(Sept 2018: Gave this fic a huge makeover/editing job, though story beats are still the same and intact. Yeesh this was a bad one. Not my best editing but still much improved. Constructive criticism welcome, but do remember that this fic is literally 10 years old)

One of my favorite authors posted a giant oneshot she called a little drabble, and said it was based on a plot device from another fic that kinda went unused. I'm doing the same thing. I've had this plot device in my head for a long time so I'm gonna make something of it. My fics tend to get excessively long so I'll try to keep this short but you've probably heard that one before.

Note: In this oneshot, a Kage is not only the leader of the ninja village, but the entire country their village is in.

War was inevitable. This fact struck humanity across all times and all places and many who thought themselves exempt from it. The Land of Fire was not exempt. They were honorable and naive and used. The Land of Sound was only greedy.

Fire trusted Sound and grieved their mistake when it was too late late. For Sound had secretly brought a tacit alliance up with Suna and Iwa and then every neighbor who loved freshly minted coins being put into their hands. Leaf's Hokage had invited other country leaders to the autumn festival where neighborliness and cozying up with good friends and warm meals was celebrated. She lived long enough to feel humiliated by it.

She was watched by hundreds of eyes looking from the citizens' tables up to the Kages on their little pedestals. They watched her pour a cup for herself and for the Tsuchikage. People watched her grin and laugh. That reputation of a wild drunk had followed her everywhere and folk were excited to see it and grinning in advance.

Some saw the kunai flash behind her. Someone had thrown it from afar and struck their target with a quiet thump that none of the guests heard between their talking and clinking and chewing. She was struck in the brain stem and she faded immediately. Tsunade's finest robe was painted with a thin red stripe that spread over and down one shoulder.

There was a cadre of strange men hiding in nearby trees with the strung-up lights and lanterns and disguised among the guests, and they rose up together as instruction. Their instructions were to blast knives and kunai and shrapnel bombs outward from their positions and they did this. The flying metal for a moment outnumbered and outsized the people sitting in their tables, coloring all things shimmery black, and then that second passed and the targets fell. The remainders bolted and screamed. Metal candelabras and serving plates and hundreds of pounds of food fell onto the ground as people ran. The invasion started then. It spread from the dining area to the entertainment booths and the nearby houses, houses where people stuck their heads out the window to see the commotion down the road, and on it went.

The Kage all sat up and set to business, all but the Mizukage, who stayed a while to finish two drumsticks on his plate. He was thinking as he chewed and smiled, and closed his eyes shut like a pleased cat, that he hadn't had drumsticks for dinner for a few years. He hadn't had them as a child. He hadn't grown up with full cuts of meat available for dinner, or reliable heat to cook and be warm with, or honest soldiers to protect him from men who stole his coat as he walked. But his children might. Konoha's hoard of resources would more than feed the armies that were at this moment running through it and setting it on fire.

Konoha was mostly burned by midnight. Its people were cut down or ruined or taken or gone. The handful of skilled men and women who escaped with their lives and anything else they had thought to carry had fled. That was the middle day of October. November was here now, and a rebellion to cut down thieves was here now. Konoha's remnants fought back against four amalgamated nations.

The leader of these stray dog forces was Kakashi Hatake. In the two weeks it had taken his fellows to gather together and plan, their first assignment to claiming their home back was accomplished. The first of November saw the Tsuchikage laying in his bed with a kunai piercing his brain stem and clear through his neck.

Konoha guerrilla forces had so established their brutality so. They didn't waver from it. Autumn and winter passed—not particularly cold, not cold enough to stop them. Konoha set their own fires, and stole Iwa mercenaries from their beds, hid in driving snow to slit throats of guards in front of them. They buried a supply train in a land slide. They let loose a disease in Suna. The four nations took their Konoha prizes and licked their minor wounds with them, and went on. They ate Land of Fire food, and took tithe from Fire farmers and sold ore and steel and copper from Fire mines and indugled in excess most of them had never had. Konoha shinobi retreated to their hideouts again and again and soon the exhaustion they felt became a permanent state of being. Sakura knew it and felt it. Loose limbs and relaxation were only part of her dreams.

