Chapter 1- The Escape

Every shinobi has their limit. Some can withstand much more than others but there is always a breaking point. In some cases it is pain itself that causes someone in battle to give up and sometimes a shinobi dies before even reaching their breaking point but nonetheless, everyone has a weakness.

She always counted on the boys of Team Seven, her boys, to be there for her in her time of need. She never liked looking at their backs in battle and at the age of eighteen, she was damn well capable of taking care of herself.

She was taken seriously and if Team Seven ever happened to be caught in battle, the first thing on their mind wasn't 'who is going to guard Sakura' anymore. She knew that they all still worried over her but that's because she's the only girl in the group. Kakashi, Naruto, and Sai didn't have any ill intentions when trying to protect her; it's just in their nature to defend the lone kunoichi. She learned a long time ago that no matter how many battles she won or tantrums she threw, they will always still put her safety first.

Thinking back to her flat-chested, twelve year-old self and then to the strong woman she became, she was proud of how far she'd come. Yes, she have a temper and yes, her boys bring it out in her more often than not but ever since Tsunade-sama admitted to everyone in the village that she surpassed her in both medical skills and strength on Sakura's sixteenth birthday, all of her friends and family had a new level of respect for the young kunoichi. She appreciated it more than anything in the world and she knew from that day on that no one was going to keep her in their shadow anymore; she wasn't going to break down and show fear as she had so many years ago when Sasuke left… Sakura never knew how wrong she'd be.

Her legs were unstable as she sprinted across the muddy forest floor. Blood dripped continuously from her deep wounds that seemed to be everywhere; her legs, her arms, her chest. The drugs hadn't worn off yet and she could still feel the heaviness in her limbs as if they had weights tied to them. The rain pouring down from the sky wasn't helping her fast escape and despite the fear that already consumed her body, she couldn't help but flinch when a loud boom of thunder shook the ground blow her.

The girl pushed herself forward, egged on by the calls and heavy footsteps of the teammates behind her. They didn't deserve that title, not after everything they did to her.

Sakura heard Kakashi call out to Sai and tell him to use his special jutsu to get her but Sai shortly explained that the ink would never hold up in a downpour like this. She was grateful only for few seconds before the bright flash of lightning sent her heart into overdrive.

Her breath was coming out in short and painful pants, her throat raw and sore from the consistent screaming over the past two weeks. She knew why they hadn't captured her yet; they wanted her to be even more terrified than she already was of them. They wanted to play cat-and-mouse before they killed her and finally ended her torture. They wanted to play games with her mind but even though she knew all of this, it still didn't make Kakashi and Naruto's cry for me to stop sound any less panicked and caring.

"Sakura, stop and let us help you! What happened?" Sakura could hear their team leader shout out. She shut her eyes only for a moment to try and force the hopeful thoughts out of her mind. They hurt you; they don't care for you. They want to kill you. Don't stop, keep moving. Don't let them catch you.

The pinkette's shoulder-length hair was clumped with mud from previous falls that had only opened up her wounds even more. She prayed silently that when they caught her (because it was only a matter of time) that they would end her life quickly but she scolded herself immediately at the very idea. Those bastards wouldn't go easy on her after all the trouble she was causing them.

Her sobs were broken, as was her heart and she couldn't help but imagine a time when the three men behind her were the ones she looked up to the most. Kakashi-sensei was such a powerful shinobi and his strength and determination was what drove her to train so hard every day; that and Tsunade's strict orders of absolutely no slacking.

Naruto was just as inspirational with his constant rattles of hopes and dreams to be Hokage one day and lead the Hidden Leaf Village as valiantly as his father had. The boy never stopped to at good enough and surpassed what everyone thought of him to be one of the greatest younger shinobi in the village.

Sai was a different story. Sakura still had thought highly of him before this whole situation because of the progress he had made from being an ANBU robot with no feelings to an actual human being that laughed and cried and enjoyed life as it came to him. She was his friend, his comrade but as flashes of the terrible events of the past fortnight ran through her mind, she had to remind herself that they were all evil.

They had all fooled her and taken away what most kunoichi at her age didn't have. The innocence that had always made Sakura different was now gone, tainted by the disgusting desires and bloodlust of those she thought would always be there for her.

She screamed in agony and whirled around for just long enough to send a handful of kunai barreling in their direction. Of course Kakashi would see and block the oncoming missiles; the blood-red sharingan of his pierced through the darkness around them, through the rain and straight to her. She was caught and every one of them knew it. She decided very quickly that despite her injuries, she would not go down without a fight.

Almost completely out of chakra and energy, Sakura kid to a halt in the mud and turned on her ex-teammates, looking at them with a mix of utter terror and deliriousness. She was stupid to have even stopped, she decided, when the boys stopped a little ways before her. They were panting and soaked to the bone just as she was, no doubt ready to skin her with her own kunai.

