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Chapter Text

a type of three-sided polygon where there are no congruent sides; each point is differently distant from each other.

Her fingers tremble and ache in a way only a medic's could. There'd been a point in her sea of hospital shifts where the chakra could no longer be summoned; just pathetic little sparks that can barely wash away a headache, let alone repair a sliced abdomen. She had no choice but to go old-fashioned and dive in the classic way with a needle and thread, suturing and directing others to pour and heal base wounds while she quite-literally knitted flesh to flesh.

It's a consequence, she reminds herself, of war.

To be brought down from the high of victory, to be sobered up after the win. Patching together the people is her expertise and it's where she's had to bury herself. She could never hate her teacher for giving her these demanded skills, could never hate those who get injured and stretch her shifts further, or hate the many demands asked of her.

(This, among other duties to her village, from the most glorious to the most sacrificial.)

She jams in the little brass key that's always in her breast pocket, missing only once from the sheer exhaustion that carves into her bones. Sitting on three and a half shifts make her feel weary and aged, and nothing will be better than a protein bar, a hot shower, and a mattress. Fuck the paperwork that's followed her here.

Pushing the front door open, she nearly trips on the sandals that are thrown haphazardly before the step. Odd considering how she's the messiest in the house by comparison.

Tiredly, she slips hers off and slides them to the side before doing the same to the bigger, black pair. When she feels the sensation of something wet and thick, her features twist. Then the smell wafts up.

Blood.

Dread grips her heart and in a split second, she drops all the folders in her arms, a bag, her medic's robes, and follows the smattering and smear-tracks like a hound. They stop in the living room where a bloodied hand is stamped onto the pristine white lampshade—the only thing on and illuminating the walls in a gruesome, fingerprinted red.

Dearly beloved, her mind rings ominously as her stomach swoops and she stumbles on, numb and empty. We are gathered here today to celebrate the holy union of three parties.

But it's a dreary vision, framed by red roses and a casket.

Here lies—

"—Sasuke Uchiha," she whispers in the silence, "do not die on me. Do not."

She presses quivering hands to the hole carved into his stomach, summoning forth the chakra at the very bottom of her soul, the bare minimum that keeps her lungs breathing and heart beating. He's icy to the touch but he's always like that: cold and aloof, unfeeling, marbled skin and wintry eyes. Like the walking, living dead, beautiful and broken and distant.

And dying here in their living room.

The little glow begins to flicker and panic robs her of breath. She pleads from within, searches desperately for the thin thread that she can scrounge up because all she needs is just a little, just some, to manipulate efficiently, perfectly, to mimic the sutures she'd been doing, to save—

Pinwheel eyes shoot open, glowing red and eerie in the dark and the corners of her spotted vision hallucinates the battlefield, the war, the way this man scales the ground and crams his fist unapologetically into her chest. Her hand retracts hastily and she starts backing away like a startled animal, and when he moves to stand slowly, she hysterically asks for time.

More time.

"I need more time to save them! I can do it!"

I can't give you time, Yamato says hollowly. This is it.

"Sakura- Sakura!"

Sasuke takes her shaking hands and pins them to her sides, glaring until the incessant babbling stops. It only makes her beg harder, louder, and he moves to the pressure point at her neck.

She goes silent at the familiarity, snaps from one realm to the next and flinches so violently that he's forced to freeze. She stares at him like she's staring at Death: terrified.

Expectant.

He bares his teeth, growling, hating the look, and she wonders drunkenly whether he will finally do it. She thinks they all tip-toe around one another here, but she does so the most of all. One wrong move and something will happen—maybe that something is that he will go from touching her neck to snapping it.

Sometimes, she believes it will be the kindest thing he's ever done for her.

"—What the hell happened here?"

The foreground sounds fuzzy, like white noise mixed with cotton and she collapses against the couch—with non-bloodied cushions—while Sasuke rises to meet whoever else is yelling.

"—don't know! She just fucking went insane—"

"And you? What the fuck are you doing here?"— A weapon pouch thumps against the ground. Shuriken clatter. "—ever think about maybe she hates you?—"

"Rich!" Sasuke snarls angry words, punches and breaks stuff lining the fireplace. "—from the one fucking his own teammate before his wedding—"

"What excuse do you have?" his opposer seethes dangerously, "how much of the Five Nations have you slept with before your wedding—"

"—You're no better!"

"You run like a coward!" A kunai is launched. "You've been gone for six months!"

"You're one to talk," Sasuke growls menacingly. "You were gone for five before me."

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you," Sasuke hisses. "I'm going to the Fifth tomorrow to end this goddamn arrangement and I'll get petitioners if I fucking have to."

"Fine," is spat back. "Three years of this farce was three years too many."

Sasuke growls, says something angry and condescending, then turns around to leave. Seconds later, the second-floor room on the rightmost side slams closed. The one left behind sighs aggravatedly, his storming chakra in turmoil. He smells like stamping ink and fresh reams of paper and anger and disappointment.

He stands there and somewhere in the hyperventilating, distant haze in Sakura's head, she thinks he must be staring at her.

Then he steps carefully, quietly, over all their broken belongings and nameless displays of disposable "decorations."

"Sakura," he mutters. His voice is of a similar quality to Sasuke's, Sakura thinks, and in a fit of realization, stumbles to take hold of the thought. It's the first calm, coherent thing to pull through the induced cloud of memories and regrets. "What happened?"

He's always sounded patient, polite, but that's all it's ever been. Between their courting period where she found him with Tenten, and their sham exchanged in the form of vows, he'd always been good at the lack of inflection in his voice. He's only ever shown two things: appearing collected or shouting in anger.

Like Sasuke.

"I-" Her throat hurts. "I thought he was dying."

He wasn't though. Now, without the panic stuttering through her lungs, she knows he wasn't. A kunai wound was what he had, a simple stab injury that felt maybe only half an hour old, fresh; she could've knitted it with a millilitre of chakra if she wanted, but she saw more than there was. The blood on his shoe, on the floor, and on the couch wasn't his; the handprint was a result of him putting pressure on the stab and touching the lampshade.

But she saw gore and death and him crowding her chest with his hand, grabbing for the heart that's always belonged to him, intent on crushing it physically because emotionally and mentally wasn't enough.

She saw the faces of the people she failed to save, the ones she did save who killed themselves anyway because war stole their families, their loved ones, including hers but she's alive, right? She's the lucky one.

Right?

Yamato shakes his head in her mind and tells her that he can't give her any more time, feels him pulling her hands away from her dying parents' bodies as the seventh wave of enemies is seconds upon them.

Then a kunai is lodged into her mother's temple and it's over anyways, the chance is gone.

The glass beside her is moved aside and suddenly her vision is filled with liquid mercury.

"Go to bed," Neji tells her, a foot away and miles gone. His eyes are hard, slightly uncaring, and a touch irritated. "We'll solve this tomorrow."

She doesn't know what he might mean: this little fight out of many, or their damaged marriage.