Mostly she dreamed some nightmare version of the festival. She watched Tsunade give her toast and grin at the Tsuchikage, her friend of twenty-two years. Sometimes the Tsuchikage was a many-headed snake or boar. Sometimes the festival was a circus or a galley at sea. She woke up and was enraged and terrified, and then tired. She was part of war now and felt older for it, but so did everyone.

They were stationed in a cave a summoner lizard had quietly dug for them. Naruto entertained them by ripping stalagmites out of the cave wall and initiating sword fights with whoever was nearby, sometimes Sakura. She responded with her fists and sometimes her own cave-sword and so did her part to keep up morale for that day. In between the acts of silliness that kept them breathing and standing, she set broken bones and stitched torn flesh. She knew that if she were kidnapped or killed, their remaining medical ninja would not be able to carry the weight that she did.

She knew all this and thought of it offhandedly, accidentally, when she, Naruto and Tenten fled through the cramped landscape of nestled-together trees and dead shrubs carrying a Kiri jonin. Naruto's back had been cut up and down as they fled, as they tried to take him down and take him back. He was in no shape to carry a lolling body on his back so Sakura and Tenten carried the massive man's weight between them. She knew she had twenty-eight patients lying on pallets in a cave waiting for her attention after she cut this man open for the scroll he'd stored in his own body. She wanted to sleep.

She joked with Naruto about his quilted back and many scars. They weren't garish wounds but manly scars and he'd be fending off women with a stick. Or a spike, since he had some spares stuck in his shoulder from the last man they'd cut down. Naruto appreciated it. He always did.

Naruto and his smile and his cut-up back was what she was thinking of when she heard the whistle of metal through the air, like a kunai searching for unsuspecting flesh. She felt the blooming furious hurt on her shoulder, but she never saw the blade.

Tenten cried out suddenly and dropped to the ground. For a few moments, Sakura held the huge man all on her own and she felt she would have been able to carry him the last few miles to the Konoha nin's base, but the fear dropped out of her once she dropped to her knees. The shock and pain clacked her teeth together. As she gasped in a new breath, she realized Naruto was nowhere to be seen.

"RRrrrraaaoowwr!" came the call of a summoning cat, and the hairs stood up on her arms. Felines were climbers, hunters, and she was grounded. Behind its yowls was the heavily accented shouts from a shinobi who had to be from the Land of Earth.

"Cover sweep!" Sakura hissed to her friend quietly, and Tenten nodded her understanding to a coded command that meant nothing along the lines of a cover sweep. Tenten turned away from Sakura and made ready to drop her weapons and clatter them on the ground. She meant to run away, to distract, as loudly as possible.

Someone's arm wrapped around Sakura's neck and Tenten screamed out of her sightline. She tried to pitch herself upward till she was almost standing and deliver an outward kick, but the man held her too tightly. Then there was knives, or teeth, or both, pushing into her calf. And then she was screaming, and standing no longer. On her side, with one arm partially freed as the foolish nin tried to keep out of the way of the cat, Sakura was able to thrash her arm outward. She tried to punch the beat in the torso, break bones and mobility, but her aim and control had all but died. The fangs in her leg bore a tranquilizer. Or a poison. Or both. Or more.

There were more knives in her, around her collarbone, and her strength had been so sapped by now that she couldn't vocalize her pain. It escaped through her expression only, through her mouth twisting and eyes screwing almost shut. The nin that had held her had dropped her and stood over her in the dirt. Tenten was gone.

"—could snap your neck with one hand. Take her to Suna's holding designation."

All this, Sakura knew.

All this Sakura hated.

She had woken up in what might have been "Suna's holding designation," which wasn't the first block for holding prisoners of war that she had seen. She was either alone in this building or had no fellow soldiers in the area with her. It was quiet, but she was not unnerved. Not yet. Her mind blazed now and she saw endless pictures in her mind of Naruto. Naruto fleeing the scene, Naruto coming back to save them, Naruto's Kyuubi chakra burning the enemy alive. What had happened?

