at her.
Ayaka had been walking past Kakashi's table, delivering drinks to a rowdy group, when one of them lurched forward, his fingers clamping on her ass with sloppy entitlement.
Her mask cracked.
"What do you think you're doing?" she snapped—not in the airy, dulcet tones of the geisha, but in something edged and fierce, utterly unbecoming of her role.
Her eyes blazed similarly, simmering acid greens in place of placid jade.
Kakashi felt the shift like a kunai to the ribs.
She jerked away from the man with quick efficiency, her defiance lasting only a breath longer. Ayaka caught herself quickly, dipping into a stiff bow and squeaking out a stammered apology as she retreated.
Gods.
The beauty you were immediately greeted with was eye-catching, but that flash of steel underneath was entrancing.
He felt pathetic with how strongly he wanted that part of her to surface again. Kakashi found himself tracing the shape of that fire every time she smiled too politely. Redrawing her, trying to figure out where her real self overlapped the outline he had mapped in his head.
And she, perhaps rattled from slipping, began drifting toward his corner even more, as if drawn unconsciously to the one person who'd seen the crack in her porcelain.
By the third week, he could no longer pretend indifference.
By the fourth, he dreaded how easily he waited for her each night.
A shinobi wasn't allowed to indulge in softness.
Their lives were measured in how sharp their blades were, how swiftly they could move, how quickly their mind reacted.
He had found the heart of the trafficking ring before dawn, their hidden camp tucked into the cliffs east of town. It should have been a simple confrontation—quick, controlled, clinical.
Kakashi wasn't sure where it went wrong, but that could be the blood loss just reducing his mental capacities. Maybe he had forgotten to sharpen his kunai the week before, maybe he was a bit slower than usual.
He had accomplished the mission, of course. Every one of them lay dead at his feet.
But, at some point, a tanto had slipped between his ribs.
The trek back to the town was a blur of agony, his vision tunneling, each step threatening to drop him. Instinct carried him more than reason. Instinct—and something foolishly, unforgivably soft.
He should have summoned Pakkun or something, sent off for backup that would maybe arrive before he was dead. Should have found a solitary spot to treat what he could before the blood loss claimed him.
Instead, his staggering path veered toward lanternlight.
Toward the okiya.
The sounds of evening drifted faintly through the sliding doors, laughter humming in tune with shamisen notes and the muted tones of conversation. He managed to climb the front steps, blood-slicked fingers slipping on the banister. The lantern above the door swayed in the breeze, its painted flowers blurring.
He reached for the frame of the shoji. His vision pitched sideways.
"Kurosato-san? You're here earl—"
Ayaka gasped, words cracking like ice underfoot when he fell to his knees.
She caught Kakashi before he could pitch forward. Small hands, shockingly strong beneath the layers of kimono, slid under his shoulders. He felt himself being eased onto the polished wood floor, her breath stuttering against his cheek.
"God, w-what happened—are you…"
Her voice trembled.
His mask hung loose against his cheek, slashed at some point in the fight. Kakashi didn't have the strength to fix it.
"Sorry," he rasped, because he didn't know what else to say.
Her hands froze where they clutched at his vest.
For a heartbeat, the painted geisha returned—the trained calm, the soft composure.
Then she swore. Loudly. In a dialect that befit a street urchin from Suna rather than a girl from a small village in the Land of Tea.
…Huh.
"What the hell were you thinking coming here?" she hissed, already dragging him inside and off into a small storage closet. Ayaka slid the door closed with her foot, a broom clattering to the ground in their shuffle. "You absolute idiot, bleeding everywhere…"
Kakashi blinked up at her, dazed.
The fire was back, burning even brighter than the night she snapped at the merchant. Pure, unmasked fury crackling in her eyes.
Beautiful, he thought numbly.
She ripped his shirt up and immediately pressed a hand to his wound. Chakra—warm, steady, practiced chakra—flared under her palm. He hissed in pain, and she ignored it.
