DISCLAIMER: DNON

The first time they meet, she is barely sixteen.

She doesn't know it isn't really him, and neither do Kakashi and Naruto as they combine their attacks to utterly defeat him.

In fact, they don't discover the ruse until they examine his crumpled body, which turns out to be a completely different person. By the time they realize the implications, the ceremony is complete, and the person they've been sent to rescue is dead.

But they don't find that out until they reach the cave.

They don't meet again for nearly a year.

She is heading north, searching for her lost comrades.

He is heading south, searching for a place to go.

They meet on the same road, and, sensing the other's presence, both halt.

They stare at each other, and at first her instinct is to kill him, or, if she can't manage that, at least deal him a serious injury. But moments pass and neither of them has moved to attack. Neither of them has spoken.

Their silence is broken when he coughs, and Sakura jumps slightly at the sound before watching with sick fascination as blood dribbles out of his mouth and down his chin, stains his hand and neck red.

She watches, bewildered, as he tilts forward, his eyes (Sasuke's eyes) roll back until all she can see are bloodshot whites.

The thud of his body breaks the spell, and her feet propel her toward him of their own volition.

She kneels beside him and shakes his shoulder lightly, one hand gripping the handle of a kunai in case it's an act.

He doesn't move, and she rolls him onto his back gently.

He looks like Sasuke, she thinks. But he is not Sasuke, and never will be. And it is then that she notices the differences between the two previously (seemingly) identical brothers.

(Can you be a brother if your brother is dead?)

She checks the pulse in his neck and finds it fluttering weakly beneath her fingers, like a forgotten caged bird that has been neglected for too long.

Good. She thinks. Good. Let him die.

For killing Naruto.

For killing Sasuke.

She places the kunai to his throat. She presses gently and blood trickles slowly from beneath the blade.

She will kill him. She will kill the man who helped take everything from her.

As she prepares to press harder, the clouds choose to stop hiding the sun. The bright light bounces off something that is not her kunai and leaves spots in her vision.

It is his hitai-ate, the familiar leaf symbol marred by the deep scar running through it.

She freezes.

It is then that she realizes that killing him will not change the past.

Bloodshed will beget more bloodshed. Hatred will beget more hatred.

A never-ending cycle.

She takes him to a cave she knows is nearby and heals him there over a course of three days and nights. When she leaves, she makes sure to leave the kunai by his neck so that he will know what she has done for him. So that he will know that she did the right thing and so that she will remember that as a medic she is not supposed to kill but to heal.

Even though the tears would not stop coming as she did so.

They meet again in a small town on the border of Earth and Fire.

The inn is shabby, rundown, dirty, but that suits her. She's seen enough war and death by now that she feels like a hypocrite when she remembers her old life. She is no longer pure. No longer untouched by the horrors the real world brings.

She jams the key into the lock, turns it, swears loudly when the door refuses to open. She turns it again, too hard this time; the key snaps off in the lock. She kicks the door as punishment and stomps her way toward the stairs, planning to complain, when the door to the room next to hers opens.

They both freeze at the sight of the other, and Sakura asks him what he wants loudly (rudely).

He ignores her and goes to look at her door; Sakura tells him not to bother, she's going to get another room. He is focusing chakra to his fingertips. Moments later, the broken half of the key falls out of the lock and into his palm.

She swears again and calls him a fucking show off.

He holds his other hand out. She throws the base of the key at him and is disappointed when he catches it easily.

She doesn't thank him when he fixes the key and opens the door for her, and ignores him when he tells her that swearing and calling the person who is trying to help you names gets you nowhere. She slams the door in his face.

She wanders. With no home to return to, no hokage to receive orders from, she isn't quite sure what to do.

She takes a few missions to keep her funds at a reasonable level, but the only missions around now are for assassinations and destruction, and she's had enough of that. She misses working in a hospital.

She stops in a small village that has somehow remained intact after the Fourth Ninja War and settles there. She hides her shinobi past and pretends she learned medical ninjutsu from her mother, who she says was a medical shinobi that fell in love with a civilian and gave up her shinobi life. The villagers swallow the lie easily.

Time passes.

She heals broken bones, cuts, scrapes. She amputates limbs injured by fallen beams, wagon wheels, gangrene. Normal things. Things she might have gone through had she not grown up in a shinobi village.

She becomes a foster mother for the orphans in the village. So many orphans. She is reminded of Pein, laughing maniacally as he crushed what they had so carefully rebuilt, ignoring the screams of the women, the children. His holy war to end war had caused this.

And where had war gotten him? He was dead now, destroyed by the immense power of the bijuu. It was ironic really: Destroyed by the power he had sought to harness—but not before he had destroyed every shinobi village he came across.