Neji shuts his bedroom door, exhaling loudly. It doesn't rest the agitation in his bones but it keeps him from crossing the hall and punching the Uchiha's lights out. Running fingers through long hair, he leans against his desk, reaching carefully with chakra until it trickles downstairs.

Sakura edges into his awareness, an empty well and a bundle of tightly coiled nerves. He recognized what she'd started going through for what it was: a post-traumatic episode. An induced hallucination triggered by a million terrible memories—and who's the cause?

Sasuke.

His jaw clenches tightly, wired like it's stuck. Six months Sasuke had been gone, off on a requested S-Rank to god-knows-where while Neji was stuck here, proctoring the next ANBU exams, having to return to an empty house or an empty woman.

Both were equally hard to see.

Sakura, he knows, runs herself so hard into the ground that soon, it might be into an early grave. They are all workaholics but that's only one of three things they have in common, the other two being ANBU-grade and hailing from the same village. Since their ordered courtship, engagement, and subsequent marriage, the three of them had become nothing but strangers sharing ownership of a single house.

Sasuke is most famously known for the hundreds of solo missions under his belt, Neji, known for being a fearsome ANBU Captain. Sakura's skills are in higher demand at home than on the field, so she's forced to stay here and stitch together those that are torn apart. It had to be the worst possible pairing to be thought of, but the Councilmen approved, and the clanheads and the Hokage agreed (the latter albeit reluctantly, but playing favorites wasn't something she could do this time). There were few who really objected to the arrangement.

But it's like living among the dead when he's around here because any of them are always gone, whether it's in mind, body, or spirit.

He's always seen himself settling down with Tenten in the future—he'd even gone as far as to ignore the ordered courting of Sakura to continue meeting with his former teammate. But he'd found it'd only been sex to Tenten—during the post-war checkups, her egg count cropped up low and carrying to term deemed was dangerous. And she'd admitted to slowly falling for Lee. Neji became a ghost after that, then resigned himself to this sham that the higherups put him to.

He reaches again, feels Sakura still downstairs but reclined against the couch. Her signature is like a dying ember and there's no sleep on her person, but unconsciousness. A pinprick of guilt highlights his chest at leaving her down there, but then he swats it away. They're grown ups and not each other's responsibility.

Of course, he thinks, embittered, freshly showered and dressed for bed. Of course this is how it ends up.

The most powerful of his generation from the Hyuuga, the heir and survivor from the Uchiha, and arguably the strongest kunoichi alive, a daughter-figure to the Hokage—on paper, they're irrefutable matches, logical and perhaps even perfect in a way.

In practice, they couldn't be more different.

Tsunade glares at Sasuke, drilling fiery holes into the scowl that he dares shoot to his Hokage.

"No."

"But—"

"No!" She slams her desk and stands, and even though she's shorter than him, her menacing presence is still towering. "And do you know why no?"

"Because you don't care about her—"

"You finish that sentence," she hisses dangerously, vindictively, "and I will remove you from active duty, brat."

His hackles raise and the pinwheeled flower in his eye spins to life. She barks a laugh.

"You dare turn your Sharingan on me?"—and the statement is punctuated by movement at the edges of his awareness. ANBU, responding to the killing intent he exudes. He sucks air through his teeth, snarling in a way, then shuts the bloodline off. "Now that you've so graciously decided to become human again," Tsunade sarcastically quips, "you will stand there and listen to me say what I said in the beginning when I first told you why this arrangement is the way that it is."

"I—"

"Ah," she stops him, her smile an angry, vicious mix of irritation and dislike. "No talking." Her hands settle on her hips, eyes narrowed. "Now you know that after a war, a baby boom follows. In war, we lose thousands of lives and risk a thousand more for the generation to come—how do you think that generation comes to be?"

Sasuke scowls. He's not here for the birds and the bees talk but Tsunade takes sick pleasure in the annoyance on his face.

"Of course, two years after the war and what do we have? No baby boom, but we sure as hell know everyone's going at it like rabbits." She crosses her arms now. "So we check the health and sex of all of our people."

The Uchiha refuses to blanch at the topic. He remembers that irritating period when everyone was getting a physical and the questions started getting too personal.

"And would you look at that. The normal is nine-percent men, eleven-percent women are infertile at any other time. Come away with the war, and men are triple that and women are quadruple."

Tsunade sits now, regal in her Hokage robes. She stares at him, all amber eyes and wisdom.

"The revival of the old marital law was a necessity, Sasuke. Dozens of bloodlines are at stake, including yours and the Hyuuga. Nearly fifty percent women are infertile and over half of that number can't carry to term—so you do the math."

"Did you have to make it arranged?" Sasuke demands, teeth gritted. "Did it have to be Sakura and Neji?"

"Yes." Her reply is unrepentant. "Neji is the last male closest to the main line of Hyuuga. You're the last Uchiha. Sakura is not only fertile, but politically secure, and chakra control is genetic and dominantly passed, the same way the Byakugan and the Sharingan are. This kills multiple birds with one stone."

He growls and she smirks sardonically.

"The world is unfair, Uchiha. You think I would've paired her with you two? The girl I look at as a daughter? Not a chance." She threads her fingers beneath her chin, inquisitive, eyes bright. "But ever since we all decided to fight in that war, we've decided to do everything for the sake of ensuring our childrens' future. For the three of you, this is your part."

The trio are anything but a functional coupling. Their marriage had never been consummated—it only marked the end of other trysts, other connections. Before their vows were exchanged, Sasuke had a habit of picking up women when off on long missions, Neji had Tenten, and Sakura indulged herself after hard shifts and sleepless nights. They had lovers—none of them each other.

They'd never kissed, never desired, no plans about children or families had come despite the conditions. The house they live in is Sakura's because she owns it; Sasuke used to have an apartment and Neji, the Hyuuga Compound. It became less of a home to her once they moved in, filled it with the barest necessities, nothing personal except the faint scents left behind and the clan insignias on their backs. Her parents used to live here when their original house was decimated in Pein's Attack, but since their death, she has taken the master bedroom, Sasuke has taken her own, and Neji, the guest.

The men have never known why there are three living quarters here, nor why her parents had never come to her wedding.

They're faceless in the sea of war losses, death impactful on their only daughter. No parents, no siblings—the Harunos were only three people and two out of the three are dead. She assumed that her husbands thought her parents didn't come because it was too much to see their babygirl be wed off to two clan heirs in what would be termed as the "Baby Machine" Marital Law.

No illusions exist, not even to their friends, to the citizens of the village. The smiles are strained, the atmospheres hard; Neji is tense around his former team, Naruto is stiff with Hinata on his arm, Ino slips away early with Sai after a few awkward laughs. The Uchiha-Haruno-Hyuuga union was a historical affair but everyone knows that it was nothing more than duty, and while others have settled and fallen in love after weddings, they have not. They're too different.

This marriage is simply a label and they all live under it.

Neji heads to the house once, mentally exhausted. He and Shikamaru had been poring over a rising case to the west; Grass hasn't seen activity since the Snake Sannin—until now. But with Orochimaru and Kabuto quietly on Konoha's side, who could be causing the uproars?