'Naruto wouldn't have left the Kiri shinobi if he could help it…' she thought. 'But he wouldn't have left me either. No matter what Kakashi-sensei said. He could...he...' Her attempts to rationalize and cheer herself went limp. There was no denying that she would be interrogated soon. The forces that had eaten Konoha knew of her. They knew she was a direct line to the enemy leader, to their best soldiers, to the recovery of all the rest. Anyone who held her knew they had a prize on their hands. They would try every means to unlock her. To open, to carve out, to humiliate. She knew.

Some four or five hours passed wherein Sakura stayed in a trance-like state pushing against the forces on her ankle and wrist chains that pulled on her chakra, pulling and pushing back, prying at their seals. She had made progress, but not enough. A door opened, far away. Her breath had been calm before, and remained so. Her eyes had flicked in the direction of the noise, but came slowly back to the wall opposite her. She listened to the footsteps coming nearer and nearer.

With the precious little light, she could see two shadows, one just barely taller than its lean partner, and bulky. They both stopped at her cell and observed her through the bars. Sakura's thoughts when she saw the faces within their shapes were mostly: 'Fuck. No. Fuck. No.' as she recognized them easily. One shadow from Suna, one Shadow from Kiri.

The lean shadow was Akasuna no Sasori. The desert master of puppetry and cheating—for his creations' ability to use the jutsu of their original bodies, for sending ten of his toys on a squad of two men, for how hated he was even before he deserted his homeland. He looked prim and youthful, somehow, though his reputation should have outlived such a young face. She felt a strange force coming from him. Like mist.

Sakura feared the other man less. He was Hidan of the deposed Hot Springs village, Hidan of no surname but his ridiculous god, Jashin. Hidan of the bingo books, more like, who had joined a cult, killed all its members and through jutsu or black magic or something else had come away with something like immortality, and left his dying home a wanted man. His hair was slicked back on his head like oil and it made Sakura want to giggle at the absurdity. The man's air of rage dispelled that laugh from her.

"This is it?" Hidan the devil queried. "This is the bottle of mammoth-strength everyone's talking about? This is a little kid. They sent a literal twelve-year-old onto the battlefield, that's how I know those shits are getting desperate."

'And you sound like you're on your period,' she sniped back in her mind.

"Unchain her and see if she doesn't take your limbs off and leave you as a torso crawling on the ground."

Sakura had no desire to respond to either one of them. Hidan was exactly the monster he looked, but Sasori's cool voice bothered her immeasurably more. She didn't have the chance to respond anyway, because the blue man said, "Well, do you recognize me or not, Pinky?"

'Oh. It's been almost...three months since someone called me Pinky. I was almost late.'

"This might help," he said before Sakura could say anything. From the pocket of his black-and-red emblazoned cloak, he pulled out a pair of gloves and a mask, both small and probably skin-tight, colored a tannish-peach sort of color quite like…human skin. And the face on the mask looked very much like—

"You're the Kiri ninja I meant to take home with me," she said aloud. Sasori nodded his head just slightly, and so did Hidan. Sakura preferred Hidan's gesture to the other's.

"No shit." He stuffed the mask and gloves back into his pocket and one of his blue hands grasped a bar on her cell. "And good thing Sasori and Deidara and their guys found you when you did. If you'd taken me back to your base, I would have killed every last one of you little Konoha fucks I could see!"

"We would have bandaged your mouth shut first so none of us would get ear aches from your yodeling," Sakura replied. "Perhaps only I'd end up throwing up from the sound of your voice instead of four hundred of us." There were not four hundred of them, and the two of them probably knew that, but she had plans to toss out several unreliable numbers in the coming hours.

The yodeler was not amused. He pressed his face to a small gap between bars, not wide enough to allow his head through, but he pushed anyway. It stretched the skin on his face and Sakura's years of training kept her own face straight at the sight of his bugged-out eyes watching her.

"I'm glad it's you we got," Hidan said, and showed his teeth like a beast. "You think anybody gives a shit about your weapons girl? We got Konoha's doc now, the Hokage apprentice. You're good. Getting to you is gonna be good."

"Brush your teeth before you 'get to me' or I will die of shock immediately." She deadpanned.

