ITASAKU FEST 2K14

A/N: When the itasaku tumblr announced the ItaSaku Festival event I got really excited and immediately came up with ficlet ideas to meet all of the prompts. Unfortunately due to real life and my inability to write anything short (originally I told myself to stick to 3-5k words per one-shot but hah as if that was ever going to happen), I had to scrap most of my ideas and stick to the ones which inspired/made me giggle the most.

I have two (including this one) completed and one in-progress which may-or-may-not be late. Fingers crossed I'll have three done for my first participation in this sort of fanfic writing challenge.

Warning: All of this is diabetes-inducing, toothache-inspiring, sugary nonsense fluff. In reading this, you agree that I will not be held responsible for your dentistry bills.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, just an enduring obsession and fondness for shoujo manga romance novel tropes.

Day One: Meeting (Nov 23rd)

Sakura met Sasuke's brother properly for the first time when she tripped over him sleeping beneath a tree just outside of Training Ground Five.

She was running late to a training session with Tsunade-shishou and the first words out of her mouth when her knees hit the hard-packed dirt were "Bacterial endocarditis!" She then followed up with an irritated "Fuck!" as she tried to remember where she'd been in her mental recitation of heart diseases.

"'Bacterial endocarditis'?" inquired a smooth voice behind her and Sakura, already conditioned after only a few months training under Tsunade-shishou, replied with an immediate: "Fever, Roth spots, Janeway lesions, anemia, emboli—" before abruptly realizing the speaker wasn't Tsunade-shishou and snapping her mouth shut.

She nearly had a heart attack when she turned around to see who was speaking. Of course she knew who Uchiha Itachi was. There was no way she wouldn't recognize Sasuke-kun's aniki, especially when he was considered one of the best shinobi in the village. But other than seeing him in the background the few times she'd visited Sasuke-kun's house or seeing him in passing at the hospital when he came back from a non-ANBU and un-anonymous mission, she'd never met him face-to-face like this before.

"Haruno Sakura-san," he greeted, eyes flicking briefly to her most distinctive feature as she gaped at him, proving that he knew who she was if only by the color of her hair.

"U-Uchiha-san," she stuttered in reply. And then, regaining some of her scattered wits, "I'm so, so sorry! I can't believe I just—tripped, like that."

"It's fine," he said, and got to his feet apparently undamaged from her stumbling over his outstretched legs. "If you're here for your training with Tsunade-sama it's time for me to go anyway."

He offered her a hand and pulled her to her feet easily when she hesitantly took it, untroubled by her paltry thirteen-year-old-girl bodyweight.

"You should work on your chakra sensing," he said, and it was impossible to tell if he meant the words sarcastically or as honest criticism from the tone of his voice.

"It was nice meeting you, Haruno-san."

She mumbled an appropriate reply, received a small nod in return, and watched the Uchiha Clan's prodigy walk away in a disbelieving daze until the distant sound of Tsunade-shishou bellowing her name woke her up, at which point she forgot the entire incident had ever happened.

The next week she tripped in surprise when she saw him sleeping in the exact same place, but managed to catch herself against a tree just in time. Itachi didn't so much as twitch over her hastily-muffled squeak of alarm or the way she stared at him for a solid minute afterwards, hardly daring to breathe.

She probably would have continued standing there staring if she hadn't recalled just then exactly why she was early in the first place. Sakura winced, remembering the particularly vicious way her shishou had hurled those rocks, each unerringly aimed to cause the most pain if she didn't dodge them. If there was one thing Tsunade-shishou hated, it was people wasting her time.

With a small shudder, Sakura gave the sleeping man one last covert look before turning away. She regretted ever running into—in a manner of speaking—him again when she was too busy wondering why the heck Sasuke's brother was sleeping outside Training Ground Five to evade Tsunade-shishou's strikes, and ended up twice as sore as she usually was.

Training Ground Five had once been the preferred training ground for Earth-jutsu users in Konoha until Tsunade-shishou had assumed the position of Hokage. Since then the area had become known as "Hime's Playground" and was kept impeccably maintained by a team of overworked chuunin at Tsunade-shishou's beck and call.

While the ground hadn't been declared off-limits to others, it was pretty much impossible for anyone to navigate in-between Tsunade-shishou tearing it up and the chuunin putting it back together again, and most shinobi seemed unwilling to risk showing up to a training field that was either in a constant post-earthquake state or currently occupied by a rampaging Hokage.

