[Cross-posted from AO3; originally posted there last week, on 06/08/2015.]
A.N.: This is set post-canon, but technically it's a post-canon AU from some point after chapter 699 - it doesn't take into account the timeskip in chapter 700 or the Naruto Gaiden.
.-.-.-.
"I need a check-up," Karin announces, and kicks shut Sakura's office door behind her.
"For... anything in particular?" says Sakura.
"Some chakra stuff," Karin says vaguely, "just some, y'know, whatever. I definitely need a check-up," and she shoves aside a pile of paperwork, plants herself on Sakura's desk, and yanks down the zip of her jacket.
Sakura waits, in case any further explanation is forthcoming: but it isn't, and Karin's just waiting, her eyes shut tight and her jacket wide open, so Sakura heaves a very well-practised sigh of exasperation and gets to her feet. "Where's the problem?" she says. "And what is the problem?"
"Hard to describe," Karin says. "Kind of everywhere? I dunno. You should look for it."
"I actually have regular consulting hours," Sakura says, conversationally, "and my lunchbreak isn't during them. If you were wondering."
Karin cracks one eye open – sees the chakra swelling up to glove Sakura's hand, sees Sakura studying her – shuts the eye again, and grips the edge of the desk as though bracing for a particularly painful operation. "I wasn't," she says. "Look, I don't have all day, are you gonna get on with it or—"
Sakura flattens her chakra-gloved hand above Karin's heart a little harder than necessary, and a sudden intake of breath cuts off the words. In the silence, Sakura closes her own eyes: focusing on the flow of her chakra, pressing down below the skin, tracing out and threading through the fragile web of blood and nerves and energy.
But there's no disturbance. At least, there's none that Sakura can feel – no blockage, no disruption, no sign that Karin's been on the receiving end of any malicious chakra-damage jutsu recently. Sakura's pretty sure she would have heard about it by now if she had been, anyway. Karin's not the kind to suffer in silence. Karin's not the kind to do anything much in silence.
Sakura wouldn't have expected her to suffer a medical check-up in silence either, actually.
"What exactly is the problem?" she asks, but Karin still says nothing. Her breathing is quick and shallow, hot against Sakura's neck. "Look, you're not the only one with better things to be doing," Sakura says impatiently, "you'll save us both time if you give me some idea what I'm looking for. Is there pain, or difficulty controlling chakra, or...?"
"All of that," Karin says. Her voice is sounding rather strained. "All of whatever you said, yeah—" and Sakura opens her eyes just in time to see Karin's hand fly to her mouth, choking off whatever she was about to say. Whatever sound she was about to make. A flush has spread down from her face into the deep V of her unzipped jacket; her expression might be pain, but it looks very much like something else.
For one long, blank moment, Sakura's too startled to react.
The moment would be longer, would be blanker – but it's broken by a sound that Karin doesn't catch as well as the last one, a not-at-all voluntary sort of sound – and though she bites down on her hand at once to swallow back the rest of it, it's enough to jolt Sakura back to herself with the realisation that a discomfiting warmth has settled in the space beneath her ribs, and it's spreading out as slow and hot as lava.
Ninja are professionally paranoid, and Sakura's rarely met one whose heartrate doesn't rise during medical examination: even by the usual standard, Karin's is rapid.
There's probably a recommended way to deal with situations like this. Patient arousal response: it's probably in textbooks, it's probably common enough that Tsunade's encountered it enough times to be jaded to it; the advice is probably not feign ignorance and deliberately provoke your patient further. Sakura tries not to think about that too hard. A terrible curiosity is creeping up on her, nowhere near as clinically detached as it probably ought to be; but she opens the channel of her chakra wider, and tries not to think about that too hard, either.
Karin's gripping the edge of the desk tight enough that it'd have been splinters long ago if it were Sakura in her place. It would be easier to pretend she doesn't know exactly what effect she's causing if she couldn't feel it for herself, but her chakra's laced through nerves and blood and muscle and in its crackling surge of energy the information ricochets back to her: unmistakeable, contagious.
Sakura's terrible curiosity is growing more terrible, more curious still. If Karin still thinks she hasn't noticed, then it couldn't hurt – if it's just for a single moment, it couldn't hurt – and before she can think better of it, Sakura lets her chakra flare.
The room is silent, but only because at some point Sakura's forgotten to keep breathing and Karin's still smothering back all sound so fiercely that she's probably at risk of suffocation – and when Karin's heartbeat at last begins to settle, slowing, steadying out, Sakura can feel that too: in the rise and fall beneath her hand, along the threads of her own chakra where they're traced into the same channels as Karin's.
And then Karin lets out her breath, and Sakura cuts the signal much faster than is clinically advised and whirls around to busy herself shuffling through the chaotic shelves behind her desk. "I didn't find any abnormalities," she tells the shelves, her voice too loud, suddenly very aware that the back of her neck is burning, that her hand is still prickling with the memory of chakra, that her stomach feels liquid, feels heated, "but if the, uh – the problems, if they continue—"
The sound of a zip, the sound of hopping down from the desk. "No, you probably fixed it," Karin says, vaguely. "Thanks, I guess," and the door of Sakura's office shuts, leaving her alone with her blood so loud she can hear it, with her afternoon of paperwork, with her desk still warm where Karin had been sitting – where she had – where Sakura just—
Medical curiosity, Sakura tells herself, and then says it aloud very firmly, just to make sure: "Only medical curiosity." And maybe a bit of horrified fascination, as well – maybe some prurient personal interest...
