Note1_although enjoyment of this story does not require familiarity with the Uber app, it does kind of help, at least in the beginning.
Note2_Reader discretion advised: the occasional f-bomb present
Note3_A sort of reboot of my first story ever, "Den of Lions," although the plots are nothing alike.

i. "No Hard Feelings, Yeah?"

.

.

.

When Sakura Haruno pulls her car into the empty parking lot to pick up her next client (Naruto Uzumaki, no stars), she instantly knows something is wrong. Actually, the fact that the pick-up location is at the port should have set off warning bells in her head: Shady Area, Nighttime, Do Not Proceed. But med school textbooks didn't pay for themselves, so she threw a big, old "Screw It" over her common sense and went ahead with the request anyways. The docks were on the outskirts of town and a good twenty minutes away from anywhere— that was an easy forty dollars, at least.

And now, here Sakura was, probably about to regret her decision in the next few seconds. She peers at the two young men caught in the beam of her headlights as they frantically wave her down. She can't tell which one requested her, but assumes one of them must be Naruto since no one else is around. They're in suits and look around her age—wait a sec, were those guns?

"Holy shit," she mutters. Before she has a chance to reverse the fuck out of there, the sedan's back door opens and the two men scramble in. The door slams shut just and the blonde thrusts his head between the driver and passenger's seats and shouts in her ear, "Go! Go! Go!"

Sakura is about to tell him that she reserves the right to refuse service to anyone when she hears gunshots crack through the air. There's a loud thud as a bullet finds its mark on the side of her car, and she screams bloody murder while she throws her car into drive and steps on the gas. The tires screech as they spin wildly in place, and for a terrifying few seconds she thinks the rubbers finally too worn down to gain any traction. Just as she begins hating herself for putting off a visit to the auto-shop, her sedan jumps forward, and the sudden burst sends the blonde flying into the backseat.

"Put on your seatbelts, damn it!" She roars, aggressively plowing through a line of orange traffic cones. Another spray of bullets rattle through the air and Sakura's practically standing on top of the gas pedal as she makes a break for the parking lot's exit. She has no idea what the hell is going on, but her big, med-student brain tells her driving away from gunfire is probably a good start. She sees a speed bump coming up fast and the car flies off of it like a mini-ramp. They're airborne for a beat before coming down in a crunch of metal and gears, and her car's terrible suspensions send her passengers' heads rocketing into the ceiling.

"Seatbelts!" She yells again and slams the brakes, steering the car into a hard right onto the main highway. The wheels burn patterns into the road as the rubber skids across the asphalt; in another life, she could have been a drifting champion. She hits the gas again and the car scrambles to comply. A black SUV swerves out the parking lot and rips after them in hot pursuit, its engines roaring and headlights glaring back at her through her rearview mirror. She's seen enough action movies to know that they're probably loaded with gun-toting thugs that wanted to do them in.

"Where am I supposed to be go—what the hell are you doing?" She shouts. The black haired guy had rolled down the down windows and was now sitting on the ledge, grabbing the roof handle with one hand while he leans out to look behind them, the nighttime wind rushing past him as the car pushes over sixty on the highway. "Hey! Get your ass back inside!" She orders. One bad pothole and he might end up as road paste.

He doesn't listen and instead pulls a silver-plated gun from his jacket. He pops off a couple of rounds at the SUV and there's a loud bang as it blows a tire. From her rearview mirror, Sakura watches as the car swerves out of control in a whirl of screeching tires and flashing headlights before it takes a tumble off into the bordering forest.

"Hell yeah! Nice shot, Sasuke!" The blonde cheers, twisting around to look at the scene through the rear windshield.

"Shit," Sakura curses before pressing her foot down harder. The engine whines as the car struggles past the eighty mark. "For the last fucking time, can you guys please buckle in?" She says shrilly over the roar of the open window. She presses her lips tightly together against the impending hysteria. Her whole body's trembling and she's trying to stay sane by fixating on traffic laws.