So why Itachi had chosen what had to be the loudest, most seismographically-unstable training ground in Konoha for his naptime was a complete mystery to Sakura.

The problem was that Sakura was a curious person who liked mysteries, especially ones that weren't trying to kill her, or almost-kill her in the case of Tsunade-shishou's training. Being a nosy know-it-all she wanted to know the answer, and just couldn't let sleeping nin lie, as it were.

That second day she'd made sure to limp home the same way she'd come and was unsurprised but still a little disappointed to find the Uchiha gone. But he was back again three days later, and then a week after that and Sakura started looking for the pattern, trying to predict when she would and wouldn't see him, and accidentally earning extra points with Tsunade-shishou when she started always arriving early to training because he was never there after she'd finished.

In her very limited free time she began randomly popping up throughout the week at around the same time as her training in case Itachi had regularly-scheduled attacks of narcolepsy, but failed to uncover out his naptime routine. The obvious solution was just to ask him, but after several weeks of careful observation and verging on stalker-ish behavior this seemed like admitting defeat and, worse, admitting to Uchiha Itachi's face that she'd moved from obsessing over his little brother to obsessing over him.

So though it drove her a little crazy like the chafing of wearing in a new pair of gloves, Sakura tried to put the matter out of her head. "Tried" being the operative word.

Uchiha Itachi was sleeping outside Training Ground Five four of her training sessions in a row, and Sakura took particularly bad beatings each of those days as too many questions crowded her brain and made her slow. Something had to give. Either she needed to scare him away, an unlikely option considering he was Uchiha Itachi and probably used weak little genin like her for ANBU target practice; or she needed a surefire way to know when he was going to be there and likely to distract her.

There was one answer to this problem, a hint he'd given her himself, whether he'd know it or not at the time: chakra sensing. She'd never particularly focused on that skill, expecting it to grow as she did as a shinobi, but now she had motivation and a useful training dummy.

Accordingly the first time she put her new plan into action Sakura stopped on the furthest extent of her range and strained, pressing out with her chakra and her senses in the vicinity of Uchiha Itachi's napzone. Finding nothing, she casually but purposefully strolled through his normal clearing and ran into a tree when she did a double take.

There was Itachi, asleep as usual beneath his regular tree. This time he began to stir at the noise and she hightailed it as quickly as possible so as not to be caught staring, face flaming red.

It took longer than it probably should have for Sakura to figure out what was going on, but then she was a little distracted, and not just with wondering whether Sasuke-kun's brother was as crazy as everybody said he was.

Tsunade-shishou, who thankfully liked to mix up the routine instead of only beating Sakura to a black-and-blue pulp, sometimes ran through combat survival situations where Sakura had to achieve some set objective while avoiding booby-traps and her shishou's attacks. These training sessions, once more reviled than even boulder dodging, started to become mysteriously easier as the weeks continued.

One day Sakura's senses flared and she launched herself backwards seconds before Tsunade-shishou even threw a punch. Her sensei paused her attack and cocked one hand on her hip with a thoughtful frown.

"I see the problem now," she mused, "you've gotten better at chakra sensing. I guess it's time to step up the game. Good job, Sakura."

And though Sakura was staring straight at her, the innate sense of where Tsunade-shishou was, the same sense she'd been using unconsciously for weeks, went completely silent. Sakura gaped in astonishment before yelping and scrambling to avoid her shishou's not-quite-lethal attacks.

What she eventually realized was that Tsunade-shishou, a Hokage with a set routine any enemy intelligence worth their salt could discover and her own team of elite ANBU bodyguards following her around for precisely that reason, had never been particularly concerned with hiding her chakra signature.

Whereas Uchiha Itachi was concealing his chakra signature so as to remain hidden and un-molested by thirteen-year-old genin, hence why she could never get a read on him when he was catching a quick shut-eye. Since she'd never paid particular interest to him before this she had no idea what his chakra signature was like to begin with, and short of tripping over him again, there was no way to initiate the sort of extreme physical proximity or skin-to-skin contact that would give her a feel for his chakra.

Sakura, it seemed, was foiled.

On the one hand, this sort of inconsequential riddle would probably come back to haunt her at inopportune times considering her personality type. On the other, there was really nothing Sakura could do about it and she'd reaped unexpected benefits from her fascination with Itachi's sleeping habits. Unexpectedly scaring Kakashi-sensei out of a tree in a nearby training ground when using her newfound sensing capabilities was worth leaving the Case of the Sleeping Uchiha unsolved.