Unbeknownst the all four of them, two men were closing in on them fast, fiercely curious as to what had caused a woman in the middle of a torrential downpour and in the middle of nowhere to scream like that. They both shared the same thoughts, that the cry was like nails to a chalkboard and put them both on edge like they've never been before.

They moved silently, their black cloaks with red clouds protecting them from the freezing rain that would surely leave someone dead with hypothermia in hours. The scouting mission that they were returning from was fairly simple and both Nin just wanted to be home where it was warm. The desperate cry had left them so unsettled that they risked what could be a trap to scout the area. It was inevitable.

What they saw when they arrived in a small clearing left the speechless for several minutes.

Three Leaf Nin were facing a single kunoichi, obviously from the same village, while the pink-haired girl was practically falling apart. She was absolutely covered in blood from head to toe even though water was pouring from the sky in what seemed to be buckets. She was shivering so hard that it appeared as if someone were shaking her by her shoulders and one looked at the girl would clue anyone in on the terror that she was feeling.

The sight was extremely confusing to the Akatsuki duo, especially since they knew better than anyone else exactly how much these shinobi meant to each other. Something pretty terrible had to go down to make a girl like this so bent out of shape. Neither of them liked what the situation implied.

Sakura was gripped with fear and all of the fight that she thought she had when she stopped to battle were gone the second that she faced them. Images of them moaning over her and dragging their sharp blades across her skin flashed over and over again in her head. She couldn't do anything to stop the onslaught of memories to consume the rest of her strength.

Kakashi moved forward after their silence stretched on but the kunoichi was already taking three steps back, barely keeping herself on her feet. "Don't come any closer!" she screamed in anguish, terrified of the very thought of his hands over her body again.

Naruto tried to move this time though her reaction was the same, a little more hectic if anything. "Please, don't do this! Just kill me and get it over with!" Her pleads lingered in the two hidden men's minds, their disgust of the other male shinobi not too far from them growing with haste.

"Sakura, what the hell are you talking about? Just come with us and we can go home before you get sick." Naruto stepped forward again but frowned deeply when she fell backwards with her attempt to put more distance between the two.

"Just fucking kill me already!" she screeched, her sobs wracking her body painfully. More blood ran down her face from somewhere on my forehead when she dug her fingers into her scalp with the intention of diverting her attention to something, anything other than the traitorous partners before her.

Surprisingly, Sai was the one who lost his patience first as he shoved past Kakashi and Naruto and stalked towards the terrified girl. "I'm done with this…" he started but before he could even finish his sentence, two figures appeared between him and the girl, successfully blocking him from any movement forward.

The Nin with long black hair had a kunai level with Sai's abdomen and was standing a mere foot away from him while the much larger Nin with the face of a shark and a wrapped sword clinging to his back was kneeling in front of the collapsed kunoichi, his arm extended in front of her.

Naruto's eyes narrowed immediately while Kakashi hissed in anger. "Akatsuki." The words meant little to Sakura though. For the first time in her life, she was honestly happy that the deadly assassins were in front of her. Within the current circumstances, they were protecting her.

"Get the hell away from her!" Naruto yelled, balling his fists up as Sai darted away from the deadly Nin and appeared next to his team leader.

The shark man's low chuckle was well heard despite the rain and thunder loudly around them. "Why would I do that? From what I've seen she don't want anything to do with any of you."

Kakashi's eyes were scrunched with muted rage. "You don't know anything Kisame," the Copy Nin spoke with collected emotion, knowing that screaming at them would not help anyone. "Itachi, don't you think that you should just take your partner and leave? This doesn't concern you."

Itachi's eyes never left the three standing in front of him and he contemplated quickly whether or not this fight was even worth it. The Uchiha wasn't one to start unnecessary bloodshed but when the kunoichi let out another strangled sob, his mind was made up.

"In case you have forgotten, I am from Konaha too so I am well informed of how the shinobi are treated by their peers and elders. From what I see, no one from your little village would be very proud of you actions," Itachi spoke with calculation and great thought, obviously wording it so that it implied exactly what he was thinking but not saying it outright.

Naruto shifted forward, his knuckles turning white from fisting his hands so tightly. "We didn't do this to Sakura! We would never hurt her!"

"LIAR!" Sakura screamed in response, flinching when Kisame turned to look at her expressionlessly. She knew she should be scared out of her mind but she wasn't; not when the Akatsuki members were putting more distance between her and the rest of Team Seven.

Itachi turned to Kisame, the silence between everyone being filled with harsh splatters of rain and thunder. No one else could see what transpired between the teammates in such a short span of time but it was guessed when Itachi eased out of his fighting stance and Kisame stood up next to him.

The shark man didn't have a single trace of humor in his dark eyes as he had in every other encounter they've ever had with him and it was unnerving to see him so serious and… deadly looking.

Kisame turned towards the girl that was on the brink of unconsciousness; her eyes hollow, blood still pouring from the deep cuts in her skin, and her lips so pale blue that they almost looked white. She needed warmth and comfort and even though that was so not the Akatsuki's forte, he opened his arms wide for her anyway.

