Title: Moments in Time: A Close Up

Author: AppleL0V3R

Beta-reader: N/A

Fandom: Naruto

Pairing: Uchiha Itachi and Haruno Sakura

Other Characters: N/A

Chapter: Ninety-Two – #90 Imagine: I Wish.

Summary: Prompts from Moments in Time that I was requested to expand on. 92. 90 – Imagine: I Wish. They say 'be careful what you wish for,' but in Sakura's defense, she didn't ask for this.

Word Count: 1,250

Rating: T

Type: One-shot – Complete

Genre: Modern AU (Supernatural), Humor, Fluff

Warning: Phantom!Itachi is kinda pervy (nothing explicit/implicit), author maligning Itachi's chivalrous character (not sorry), author tagging warnings wrong (also not sorry)

Disclaimer: If you've heard of it before, then it's obviously not mine.

Started: May 14, 2017

Completed: June 6, 2017

Last Edited: June 6, 2017

Note: As the summary states, these were skits I was asked to turn into actual works. I will always put which one it was and the skit just before the chapter. They won't be in numerical order because I'm doing them as I'm requested. They won't be any more than one-shots though they may become two to five –shots (I will forewarn when that happens) but they won't become stories unless I choose to.

Do any of you actually read my headers? If you do, I hope you got a laugh. If not, oh well. I like how this turned out (except for the last part because I kept switching to present tense on accident and changing it to past tense made it sound funny in my head) and Itachi totally through me for a loop. Originally I was going to make Itachi really prevy (thus the warnings) but then he went and turned gentlemanly and I liked how it turned out (possibly because Itachi is gentlemanly and thoughtful and perfect in my head). Anyway, I very possibly might add to this one. Enjoy.

Request by: Anime Freak456

*.*.*

90. Imagine (Sakura)

Ever since she was a child she'd had an overactive imagination. Sometimes it was a good thing; allowing her to think outside the box to see answers she otherwise wouldn't have. And other times it was so elaborate she wasn't really sure that what had just happened had really happened.

Like this.

She'd rushed into her office to grab a few papers off the top of her desk. But when she'd been shuffling through the multiple files, arms had wound around her waist. One hand settled on her hip and the other dragged its way up to her chin. With a swift yank she found her lips assaulted by another pair. And then the culprit was gone.

She hadn't even been able to sense him.

*.*.*

When Sakura was little, she and her best friend liked to play a game. It was like a repurposed version of 'I never' that they liked to call 'I wish.' The rules were simple. After agreeing to a broad topic, each girl had to come up with a specific wish relating to it. Then they had to share, and the other girl had to come with a plan to make it happen. But if their wishes were too similar they had to start over. As they had grown older, the rules had changed until the game was forgotten all together in favor of more popular games—like I Never.

But even as a full grown woman, some of the wishes she had contrived had never been forgotten. Among them were her dream man, her dream career, and her dream house.

She was currently batting two out of three on those. She had the career—residency at one of the most renowned hospitals in Japan and respected as the youngest cardiologist to head her field. She had the house—unsurprisingly, being the head of cardiology paid well, and while she hardly had a mansion, the modest two-story traditional home she had paid off within a year was what she had detailed to the letter in that particular round of 'I wish.'

She did not have the dream man. Never had her fabled 'prince charming' come along to sweep her off her feet and treat her like a princess. Oh, boyfriends had certainly come and gone, none of them terrible, but none of them exactly what she had wished for either. It was a fact of life that she had resigned herself to. She could make the career—and by extension the lifestyle she wanted—happen, but she could not make a person be her ideal man. She would either have to reconsider what actually constituted her dream man, or she would have to be patient and live life to the fullest until she met him.

As fate would have it—she would do both.

Her days since gaining notoriety in her chosen field had left her swamped. More often than naught she found her schedule full of twelve to eighteen hour shifts seven to fourteen days in a row, and sometimes she found herself working overtime. It had become common for her to spend over forty-eight hours straight at the hospital between rounds, surgeries, and paperwork. Her day-to-day life barely allowed for sleep let alone anything else outside of work. Rare was the day she had a full twenty-four hours to herself, and nonexistent were the times she was not on-call.