They had little clues except for a bloody symbol drawn on a scrap of clothing, bright and stark red among a pile of charred bodies.

Sakura is assigned to the forensics team, analyzing pieces of genetic information left on the scene, and in charge of autopsies on recovered corpses; Sasuke had been on the dispatch squads that brought them to the village.

He picks up the reference material that he'd needed, then leaves the house. Sakura must be finished with the first autopsy by now so he makes a beeline for the hospital morgue. Nodding to the people at the front desk, he descends into the basement where the temperature is crisp and cold, like a giant freezer for the dead.

Passing through to the help station, he asks for Doctor Haruno and is directed to one of the many halls spiderwebbing the area. She's in the third hall, in the furthest room down.

The closer he comes, the more he sees that Sakura is not alone. She's out cold, face plastered to the icy surface of one of the metal tables, a dead body flayed open behind her. He ignores the uncomfortable feeling crawling along his shoulders; he's killed plenty times and seen those killed many more, but there's something unsettling about the way she can freely be unconscious with an opened up human at her back.

Frowning down at the top of her head, he drops the file and surveys the area, noticing notes scrawled in unintelligible handwriting with equally difficult words. The body behind them is marked with a pen, notable features highlighted. Skin is pulled back over muscle, meticulously divided up into layers and peeled open for inspection. Some areas are drilled down into bone, well-kept organs as showpieces. Jars of them are preserved on a nearby cart.

The brain is the most eye-catching thing on the corpse, cracked open and on display in an almost grossly artistic manner.

"Ugh, fuck."

Neji's lips press together as he looks away, seeing Sakura groggily lift her head and rub at a temple. She doesn't seem to notice him standing behind her on the other side of the gurney, instead pressing a little button that brings up the intercom.

"Yes, Sakura-sama?" He recognizes the voice from the front desk.

"Same cause," she mutters half-heartedly, rubbing her eye socket with the back of her wrist. "I'll have the reports down; send someone to wrap up the body. Bring in the fifth corpse for prep."

"Of course, right away."

He feels like he's intruding almost. There's practically never a time after the war where the old Sakura exists—the one that curses like a sailor and grumbles at the air, and he's never in the hospital or around hospital staff enough to see the self-confident presence she seems to give off.

She's almost always timid and jumpy, scurrying off at the sight of him or Sasuke.

—Wait, fifth?

She leans back in her chair, pops the bones that ridge along spine and shoulders, then stands, brushing strands of hair that has fallen from the thick bun it's always in. Upon turning around, she freezes at the sight of him like an easily scared deer. Gone is the woman from seconds ago, the one who reminded him of the person who'd punched a goddess.

"...Neji," she says finally, eyeing him and especially his hands. "What are you doing here?"

Stone settles onto his face like home and he crosses his arms slowly. "I brought an interrogation report from one of the prisoners." He nods to the files on her desk. "And a piece of reference material from the house on what we saw. Shikamaru and I are cross-referencing our evidence and thought we should get some of your findings on the bodies."

She wipes her hands on her medic's robe. "Right."

Green eyes glance to the body between them before she hesitantly moves to stand at it's head. She motions for Neji to come closer to where the crown is peeled back and skull cracked open. She slips gloves on, wields a scalpel and long, thin medical tongs, prying open brain matter and tissue until she picks apart an empty cavity within the folds.

"Located here was the hippocampus." Her head nods to one of the jars on the cart labeled so. "It was abnormally small when I extracted it—possible signs of foul play."

"What is its usual size?" he asks, picking up the jar and peering at the odd, seahorse shaped organ.

"Approximately three to three-point-five cubic centimetres in volume in an adult," she says, removing the tongs and scalpel. Her features twist in contemplation. "It's believed that the larger, the better your memory."

"And this one was smaller?"

"By quite the margin." She removes her gloves, tosses them in the bin. "Only about two-point-four cubic centimetres." He puts down the jar, a slender eyebrow moving up in silent question. Her head tilts, shaking hair from her face. "I believe the hippocampus was compromised. Tampered with in order to induce amnesia so that these so-called 'merchants' that happened to be dead nearby the base aren't actually merchants. They're enemy nin."

His mouth hardens, eyes narrowing. Enemy nin.

"Your reasons to believe that?"

Sakura's lips purse and suddenly there she is, a glimpse of the girl from the war. "Genjutsu, is what I'm saying. This hippocampus looks like a drained version of a normal one. Various portions of the entire brain looked to have undergone some kind of trauma—abnormally concentrated swelling, for example. Small-scale versions of the swelling happens when a genjutsu is cast, since your opponent's chakra acts as a mental barrier to cut certain processes, altering your reality." She waves absently to the open cranium between them. "Long term blockage results in this—light hemorrhaging, which indicates memory interference."

"Someone removed their memories?"

"Someone replaced them," she corrects, tone leaving little room for rebuttal. Not that he can—this isn't quite his forte. "What did you guys find?"

"Shikamaru mentioned that Yamanaka found a psychological barrier. Missing parts in the psyche."

Sakura nods almost distractedly, chewing on her lower lip just a bit. "Makes sense. Ino's technique almost always enters the mind through the frontal lobe, which is one of the many places where the swelling is concentrated. It was the same for the other three bodies before this one."

Neji takes this in, begins the mental process of cross-referencing all that he's just learned. "What use will a fifth autopsy yield if you're so sure?"

"To make sure that we're seeing correlation and not just coming to the wrong conclusions," she simply says. "The amnesic episodes might just be a coincidence—instances where they happen to be a team unlucky enough to be there, for example, and the real enemy planted them as distractions. Rough-housing for another, and the violence has compromised their long or short term memories. Unfortunate timing, substance abuse, latent trauma, among others. A fifth will confirm correlation, but we need causation as well."

"And how do we do that?"

Her responding smile is slightly surprising. Grim, he sees, knowing. Aged. "You have to ask Sasuke for that."

Someone knocks on the door and three medics come in—two to wrap up the current body and one to prep the place for the next.

Sakura steps back but continues: "Have him use the Sharingan. With a Mangekyou, he has the ability to survey the finer presence of residual chakra traces. If he recognizes genjutsu indeed on all five of these bodies, then we have causation."

"What about the two living men?"

"That's for the Byakugan." Her attention is leaving, truly professional mask slipping on. "If you can spot disruptions in the cranial tenketsu, the evidence is damning."

He hums. "I see."

She smiles again, tilted and hesitant and for a moment the confidence disappears because she seems to always be like that around him and Sasuke—unsure. Her fingers fidget.

"Well. If you will excuse me."

Sakura turns away just as a fourth and fifth medic appear at the door, body bag on a gurney and greeting, "Haruno-sama" on their tongues. He takes it as his cue to leave.

It's poetic tragedy almost, how well they seem to function together in everything except for where it personally matters.

They all have nightmares.

It's obvious Sasuke would—he suffers underneath the wicked bloom of his brother's Mangekyou but instead of just seeing Itachi kill off their clan, he watches him cut the heads off his parents' shoulders in their bedroom, then turn the sword on himself.

