.

.

.

in rings, swinging, claw against the reins

-o-

There was something miserable about wet feet stuffed into wet sandals, dirt and water and blood all trapped together by cloth wrappings.

Sai, sitting at the table in the kitchenette of her parents' home, lifted an eyebrow as Sakura unwrapped the dripping bandages from around one of her ankles and then the other. Like her, he was stripped down of most of his outer layers of clothing and trying to warm himself with hot tea and a towel around his shoulders.

The rain outside was relentless and their morning sparring session had been somewhat fun and exhilarating at first, but the march home much less so.

"How do you not have calluses?" Sai asked, his stare very pointedly set on the recently raw skin of her heels.

Sakura poked at the stinging flesh and made a face. "Because I'm a clod who continues to like the feel of soft skin when she rubs her feet together at night and so she relentlessly heals herself before any helpful calluses can form..."

With his cup raised to his lips, she couldn't quite spy his unimpressed frown, but his eyes were plain to read.

"How often do you heal yourself like this?"

"Too often," she said.

"And yet you also wear fingerless gloves..."

She could wear more protective fabric, was his point.

"Never a thing as too much practice," she sang back.

Sai took another sip of his tea and his confusion, very nearly bordering on skepticism, escaped him in a low hum. "Do you really care that much for 'practice' or do you just like the pain?"

It could have been a sardonic joke from another person.

"Oh come on...that would really be something if I were in this line of work and couldn't handle a little discomfort," she said with a little humor, well inured to the healing routine and not keen to dissect possible psychological angles behind it.

Sai didn't say anything pressing and they lapsed into silence. Sakura listened to the rain on the windows and smiled ruefully at his calm presence in the house. With his company, she didn't feel nearly so loud as she once had in the empty rooms.

She missed her family with a painful hollowness in her chest. She missed the warmth of company.

But that was good for her mission, Sakura remembered, and she anchored the loneliness down deeper. Deep enough to not notice.

At the same moment, she and Sai both turned their heads to the entry way of the home. Someone had arrived on the stoop outside.

"Sensei is here," Sai pointed out.

Before Ken could knock, Sakura called for him to come in.

"Sai," Ken started, "go and prepare for immediate departure. Three weeks. Make any necessary arrangements."

Sakura was confused at the order and started to get up and ask about the hurry, held Sai get his things together, but Ken held a placating hand out and told her to wait. She nodded and sat back down.

"I guess – goodbye?" She said as Sai dressed.

"You're coming too, Haruno," Ken told her. To Sai, "we'll brief at the western gate in an hour."

Ken was calm as Sai left, and he hushed Sakura back into her seat when she got up to put away dishes, needing to be busy with the appearance of more company. He looked her over and said she could use another cup of tea, then got the serving ready for her. The kettle on again and refreshed the leaves in the infuser, he retrieved a cup for himself from the cabinet. In his student's absence, he breathed more easily and his shoulders lost the tenseness that came with the cloak of authority he wore as a teacher. He lost his mask, too.

"How are you?" He asked, taking a chair for himself at the table once the tea was ready. He was next to her and took the chance to glance at her bare feet, healed and new again, and then found her eyes. "Strange habit, apprentice."

"I've been told," she said. "Is this new mission an emergency?"

Ken gave her a sad smile. "You know that was a dodge if I've ever seen one. Last we talked, you were struggling a little."

"I don't remember it that way," Sakura insisted. She brought her knees to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, took the pose for contemplating.

He read the action as a retreat, as vulnerability, and after watching her for a moment, tracking the way her hair ran rivulets of water down her legs, he leaned forward. Taking the towel still hung around her shoulders, Ken used it to wipe away the water, then patted at her wet locks, took his time brushing it over her head and hair.

"You saw what that raiding party did in the contested territories. You know their terror up close."

It was about Orochimaru, then.

He continued, "we've asked a lot of you, Sakura...and this time..."

Ken trailed off and there was almost regret in his tone. Hesitancy or worry, maybe.

Sakura wondered how much of it was sincere. It felt real …But then, it was supposed to.

Ken had paused in his movements and so she placed her hands over his where they rested on either side of her neck.

"You don't have to ask anything of me..." She wanted him to know from her voice, from her expression, from the way her body stayed so comfortably under his, that she meant every word. "Tell me what I have to do."

.

-ii-

bones grating thin strip back the skin

-o-

Their cell was well outside friendly territory.

As an academy student, Sakura had never appreciated how often missions would take her to places Konoha nin were very clearly Not Supposed To Be. She had never appreciated how often her missions would not be about battles or skirmishes, quick jabs and powerful explosions. How long she would be inactive when out in the field, waiting for action.

She had never considered, in her profession, how much and how often she would have to lose in order to progress.

It was dusk and she was finishing helping Sai with his new cover. It was important that they all matched a certain look for their mission infiltrating their new targeted territory, this time in leftover clan lands north of Grass country borders, and it was a lengthy process getting the details just right. They observed first, they stalked and they stole.

The first step had been a week long cleansing ritual, involving specific oils and tinctures, steaming and purges. Jutsu had helped mimic the appearance of a lifetime of such habits. They had hidden scars and trimmed down their physiques, coached one another in shedding inappropriate body language and presenting more authentic habits to their covers.

Sai had cut off Sakura's hair, shaved most of her head and darkened her eyebrows with semi-permanent dye. She was returning the favor, taking care to keep his scalp blemish free and healthy, as hers now was.

They spoke to each other in an increasingly familiar accent. They sparred in an increasingly familiar style.

"I can feel too much air now," Sai said to Sakura, words affected in an increasingly less strange manner, remarking on the loss of his hair. Instinctively, his hand went up to rub at the bared skin.