So when it first happened, she almost chalked it up to sleep deprivation. But she had just come off a full day off that had been used to get household chores done and curl up in her favorite window chair with chamomile tea and a new book she had been dying to find time to read.

She had felt refreshed, even after having to get up at quarter to five in the morning. And while she had ended up having to rush to get to work on time when her first surgery of the day got moved up half-an-hour on grounds of the transplant heart arriving earlier than expected, she had felt wide awake and ready to perform. As she had originally intended to be at work with time to stop by her office before scrubbing in, she found herself walking in the hospital doors with just enough time to pick up all the necessary documents for the surgery she was headed to.

Sakura kept her workspace organized, but on her days off, the rest of the staff tended to simply stack all kinds of paperwork on her desk for her to sort through upon return. In her hurry, she had forgotten that. Mildly chagrinned at the sight of her neat desk overflowing with folders and lose papers, she huffed and promised herself that she would deal with it after the surgery. Right then, she needed the papers she had put on the corner of her desk, which had thankfully escaped the mass threatening to topple over on it, so she snatched them up and stepped away from the pile, blocking out the impending disaster in favor of making sure she had grabbed all the necessary papers.

So intent was she on shuffling through the multiple files, she almost didn't realize arms had suddenly wound around her waist. Brief surprise stunned her long enough for one hand to grasp her hip while the other dragged its way up to her chin, fazing right through her arm on the way. With a swift yank she found a pair of lips assaulting her own. And then the culprit was gone.

Surprise turned to shock as she scrambled to gather her wits. Tried to make sense of what the hell had just happened.

The obvious answer was that she was losing her mind. And not even in a good way. After all, who hallucinated having an invisible person appear out of nowhere, steal a kiss and then disappear all within a moment.

But there was a reason Sakura's imagination had seemed to run so wild. And it was because she was a natural born medium, and not a particular happy one either. Her ability to essentially commune with the dead and other incorporeal entities was not one she embraced. For her it had always been unwanted, like funky birthmark that would never go away or the tendency to burn instead of tan no matter what precautions were taken. And secretly, she had always figured that was why she could never seem to find the right guy. Her ideal man needed to have a brain, a thirst for knowledge, and maybe even a coolheaded temperament to balance her hotheadedness.

Such a man would be even less tolerant of such notions than she was, and she lived with them.

But there was no getting rid of her ability—something she had tried and failed at, repeatedly—and so she would just have to deal with the implications for her love life.

She blinked at the files in her arms, remembered suddenly what she was supposed to be doing and resolved to think about the whole thing later. Or maybe never, she thought, rushing out of the room and hoping she had not held everything up for too long.

*.*.*

The next time she encountered what she would later term 'Ghostly Suitor' was, surprisingly, on her way to meet Ino for a breakfast that her blonde haired best friend had been on her case to have. Sakura could hardly be irritated at the insistence, not when she had effectively stood the other woman up three times in a row already. So when her next rare day off came up, she had sworn to her childhood friend that she would meet her for breakfast, and would not cancel again. Ino had been exasperated, grumbling about rearranging her schedule, but had ultimately warned the pink-haired doctor not to be late or else.

Else meaning Ino would come find Sakura and drag her to the little café they got breakfast together at once a week. Else was not an idle threat from Ino, but fair warning and Sakura had been subject to it more than once.

So the cardiologist had set her alarm and made sure to turn in early enough to get a decent amount of sleep so there would be no excuses for tardiness. And, indeed, she had gotten up and cruised through her morning routine with time to spare thanks to not grabbing anything to eat before she had to leave.

Only, as she reached the door after slipping on her wedged heels, she felt a hand in her hair, tugging gently but firmly on the short strands. When she would have turned, assuming the spirit was behind her since she could not see one in front of her, another hand caught her chin, stilling her movements. Freezing altogether because she had never, never run across a ghost she could not see, she waited for the spirit to do anything else.