"Know that I will always love you," Itachi would say, crying bloody tears with an equally red smile stolen from their childhood, before he jerks the blade sideways and slits his own throat. And Sasuke, small and young or tall and old, will still scream and cry and feel like he wants to join them wherever they go.

So he'll shoot wide awake, sweating, throat raw and in pain. He'll tear off his shirt and throw his blankets away. He'll knock his head against the headboard to return to earth, Sharingan fluctuating, then riot out of the house through the window.

Neji also has nightmares. He remembers the day he hears his father is dead for the sake of his uncle. He can feel the burn that sears through his forehead, linking dangerous, constant chakra to his eyes so that if ever he died, his bloodline will seal closed. It's like a trigger always at the ready, pressed to the temple. He knows the feeling so well but he can't help the wretched sounds that leave his body when he falls asleep alive and wakes up dead.

In the aftermath, he sits, face buried in his hands in misery. Hiashi is dead because he'd pushed Neji out of the way and taken the hit meant for Naruto by the Ten Tails. Gai is forever wheelchair bound, Tenten didn't love him back, Lee's his strained best friend.

Life falls apart little by little for Neji but it stands on thin legs and he has to keep going anyway. So he puts bandages to his forehead and meditates in the moonlight, intent on forgetting where and who he is.

Sakura is someone people would never think has nightmares, but she does. She does in vivid and graphic detail. She remembers the war a lot and how she summoned Katsuyu and divided up the slug's body to heal people. She can feel the stress on her control and her chakra from the sapping, how just the slightest mishap and thousands upon thousands of nin would be killed if she wasn't careful.

She remembers the way Naruto dies and she has to force her hand into his chest to manually pump his heart. And how Sasuke shouts at her to keep his left eye safe while he goes in to steal the Rinnegan. And how she impaled herself on a chakra rod to give her team the opening on Madara. How Sasuke wanted to kill her handfuls of times, how she loved him anyways, how she punched a goddess and rocked the earth and saved many and lost more.

And how she was right there to heal her parents, just milliseconds away, just a little more fucking time—but she hesitates, the kunai's handle-deep in her mother's temple and—what use was there?

Neji and Sasuke were damned to events out of their control. It's in Neji's house traditions to get marked; Sasuke was much too young to hurt anything, let alone save anyone.

But Sakura was a grown girl, sixteen, Tsunade's prized disciple and just unlocking the diamond seal on her forehead and she still lost her parents.

I can't give you time, Yamato says in the background, emptily, like he thinks she should just accept it but how can a single daughter accept the death of her only family when she was right there, a talented medic, brilliant and powerful; just a second more and they'd be stable and alive and they died anyway. This is it.

Useless.

Useless, useless girl.

She wakes from this bloody kaleidoscope of nightmares with the most heartbreaking sobs of all. She drags the blankets off her bed and sits in the corner by the window, rocking herself, bathed in the moon until dawn.

What a lie her life is quickly turning out to be.

It's a rare moment when they're all home at the same time. Sakura is sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, papers scattered around her like leaves falling from a tree. Her hand is unceasing, scrawling thin and thick, curving words across anything that required her hand. She's in so much of a zone that she almost doesn't notice when Sasuke appears in the hallway from upstairs, casually dressed and holding a report scroll.

Almost being the key term—it's hard to miss the man she's loved and hated all her life.

She tenses up so, so slightly, that if he weren't such a seasoned, elite shinobi it might've gone unnoticed. But he did see the smallest flex of her fist, the way she pauses a nanosecond over a word before continuing to write it out, that his eyes narrow and he puts on a coat of winter in response.

Like a wraith, he travels to the loveseat that's adjacent to the couch she's leaning against—the very same one she often finds him bleeding out on after missions. He sits, puts one ankle on top of the other knee, spreads the scroll and begins writing.

There's nothing but scratching that fills the air paired with the occasional piece of paper rustling. It's almost peaceful in a way, the company tolerable to an extent. Sakura's still wary and Sasuke's still irritated.

But what else is new?

Then the front door softly swings open, shuts, and Neji appears, carrying a folder with a ream of paper tucked inside. He must be fresh from HQ or TI, fatigue written on his nosebridge and across his shoulders.

A look of confusion highlights his features at the sight of two ticking time bombs in one room but it's schooled quickly into indifference. He ignores them, heads upstairs to work on whatever he's brought home with a condescending frown.

Sasuke clenches his jaw then gets up with a scoff. He walks into the kitchen and out the backyard door, not slamming the sliding glass shut but closing it firm enough to make a point. Outside he works in the grass, beneath a tree and avoiding everybody else.

Sakura stops, buries her face in her hands and almost physically tries to sort the mess in her head with shaking fingertips.

They tip-toe, she reminds herself, around one another. One day, one of them will snap in a manner that will permanently end something. Or someone.

Is it too much to hope for that it'll be her?

They almost never interact. Everything is polite and distant and more often than not, cold.

Sakura is only home once every two or three days. She gets to the house at around one in the morning, makes herself a small snack or crams a protein bar down her throat, showers, and locks her door to sleep. Then she's gone four hours later.

Sasuke is only home once every three or four months. He gets to the house at any time in the day but usually through his bedroom window, will eat two tomatoes, seals his room to rest and then head out to train in his downtime.

Neji is the only one who goes home regularly, usually every day except for the occasional one or two spent at HQ or with Shikamaru, or the missions that crop up requiring his expertise and Captainship.

He comes through the front door, takes off his sandals and sets them aside. He doesn't call out to anyone and never flips on the entryway light—only the kitchen and living room ones. He makes himself a simple dinner of rice and fish, sometimes indulges in soba herring, has chamomile tea, then hits the switches to go upstairs. He does paperwork for an hour, showers, then goes to bed.

He doesn't lock his door because they would never come to his room. He's hyperaware of his housemates coming and going at random times.

Funny. They're all technically bonded by marriage and that's all they are.

Housemates.

Sasuke rubs at his eyes, irritated beyond belief. When Shikamaru asked for him to be there at the TI headquarters for an interrogation, he thought it'd be a quick ordeal. Turns out, all seven merchants they captured and thought were civilians actually fell under the new enemy organization—the two that are alive and the five that are dead confirmed as much.

They needed the expertise of the Sharingan to detect foul play and pick apart the mind, perhaps even unlock the unedited versions of their brains. Turned out to be a lot harder than expected; it's actually why Neji happens to be on the couch while he's at the loveseat, equally exhausted and equally rubbing at his eyes.

Whoever's replacing their memories must have a similar set of skills as the Yamanaka but with a lethality of a higher grade. Neji's Byakugan allowed for the finer visuals of the chakra network that makes up the brain, which squeezes apart an opening. It was under Sakura's direction that they aimed for the hippocampi on the living prisoners, followed closely by blockage detection.

"All places of memory," Ino had read off on the report. "Sakura thinks if we aim these places and undo the blocks, we can get a better read on the memories that got replaced."