Sakura had another four months to grow accustomed to Itachi's frequent presence outside Training Ground Five, and then Tsunade-shishou changed her training schedule and Sakura had more important things to worry about.

Breathless and running late, Sakura opened the door to the next patient's room while flipping over the blank top sheet on the medical report, tripped over something laying in the path of the door, and barreled into Uchiha Itachi half-way through taking his shirt off.

Tsunade-shishou probably thought this was a hysterical way to inform her that her security clearance had been upgraded, Sakura thought darkly as she remembered the Hokage's smirk earlier that morning and assertion that Sakura was in for a "surprise." Under normal circumstances she might have been excited at the rise of her seniority, but she was far less enthused after smashing into what felt like a solid brick wall and getting elbowed in the head by her teammate's aniki.

"I apologize," Itachi said when she'd recovered enough to push away from his chest and rub at her aching scalp. He finished shrugging out of his shirt and tossed it on the examination bench behind him.

"I thought I'd have more time."

"What?"

Sakura tore her eyes away from the flex of muscle revealed as he stripped and looked behind her to see that she'd apparently tripped on his sandals, inconveniently placed for maximum embarrassment on her part.

"Oh, that's ok," she said as he conscientiously picked them up, put them where she was unlikely to trip on them again, and hopped up onto the bench. "It's my fault for being late."

Itachi's eyebrow rose fractionally at her statement and Sakura followed his eyes to the clock on the wall behind her. Confused, she checked her watch, which was exactly twelve minutes fast. Slowly and knowing what she'd find, she undid the strap and turned her watch face over.

Someone, and it wasn't hard to guess who, had drawn a cute little henohenomoheji face, the leftmost no eye replaced with a straight dash and the he mouth drawn big enough to resemble a mask covering the lower face. Sakura felt her eyebrow give an involuntary tic, already plotting how to get Kakashi-sensei blamed for the theft of Tsunade-shishou's sake.

Someone coughed and Sakura gave a start, suddenly realizing that she'd been grinding her teeth as she stared unseeingly at Uchiha Itachi's bare chest.

"Well then, Uchiha-san," Sakura said with a little nervous laugh, "let's see what you're in for today."

With an air of forced casualness she turned back to the medical chart she still held, refusing to look at Itachi so he wouldn't see that she knew that he knew that she'd just been caught staring at his chest.

If she hadn't been so flustered over being late in the first place she probably would have recognized the blank top sheet as a sign of the anonymity necessary for the patient's status within the village, and not been as surprised when she literally ran into Uchiha Itachi, or embarrassed herself by acting like an airhead in front of him. The next time she saw Kakashi-sensei he was so dead.

Upgraded security clearance or not, the brief medical history she'd been provided was heavily redacted. Sakura's eyebrows arched higher as she skimmed, mouth pursing when she finally came to his most recent condition. Recovering from two broken ribs, a fractured rib, a severely contused lung, and a small side of acute bronchitis.

She darted a look at the man sitting quietly on the examination bench who was staring at his bare feet on the crinkly paper-covered footrest. There were no mission details in the medical chart, but he could have received his injuries from a particularly violent bear hug for all the interest he showed.

"You don't have to take your shoes off, you know," Sakura said, and thought she saw him give an infinitesimal flinch, though it could've just been her imagination. "Most people don't."

"Whenever I keep my sandals on the paper gets ripped. It seems like it would be easier for whoever cleans up if it stays in one piece."

Sakura blinked, confused at him voicing such a thoughtful answer for such a mundane thing.

"I never thought of it like that."

Itachi made the standard "Hn" Uchiha Sound of Varied and Unspecified Meaning in his throat, and didn't say anything else. To cover the awkwardness, she went to the sink to wash her hands before taking the stethoscope from around her neck and rubbing the diaphragm between her hands to warm it.

"Have you felt any chest pains since your last visit? Any difficulty breathing or prolonged coughing fits?"

He answered in the negative and Sakura continued down her mental checklist, each question receiving a polite denial.

"Ok," she finally said after he affirmed that none of his sleeping positions caused him pain or affected his breathing.

"I'm going to listen to your lungs first to check for any remaining fluid, then I'm going to use my chakra to more fully examine the recovery of your lungs and ribs."

He sat up a little straighter when she placed the stethoscope against his skin and Sakura worried she hadn't warmed it sufficiently, but he followed her instructions on when to inhale and exhale without further complaint so she let it go.