Sakura did the same to her own head with his reminder, her fingers too rough and traveling too quickly without the usual resistance. He was right. It was like she was extra sensitive to any slight change in the breeze. The sun felt hotter than it used to. There was nothing to brush from her face and tuck behind her ear, though the want somehow still existed like an itch in her hand. She felt out of order and exposed.

But it was getting better. This wasn't her first cover.

"Does this mean you're not going to stick with this new look after our mission conclusion?" She teased.

"Definitely not. I hope none of us do. Look at sensei. His eyebrows are offensively out of proportion like that."

Sakura fought a smile from her lips. Parroting quietly to herself with humor, "'offensively.'"

There was more to be done than hair. Piercings and inkings and other modifications. By the end of the transformation, she didn't recognise herself. She was once again someone else.

Or maybe it was more like –

As she was thoughtfully and, she thought, subtly glancing at Ken, when he caught her eyes.

– this was who she always had been.

-o-

Orders for the mission intended that the Otogakure raiding party find their cell, under the assumption of their covers, and to make contact. The goal was to learn about Orochimaru's intentions, about his forces, their tactics. More intelligence gathering after the fall out of the Carbon Man mission. All the information gathered would then be passed on and examined by others, and the board espying the political and military spectrum of the shinobi nations as understood by Konohagakure would be appropriately adjusted or redefined.

As with most missions, there were risks. Hoping for contact with an enemy upped those risks.

Weeks had gone by when Sakura and her cell finally caught the raiding party's attention. Cautious surveillance and preliminary scouting was then succeeded finally by an encompassing attack.

Her cell was using the cover of an unaffiliated shinobi clan; not mercenaries and not traitors, just an isolated lineage that wasn't usually worthy of much attention from any larger players. But for someone interested in getting himself more bodies – well, that was what made them attractive to an outfit like Orochimaru's. While he made a point of pursuing certain bloodlines, he also had a pattern of seeking out those who were skilled but not too skilled.

Bodies.

She was just a body. A vessel. Something separate.

"Risu, on your left!"

Sakura was 'Risu,' and the warning came from Sai. He only said it for show, and she reacted as a less experience fighter would. Over-extended a kick and then got slammed in her torso for the effort.

Her cover knew only a limited amount of taijutsu and was better suited to setting traps than brawling. Nonetheless, Sakura was able to curl over the knee at her stomach and swing her weight forward. She took out her opponent's other leg with her own and they both toppled to the ground. She had more advantage there; flexible and writhing and unrelenting.

The man she was grappling made the mortal error of losing his grip on his knife.

Sakura disabled one of his arms, managed in their tangled movements to coincidentally sever tissue that kept him from properly moving fingers, keeping any sort of grip, and hindering the force of any punches he might try to land.

Her cover was weaker, maybe, but that didn't mean she had to lose.

She put all her weight over the man under her thighs, applying a good bit of force to the man's neck as she nearly popped his arm from its socket. His free hand went to her face, thumb reaching and failing to find a hold in her eye. Instead she bit into his wrist.

Her cover was weaker but she was valuable yet.

Around her, in the small wooded area in which her cell matched weapons with the raiding party, Sakura looked up from choking out the Oto nin to watch her teammates play their roles admirably.

Everyone had a part to play and she had maneuvered herself as best she could amongst them.

Ken didn't seem to be paying her any mind, but Sakura knew better.

They would catch the nin for interrogation. Or, really, taking one prisoner would be sufficient, and at least one enemy would have to escape.

Again, she heard Sai call out her name. Within the span of those two syllables, a particular and painful order of events took place: firstly, Sakura lost her vision; almost simultaneously while hearing a sharp sort of thwack; and feeling a shockwave of pain rupturing out from a specific spot on the back of her head. She lost her grip on the man she was holding down. She might have lost her grip on anything, and her body seemed to slacken some, like how a sack does when the rice inside shifts suddenly. Most importantly, during this quick succession, something wrapped around her – multiples of something like metallic cord – and she was yanked backwards.

It all happened too fast to register immediately. Someone was pulling her away and she felt sedated and numb and still full of aches. Instinctively, as she noticed Sai reaching his hand out for her, Sakura reached back. She couldn't tell if she really moved at all.

They might have touched their fingers, she didn't know, but in the next second she was gone.

-o-

Sometimes she didn't make it to their prearranged meetings. It happened. It was expected in their sort of mission. They had plans for it.

Kakashi was only annoyed because the backup plans weren't panning out either. Sakura was on another mission outside of the village and back in her slot as a medic for Ken's cell. Nothing she could help, really. It was a good thing, really.

He wasn't disappointed by the lack of a message left for him with the staff of the rooftop cafe, signaling to him she was ready to meet again in another secure location. And worry wasn't the word. Kakashi was...impatient? He had things he wanted to talk to her about. Thoughts that had been plinking off him like stones off the wall across from a bored kid on a summer's eve. Flick, smack. Flick, smack in a tiresome loop.

He was agitated, maybe.

The thought that shadowed him most – "I've lost all my students."

Sakura's circumstance was different, in that he might have lost her to the job, to the demands of their lifestyle, rather than lost her to another, more powerful and attentive mentor. Or maybe it was that as well? No, no.

It wasn't that he had really lost her.

He didn't think that for several more weeks.

-o-

Sakura was not unconscious for very long after she was taken from the fight. But she had been drugged or put under a jutsu and for what her memories were worth, she might as well have been flat knocked out the entire time. She remembered sensations of being cramped and it being hard to breathe, like she were wrapped in spider silk and sunk into a warm, wet clay pit. She remembered brief flashes of being terrified and confused and then succumbing to darkness.

