A/N: This chapter is dedicated to CloeyMarie (Yes, I know I already dedicated a chapter to you on my SasuSaku story, but I'm doing it again b/c you rule) and MyAgent'llSendYouAGiftbasket, as they are my only reviewers as of yet. I hope ya'll like it!

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Sunburn. That's what you get for waiting for the copy-nin, master of 1000 jutsus and the art of being late, to show up. Day after (humid but not quite hot; sky cloudy and somehow smug) day.

Sakura slathered some more of the magical remedy known as Aloe Vera on her aching shoulders and leaned back on her bed, thinking about the origins of her burn.

Three days was a long time to go without visiting a place you practically live at. A suspiciously long time. And Sakura was almost positive Kakashi hadn't been to the stone since their brief conversation three days ago.

At first it had been a casual thing; simply a glance over in the memorial's direction as she passed it on the way to the ramen stand. But increasingly it became a bigger and bigger deal until, on the third day, Sakura had gone to the stone in the morning and not left until the sun had vanished from Konoha's (cloudy and somehow smug) sky that night.

Resulting in a sunburn of the heinous variety and an equally heinous speech from her mother on keeping up appearances ("You don't want to end up like that Hatake character, do you, dear? Oh, don't give me that look. I know he was your teacher, but that awful mask! He must be hiding something."). There was no explaining things to her parents– after attempting that feat she had promptly been banished to her room to apply Aloe Vera in copious amounts and sulk.

It was Tsunade's fault, all of it. If only she hadn't given Sakura a full week of vacation, that short exchange with her ex-sensei would've faded into the din of the medical profession, lost amongst senbon wounds and healing jutsus. Instead she had gone home and, after the initial period of forgetting all about the interlude, lain in bed at night and replayed every word spoken in her mind. In fact, the only way Sakura could think to rid herself of this newfound obsession was to request reinstatement at the hospital from Tsunade.

But that could wait until morning. Right now, she had the oddest urge to visit the memorial stone. . . again.

There was no real reason to be visiting the stone. Sakura hadn't lost someone important to her in a long, long time; and he wasn't dead, anyway. Surely she could glean no comfort from a mere chunk of earth, immortalized by mourners and sadists alike. And surely Kakashi wouldn't be there; not if he was sane, at least. So why go now, in the middle of the night?

It must've been the moon, she finally concluded. The moon always made her feel so liberated. She was free from all the expectations she could never fulfill, expectations she had never wanted in the first place.

On top of that, it always reminded Sakura of her own power. At times the moon seemed like a mere fragment of a whole orb; broken by events out of its control. But every once in a while it (she) proved everyone wrong. It (she) wasn't broken at all. Just. . . hidden.

She had to remind herself of that power as she silently opened her window and crept onto the roof. To say her mother wouldn't be pleased to find her daughter sneaking off to the memorial stone at midnight would be an understatement ("What would people say, Sakura?"). But a glimpse of the moon through the trees was enough to convince the pink-haired girl to journey on. She was a 16-year-old ninja, for God's sake! She had seen (done) things her mother couldn't conjure in her worst nightmares. She was a kunoichi.

The window latched behind her, sealing the deal. If she couldn't sneak out of her own house with civilian parents, Sakura wasn't fit to wear the headband.

Maybe I'm not so worthless, after all, the girl thought dryly as she leaped from tree to tree in pursuit of the one thing (person) that had been on her mind the past few days. Not worthless at all.

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Sakura temporarily forgot her destination and relished in the feel of wind in her hair as she flew through Konoha's thick woods. She didn't realize she was speeding until she was reminded by a flash of silver– a flash of silver that was not the moon.

As she skidded to a stop as quietly as she could, Sakura prayed that the perverted jounin hadn't noticed her. Somehow it would feel awkward; him knowing she was racing to the stone, to him.

She wasn't, of course, racing to him– it would just seem like that. The girl supposed that, in a roundabout way, any sensei–student relationship would have it's fair share of clumsiness. But Sakura really didn't want their current relationship to be any more awkward than it had to be.

So it was with as much dignity she could muster that she marched into the clearing and announced, "You've been gone for three days, sensei."

And it was with as much amusement he ever allowed himself to show that he turned and said, "You've been counting, student."

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Kakashi wasn't known as one of the most elite jounin in the village for no reason. He was elite, and he had noticed Sakura from a mile away. But he stayed, letting her hesitate in the trees for a moment. He waited for her to make her presence known. Sakura being Sakura, it shouldn't take too long.

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The pink-haired girl was glad the moon had briefly covered the clouds– blushing was probably not the wisest thing to do at this point.

"You were my teammate, you know," she told him in an annoyed tone. "It is perfectly normal to wonder where your teammates run off to. God, you make it sound like a bad thing!"

"Not a bad thing," Kakashi defended mildly, as if he frequently had debates with old students by the memorial stone in the middle of the night. "Just. . . an odd one. I'm not exactly your sensei anymore."