The black-haired guy—Sasuke— ducks back into the car and closes the window, sealing them all in silence. Sakura can hear her two passengers adjusting themselves in the back as they settle into their seats. She's chagrined when she doesn't hear the click of their seatbelt buckles.

"What just happened?" She demands, gripping the steering wheel for dear life; her heart's thudding against her chest and she's about to fly into a million pieces.

The blonde (who Sakura assumes is Naruto) leans forward into her space again. "Hey thanks!" He chirps. "We would've been toast if it weren't for you!"

"I'm going to turn around and drive straight back to that SUV if you don't tell me what's going on," she threatens, and to prove her point she hits the brakes and the car slams to a stop. The blonde yelps as he's thrown backwards once again. Sakura kills the engine, and the seatbelt digs into her shoulders as she turns to glare at them. "Who are you people?"

The blonde's on the car floor groaning while Sasuke stares stonily back at her. In another time and another place, she would have thought him to be handsome, but right now there's no space for romance between all the fear and adrenaline raging through her.

"Take us to Southside," he says after a length of silence.

"Are you serious? What makes you think I—"

He cuts her off. "We'll explain everything once we get there."

Sakura wants to throw up her fingers into a rude gesture before tossing them out of her car. When she signed up to be an Uber driver, "getaway car" had definitely not been in the job description. However, instead of carpet-bombing him with angry insults pertaining to his hair (which, objectively speaking, was actually quite nice), she huffs out an angry "fine," and restarts the engine. Sakura hates backing down from an argument as much as the next over-achieving brainiac, but she's a smart cookie and she knows better than to pick a fight with the guy holding a gun.

.

.

.

Naruto is pretty chatty, but whenever Sakura tries asking him a question about who they were or what was going on, he'd just take off on a completely unrelated tangent. An example exchange:

"What were you guys doing out at the port?"

"Did you know that Ichiraku just released their instant ramen line?"

"Why were those guys chasing after us?"

"I don't have to wait in that long ass line at the restaurant anymore!"

"Are you criminals?"

"For the record though, their instant miso pork flavor isn't as good as the original; I guess that's the price you pay for convenience, huh?"

And so on.

Sakura decides he's either infuriatingly good at deflecting questions or just an infuriating idiot. Eventually he officially introduces himself as Naruto and his partner as Sasuke, who hasn't spoken a word since his instructions for Southside. Whenever she glances in the rearview mirror, the black-haired guy's always in the same position: his head turned slightly away from her as he stares out the window, clearly deigning their chatter to be beneath him.

"So…what's your name?" Naruto asks, draping his arms over both the driver's seat and the passenger's seat— by this point she's given up on the whole seatbelt thing.

"Sakura."

"Sakura, huh?" Naruto flashes her a toothy grin. "Nice ta meetcha."

"Likewise," she lies.

.

.

.

Like its name suggested, Southside was located south of the city center. A long time ago, the area used to be bustling with factories, but ever since the manufacturers moved their business to Kumo, the neighborhood slid fast and hard into abject poverty. Most of the abandoned warehouses had turned into shanty towns for the destitute, and the boarded up buildings were popular with local criminal cartels as strongholds for their operations. For a long time now, candidates who ran for positions in the city mentioned something about fixing Southside on their platforms, but invariably forgot about it once they were actually in office. Part of it was because fixing Southside would be a long and painful process, and politics demanded attention be first given to things that immediately effected the everyday lives of tax-payers, like potholes. The other part was because the last guy who actually tried to "save" Southside was found dead in his office with a knife between his ribs.

All of this is to say, Sakura had never had any reason to go to Southside and only heard stories about it from her older classmates as the dangerous part of town that sold good weed.

But now, here she is in Crime Central with a bullet in her car and two nutcases in tow. Wow, she was definitely going to need that Netflix binge later tonight.

"Around here's good," Naruto says.