It was only after she'd delivered his prognosis and Itachi was putting on his clothes to go that Sakura realized the huge opportunity she'd just been offered.

No shinobi could hide their distinct chakra signature from skin-to-skin contact. This had been her chance to get a feel for his chakra and she'd missed it.

"Thank you, Haruno-san," Itachi said from the door, unperturbed by the dumbstruck look on her face. "Next time I will be more careful."

Sakura's mouth formed appropriate, societally acceptable words, and Uchiha Itachi left.

Several minutes passed before his parting words finally registered in her mind. He'd said "next time" and that meant she'd have another chance. Maybe she wouldn't hide Tsunade-shishou's sake after all.

Bone-tired and bleary with fatigue, Sakura stumbled on nothing and would have eaten dirt if warm hands hadn't appeared at that moment to catch her by the shoulders.

"Sakura," someone said.

"Hm," she hummed. "Wha?"

"We really must stop meeting like this," Uchiha Itachi said, and put one hand around her back to support her.

If Sakura had been a little less tired she might have goggled at Sasuke's brother making what sounded like a joke. As it was she only mustered the effort to hum again.

"Sakura, what are you doing here?"

She paused to think about his question and some of her energy returned when she remembered her errand.

"Sasuke," she waved a hand in the vicinity of her head, "concussion. I tol' him to go—hospital but he left when I wasn't looking. He needs to go he—" she interrupted herself with a yawn- "passed out 's not good. Tried checking 'self but 'm so tired—needs to be checked."

"And there was no one else to come get him?"

"Jus' me," she squinted at what she thought was his face. "Naruto's watching Kaka-sensei so's doesn't leave after he's 'wake. 'M no good like this. I'd sleep 'n' poof!"

Sakura threw out both arms to mime her sensei's sudden vanishing and would have toppled over if Itachi hadn't been there to steady her.

"Sakura, do I need to take you to the hospital?"

"Nah," she shook her head too hard and had to stop for a moment as everything spun around her. "'M jus' tired. No more chakra. Used last bit for—" she yawned again, this time so widely her jaw cracked twice— "tha' bastard."

Sakura frowned, slowly made a fist, and held it up with as much grave determination as she could currently muster.

"Gonna drag 'im back to the hospital. 'N' if he won't go I'll kill 'im."

"I don't think you'll have the chance," Itachi said with a quiet purposefulness she completely missed, and bent down to pick her up.

Sakura clutched blindly at his neck, confused by the entire world suddenly tilting on its axis.

"Sakura, where do you live? I'll take you home."

But she wasn't listening, having moved from groping at his shoulders to patting his chest. Finding it reassuringly solid and radiating a pleasant heat, she ducked her head and started nuzzling underneath his chin.

"'S nice. Usually I hurt m'self on you. This's better. 'M approve."

"You have made an unfortunate habit," Itachi agreed with a startled laugh, and the rumbling of his chest felt to Sakura like she was cuddling a large purring cat.

"Sakura, I need to know where you live to take you home."

"Hey," she said sleepily from the warm place she'd started drifting into, "'s something I've always wanted to ask you."

"Yes?"

"The sleeping thing," she signed, lulled by a strangely familiar rhythm pounding beneath her ear, "how come?"

Whatever answer Itachi gave to her unfinished question went unheard. Sakura had fallen asleep.

Sakura awoke with no memory of how she'd come to be in her own bed. She remembered something about Sasuke and the hospital—a shift of movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention and she turned her head to see her teammate sitting in a chair by her bed and frowning down at one of her medical textbooks.

He straightened up when he noticed her looking at him, and nodded wordlessly at a glass of water on her bedside table before she could say anything.

"Sasuke," she asked after draining most of the glass, "what are you doing here?"

"Next time you're suffering from severe chakra exhaustion, don't pass out on my brother," he said without answering her question.

"I...what?"

Confused, Sakura took stock of herself. The last thing she remembered was being at the hospital watching the medics on shift finish up her healing job on Kakashi-sensei, Naruto telling her he'd stay to make sure their teacher didn't bolt the instant he woke up and she… she had gone to get Sasuke for some reason, what was it?

"Sasuke," she sat up with a yelp, "did you get your head checked out? Why aren't you at the hospital?"

"I'm fine, I told you it was fine," he grumbled. "You checked me over yourself."

"I checked you while suffering from severe chakra exhaustion, meaning my judgment was impaired, and that's why I wanted you to get a second opinion!"