Sakura put a lot of effort into controlling her face after that, as Hidan's frown warped his whole face.

"You know. I seen you once take a guy's summoning crocodile and snap its neck on your knee like a hockey stick. I seen a guy's leg get twisted around like the hand of a clock and he showed up the next month in some skirmish somewhere all normal and good again, and it had to be 'cause of you. So at least that shit's done for Konoha."

"It's nothing but sheer willpower, and I am not the only one with a good supply," she said by way of distraction. It was true to some extent, enough to stick in their brains, she hoped. "I want to snap a crocodile's neck and sew ligaments together, and if I want to severely enough, I will. I see you want to come in here and bust my skull on the wall, but I don't you able to do such a thing right now. For some reason." The fanged frown between the bars came back.

"Do you outrank him?" Sakura addressed Sasori. She added one girlish, fluttery blink to her question. "The only thing keeping him from wriggling in her like a desperate rat must be punishment from you or higher officers. I can't believe he can heel for this long. Give the man a biscuit."

Sasori titled his head in a way that reminded her of Naruto and Kiba at once, and so she instinctively read it as playful. But even as she had that helpless feeling, she listened, she felt, for something else. "I gave your fellows a week to grieve you, or try to come for you. No signal. No movement. Kakashi Hatake must do his grieving in private. He must see you as almost his daughter."

Sakura flashed back to the autumn festival of two years ago, before there was conflict and when she still had a house and a neighborhood. Back to a time when Kakashi had gotten drunk in front of his students for the first time, and told Sakura and the drinking cup in front of her that she was 'almost his daughter.' But 'almost,' he'd said. A strange phrase. A phrase most people did not utter and Sasori of all people would not have heard. Unless he was there. He left this information for her, this question, unaccounted for.

He also left questions regarding Sakura herself unaccounted for. Why had she slept an entire week? Why would they let her sleep an entire week? By now, the Konoha forces would have surely moved to a new base. She was still a useful hostage, but not nearly so much so as she would have been several days ago. The books spoke of Sasori as being impatient and cruel, but not wasteful.

"I will come here tomorrow evening and every evening after, and you will talk to me. My methods will vary by day until I find one that seeps into your dreams and makes you afraid to look at me."

Sakura kept her straight face, though she wanted to cringe and spit and question how men like him were allowed to exist.

"That method, I'll force upon you till I have what I need to know, and I'll pass those things onto the Kazekage, and anyone else who needs to know."

Hidan grasped the cell bars again. "What? You? Why do you get to be the one to—"

"Talk to Pein, not me. I didn't ask to be given the assignment. But I'm glad I got it." The last bit made Sakura's stomach turn uncomfortably, and she hid her nervousness by glaring instead.

"I'll be dead before you get what you want from me," she said to him. Sasori knew what she was threatening to do to herself, but Hidan probably did not.

"The restraints will make that difficult for you to do," Sasori told her.

"Sucks if you get an itch on your ass," Hidan added.

Instead of replying, Sakura scooted down onto the floor a bit and then insolently turned her back on the two men, lying on her side. Hidan had the brain cells required to be insulted and growl at her turned back.

Eventually, there was a tiny brush of cloth. Heavy cloaks moving, and then footsteps. "I'll see you tomorrow, Sakura. Have a good night."

Her nose twitched. "Have a good night, cunt."

Hidan laughed at her, but Sasori had no reply. She could discern their footsteps from one another without any effort: Hidan's slapping sounds on concrete and Sasori's quieter ones, going at an eerily calm, predictable interval. Like a wind-up doll.

Sakura took up some of her remaining alone time to contemplate if she'd be going to hell when she died, and if she did, who she might see there.

November 15th, 4:45 PM

"Check."

"Again?" Sasori chuckled, moving his king piece.

Sakura, who sat cross-legged in her cell with Sasori, kept her eyes on the chessboard between them. She kept her nose from twitching or scrunching. And she kept her thoughts on how forced chess games as a form of torture were some insipid kind of bullshit to herself. "And eternally, if you keep pretending to be this bad at the game. Challenge me once before I die."