Sakura pulls up against the curb and peers out the window. "Here?" She asks skeptically, looking down the lane bordered by old row houses. The windows are dark and judging by the weeds bursting out of the foundations, she doubts anyone's lived in them for a long time. Overhead, the roof of leaves and branches from the massive oak trees casts a heavy shadow over the street; perhaps during the day it would have been pleasant with the sunlight dappling through, but at night the effect is ominous.

"Yeah here's fine," Naruto confirms. Sasuke pops the door open and steps out without a word. She can hear the leaves above them rustling in the wind.

"Uhm…your receipt will be emailed to you. Thanks for your patronage. Have a nice night," she hastily says into the rearview mirror. By this point, she doesn't really care who they are or what they were doing. All she wants is these for these goons to get out of her car so that she can high-tail it back to her dinky, little apartment on the other side of the city and pretend none of this ever happened over a hot cup of tea and maybe some Netflix.

"What? You don't wanna know more about us?" Naruto asks. She can't tell if the surprise in his voice is genuine or mocking.

"No, I'm good, thanks. Busy night, you know? Maybe next time?" She tacks on weakly with a strained smile. She's suddenly very aware of how empty the streets are. Her heart skips a little faster, but she tightens her grip on the steering wheel and tells herself to stay calm.

"Naruto," she hears Sasuke call out from outside. He sounds impatient.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, asshole," Naruto says over his shoulder. He turns back to Sakura. "Okay, so Sakura-chan, right? You're a really cool girl, super cute too, so I feel pretty bad about this." She hears a click and something cold presses against the back of her neck. "No hard feelings, yeah?"

.

.

.

Sakura sits at the edge of the bed, her hands balled up in her lap. The polyester blanket beneath her gives off a strange, plastic-y scent, and she imagines the army of bed bugs crawling beneath it. She's at the Driftwood Motel: free pool, HBO, open kitchen and the faded sign beneath it perpetually declares "Vacancies." Naruto had popped out a little while ago, and Sasuke closes the horrendous curtains over the windows before settling into the pee-colored armchair in the corner. Beneath her, the stained carpet reeks of cigarette smoke and crushed corn ships, and the naked light bulb sticking out of the ceiling buzzes plays at being a mosquito zappers: bzzt bzzzzzt ting bzzzzt. A bowl-shaped sconce had once covered it, but someone had stolen it for reasons unknown long before.

It's hard for Sakura to believe this is all happening. Her biggest problem this morning was that she had run out of milk for her cereal, and now she was being held against her will in some run-down motel by two dudes she had been an Uber driver for. Okay, so technically she had come along by choice, but that was because the other option was getting her brains blown out to Kingdom Come. Her life had suddenly turned a strange corner, and now she was in Unknown Territory. She knew she should've just stuck with retail.

The mattress springs creak beneath her as she gets to her feet. Sasuke's eyes snap open to glare at her.

"Where are you going?" He demands.

"Bathroom," she replies and quickly strides towards the toilet room before he can have any thoughts about stopping her. Inside, she presses on the lights and locks the door behind her. The small fan overhead clatters to life. She doesn't really need to go, but she can think better on an empty bladder so she takes a piss anyways into the ugly rose-colored toilet. After she flushes, she washes her hand using the scummy bar of soap and then splashes some water on her face. She lets the faucet run and grips the sides of the sink while she stares at her reflection in the mirror, not bothering to wipe away the droplets dribbling off of her chin. 'Think, Sakura, think.'

Both of her captors are armed and clearly not afraid to use the fact to their advantage. She knows she has a mean right hook, but something tells her the two young men have dealt with worse than her 118 pounds of nerd fury. She closes her eyes, the sound from the fan and running faucet filling her head like white noise.

They had confiscated her cellphone earlier, so calling for help wasn't an option. She had spied a greasy, black landline plugged into the wall, but that was located on the small nightstand next to the armchair, which was currently occupied by Sasuke, and she doubts the serious-looking man would believe her if she told him she was just using it to order pizza. No one's waiting for her at home, and it's not strange for her to disappear for weeks at a time because of schoolwork, so a search party in her name was highly unlikely in the next twenty-four hours, and who knows where'd she be by then? Maybe in a ditch somewhere, deader than a doornail. Basically, she was pretty much screwed. Sakura plummets into a crouch, hanging onto the edge of the sink for dear life.

