Work Text:
"Look," Sakura sighed, pressing a hand to her temple to ward off the inevitable headache, "I cannot tell you how much I don't have time for this."
The man in the corner of the room didn't say anything, because—well, why would he? Not like he was standing, uninvited, in her apartment at three o'clock in the morning.
Also, he was very blatantly Uchiha Itachi, mass murderer of one of Konoha's oldest clans and tormentor of her former teammate, and equally blatantly dead. The blood dripping down his mouth and chin and the fact that her fists, when she'd swung at him, had gone right through, were equal evidence of that.
Both of those things felt like they should be a bigger deal, but an eighteen-hour shift at the hospital had a way of burning out Sakura's capacity to make good decisions or feel fear.
For the third time since she'd walked into her apartment and found a dead man standing there, she formed her hands into the familiar symbol. "Kai."
Her frayed and exhausted chakra reserves sizzled in her coils like old oil in a pan as she forced herself far, far past her limits. Her vision swam, nausea rose in her stomach—but Uchiha Itachi just blinked, as if the wave of chakra was no more than a spritz of water, and stubbornly refused to disappear.
Probably this was a hallucination. Wouldn't be the weirdest one her work-exhausted brain had ever thrown at her. But even if it wasn't... well, that had officially become Future Sakura's problem. Present Sakura was way too tired to deal with this shit.
She stomped her way past the murderer's ghost to collapse into her thin futon, rolled out on the floor where she'd left it this morning when the all-hands-on-deck call for medics had gone out, and collapsed on top of it with her skin still grimy and her stained and filthy medic's outfit still on.
For a moment she almost wanted to tell the ghost good night; for another moment she thought of flipping him off. In the end, she didn't have time to do either. The moment her head touched the pillow she was out like a light.
—
Sakura woke, twelve hours later, to the grim, pale face of a dead murderer staring down at her.
"Augh!" she yelped, panic racing through her veins.
Right side pouch, strapped to her hip—Sakura's body moved on adrenaline and well-honed instinct, rolling away from Itachi while flinging a trio of kunai at his face, his eyes, trying desperately to disable his most dangerous weapon before it was too late.
The kunai passed through him, embedding themselves into the ceiling of her rental unit and sending down a shower of dust. Itachi's blank expression didn't change for a moment. His eyes, too, were flat black, nothing of his strange warped Sharingan showing in them.
He looked, somehow, deeply unimpressed.
Right. Right. The memories of last night flooded back in, each of them somehow more embarrassing than the last. She'd found a murderer-turned-murderee standing in her room, tried to punch him, tried to dispel him, and then when both those failed had immediately given up trying anything else and gone to sleep. Past Sakura was useless.
Still, the fact that she'd slept twelve hours without Itachi either disappearing or murdering her in her sleep told her three things.
First, he probably wasn't just an illusion brought on by some ultra-complicated genjutsu. The only person she'd ever heard of capable of building a complex, long-term genjutsu like that was Itachi himself, and him using that advanced Sharingan of his just to project an illusory bedroom with an illusory dead copy of himself in it to a woman he'd never directly spoken to in his life would be... odd, even for him. Also, frankly, funnier than she thought him capable of; maybe it was just because she'd only ever met him when he was swooshing around in that ridiculous cape of his, trying to murder, traumatize, or kidnap one or the other of her teammates, but he'd always seemed like kind of a wet blanket even on top of the whole murderer thing.
Second, if this was a hallucination, it wasn't one she wanted to report to Lady Tsunade. Short-term creepy hallucinations were a normal side effect of being sleep deprived and surrounded by blood, guts, and restricted clan jutsu aftereffects for so many hours of the day. Long-term creepy hallucinations meant talking to hospital therapists, taking leave, and, worst of all, paperwork, none of which Sakura had time for. Being haunted by a creepy dead clan murderer who stared at her while she slept was much less of a hassle than requesting medical leave.
Third, assuming Itachi's presence here somehow was real, he probably wasn't here just to kill her. He'd always had a reputation for being sadistic—remembering how Kakashi had looked after his battle with Itachi still made her shudder—but waiting patiently for twelve whole hours just to make sure his target was awake and aware when he killed them had to be overkill even by his admittedly messed-up standards.
Sakura groaned, dropping her head into her hands. Why couldn't she ever have normal problems? Other people got to stress about passing their chunin exams or learning new jutsu. She got... this.
After a long, self-pitying moment, she lifted herself back up, rolling off the ground to meet Itachi at something a little closer to eye level, and skewered him with her best medic's glare.
"Okay. Look. If you're not a hallucination, tell me something I couldn't know."
Itachi blinked. Last night, he hadn't seemed especially interested in interacting with her, but today he hesitated, opened his mouth—and then grimaced, drawing a line silently across his throat.
"No talking, huh? That's convenient."
And a point in the 'psychologically-worrying-but-too-much-of-a-pain-to-do-anything-about hallucination' column, to boot. Joy.
Itachi shrugged. Somehow he looked smug while doing it, though that might just be a side effect of the general aura he gave off at all times. Death hadn't made him any less obnoxiously pretty, even with that same trickle of blood from last night still clinging to the corner of his mouth.
"All right." Sakura sighed. "In that case, I'm ignoring you until further notice."
If Itachi had any particular thoughts about that, he didn't seem inclined to share them.
Sakura stood, stretched, went to finally grab some fresh, viscera-free clothes from her dresser—and then scowled as she realized.
"One more thing," she said, swiveling to face Itachi once more, "and then I'm ignoring you."