She had been transported somewhere for an indeterminate time and by an indeterminate method.

Awake again, however, she had a general grasp of her situation – if only because she recognised the face of the man observing her, and so many others in their tight and writhing space, from a balcony high over her head.

Kabuto.

.

-iii-

take it, take it again, stitch the spine back in

-o-

Sai waited for Ken to approach him with the inevitable decision. It had been four days since the raiding party had found them and taken Sakura. They had rested through the night and dawn had finally broken. Nothing from their lost team mate. There were protocols for this sort of thing and Ken would be one to adhere to the expectations.

Sai felt the grooves of ink under his fingertips from the scroll he had open and wished there was chakra warmth there to meet his skin. He watched his own movement so that he didn't have to look up as his CO came to a stop in front of where he sat by the cooling embers.

"I need to send a message," Ken said. It was Sai's ink ninjutsu that would get information back to Konoha.

"We're leaving?" Sai asked. It was rhetorical, but it wasn't like him to question his captain. The words were out before he could stop himself.

Ken was a silent figure behind his white mask. "Get your supplies ready for departure. We'll be on standby for orders."

Sai wanted to ask if they would pursue Sakura. He wondered for how long they would wait.

-o-

Kakashi went to the window of the Hokage's office and stared out at the village. He leaned onto its ledge, knuckles pale with his weight and with worry. It was poor form to show his back to his Hokage, but she was unconcerned with pomp and circumstance at the moment. Or, perhaps she was sympathetic to his fumbling attempt to hide his reaction to the news she had for him.

"They're saying she's been gone nearly a week now," Tsunade said. Her voice was thin with impatience and a quiet anger.

"Is she dead?" Kakashi had to ask. "Do you think she's already..?"

"My student? Hardly. Sakura is too stubborn to die."

He winced, tried to hide it with a strong exhalation.

"And also," Tsunade said, "because of our pact with Katsuuyu, I know she's alive."

The dread that left him was heavy and, feeling light and without tension, Kakashi was thankful he had the window to support himself.

Tsunade could have just opened with that...

"Sakura's been gone for a month," he said, pushing past his winded relief.

"Their mission took them further from the village than expected."

"They're saying she's been out of pocket for a week?" He didn't believe them. The situation wasn't what they were trying to pass it off as. "What was the mission?"

"Undercover. Tracking and obtaining a Chuunin suspect for a murder case CID has. Remember the body left in the walls of that apartment complex under construction?"

"Huh." Kakashi had only heard about it second hand. It wasn't unusual for ANBU squads to be called in for cases like that, though. "And what was the status on that recovery?"

Tsunade smirked without humour. "Wouldn't you know, their partner squad came in with the suspect deceased a day prior to Sakura going missing.

"Of course. And this was all in total collaboration with her ANBU cell," Kakashi muttered. The missions were definitely covering something else, someone else's directives, but the paperwork would never reflect as much. There was no coincidence in his mind that after looking into the Oto raids in the contested territories they would happen to lose Sakura to a surprise ambush.

He said vaguely, "some coincidence."

Tsunade understood his meaning.

He pushed from the window, shoulders a little straighter and taller than normal.

"Stop your feet, brat. You're not dismissed." Tsunade watched him as he patiently returned to attention. Her eyes were sharp and discerning. "Don't think you're getting involved in this, Kakashi. This isn't your due."

A quick retort died on his lips and she cut him off.

"This is my apprentice. ...She's in Orochimaru's country. I'm not going to be reckless about how we move forward. It cannot leak that this operative is missing and in this way. If he understands who he might have in his possession, Kakashi..."

Sakura being the one taken made for many complications. Her position as an apprentice to the Fifth, the knowledge she had, her association with her former team mates, not to mention anything of her other duties. There was a larger play at work on the board, was Tsunade's point to him. Inter-village and internal politics to consider, strategies to consider, consequences to weigh for any action taken, and all their emotions and personal connections needed to be kept in check. Unfortunately, some of it came down to the simple fact that Sakura's unconfirmed status meant Kakashi couldn't move without risk in exposing her triple-allegiance.

"I know who I'm sending out on this. She won't be gone very long." Tsunade took a scroll from her desk and handed it to him.

The retrieval squad included a Yamanaka, an Aburame clans members, Genma, and Raido. The roster was impressive and he didn't have a legitimate reason to scowl, but he did anyway.

He wanted to believe her and trust in her judgement. But he would have preferred to go himself.

"For the moment," Tsunade continued, "you have other missions waiting, Kakashi."

For the moment, he thought. "Yes, ma'am."

-o-

After spending days in the man's company back in the Forest of Death, for a brief, chilling moment, Sakura entertained the thought she was memorable enough for Kabuto to recognise.

She wasn't.

Her eyes had stared, wide and focused, on his, but the man had not deigned for her a second's attention in return. Sakura was just one in a group of prisoners and his gaze had scanned over her like a person mulling over which of the yet ripened fruit might be worth purchasing. (None, for the moment.)

Including herself, there were twenty two people in the room. She had counted as many as she had gotten the schematics of her environment. But that opportunity to take in any visual details had been short; almost immediately since, both her eyes had been sealed shut and her hands bound behind her back. To further restrain her mobility, a rope ran from a collar around her neck to one of several metal bars overhead. They were all on leashes and its system was rigged so that there was never any slack in the line. Her communication was also limited, physically she and her fellow prisoners were only capable of soft hums from their throats and not much else in way of speaking. The sound of skin clapping against skin and the constant bumps of someone against her informed Sakura they were all as naked as she felt.