"I was going to have Kaa-san keep an eye on me, she's watched over Tou-san and Itachi enough to know the warning signs. I told you that."

"You mean when I was suffering from severe chakra exhaustion?" She shook her head in disbelief. "Sasuke, are you really getting on my case about trying to keep you healthy?"

She thought they'd gotten over this when Team Seven had reformed, but if he really thought she was doing this out of some misplaced desire to be clingy and overly involved in his life she'd set him straight right now.

"No," Sasuke sighed, "that's not what I—"

He glared down at the book in his lap and ran a hand through his hair in obvious discomfort. It was clear then that something was bothering him, and she was beginning to think his earlier petulance hadn't been about the concussion at all.

"Sakura, what did you say to him?"

"To who?"

"Itachi."

"What does he—" but there was a niggling suspicion in the back of her mind.

She had a well-documented history of literally running into and then embarrassing herself in front of Uchiha Itachi, and the chances of her having run into him while loopy with chakra exhaustion were astronomically high.

"Sasuke," she groaned as a few choice memories came back to her. "I think I felt your brother up."

"What."

"Kami," she recoiled from the shock on his face, "not like that. I mean I pet his chest and told him he was comfortable and maybe… cuddled him a little.

"Sasuke," she wailed when his expression didn't change, "I couldn't help it! I was so tired and he was so warm and he smelled kind of nice and-"

"Sakura," he looked pained, "just stop."

Groaning again, she pressed her cool hands to her overheated face and stared down at her comforter in abject mortification.

"So you just—" she could hear the grimace in his voice— "touched him and told him he was comfortable? That's it?"

"No, he asked me about what I was doing and I told him, but I don't remember what I said exactly." She paused to consider the sequence of events and immediately wished she hadn't when a few more memories cleared themselves up.

"I told him I was going to kill you if you wouldn't go to the hospital. I told your brother I was going to kill you. Sasuke," she moaned into her hands, "he's going to kill me!"

"He's not," Sasuke said, and his strangely monotone voice made her look up from her hands in surprise. "He's going to kill me."

"What?"

"Do you know," Sasuke said to the dented corner of her textbook he was worrying with a fingernail, "the one thing my brother has in common with Kakashi?"

"They're both really powerful and have worked in ANBU?"

Her teammate looked up from the book long enough to roll his eyes at her.

"Aside from the obvious."

"They both like sleeping in weird places?"

"What?" Sasuke frowned at her for a moment in confusion before giving up on the futile guessing game. "No- neither of them can forgive someone who abandons their friends.

"You were weak and falling over on your own feet, but you still tried to find me and take me to the hospital because you thought I was hurt."

"You were hurt—" Sakura tried to interrupt, but was silenced by a dark scowl.

"I left without making sure you knew I was ok and without making sure you were ok. Itachi… wasn't happy with me." His brow furrowed. "Neither was Kaa-san."

"Oh." She mulled over what he'd just said and tried to make sense of it. "But that doesn't mean he's going to kill you."

"He told me that since I'm still healing from my own injuries, he'd wait until I'd fully recovered before helping me train."

"What's the problem? That doesn't sound bad at all."

"With his ANBU team," Sasuke clarified. "He's going to train me with his ANBU team, Sakura.

"You've never trained with his team," Sasuke said when she only continued to look confused. "Itachi said he'd come up with a strategy to help me improve my shortcomings."

"Sasuke," she laughed, "don't tell me you're afraid of your brother."

"And you're not?"

"Well, yeah, but I think I'm jinxed to run into him all the time." Her teammate gave her a weird look, but she ignored him. "It'll be ok. When I go to thank him, because apparently I owe him one, I'll tell him to only mostly-kill you and to bring your body to the hospital so I can patch you up."

"Ha ha, Sakura." He paused and then said, "I'm sorry."

Sasuke snorted at the look on her face. "Is it really that surprising?"

"You apologize maybe as often as Kakashi-sensei's on time."

"Hn."

But he was smirking, so everything would probably be fine.

As it happened, Sasuke's brother had just left on a long, indefinite mission, which gave Sasuke time to get over his apprehension and Sakura time to reconcile with having embarrassed herself in front of Uchiha Itachi again. It was almost blissful, knowing from Sasuke's unconcerned face at team training that his brother wasn't back yet and it was physically impossible for her to run into him. She'd even been relieved when they were assigned a mission, thinking it would take that much longer to meet Itachi again, and that the burst of confidence from completing it would be good for herself and Sasuke both.