He stared at her, unimpressed or uncaring.
"I'm going to take a shower, and if you follow me in there I will find a way to punch ghosts."
This time, Itachi definitely looked unimpressed—he arched one thin, dark eyebrow at her in an expression that seemed to say, Really? His cheeks had even gone a little red, maybe, though it was close to impossible to tell on him; death hadn't affected his complexion at all, but even in life his face had been standard corpse-pale Uchiha and therefore couldn't hold a flush any better than it could hold a smile.
But he stayed obediently behind as she walked away, and when she returned, toweling her hair off, she found him crouched down in front of one of her shelves and reading the spines of her meager book collection with an interest that looked genuine.
For a moment she almost asked him if she wanted him to take one out for him—not often she saw someone interested in her medical textbooks, and it wasn't like he could open them on his own in his state—but just in time she snapped her mouth shut. She was ignoring him, and also he was a terrifying clan killer who, dead or not, hallucination or not, definitely didn't need to pick up any more possible new techniques from her books. Some of the medical jutsu those texts taught were nasty.
The hospital would be needing her again soon. No time to waste. Sakura pulled her damp hair into a short ponytail, grabbed a ration bar from the basket on her counter, and unlatched her front door.
She was ignoring her pet hallucination now. She didn't look behind her to see if he was following. But she did catch a glimpse, just out of the corner of her eye, of him standing up and leaving the bookshelf to instead trail behind her, and that was, well—hm.
A lot less unsettling than it should have been, probably. And a lot more flattering too. She needed to get out of the hospital more and spend some time with her yearmates if this was how her subconscious decided to make her feel less lonely.
—
Sakura's route back to the hospital took her over Konoha's rooftops at a leisurely pace, using just the barest flow of chakra to keep her stuck firmly to the roof tiles. It wasn't a long run, but it was a solitary one: nothing but her, the wind whipping through her damp hair, and, now, the shadow following along loyally at her shoulder.
She was ignoring him. He was a hallucination and a murderer and she was ignoring him. But—
She threw a casual glance over her shoulder, just to see whether she might be able to trick her brain into remembering what was actually real by looking at him from an angle other than head-on, and instead was struck for a moment by the sheer openness she saw in his expression. He was staring out at Konoha like he'd missed it, like the afternoon sun and the rooftops under the partial shade of trees were the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Sakura hadn't even realized he was capable of making an expression that conveyed anything other than boredom or smug superiority or cold, murderous rage.
In the next moment, he caught her watching him. His face shuttered in a fraction of a heartbeat, back to the familiar grim glare so quickly she could've almost believed she'd imagined what she saw before.
...Well. She had, probably. She was imagining all of this. But still.
Sakura cleared her throat awkwardly. "So. Was it Sasuke? Who..." She gestured awkwardly at the blood still lingering on his face. "You know."
He blinked. She expected him to ignore her entirely, but instead after a pause he lifted a hand to his throat and made the same gesture he had before. No voice.
"Well, but you can nod or shake your head, right?"
His eyebrows furrowed. She had a sudden feeling that the idea hadn't occurred to him at all. (And honestly, what was it about Konoha's prodigies? All the smartest people she knew were also the stupidest.) After a long pause, Itachi staring at her like he was trying to decide something, he finally shook his head.
Sakura winced. "Huh. That's—huh."
Stupid, really, that her first instinct was sympathy for her long-lost teammate. Sasuke had betrayed Konoha, again and again, and he'd hurt just about every person she cared about doing it, ripped apart Team Seven more thoroughly than any enemy could.
But he'd done it all to kill the man following alongside her now, and some dumb, sentimental part of her had always felt like the things they'd all lost to Sasuke's revenge quest might at least mean something if he succeeded at it. And now even that had been taken from him.
...Assuming this wasn't just a hallucination, which was exactly the opposite of what she should be assuming. Uchiha Itachi was still out there somewhere, still a madman waiting for his little brother to come try to kill him, and Sakura's over-stressed brain had invented this sad quiet ghost of him out of scraps of memory and every last one of her anxieties.
At this rate she really was going to end up on forced medical leave, because the next thing out of her mouth was, "So who did do it, then?"
Itachi stared at her for a long few seconds, the focus of his gaze sending a prickle down her spine even without his Sharingan backing it up, and then very deliberately nodded. Shook his head. Nodded again.
Right. Right. Not exactly an easy question to answer with their limited communication options.
"Hm. Guess we're sticking to simple questions, then. You planning to stick around much longer?"
A shrug. An actual, proper shrug, even; more expressive than the little half-jerk of a shoulder Sasuke used to give them.
Sakura ducked a low-hanging tree branch, launched herself off of someone's balcony and onto a higher roof, still deep in thought. The hospital was right up ahead now. She wouldn't have time for many more questions. Not that she should have asked them in the first place—her resolve not to speak to the hallucination had lasted all of five minutes, she was going to have to beg some remedial lessons in resisting mental manipulation off of Ino—but still. If she was going to let her resolve break so easily, she might as well get something interesting out of it.
"You're not here on purpose, then?" she asked.
Itachi shook his head, paused, then waved his hand at the city around them in a broad, frustrated gesture.
Sakura blinked, trying to puzzle that one out. "You... came to Konoha on purpose?" she guessed finally. "But not to me specifically."
Itachi's eyes widened a bit. He nodded, looking almost impressed.
Ha! She was good at this. Or, more likely, she was figuring out mysteries her own subconscious had created for her and then getting pathetically excited over it.
