Chapter Text
They told me you were a killer
And I’ve got no doubt that the only way out of this thriller
Is if I am a killer too
Somewhere in the world, someone was relaxing in a silken yukata and availing themselves of hot tea while peacefully watching the gloaming rain fall over a volcanic bath, steam rising among the blood-red maple leaves and paper lanterns hanging in the garden. Haruno Sakura was not that someone. Her robe was indeed soft and the rain outside lulled the senses, soporific, but she was curled upon a cushion among the other painted women whispering and fanning themselves as they made eyes at the men around the room engrossed in their drunken good humor, and she was honestly feeling somewhat claustrophobic in the middle of it all.
Painted shoji doors and the rich, polished chestnut floors gleamed under warm lights. Jasmine and honeysuckle wafted from incense sticks tucked into alcoves in the walls and mixed with the faint smell of clove smoke, all of it rendered a bit sodden thanks to the rain that pattered over the garden and the natural hot springs outside. Sakura had worked up a thin sheen of sweat upon her famously wide forehead in all this summer humidity. She wiped it with the end of her bell sleeve and plastered a demure smile on her face when she found a man looking at her across the way, drawn to her movement. His grey eyes lingered on her only a moment before a much softer, more compliant companion grabbed his face and his full attention.
That’s just fine, Sakura thought. Better the actual courtesan than the kunoichi posing as one.
She sipped her tea (tepid now, which was just one more injustice to add to the many thus far accumulated since she’d arrived at this accursed bathhouse) and scanned the room in an attempt to do at least the bare minimum of her job.
There. Behind a half-closed shoji door, Anko played cards with two other courtesans and several men whose deep, rumbling laughter Sakura could hear even from her vantage. She hadn’t seen their mark emerge from that same little side room, so he must be safely tucked away in there under Anko’s sharp eyes. Those sharp eyes were creased in devious mirth at the moment as she laughed prettily and set her hand upon a faceless man’s arm directly next to her and squeezed, as if she knew exactly how he’d want to be touched. As if she were perfectly at home in this lascivious den.
As if she weren’t a top Konoha Jounin and Head of Coercive Tactics and one of the only people in the world Sakura could truthfully admit she harbored a healthy fear of. Because Mitarashi Anko was a twisted misanthrope with a blood kink and a mysterious past connected to Konoha’s number one most wanted missing nin, the vile Sannin Orochimaru, and Sakura knew from personal secondhand experience that that sort of thing had a way of carving scars upon the soul.
But.
Anko was also her mission leader and her only ally hundreds of miles outside of their native Fire Country, and Sakura had promised their boss and Hokage, Tsunade, that she would defer to Anko’s direction absolutely, no questions asked. Because Anko may have been a bit screwy and violent and definitely scary, but she did have a past with Orochimaru, and that put her in the best position to anticipate, assess, and thwart any tactics Orochimaru and his Hidden Sound Village might employ against their target.
One of Sakura’s fellow courtesans laughed at a joke someone told and nudged Sakura’s arm with a playful, “Don’t you think so, Sakura?”
Sakura smiled sweetly (If you know how to smile, you know how to lie, Anko had coached her on their weeks-long journey from Konoha to Kinu, capital of the Land of Silk at the ass-end of the world, as far as Sakura was concerned). “Of course, Rina!”
“I told you so, didn’t I?” Rina the courtesan gushed, completely forgetting about Sakura as she bantered with the other women who were all being summarily ignored by the men who had already picked their company for the night.
Which was, as previously established, just fine with Sakura, whose primary job was to—
“—observe and assess,” Tsunade had repeated yet again with fresh synonyms that last night in her office. Watch and report. Look but don’t engage. “You are not to approach the target or engage with him unless there is no other choice, and I will be determining the necessity of such a choice with the benefit of hindsight after reading your mission report. Am I understood?”
“Yes, Lady Hokage,” Sakura had said. “I understand my role perfectly.”
Tsunade watched her across the wide expanse of her desk, messy with the day’s neglected reports and debriefs. “That’s good, because in the unlikely but entirely possible event that Sound is already there and courting our target, I do not want you compromising yourself or Anko or your mission. There’s not a single reason under the sun that would justify that.”