"Little Girl. Shut your mouth," he remarked casually. Sakura was not bothered. "We are all stumped in front of a challenge at some point. At all ages, at any time. Kakashi Hatake would agree."

"I'm stumped by the face of stupidity, and it's the face of a redheaded bastard," Sakura glared. She was not angry to the point of bursting, not yet, not here, but she was trying to slowly push the idea that she was headed in that direction. And if her body reacted in any minute way, she wanted it to look like the reaction of a bad temper and nothing else. "I'm stumped by the banality of your 'favorite color' and 'weekend hobby' questions and I would rather listen to my hair grow than listen to your terrible Academy lessons. Take me outside to a green lawn on a nice day if you're going to deliver me an ethics lecture. Or rather keep me in here if you are only going to tell me lies."

"I haven't told many lies."

"You tell me nothing. You read me your bingo book pages. You waste my time and my life." 'Okay Sakura, maybe reel it in a bit after this, my goodness.'

"You're not a waste of my time," Sasori told her. His eyes roved up from the board to her face and she wanted to shiver how they moved. How slowly and perfectly, again, like the movement of a wind-up doll. "And I love to dig into your lies. You are not a serial cloud watcher. You have never had a pet rabbit and may never have touched one in your life. But you do meander. From one fact to another. One emotion to another. You read many books and you talk to many people."

"You read many books and talk to no one, and it shows," Sakura said, with a bit less enthusiasm than her previous outburst had shown. "Natural talent and probably an obsession with your evil puppet show helped you climb socially where your own behavior would have made you sink. I shudder to think what you were like as a schoolboy."

"I had a few friends."

"Human ones?"

"Yes."

"Hilarious, and I don't believe you. But I look forward to more lies like that."

Sasori's fingers were clasped around a pawn piece. "My friend Komushi played violin because his parents made him. I used to use chakra strings to play his violin for him during concerts."

Sakura cocked her head. "Did he pay you for that, or were you doing it because that's what friends do?"

"I liked the music he played. He played classical pieces and if I stayed behind the curtain at his concerts I could hear them up close."

There had been a Komushi, and he had died around Sakura's age, years ago. She took a risk with her next move. "There was not a Komushi in your life. But I would believe there was a violin. Strings for you to control and hear. And not too loud a sound for a sensitive boy so high up his own asshole."

"String music is calming and inspirational. I was one of the first people in Suna to get a record player. To listen while I worked on my puppets."

"Purchased with money from sales of rare antidotes? From your parents' bank accounts? Could be a lie." 'I don't think that's a lie.'

"It isn't, Sakura."

"Mm-hmm." 'I believe you, you redheaded fuck.'

"If we were children at the time time, would you have been the type to push me into a locker?"

"I think you would have been the type to peek into the girls' bathroom instead of speaking to a girl. Yes, I would have pushed you into a locker. I pushed a good few skinny little dweeb types into lockers." But Sakura had only pushed someone into a locker once, and it had been for a dare, and the person had been Naruto, trying to hide from 4th period weaponry class. And if he had been her age, she would have been staring at him in class. She knew that.

Her first days of "torture" with Akasuna no Sasori played out this way, like a stupid fucking game, or a stupid fucking script written by an idiot. But Sakura shivered inside, when she was alone, usually in the mornings knowing the evening with Sasori was a long but inevitable wait away. She had prepared for brutality and pain, not a long game of holding out in front of a pretty face. She knew his body was a wooden puppet now, animated like a real human, but no flesh left but for the heart somewhere inside. He'd placed it there many years ago and nothing about his heart or mind or body had changed since then.

She stood firm in her conviction to confound him. She played herself up as angrier and haughtier than she was, usually. When she actually felt angry and haughty, she toned herself down, usually. She told lies about Ino and Naruto and her home in Konoha. She told a few truths, too, as she ought. Sasori asked her almost nothing about Konoha's remaining fighting force or what their plans were. He asked her about herself. He talked. In her weakest moments, Sakura pretended she was on a date with someone she liked instead of sitting on a concrete holding cell in a basement smelling her own sweat while a murderer asked her what she liked to eat.