"Well, I guess that makes sense." As much sense as any of this did, anyway. It'd be pretty weird if he picked her specifically to haunt. But Konoha... She stared him down, narrow-eyed. "Why did you want to come back to Konoha, then? Your brother's not here anymore, I'm sure one of your missing-nin buddies told you that."
Every time he showed his face in Konoha, something horrible followed. Even with this spectral version of Itachi, as sure of his nonexistence as she'd become, the thought of him purposefully making his way here sent a shiver down her spine.
She'd expected another shrug or some more pointed mockery of her attempts at asking him anything beyond simple yes or no questions. What she didn't expect was for him to glance away from her near immediately, turning instead to stare out over the houses and the distant treetops—a movement almost, almost quick enough that she wouldn't be able to catch the grief-stricken expression that passed across his face like a wave.
Weird. Weird, weird, weird. And the last, final proof that she was hallucinating, too: the real Itachi would never act like this. She'd heard enough stories, seen enough of the aftermath of his handiwork on people's lives, to know he wasn't capable of anything so tender as grief or remorse.
That settled it, then. Just in time for her to drop to the ground in front of the hospital's staff doors and take one last longing look at the beautiful day outside before starting another shift.
Sakura sighed as she stepped inside, half-worried but feeling vaguely like she should probably be at least three-quarters-worried instead—only to be stopped a moment later when Itachi stepped closer beside her and waved a hand in front of her face.
Scowling, Sakura shook her head as subtly as she could manage. The lobby wasn't full at this time of day, but it wasn't empty either, and if anyone saw her talking to herself... well, most of the staff probably wouldn't comment. It would still leave her saner than the average medic-nin they worked with on a daily basis. But Shizune would be worried, if she saw, and Lady Tsunade would be worried and furious at her for not reporting it immediately.
Better to get used to ignoring him—ignoring it—as soon as she could. She looked away, letting her gaze slide past his form, his grim unsmiling face, only to be drawn back in by movement.
Itachi made a hand sign. Then another, and another, and another—a sequence of twelve altogether, with a pause on the last before repeating, for three repetitions total. He stared at her the whole way through it, his flat black eyes burning through her with a force that made her shudder; like he was expecting her to know what he was doing. Like it ought to mean something.
The first sign was a mystery. So was the next, and the next—then, there, one she knew, familiar as day. Mission. Another few mysteries, followed by one she was sure she recognized but didn't know the meaning of, and then a second half-familiar sign, another she didn't know...
A hard, sour pit formed in Sakura's stomach. She knew where she'd seen those signs before: from the hands of white-masked patients fresh off a mission, too delirious and frightened to realize they weren't being debriefed yet. From the guards who watched Lady Tsunade's back whenever she had foreign diplomats visiting. And from Kakashi, once or twice, when he forgot she and Naruto didn't have clearance for them and he had to use the boring old Konoha-standard-issue versions instead.
ANBU hand signs. Itachi worked through them slowly and with all the desperation of someone stumbling through a foreign language, begging her to understand. Repeating it over and over in the hopes that something might just click.
Sakura didn't know ANBU hand signs. And she definitely shouldn't be able to hallucinate any. It had to be another trick of her subconscious, feeding her what little bits and pieces she remembered, but—
With a glance left and right, she lowered her voice to a hiss. "I don't... can't you do the normal set instead? I know the ones they teach in the Academy."
Itachi just stared at her, eyes wide, one bloodied lip caught now between his teeth, and hesitated a long, long moment before sighing and clenching his hands into fists. A shake of the head, a shrug, all with a surprisingly helpless expression on his face.
Right, Sakura thought. No chance he'd spent much time, if any, in the Academy. He'd probably never gone on a mission with anyone who didn't know ANBU signs, never needed to learn the basic set at all.
This wasn't real. It wasn't. But if it was—
If it was, it was frustrating. One language barrier replaced by another, because the Uchiha clan never saw fit to let their heir learn anything but battlefield skills. Not that she had any intention of sympathizing with a clan killer. It was just... strange, that was all, to imagine what the man standing in front of her now had been like as a child.
Sakura grimaced. She couldn't be thinking about any of this right now; someone with enough authority to question why Lady Tsunade's apprentice was standing in a doorway staring at nothing might come along at any moment.
"We'll talk later," she murmured to Itachi out of the corner of her mouth. "I'll—figure something out."
Itachi stood there a moment, still as a statue with that strange, frustrated look in his dark eyes, and then finally he nodded. His expression faded back into apathy, becoming cold and unreadable again, and he moved to put himself back at her shoulder.
What a nightmare this was getting to be. Either she was insane, in which case she was doing a spectacularly bad job clinging to the crumbling pieces of her reality, or she wasn't and she was actually considering listening to the pleas of a murderous, clan-killing traitor's ghost, which was actually worse than the first option.
She ought to go to Tsunade now. Admit to everything, check herself into observation. Refuse to pry any further into the messages the shadow at her back was trying to leave her. It was the smart, sensible thing to do.
Sakura sighed, pulled her hair up, and went to start her next shift. If she'd been a sensible person, she never would've lasted half a day as part of Team Seven.
—
Itachi was, to his credit, an impressively polite shadow. Medical jutsu was much, much uglier to witness than anyone not a medic realized: she'd had shinobi with decades of field experience gag at the sight of the some of the injuries she treated, and today's rounds were especially gruesome. Whatever mission these shinobi had been on, it hadn't ended fantastically for them. Not that Itachi could have spoken up to object even if he was disgusted by what he was seeing, but she never once caught him looking queasy or turning away from a medical procedure in progress. If anything, he seemed fascinated by watching Sakura work; once or twice, he opened his mouth like he might be about to ask a question before snapping it shut again.
