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Sakura spent a fair amount of time irritated, through no fault of her own. It was a surprise, though, to wake up to the dull throatache of irritation and not know why. But she was also chained to a wall, she realized after a moment's inspection, which explained a lot of it.
The Rokudaime's circle of advisers and confidants was loose and informal but still under a certain amount of scrutiny by foreign intelligence. Two weeks after their wedding, Sakura and Lee were woken up by an Rock Country nin rifling through their bank statements. At the time it had been funnier than it had been disturbing; Lee caught the enemy shinobi by surprise and made a speech while Sakura punched him in the throat. Later she harangued Naruto into repairing the damage done to the house's foundation while they went on a slightly belated honeymoon to Rice Country. But there was always that current of tension between your eyes when you revolved around an important person. She expected the danger to be directed around her and not directly to her and spent her entire adult career healing and absorbed in others. But still while Sakura tested the chains and squinted to see how large the room was, she felt disoriented but mostly dumb dumb dumb.
It was hard to judge distances or move and her arms were heavy and uncooperative. She felt blurry and swampish. Dosed then - the thought swam up through the haze, practical and clinical, a great deal like Tsunade - by something incapacitating enough to be a chakra-bonding chemical. That was good and bad; there were very few of them and an antidote wouldn't be so hard to make, but if you didn't have access to your mednin kit you were down for the count. Sakura was more used to the weight of her kit than she was to her wedding ring, and whoever they were, they had taken it off of her. Sakura let herself slump with a certain amount of relief. Four hours, she estimated. Four hours at the most and it would be out of her system and then she'd be able to evaluate the situation and cope.
She slept - no point not to, really - and at some point a hand covered her mouth. Reflexively she bit it.
There was a tightly inhaled breath and a voice said, "Sakura," deep and calm, testing.
Sakura looked up and saw the curve of a mask, white and ceramic, dull like bone. "Sasuke-kun?"
The suffix gave them both pause, but Sasuke was already doing something to her manacles. Her eyes hadn't adjusted yet, she couldn't say what. "Sakura," he said, professional, forthright. "Can you walk?"
There was something wet and warm on her chin. Sasuke's blood or possibly her own, but either way it felt uncomfortably intimate. "Probably," she said, thickly still but a little clipped. It was a bad question.
Sasuke had left the cell door open (and it was a cell, she could see that now, the walls too uniform to be anything else. A government job, maybe, or mob baron.). He always used cockiness like a business card, even when they were kids. Anbu were supposed to be anonymous, but these days she was usually able to pick him out of a squad. A slice of sallow light hit the far wall. Her pupil response was still lagging and it hurt her eyes, but she could make out the full shape of Sasuke now, the easy angle of the regulation sword slung across his back. Their positions were all wrong, face to face, but it made her think of when the sun was in her eyes and she first saw him with a sword. It was an unfair memory and Sakura pushed it away.
She didn't know how much the manacles hurt until Sasuke picked the lock and her wrists had room to object. Manacles, of all the nerve. It had to be a government operation. Shinobi had more respect than this; only civilians would be so crass. She stumbled a little when he freed her left arm, and Sasuke eased her up before she had time to decide whether to catch herself or not. The sensation was jarring even though the movement was smooth, and Sakura realized it had been years since they had touched, if they ever had. "We have to go quickly," Sasuke told her. She'd put her irritation on the back burner, but at that it started to roil.
"I know." Sakura straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath. She wanted to snipe don't patronize me just because I made a mistake! She wanted to ask where am I? what happened?. But Sasuke was right: they didn't have time for her to be anything but obedient. "Let me have some of your kunai." She was proud of herself for not making it sound like a request.
When he gave Sakura a handful and she tucked them away, she finally realized what was skewing this picture so badly for her. It was a tiny detail in the vast landscape of the bizarre, but Sasuke was here without Naruto. Sakura saw Naruto by himself all the time, but she only saw Sasuke in the Hokage's wake, as unobtrusive punctuation, like footprints.
She managed her way out of the dirty little warren without relying on his help too much, picking her way over slumped and still guards.
***
It was the gray time just before dawn when they made it above ground. Sasuke tilted his head to scan the trees, and even with the mask she could see him deciding she wasn't ready to start making the way home. She wasn't sure what annoyed her more: that he was presumptuous or that he was right. "We should conceal ourselves for the day and travel at night. They'll have scouts."
"Mm," said Sakura. And since it would never occur to Sasuke to volunteer the information. "Where are we?"
"Twenty minutes outside of the capital of Water Country," Sasuke said. He started moving, grabbing his comm link and murmuring hushed in a code Sakura didn't know anyway. She made a face.
Doing her best to keep pace, even though she was still heavy and slow and he moved, as always, with oiled, intense ease, she heard him ask, "What's the last thing you remember?"