It had, after all, been very hard to look away.
She looks back down at her desk, at the paperwork Karin had shoved aside. She'd been getting ahead on next month's treatment inventory; she pulls it out of the mess and rearranges it in front of her: four stapled pages of numbers and tables and data in Shizune's cramped, semi-legible handwriting.
She keeps on looking at it. Her pencil is right there. She should pick it up; she should get back to work. She shifts foot to foot, and slides a furtive glance towards the door instead.
It's not like anyone would notice if it was locked, really – not just for a few minutes. And even if anyone were to notice, it's not like they'd question it; definitely not like they'd know where to attribute it, either: the remarkably resilient memory of Karin biting her hand to keep quiet.
It's Sakura's door, Sakura's office – Sakura's lunchbreak, too – and she can do what she likes with it.
Sakura goes to lock it.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
Above the entrance to the operating theatre, a red light goes on while surgery is in session: occupied, keep out. This does nothing to deter Karin, who announces herself as ever with the slam of a door. "Have you got files on that Mitarashi woman?"
"What?" says Sakura. "I mean – what? I'm in surgery!"
"Yeah," says Karin, in a tone of voice that says so what?, and she spares the patient laid out on Sakura's operating table a single disinterested glance. "My supervisor said I should fill in some forms or whatever, but I'm not wasting my time on admin. You can sort it out for me without that crap, right?"
"I'm in surgery," Sakura repeats. Her surgical mask covers most of her face; she's keeping her voice as hushed as she can; she can't lift her hands to gesture, because one of her hands is splayed over an opened laryngeal cavity and the other is steadying it by the wrist, both of them bright with chakra. It's possible some of the effect of her furious incredulity is being lost. "I'm in surgery! Karin, get out, if I wasn't currently in the middle of an operation I swear you'd be—"
"Fine," says Karin, "okay, fine. I heard you the first time." She's not even wearing a surgical mask. Sakura's going to find her later and kick her through a wall, and then stand over her reciting the Leaf Hospital's guidelines for medical competency for as long as it takes Karin's inbuilt healing jutsu to put the pieces back together. Or possibly just report her to Tsunade – but no, not that: not even interrupting surgery deserves punishment like that. "Fine," Karin says, again, "but I want those files, okay? You better not forget."
"Get the hell out of here," Sakura says. She manages to keep her voice even, but the struggle it takes is audible. "Last warning, or I swear you'll regret it. I swear you will."
"Yeah, whatever," says Karin. She lingers another moment at Sakura's side before she turns for the door, heaving a sigh as long-suffering as though she's the one being inconvenienced here.
So infuriated is Sakura, and trying so hard not to let her fury distract her from her close, fiddly work, that it's not until hours later that she remembers the last time she saw Karin – and then the mortification hits her all at once, on her way home in the fading golden sunshine at the end of the evening, and Sakura takes to the rooftops for all the rest of the journey, leaping and sprinting as fast as she can, so that no one she knows will see her, and want to know exactly why it is that she's so flamingly hot in the face.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
There's an official request for Mitarashi Anko's medical records lying in her inbox the next morning. It's signed in triplicate by Karin, Karin's supervisor, and by Anko herself; it's as above board as any paperwork could ever possibly be, and Sakura would be well within her rights to delegate the errand.
She doesn't. She feels, quite distinctly, that to do so would be to concede defeat, and a little thing like deliberately helping a former international terrorist get herself off on her own office desk is not enough for Sakura to concede defeat, even if just the thought of it causes her stomach to lurch guiltily, and heat to sink guiltily lower still; and so she pulls out the files, and goes over to the Research & Development building on her break.
It's a squat brick building with few windows and clean, cold hallways. Karin's office – when at last Sakura locates it, deep in the maze of chemical-smelling corridors – is just as cold, just as clean, and absurdly well organised: a desk down either wall, with drawings and diagrams and annotated paperwork pinned above each of them. Even the files on their shelves are ordered by colour, labelled on their spines. "I have to share an office," Karin says, by way of greeting, though Sakura hasn't asked. "They won't let me work alone. Ethics reasons," she adds in disgust, and knocks her fist against a stack of boxes beside the right-side desk. "Dunno what the hell they think I'm gonna do, if I'm left alone. You got those files?"
Every last one of Hidden Sound's hideouts was picked clean after the war by investigative teams. Sakura's seen the reports they produced; she's had the nightmares those reports induced: she has a pretty good idea of what the Leaf thinks Karin might do.
It wouldn't be diplomatic to say so, though, and Karin's waiting impatiently for her answer. She seems busy and irritable, and entirely unfazed to be around Sakura, and it's almost enough for Sakura to start wondering if she didn't imagine the whole thing – if it wasn't a particularly vivid, incriminating dream she had one night, and if Karin's complete lack of acknowledgement that anything ever happened isn't just because it never did – because Karin has no way of knowing what Sakura's sleeping mind made her do.
With an effort, Sakura pulls herself from paranoid reverie. "If you want to take a look through them now, I can answer any preliminary questions," she offers. She drops herself into the desk chair, wheeling it nearer as Karin shuts the door. "It was before my time that Anko received her seal, but she's been my patient since Tsunade-sama took me on, so if there's anything you need to—"
"If there's anything I need?" Karin interrupts.