It was a long, painfully tedious process, and while he and Neji have above average chakra control, it's not nearly as fine as Sakura's; not fine enough for a job that requires guiding hypothetical threads through needles.

So here are the two of them now, mentally beat, slightly irritable, and just a tad frustrated. They'd gotten about halfway through the first suspect before their chakras collapsed and they unfortunately fried his brain. They confirmed Sakura's (and all of their's) suspicions, but didn't get to see the unedited memories. Soon, they'd try on the second.

The front door opens and in Sasuke's exhausted haze, he senses their third party enter the room. Bone-deep weariness radiates off her like it always does.

She stumbles into the living room, pausing—probably to figure out what she's looking at. They must look odd, sprawled ungracefully across the cushions, actually here for once. There's hesitation written all over her like graffiti and he thinks that she's going to just leave them there.

He would.

But she doesn't because as much as she's terrified of him and wary of Neji, she's still Sakura, through and through. Naruto believes he can save everyone the same way Sakura believes she can fix everyone and it's understandable; it's what she's good at.

The medic in her must win out because she comes this way, nearly trips on her feet in haste. Both of her hands spark to life and he can sense the way she's on near-empty in reserves but it doesn't matter because all she really needs is a single thread, just a drop for each of them to mold like a healing feather.

But Neji doesn't like his forehead touched and Sasuke is not Kakashi, therefore does not like his Sharingan tampered with. They both pull away, harsh and rough, eyes snapping open to glare.

And she does it again—shrinks in fear, flinches away, one hand to her neck, lip abused by teeth.

And they do it again—stumble up the stairs and slam their doors closed like children.

The sound echoes.

The wedding is something no one ever talks about. All of them act like they don't remember any part of it, but in reality, they all think of the day at the most random of times.

Whether it's in the cold, hard rain on the borders of villages or it's in the lull between surgeries or periods of downtime from one meeting to the next, they think of their ties to one another.

Their courting period didn't involve any courting. Tsunade simply ordered that they would be married in six months' time—and what do they do? Sasuke takes on more missions, fucks women in other villages. Neji drowns in work, has sex with Tenten. Sakura fixes people, rides other men after death and a few drinks.

There are no bachelor or bachelorette parties. The night before the ceremony, Sakura is healing hickeys in the mirror, Sasuke has just come back from a three-month long mission, and Neji is alone because Tenten had told him she's seeing Lee about a week ago. They never take lovers again—not anyone else and certainly not one another.

The next day, Neji wears grey, Sasuke wears charcoal, and Sakura wears white, all dressed in ceremonial robes and standing before the Hokage even though the whole thing feels more like a funeral than a marriage. The right side of the temple is made up of the dark, regal colors of the Uchiha, insignia emblazoned proudly on his back and on the tapestries. On the left, the neutral, elegant tones of Hyuuga exist and the folded sensu and flame symbol decorates the banners and his clothes.

Sakura bears nothing of the sort. She only owns a circle on her back, empty, meant to be filled. Like a single, large manacle.

It's the only ring she has, coming out of this ceremony.

They're not sure if they trust each other.

Professionally, they do.

They trust on Sakura to pull them from death's door when they're taken to the hospital or even out in the field. They trust Sasuke to act fast and eradicate threats. They trust Neji to dish out orders and lead them to safety.

But personally, they don't.

Neji will never let them touch his forehead. Sasuke will never let them feel his eyes. Sakura will never bare her neck.

Chapter Text

a type of three-sided polygon where there are two congruent sides; two points are equidistant to a third

Change comes about during the most unlikely of times, in the most unlikely of ways. They sneak up on you when you least expect it, whether or not you want it, but you must surely need it.

For them, change happens in the way they grow tolerant of one another. Company that had been forced and tense loosens into something less painful, less solid. Threads unravel to allow room for movement and that's what they do: they move.

There is nothing special in their interactions. There's nothing great about the way they learn to co-exist with one another.

It'll be the decision to stay in the room five minutes longer, leaving behind leftovers for a late home-comer, washing laundry that piles in the laundry room, no matter who the shirts belong to.

They've stopped running backwards. Now they stay where they stand, unmoving.

This is progress.

Today when Sasuke stands impatiently at a certain blonde idiot's door, his ex-sensei comes upon him. Kakashi's eye is upturned as he glides down the street, slouched and hunkering but silent all the same. His everpresent orange book is pressed between one hand tucked in a pocket and his side, the other is up with two fingers in customary greeting.

"Yo," the man says, carefree. He's a constant, Sasuke thinks. Nothing about him changes. Even more so since he'd been diagnosed infertile and recently re-entered bachelorhood. He doesn't look a day over thirty even though he's nearing forty now. "How's it going?"

Sasuke grunts, arms crossed. Kakashi is unfazed by his mannerisms.

He's kind enough of a person and therefore doesn't bring up anything about his ex-student's personal matters. "Waiting for Naruto?"

"Aa."

"You'll be waiting forever." He shrugs half-heartedly. "He left on a mission with Kiba and Lee this morning."

Sasuke frowns. He hadn't known. "Then you spar with me."

Kakashi makes a noise that sounds like him sucking his teeth. "Ooh, sorry, can't. I've got a meeting at the Tower in ten." With that, the silver wolf salutes and begins to walk away.

"The Tower's the other way," the fire-breather deadpans at the back of Kakashi's head.

He hears a chuckle in return. "I didn't say I'd be on time now did I? If you're so adamant on having a good partner, why not ask another dojutsu user?" With a wink, he's gone.

Sasuke's still frowning but the seed of curiosity is planted.

Neji has always kept his bedroom door unlocked. No one will ever come to him; this is a given. He accepts this.

Of course this fact of life is shattered when a knock rains against said wooden slab. It's out of pure surprise that he makes an affirming noise and his brows shoot up at seeing Sasuke—of all people— standing there, arms crossed, mildly disturbed but overall aloof.

"What do you want?" Neji asks impassively, careful to shed the confusion in his system. If ever someone were—hypothetically—to come to him in this house, he figured it'd be Sakura before Sasuke.

The man only says: "Spar with me," and Neji's never been one to back down from a challenge so—

Here they are now, standing meters apart in a clearing at Training Ground Eleven.

They've never sparred against one another before today, only fought side by side in battles in and out of the war. Today is the first time they will pit an elite Sharingan user against an elite Byakugan user and in some ways, it's personal yet exciting.

They're some of the most powerful shinobi in this village, of their generation, hailing from dojutsu and cut from the same cloth. They're both orphans, borne from tragic upbringings and regal traditions, with names bigger than their singular lives and statuses too high to see the top of. It's in their heritage to be rivals somehow, on a clanhood level.

Neji tightens the gauze around his hands and knuckles to protect them, palms glowing with chakra that hits like a wall. Sasuke draws his sword, the 'sching' loud and imposing. But they're at clear advantages and disadvantages: Neji had been on a team with a weapon-user and knows how to dance in and out of any metal that comes his way; Sasuke had been on a team with a taijutsu-user owning dangerous hands and knows how to keep the battle long-range.