Kabuto had seen them, gone without comment, and then they had been hosed down with gravel rough water and repackaged into their current state.

Before the shower, she had determined that the room wasn't impenetrable. It was a ten metre by ten metre by fifteen metre space. Tiled around, two doors opposite another about six metres off the floor, bisecting the room with a metal walkway stretching between them. Pipes came out from the walls near the ceiling and were fitted with a sprinkler system. Drains in the form of a shallow trough outlined the floor. There were seats along the walls, but they were awkwardly high up and too narrow for a comfortable perch. There was enough lead from their collars for them to move to the seats, but not enough space on the shallow edge for each of them to sit at one time. About twelve, she estimated, if people were generous with personal boundaries.

Even with her hands tied and her eyes blinded, she could get out. The Oto nin had done nothing to limit her chakra, likely assuming taking away the ability to form hand seals, their bare vulnerability and mounting physical fatigue together were enough of a dissuasion to keep any of them from attempting escape. She guessed it might have been the appropriate estimation for most everyone in the room with her, but assumptions were never safe.

When one of them made the clever decision to climb up the person next to them, making to leap to the walkway, an electric current shocked through their leashes.

For a long while, no one tried any more tricks.

At one point, Sakura started to count the time. A day and more passed and she stopped.

Sakura waited and she occupied her mind with any all thoughts that could come to her. The room around her assaulted her senses and, taking what vital information she had been able, she quickly closed herself off to what was happening with her other prisoners. The smells, the sounds, the textures of unseen but unavoidable things around her.

Shit, urine, sweat, vomit, bile, blood. And then the showers would turn on again, followed by hot blasts of air from fans high on the walls, and it was a constant cycle. Sakura turned her chin up to the water and drank as much as she could. It tasted the way a twang on metal wire sounded. It was their only means of hydration and their was nothing more for sustenance.

What was the point? She wondered.

She was pretty sure she knew the answer.

At times she would make her way to the wall to sleep. A few seconds rest and then her body would start to slacken and the collar round her neck would tighten and she would jerk back awake. This was another cycle. Some of the prisoners didn't much appreciate it. Tempers and exhaustion and the lack of rational thinking led to frustrated conflicts. A lot of body checks and kicking.

Sakura was at the wall, "sleeping," when she felt another body pressed against her. The person was hard and she wanted to die, but maybe not as much as the boy attached to the illogical and insistent thing between them. She eventually became more used to the things that still happened in the room – despite it's remorselessly vile situation.

What was the purpose of all this?

Someone still had tears in them and the room for a while filled with muted sobbing.

Another shower, two minutes. The fans ran again, ten minutes. The fans coincided with a different electric humming from the lights, and Sakura thought they were heat lights to help the prisoners dry faster. Weakened and remorsefully shamed, but the showers and warming process were meant for something. Maybe to keep them minimally intact in order to serve some other purpose?

One of the group died in a scuffle. It sounded like they had been bitten and gnawed on until they started to bleed out. The fight invited the showers and during the spray, the dying prisoner was removed. Sakura smelled the Oto nin and their cleanliness was enviable and intoxicating. That was the first death and it opened a gate to welcome others to the same end. Their number dropped.

Sakura didn't sleep enough and her body shook for two days straight. Her system expelled anything and more she had inside her. She sweated and forgot her mind for just as long.

She woke up with bodies slumped against her on either side and the feeling was no longer anything to note. Bones pushed out against skin and when any of them moved, it was like sticks knocked together.

Her nails became longer and her head itched with hair growth.

The real estate of the suspended benches was valuable. A person could sleep best there and everyone wanted to get their feet off the permanently slick, always a little bit damp tiles beneath their feet. Sakura would stand on one foot and let the other recover before switching. It was a mind numbing existence and she would have slit a man's throat to be able to feel her eyes blinking again. Damned if she saw anything, she just wanted to blink.

She began to worry when she lost interest in feeling those sensations again. Too much time was passing.

More than what she suspected – What was the point?

It was however long after arriving in the room when something changed. A scraping sound of metal sliding on metal and then the downpour of the showers. The water didn't drain. Instead, it collected at their feet until they were ankle deep. It remained there for hours. And hours. And longer still. The reason for this wasn't immediately apparent.

As they had all tried to get away from the wetness of the tiled floor before, the renewed and more imperative effort to free their skin of the perpetual water started to eat away at any remaining control and patience between them.

And in the madness to hold onto any space above the ground, Sakura remembered what she had earlier supposed was the ultimate purpose of the room: stressors to awaken something one or more of them might not have ever realised previously. Orochimaru was still searching for bloodline limits – even now resorting to attempting to stimulate dormant abilities in prisoners he had scouted from unaffiliated clans. The observation came from a quiet part of her mind – somewhere drowned out by adrenaline and survival instincts.

It seemed the recent batch including her was lacking.

No one had any 'awakening' of any sort. They merely devolved into a brawling mass of teeth and knees. She used her head to knock out someone and she was pretty certain their immobile body was suffocating on their collared noose behind her. No mind. There were more people crowding around her, trying to get to higher ground and so she used their bodies like stepping stones, hooked her leg around a neck and squeezed. From there, she channeled chakra to her feet and kicked at a sternum attached to some other body. She took out legs and kneed a nose into a skull.

Really, all she wanted was out from the water and the torrential rain of the showers.

The loud water and the shouts and the storm of her pulse. Underneath it all, the mantra of her rank and her mission. She was blinded, but she heard the person charging her, knew which foot was coming up for a hit to her head, knew how to dodge around their momentum. She stopped herself from returning the kick in kind. She had to stop reacting and start thinking.