"If I know it," says Sakura, after a moment. There was something – odd, about that. "I can just ask Tsunade-sama if not, so either way..." She offers up Anko's files.
Karin flips through, briefly – then casts them carelessly aside and deposits herself on the edge of her desk. "I'll look at them later," she announces.
A beat of silence. Sakura tries to scoot her chair back from the desk without seeming as though she's doing it at all, but Karin's foot gets in the way: planted on the edge of the seat, beside Sakura's thigh. Sakura looks at it. Then she looks up at Karin, who's studying her intently, with an expression that's more than a little difficult to read: intense, very focused, blushing darker by the moment.
"Or," says Sakura, after a moment, "if you don't have any questions – then I might as well go back to the hospital. I might as well just—"
Karin sets her other sandal on the chair: one either side of Sakura, and she folds her arms on her knees and leans in. "There are other things we could talk about," she says. Her voice is lower than usual. It's huskier than usual, too.
"Right," says Sakura. She says it confidently, like she has any idea what's going on. She looks down to confirm for herself that she is, in fact, now trapped where she sits. She looks back up. That very intent red stare is still fixed on her. "Right," she tries, again, "well – like I said, I'm actually on my break at the—"
The door shoves open. "There's a spare lab slot in ten minutes," someone announces, very loudly, and instantly Karin kicks Sakura's desk chair away from her so hard that it careens wildly away across the little office room and collides with the desk along the opposite wall, spilling Sakura out of it with the force of the rebound, "—but you'd better get there quick if you want it, Karin-san, I dunno who's free to supervise you."
"I don't need supervision," Karin snaps. She shoves up her glasses, still furiously red, and by the time Sakura picks herself up from the floor and rights the wheelie chair, rolls it back over to its rightful home, she's busying herself by slamming through the drawers of her desk, piling papers on its surface. "Don't you have anywhere better to be?" she says, and slides Sakura a resentful sideways look. "Won't your precious Hokage be missing you yet?"
"She's your precious Hokage too," Sakura retorts, but it's mostly by reflex: her thoughts are elsewhere, methodically testing out a set of suspicions growing stronger by the moment. She runs through a couple of silent seals, and says, "Karin?"
"What now?" says Karin, and when she whirls impatiently around Sakura catches her by the wrist, the bare skin where her long sleeve ends; she pushes a small, experimental burst of chakra from her palm, and Karin stills as suddenly as though it's stopped her heart.
It's a technique for emergency examination: the fastest way to explode chakra through the network of a patient's body, and though Sakura jerks her hand back at once, traces of her chakra will be lingering in Karin's system for a good few minutes yet. She should tell her so – she would tell her so, under normal circumstances – or, well, under normal circumstances Sakura would have explained the jutsu to a patient beforehand, warned them of what the procedure involved, and had a viable medical reason to use it in the first place; but when the words rise up, she bites them back.
Karin's flush is already returning with a vengeance. She sits down. She does it very abruptly, and presses her hand to her mouth in deep concentration, and she doesn't look anywhere near Sakura at all.
And as far as Sakura's concerned, that settles it. It was never her imagination, she thinks, victorious – it was Karin, all Karin: she's weird about chakra and she's weird about Sakura, and whatever it was that happened in the hospital, Sakura very much suspects that Karin saw it coming. She suspects it was exactly what Karin wanted to happen, in fact: which means it was exactly as much her fault as it was Sakura's – or which at least makes it much easier for Sakura to think of it that way, which is the part that really matters – and with that thought, a vague and lingering sense of guilt lifts from her.
"I'll see you later, then," Sakura says cheerily, but Karin's too preoccupied even to realise she's been addressed, and Sakura doesn't stick around to wait. The urge to laugh is rising suddenly, wildly, up in her, and she hurls herself through the double doors of R&D into the daylight with her laughter bubbling up and spilling over, giddy and ridiculous, impossible to squash back down.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
It's two days before Sakura sees her again: this time in the grocery store, while Karin's scowling at a display of canned beans as though each of them has personally offended her at some point in the past. Sakura hails her sunnily from the end of the aisle, and then Karin scowls at her as well.
"You know," says Sakura, as earnest as she can, "I'm glad I ran into you. I really am. How are you doing?"
Karin receives the enquiry with immediate disbelief and, then, immense suspicion – as though, to her, how are you doing is the conversational equivalent of a very well-concealed weapon.
Sakura persists, more gratingly earnest still. "Your chakra problem, I mean. The one you came to see me for? Did it sort itself out in the end?"
The suspicion deepens. Sakura waits, waits, waits – adds several cans to her basket – waits, waits—
Karin concedes, eventually, that she's fine.
"Oh, I'm so glad to hear it," says Sakura, warm as can be – which seems to deepen Karin's suspicion exactly as much as she had hoped it would, and her mistrustful glare follows Sakura all the way out of the aisle.
A little later, in the plate-glass doors of the refrigerated shelves, Sakura catches a reflection of the mistrustful glare still following her, though it seems less mistrustful and now more contemplative – more contemplative, and also more directed at Sakura's butt, as well.
Sakura doesn't mention it. She doesn't mention it when Karin slinks closer than strictly necessary in the checkout line, either; and in return, it goes unmentioned that Sakura's been deliberately raising her chakra signal, just slightly, ever since she first caught sight of Karin inside the shop.