Sakura imagined her old teammate Uchiha Sasuke as he’d once been, young and determined and hers, and then as he was now, his katana aimed at her heart and eyes full of nothing at all. She pursed her lips, but she nodded stiffly. “No, Lady Hokage.”
Then, more gently: “I’m trusting you, Sakura. There are plenty of other kunoichi with more directly relevant experience and less skin in the game that I could be sending, but I’m trusting you on your word that you will do as you are ordered and not a thing more.”
Sakura said nothing to that. There was nothing to say, for the Hokage spoke truly. She knew this mission was as much a personal risk on Tsunade’s part as on her own, but it was a risk she could not possibly pass up when it was a potential inroad to her estranged former teammate and friend. “I swear, I won’t let you down.”
Tsunade studied her former student and protege for the longest time. “I know you won’t. I trained you, after all.”
And Sakura, with her chakra masked and her deadly fists hidden under the luxurious sleeves of a thin, silken robe as she lounged with her hair in a pretty twist and pretended to enjoy the company of a gaggle of civilian courtesans, suffered through it all for the sake of her promise.
But gods be damned, it was boring.
She and Anko had shown up here a month ahead of their target’s scheduled arrival to scope out the sprawling bathhouse and its resident staff, to insert themselves seamlessly among their ranks and establish rapport and backstory so that no one would question the convenient timing of two unattached women showing up just before this land’s most infamous shinobi in between the jobs he took for increasingly higher bidders as his reputation grew and metastasized.
Sakura lazily swept her gaze across the room once more, searching for any signs of trouble as Anko had ordered her to do.
Look for the ones who are paying attention, she’d said.
Paying attention to what? Sakura wanted to know.
To whatever doesn’t belong.
To her, Sakura knew. And to Anko too, if only by association. Anko had been training in subterfuge for years; Sakura had only been at this for a month and change. She was learning fast, but she’d never been a great actress of any natural talent. And so, the two of them kept separate as much as possible so as not to draw any inference of association from the patrons.
Sakura was, essentially, a pretty little worm on a hook meant to key-jingle in the general direction of any undercover missing nin who might be thinking of recruiting their target into some nefarious, rogue cabal of murderers for hire.
This pretty little worm felt her ass falling asleep in this position, so she rose to stretch her legs and walk the room under the pretense of procuring something a little stronger than tepid tea. She slipped through the opened shoji panels of the connecting room to the bar and held her breath to the thick, spicy scent of clove smoke. It was much stronger in here than in the main lounge; the sliding shoji doors that opened up to the garden were partially closed due to the rain.
A few men playing mahjong at a table were so engrossed in their game and the crooning of their courtesans as they cheered them on that they didn’t even notice Sakura weaving among them to get to the liquor bottles neatly stored behind the bar.
As she rose with her purloined bottle, she stopped dead in her tracks to find a man’s singular attention focused solely on her across the small room. She would have thought nothing of it—in her time at the bathhouse, she had been on the receiving end of many a leer, stare, and once even a man licking his lips without a shred of shame—except that there was no heat behind this man’s stare. There was warmth, yes: his eyes were the warmest shade of honey left to crystallize under the sun’s beams. But there was a glassy chill to them that spoke of scrutiny, or suspicion, rather than any sort of carnal curiosity.
Oh fuck, Sakura thought, succinctly.
He was just sitting there. Hadn’t even budged an inch. A porcelain sake cup dangled from his long fingers, mostly empty, and a slender, ivory cigarette holder perched in his other hand just shy of his lips, blue smoke curling faintly from its burning end. His yukata loosely draped him much as he draped the cushions upon which he sat, spilling open over his bare chest in a way that said languid but not careless. There was nothing unintentional about the way this man was watching Sakura.
For a hundred years, neither of them moved nor spoke as they gazed upon each other. Sakura was not sure when her heart had taken up residence in her throat, and it hammered at her wildly now as if it believed the rest of her was unaware that she had just hooked a fish too large to hang on to.
He lifted his empty sake cup in her direction, his eyes never leaving her face. “Pour for me,” he commanded.