And she realised who was shouting; not other prisoners, muted as she was, but guards. The guards only entered for the reason of removing bodies. She wasn't one of the bodies, but she had made bodies. Did that count? Would they take her too? She couldn't afford to get their attention – Let her stay in the room, she hoped – Let her stay and smash her way out – Let her use her fists –

But they found her.

-o-

Her body was attached to her cot like the two were magnets. Sakura thought a jutsu was at fault at first, but her mind cleared and she understood her exhaustion for what it was. Her eyes burned and watered, she clenched them shut but soon realised she could open them. It had been so long the sensation was foreign and painful. She could see, if only with very blurry vision and an extreme sensitivity to light.

She was waking up. She had been lying down. She felt dry and even clean. Sore and almost without energy, but somehow refreshed.

A chemical smell and the intravenous line in her arm told her she was in hospital. A catheter, too. She'd been out for awhile. Or under?

Sakura wondered, only then, where she was.

She was in the prisoner's cell last... The guards had come and gotten her and then she had slept. Until...

She was still in Otogakure.

The answer didn't come from her, so much as in the form of the man who appeared at her bedside just as the question occurred to her.

He was, as was his style, smiling in a very benign manner.

"Your eyes speak of recognition," Kabuto said, not glancing up from the notes he was reading. The smile peaked at one corner. "That's a...sign. You've been with us, but not exactly cognisant, for several days."

He put aside the clipboard to lean over her.

Sakura tried to throw her arms up and failed. They were tied at her sides. So she squirmed and tried to shrink away in futility.

"I only want to ask you to follow a few, simple commands. That's all." More smiles and gentle words. "Relax. You have it good here, little girl. I could have authorised you for Juugo's study. See? That would be a cause for concern."

Juugo's study meant nothing to her, but its introduction made her pause. It was out of curiosity, but Kabuto thought she calmed from his reassurances.

"That's good, that's good," he cooed. "You understand me? Yes. Make a fist for me? Good, good. And move your toes? I see, that's functioning, too. Left foot? Now the right? I see, I see. Interesting. Well."

Sakura narrowed her eyes as the man contemplated her successful tasks.

He sighed, disheartened. "Well," he repeated, and tacked another smile to his face. "I'll try again tomorrow."

Tapping her forehead with the clipboard, he gave her an indulgent once over. He didn't seem to be addressing Sakura so much as himself. "Don't frown. I'll crack her jutsu. Eventually."

Again, meaningless words.

Kabuto withdrew a bottle from his lab coat pocket and a needle, adding the bottle's contents to her IV line. A sedative or similar, Sakura thought. She would have enough time to wait until he departed before removing her restraints and the line –

And then his hand connected with her forehead and she saw black.

-o-

"You're awake. That's good. And you can understand me? Yes? Good. You've been in and out before now, but it seems this time your more cognisant. Don't worry, don't worry. I'm just going to ask you to do a few tasks for me. Can you make a fist with your left hand? Good, that's good. And your right? Well. We'll try again tomorrow."

-o-

"You can understand me? Good, good. We've met before, but I'm afraid you might not have had your wits about you. You're doing better today. Shh, shh. Relax. There's no need to fuss, I'm just going to ask a few simple tasks of you. Can you move your right foot for me? Just the toes – ah, there. Good. Good. And your left? Ah, I see."

-o-

"...Hello. You're awake. That's good. I can see in your eyes that you're more with us today than you have been in the past. That's good. And can you understand me? Yes, good..."

-o-

"Why wasn't this one moved on to the selection process in S-unit?" Asked a new voice.

Someone she didn't know was talking. And they were close to her. They might have been the person touching her. She was scared for a second, but then thought that it was good someone was there. Someone to latch onto to keep her from falling back to the darkness.

"Showed symptoms of withdrawal. Automatic 'no.'"

"Oh. She was strong though, wasn't she?"

At least two people in the room with her. She thought it was inside a room, at least. The warmth of the air, the hum of electric lights. Inside, she thought, definitely. Her body was heavy and unresponsive. She felt hungover.

"Tch. I'm stronger than her," came the second speaker's voice. It was a touch defensive. And then, more reluctantly softer, "do you need help?"

The sound of material ripping apart and suddenly her ankle and then her arm were free from their restraints. Her lethargy kept her in place, though.

"No, I'm fine. They're all featherlight at this point."

She was being flipped onto her stomach and scrubbed with a cloth. A dry bath. The action was familiar to her, but from a cotton-swabbed distance. She knew what it was called and that it was used on patients who couldn't wash themselves.

"Hold on!"

She felt the hands gently scrubbing her back still, and then the second person in the room was leaning over her. The air around this person was different, more intense and less amiable. Her hands were rougher and they swept over a particular spot on her back with purpose and wonder.

"No way," that person said, disbelief quieting her words. The fingers ghosting her back went to her nape and flitted over the locks of hair laid down her neck. "I know her. I fought her. During the Miyabe raid. What...what the hell is she doing here? Don't – don't – no, never mind. I'll be back in a moment."

"Karin?" The first person asked after the second, who had quickly left the room. And then, seemingly alone again, the person mimicked in an amused way, "I'm stronger than her! Ha! I mean, maybe she's right, but the gall..."

On her bed, flipped over and vulnerable as she was, something in her head played on repeat like a tolling bell. Miyabe. She knew that name. It was important to her.

A slide slotted into place and she remembered. Miyabe Shoma. He was important to her and he was dead and these people were responsible.

She smelled fire and burning flesh. It was in her nose and her throat, her lungs and in her head.