The orphans are eager to learn her techniques. Are fascinated by her mint green chakra as it makes all their hurts disappear. She teaches only those with a real knack for it, those she can tell will be dedicated to their education. She doesn't use the techniques Tsunade used to teach her. Those techniques were learned in a time of war and this is a new era of peace.

A year after her coming to this village, there is a knock on her door.

She crawls out of bed and answers the knocking, which increases in intensity as she shuffles sleepily toward the door.

When she opens it, she wonders if it is too late to go back to bed.

And then she wonders if the gods are playing some kind of cruel joke on her.

Slung between two of the village men is him.

She wants to slam the door in his face again. Wants to pretend she hasn't seen him, but she has and now she has no choice but to heal him again.

He doesn't wake up for nearly a week, and when he does, it's not his eyes watching her clean her house—it's Sasuke's (How does it feel to see the world through eyes that are not your own?).

He watches her constantly as she tends to him, never looking at his (stolen) eyes. He doesn't say much, and she doesn't encourage him to. The only times they speak are when she asks him how he's feeling, and he doesn't say anything, just nods or shakes his head.

In another week, he is healed, and she wakes up one morning to find his cot empty, blanket folded neatly on his pillow, a kunai on top of the blanket.

She reads the note attached to the kunai with some trepidation.

It has only two words:

Thank you.

She leaves the village a year later, her orphans trained to her satisfaction. (She is done here, she has made a difference.)

As far as she is concerned, she is still the apprentice of the fifth hokage of Konoha. She begins to train herself again; she is not to be underestimated by the (homeless, hopeless) shinobi that pop up in her path from time to time.

She is at a bar, drinking sake and trying not to remember her friends when a man tries to feel her up.

She punches him through two walls and a tree and leaves without another word. The bartender begins to demand payment and cuts himself off when she shoots him one of her patented deathglares.

She works at a small inn for a while, needing something to do with her hands. She loses the job after a month because she punched a man seeking lodging through several already occupied rooms for trying to peek at her while she was bathing in the hot springs to the rear of the building.

It is only when she is forced to kill a hunternin intent on dragging her all the way back to the Land of Waves to pay for the 'crimes' she committed during the war that she realizes that she has become no better than Itachi. She has only been justifying her actions by pretending that killing for her village is better than killing for the fun of it.

Murder is murder, and it leaves a stain on the soul. If you kill, you don't kill a target. You kill a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a friend. And in return, you sow the seeds of hatred in the ones who survive them.

Not long after she comes to that realization, she begins to wonder just why Itachi sought to stain his soul with the massacre of his clan—why any shinobi should have to kill at all when it only created more hatred.

Someone is gathering shinobi to create a new village.

That is what she hears from her old contacts, the ones from Before. She has no new contacts, wants none. For what is the point of being a shinobi when everyone hates them for being the cause of all this destruction?

She has not been approached yet, but that is because she has hidden her hair beneath dyes and head coverings. She no longer wears the symbol of her destroyed home. Her shinobi tools and weapons are hidden beneath layers of clothing and the large black cloak she received as a gift from a contact she'd been close to in Wave. It was weatherproof and light, ideal for her because she was on the move all the time. Her pack holds only food, scrolls, and money. She is not afraid of anyone stealing it because even if you hide everything that could pin you as a shinobi on sight, you cannot hide eyes dead from years of murder and hardship that comes with being a shinobi.

The recruiter finds her (not) sleeping in a hollow tree and nearly loses his head when he pokes it inside.

At first, she is wary of the man. He is much too well cared for to be a shinobi in these times. But when he begins to explain of the village they have established she understands.

She tells him she needs a week to think the offer over and they agree to meet at a waterfall several days' travel north. Before he leaves her, he tosses a stack of money to her, telling her that there's more where that came from and that he hopes she makes the right decision.

She understands the threat implied in his statement, but sticks by her decision to wait a week before giving an answer.

When they meet at the waterfall, she accepts the offer and the man immediately performs a transportation jutsu to take them to her new home.

The village is hidden within the mangroves of the Land of Swamps, the buildings and walkways raised on stilts like the houses in the Land of Waves. It is already prospering, despite the fact that it was only founded a few months ago. Sakura recognizes the wood used to build the houses and her heart leaps at the thought that one of her old comrades is in the village.

It is not until later that she finds out the Kamikage stole that comrade's body to obtain the power to do that particular jutsu.

The Kamikage, the Godshadow, as he calls himself, is a shinobi in his thirties, around Kakashi's age. No one she has spoken to in the week she's been in the village knows who he is or where he comes from, they only know that he knows everything that goes on in the village—and out of it for that matter.

She is the only Leaf shinobi in the village so far, which doesn't surprise her: She had been on an espionage mission in the Land of Tea when Pein went on his rampage. If any one had survived the second destruction of the village, it would be those who had been on away missions like her.