Probably that wasn't a good sign. A murderous S-Rank Uchiha with knowledge of medical jutsu was a nightmarish concept. But he was fake or he was dead, so it hardly mattered—and anyway, it was kind of nice to have someone watch without judging.
...Even if the reason he wasn't judging was because he was used to inflicting worse injuries on people, which was very possible for an Akatsuki member like him.
Thankfully, this shift wasn't the mind-numbing, endless, back-breaking work of yesterday. She only got four hours into her rounds before Lady Tsunade showed up and scolded her right out of the hospital with a snapped, "Go home and rest, damn it! I'm trying to teach you, not work you into an empty grave."
Sakura'd protested, but not very hard. She was so eager to get out of this place that she could barely keep her mind on her patients. Not so she could rest, though maybe she should've, but the moment she was out the hospital doors she instead took to the rooftops to head towards the center of Konoha instead.
The sun was halfway over the horizon, bathing every tree in orange-gold light. A warm breeze kicked up, sending Sakura's hair whipping around her face. Itachi, when she risked a glance his way, was staring out at the scenery again, just like he had on their way here. His expression looked better suited to someone in the middle of memorizing a life-or-death coded message than a man staring at some trees.
Did a summer's day have any meaning to him now? Could he feel the temperature? The wind? Or was he stuck, cold and frozen, looking out at a world he couldn't interact with?
Not that she wanted him to be able to interact with Konoha. Any time Uchiha Itachi interacted with Konoha, he left bodies in his wake. But—
If he was real, which was a big if, then she hoped he could feel the breeze.
Itachi stiffened as Sakura came to a stop on one of the rooftops downtown. He looked almost—awkward, or at least as awkward as a person with a face like his could manage looking, and Sakura had to stifle a laugh. By now it was almost becoming instinct to invent parallel explanations for every Weird Itachi Behavior she noticed, and even after less than a day together there were a lot to notice.
Hallucination or ghost? Maybe he was acting odd because he was a reflection of Sakura, and Sakura really wasn't looking forward to making a fool of herself in front of her teacher. Or maybe he was acting odd because he could sense exactly who was inside, and he had some sort of messed up missing-nin honor code about breaking into the houses of people he'd tortured and left for dead.
Sakura giggled to herself, making Itachi side-eye her—and if even her hallucinations were calling her crazy now, that couldn't be a good sign. She dropped down from the roof to the side of the wall before she could second guess herself more, sending chakra to her hands and feet so she could cling to the outside of the apartment like a frog. Carefully, she grabbed hold of the edge of the window and slid it open in one smooth motion, then yanked her hand back just in time to avoid losing a finger to the spray of kunai that launched themselves skyward the moment the window pane moved.
There was a door, of course, but the door was booby-trapped even worse than the window; for as laid back as Kakashi acted, he was one of the most paranoid people she knew. She'd long ago learned this was her best option for impromptu meetings with her teacher.
(Well, there was always asking him to meet, like a normal person, but that was the worst option of all unless she was in the mood to play mind games with Kakashi-sensei over just how late he would show up. He got bolder and bolder in his tardiness with every passing year.)
Sakura hesitated a moment, just in case a flash bang was about to follow, but either he'd forgotten to rearm that one or he'd finally gotten too many complaints from the neighbors because the second wave was just a smattering of senbon needles that she easily batted away as she clambered up and through the window.
"Hey, sensei!" she said, grinning, as she landed feet-first on his hardwood floor. "Miss me?"
Kakashi's apartment was a small, sparse thing, decorated just enough to keep it from feeling barren. A few paintings hung on the wall, a bookshelf in the corner held a mix of field guides, jutsu scrolls, and his favorite tacky novels. Everything here, she suspected, had been gifted to him by someone else rather than picked out for himself, but even still it somehow managed to feel like a home. Maybe that was just her fondness for the person who lived here talking, though.
At her side once more, Itachi took it all in, his expression unreadable. For a moment Sakura had to fight the urge to tell him to cover his eyes; fake or no fake, letting him stare at her sensei's rooms felt like crossing some invisible line.
Not like she had much of a choice, though. She should've thought of that before she came here if she was so concerned.
Kakashi was perched on the edge of his bed, an Icha Icha book in his hand. He gave her a lazy once-over like he hadn't expected her at all. Sakura had no doubt he'd pulled the novel out the moment he felt her chakra on the rooftop, just to keep up appearances.
"Ah, a surprise visit," he said with his eye curved up into a smile, giving her a wave before turning back to his book. "How mysterious! To what do I owe the honor?"
"Ah, well..." Sakura bit the edge of her lip, suddenly at a loss for words.
She hadn't really thought past getting out of the hospital and to Kakashi in the first place. What could she possibly tell him? Quick, sensei, I need your help in figuring out whether I've gone crazy or if I've just been casually leading the spirit of one of our worst enemies all through the heart of the village instead. It won't take more than a minute, I promise.
At her silence, Kakashi sighed. "If it's about Naruto, I don't know anything more than you do. Jiraiya-sama keeps a tight lid on anything related to their whereabouts."
"Well, good." She'd have to kick her own jounin-sensei's ass if she ever found out he was withholding something about Naruto's travels from her. "But no, it's not about that. I had a question about, ah... your old job?"