"Don't talk," she grunted, leaning over him, pink hair falling from its ornate pins in soft waves. He wished he could reach up and touch it. "You'll make it worse."
Kakashi stared at her for a moment, eyes dropping to take in the chakra that shouldn't be there. It was the angriest he'd ever heard her.
"You're… not…" he croaked.
"I said don't talk."
The brightness in her eyes had narrowed into something deadly focused. She moved with an efficiency that only came from years of experience in the field.
And Kakashi realized—too late, too bleeding, too tired—that Ayaka was not the fragile illusion hiding a strong-willed woman. She wasn't just steel wrapped in silk robes, dusted in powders and dipped in acid.
Ah.
Shinobi.
A shinobi wasn't allowed to indulge in softness.
But coming out of his deep sleep, covered in a downy comforter and cushioned by plush pillows, Kakashi was actually quite content with all the softness around him.
The world greeted him in muted pieces—clean linen beneath his cheek, the faint tang of medicinal herbs. His ribs ached with a deep throb that told him he was very much alive.
He flexed his fingers first, then attempted to shift his arm, and a soft voice immediately cut in.
"Don't move."
Kakashi's eyes cracked open - his vision was blurry, but he knew the shape of her by now.
She sat beside him, bathed in the soft glow of a single lantern and the light creeping through the cracks of the shoji screen. Her hair was loose around her shoulders in a pink waterfall, face clear of its usual heavy makeup and deep red lipstick.
"How long…" He winced at the scratch of his voice, throat tickling uncomfortably.
A solid hand slid between his back and the futon, lifting his shoulders until he was partially upright. The cold ceramics of a cup at his lip made him flinch minutely, but he gulped down the water inside it almost immediately after.
"Almost a full day," Ayaka—well, she murmured, careful not to spill as he desperately drank from the cup. Her other hand came up to cup beneath his chin. Kakashi's eyes fluttered briefly at the gentleness of the motion.
When he finished, she set the cup aside with a quiet clink.
"You were running a fever there for a bit due to chakra depletion. And," she added pointedly, shifting the pillows behind him so Kakashi could sit up, "you left a very large bloodstain that took quite a bit of elbow grease to get out of the wood."
Kakashi huffed something meant to be an almost-laugh, but came out instead like a strained breath. "Didn't mean to."
"Of course not," she replied dryly.
He peered at her through half-lidded eyes. This close, the tiredness under her eyes was unmistakable. She'd likely stayed up all night healing him.
"…Ayaka."
She flinched—minutely, just a subtle tightening of her shoulders. But it was enough. Her hands stilled in her lap. She exhaled roughly, then shook her head, seemingly decided.
"That's not my name."
"What is it then?"
She held his gaze. Really held it. Not performing or adjusting or pretending for anyone else.
"Sakura," she said, finally. "Haruno Sakura."
Something in Kakashi's mind clicked.
…Oh.
Haruno. Medic-nin and poison mistress, one of Suna's elite. Chiyo's apprentice. Rumored to have single-handedly destroyed a thousand Iwa troops during the Scorpion Gulch incident.
He blinked slowly, trying to reorder the pieces of the woman before him.
"You're… that Haruno."
Sakura rolled her eyes, an unrestrained motion that dismantled the last remaining portrait of a geisha that once framed her entirety. "Yes, that Haruno."
Kakashi stared at her in a way that must have been rude. At the pink hair he'd thought was dyed. At the fierce eyes he'd thought were a slip. At the hands that had been so steady on his wound.
"You've been undercover this whole time."
"You're very blunt, you know?" Now, she sounded almost annoyed. Kakashi wanted to curl up in her lap and apologize. "This okiya was a hub for the trafficking ring Suna's been tracking. I didn't realize Konoha was involved until I saw the Copy-nin lurking in that corner."
He groaned softly. "I wasn't lurking. It was reconaissance."