"I went home after the emergency meeting. Lee was still on his mission. There was, only a little, but I guess this smell. This sweet smell. But not exactly sweet, more... No way!"
"Mm?"
"They used the aloe. There have been rumors of work being done on an aloe derivative, but it's highly experimental and we thought still in the rudimentary stages. That's..." She trailed off when Sasuke put his comm away and she realized he had just been listening to the transmission. "Well, it's very interesting."
"We should head west," Sasuke said.
They lumbered along for a while, battling shrubs. "How long has it been?"
"Three days."
"Three days?" Lee must be back by now and hysterical; Naruto, apoplectic. "Do you know why... this happened?"
Sasuke shrugged. "Mist has been unofficially estranged from Water's government for a long time. Water's desperate for leverage. This is a standard power play, as far as we can tell." The 'we' probably meant Anbu, not 'Naruto and I', but Sakura felt a sudden hot spike of jealousy anyway. "But they left a trail and Naruto dispatched me right away."
"He must have been really worried to send you," Sakura said. It sounded more pointed than a standard triviality, in hindsight. She nearly tripped over a tree root. The drug wasn't entirely out of her system and the terrain of Water Country was as different from Fire as could be - mossy and insidious where Fire exploded with greenery - but the stumble made her irrationally nasty. "Although it was about three in the morning, wasn't it? With Naruto... You were probably still on the clock."
Epileptics go rigid before a grand mal occasionally. You shouldn't try to restrain them when you see it, just remove hard objects from the room so they won't hurt themselves. Sasuke's posture looked like that now, shoulders stiff in a few frozen moments before a catastrophe. Sakura had made a mistake; she knew it with the same dread she had known she had been poisoned. "Sasuke-kun..."
"I volunteered for the assignment," Sasuke said. "Actually. We need to make camp."
***
Sakura felt belligerently, in that way that sprang from unrelenting sheepishness, that things would be better if Sasuke would just take off that stupid mask.
They had bunked down in a mossy depression under a nettle thicket. It was as inconspicuous as anything could be in Water and the early morning fog was rolling in, creating a reassuring cover. Sasuke gave her an energy pill. Sakura glimpsed briefly into his sack and saw he had brought enough for at least two weeks, although what that meant for his expectations of the mission she wasn't sure.
She tried to ask him about it - sometimes it was easiest to gloss things over with small talk - but Sasuke just grunted. The mask made communication awkward, but Sasuke's posture was all downward curves, joints bent in spiky angles. It had taken her years to be able to interpret his behavior as such, but he was a champion sulker. Sakura knew for a fact he could keep it up the entire fourteen hours until dusk.
"Look, Sasuke-kun." It had been a while since she used the pet-name, but her mouth seemed stuck on it today. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
Sasuke might as well not have heard her. Maybe Sakura could tear off the mask. The idea was immensely satisfying. But then he said in a monotone. "It's fine."
"You're not acting like it's fine," Sakura pointed out.
It took him another minute to respond, but his voice was more animated if dour. "You shouldn't act like you're sorry. You meant what you said."
"Sasuke-kun..." Sakura looked down at her feet. Her big toenail was cracked and on its way to getting infected. She felt clear-headed and lucid now and wished she could go back to being buried in a druggy haze of unaccountability. "That's not true. It's just..."
"... What?" Sasuke sounded bored, but he was looking at her now.
It was hard to explain. Because she had said it without thinking and she meant it to hurt, but under the venom was a real and valid sentiment. "We haven't talked for a while," she offered, clumsily.
Sasuke was quiet again, thinking. "This isn't a good time-"
"Can you think of a better time?" Caught up in the moment, Sakura was proud that she sounded more like herself, not like a twelve-year-old who had read too many magazines. That girl had always been her default setting around Sasuke. "We're not going to be able to move for at least twelve hours and we're the only ones here! If we're ever going to talk now's pretty much perfect."
Sasuke rested his chin on top of his fist and sullenly conceded, "Fine." He didn't turn to look at her when he said. "So talk."
And now that all the avenues were open to her, Sakura wasn't sure what to say. She had scripted this conversation in her head many times, but the scenario was supposed to be less desperate, less dew-damp, and Sasuke was always contrite right from the start. Sakura wound a strand of hand around her finger and blurted out, "Why didn't you tell me you and Naruto were together?"
A bird landed on the bush above them and began to preen with staccato little bird movements. "It wasn't anybody's business," Sasuke said.
"I'm not anybody!" Sakura's voice cracked a little. "You owed me!"
"It was just a crush, Sakura," Sasuke said. It took Sakura a little while to work proper nouns into that statement, and then her right eye twitched.
"We were a team! We were a team once and that should mean something. I had to find out from Ino. Do you have any idea how humiliating that was? This wasn't about my feelings for you!"