Most would have run screaming, but Sakura, despite her avoidance of the entities, knew when she was dealing with an inherently malicious spirit. Malignance had an unmistakable pall, pressing uncomfortably at her skin and scraping her senses on a metaphysical level. Living or dead, she knew when she had encountered evil. This spirit? She could not get a read on him any more than she could see him. So, if she had to guess, she assumed he was a neutral being, goal driven and was interacting with her intentionally.

He chose to play peek-a-boo. He chose to invade her space and touch her at will. Clearly, he knew where she worked and where she lived. If she had anything to fear from him, it was that he might get to handsy at an inopportune moment. Because a spirit who could control whether she saw him or not and could touch her whenever and however he pleased would have already killed her if that was his intent.

Instead he had stolen a kiss before she started her shift in the quiet of her office, and now he kissed her temple and petted her hair like he was bidding her farewell.

Was it disconcerting? Certainly. Did she feel threatened? No.

But once more, before she could do anything, say anything, the feeling of hands on her and lips brushing her skin disappeared without a trace.

Next time, she swore to herself, she was getting a word in edgewise.

*.*.*

Next time came and went, complete with gentle touches and butterfly kisses that had her stomach flip-flopping uncomfortably, but she made no progress. How could she when the guy—and she was positive by that point the spirit was a guy by the size of his hands, the hardness of his body, the sheer masculine presence of him—caught her exiting her car after coming home from a long day, and night, at work. The sun had risen and set and risen again while she was at the hospital working a twenty-hour shift. And so, her neighbors, middle class families with two-point-five kids were ushering their kids out the door for school or walking their dogs or getting their newspapers when she nearly tumbled out of her car.

She had placed her foot over a crack in the cement and her heel had caught when she shifted to put her full weight on that foot, effectively off-balancing her. Sakura was far from klutzy, and it was the sheer exhaustion of a long, trying shift that made her clumsy now that she was finally home. But rather than face planting or anything of the sort, she remained upright by virtue of invisible arms. Sinew and warmth wrapped around her middle, righting her against a hard chest and kept her from falling over. Hands splayed over her abdomen with long fingers to keep her steady until she could take over with the placement of her feet.

He stayed pressed against her for a moment longer than necessary and she felt the puff of warm air on her ear.

Torn between thankful and tired and grumpy, she missed her chance to make a single sound when he dropped two feather-light kisses on her jaw and cheek before leaving her cold and bereft. But her feet kept her upright and though they threatened to buckle when she forced them to carry her to her front door, they did get her inside and to her bed before she collapsed.

Sleep stole her conscious before she could analyze the implications of a ghost going out of his way to catch her—and kiss her again—before disappearing.

*.*.*

Hands on her shoulders jostled her awake from an unintended nap in her upstairs home office. They dropped when she jerked up straight to the sound of her security alarm shrieking like a banshee. Instinct had her on her feet, adrenaline already pumping in her veins as she sprinted out of the office and down the hallway to get to the first floor. Relief nearly had her dropping on the hardwood when, minutes later, she found no signs of intruders, but she fought it in favor of answering the old landline she had been meaning to get rid of for years.

Only after she replaced the phone on the receiver, the home security company assured that it was a false alarm, did she remember what had woken her in the first place. Not even noticing the broken glass on her floor from the shattered window of her back door could derail her with the sudden realization.

Not the house alarm. Hands. The same invisible hands that had caught her when she got home from work that morning.

She could not feel any spirits in the vicinity, but that did not matter to her this time. Taking a deep breathe, she hoped he could hear her. "Whoever you are, whatever you want. Thank you."

Suddenly, for the first time, Sakura could see.

Long dark hair over squared shoulders, proud patrician features with equally dark eyes watching her with a fathomless depth. He was tall, but she knew that from the last encounter, and muscled, she remembered, despite the lean look of him in dark fitted clothes.

For a long moment, all she could do was stare now that she could see her ghostly suitor—mostly because the man, the ghost, was gorgeous. The kind of handsome that made women do stupid, shameless things. But then he did something stunning and she knew, without a doubt, that she was in trouble, she was absolutely done for. He smiled, his lips upturning and his eyes, still so dark and entrancing, softened.

"You're welcome, Sakura."