"Fucking Mist-nin," she growled, ostensibly to the Naruto clone standing behind her on the other side of Kakashi-sensei's prone body, "why is it always fucking Mist-nin? Are all of their hunters in cahoots with their missing-nin?"

She paused to lob another handful of kunai at the attacking rogue-nin with a snarl.

"What are those idiots at the mission office even doing? This is the second time this has happened! With Mist-nin! And why does Kakashi-sensei always have either the best or the worst timing? He's had the Sharingan for practically ever! He should know how to conserve his chakra by now! How he even made it to jounin—"

One of the missing-nin, faster than his compatriots but not as observant or as clever, ducked the rain of weaponry and moved in with a grin, clearly thinking everything would be easy once he got close enough to the weak-looking pink-haired girl. Sakura kicked him square in the chest and sent his body flying back into the oncoming rush of enemies.

"I know," she continued without missing a beat,"I'm going to be the one dragging his deadweight all the way back to Konoha. And the first thing this good-for-nothing sensei is going to do when he wakes up is slip out of bed and exhaust himself all over again reading his stupid porn. I've had enough! If he doesn't stay in bed this time so help me I'm going to—"

"Uh, Sakura-chan-" the clone tried to say, but Sakura wasn't finished.

If she had to act as decoy while Naruto kept the Mist-nin busy and Sasuke drove the remainder of the rogue shinobi force towards her, Sakura intended to get all of her frustrations out in one go. Normally Naruto had a sixth sense for avoiding her when she needed to rant. Right now his clone was basically a captive audience and she meant to take full advantage.

"No, I'm so done this time, Naruto, I'm going to take every one of his silly little books and—"

And that was when she heard the telltale puff of smoke from a clone dissolving behind her. Sakura, conscious that no matter how much she complained about her no-good porn-reading sensei she didn't actually want him skewered while he was passed out and vulnerable, spun around and tripped over his unconscious deadweight body.

Of all the potential and most likely fatal results she anticipated from this blunder, Sakura didn't expect to slam into something solid and to feel an arm curl around her waist to hold her up. Automatically she grabbed the offending hand, ready to cut her way to freedom with a chakra scalpel if need be.

"Duck."

One word from a voice she vaguely recognized was all the warning she had before whoever it was shot fire at the approaching group of missing-nin.

In her team fire usually meant Sasuke, but since he was supposed to be herding the rest of the missing-nin in her direction either Kakashi-sensei had miraculously recovered or- Sakura let go of the hand she was clutching and took a step forward when the arm with the familiar-looking armguard obligingly released her.

It was Uchiha Itachi, of course, ANBU mask hanging loose around his neck as he used a steady stream of Katon to give them cover. He glanced at her briefly before nodding his head to the side.

"Go. I'll watch Kakashi-senpai."

Later, after she and Sasuke had crushed the rouge-nin between themselves and Itachi, Sakura watched Genma and Shisui seal the body of the Mist-nin into a scroll for transport and tried to rally her strength.

"Thank you, Uchiha-san," she said to Itachi as he stood supervising a group of Naruto's clones constructing a stretcher for Kakashi-sensei. "Not just for this but for the other time too. I really didn't mean- Anyway I'm sorry and thank you again."

"It was no problem, Sakura," he replied, apparently unbothered that she'd felt him up while half-unconscious. "Thank you for looking after Sasuke."

"Aniki," Sasuke groaned from where he'd been standing, Sakura suspected, close enough to intervene if necessary.

"I believe I still owe you help with your training, Sasuke," Itachi said in a way that shut her teammate right up before turning to look at her. Instantly, Sakura felt every muscle in her body go tense.

"And, Sakura, you should really work on your chakra sensing."

Itachi went to inspect the completed stretcher before she could reply, leaving her to gape at his back in disbelief.

So she'd gotten a little handsy while drunk on chakra exhaustion. Maybe that was enough for him to upgrade their relationship from "Haruno-san" to "Sakura," even though she was still politely calling him "Uchiha-san." But that didn't give him the right to chide her just like Sasuke, and how else could she label it when he'd given her the same criticism twice now?

Sakura fumed all the way home, mood a perfect match to Sasuke's grumpiness. Itachi, as the most senior shinobi present, took charge of their team and escorted them all the way through the village gates and to the hospital to make sure Kakashi-sensei was properly treated. Only after their sensei had been checked in did Itachi tell them goodbye, carefully tugging his uniform back into order in preparation for seeing the Hokage.