A second passed and the thunk of metal colliding with skin and bone resonated in her ears. She was upright on her mattress, three of her limbs free from their restraints, and her right arm still tied to the bar she held in that hand. The metal had ripped from its welded points in her grip. She had swung the makeshift weapon with ease at the person's head and now they were on the floor, a slack heap of person in a growing circle of red.

"That was for him," she thought in response to the unconscious girl on the floor. Closing her eyes, Reina felt vindicated.

There was work to do.

.

-iv-

the cremation torches, shadows play on corpses

-o-

Their's was the disposal unit. Gou was not yet used to working the new job. He'd been in sanitation previously, and had only dealt with the deceased then. Facing the living specimen was different, knowing their unavoidable fate and having to play a part in its conclusion – that he hadn't quite warmed to yet.

His shift partner, however, delighted in the job. His name was something boring and forgettable and everyone called him Croak anyhow, on account of his froglike appearance. Something about his cheeks and his flat nose and bubbled lips and rubbery, slick neck. Croak liked working in disposal and would taunt the specimens with less than clever jabs as he led them into the chamber. He had the privilege of walking above them by a good five metres and the aid of an electric shock stick if they ever tried anything shady, moved too slowly, or keeled over for any reason. And when the gas was deployed for termination inside the windowed chamber, he liked to watch them from the other side of the glass with his face real close. Close enough to steam from his breath.

According to those in charge, gas was inexpensive, readily applied, and ideal for en masse usage in everything from cost, efficiency, and clean up. Even menial workers like himself and Croak, who had no skills for jutsu of any sort, were capable of taking out the trash in the chambers.

Gou didn't like the job. He hated even acknowledging the things they led to the room. The specimen were grotesque in behaviour and appearance and were deemed for termination only after the full extent of Kabuto's scientific endeavours had been exhausted. Well, the endeavours in need of living tissue, at least. Some of the bodies were useful for slicing and prodding in postmortem.

Specimen. With little numbered tags pierced through their skin and all. If the hide was too thick to stab, then a seal burned into it with the same systematic labelling method. Specimen and Gou had to ignore the way some of them managed to have scraps of clothing still defiantly attached to them, caught around a protrusion, or stubbornly stretched over a thinness of an arm or above an ankle. But the clothes were remnants of a human long passed. The bodies were defunct products of the curse-mark, crude in formation and impossible of sustaining biological functions for any profitable amount of time. Whoever lived inside those bodies after the transformations – for them, Gou sincerely prayed they had died before having to endure the hellishness of such a state.

He was praying this again after catching sight of one of the specimen – large and bowed into itself with a tooth grown up and out the top of its head, effectively clamping its jaw shut and caving in half its skull. It moaned long vowels and quick, chesty grunts of pain and feelings even more terrible as Croak goaded it from the track into the room with the end of an extended corralling tool.

"It's not human," Gou lied to himself, listening to his partner. It's not human, it's not human, this isn't human.

As he turned from the viewing glass into the two storied chamber adjacent to their room, his chanting thoughts were interrupted by something different. A smell. It was like smoke, but not the smoke he was used to from their facility. Not the smell of organic tissue charcoaling. He was hovering in the corner of their control room and he turned to look back through the door from which they had just come. Beyond the room was a larger, open chamber for housing the specimen. It was bisected through its width with a length of a raised walkway. The walkway led to a door opposite and another part of the facility. More rooms for procedures and holding different experiments. The door was metal and built for security, but the base was old and its edges were less than what they used to be.

Gou forgot his partner and their task for a moment, staring at the door across the way. He thought he saw something coming through the seams, wisps rising in the air. He frowned, trying to see a little better.

The lights flickered and cut out.

"What the shit?"

The backup lights turned on and suddenly the rooms were illuminated only by a soft red glow. The screens on their equipment were black.

Croak dropped back from pushing up against the glass. He was suddenly much more sober and wary. "The containment door is locked, right?"

"Yeah," Gou said. His voice scratched and he swallowed spit, trying to ease the dryness in his throat. Casually, "You smell smoke?"

"Is it the fucking generators?"

Gou wanted to say, yeah, probably. The base occasionally had electrical problems. Losing the lights wasn't unheard of.

"Did you say something about smoke?" Croak asked. He was also glaring at the door across the way from them. "The generators might be overheating."

Before a response came to him, a static crackle from his hip made Gou jump. It was his radio. They both stared at it, waiting for words to come across, but the static noise garbled incoherently in the otherwise quiet room and then shut off.

"Generators are above ground," he said in the resuming silence. Along with their inter-base communications broadcasting towers for their secured channels.

Both their eyes went back to the door. There was smoke coming from its edges.

The sounds of the specimen mulling and groaning from the chamber below became louder and more distinguishable as they both waited dully for a moment. Someone was going to report in about the smoke and the lights any second. Probably.

Above them, the backup lights went out and the darkness around them was absolute.

Croak hissed a line of curse words, but he spoke in little stubborn and stuttered bits. "This fucking piece of shit base. Fucking shit electrical work."

Over his partner's forced grouching, Gou's hearing strained to pick up more. His eyesight useless, his other senses worked overtime. He might have been imagining the muted shouts and quick cries from elsewhere in the base.

Croak shuffled in the room, moving to the back wall and fumbling with things on the ground.

"The rooms have a battery system," Croak explained without provocation. "For when shit like this happens. But I can't tell which fucking button..."

Gou mimicked the unconcerned, mildly bothered tone. "Right. Yeah. Yeah, I got a light on me somewhere."

He found a scroll from his back pouch and felt the seal for the one that would glow temporarily once opened. He dropped it on the floor next to Croak and then immediately felt useless. His partner was a morbid clash of glowing yellow light and black shadows as he worked.