This will be hard but this will be good and when it's over they will think: why haven't I done this before?

This is how Sasuke and Neji connect: physically.

Time between them is spent like that, even after Naruto returns from his mission one week later and Sasuke can go back to his routines. There's something about fighting a shinobi who thinks like him—something thrilling, something that exercises more than his desire to destroy with flashy moves.

Because Neji isn't flashy. Neji is subtle but lethal. He doesn't shout or show all his thoughts on his face. He doesn't announce his arrival and come in to push him down. He doesn't flail and demand rematches the second a blade touches his neck (if at all).

Neji is analytical and careful with a poker face that hides his every card. He slinks in between the trees and uses high ground as an advantage. He builds a strong, constant defense but when he's on the offensive, he strikes hard and fast and skillfully retreats to re-examine the next move. He takes his defeats (as few as they are on both ends) with grace and puts on a smirk with well-placed jabs at how he'll best him the next time they fight.

And sometimes he does because Neji has a learning curve. The moves are often the same but the order changes, is tuned to Sasuke's attacks and Sasuke feels himself riding high on the tide of adrenaline. His Sharingan will come to life to read Neji's movements and the Byakugan will respond in kind. Though the Uchiha's technique is stronger, the Byakugan's visual ability is better. This often ends in draws that surprisingly make neither angry; in fact, all it does is make victory sweeter.

For once, Sasuke has to be thoughtful and tactical about his attacks. His style is primarily offensive and mid-to-long range, but neither deter Neji. He enjoys this, the challenge that the other man serves.

They fit like ever-changing puzzle pieces.

It's a relationship that forms, a connection that allows them to fight and come back to the house together, sharing post-workout snacks in the kitchen and hording the water from the faucet. They have respective showers, then come to the living room to polish blunted weapons. They make smirking jabs in passing, call bets about the next winner, compare techniques and discuss dojutsu.

Like this, they close the gap between one another.

Neji is the least closest to Sakura, even though she's technically his wife now. Three years in marriage and nearly a decade of knowing eachother in total and he doesn't remember anything beyond her name and her skillset—most useful pieces of information in his opinion.

But he knows her from a distance, knows who she is when she's with other people. It's pretty easy to notice her and file her to the back of his mind: she's friends with his cousin and ex-lover, apprentice to his Hokage, ex-teammate to a person he looks up to, ex-teammate to his current training partner, past crush to his best friend. She's always there, a constant figure but never impressive—like the sky or the sea. Just there.

He thinks she's pretty good at what she does. She's good at healing and saving people. She has a mouth on her—loud and opinionated—a less vain version of Yamanaka. She doesn't discriminate a lot with her punches (but her fist has a preference for annoying blonde guys), loves freely, wants to save the world.

She's like a smaller mirror of Naruto, at least in soul but certainly just as bright.

But then the war happens and here she is, a shell of who she once was. Perhaps others don't notice and he and Sasuke do because she comes home to them; perhaps others do notice but how do you fix someone who's always been fixing you?

She's not a bad person though. Anyone worth their name in salt can see that she could never be a bad person. She's too sweet, too giving, too smart.

Perhaps this is why he doesn't stray one night when Sasuke is on a short mission and Sakura comes home, groggily pushing her sandals to the side and stepping past the entryway.

Neji is at the dining table reading old scrolls from the Hyuuga Compound as he, Hinata, and Hanabi have been sorting through Hiashi's belongings and delegating ownership of certain things. He'd taken the theoretical scrolls on their dojutsu, intent on developing their use beyond simply seeing chakra points.

Sakura, who tip-toes around the men who live in her house, quietly removes the surprise on her face and steps towards the kitchen, hoping to drain an ice-cold water bottle, have a bowl of strawberries, and go to bed.

She rinses a few bright red treats and twists a bottle cap, and Neji can feel the way her eyes drift to the back of his head in curiosity.

As a medical professional, surely she might have some insight on the scrolls. And Naruto has yammered before about her scoring high in technical portions of tests (what kind of monster had managed to complete the written part in the Chunin Exams on her own?).

"Sakura," he calls, and she startles slightly at the way his voice breaks the silence.

"Uh—yeah?"

He moves a scroll purposefully. "Hypothetically speaking, if someone wanted to do more with their Byakugan, what do you think they could do?"

She hesitates but he senses the way her eyes ignite, the way the gears begin to spin in her head. "...What is the range of yours?"

"Two kilometres now," he says, a beautiful development from five years ago when the most he could reach was eight hundred meters.

"...Is there anything it can't get through?"

He frowns thoughtfully, seeing the way she edges towards a seat on the other end of the table, far from him but within his space. "Certain barriers, if I remember. But able to get through most. Why?"

Her finger tucks hair behind her ear, bun messy and shoulders slumped but eyes thoughtful. "When we fought Kaguya," she begins carefully and his attention stays on her, fascinated with the topic that she never seems to touch despite owning bragging rights, "Hagoromo told tales during the ordeal. He mentioned his brother, Hamura, an ancestor of the Byakugan, and how his mother's was so powerful that it could even penetrate minds."

It's a powerful thing to be able to gauge the mind while the Sharingan manipulated it. The potential is scary but worth exploring. "Perhaps along the lines of chakra reading, then?"

"Aside from the god-membership she owns," Sakura says sardonically, "I'm not certain how she was doing it." She twirls her waterbottle. "But I have a theory and you're not far off."

Neji remembers some time ago, a month or two out when he'd gone to the morgue and Sakura stood at the open cranial cavity of a corpse, telling him things his mind stored but couldn't process.

"Elaborate." His brow rises but so does his fascination.

She purses her lip. There's a dam there, he sees. Just waiting to be let loose and he poses his body language to indicate that yes, he wanted to hear.

He's struck with a little bit of awe when the everpresent hesitance in her posture melts, sheets of ice sloughing off her body in the face of a topic she's confident in. Neji is reminded again of the fact that the notorious Team 7 is a triad and Sakura is their backbone. She's brilliant, he thinks. Brilliance that's different from Neji or Sasuke or even Shikamaru.

Her mind functions in theoretical colors, a kaleidoscope of "what if"s and "could be"s and it's wondrous the way she's pursuant of the answers rather than just blasting hypotheses into the air. Her mouth runs a million miles a minute but the tirade she launches into is anything but irritating.

Life is breathed into her in this moment. Had she been so dead before that this previously default state of hers is so rare now?

"Intriguing," he murmurs when she pauses for his comments, glancing down at the parchments in his hands. He actually knows about that piece of lore: the way the goddess Kaguya had a Byakugan worthy to be feared, how it was so powerful that it penetrated space, time, and mind alike. And Sakura might've unlocked the possibilities that can lead to developing such a skill to an extent.

"Indeed," Sakura says, a curious half-smile on her face. "The Byakugan can be used in psychological warfare if we tune it that way, like the Sharingan. Perhaps even of higher caliber than the Yamanaka."

Her shoulder shrugs but there's a glimmer in her guileless eyes, like she's been recharged after so many years of being empty.