.

.

.

A little while later, Naruto returns with dinner. Sakura's perched on the edge of the bed again, staring blankly at the moldy walls, her eyes raw but dry. If Sauske had heard her crying jag earlier, he pretends to not know.

"Hey, Sakura-chan," Naruto says, approaching her with a sunny smile as if he hadn't been holding a gun to her head just a few hours before. Sakura wonders if he's maybe a little unhinged. "You hungry?" He asks, holding out a white paper bag stained with grease. "McDonalds," he says as if she couldn't recognize the golden "M" printed across the front.

She ignores the offering and looks at him dead in the eye. "Are you going to kill me?" She asks flatly.

He frowns. "What? No? Why would I do that? Here, eat up, you must be hungry," he says, pushing the bag into her hands. Sakura refuses to take it, and it falls from her lap and onto the floor with a plop. "Then why are you keeping me here?"

Naruto bends over to pick the fallen bag off the ground and places it on the blanket next to her. "Well we aren't are really keeping you here."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Sakura shouts, her temper flaring. "You held a gun to my head! That's textbook coercion!"

He looks at her, trying to cross the gap between his point and hers. "But I didn't shoot you."

"That's not what I mean! And I keep telling you I'm not hungry!" She yells and grabs the paper bag next to her and lobs it across the room. It hits the wall with a smack before dropping to the ground. French fries spill out of the open end and the pungent odor of cooking oil fills the room.

Naruto scratches his head and looks between her and the paper bag, unsure of what to do. Finally, he walks over and scoops the fries back into the bag. "Well, the fries are shot, but I think the burger's still fine. If you get hungry, I'll leave it here," he says, placing it all on top of the chipped dresser. He then gives her a thumbs up and flashes her a cheerful smile.

Sakura wants to go over to the bag, dump out its contents onto the carpet and stomp all over his stupid burger and his stupid fries and tell him he could shove it all up where his stupid sun don't shine. Sasuke must have sensed her vicious intent because he tells her, "Don't bother. You're not going to get a rise out of him."

She turns the blazing sun of her anger upon her other captor who's eating from his armchair. "What?" She snaps.

"He's not going to get mad," Sasuke says around a mouthful of his Big Mac.

"What do you mean 'he's not going to get mad'?"

Sasuke just shrugs and swallows. "That's just the way he is," he says matter-of-factly, explaining everything and nothing at all. "You can't make him upset. He's an idiot."

She's about to tell him that they're both a pair of idiots and probably insane to boot, when something shatters through the window. It hits the curtains with a dull thud and falls to the carpet, hidden behind the floor-length fabric. Sakura wonders what it is, but Sasuke and Naruto seem to know, and their eyes widen in horrified recognition.

She is still wondering when Sasuke throws aside his burger and lunges out of the armchair and bulldozes her to the floor. Her head slams against the ground and she's gaping like a fish for air that won't come. Dizzily she begins to wonder if they had finally decided to kill her when an explosion rips through the room.

.

.

.

Author's notes (rants?)_

1. This was supposed to be a short, comedic sketch that I was doing for the lulz, and then things started getting serious and I was like "whoa, whoa, whoa, wait guys, maybe we would think about this" but of course no one waited (story of my life), and Naruto started getting trigger happy, now I'm here writing a (maybe) multi-chaptered story about Sakura the Uber Driver getting kidnapped by Mysterious Gunmen, Naruto and Sasuke. Weird.

2. Uh, I wrote this on the fly, so the plot's kind of shady, and by shady I mean non-existent, but maybe this will turn into something more substantial 'cause now I'm kind of interested in seeing where all of this is going. Besides, I kind of like maybe-probably-Crazy!Naruto (definitely a throwback to "It's 2AM") and Sasuke eating a Big Mac is always fun, so.

3. Reviews and comments would be swell (and tip things in favor of continuing this story tbh).