If Karin won't admit she's up to anything, then Sakura doesn't have to admit it either; and if Karin doesn't realise that Sakura's ready to play her at her own ridiculous game – to play her and to win – well, Sakura thinks, as she rationalises it to herself: that's hardly Sakura's problem.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
"Oh! – oh, um, it's – nice to see you," says Hinata, though she doesn't sound altogether convinced of that. She says it to someone outside of Sakura's line of sight, but there's only one person Sakura's expecting to see when she looks around: there in the doorway of the changing room, her sandals tucked under her arm.
Sakura gives the towel around her hair one last scrub before she pulls it free. "Fancy seeing you here," she says.
"What a coincidence," Karin agrees, so blandly shameless that laughter nearly startles out of Sakura. She'd mark it up to coincidence, if it was anyone else; she'd assume they'd just happened to feel the same longing for the hot springs on this chilly weekday evening as she and Hinata had. But Karin can track chakra, and Sakura knows she can.
Maybe she thinks Sakura's too oblivious to put the pieces together; maybe Karin really thinks she's just that subtle. Whichever it is, Sakura's enjoying herself much too much to mention it.
Hinata fishes out her sandals from beneath the changing room bench. "We're just on our, um. Way out," she explains.
"You've just missed us," Sakura agrees, and before she retrieves her tunic from its peg she links her hands to stretch above her. It's a luxurious stretch. Without her tunic, it's also a sleeveless stretch in shorts and undershirt only, and there's a secretive, giddy spark of a thrill in how hopelessly caught Karin's attention is by her: a loose thread of focus, snagged on Sakura and unravelling, unnoticed. "Really, if you'd just got here a few minutes earlier..."
"Then I'd have had to put up with you talking all the time," Karin says, "so hurry up and get lost, I'm only here for the peace and quiet."
"Suit yourself," says Sakura, and she pulls on her tunic with a graceless wriggle. When she emerges on the other side of it, Karin is scowling. Admittedly Karin is usually scowling, but Sakura's been paying her enough attention recently that she's started picking up on all the infinite shades of irritation Karin is capable of expressing with her scowls, and this one, Sakura is quite sure, is undercut by disappointment.
Two can play at this game. Sakura wants to tell her so, a cheerful challenge whispered in her ear – but she doesn't. She balls up her damp towel; she shoves it in her bag; with the airiest, the friendliest of farewells, she follows out the changing rooms behind Hinata, and fights the urge to look back.
Two can play at this game, and Karin really doesn't seem to have realised that yet.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
There's a run-in at the riverside, among the ranks of summertime sunbathers on the banks of the Nakano; there's an almost certainly accidental encounter in the courtyard outside Torture & Interrogation, Sakura on her way to pick up Ino; there's a very strange game of footsie beneath the table at Ichiraku, well out of Naruto's line of sight, which Sakura's pretty sure she wins by forfeit when Karin becomes so agitated that she knocks her own ramen bowl to the ground; and then, one morning, Sakura is woken up by rapping at her window.
She heaves herself from bed; she pushes up the blinds. Karin is squatting on the very narrow brim of the windowsill and looking understandably irritable for someone already awake at 4.30AM, the village still washed out and grey in the pre-dawn light. That Karin's generally this irritable regardless of the hour of the day only registers secondly for Sakura, who's still yawning, blearily rubbing sleep from her eyes.
"I need some stuff out of your medical inventory," Karin says, and hesitates for a moment when Sakura wiggles her fingers in sardonic greeting. "Yeah, whatever. Hi. I need some of the drugs you've got – Kabuto kept them for the curse seal subjects, I wanna get hold of them again but access is restricted and I'm a security threat, apparently—" derisive at the thought, "—so you need to sign off on it for me."
There's an unfurled scroll stretched out before her. Sakura blinks at it, and then she takes it from Karin to study the small print. It hasn't become any more acceptable for her to leapfrog all village bureaucracy and go straight to Sakura, but Sakura's broken more than enough rules herself in the past for the sake of people she cares about; increasingly, she finds it hard to feel anything but sympathy. It's hardly as though skipping a few steps on the bureaucratic ladder is the worst thing Karin's ever done in the name of medical research, anyway.
"I'll get a pen," Sakura says at last, and tucks the scroll beneath her arm and leaves her bedroom, picking her way through the shadowy night-time gloom of her apartment.
Karin's still in the windowsill when she returns, though for whatever impenetrable reason she's looking a whole lot more flustered, adjusting something in an inner pocket of her jacket. Sakura passes back the scroll; she does her best to keep a straight face when Karin turns nearly scarlet at the extremely brief contact of their hands, and instead says, "It's going okay, then? Your – whatever it is?"
"Fine," Karin says at once, as belligerent as any fuck off could have been. She fixes Sakura with a suspicious look that Sakura's far too inured to to be fazed by, and relents: "It's fine. All right, I guess. Be easier if your lot hadn't burned so many documents."
"Your lot?" Sakura says. She says it in a tone of such inoffensive mildness she can almost guarantee that it'll aggravate Karin – and it does: she gets a remarkably irritated scowl for her troubles. Given how deliberately Sakura's been cultivating that particular tone lately, she'd have been disappointed with anything less.