Then she's up, dumping the green caps of her strawberries and moving to the hallway. Her softened, content expression remains.

"'Night Neji."

"Goodnight," he says absently.

This is how Neji and Sakura connect: mentally. They exchange knowledge of the human body with one another—the Hyuuga are actually quite adept in the biological functions of living things so long as it was related to chakra, and Sakura bridges it with more medical aspects.

Together, they scheme theoretical possibilities to add to their arsenal. When Sasuke is busy on his missions or training with Naruto and Neji has space between assignments, he makes a beeline for the hospital. Most times Sakura is caught in a surgery or with a patient but every now and then, she's in her office.

He enters that way—no one announces him with, "Haruno-sama, your husband is here." No one even refers to Sakura as Hyuuga-Uchiha-sama, which is her name by default on their marriage documents. Always just her maiden name.

Not a soul comments on it.

He knocks out of courtesy and she lets him in and he sees the visible fatigue tattooed all over her body. Her bangs fall across her forehead, bun messy like the elastic there has been buried for months in all that hair. The stiff smile on her face is customary and greeting, like she knows they are tolerant enough to meet professionally like this but she refuses to step across imaginary lines.

Neji pulls up a chair and takes out a scroll and like that, they talk again about the thing that connects them. Sakura loosens in that time, comes to life before his eyes as she talks about something that sincerely impassions and drives her. This is something he didn't think he and Sasuke would have in common with her: jutsu invention.

Sakura is like a star, Neji thinks. Bright and stunning with three paths: a supernova, a black hole, or a ball of cold dust. He wonders how beautiful the first outcome might be, even believes it suits her best.

The dynamic between Sakura and Sasuke is the most strained of all.

It's the very fact that they have some sort of history between them that they throw up walls higher than normal when they face off. They live in the past together, two images painted in greys and memories.

When Sasuke looks at Sakura, he sees the girl he's used to saving. He remembers how it made him puff his chest, how much more useful he'd feel being depended on, being looked to for saving. Then he remembers the way he didn't hesitate to put a chidori through her chest, to run her through with a sword, to ward her off during war by trying to replace her heart with his fist.

It makes him angry, he thinks, to look at her and see what she's become—a shell of her former self. She doesn't trust him the way she used to, doesn't depend on him to have her back (hardly shows it to him in the first place). He hates the way she so very dearly loved him at every moment: knocking her out, injuring Karin in front of her, asking her to keep his Sharingan safe, re-attaching his lost arm. She loved him at every point in time.

He'd always believed she would be his endgame. Selfishly, in the years before, during, and after his defection, there'd been no one else but Sakura in his eyes. She'd always been there—that was more than he could say about most people. The shallowness of her affection grew into a resilience he hadn't seen in anyone besides Team 7—her least of all before then.

But one day it's like the world collapsed. Like all the wrongdoings she forgave him for came rushing back and suddenly, she walks with her eyes always on him, hand rubbing at her neck nervously like she's trying to shield it. One day the level of which she loves him has equated the level of which she fears him and he hates it.

Then the marital law comes and he's driven to brinks he's never known existed. The one woman he might've ever held close to him and she no longer wants it, is too scared of it. So he fills his time by taking the bodies of others, indulging in women that both were the antithesis to the one he wants and who were scarily similar.

Like the one he'd gone home with in Kiri, a kunoichi with pale red hair and teal-colored eyes, framed like a pixie and made of curves and muscle.

But all it gives him is a few hours of reprieve. He never stays, never touches the same woman, sleeps anywhere but on a bed with another. Nothing will ever replace the real thing.

For Sakura, she'd never believed he would be her endgame. She hoped (goddamn did she hope), but the years weren't the kindest and her idealism morphed into realism. For her, so long as her boys were home safe and sound, it would be enough.

Sasuke became more than a crush. He became an impossible dream, a motivator, a driving force. She'd pushed herself to the edge of exhaustion, then threw herself straight off that cliff the second it was in sight. She would be strong, she pledged, not just for herself but for him. To save him, bring him home, make him stay.

Even through it all, she'd loved him. She would've given him the world and then some. She still would, but the memories act like a plague on both houses and now she's stuck in a film reel, forced to relieve the worst parts of them when they should be building the best.

Before the marriage, she'd been a woman who explored promiscuity without love. Her partners were not many, often repeated performances, men close enough but distant still. They were fillers meant to close a gap. They never shared her bed, she invaded theirs. They never asked for anything more, they knew what she wanted.

There'd only ever been three partners she'd had—different ones who knew what it meant when she turned up on their doorsteps tired, covered in patients' blood, carrying nothing but her weight and the burden of the past.

One is Kiba Inuzuka, her choice when she's with the Konoha Twelve and leaves gatherings because she can't stand the sight of her ex-teammate. The second is Iruka Umino, a brief fling that lasted two months but had been kindling to her most gentle of sexual interactions. Another is Genma Shiranui, a man she goes to when she seeks to indulge in her selfishness.

Every single choice had been a subconscious need: to pick men that were nothing like Sasuke. They were all greatly different, the only things they have in common being men and shinobi of Konoha.

Kiba is rowdy and rough, a lover that pillaged her body and left her with reminders of their explosive couplings.

Iruka is soft and kind, a lover that christened her body deep into the night and left her feeling warm and sated, as close to love-making as it would allow.

Genma is salacious and seductive, a lover that worshiped her body and left her feeling his touch for days after their meetings.

They were all nothing like Sasuke.

And now here she is, bonded to not only him, but a man much like him. All three of her previous lovers had attended her wedding, lips smiling but eyes sad and she wonders if their nights meant more to them than she'd thought. They knew she loved—loves—Sasuke; now she can't help but feel like she's broken not just three hearts, but four. Maybe five if the way Neji had escaped to Tenten before their marriage was anything to go by. Not a sixth: Sasuke's heart belongs only to himself.

But that doesn't matter because now she is caged between them, two towers of impossibility.

They will kill her, she thinks.

One day, their everpresent stalemate moves.

Sakura is on two days of paid leave; Tsunade had issued the order when she'd found Sakura dead on her feet, three shifts under her belt and trying to enter a high-stakes surgery.

"You will kill more people than you can save in that state," the blonde woman says sternly, and it's with clear purpose because it gets the job done; Sakura flinches hard at the reminder, the scolding, and obeys the order of going home to rest for the remainder of the day and for the two following. No one is at the house so she drains a bottle of ice-cold water, crams a protein bar into her body, then sleeps like the dead from three pm to five am.

When morning comes, she's barely coherent, uncertain of where she is and who needs her help, then remembers belatedly that yes, Tsunade will kill her if she shows up any where near the hospital without good reason (short of dying). Reaching tentatively with chakra yields the fact that she is alone; her breath comes out relieved. Sasuke is still on a long mission and Neji must've been dispatched on a short one recently.

Sakura gets up that day feeling lighter on her feet. She showers and dresses in civilian wear that looks flattering on her; simple shorts and a t-shirt that fits loose but soft. Meticulously, she undoes the constant haphazard bun in her hair and primps it, makes it fuller and more put together. Her bangs continue to cover the space of her forehead, combed through with fingers.