Sakura swallowed hard and did her absolute best not to look like a rabbit facing down the fox’s jaws. Not trusting her voice at all, she instead put her faith in the smile Anko had armed her with and sweetened for him.
Her mysterious patron held his cup out for her. Sakura kneeled next to him, drew back her oversized sleeve to expose her pale wrist just as Rina had taught her on her first day at the bathhouse, and poured. When she’d filled his cup, she carefully wiped the mouth of the bottle with her sleeve.
He was still looking at her.
In a move so smooth and discreet she barely registered it, he pressed two gold coins on the low table next to her own cup. “Now you.”
Sakura averted her eyes, as much out of feigned feminine modesty as rising anxiety. She would be obliged to sit with him and share a drink now that he’d paid her, and she did not like the sound of that. Something about this man unsettled her the way a sleeping tiger would: one wrong move, and she might awaken something hungry and terrible and focused entirely on her. Most of the men who frequented the bathhouse were of a similar feather, rich and powerful, or else deadly and powerful. And every single one of them entitled to the spoils prettily made up and displayed before them. To capture the singular attention of one of them (Sakura noticed that no other courtesan had entered this man’s orbit, nor even glanced in his direction as they busied themselves with the more jovial mahjong players in the corner) was dangerous.
What flavor of dangerous remained yet to be seen.
But this wasn’t her first night on the job, either. Anko had trained her for this very situation, and she had gotten better over the course of the month. The night, no matter how long it seemed, would not last forever. The sun would rise in the morning, and this man would return to the shadows whence he came, just like all the others. She need only endure. She need only smile.
Sakura smiled for him again now.
“Sir,” she said, tempering her voice to a dulcet whisper. “Are you enjoying your evening?”
He took a drag of his cigarette, and Sakura watched his lips purse around the ivory and suck. Blue smoke rose above his head and sprawled, a skulking creature in itself, until it dissipated.
“Not really,” he said, his voice a dry, clipped monotone. “Sit.”
Sakura wanted to do about a hundred other things besides sit next to this man on his mountain of hoarded cushions (there seemed to be rather a dearth of them throughout the rest of the room, and she wondered if he’d shown up early to pile them all up in this spot before any of the other patrons could take them). Alas, she was undercover and had a mission to uphold, so she picked a spot on the cushion farthest from him and settled in with her sake cup resting over her folded knees.
Even so, he was not an arm’s length from her.
“Drink,” he ordered.
Sakura’s lip twitched. Would he simply order her through the rest of the evening? She drank her sake and put the thought out of her mind before it wandered to other things he might be tempted to order her to do.
Silence ensued as they sat there with their sake and observed the rest of the party. Sakura realized they had a rather good view of this room and into the adjoining one from their vantage. Among others, she caught a glimpse of Anko’s profile through an opening in the shoji that sectioned off the card room, as well as the boxy face of their target: Ocha no Takuya.
“Where are you from?”
Sakura startled at the voice of her inconvenient patron. Despite the ambient strum of a Shamisen drifting in from the other room, his whispery voice cut with the sharpness of a well-maintained blade. It sent a shiver down Sakura’s spine.
“Um,” Sakura stammered, caught off guard. Then, remembering her backstory she and Anko had practiced every day since the start of this mission, she said, “I was traded from a caravan out of the Land of Mountains when I was a girl. This is the only home I’ve known.”
“The Land of Mountains,” he repeated slowly. “You must have fetched a king’s ransom with that coloring. It’s unusual that far west.”
Sakura held her smile. “I couldn’t say.”
“No,” he agreed, eyeing her naturally pink hair.
They fell into a short silence once again. Sakura heard Rina laughing in the other room as she passed by on the arm of some man red-faced from drinking and looking like he was having the time of his life. Anko’s room erupted with applause when one of the courtesans—a blue-haired beauty whose face Sakura couldn’t recall—won the round. Takuya did not look too pleased, but when she reached across him to refill his cup and the sleeve of her yukata slipped to reveal a swath of bare shoulder, he seemed somewhat mollified and whispered something that made her laugh prettily.
“You seem far more interested in card games than in me,” Sakura’s patron said. “Is my ransom not kingly enough for you?”