Gou straightened from his watchful leaning. His eyes were back on the door. Its frame was lit, barely, and there was nothing past it but the darkness. He asked, "did you hear that?"

He had heard something like the shrill creak of metal sliding over metal. A draft of air struck him and the smell of smoke intensified.

More curse words from Croak. Barely discernible, and with a lot less cool, "we're fucking under ground, the base is on fire, can't see for shit, I'm gonna fucking die..."

Then a relieved sigh as something clicked and the room came alight again.

Croak was relieved.

Gou was not. His eyes were strained and for a moment, and he told himself it was all his imagination, but he couldn't look away from the door and what was forming in his vision just beyond the light of their room. He could see something standing on the walkway. Its shadowed figure was looking at them. Watching and rocking with its breathing. A weight fell down his middle, shivering his spine and thunking somewhere low in his body. His palms were slick and cool. His mind supplied the sound of ragged inhalations where his ears surely couldn't catch them...

"There's," he paused to lick his dry lips, "there's something out there."

"Well, is the asshole going to tell us if there's a damn fire or not?" Croak asked in response, not looking out the door in a manner that was almost defiant. Bravado, or something like that. Denial. His attention was back to the equipment. His words began to crash into one another as he spoke. Stuttering. "The f-fucking lights aren't on in the c-cage."

"I think..." Gou started to say, trying to see better the shape in the darkness, "...it's a person..."

"Where the h-hell is the operation m-manual. This thing's still f-fucking on?"

It was a person. Or like a person. Staring at it made the hair on his neck stand on end. There was something wrong with the stick thin silhouette, lopsided and twitching with its steps. One hand was dragging a length of metal. Piping, maybe. He heard the scraping and clank it made over the flooring as the person approached.

"Croak," Gou said, his hand blindly reaching to get his attention. Croak shook off his hold and refused to turn away from the machines. "Croak, this isn't –"

The drag of metal stopped and the figure was motionless outside the reach of light. Gou watched it lift the pipe in its hand and bring it to the door jamb. It tapped the side three, four times. Croak finally pulled to his feet and stared, slack in his jaw, with Gou. At the same time, they each seized up and neither of them breathed. But the room was loud with long raspy inhalations.

It was a girl at the door. At least, he thought. He could really only surmise from the column of her neck and the ridges of her clavicles close together above the line of her shirt. Dressed in subject rags, pale and dry like death. Her bones pushed out like sticks under a sheer canvas and her veins were bulging and noticeable. He could see outlines of tendons and when she breathed it looked like the movement might push her ribs slice clean out from her skin. Purple skin around sunken eyes and teeth that looked too big for her emaciated face.

She looked at them, dropped her head to one side, and smiled. Her lip rupture open and blood, thick and slow, oozed from the split.

"What the fuck?"

Gou heard Croak, processed what he had said, and then flinched when a hot, sticky splattering hit the right side of his body. Every muscle and tendon and bone in him resisted Gou as he turned to look at Croak. The pipe was obvious first, and then it was the spray of blood, and next it was the remains of a head pinned into the wall next to him.

The girl walked into the room and she smelled of gore and smoke and everything awful. She ignored him in favour of the window into the chamber. He wondered if she knew what she was looking into, but she noticed the specimen and it was obvious from her movements she was counting them. Something on the glass caught her attention that made her recoil. Or, perhaps the sickly picture reflected in it.

She leaned closer, dragged her fingers with a sleek rub over the glass as if to confirm the reflection were actually hers. She mumbled a string of incoherent words and sounds and then swallowed a painful noise and went quiet. Her attention returned to the specimen in the chamber below and he saw her expression thin again. Her hand hovered over the switches that would activate the gas.

Gou waited and wondered at her options and it was a second before he noticed she had moved her eyes to stare at him.

He'd said something. A little noise from his dry and closed throat.

His vision jerked and his head bobbed back as a fissure of pain erupted in his skull. She'd thrown the knife into his right eye. Somehow he knew that.

The lights went out again.

.

-v-

silk on silk on silk, it's an arrow's mettle

-o-

Leafless trees and snow-bowed evergreens, the last melting ice of winter on the ground. Sakura was in the woods. Bare feet, a throwaway gown, and a jacket too tall in its fit that was certainly not her own. Under one arm, a sealed scroll. A short bladed sword in her hand. Smoke hung on her, carried on the wind, too, but from a distance. Nothing was familiar. She darted her eyes to different things: birds moving, a stream, grasses dull and brown. She didn't know where she was or from where she had come.

A cough seized her lungs and there wasn't enough air.

She couldn't remember what she had to do.

"Sai?" She tried asking, but another word left her lips. Something unrelated. She jumped a little, thinking it must have been someone else to speak, but it was her. A random word, and when she tried again, it was more the same. Nothing she said came out right and it made her stomach drop. The more she spoke to the quiet forest around her, the more useless inanity filled the space. Phantom noises she would swear were hers. She wasn't herself.

Sakura was rust and charcoal all over and there was something wrong with her head.

She hadn't been herself.

A spasm started in her shoulder and traveled down her arm. She dropped the sword. It was covered in dry filth and she stepped back from its dark branding on the white ground.

There was a tree with a soft needle bed beneath its heavy boughs and Sakura took shelter there. She unsealed the scroll. It was her handwriting that had closed it. Once open, it revealed piles of folders and even more scrolls. Records for the logistics of mass experimentation. Specific details, charts, proposals, methods, and results came as she looked more thoroughly.

She remembered she had gone to Sound for this information. A mission. That was where she had come from – the base. She had been taken to a base by a raiding party. She'd been held until she had escaped. She was still in enemy territory.