They talked about what summoning animals they wished to have. They talked about cities they had visited in the past. Sasori told her the names of plays and playwrights and musicians and Sakura participated in these conversations of his smug self-indulgence and apparent desire for her to be impressed by his great and educated repertoire. Sasori asked her personal information and stories of her youth, and participated in the act of being interested in her childhood stories. She told him her favorite memory was making a snow fort with Naruto at the age of twelve, which was true, and that her favorite subject in her Academy days was ninjutsu, which was untrue.

Eventually he brought her a chessboard, one day after a discussion of books. Sakura cringed inwardly at the feeling of her Academy days: some skinny dweeb boy latching onto her after she gave one offhand compliment or responded to something geeky he had to say. The freak got her to say something about classical literature and now he really wanted her to come to chess club. Sakura glared at the older man and slaughtered him in the first game, but she knew that he was letting her. She wondered how long he would let her do anything before he finally got tired of waiting for her to react to his true machinations.

It was the fifth time he had brought a chessboard, and he let himself win more often. They did not grow bored of it, but Sakura's focus on the game was tainted by her tension that had grown and grown these past few days. It seemed he meant to poison her with confusion and a false sense of security that would be ripped away one day, and it would feel like the whole wrap of her skin was coming off her muscles.

She decided to test a theory. She would be terrified, but her tension would break.

"You know…" She moved her knight piece slowly forward in its distinctive L-arc. "I wonder how much trouble you're in for failing to extract anything from me with these schoolboy games."

The doll eyes roved up and he did not move a piece of his own. "Maybe this has worked before. Other men and women have broken down and asked when you were going to start twisting their limbs off. When you were going to start turning their bodies to wood. And I am less and less valuable every day I don't start crying in front of you. Konoha's force have probably moved bases three times now. Perhaps four, starting today." Truly they may have moved once, and there was no pattern to the moves, but the nonsense fact being out there in the air now helped. She still had some confidence left, and a sense of smell.

The glassy brown eyes were pensive now. Thoughtful of what could and could not be lies. He might be detect something in her guess of the base movement. He might be judging her absolute foolishness. Might be aware that she was still teasing him.

"And I really did have a pet rabbit." Sakura tossed in that truth for spite. "The first owner called him Benvolio, I called him Ben. He was sweet and lovely. He was the color of your eyes."

Sasori stared, and blinked once. Sakura wanted to shiver but held it down. She was sitting primly and smiling and he watched her.

"I miss him, and Konoha, but I can have my home back someday. I know that. I know Orochimaru is visiting the Kazekage on the fourth of this month. I know my comrades and I know myself, and I know you, too."

"Do you know me at all, little girl?" he asked her, as though she hadn't spoken, as though they were close and whispering, but they were.

"I knew your life before you flicked your pretty eyes at me," she said. "I know that when your parents didn't return from a mission, you lay in your grandmother's bed with her and cried. I know there was a boy named Komushi when you were young, but you did not know him, or play his violin for him. I know you played it on front of puppets shaped like your parents because you liked to pretend they were really there, and I don't know how it feels to grow up so broken. I am sorry for what happened to you, but I am not sorry for you now. I'm not sorry for the soulless demon sitting in front of me. I want to deck you in the fucking face and break the container that you keep your worthless heart in. But I simply can't, because then it would all come...spilling out, wouldn't it? The smog that you thought would break my mental faculties."

She leaned forward. "You must be older and softer than thirty-two years if you think I can't smell the poison smog coming out of you. You probably did some weeks of testing and brewing to make a scentless smog. And you failed. I am dispelling it every second you are near me, and before, and afterward. If you were hoping to wear down my brain and chakra functions with time with your garbage concoctions you'll need to take it back to the drawing board and start over, you piece of shit."

She used her thumb and forefinger to flick his king and some other piece off the board and onto the floor. The pieces clattered away from their feet and out of sight. Sakura's line of sight was taken entirely by Sasori's face, smiling for her, and some unmoving prison bars behind him.

The seconds passed by and Sasori was unmoving, and Sakura was afraid. She wore her smile and waited. Then—his hand was around her neck and the several inches between their faces shrunk to almost none.