"Our lot," Karin says. "Whatever, you know what I mean. The winning side. The good guys." Sakura chooses to overlook the sarcasm. "Kabuto's a piece of shit, but he knew what he was talking about."
A brief, blinding flash of sunlight far behind her, as someone pushes back a window and the light catches on the glass. In the first traces of dawn, the rooftops are turning rust-coloured. Karin's hesitating, caught up by a fit of indecision – gripping the edge of the sill, gaze sliding shiftily left to right behind her glasses – and Sakura says nothing, sleepily waiting, attempting to untangle the unreasonable kinks of her bed-hair. It's a cold morning, and her bare legs are starting to feel the chill.
"I'll come by the hospital and pick that stuff up later," Karin says at last. She says it like she's forcing it out, like it's the most generous allowance she's ever made. "To save you the trip. So don't bother coming to me."
Sakura pauses in her untangling. "Are you sure? Your department's on my way home, so it's really not—"
"You better have it ready, though," Karin says, loud enough to drown her out, and then takes off with a jump so abrupt that her sandal skids on the windowsill like a genin on her very first day of chakra training. To the helter-skelter stack of apartments across the street from Sakura, to a telephone pole, to the apartment block again – Sakura slings herself halfway out her window and puts her hand to her mouth, and calls her name as loudly as she dares, so early in the morning.
She whirls around, balanced on a sheet of corrugated aluminium siding repurposed as a ramshackle balcony roof. "What?"
"You won't be getting anything," Sakura informs her, "if you don't say thank you."
It's a cold morning, but Karin's look of outraged consternation will be enough to keep her warm for a while. Sakura props her elbows on her windowsill and settles in to wait.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
Getting dressed for work later, she finds that one of the thin undershirts she likes to wear beneath her medic's uniform seems to have gone missing; but that's the kind of thing that goes missing all the time. It fell out of her basket at the launderette, perhaps; it's fallen down the back of her wardrobe; she left it in someone else's locker at work. After the initial moment of frustration once she realises it's gone, Sakura forgets all about it.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
There's an almost sociable run-in at the weapons market one early morning; there's an incident with an unlocked dressing room door that would probably be awkward if it was anyone but Karin, and anyone with shame; there's a particularly peculiar sighting at the village's ranks of clunky new public payphones, which leaves Sakura unsure if Karin understands how long-distance phone calls work or if she generally just yells that much while talking to her team; and then one afternoon there's an audience at the practice grounds by the time Sakura finishes training, though it was deserted when she began.
Her warm-downs don't usually last as long as this one does. Sitting on a tree stump at the edge of the clearing, Sakura's audience raises no complaints about the unscheduled delay. The audience's expression is unreadable, her glasses blankly reflective in the sunlight, but she's sitting forward in an attitude of profound focus.
At last Sakura runs out of creative excuses to keep on going; the dust settles, and she goes over to retrieve her water bottle from beside the tree stump. Karin watches her do it. She straightens up to drink – Karin watches that, as well – and Sakura stands straighter, adds an unnecessary bicep flex to the process of lowering her bottle. Karin watches that too, so intently that Sakura forces herself to stop before the strange, flattering warmth overrides her common sense and coaxes her further still. She's not sure Karin is even remotely familiar with the concept of embarrassing yourself, but Sakura's not that far gone yet. "Did you want something?"
It takes Karin a moment to answer. "Yeah."
Sakura waits. She waits some more. She shoves her sweaty hair back from her forehead and gives up waiting, and prompts, "Anything particular?"
With some effort, Karin shakes off her very obvious preoccupation with the damp patches on Sakura's shirt. Her tone becomes abruptly business-like. "Yeah. Yeah – I'm gonna need Juugo around at some point. I'll need to leave the village to get him, and I'll need permission to leave, and I'll need to get all that shit sorted in advance. So I wanna talk to you about it."
"You'd be better off speaking to Tsunade-sama," Sakura points out, but only for the sake of Karin's instinctive recoil. Tsunade granted Karin's temporary citizenship under duress of the fact Karin had, technically, saved her life during the war; but neither Tsunade nor Karin seem to have found very much to like about the other since then, and both seem to have found so much to dislike that half the time Sakura suspects Karin and her citizenship are only one more muttered insult in the hall outside the Hokage's office from being violently torn apart.
"Well," Sakura relents, "I guess it's fine, if you can find out what kind of paperwork—"
"Got it," Karin says at once, and after a moment's rummaging produces several loose sheets from inside her jacket, along with a selection of ballpoint pens.
Sakura pauses, taken aback, and gets a questioning look passed her way. You actually have a reason to be here probably wouldn't go down well, and nor would the elaboration: a reason that isn't just my abs; and both of those would ruin the illusion that neither of them know what's going on here. Diplomatically, she says: "You're more organised than I am."
Karin's expression is unimpressed. "Obviously. I've seen your office, it's a total dump. I don't know how you stand it. Listen, I checked all the mission schedules they'd let me see, I've drawn up a preliminary list of dates—"
Sakura supposes she should have known better than to think Karin would ever take a compliment as a compliment. None of her attention is left on Sakura; she's laying out her papers on the dusty edge of the training field.
The paperwork isn't urgent, though; and Karin didn't have to come all the way out here to talk to her about it – to a training ground so distant that Sakura's attacks won't do anything worse than startle up a flurry of birds from the forest, that the tremors in the ground won't shudder the village – and Karin certainly didn't have to sit in audience for thirty shameless minutes as Sakura got sweatier, dustier, redder in the face with exertion and training.