In the blink between one second and the next, Kakashi's entire being shifted. The book snapped closed and was stowed away in a pouch on his hip, so quickly she could barely see his hands move. His eye narrowed. Every casual, human movement she'd barely even noticed up until now—a shift of the head, a twitch of the fingers, his leg casually kicking against the bedspread—turned to pure, focused stillness in a heartbeat.
Ah, Sakura thought faintly. So this was how Konoha's enemies felt when they had to go up against Kakashi of the Sharingan.
She had to be in trouble. His Sharingan was showing him something, or he could see read something in her face that screamed untrustworthy. She squirmed in place, wanting to confess to every lie and not even sure what her lies were, what exactly she would be confessing to. There's this ghost, you see, and—
But when he finally spoke, carefully polite in a way that only sounded cold, all he said was, "Ah, Sakura, has someone been trying to recruit you to something? Because if they are, they should have come to me first. As your jounin, I have to sign off on those sorts of things."
He didn't, actually. Chunin could request their own placements. But—something in his voice made her hold back from telling him so. Beneath the carefully controlled words, he didn't sound angry so much as he did afraid.
"No!" Sakura said. "No. No. Nothing like that. It's just"—come on, she thought to herself, think of something, anything—"um, there was a patient in my rounds today, and he kept making some strange hand signs to me. I couldn't tell if he was trying to say something meaningful or if he was just delusional from the pain, and I didn't really know the signs myself, so I thought, ah, perhaps I could ask you about it. You know."
Her face felt burning hot. Her cheeks had to be bright red. As far as lies went, it was quite possibly the worst she'd ever come up with, the kind of awful, awful attempt at an excuse she might as well hang her forehead protector up over. Kakashi just stared at her, his eyebrow raised, and even Itachi was looking at her with an expression that was somewhere between disbelief and exasperation.
Asshole, she thought, hopefully loud enough that Itachi could hear it through the force of her willpower alone. It was his fault she was having to do this in the first place.
"...I see," Kakashi said finally. "Me? Not Tsunade-sama?"
"Erm. Yes."
"Even though she's right there in the hospital? And has the authority to decipher and disseminate the meanings of any hand signs she wants at any time?"
"...Yes."
Two more seconds of questioning and she was going to jump straight back out the window she came through. Perpetual haunting via hallucinatory murderer would be preferable to sitting through any more of this.
Kakashi stared at her another moment longer and then said, cheerily, "All right, then, show me!"
Sakura blinked. "Eh?"
"If it's important, it's important, right?" Even behind the mask, it was obvious he was smiling. "I can't say no to a super-illegal request from one of my students."
It was still there in the edge of his voice, something he was trying and not quite managing to hide: that hint of fear. Did he despise the ANBU that much? He'd never once spoken about it with this kind of venom in his voice before. This felt like... something else, something Sakura was wholly unaware of. Like she'd somehow walked up to the edge of a precipice she didn't realize existed.
Itachi wasn't looking at her anymore. He'd turned to Kakashi instead, an intensity in his stare that Sakura couldn't make sense of. Everything about this had turned sideways in the space of a heartbeat.
"All right," she said anyway, because she hadn't gone to all this trouble just to back down at the last moment. "It was, um..."
She stared at her own hands, mind gone blank. There'd been rabbit in there, she remembered, and something that looked like a modified dragon, but the rest...
Pale hands settled in beside her own. Sakura blinked, glancing to the side, to see Itachi standing closer to her than he ever had so far. His eyes looked darker than ink in the apartment's dim lighting, deep enough to fall into and never escape. He gave her a quick, sharp nod, and then slid his hands into the position of the first sign he'd made earlier.
One hand over the other, pinkies drawn back...after only a moment's fumbling, Sakura managed to copy him. He moved from there into the next strange sign, a one-handed one she thought she remembered one of the proctors in her chunin exams using, and then the next and the next after that. It became easy, soon, to settle her hands in the position he was showing as soon as he moved to it; there was an intuitive, fluid motion to the signs she never would have been able to pick up on without trying them herself.
Kakashi followed along, eye narrowed in concentration, the crease in his brow growing more pronounced with each sign. When she finally finished, holding on the last an extra second before folding her hands nervously in front of her, all he said was, "Interesting."
Is that it? Sakura didn't ask, because she knew Kakashi. Asking him questions directly was the worst way to get information out of him. Instead, she tilted her head and said, in a tone to match his, "Anything interesting? Or did I climb through a booby-trapped window for nothing?"
Am I crazy? Or just putting Konoha in incredible danger?
Kakashi snorted. "Interesting way to say, broke into my jounin-sensei's apartment."
Sakura just shrugged. If he had a problem with it, he should've learned to show up to things on time occasionally. She'd only taught herself to do it because she was so tired of waiting—and, admittedly, because Gai-sensei had made it seem easy.
Instead of answering her question, he held his hands out to mimic one of the last signs she'd done, the one that looked like a modified dragon. "This one here, you're sure this is what you saw?"
At her side, Itachi stiffened.
What the fuck, Sakura wanted to hiss at him. But she couldn't do more than glare daggers at him out of the corners of her eyes without making it obvious to Kakashi exactly how weird she was acting. All she could do was—fingers clammy, unsure what information she was giving away with the words—nod and say, "Yes, I'm sure. That was it exactly."
It really was a perfect imitation. Even without his Sharingan eye active, Kakashi's mimicry skills were second to none.
For another long moment Kakashi was silent. And then, finally, his voice perfectly steady in a way that wrapped back around to sounding unsure, he said, "That one's not an ANBU sign. It was used internally by members of the Uchiha Police Force, back before... well. I only knew one Uchiha who ever used it to communicate with anyone outside of the clan, actually."