"I thought you wouldn't want to know anything like that," said Sasuke, icy.
"Why wouldn't I? We spent so much time looking for you. Worrying about you! Why would you think I didn't care?"
"When I came back you wouldn't even look at me."
"That's not true! Who didn't want to look at who?" Sakura had run tests back then, countless tests, on Sasuke's blood samples, tissue samples, bone marrow one time, trying to find if there was a disease, something eating away at his chakra maybe, that made him so unresponsive. She hadn't expected him to be happy or even grateful to be home, but his reaction time had been pitiful and he wouldn't eat. He had just curled up in Naruto's filthy sheets like he was waiting to petrify. Naruto would hover over her begging for a prognosis, circles engraved under his eyes as if he were giving all his extra sleep to Sasuke. Sakura could only tell him we're doing everything we can, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, never adding I would make this hurt less for you if I could although it was the only certainty she could have given him.
Sasuke, in a move that startled her to flinching, lifted up his mask. It was unfair, how beautiful he was. Long after those feelings had been shredded, he took her breath away. He was pale with anger, only more striking now that he was all black on white. "You barely spoke to me for years. You were too uncomfortable."
"You don't know what I was!" Sakura was yelling as much as was possible in a sotto voice. It came out like cloth being rubbed over a microphone. "You're so presumptuous! We were teammates. We lived in each other's pockets for a year! You really think I was too uncomfortable to deal with it?"
Sasuke snorted. "What were you then?"
"I was in love with Naruto, you idiot!" Sakura said, before making muffled a tiny, startled sound when a kunai pegged Sasuke in the throat.
***
Sasuke jumped out of brush above them before the log he used for the replacement technique thudded to the ground. Sakura had hoped the presence of enemy shinobi would have at least distracted his focus. But when he looked up from stunning one with a blow to the back of the head, he had activated the sharingan but his eyes were still huge and horrified.
They were both too good to have been ambushed by petty mercenary ninja this scared of them, and Sakura soothed herself by kicking one three feet through the ground. "Well, I'm not anymore," she added.
The last one, a kunoichi, fell down clutching her head and screaming. Sasuke broke eye contact with her when the genjutsu was complete, his irises fading back to black. "We might as well move now. I'll radio in."
Sakura nodded and took off, trying to outrun her blush.
Sasuke caught up to her when they reached some tree cover, following her up into the branches. "No one told me," he said. His voice wasn't exactly apologetic, but it was leaning towards it now.
Sakura shrugged, feeling a few twigs snap off beneath her feet as she sprang off. "I never said anything. It was just..." The wind-sheer scoured her face, and it was a good excuse to close her eyes for a second. "I was fifteen and he came back and he was different, but in the ways that mattered he was still just the same. So I was in love with him for a while. And I didn't understand why we drifted apart after you came home until Ino told me."
"Oh," said Sasuke. He still hadn't pushed his mask back down.
"So... yeah, maybe I didn't want to talk to you for a while after that. And before that... I was your doctor and I didn't know what was wrong. I was prodding you so much, I figured you needed space. Emotionally. I thought Naruto's basement was as good a place for that as any." Sakura bit her lip. "I didn't know it was about Naruto more than the basement."
"I was tired," Sasuke said, sounding just as tired now. And then, a quiet revelation, "I missed him."
The trees were larger now as they got closer to the coast, wide and thick and more stately and established than the untamed trees of Konoha. Sakura jumped to a higher bower level and waited for Sasuke to follow her. He took a vertical leap up, and for a half a heartbeat there was the illusion they were exactly the same height. "Yeah," she said. "I know."
***
Sakura hadn't seen many beaches in her life but she always thought of them in postcard squares, sunny and lazy and decadent. The one they came to, signifying the boundary of Water Country, was disappointingly and uniformly gray. Sakura's feet crunched over gray, irregular pebbles as she went to poke her toe in the gray, sluggish sea. The salt stung but at least there wasn't any sand and it was all she could do for the swelling at the moment. She looked up at the sky. It was nothing but dirty clouds. "Rescue team?"
"Forty minutes out. There'll be a signal." Sasuke sat down farther from the water, drawing his legs up and resting one arm on his knee. The lapping of the waves kept inexorable, exact time, equal parts oppressive and reassuring. Eventually Sasuke snorted. Sakura knew without looking he was smirking. "You know, I thought for sure when I came back he would have talked you into marrying him."
Sakura shrugged. "I kind of thought so too. It wouldn't have worked though." She looked back, ruefully amused. "All we ever did was talk about you."
Sasuke looked down hurriedly, but not before Sakura saw something like surprise splash across his face. Sakura shook some of the water off her foot and sat down beside him, staring out at the impenetrable horizon.
"I know what people say about me." The sound of a voice was startling enough in this cottony little lull, it took Sakura a beat to register Sasuke's words.