And Sakura didn't have to play along, either. She takes another drink, one that involves much less bicep-flexing than before, and sits down in the grass beside her to start talking technicalities.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
And then there's a night out after work, and Sakura pushes back the door of the bar, scanning round for the bright yellowy shine of Ino's hair. She spots it at a booth table tucked away towards the back – but with her, Sakura spots the wild and very red mess of hair belonging to the person Ino appears to be deep in conversation with.
It dawns on Sakura: the game is up.
"Forehead!" yells Ino. She's jumped up from her seat, waving across the room. "Get over here!"
And even if the game isn't up yet, it might as well be. All it's going to take is one look from Karin – longing, lingering, lustful – for Ino to suss her out: and then the days of Sakura pretending she hasn't noticed a thing will be over; the days of Karin believing she hasn't noticed a thing will be over; their – objectively, very strange – game will be dragged into the open, and Ino will joyfully spend the rest of Sakura's life making sure she never lives it down.
The game is up; there's no way the game isn't up. There's nothing for it. Sakura takes a deep breath, hitches her bag higher on her shoulder, and prepares to meet her end with as much dignity as she can scrape together.
But Ino doesn't greet her with I know every last one of your dirty little secrets; she doesn't greet her with a meaningful eyebrow waggle; she doesn't even bother with hello. "I've never seen anyone that moody in my life, basically," Ino announces, and lifts her voice up over Karin's immediate, heated demand that she go fuck herself, "—and that's including you, Sakura – so I was like, okay, there is clearly a stick up your ass today—"
"Bullshit," says Karin. "This is all bullshit. This is the biggest pile of shit I've—"
"—a bigger stick up your ass than usual," Ino concedes. Her high spirits are buoyant. "Not that I'm talking to you. I'm talking to medic-san. So I said, that you'd better come with me. To her. I said that to Karin. You need to calm the hell down, I said. Which is true," she concludes. "It's always true. And that's what she's doing here, so you can pretty much just think of it like an act of charity, Forehead."
It takes Sakura a moment to process this. It takes Karin less than a moment to pick a fight with Ino, and Ino certainly less than a moment to delightedly seize upon the fight, and Sakura has to raise her voice over both of them of them before she's heard. "Wait – wait, shut up! Both of you shut up," she orders, and lifts her hand to shush them. It doesn't work. She smacks her hand on the table: that does work, though the table nearly splinters. "Since when do you two know each other?"
"Oh, for a while," says Ino, rather vaguely, "just, y'know. Around. From work," but at the same time Karin says, "Prison," and that's considerably less vague.
"Interrogation," corrects Ino, "but the past is the past and it's so great how you've promised to stop going on about it all the time, right? Sakura, come on, sit your butt down. Wait, no – get a drink. Get a drink then sit your butt down. Why are you still here when you should be doing that?"
It's a good question. The sound of raised voices explodes behind her again as she goes over to the backlit gloom of the bar; Sakura makes it a double.
On her return she catches Karin checking her out, but only with a flick of a glance – up and down, perfunctory, and so indifferent that for a moment Sakura's almost alarmed by it. That level of subtlety is not normal – or rather, it's normal for anyone but Karin, and Sakura's been embroiled in Karin's unspeakably bizarre games for long enough by now that, somehow, 'normal' seems more disconcerting than 'seductively ambushed near the foot of the Hokage Mountain' could ever be.
Except that's a ridiculous reaction – and one that almost certainly means Sakura has been spending far too much time with Karin, to be as absurdly, unreasonably suspicious as she is – and Sakura sets it firmly aside. She slides into the booth beside her, and Karin heaves a very eloquent sigh of resentment: that much, at least, is business as usual.
But the evening continues to be normal. It continues to be abnormally normal. She's sitting so near to Karin that she can feel her warmth, so near that when Ino drops a particularly aggravating remark and Karin reacts with predictable force, her elbow jabs Sakura in the side; she's sitting so near that, if Karin were to slyly check her out, Sakura would notice – but after that first time, brief and perfunctory, Sakura doesn't catch her at it. And isn't that the kind of thing Karin would do? It seems like the kind of thing she'd do. It's what Sakura does, anyway, when Ino succeeds in propelling Karin to her feet from sheer irritation, and the line of bare skin between her skirt and stockings arrives very suddenly near to Sakura's eye-level.
Perhaps it's just that she's come straight from work, Sakura consoles herself; perhaps it's that she most likely still smells of medical disinfectant.
But that's never done anything to deter Karin before now. Nothing has ever done anything to deter Karin before now.
Very slowly, very casually, Sakura slides too close to her along their bench. No response. She executes a very subtle under-the-table kick to the ankle, and receives a sideways look of suspicion. She attempts provocation via playful shoulder nudge—
"Are you drunk?" Karin demands, in a tone of such monumental disbelief that Sakura sits back up feeling rather insulted. Fine. If she's going to be like that – fine. She scoots back to her own side of the bench, ignoring with dignity the arch of Ino's eyebrows across the table.