It was as he reached up to adjust the lay of his mask that Sakura noticed a ring of bruising at the base of his wrist and several evenly-spaced bruises inching up the side of his hand, bruises that perfectly matched the shape of her hand from when she'd gripped him earlier.

Properly chastised, she opened her mouth to apologize and found herself speaking to empty air as he disappeared.

If Sakura were a better person and not a coward she would have made more of an effort to find Itachi and apologize to him. Instead, she was going out of her way to avoid him, a not insubstantial feat when she still didn't have a good sense of his chakra signature. Out of all of her embarrassing interactions with Sasuke's brother, this latest one had to be the worst.

She'd hurt him. Bruises that dark so soon after being made had to ache, though he'd acted as if they weren't even there. This wasn't like that first time when she'd tripped over his legs, though from the way Kakashi-sensei had complained of a mysteriously sore calf right after waking up she was beginning to rethink whether or not her thirteen-year-old weight was as paltry as she'd always believed.

She needed to deal with her mingled embarrassment and shame and apologize like a mature, responsible adult.

Sasuke, when she asked him about it, gave her a funny look and told her that as biological brothers he and Itachi shared very similar chakra signatures, and that if she wanted to know what Itachi's was like she should just look for one that felt similar to his.

This was not helpful advice for sensing someone who seemed determined to remain hidden twenty-four/seven. Sasuke claimed, on being further questioned, that Itachi was a really private person who spent most of his time on ANBU missions where he was supposed to be anonymous anyway, so suppressing his chakra was probably more habit than anything.

Again, Sakura found her teammate less than helpful, especially because his initial advice of looking for others with similar chakra signatures made her into an expert Uchiha-detector, a niche skill which was really only useful for locating Sasuke during team training sessions. The direct approach was always best, but she didn't think Uchiha Fugaku had ever stopped suspecting her of lusting after his second son, and Uchiha Mikoto, while nice, could be a little smothering.

There were only so many times Sakura could use the "really, I'm just waiting for Sasuke if he's not here I'll go find him, Kakashi-sensei changed the training time again you know how unreliable he is" line to excuse herself when Mikoto-san starting reaching for her wedding album and reminiscing about her younger days and how she'd always wanted a daughter to inherit all of her heirloom kimono every time Sakura "randomly" dropped by ostensibly to find Sasuke but really to see if Itachi was around and open to heartfelt apologies.

As per her usual luck, Itachi only appeared when she wasn't expecting him and her not expecting him guaranteed that the meeting resulted in maximum embarrassment and awkwardness on her part.

Sakura was on her way to Training Ground Five, long since adopted as her personal favorite training ground and not because she had an emotional attachment to a site of trauma, as Sasuke the smartass claimed, but because the overworked chuunin who were in charge of Konoha's training ground maintenance had politely requested she lessen the inconvenience her destruction caused others, and what better place to train than the one her shishou kept perpetually destroyed.

More specifically, her feet were on their way to Training Ground Five, the rest of her still back in the lab isolating components from a mysterious new poison for which an antidote was badly needed. Under normal circumstances Sakura could have walked there in her sleep, but this time she was unprepared for the dangling branch that hit her in the face, stumbling backwards and tripping over an exposed tree root with an undignified screech and flailing of her arms.

"Shit!" Sakura yelped as she went down. Knocking her head against something hard, she laid on the ground where she'd fallen, staring up at the trees as she tried to recover her breath.

Sadly, this was not the first time she'd been distracted enough to accidentally injure herself. Usually she gave her surroundings a searching glance for possible witnesses she'd need to kill, got up, brushed herself off, and told herself everyone had off days and she was still a badass kunoichi to make herself feel better.

She'd never hit her head so hard the entire world started laughing at her before. Slowly Sakura turned her head to the left and saw nothing but sunny, untroubled forest. She looked to the right and saw Uchiha Itachi, head thrown back and laughing like it was going out of style. Hallucinating after hitting her head was probably a bad sign. She should maybe get that checked out.

The "exposed tree root" she'd tripped over shifted under her feet and Sakura realized it wasn't a tree root at all, it was Itachi's leg. This wasn't a hallucination it was real. She'd tripped on Uchiha Itachi sleeping outside Training Ground Five again.

He was still laughing, and Sakura might have been more astonished if she didn't feel as if her entire face was about to spontaneously combust.

With a grunt of effort she levered herself into a sitting position and pulled her legs away from his.