Sakura bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood. Flustered, she whirled on her patron and only barely kept her wits about her when she found him inches from her face, having leaned in close while she was distracted. “N-No, sir,” she stammered. “Forgive me. I…I’m a bit tired tonight.”
It sounded pathetic even to her, but he gave little away as he watched her behind those cold, pretty eyes. “Very well,” he said, much to her relief, until: “On one condition.”
Sakura clenched her clammy fists in her lap. “Oh?”
“Tell me your name.”
Her name.
A simple enough request, and one that irked her innate suspicion of men in his position who held all the power in a world that guaranteed as much. Still, this was a civilian bathhouse in a country far from any established shinobi activity, and she was trained by the Hokage. Beyond securing her unwilling yet harmless servility for the night, what could he really do to her?
“Sakura,” she answered.
Her patron’s eyes widened in unmistakable amusement, the first glimmer of emotion she had detected from him that wasn’t scary indifference. His fine lips twitched, wanting to smile or to sneer, it was impossible to tell.
“Really,” he said.
“Truly,” she said flatly.
He leaned back, apparently satisfied with her answer, and set aside his empty cup to take a drag of his cigarette. Sakura hesitated a moment. She did not want to anger him or tempt him, lest either remind him of his relative power over one such as her and give him dark ideas. Kunoichi she may be, and her keep paid by Konoha rather than any real patrons she’d otherwise have to ensnare, but he didn’t know that.
She decided on the most neutral path forward, which had hardly failed her before. “May I pour you another?”
Her patron said nothing as he held out his cup for her, and Sakura gracefully bared her wrist to him once more and poured.
When he moved, it was as though through sleight of hand: she didn’t even see him coming. Long fingers curled around her slim wrist in a grip that crushed but didn’t break. It was enough to make her drop the sake bottle, but it didn’t fall to the ground. He had caught it before it could shatter, miraculously spilling only minimally on the red cushion pinned under his knee.
“Sakura,” he spoke her name as though tasting every syllable before allowing them to pass from his lips. He was close enough that she could smell the cinnamon spice of cloves on his breath. “You are an exceptionally poor conversationalist for a courtesan.”
Sakura’s survival instinct roared in her blood then. She tried to pull away, but he held fast. He was strong. Strong enough that she’d need chakra to overpower him, something she wasn’t willing to risk in public—yet. Forcing herself to calm down, she clenched her trapped fist and met his deadened gaze.
“But you possess the quiet discretion of a kunoichi.” He pulled her hard, and like he could read her mind, caught her other hand before it could stun him with a burst of medical chakra to his central nervous system. Caught, that is, but not with his already full hands.
He flashed his teeth in a smile. “Or not.”
Sakura was pissed off and afraid, and she could not tear her eyes from the subtly shimmering chakra threads that had stopped her attack an inch from his neck. Chakra meant shinobi, and a shinobi who could subdue her so quickly with a technique she’d never seen before meant very bad things.
“Let me go,” she hissed.
His body was warm against hers. Close as they were, their limbs entangled, they probably appeared intimate to anyone who might have glanced their way. He angled his face toward hers as a lover might, and she realized he was doing it on purpose to maintain the ruse. But his breath tickling her ear made her shiver not in passionate desire, but in dread for what he might do to her now that he’d discerned her true nature.
“Why would I do that?” he crooned. His lips were soft against the shell of her ear. “I paid for your attention, so…attend to me.”
He held her there a moment, but he didn’t attack her. He didn’t release her, either. Sakura’s eyes darted around the room. No one had noticed their altercation, too absorbed in games and seduction and booze, but any longer like this and they were sure to draw eyes. Hating herself for it but seeing no better choice given her unfamiliarity with her opponent’s technique or true motives, she relaxed her muscles.
“All right,” she relented.
Her patron slowly untangled himself from her, his expression carefully placid like nothing untoward had transpired at all. His strange chakra strings retracted and gave her back her hand, and he righted the sake bottle she had dropped. To her surprise, he refilled both their cups and handed hers over.
Sakura knew better than to argue now, so she mutely accepted the cup and raised it to her lips to join him in a drink.
He said nothing as he studied her, and it became apparent that he wouldn’t. So, Sakura broke the ice.