An hour slides into another and another, and they're evicted from the closing bar into the cool, faded light of late evening. The reflection of lanterns in the Nakano proves too heartbreakingly beautiful for Ino to pass without stopping to clutch one hand to her heart and the other to Sakura's sleeve, and so their party takes an unscheduled delay – then unexpectedly acquires Kiba, and promptly loses Kiba as he hurtles past on Akamaru's back with a yodelling yell that grows distant as fast as it grew near – unexpectedly acquires Lee and then loses Lee, just as promptly, as he blitzes past in furious pursuit – and at last makes its meandering way up to the Yamanaka gardens.
The gates are white lines in the dusk, propped open with flowerbeds stretching murkily on and on behind them. Ino gives Sakura a thwack on the shoulder that's no less affectionate for being nearly hard enough to numb her entire arm, and pulls her into a hug. "I think you embarrassed every single person in that bar tonight," she says, under her breath and right into Sakura's ear, "so nice work, Forehead, good going." It sounds like she's wearing her most beautiful lethal grin, which is rarely anything but a sign for Sakura to brace herself – but: "You owe me," Ino continues, "you seriously owe me, I'm letting you off so easy that it's killing me. You better not forget about this. Even if you forget, you can bet I won't."
If Ino's taking mercy on her now, it's only because she plans to take none at all in the future: but Sakura's still oddly touched by it, which is as sure a sign as anything that her common sense hasn't yet returned from its travels. "I don't know what you're talking about," she says, very firmly. "Get some sleep, Ino-pig, you're talking nonsense."
"If you say so," says Ino, and pulls away. Sakura was right: her most beautiful lethal grin is very much in place, and it scans over Karin as well, where she's loitering near Sakura's side with her hands jammed in her pockets, subjecting the garden wall to a needlessly belligerent glare. "See you around, then," Ino says at last, carelessly.
"Yeah," says Karin. "You too, I guess. Whatever," and though it sounds like even that much politeness is physically painful to her, the warm swell of affection Sakura's already been feeling for Ino suddenly, unreasonably, grows. Maybe next she can teach Karin about please and thank you; maybe after that she can teach Karin about not luring people into weird sex games.
With a wave and a final knowing, backwards glance at Sakura, Ino sets off down the ghost-pale line of the estate's gravel path.
The warmth in Sakura's heart lingers, fond and sweet, for a few minutes more. It lingers while they're walking, for as long as it takes to reach a place away from the streetlights and the roving, curious gaze of any sleepless Yamanaka; it lingers for as long as it takes her to realise that she and Karin are now alone – and then Karin's attitude changes entirely, immediately, and in an instant there's so little space left between them that the next breath Sakura takes is still hot from Karin's mouth.
"You know," Karin begins, her voice already low, already intent—
"Oh, come on," Sakura says, incredulous, "are you for real? Are you seriously doing this?"
"—since we're alone," Karin continues, because of course she's for real, and of course she's seriously doing it, and Sakura takes the one backward step needed to let her back hit the wall, out of the way and out of the murky streetlight, "I was just thinking—"
Sakura draws herself up to her full height, which is less intimidating than it could be given that it's only Karin's own height, and plants her fists on her hips. "Why are you so weird about this?" she demands.
"—that maybe we could," says Karin, and stops. Whatever bizarre track she was on, Sakura's knocked her off it: she shoves up her glasses and steps back, looking deeply affronted. "I don't know what you're talking about," she says, and starts to adjust her glasses again before seeming to remember that she just did, and jerking her hand back down instead. "I don't know what you're talking about. All I was gonna say was I've been thinking—"
Sakura hasn't. She's brazen with night-time and the lingering warmth of sake; she seizes Karin by the front of her shirt and yanks her in to close the last of the gap and kisses her. "You know exactly what I'm—" talking about, she intends to say when she lets go – intends to declare, and to declare it triumphantly – and she'll let go while Karin's still reeling in shock, while Karin instantly resorts to outright denial, while Karin attempts to explain herself away in increasingly frenzied embarrassment—
If Karin feels even a moment of shock, it's too brief for Sakura to notice it before she shoves her back against the wall and kisses back so aggressively that Sakura's line of thought casts off in the middle and doesn't return. She breaks away long enough to fight Karin into removing her glasses; she cracks her elbow against the bricks in the process, too urgent to be careful, too urgent to care.
They should talk about this – they should probably talk about this – but they can talk whenever, really, and why do right now what they could do later? Or not at all? A hand curls in Sakura's hair, abrupt and tugging and not gentle in the slightest; all the way down her spine her nerves are lighting up, and instead of fabric at Karin's hip she finds bare skin where her shirt is riding up. And technically, anyway, this isn't even escalating the situation – because technically, this isn't even the furthest it's gone between them; technically, this is still nothing at all compared to that first hospital encounter—
A shameless hand slides from her waist to her butt and pulls her nearer: which Sakura has to concede is a strong point, and one that doesn't lend itself well to discussion.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
It's already daylight when Sakura wakes up. She contemplates the strips of sunshine across her bedroom walls; she contemplates the dull, persistent ache inside her skull; she rolls her head on her pillow and contemplates Karin's ability – unsurprising, in hindsight – to look pissed off even in her sleep. There's a lot to contemplate.
Gingerly, she presses her hand against her temple. Soothing her own hangover is by no means the most inappropriate use she's found for her medical jutsu over the last few weeks, after all – and after a moment, the tension eases.
She sits up, and kicks away the sheets. "Karin." No response. Sakura pushes her shoulder, and says it again, louder – but Karin just rolls onto her back and scowls her sleeping scowl up at the ceiling instead. "All right, then," says Sakura, and swings one leg over her hips to sit down heavily on her stomach.