"You," she accused, all thoughts of apologizing for bruising his hand and his legs that once—twice now—completely gone, "why are you always sleeping here?"

"I'm sorry," Itachi chuckled, wiping his eyes with a hand. "It was impolite of me to laugh."

And then he smiled in a way that made Sakura blush for an entirely different reason. She'd never seen Itachi smile before, not more than a slight upturn at the corners of his lips or the smirk he used to antagonize Sasuke. He'd been either polite or professional in all of their past dealings, aside from that one time she'd passed out on him, and then she'd been too busy snuggling into his chest to notice his face.

"As to why I sleep here, it's the best place in the village for an undisturbed nap."

"But," Sakura frowned, "this is where Tsunade-shishou trains. This is where I train."

"Every shinobi in the village knows when the Hokage and her apprentice are training here and avoids the area. I always time my naps to end with your arrival."

Sakura stared at him, completely bewildered. "That's it?"

This was the answer to the mystery of his sleeping outside Training Ground Five, a question that had plagued her for nearly a year and then continued to annoy her on-and-off at regular intervals? She'd always thought the answer would be something more profound than just "he wanted to sleep somewhere no one would think to look for him."

"I will admit to being curious about you."

"What?" She pointed at herself, as if there was anyone else to whom he could be referring.

"I've never met anyone as determined to throw herself into my arms as you are, Sakura."

Sakura gaped at him in shock.

"That's not—I don't do that on purpose! You just, you always suppress your chakra signature," she stuttered, "and I don't know what it's like in the first place."

"If I recall, you've had several opportunities to remedy this."

"I wasn't paying attention," she protested. "That one time I was nearly dead on my feet and the other, well it's not like I go on rounds anticipating getting my hands on the patients."

She blushed at his raised eyebrow, staring at the tree trunk to the right of his head instead of meeting his eyes.

"You could have asked," he pointed out, "since we seem to have a habit of… running into each other in interesting ways."

"Yeah," Sakura said, still refusing to look at him, "that's not weird or anything."

"There is a simple solution to this problem."

Without further explanation, Itachi shifted much further into her personal space than she was mentally prepared for, took one of her hands between both of his, pressed it to the skin between his collarbones, and flared his chakra.

Sasuke couldn't judge her if his brother initiated the feeling up, Sakura thought dazedly. His skin was very warm and he really did smell nice, a little like fresh wood smoke and the mineral oil all shinobi used to sharpen their weapons. She stared at large hands where they overlapped her smaller one, tucked against the pale skin at the base of his throat.

Itachi flared his chakra again, likely because he knew she wasn't paying attention, and Sakura felt a shiver work its way straight down her spine at the sudden pressure in the air.

"Can you feel it now, Sakura?"

His eyes were very dark. Numbly, she nodded her head, a flustered automatic response.

"Yeah," she said, very close to a sigh. "I won't forget."

"Good," Itachi said and released her, the sense of his chakra receding until nothing remained but a bright compacted spark flickering steadily before her.

"Then it's time for me to be going. I won't interrupt your training any longer."

He got to his feet in one smooth motion and offered her a hand, so similar to their very first meeting. This time Sakura didn't hesitate to accept his offer, though she was surprised when Itachi leaned forward after she was standing to pluck a leaf from her hair.

"I'm sure we'll see each other again," he smiled softly, twirling the leaf between his fingers. "Until next time, Sakura."

She watched the leaf flutter to the ground in his wake, his chakra fading into the distance until it was beyond her range and she couldn't sense it anymore. Then she made her way to Training Ground Five to begin her warm-up stretches.

It was odd, almost anticlimactic, to have finally discovered the reason behind Uchiha Itachi's strange napping habits. He'd made irrevocably sure that she knew what his chakra signature felt like, which meant he'd totally eliminated any chance of her running into him the way she had in the past. While she should have been happy at the prospect of avoiding future embarrassing encounters, Sakura felt strangely disappointed.

She'd finished three kata and busted up a portion of the ground for some terrain-evasion training when the full meaning of her interaction with Itachi occurred to her.

He'd been teasing her, and unless she'd learned nothing after years of being subjected to Ino's advice about boys, flirting with her, at least a little. Absent-mindedly, Sakura punched her way straight through a boulder, a smile slowly forming on her face.

Itachi had outright admitted that he would be outside Training Ground Five right before her training, and he'd said they'd see each other again. Only next time Sakura had no intention of tripping over his legs.