“Who are you?” she demanded, keeping her voice low. “What do you want?”
He seemed to find her questions amusing. “You seem to be under the impression that your questions carry any weight.”
Asshole.
Sakura let him see her real rage then. He may be shinobi, and he may be strong, but he’d only caught her off guard before. He would not do so again. He had no idea who he was dealing with.
However.
Starting a brawl with an unknown shinobi simply over her pride was not a good enough reason to compromise Anko and their mission. So Sakura held on to her chakra and forced herself to stay calm. “I gave you my name. It’s only fair to give me yours in return.”
“I paid you for your name,” he corrected her. Then, he let his gaze trail from her face down her body, which was still curled up next to his on his many cushions. “Among other things.”
Sakura fished his coins out of the hidden pocket in her robe and shoved them at his half bared chest. “I’m not for sale.”
“Yes, you are.” His coins tumbled to his lap and rolled onto the floor, but he didn’t seem to care for them. “Shinobi or whore, there’s little difference between us and them.”
Us.
Sakura didn’t know what to say to that. In a way, she supposed he was right.
“My name,” he said, leaning back and taking a savoring puff of his cigarette. “I’ll trade you for it.”
She stiffened. “Trade for what?” she said venomously, an unspoken warning in her tone.
“Your tag.”
Sakura’s hand instinctively flew to the simple, black stone carved with her name and threaded through a leather strap around her wrist. It marked her as a courtesan of this bathhouse. Each girl wore one, and she only gave it up to a patron who promised to pay her exclusive fee for as long as he deigned to keep it. Sakura had never given hers, of course. She had never needed to, and she certainly had never expected to.
“I am no courtesan,” she said firmly.
“And I’m no hedonist content to pay for a kunoichi’s poor imitation of the real thing,” he said just as firmly.
Sakura wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that he wasn’t interested in forcing her into his bed or offended that he assumed her utterly incapable of any charms.
Relieved. Obviously relieved, you colossal twit.
“So, what then?” she asked.
“I can’t very well have you running around as you please while my mission here is ongoing.”
Of course. She should have guessed as much. And considering the value of her target, she had a pretty good idea what his mission entailed.
“What mission is that, exactly?”
He smirked. “Your tag, Sakura. If you want to know more, you’ll have to find something else to trade me.”
Sakura was sure she wanted to trade her fist in his perfectly symmetrical face for his eternal silence, but she kept that petty thought to herself. Seeing no way out of this, because of course now she was going to have to keep an eye on him in case he got it in his head to get in Anko’s way and jeopardize their mission, Sakura ripped her tag from her wrist and roughly handed it over. “There. Happy?”
“Not at all,” he said as he accepted her tag and rubbed his thumb over the kanji that bore her name. There was something almost libidinous about the way he touched the stone, and Sakura bit her lip to hide a grimace.
“Well?” she prompted. “Your name, as promised.”
His honeyed eyes flickered to hers, and Sakura forgot her disgust in favor of that ominous thrill she’d felt when they’d first locked eyes. Danger, it said, tempting.
“As promised,” he said softly, pocketing her tag in his yukata sleeve. He drained the rest of his sake and rose to his full height over her still seated on the cushions. “Sasori.”
Even his name hit her with a velvet sort of violence.
Sasori snuffed out his spent cigarette and pocketed the ivory holder. With a final glance down at Sakura he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sakura. Don’t keep me waiting.”
Sakura watched him melt into the darkness of the corridors leading away to the sleeping quarters as if he were nothing but smoke himself. She clutched her naked wrist and found that her hand was shaking.
What have I done?
She’d gotten the singular attention of a powerful missing nin, that was what she’d done. Whether it ended quite badly or very badly remained to be seen.
Sasori’s coins remained on the floor where he’d left them, and she recalled what he’d said about shinobi and whores. In a moment of unrestrained fury, she gathered them in her fist and crushed them with chakra until they warped.
Sakura got up, threw the useless lumps of gold down on the cushions, and stalked off to her own quarters. With Sasori gone for the evening and the threat with him, Anko wouldn’t miss her keeping watch. She’d need her rest, anyway, if she was going to have to meet him again tomorrow.
Something told her he would not appreciate her being late.