That wakes her up. "I didn't break in," she blurts, at once, and then blinks a few times in short-sighted confusion before her expression shifts; she takes a handful of Sakura's baggy sleep shirt and yanks her down, unexpected enough to catch her off balance.
There's noise in the street outside, the bustle of a day already underway – late morning, maybe? The window isn't closed all the way; the blinds are rattling in a mild breeze. Karin tastes of staling alcohol, but Sakura's pretty sure that she does, too; it's not as though either one of them is complaining.
And aside from anything else, it serves as very recent evidence when at last Sakura pushes away and sits back, and takes a deep, preparatory breath that still doesn't clear her head as much as she'd like, and says, "Right. Let's sort this out." She jabs a finger at Karin, who eyes it warily. "You're into me."
Karin says, "Like hell I am."
Sakura continues to sit on her, and says nothing, and waits out the very short time it takes her to turn scarlet. "Like I said," she continues, "you're into me."
Karin opens her mouth – then shuts her mouth, and looks determinedly towards the ceiling.
"And chakra," says Sakura. "You're – okay, well, I don't really understand this part, but you're into chakra. You definitely are. Probably not all chakra, I don't know how anyone could survive in a ninja village if they were into all chakra – but definitely some. Definitely mine."
Karin seems to weigh her response. "Says who?" she says at last, evasively.
"Says – are you serious?" Sakura's finger is jabbing again, all of its own accord. "Says me! Did you seriously think I hadn't noticed? How about that business in my office? You thought I didn't notice that? You really, seriously, thought I wouldn't notice?"
"I didn't—" but then Karin stops, and glares at the ceiling even more fiercely than before. "All right," she says, at last. "All right, fine. Fine. So what?"
Sakura blinks. "So – what?"
"That's what I said," says Karin. She's patting vaguely around her pillow. A few pale whorls of scar tissue curl out from where her sleeve slides up. "Where the hell are my glasses?"
Sakura had been ready to argue this for hours. She'd been expecting to argue this for hours – she'd been planning an entertaining morning based entirely around arguing Karin down on this until Karin was finally left with no other choice but to admit to her very personal, very intimate interest in both chakra and in Sakura. That had been her goal; and beyond that goal, Sakura's plans for the day are only pleasantly vague: thoughts of breakfast, of chakra, of eventually picking up exactly where they left off last night.
There's a thud on the roof above, a scrape of tiles: someone using the building as a shortcut. "You're so weird about this," Sakura says, sounding almost awed by it. "I didn't even know it was possible for someone to be this weird. You've been so weird about it that you made me weird about it, and I'm usually normal about it. Very normal. I haven't acted this weird about someone since I was twelve—"
"I'm not weird about anything," Karin says, with remarkably misplaced confidence. "So what if I started it? You joined in. You're into it. Me. Whatever. Move over, I need my glasses."
Sakura considers this. Then she shifts her weight and settles comfortably back in place, and says, "No."
Karin squints ferociously up at her. "No?"
"You heard me," Sakura agrees. She was looking forward to that argument, but just because it's been stolen out from under her it doesn't mean she can't start another. Picking a fight with Karin is easier than preparing cup ramen, after all; even inanimate objects manage it on a daily basis. "Ask nicely and I'll think about it."
Karin's ferocious squint grows more ferocious still. She braces her hands against Sakura's thighs and makes an attempt to dislodge her, but Sakura's the strongest ninja in the village, an immovable force who's perfectly content exactly where she is, and the attempt does very little but send an agreeably low shudder through her muscles and up into the pit of her stomach. "Move over, I said—"
"Say please," Sakura says brightly.
"Fuck that," Karin says at once.
"Well," says Sakura, and then again, rueful as she can, "well – that's too bad. We're going to be here all day if you keep that up."
"Is that a threat?" Karin demands. It's not even slightly a threat. Sakura resists the urge to make it into a threat. "If you wanna fight, say you wanna fight. Get to the point, don't just—"
"A-a-all day," says Sakura, raising her voice, even more meaningful than before. "Here, all day. Here, in my flat, in my bedroom, in my bed—"
Picking up on very obvious hints doesn't seem to come easily to Karin, who promptly starts forming the seals of some unidentifiable attack jutsu – but patience doesn't come easily to Sakura, who swats the seals aside and slides her hands up beneath the front of Karin's shirt, and fans them on her stomach: which cuts her off both mid-word and mid-struggle. "I'm hitting on you," Sakura says. "I'm being as obvious as I can, I'm being as obvious as you, I don't think I can be any more obvious—"
"Well, why didn't you just say that to begin with?" Karin says, her voice so exasperated that half a dozen possible responses flicker through Sakura's thoughts, each of them more outraged than the last – but that particular argument can wait. Right now there's a midday sun on the rise and several weeks' worth of frustrations to work through, and finally, finally, Karin's got the message: her ferociousness disappears, sudden as a switch, and moments later so does Sakura's baggy pyjama shirt, which she yanks unceremoniously over her head and slings aside. It collides against her wardrobe; it slides down to crumple on the floorboards. What little patience either of them ever had has been lost, and Sakura doesn't miss it.
There'll be plenty of time for arguing later, anyway: she's already looking forward to it.
.-.-.-.