"No, but– sensei, you're bleeding!"

Kakashi winced. The moon picked such inopportune moments to come out of the clouds. "Yes, Sakura, I'm bleeding," he sighed. "It does happen, every so often, on A-ranked missions."

Sakura ignored him, reaching out instinctively to get a feel for the extent of the damage. "How did I miss this?" she asked upon further investigation of his wounds. "What kind of medic am I?"

"A very good one," Kakashi smiled. "One who was ordered by her sensei to take a week off and not use any unnecessary chakra."

"Wha– oh, you mean Tsunade. How did you know about that?"

"Well, there's this unpleasant little encounter at the end of every mission where the honorable Godaime screams her head off at you for any mistakes you may or may not have made while on the job," Kakashi drawled, crossing his arms. "I found that little tidbit tucked away in a rather disturbing rant about my 'phobia of hospitals'. It's amazing, really, what you can discover if you listen to that woman for long enough. Most people just tune her out."

"Again with the sarcasm," Sakura laughed. "She's not that bad, you know. Just. . ."

"Slightly insane?"

"Temperamental," Sakura finished, rolling her expressive eyes. "And the woman is an absolutely brilliant medic. I've really learned a lot, these last few years. . . Now hold still; I'm about to demonstrate a new jutsu I've been dying to show off."

Sakura somehow knew that the moment she reached to pull him closer he would disappear, gone like the night slinking away in the face of dawn. It was such a Kakashi-ish thing to do. But it was disappointing, all the same. So disappointing that–

"Boo." Sakura stiffened as she felt Kakashi's breath on the back of her neck and whirled around. But she was too late, and he was already gone.

"Sensei, those wounds are nothing to joke about!"

There was no response. She tried again.

"I'll buy you a month's worth of Icha Icha Paradise!"

There was a silence, then a quiet rustling as the copy-nin emerged from the foliage a few feet in front of the girl, his one eye studying her lazily. "Okay."

Sakura could only stare at him, mouth open slightly. It actually worked?

"I'm all your's," the silver-haired jounin said. Sakura noticed the creases in his mask as he smiled and visibly hesitated.

This jutsu would require a lot of close contact, and somehow she knew that the awkwardness of it all would be off the charts. When Team 7 had been a fully functioning squad, she used to sit on his back while he did push-ups during training; it had never bothered her then. This, she knew, was different. She was older, for one, and as he'd put it earlier, he wasn't exactly her sensei anymore. Things were bound to get. . . complicated.

"Let me guess." Kakashi's lazy drawl promptly brought her mind back to the matter at hand. "It was a bluff, wasn't it?"

It might be easy to back down, to laugh it off and walk home, defeated. But it was never so easy when pride was involved, and Sakura had pride to spare.

"I don't bluff," she told him coldly, looking straight into his single eye. "Let's get started."

Kakashi wasn't surprised by her sudden ferocity (she was the Godaime's apprentice, after all), but the swift efficiency with which she cornered him against the tree he was leaning on and brought her hands to his heart rendered him speechless.

Sakura admittedly had been furious that he was underestimating her, but she would swear that her body had moved of its own accord. Hey, I didn't tell you to do that, she thought in mortification as she noticed her hands cradling the hollow of his lower neck. The rest of her body was so close to his she could feel the warmth radiating off his lithe form.

This is taking the 'hands-on' approach a little far, Sakura groaned to herself. But I can't back down now.

Kakashi watched in mild fascination as Sakura's fingers began tracing patterns on his chest, gently directing his chakra. "This jutsu counteracts the effects of physical blows on internal organs," she explained, sounding knowledgeable but not quite meeting his eye. "It uses the natural flow of chakra to create a barrier around the wound of a specific organ."

The medic paused for a moment. The situation wasn't as graceless as she first expected. Maybe–

"Sakura?" Kakashi said suddenly, his voice creating vibrations in the base of his throat that tickled the medic's deft fingers and caused them to falter, if only for a second.

"Mm?" she responded vaguely, resuming the tracing with her fingertips.

"Well, I was talking to Tsunade, and–"

All at once his voice in her ears sounded so impossibly deep and velvety that she stopped paying attention to the actual words and started concentrating more on the pitch and inflection. All she could feel were the rough pads of her fingertips caressing his silky jounin uniform in figures that were becoming increasingly random.

"–which I agreed to. Do you think that's a good idea?"

"Oh." Sakura quit rubbing his chest and stepped away from him and his body heat, running a hand through her hair as she did so. "Um, sorry, could you repeat that?"

The jounin sighed. "Weren't you listening?"

"I was concentrating on. . . healing. That's a pretty bad wound, you know," she said, nodding towards the cut that ran from the top of his shoulder down to his hip.

Kakashi sighed once again. "Never mind. We'll talk about this some other time."

The girl nodded quietly, forcing back a yawn. "We could just. . . sit?"