Sasori's lips brushed hers when he spoke. "And did you know, Sakura, that you are trying my patience to its limit?" Sakura didn't dare speak and force her lips to move against his. "Making me regret having to hand you over? I want to pick that brain of yours. I want to see you question me. I want to feel you with my own hands."

One hand held her captive at the throat. It was not lifeless, but it was cold. The other dead hand came around her back and pulled her forward, and she was not sitting anymore but leaning into him. His eyes demanded hers. Her hands fell against his torso and laid almost helplessly upon him. Sasori's cool fingers brushed under her chin as though she were a pet.

"I want to strip this filth from you. I want to take these stories of our worthless interrogations to the Kazekage and assure him that you are an asset of lost cause, and you should be given to me instead."

"I'm an asset of lost cause to you, too, if you think I wouldn't reach inside you and crush your heart in my hand." she said, not moving.

"Not if the whole of you is in my hands, little girl."

"I am not."

"You will be," he said against her lips, and kissed her. Sakura gasped when he did, and then he was in her mouth.

Their tongues blended together and Sakura shuddered. A sharp wave of pleasure spread down her and he followed it as though it was in his sight. Sasori's hand pressed her against him till her breasts pushed against his body, the other curving under her ass and pulling her more forward still, till she straddled one leg.

"Tell me you haven't been waiting," he said against her face. He guided her rocking motions on his leg and watched Sakura jerk slightly upward from the sudden friction he put between her legs. The next time she did it herself and pinched her mouth shut to prevent a hard gasp from pushing out her mouth, but she failed.

He reveled in her open face. They both knew she had been ambushed, and had no defense. As she pushed back, trying to support herself, Sasori brought her closer again. His hands slid on her waist and he hummed at the feel of it. He found the hem of her shirt and slipped easily underneath it with one hand, and after a beat, the other.

"What a sight you make. Little Sakura. Open your mouth."

"Rotten bastard," she said, looking away from him.

"I've been patient with you and your worthless little games and stories," he whispered. He angled his fingers so Sakura felt his fingertips and then his nails, and then one thumb give a teasing stroke to the underside of her breast. "I waited three weeks for you to breathe my breath and weaken to a poison, and soften, when it shouldn't have taken this damn long in the first place. And know that if you had dispelled all the effects of the first gas, there would have been a second, or a third. As many as it took."

Now Sakura straddled both his legs and felt his whole body against hers, and he felt like flesh. Her mind now addled, halfway under control, she found herself holding him closer to her with her legs before she realized she was doing it. Sasori held her just far enough away to keep his hands on her. Enough to have one hand lift her shirt high enough over her breasts. Sakura made a barely audible gasp at the feeling of air on her nipples, and then another at Sasori taking one between his fingers. Her fingers clasped on his shoulders.

"I've seen you out with your Konoha squads before. I like to tell myself that you know I'm there, that you're coming to see me."

"Not. Even. Close."

"Close. And soon. Your people will be crushed, and we will take prisoners, and I will take you."

"This doesn't matter. It doesn't." she said, trying to think. She mostly failed. "This. Won't last." His hands were better than hers. For every push her hips gave against him, he thrusted back and gave her the friction she was looking for. It interrupted her. Interrupted everything but him. When he removed his hands from her and her nipple felt tight and painful, she had one heartbeat to breathe before he replaced his hands with his tongue.

"God, ahh," she whined and pressed herself into his mouth. His tongue was real and warm and played magnificently on her skin. She finally put one around around his neck and hung on.

The other hand stopped holding her and she didn't have words with which to question where it had gone. It appeared in front of her, pushing under the waistband of her skirt that had already hiked high up on her thighs. He went under the waistband of her panties a second later, making her wait for the movement. His hand moved down a little swath of her belly as though he knew the surface by heart. His hands slowed when he felt curled hair and Sakura's hands clasped tightly in anticipation of a foreign feeling that struck her motionless.

He found her clit and played with her. Sakura grit her teeth and worked hard to keep from falling forward onto him. His hands were cool and strange against her natural heat. There were only two exploratory fingers first, stroking the surface. Even this touch was strong enough to shoot upward through her body, almost making her sit up completely.