Sakura swallowed. There was only one thing she could imagine that meaning, even though it wasn't possible, it couldn't be—
From the beginning, some deep-down part of her had been sure this was a hallucination. That no matter what she let herself half-believe, no matter what lengths she went to in order to decipher the messages her murderous ghost was sending her, it was only so she could finally come to accept that she really had lost it.
Because if she hadn't.
If she hadn't.
Carefully, still speaking in that steady, steady voice, Kakashi asked, "Who gave you this message, Sakura?"
Sakura dropped to the floor.
She hadn't meant to, she just—either she knelt down right now or her knees were going to buckle under her, and one of those would be more of a pain to deal with than the other. Knuckles white, fingernails digging harsh crescent moons in the skin of her knees, she focused on nothing more than steadying her breathing and her coils until she could finally speak again.
It was real. It was all real, and she'd played host to a traitor, a clan killer, she'd led him through the hospital and into her own mentor's apartment. She'd let him watch her sleep.
When the vice grip panic had on her lungs finally eased up enough that she could take a breath, the first thing out of her mouth was, "You bastard."
Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have warned Kakashi first, should have thrown him and herself both out his window before Uchiha fucking Itachi, the real person, standing incorporeally next to her right this very second, could put whatever plan he must have into motion, but—in the moment, the betrayal of it all was what came bubbling out of her before anything else. How dare? How dare this man, the one she'd known from the very beginning was a traitor, betray her?
Itachi raised both hands, fingers splayed wide, in what could only be a gesture of innocence. He was caught now, he had to know he was caught, but his eyes still stayed the same flat black, his ghostly presence didn't suddenly gain shape and form, no strange jutsu seemed about to attack her and Kakashi. If this was some planned-out betrayal, he was doing an awfully bad job of going through with it.
What a weird plan it would be, too. Elaborate, risky, and stupid, no one's winning combination. But if he wasn't a hallucination, and he hadn't elaborately faked his own death as part of the kind of plan that would give even Shikamaru a headache, then—what? What was left?
Kakashi's hand on her shoulder shook her out of her rapidly-circling thoughts.
"Sakura." His voice was gentle. It would've been more soothing coming from anyone but Kakashi-sensei, for whom gentleness was normally a warning sign for some kind of upcoming mischief or torturous bit of training. "Was it him, then? Did you meet him somewhere? Did he speak to you?"
The noise that forced its way out of Sakura's throat sounded less like a laugh and more like a rusty kunai scraping against stone. There were ways to explain, maybe, that would at least make her seem less insane, that would help her dig a slightly smaller hole than she was in the middle of carving out for herself right now. But she was tired, and afraid, and the spirit of a clan-killer was standing right beside her, and all she could manage to tell Kakashi was the honest, awful truth.
"Meet him? Meet him? He's here now." She waved a hand at Itachi's stiff, nervous-looking form, as if gesturing wildly at a patch of air might help Kakashi understand somehow. "He's dead, and he's been following me, and I thought I was just seeing things, I thought I'd taken one too many shifts of overtime, but..."
Laughing probably wasn't helping make her case. She couldn't help herself, though. This was all too much.
"I let him stay in my house," she finished, the least of it all and yet somehow the most.
For a long, long moment Kakashi was silent. He stared at her, then at the patch of Itachi she'd gestured at, squinting with his one uncovered eye like he might somehow make sense of her rambling through sheer force of will alone. His hand went to his hitai-ate, sliding the fabric there up to reveal his lazily-spinning Sharingan eye. He looked again.
"Huh," Kakashi said, much too calmly. "You weren't kidding."
Sakura said, "You see him too?" like a heroine out of the kind of trashy ghost story manga they sold at newsstands for 200 yen.
"Not... exactly. Not as clearly as you do, if you're able to read his hand signs. But there's a chakra pattern there for sure." And then, in some strange parody of politeness, he tipped his head and added, "Hello again, Itachi-san."
Itachi blinked, then, a little awkwardly, returned the gesture. The look on his face said, very plainly, that he had no idea how to react to Kakashi's, well, Kakashi-ness. Sakura could relate.
"I think," Sakura said, more calmly than she felt, "that we maybe have bigger priorities than being polite to the mass-murdering chakra signature that's currently haunting me, sensei."
"Ahh..." Kakashi scratched idly at the back of his head. "Well, that's the issue, really."
She waited for him to elaborate. He did not elaborate.
"You know," Sakura said, "aiding and abetting a traitor to Konoha is already punishable by execution. They can't actually kill me more if I also strangle my jounin-sensei before I die."
Kakashi smiled at her behind his mask, in a way that could've meant anything at all, and then finally said, "The message that Itachi asked you to decipher is, ah, unusual."
"Unusual," Sakura parroted.
That could mean anything. Had she delivered a threat? Meaningless rambling? A message intended for someone else entirely?
Itachi was watching them both, back ramrod-straight, mouth a flat line, an odd gleam in his eye. He looked—frightened. Or hopeful. Or both. More than ever, Sakura wished he could speak; Kakashi was the best person she could have brought this too, but also the most frustrating. Even a direct conversation with a monster like him would be less aggravating than trying to drag information out of Kakashi at a pace faster than he wanted to go at.
"Look," Kakashi said patiently, "here, I'll show you."
He held his hands out, twisted into a sign that was—even without the Sharingan to rely on—a perfect mirror of what Sakura had shown him before.
"This one means WARNING, or DANGER, or MISSION COMPLICATION. Whenever it's used, it's always at the beginning of the message."