The pinkette was stunned and it showed with her wide, bloodshot eyes and slack jaw. He felt bad for her and that scared him a little. He as a notorious killer who had long forgotten what is was to care for someone and in turn, be cared for. He didn't exactly enjoy or relish in the fact that he barely knew her and she was already making him feel again. With one backward glance at Itachi, he realized that his partner felt the same way.

Slowly, as if she were afraid it was a trap; she stood on her shaky legs and stumbled towards them, forcing Kisame to hold her up when she clutched his robes. His blood boiled when he smelled how much blood was on her and it didn't help when he could physically feel her trembling from fear, blood loss, and the cold. She was falling apart.

"Sakura, get away from them! What the hell are you doing?" Naruto raged again, the air around all of the stiffening when the Kyubbi's chakra eased out of him. His anger was practically visible.

Itachi reached his hand out and secured his fingers on one of Kisame's sleeves as his arms tightened around the girl in front of him. She sobbed again just as Itachi raised his head to pierce the Leaf Nin with his threatening glare.

"We're going to take her with us and shelter her from monsters like you. The Akatsuki might have taken away people important to you but we are given assassination missions just as you all have done before. We did our job but nowhere in any Konaha mission has it ever required for such torture to be given to one of their own. At least the Akatsuki know how to treat women."

The two cloaked men and the small girl burst into hundreds of black ravens that scattered in an instant. Lightning flashed in the sky again and as Naruto tilted his head back; his scream of anger was lost in the howling wind.

….

Three figures sat stiffly on the large couch opposite the burning flames in the stone fireplace. The one with red hair was quietly reattaching fingers onto a wooden hand while the blonde next to him kneaded a small clump of white clay with his fingers.

The shark man that sat precariously on the right side had told them everything that had happened and why the Uchiha was still with the now sleeping girl. They had all cringed when hearing her screams from nightmares after they brought her in and Itachi had decided to stay there with her so that hopefully she could get some sleep in order to heal her wounds.

The men didn't know how bad it was until Itachi had swiftly entered the infirmary and left moments later with arms full of disinfectant and bandages.

The silence was bothering Deidara and the more he tried to focus on the clay bird in his hand, the more it began to resemble a blob of nothing. With a sigh, he threw the squishy substance onto the mahogany coffee table by their feet and turned a glare onto the man seated beside him.

"Why do we have to deal with this, yeah? You know that the second she's better, she will blow up this whole base." He was angry and had no desire to hide his feelings. It's not that her arrival was an inconvenience but it was more along the lines of her arrival creating emotions in Itachi and Kisame that they should never have in this organization.

Kisame fixed his threatening gaze on the blonde as if daring him to say more. "What did you want me to do? After how we found her, I doubt she's going to willingly go back to the Leaf."

"You should have left her to die! We are killers, not rescuers. We don't need people underestimating us just because we saved a little kunoichi in the rain."

Deidara had less than a second to avoid the large pulsing sword that was suddenly hurled in his direction. The mad bomber back flipped over the table and landed in front of the fire, giving the angry man an exasperated look. "What the hell was that for?"

Kisame looked murderous and a small part in the back of Deidara's mind wondered who this girl was to cause such emotion in this man as quick as she did. "Watch your mouth," the shark man said, lowering his sword to the ground. "You weren't there when we found her. We might not be the most accommodating people to hang out with but at the end of the day, we're still people. In this line of work, we're at the point that we kill without remorse but it was different with her."

Sasori, who had been listening to the conversation while fixing one of his puppet's hands, finally grew more interested at the tired tone that everything was turning to. "How so?"

Kisame looked down at his feet. "She came to us willingly."

Deidara's eyes bulged out of his head and his mouth opened wide. "What?"

"I said she came to us willingly. Do you understand how afraid someone must be to feel safer with us than the other group? She grew up with them, entrusted her life with them and we found her torn up and bloody and begging for death. You didn't see her there. You would have felt bad too."

Kisame rose to his feet, obviously worn from the day's unexpected turn. "Did you contact leader as I asked you to?"

Since Deidara was utterly frozen to the spot with the same stupid look on his face, Sasori sighed and answered for him. "Yes; leader said that since we are trying to hang low for a while that it would be better if everyone came here to stay in case of an attack instead of all over the place. He said that he will talk to the girl himself and decide then what to do with her. If she stays, we are going to have a hell of a time explaining this to the rest of them."

Kisame turned his back to the dim living room and stopped for a moment in thought. What would he do if leader decided to end the young kunoichi's life? He knew it was what she wanted but was it what he wanted?

Itachi wouldn't mind; especially since it was the Uchiha's idea to bring the dying girl here. It was only a matter of time before she woke up and everyone could see for themselves how bad off she was. It leader let her stay; he would do everything in his power to protect her from anything else harmful to her. She was different.

"I know," Kisame replied in a troubled voice, and left the bomber and the puppet master to their own thoughts.