She was saying something like "please" under her breath and turning her head just slightly away, but Sasori watched her.

"Look at me. And show me what you like," he said.

"Or. what," she whispered. She stopped whispering when the fingers moved again. A sideways stroke changed direction and moved inward. Sakura's hips jerked in surprise and she pinched her lips shut.

"I'll find out myself. You aren't hard to figure out, Sakura. Just tedious." He let Sakura feel two of his fingers inside her. The walls within were hot and there was no hiding that she had never felt such a thing as him inside her. "Move." She did. She rose up slightly and he left his hand where it was, but Sakura lowered herself down and found them again, and buried them deeper than the distance Sasori had first given her. She opened her mouth and mewled. Supporting her hands on her shoulders again, she tried a second time. He gave her the motion of his thumb on her clit again and she grit her teeth. He reached up slightly and gave her his tongue along the dip of her neck and shoulder. He sucked at her warm skin, feeling that life and brightness and eating it. Sakura moaned and tried to hold onto him as she pressed down onto the three fingers waiting for her. She had a passing moment of clarity and thought of her bed in Konoha, so warm and good. A moment later she felt the sudden retreat of Sasori's fingers from inside her, and she had another moment of clarity.

"You're worth the wait. You're worth it." He said, but she wasn't able to talk back anymore. He pulled her down, hard, forcing their faces to be level and forcing the core of her to thrust against him so sweetly she nearly cried. "Over a year I had to wait before someone caught you. Evading us constantly. Not face to face even once. Sweet Sakura. You were mine from the moment your Hokage dropped her wineglass and died in her festival chair."

Sakura's shirt dropped down slightly and her hands loosened on Sasori's shoulders, but she hardly noticed these changes. She was coming awake but her attention remained on him. She saw through the fog that had disabled her so. She felt Sasori's hand against her cheek. She felt his thumb pressing just slightly against her lip.

"I saw you there and thought I would see you again before the night was over. But you got away. Too many of you did. Too many of you are still living the fantasy of restoring that place. But it's gone, Sakura. That place is burned. That broken festival site is still there, and overgrown. Did you know how much of the Land of Fire that Suna is going to take? Do you know how quickly and easily the Hokage died?"

All through this talk, Sakura's eyes came wider and wider and she trembled in his grip more and more. Akasuna no Sasori embraced her. She listened. "Did you know, Sakura? I was the one who threw that kunai."

Sakura Haruno's hands that rested on the man's shoulders came forward and clasped like iron locks around Akasuna no Sasori's wooden neck. Her legs did not straddle his but flew towards the ground in a wide-footed stance. And she rocketed away from his seat and took him with her and crushed his body against the nearest concrete wall. She held him up by his neck.

"You son of a bitch!I should crush your fucking skull!"

Sasori didn't need to breathe, or choke. He watched her from his slightly elevated position against the wall. "I know she was your teacher. It would have been terrible to see, I imagine."

"I will be terrible to see. To you. In the future. When I take your heart out of you and eat it."

"Sakura." he purred to her. "In the future, this heart will be yours. You'll see when the scraps of Konoha finally wither. I'll come find you."

She paused and was stone-still. "Then so you will." Sasori helplessly took in a breath of glee and did not hide his grin from her. "Find me. And I'll bury you."

Her fist came forward not a second after she was done speaking. It came rocketing and glowing green. A chakra-fueled first crushed Sasori's body, wood and flesh, and parts of him splintered and burst away. The wall behind him busted through as well. Sakura and the remains of story were blasted by harsh orange light. As planned, Sakura took off through the hole and began running through the empty compound, pursued by none.

Sasori began to pull his body together into one piece again not long after she was gone. He stood in his half-torn cloak, in that spot where she held him up to the wall, and saw into the future when he would see her again. He saw her with the scraps of Konoha, and then without them. He saw her alone surrounded by rubble and bodies and wearing other people's blood. He would take that away, take her away, clean the filth of her struggles away from her. He turned halfway to look through the desert smeared with twilight glare and thought of all the lies she thought she had fed him.