"You were lurking," she said flatly.
Kakashi let a beat of silence pass.
"Why did you help me?"
"Well, you made it extremely difficult to start," Sakura countered. She was avoiding the question. Her voice softened in the next moment, arms crossing defensively. "Coming to me? When you were that injured? What were you thinking?"
He tried to shrug. Regretted it immediately.
"You were," he said simply. "The only place that felt…"
Safe.
Wanted.
Soft.
He didn't say any of that, but she heard it anyway.
Sakura looked away, pink hair sliding across her cheek to cover the heat rising to them. When she spoke, her voice was even quieter.
"Don't mistake this, Kakashi. I did what any medic-nin would do."
He let his eyes trail down to her crossed arms, where they trembled slightly with exhaustion. She hadn't left his side. And she was sitting close enough that her knee almost brushed his thigh.
"You did more," he said.
Sakura stiffened. "That doesn't mean—"
"—I know what it means." He sighed. She bit the inside of her cheek, clearly debating saying something. But decided against it, whatever it was.
She reached for him, fingers ghosting the edge of the bandages across his ribs. Her chakra flared to life at her fingertips, steady as bedrock, sealing more of the damage in his side and taking away some of the lingering ache.
The fire in her green eyes dimmed, not into the softness she'd worn before, but into something wry. Knowing.
"You're lucky I was here," she muttered, affixing the bandages in place once more. Kakashi exhaled shakily, but he couldn't say whether it was from the pain of his injuries or the touch of her hand. "Another five minutes and you'd have bled out on the front steps. That would've been an ass-load of paperwork to deal with."
"…Sorry," Kakashi tried again, because apparently being mortally wounded didn't absolve him of the instinct.
"Hm." She wiped her hands on her kimono absentmindedly. "For a man with such an… illustrious reputation, you're kind of an idiot."
Kakashi could not think of a single time during his life that he had ever been called an idiot.
Is a few weeks long enough to fall in love?
She could tell he was obviously thrown by her words, expression softening into an amused smile. Sakura was looking at him like the cat that caught the canary. "Don't look at me like that. I didn't fool you that badly."
"You fooled me enough," he murmured.
Her lips quirked wider, clearly pleased—and then she leaned in, close enough that the clean-sun smell of her hair brushed over him.
"Come visit sometime," she said lightly, as though inviting him to tea instead of a hidden village. "The sand in Suna is pretty rough, though."
She pulled back just enough to rise gracefully to her feet. As she moved, her hands were already undoing the ties of her okiya attire, stripping away layers that didn't belong to her, silk sleeves sliding off her arms as she crossed the room. Sakura knelt at a small storage trunk tucked behind a shelf, removing all the goods of a travel-ready shinobi. Steel. Canteen. Cloak.
A kunai holster was buckled around her thigh with the same ease she'd once used to pour him tea.
All the while, her voice stayed maddeningly light.
"Not much softness anywhere, and the heat can be pretty nasty if you’ve never dealt with it before," she went on, inspecting the edge of a stray kunai before sliding it into place. "Cushy Leaf-nin like you would hate it."
He should've bristled at the jab. Kakashi stared at her, heart thudding once—hard—in his chest.
Sakura closed the trunk and straightened, moving back to glance down at him once more. Her eyes trailed down his body, and Kakashi's heart kicked up into overdrive once more.
She stepped closer, crouching so they were eye to eye, her small presence somehow filling the entirety of the room.
Sakura smiled at him—wicked, inviting, undeniably hers.
"Try to survive the trip back to Konoha," she said, tapping his mask where it hung crooked around his neck. "Then come find me."
She left him with the scent of herbs, the faint rustle of a cloak, and the lingering ache that had nothing to do with his wounds.
A shinobi wasn't allowed to indulge in softness.
Luckily, Kakashi thought mildly, Haruno Sakura didn't seem quite soft at all.