He mimicked her nod, his sandals clicking against the pavement as he followed her to sit next to the stone. A hush fell over the two, a kind of moment where there is no need to mask silence with meaningless words. For now it was just a sensei and his student, just like the old days when she had sat on his back and admired his strength.

When his words came, so quietly she could've mistaken them for the breeze, the pink-haired girl knew that, despite her mother's misgivings, Kakashi was the best teacher she could've had as a genin. "You're an excellent medic, Sakura. You learn things quickly, and you learn them well. Any sensei would be proud to be part of such a student's education."

She wasn't sure how to respond to this, so rarely did she earn a compliment from her mysterious teacher. So she let the silence and her smile speak for her. She was proud to be his student. She was proud to be his. . . friend.

Kakashi wasn't quite finished. "That day you sat with me. . . what did you mean, that we make this rock have feelings?"

He reached out and caressed the name of some forgotten chuunin, and Sakura envied the gentle ease of his fingers as he traced the same name she had, not so long ago.

"I. . . I don't really know." The last part of her sentence was marked by an apologetic, almost pained smile. "Sometimes it's just easier to speak without really thinking about what you're saying. Sometimes. . . your words have a meaning but you don't know what it is."

The jounin nodded in a slow way, trying to wrap his mind around her words. "Or perhaps you know what the meaning is, but you can't admit it."

How is he always so right?

Sakura laughed quietly, the sound almost unnatural against the stillness of nature. "Perhaps."

There was a lull as the girl considered her next words. "I've never been to the memorial at night before. When I was little I always figured it would be spooky, like Halloween or one of those horror movies I wasn't allowed to watch." Sakura smiled as she reminisced, lifting a single hand to rest it on the stone. "I feel silly now. There's nothing scary about this place."

The next moment she pulled her arm back, shifting away from the rock uncomfortably. "I don't have a real reason for being here, actually. I haven't lost someone important to me in a long, long time; and he isn't dead, anyway." There was a hint of bitterness in her voice that Kakashi picked up, helping him further analyze the situation.

"Curiosity kills," Kakashi remarked idly, not missing the brief look of surprise on Sakura's face but not questioning it, either. He figured she would eventually say something, and, Sakura being Sakura, he could wait her out.

It only took a few minutes. "What do you mean, Kakashi-sensai?"

"Sasuke had never felt the kind of power he did during the chuunin exams. It was exhilarating, liberating. He wanted to know more. He was. . . curious. And eventually that curiosity drove him to lengths he would normally never take; he took steps that made him dead in Konoha's eyes. Curiosity kills."

She's not as over him as it seems, he thought. He considered the previous (humid but not quite hot; sky cloudy and somehow smug) day, searching for something to share, something to distract her. "I. . .wasn't paying attention."

"On your mission?" She was puzzled, but her mind was completely on him now.

"When I got the injury," he corrected. "Days like these make me–"

"Over-confident?"

The copy-nin had originally been planning on saying 'make me doubt myself.' And as soon as she interrupted him he had planned to set her straight; taking her shoulders and shaking them in frustration. But a thought occurred from out of the blue, and he closed his lips.

How is she always so right?

His mouth moved again, but this time he neglected to think about what he was saying. "Tonight would be a good night to die."

The pink-haired medic, so accustomed to people who desperately wanted to live, didn't look up at him but stiffened slightly. Her hand wasn't quite steady as she reached out again for the stone, and her lower lip quivered before tucking into a grim smile. "Why?"

She was waiting for an answer he didn't have, and they both knew it. Sakura sighed, a lonely sound, and hugged her arms to her legs. "In my profession, you get terribly comfortable with the idea that everyone wants to live, fiercely and with no second thoughts. But it's in-the-box thinking, I guess. If someone didn't want to live they just. . . wouldn't go to the hospital, right? And we would never be exposed to that kind of person. I guess everyone is sheltered in their own kind of way. . ." A pause, as she worked up courage. "How are you sheltered, sensei?"

The jounin made no move to reply as he stood, ruffling her hair affectionately and straightening the sword strapped to his back (when had he started carrying around a sword?).

Sakura felt a strange sense of dissatisfaction as he stood to walk away, and she longed to call him back and demand an explanation (what made you so friendly all of the sudden? why do you leave without saying good-bye? and how the hell did you get that wound?). She waited until he was almost to the edge of the clearing before calling out, "Kakashi-sensei, who gave you those wounds?"

He froze, mid-step, then answered her question in his usual cryptic style and a voice as dry as the desert. "A rather single-minded enemy." His voice took on a more casual note as he set his foot down. "Why do you ask?"

He was waiting for an answer she didn't have; both of them knew it. Eventually the silence grew too long and he left, gone like the night slinking away in the face of dawn. She was coming to expect that from him, and she wouldn't have it any other way.

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A/N: I'm not going to delete this story, but I probably won't be updating in a long time, either. I can't seem to write the next chapter, and I'm working on a couple of other things right now. Not to mention the fact that school is about to start up. I'll try to finish this some day, though. Thanks for the patience!

-Mere Anarchy