There are many sound shinobi, and she has to fight at least a dozen every day because although the villages are gone, the old enmities between villages are not. She has help though, after her first few days; the survivors from Suna quickly band together to help her and she soon has a small circle of trusted companions (not friends, all her friends are dead, she wants no more friends).

When the Kamikage learns of her apprenticeship under Tsunade, she becomes his personal medic and bodyguard. The attacks by Sound cease because to attack her means to attack the Kamikage. Her companions from Sand soon become aides to the Kamikage and his advisors.

After not hearing about him for so long, she presumes that Itachi is dead and his bloodline with him, but that presumption is proved wrong by the arrival of the second ex-Leaf shinobi in the village.

Itachi is soon made the Kamikage's second bodyguard, much to her displeasure, and she spends as much time ignoring him as she spends swearing at him for doing something she doesn't like. He ignores her back, but she catches him watching her when he thinks she isn't looking.

The Kamikage only allows her and Itachi to address him as Makoto-sama. He says he doesn't need a last name, but Sakura suspects his last name is an infamous one that he doesn't want revealed; she doesn't dig any further into it because he pays the two of them well and treats them as old friends (as if they hadn't just met two months ago and she and Itachi were on speaking terms).

Itachi's room is on the opposite side of Makoto-sama's. Both she and Itachi have adjoining rooms to his room in case of assassination attempts (and there have not been any because both their reputations preceded them). Sakura hates the arrangement. She doesn't like that Makoto-sama's eyes linger on her when she and Itachi finish sparring, nor the way he seems to always need her when she's just gotten into the bath. She hates his cold, grabby hands and the way he always finds a reason to touch her. She hates the way he licks his lips when their eyes meet.

She hates Itachi and being cooped up in this village. She hates having to watch her temper because she could easily destroy the village with one well-placed chakra-enhanced stamp of her foot. She hates how calm Itachi is even when she's screaming at him (and she doesn't know why, she never knows why) and how Itachi will make her tea so thick with honey it's almost like maple syrup when she's hoarse from screaming at him. She hates that she wants his approval in everything she does, although she sees it in his eyes when she heals their injuries after their sparring matches.

She hates that he looks so much like Sasuke it hurts.

She hates his (Sasuke's) eyes.

She hates how his eyelashes are prettier than hers.

She hates how his hair is longer than hers because she refuses to let it grow out.

She hates how his voice remains the same, no matter what he is saying.

Aren't you human? She screams at him. Don't you have feelings?

He smiles at her this time, for the first time, and tells her

NO.

She refuses to believe it and tells him so which makes him laugh (another first).

Are you human? He asks her. Do you have feelings?

She thinks on this.

NO.

I am a monster, just like you.

Itachi raises an eyebrow at that. Then at least we're with each other, he says. Birds of a feather must flock together.

It is the most she has heard him say in the time she has known him.

We are not with each other, she tells him, and stalks out of the room in a huff.

A year has passed since they both came to the village.

Makoto-sama senses her restlessness and allows her to start a hospital and train medics. She dives into the work, relishing everything about the familiar job and swearing that she'll never take being a medic for granted again.

The only thing she hates about her newest job is the fact that Itachi comes to escort her home when he thinks she has been working too long, and she tries to explain that she is used to working long hours. He tells her it is not necessary to strain herself so much when there aren't many people in need of a medic in the village. Yet, she tells him. There aren't many people in need of a medic yet. He smirks at her and concedes that she has a point.

She is about to smirk back at him when he reminds her that not many missions have come to the village yet and then scowls instead.

Makoto-sama insists that she simply call him Makoto on the days she protects him because it is Itachi's day off and he feels that they know each other that well. She blushes demurely and continues calling him Makoto-sama, but she wonders why he wants to be closer to her, an impure murderess. A monster.

Itachi brings her water and aspirin on the days she's really exhausted from hospital work. He holds her head in his lap and massages her temples with his fingers and a little bit of chakra when the aspirin is working too slowly and she can't sleep.

She likes the way his clothes smell like smoke and sweat.

On the days she has off from the hospital and protecting Makoto-sama, she likes to go to the village outskirts and fish. She catches a few fish and gives them to her friends who don't live in Kamikage tower like her.

She finds out Itachi likes fish and saves one for him. He doesn't say anything when she brings it to him, but the way his eyes light up when she tells him it's his is thanks enough.

Itachi is sent to find her on one of her days off, but he stands behind her and watches her fish for a few minutes before he speaks and he startles her so badly she drops the pole into the water. It sinks quickly into the muddy water and she snaps a question at him when she stands.

Makoto-sama is ill and wishes to see her, Itachi says. She tells Itachi tersely that she expects him to pay for the fishing pole then rushes to see what is ailing their employer.

Makoto-sama has been poisoned.