Sakura swallowed. This was... a lot more than she'd asked Kakashi to tell her. A lot more than it was safe for him to tell her, for that matter; there was a line between humoring a distraught student and actively aiding in leaking ANBU secrets, and Kakashi was stepping over it without so much as even trying to slide a toe over first.
"Sensei," Sakura said. The urge to learn and the urge to keep her mentor out of trouble warred against each other.
Kakashi didn't so much as acknowledge the worry in her voice before sliding his hands to the next sign.
"This means BETRAYAL, or sometimes TRAP. It elaborates on the warning given in the previous sign."
Sakura frowned. Curiosity was quickly winning out over self-preservation, and the horrible knowledge of the person standing beside her. If Kakashi was translating, then of course the translation couldn't be wrong. But the translation Kakashi was giving also didn't make sense. Who was betraying who? Why would Uchiha Itachi, of all people, be trying to send a message about betrayal through her? Even as little as he knew her, there was no way he could possibly expect she'd be willing to send a message to one of his Akatsuki partners, and if it wasn't one of them, then...
Sakura caught Itachi's eye, studying for a moment the deep, heavy blackness of his irises, inklike and strange. After only a few moments, Itachi glanced away. Odd, and yet not. She couldn't imagine how long it had been since somebody last met his gaze. She hadn't ever thought that the aversion to eye contact might run both ways after so long spent without it. Hadn't thought anything at all about what his preferences or discomforts might be, because the idea of an Uchiha Itachi who felt anything more than bloodlust and cruel glee was unthinkable.
And here he was, frustrated by his own forced silence, willing to tag along through her hospital rounds, trying to mime politeness to a man who couldn't even see him.
"...Okay," Sakura said, turning back towards Kakashi to give a short, sharp nod. "Show me the next sign."
Treason or not, dangerous or not—there was something here that she didn't understand yet. Something big. And, above all else, the greatest failing a shinobi could fall prey to was choosing to remain ignorant when information was available.
Kakashi didn't smile, but somehow he managed to look pleased.
"All right," he said. "Watch me closely, then."
The next sign—fingers elaborately twined around each other, Kakashi managing to make it look far more graceful than Sakura had when showing him—meant FAILURE or BREAKDOWN IN NEGOTATIONS. The one after that could mean any of a dozen different things depending on context and surrounding hand signs, from THREAT SPOTTED to CURRENTLY UNDERGOING TORTURE, and instead of just telling her which was meant here he went through the definitions one at a time, giving a thorough explanation of the subtleties of each. Sakura would've been frustrated at the waste of time if she weren't too busy being overjoyed by the flood of information for her to memorize and digest; her hands itched for a pen to take notes with so she could nail down the subtle differences in context between the ATTACKED BY SCOUTING PARTY definition and the HARSH WEATHER CONDITIONS JEOPARDIZING SUCCESS OF MISSION definition.
SEEKING BACKUP or IN NEED OF GUIDANCE FROM MISSION COMMANDER, CHAKRA RESERVES LOW or SUPPLIES DEPLETED or CURRENTLY UNARMED, BETRAYED or TRAITOR DISCOVERED—
The hand signs they were taught in the Academy were just that: simple replacements for words, meant to teach them the dexterity and positions necessary for jutsu as much they were meant to give them a way to communicate. Even with just a handful of minutes' experience, Sakura could see the ANBU's version wasn't anything comparable. What Kakashi was showing her now was a language. A language meant for battle, admittedly, with a vocabulary to match: Sakura doubted anyone would be using it to declare their love or hash out a shared laundry schedule anytime soon. But it had a grammar of sorts, a poetry to it that Sakura was sure she was only glimpsing the very surface of from Kakashi's simple explanations; killing or being killed, who was attacking or being attacked by or temporarily agreeing not to attack whom, all of it came together as much in the combination of signs as in the simple words themselves. Sakura could have spent months diving into it without ever being bored. But right now, she didn't have months—she had all of the next few minutes, watched by a murderer and her sensei both, both of them clearly wanting her to work through the meaning of Itachi's message on her own.
Sakura frowned. Flipped through the signs a few more times just to feel for herself they way they fit together now that she knew their meaning, the movement of palm and fingers growing more fluid each time. Thought, as she worked through them, of the meanings Kakashi had taught her, of what exactly Itachi could've been trying to say through his choice of signs.
And then she stopped. Closed her eyes. Bit her lip, hard enough she tasted blood and had to hurriedly send a zip of chakra to her mouth to heal herself.
She had a translation. It was bizarre. It didn't make any sense. If she was wrong, Kakashi would think she was insane, and Itachi—well, she couldn't imagine Itachi laughing, but maybe he'd try it for a first time just to laugh at her. But...
When she thought about the way the words fit together, the explanations Kakashi had given her, she couldn't imagine it being anything else.
"All right," Sakura said. It was Kakashi who had set her this task, but she found herself naturally turning to Itachi as she spoke. These were his words, after all. It was his approval that mattered.
"I think... I think what you wanted to tell me is, Long-term undercover mission failed due to betrayal by mission-giver. Captured and currently undergoing torture. Requesting assistance immediately."
She looked between Itachi and Kakashi, waiting for one of them to break, to make it obvious her guess was comically wrong—but instead Itachi glanced down and away, overcome with a sudden shyness, like the fact of hearing it out loud was for a moment too much to deal with.
"That's..." Sakura looked at Kakashi, beseeching. "That can't be right, can it?"
He's lying, isn't he?