"What?"
Sasuke's hair was dirty, lank and long hunks of it hanging around his face. "About me and Naruto."
"What do you think they say?" Sakura's voice came out somewhat timid.
Sasuke just smirked again, but ugly now, inward. Sakura looked down at her lap. "I had enough hearing about it at Sound. I didn't want to hear it again."
"At Sound? You? ...What?" Sakura had run every test, every conceivable test except she never thought to... It had been entirely out of her scope of possibility that Sasuke could, or could want or be made to... "Oh."
Sasuke shrugged, a knife's edge away from defiance, just waiting for her to give the right cue.
He wouldn't want to hear that she was sorry, swollen with monumental, tender pity, which is what she knew the faint nausea meant. "I didn't know."
"Naruto knew."
"You and Naruto always just... knew each other," Sakura said. And then she surprised them both by sliding Sasuke's mask off the back of his head and putting it in her lap. The fox face was as benignly enigmatic as ever, but Sasuke was blinking at her like a kid. "And it wouldn't have been like that at home. We're you're friends. We would have been happy for you. I am. I'm happy for you."
Sasuke just said, "Hm." And then, precisely, like he had been rehearsing it. "I needed it and I'm not sorry. But you deserved better."
"I got it," Sakura said. "Just with Lee."
"Hm," Sasuke said, but it was a more elastic sound.
The terrible revelation at the end of crying herself out and clear-cutting a good acre of Konoha's forest with her fists and crying again when her knuckles had splinters was that Sakura wasn't heartbroken nearly as much as she was devastated at being abandoned. She had made herself strong for Naruto and Sasuke, her two stupid, brave, wonderful boys, and they had left her behind for their new adventure. But that was impossible to explain or reconcile, so she just waved at them in the street and showed up on time for work at the hospital. And there she realized, gradually - and it had hurt like a bone being set - that she had defined herself completely without them. And then Lee knocked on her door with an armful of roses. After lecturing him for half an hour about the importance of not wooing anyone at four forty-five in the morning, it broke over Sakura that there were different ways to be strong for someone. Lee would never want her to be anything but her own ever-changing self, and she would only ever need the same from him.
Sakura fiddled with the kitsune face. When they were kids, Sasuke's deep quiet had seemed romantic in the shallowest possible sense. Maybe it was apocryphal now, but his silence in the months after Naruto appeared carrying him over the hilltop, both their faces marbled with blood and tear-stained, had an intricate and festering quality. Her pain had been straightforward, almost sunny in comparison. "Orochimaru.... really?" She said it instead of taking his hand.
"It was part of my apprenticeship," Sasuke said, clipped. "I brought it on myself with my actions and I accepted the consequences."
"That doesn't mean it should have happened," Sakura said.
Sasuke just shrugged. This was buried for him. Maybe it was something he talked about with Naruto, maybe it gave him nightmares or maybe he didn't care, but this was where the line was drawn for her. That could be good enough, for friends.
"We should go out to dinner," Sakura said brightly. It sounded inane and ditzy and it was surely not enough, but that was part of life too, the little gestures that ended up meaning almost everything. When you're lucky a similar principle applied in medicine, like when applying a poultice ended up saving a limb. "Just the three of us. And not talk about work or anything. We can go out for ramen and make Naruto pay."
"I would like that," Sasuke said. Sakura was pretty sure he meant it, and she smiled.
They lapsed into silence after that. There wasn't any wind and the water was dead, but the fog was still rolling in across the sky. Which meant that the shouting penetrated long before any shapes appeared on the horizon. Sakura raised her head. "Does that sound like...?"
"SAKURA-SAN! MY BEAUTIFUL BRIDE! IF YOU CAN HEAR MY ENERGETIC VOICE, PLEASE ANSWER ME WITH THE CALL OF YOUR PURE HEART!"
"... Yes," Sasuke concluded.
"SHUT UP, THICK BROWS! THIS IS A TOP SECRET MISSION!"
"You don't think that could possibly be the signal?" Sakura asked weakly.
"No," Sasuke said, watching as a flare cut through the cloud cover, creating an illuminated haze around it. "That is."
"That's good," Sakura said.
"FORGIVE ME, HOKAGE-SAMA! NOW I HAVE FAILED YOU AS WELL AS MY GLORIOUS SAKURA-SAN! MY SHAME KNOWS NO BOUNDS!"
"OH FOR THE LOVE OF-"
"Naruto really shouldn't be here," Sakura said thoughtfully. "I mean, I'm sure they kidnapped me just to make him nervous, but luring him all the way to Water Country still really can't be good for anything."
"Unless he's here for negotiations," Sasuke said. "But then it's too soon and he's still an idiot." They shared a short, aggrieved look.
"We should go," Sasuke said. Sakura nodded and they ran, skimming over the water.