She doesn't know how, she doesn't know when. She does know that the poison is meant to weaken its victim slowly to make their decline in health and eventual death seem natural. She manages to extract the poison still in his bloodstream, but it is still hiding in his tissues and she makes an antidote that is to be administered once a day until it is fully evicted from his body.

She notices Itachi doesn't look very hard for the would-be poisoner, but decides it doesn't matter who poisoned Makoto-sama because he lived.

She secretly wishes the poisoner had succeeded.

Makoto-sama wants her by his side at all times while he is recuperating and even after he is fully recovered, he insists that she remain with him.

She can't refuse a man who was so near death, so she stays near him and develops a jutsu that will tell her whether or not the food and drink in front of her is poisoned. She teaches it to Makoto-sama who insists that it is too complicated for him to remember and has her perform it instead.

She begins to lose patience with Makoto-sama and his fake bad memory. She actually yells at him when he pinches her bottom one evening while she is performing the jutsu. He gives her a funny look, but his hands stay where they should for the rest of the night.

Itachi gives Makoto-sama an unreadable look, and she wonders why because Itachi and he seem to get along fine.

Makoto-sama is finding other reasons to keep her near him. She is growing bored with this game; she wants to return to her duties at the hospital because now the village is receiving commissions from other countries and some of the shinobi are coming home wounded.

When one of the shinobi returns to the village with a wound that eventually proves fatal, she demands to return to hospital duty and her wish is granted, although he does not look happy with her choice.

Itachi resumes escorting her home, and she notices that when she and Itachi walk through the door together, Makoto-sama gets that funny look on his face, even though he quickly replaces it with an expression of welcome.

Her birthday is coming again. She will be twenty-one in a month.

Itachi notices that something is bothering her and gives her his dango though he doesn't ask her what is wrong. Sakura is surprised at the gesture because Itachi normally guards his dango like a dragon guards its hoard, and tells him she misses home.

She misses Naruto, and Hinata. She misses eating ramen at least once a week. She misses Ino waving at her from behind the counter of her family's flower shop.

She misses caring that her birthday is coming.

Itachi listens to her without saying a word, but when she has finished, he wipes her tears away.

Thank you for listening, she tells him.

It is the first time she has thanked him.

Itachi gives her a new fishing pole a week later. We monsters have to take care of each other. The card reads. Sakura puts the card on her bedside table where she'll see it when she wakes up in the morning.

It rains the morning of her birthday, and she grumbles at the sky as she eats her breakfast. Itachi watches from his position opposite her at the table. Makoto-sama is ignored, and is fuming.

She is washing her plate when Itachi takes the scrub from her hand and tells her he will do it as it is his turn and her birthday. She scowls at him; she doesn't want to be treated differently on her birthday.

Itachi notices she has a bit of rice stuck at the side of her mouth and wipes it away with his thumb. Her lips feel soft against the pad of the digit, and suddenly he is leaning forward and kissing her.

Makoto-sama watches from the doorway, his arms crossed.

Her subordinates at the hospital send her home at sunset on her birthday; it is the latest she could get them to allow her to stay. She stalls, pretending she still has one or two things to do, and by the time she finally leaves, it is dark out. The paper lanterns used to illuminate the walkways at night to prevent accidents are not lit but she thinks nothing of it as she takes a shortcut home.

She is nearly home when someone calls her name.

As she turns to find out who it is, she hears someone right behind her say that she has it coming.

And then everything goes black.

When she wakes up, she is in Itachi's bed with a large lump on the back of her head. She has no idea how she got there, and she has no memory of what happened after she stepped out of the hospital.

She sits up slowly and then clutches the sheets to her chest when she realizes she isn't wearing anything. There is a dull ache between her legs, and she suddenly remembers Makoto-sama's face above hers, smiling, laughing. She begins to cry as she remembers what happened, but she can't remember how she found herself in Itachi's room until he walks in, wearing the Kamikage's robes.

Itachi saved her, she remembers, and she throws herself at him, taking care to keep the sheets wrapped around herself.

Thank you, she tells him over and over. Itachi rubs a small circle on her back with his hand and tells her you're welcome.

Something comes to her then.

Are you human now? She asks.

YES. He replies. Are you?

YES. She said. And she knew it was true.

A/N: I needed something to break my writer's block because I've been focusing so much on writing a real book that I've blocked my fanfiction muse.

When I originally thought of this title for a fic, I never thought I would use it like this. I had already planned a story using this title, but somehow I found myself using it and this became Monsters instead.

This also marks my first attempt to write in this tense, but I think I did pretty well. The main reason I did it was because I've been reading fics over the last few days, and some of the ones I really liked were written in this tense so I wanted to try it out.

R&R as usual and tell me if you liked or not. And if you spot any mistakes, tell me. Please.