The base. Sakura couldn't breathe and her throat was a tightening vise. The base. She remembered the smoke and the flames. Her hands were fire raw and there was crust under her nails from blood and ashes.

She buried them in paperwork to keep from seeing the damning evidence.

Something was wrong with her.

No names for demarkation on any of the files, only codes like the one scorch-raised into the underside of her wrist. They contained pictures, medical information, and the goals for Kabuto's experiment. She read what she could decipher of his notes and felt a strange emotion swell in her middle. Disgust and satisfaction, both. Wherever she had fallen into his testing, nothing had come to fruition as he had planned.

She spoke a string of nonsense and then shut her mouth. She'd cursed the man out but no one would have known it had they heard her. Kabuto hadn't set out to destroy her ability to speak, she didn't think, and it was a side affect from whatever he had been trying to do that she was certain she would be able to eliminate.

Finished with looking at the files, she returned them to their place in the sealed scroll. She was supposed to turn the information she stole from the base over to her cell captain. That had been her mission. It had been her objective after capture to then discern the reasons behind their raids.

Her superiors behind the mission inception had wondered if the raids were for obtaining subjects for testing.

Sakura had their confirmation.

Everything was damp and she couldn't feel the cold, but her empty stomach turned and she could hear every inch of her creaking with the unresolved heaving. Kabuto would require more subjects. Everything he lost in the base he would want back. For all those she had taken from him already, she had damned just as many more.

No one would do anything to stop it, she thought.

She had nowhere to go until she righted what had been done to her by Kabuto. Not until she had her words back in order.

When she was ready, she would activate the ink disguised in the tattoos over her skin; it was part of Sai's ninjutsu and he would know she was looking to return. Her team was waiting for her signal.

She did...she did have people waiting for her. Not all had been lost in the fire.

Pushing the loose strands of hair from her face behind her ears, she found the specific place within the hidden seals to activate the justu. Sai's jutsu connected them and he would be able to summon her once she opened her side. Something like signalling to open a transportation scroll.

Her fingers shook as she made the hand seals and her normally highly responsive chakra seemed to slow and stall her system with each subsequent sign.

Her chest visibly rocked with a doubled-up heartbeat.

She waited, tried again, and there was nothing. Her arm spasmed.

-o-

"This isn't the right time, Kakashi."

"You're right." Kakashi closed the last latch on the armor over his shin and then gave the pug sitting at the end of his mattress a tired look. "The right time was months ago. ...I should have gone to get her months ago."

Pakkun wasn't trying to make that point and his silence seemed to emphasize as much.

"Have you always been this sensitive to following the rules? My own flesh and blood... You know, no one gives a shit about what I do, Pakkun." Kakahsi said, a bit defensive from the silent judgement of his summons. "These days, I'm just another asset."

He said it and he believed it, but his audience did not. Kakashi added, "with Jiraiya on his way into the village, now would be a fine time to sneak out. You should be happy, I'm running the whole pack."

The pug hummed – or growled, maybe – unconvinced.

He was doing what his father had done, he realised, by going against the decisions that were made for the whole good of the village over the meagre weight of one person's life. But then – Kakashi could always justify Sakura was worth much more to the village alive and out of enemy hands and he, as her jounin sensei and one of the most talented ninja of his generation, was perfectly capable of getting her back. The other four were unreliable, clearly.

"If I don't do this now, it will be Naruto running off as soon as he figures out what's going on. He'll be back in a few days. We can't wait."

"And if that convinces you, then sure. Sure, you're justified."

"The Fifth will be fine without me for a few days. I'll get this done." Someone needed to.

Still a bit reserved about the very minimally, very slightly 'abandonment of one's post" aspect of Kakashi's plans, Pakkun listed, "you understand you're doing this even though she's alive, she's capable, she's a kunoichi, she's not your sole responsibility –"

"I don't –" Kakashi's voice jumped and he took a second to breathe. He cursed, rubbed at the headache forming between his eyes. Standing up and continuing with getting his gear together, he said, "this is my due, Pakkun. I'm her handler and the people she's acting operative for have thrown her away. Both sides, Pakkun. And..that... That cannot include me any longer."

He punctuated his resolve with the cool slide of his katana into its sheath on his back. His old uniform from black ops and a new blade. He looked to the open window of his apartment bedroom, then back to his summons.

"Now, you joining me or what?"

Pakkun tilted his head and hopped to his feet. After a second, he said, "no."

"...Pal, that's not actually... I mean, not that I want to enforce this pact we have going, but that's not how we work usually..."

"We're not going anywhere," Pakkun said, though he jumped to the window ledge nonetheless. "She's here in the village. I can smell her."

Kakashi went straight, a bolt of tension and apprehension shooting up his spine, and the small amount of mirth he'd allowed dissipated. "Where?"

He had donned his stealthiest, most elaborate uniform, ready to ditch his village entirely and they found Sakura in the village hospital. She was laid out in a private room, flanked with the Hokage's personal guard, and only recently arrived. They had intercepted her en route.

Kakashi hung back on an adjacent rooftop to the hospital as he sent an unassuming Biscuit, sans his typical summon's bandana, to get more information. He sat perched on the concrete wall for an hour until the report came back.

"She's not in any imminent peril," Biscuit said, rejoining him and Pakkun. "She got back on her own to the border a day ago. Dehydrated and quiet, but she seems alright."

"She's alright?" He asked, went slack when the dog nodded again. She was safe and she was back.

Kakashi took the porcelain mask from his head, the mask away from his mouth, to breathe. He dragged a hand over his face.

What was he doing?

Sakura was home and it wasn't any thanks to him at all.

.

.

.

-o-

~Please Review~