He had to be lying, because he was Uchiha Itachi, and because if he wasn't—
She hadn't seen the bodies. She hadn't known the people. But she'd walked the streets of Sasuke's clan compound after Sasuke left, trying to keep some trace of him in mind, and she still remembered perfectly the empty streets. Houses with doors hanging open, the entrances warped by rain or covered in dust but otherwise looking like their owners might return home; faint stains that Sakura knew weren't rust in the shadows of alleys where the rain hadn't touched. An entire ghost town left to a single child.
Every last one of those people was dead because of Itachi. And if Itachi was on a mission from Konoha...
Had Sandaime-sama known? Did Lady Tsunade?
They couldn't have, there could be no way—but if what Itachi was saying was true, there was no possible way that at least one of the two didn't know.
Kakashi must've noticed the play of emotions across her face. He sighed. "I shouldn't be telling you this," he said.
Sakura sat up straighter. Considering everything else he'd already told her, that this would be the statement he was hesitant about said something.
"After the massacre, the ANBU were put in charge of cleanup. It left us with questions. Certain things we found didn't quite make sense. Of course, we wanted to investigate." Kakashi made a harsh, low sound between his teeth, the cousin to a growl. "We were... heavily discouraged from doing so. By The Third Hokage, and especially by Shimura Danzo."
Itachi flinched. It was brief, smothered movement, barely a twitch, but right now this was halfway to a lecture and Sakura had always been the one who paid too much attention in class.
She pounced. "Is that who this is about?"
A long hesitation, so long that she thought he might refuse to answer entirely, and then Itachi nodded.
It made a chilling amount of sense. She'd heard the name before, in passing, just from Lady Tsunade complaining about her predecessor's choice of advisers and the ridiculous decisions they tried to force on her. She'd played it off to Sakura as if it were a joke, but Sakura hadn't missed the lines of stress under her eyes or the way she grit teeth when she spoke of them. If it were The Third alone who'd set this mission, a mission so secret only the Hokage could know, then Itachi would be freed of it upon his death. But if there were others sharing the duty of handler, then it could be trapping him still, a contract lasting path the death of the one who'd first signed it.
(And if it was him, that meant that Lady Tsunade might not know about this, might not have agreed to cover up the deaths of so many on the orders of her predecessor. She hoped, she hoped, she hoped—let Lady Tsunade not know about this.)
Sakura asked, carefully, "Is it him who has you now?"
Another, even longer pause. Itachi nodded again, short and sharp.
"Right," Sakura said, sucking in a breath, "right, so you're not..."
There were a dozen ways she could've finished that sentence. Not dead. Not just a terrifying merciless killer. Not our enemy after all. But all of those felt too much, somehow. Too intense for a man who was still functionally a stranger, a man who she somehow knew less about than she thought she had only fifteen minutes ago. For a day he'd been her ghost, and now—
He was alive, and somewhere in their village one of Konoha's advisers had him captive.
Was it treason, what Danzo was doing? Or would it be treason to go against him?
Not that it mattered, really. Sakura was still part of Team Seven, even if she was the only member of it in Konoha today. Kakashi had taught her well.
Those who break the rules are trash. But those who abandon their teammates are worse than trash.
If The Third hadn't wanted this, Sakura thought, then he shouldn't have led this village the way he had. She had a feeling he'd be smiling down on her.
"All right," she said, standing. She was gladder than ever she'd gone to Kakashi for this; it had been a while since they'd been on a mission together, with her training under Lady Tsunade, but he was still her sensei. "What's the plan?"
Kakashi eye crinkled in a smile. "Well, as I like to say, better to ask forgiveness than permission... does your, ah, guest, have any idea where he's being held?"
"Itachi?" Sakura asked, turning expectantly.
Instead of giving an answer, he just stared at them both, openly confused, and gave a sign that Sakura now knew meant QUESTION or MISSION PARAMETERS UNCLEAR.
"We're breaking you out," Sakura said. "Obviously."
"Obviously," Kakashi echoed teasingly, despite not knowing what Itachi was saying in the first place.
There came the QUESTION sign again, then TRAITOR, then QUESTION again, all rapid-fire.
"Well, officially. But Kakashi thinks you're telling the truth, and I trust Kakashi, so." Sakura shrugged with a calmness she was trying very hard to convince herself to feel.
It wasn't going to be that easy. Nothing could be, when S-Class secrets and the highest ranks of Konoha's shinobi forces were involved. If even the slightest thing went wrong, Lady Tsunade would have very little recourse but to execute them both herself. But—she trusted Tsunade, and she trusted Kakashi, and the only person in this she didn't trust was the one who was now her enemy. That made it simple.
Lady Tsunade wasn't able to oppose Konoha's advisers directly; if she brought her suspicions to her now, with only a ghost no one else could see and some hand signs she didn't know for proof, she'd be—well, not disbelieved, exactly. Not by Tsunade. But the whole thing would be tied up in red tape so long Itachi would be long dead and his body disposed of before Tsunade could get even a hint of evidence that anything had happened.
Red tape, crucially, a pair of rogue shinobi weren't (couldn't be) tied up in.
Rescue Itachi's body, reunite it with his disembodied chakra, bring both in front of Tsunade and let her see for herself the rot that infected the advisers.
Not easy. But straightforward. And that was good enough for Sakura.
She smiled at Itachi, genuinely this time, and offered him a hand she knew he couldn't take.
"If you're telling the truth, you're one of us. And we believe you. So let us help you, okay?"
And Itachi nodded, something that almost looked like hope in his eyes, and let his hand pass through hers in a way that felt like a promise.