She looks the way she feels: lazy, comfortable, at ease. There's no one to tiptoe around in her house, she's had more than three hours of sleep, and work won't demand anything of her. Today she's Sakura Haruno—not the war veteran, not the Hokage's Apprentice, not the Second Slug Sage—but the civilian. The girl who adores flowers boys get her and giggles guilelessly with girls like her.

Deciding she can indulge, her first priority is to eat something that isn't one-hundred percent just for sustenance. Shopping at the grocery store yields her sweet compliments from old vendors and comrades alike. She comes across Genma, who is still cheeky and flirty in his shortening bachelorhood (he is slated to wed Shizune in a year according to the marital law).

He helps her shop, makes her laugh, carries her groceries and walks her home not because she's incapable, but because he still very much likes to spoil her and show off his charm all at once. They both feel free at this, standing in her kitchen and arranging things, and Sakura asks about how things are with Shizune, when their courting period will begin.

"In six months," he says, the vibrancy in his smile dimming. She notices—it's in her blood as a doctor to notice these cues.

"You're not happy about it?"

His lips are still upturned but the tone lowers, saddens. "It's not what I want," he admits, steadying a box of pasta on the counter. "Shizune's great and sweet and I'm sure that with time I'll love her, but..."

—But it hadn't been out of personal choice. But Shizune was (is) in love with Kakashi. But Genma has feelings for...

He looks at Sakura, eyes shining with something unsaid and her heart throbs once, twice. She really hadn't known that there'd been more to her trysts than the comfort of bodies.

"It's okay," he breathes, expression tragic and beautiful. Genma is like that: handsome and roguish but with a heavy heart of summer gold. "You had to accept it and I will too."

"Is it?" she whispers, eyes wide. "I'm... I'm not..." —happy.

He knows, she thinks. Everyone knows. "You will be," he says confidently. He picks up her left hand, kisses the knuckle just above where her wedding band would be if she actually wore it, if she actually wanted her spouses as a wife. They will both have that in common. "You deserve it the most."

When he leaves, she wonders who was really letting go of who.

Grocery shopping yielded great possibilities. For one, a recipe has been sitting around in the back of her head, stewing in silence ever since she'd dropped in on Chouji and Karui and there'd been the most amazing smell of oven-roasted tomatoes in the air.

Sakura bustles in the kitchen that night, tinkering at the stove with a pot of tender pork and sour soup boiling to perfection, fish grilling on a pan nearby. The oven is hissing lightly, deepening and drying the flavors of tomato slices until there's nothing left but soft, wonderful disks of happiness (really, good food puts anyone in a good mood).

She barely notices when someone enters the kitchen. It's in the sound that a pack makes, the muted thump of it hitting the ground.

Her body doesn't freeze this time. Her shoulders don't scrunch.

The impulse to keep her back away from Sasuke is removed and she stirs the soup, hand on a hip, eyes glancing back. There's too much peace in her to throw up walls; for once, her home is her own and so is her life.

"Whether or not you want to eat is your choice," she says as neutrally as possible, nodding to the dining table. He's standing there, mildly bewildered at what she says and she almost laughs at the dumbstruck look on his face. Talking to Genma has eased the anvil in her chest she calls a heart.

It's pretty surprising though, when she finishes the stew and goes to set the oven-roasted tomatoes on the counter, how Sasuke is freshly showered and sitting patiently at the set table, staring at her. How he accomplished such a feat in fifteen minutes without her noticing would be beyond her, but they're both elites here and they can acknowledge skill.

For once his face is free of anything negative. There's a curiosity in his eye, an eagerness as he looks at the baking sheet in her hand and recognizes the fruit on them. Pushing the disks onto a serving platter, she fills their bowls, puts quarters of the fried fish on plates of rice, and serves up their dinner.

She carefully gauges his expression, watches in partially stunned silence as the quality of his eyes change in shades and tones. They soften, widen, are surprised or wondrous.

"It's good," he says, cutting through the silence and her jaw must unhinge, make her look dumb, because his lip quirks.

This is how Sakura and Sasuke bond: emotionally.

Sasuke's work load lightens because they are in peace-time and their focus is on the case in Kusa; Sakura's work load lightens because Shizune has been let go of her position as Hokage assistant (delegated to Shikamaru in preparation for Naruto's coming ascension). When Sasuke is at the house, he will set the table and sit patiently as Sakura bustles and cooks. He watches her like a hawk, face empty but body relaxed.

They eat in silence but they eat slowly rather than in haste. When he is at the police headquarters, she drops by to give files to forensics and passes him a homemade ball of okaka onigiri. When he happens to be in the hospital to get healed, he doesn't leave, waits for her to offer lunch or dinner.

In a personal way, it's great. Sakura used to eat only for sustenance; Sasuke used to eat only for fuel. Now they appear healthier, having more balanced meals with decent portions and in normal quantity because anything is easier to do when done with company.

Their history is crammed into a closet but instead of bursting at the hinges, they have found a universal lock and key, a thing that is controllable, that no longer feels like it'll spill at any possible second.

Instead it's kept securely, a door they can turn away from and never feel the need to open.

The air in the house changes over time. Neji and Sasuke continue to have their sparring sessions and dojutsu discussions, Sakura and Neji continue to have their theoretical exchanges and hypothetical debates, Sasuke and Sakura continue to have their lunches and dinners and quiet times.

For a while such encounters are mostly kept under wraps from the other duo until inevitably, all sides begin to overlap.

Sometimes Neji will go to spar with Sasuke but Sasuke shakes him off, says he has a 'meeting' with someone over lunch and can't that afternoon. Sometimes Sasuke will go to speak with Sakura but a nurse will tell him that she'd already left with someone a few minutes prior. Sometimes Sakura will go to Neji with something about his dojutsu but he mentions needing to go for training.

A niggling thing forms in the back of their heads—who is taking their time away?

This is how they change: through the third discovering the others paired up and through the seed of jealousy that sprouts as a result.

Neji finds them one evening. Though he's the one who's almost always home, the rising cases in Kusa have been asking for his tracking expertise which pulls him away from a desk and puts him behind a mask.

On the trip home, he enters through the doorway and sees something that makes him feel like he's intruding—Sakura is at the stove, meandering about and flooding the house with the most delicious of smells and Sasuke is at the dining table, one mission scroll in his hand and a pen tacking away on its surface.

Since when does Sakura cook?—he wonders—and since when has Sasuke done his work in a place that's not his room or somewhere outside of the house?

Then he sees how Sakura flicks the heat lower and Sasuke stops, stretches, gets up towards the cupboard where they keep their plates. It's like clockwork, Neji notices, the way Sakura conveniently moves aside right as Sasuke opens the overhead for bowls, then leans back when he drifts towards the silverware drawer.

He pours them drinks while Sakura plates, and then they both sit at the table, murmuring thanks for the meal.

Sakura is the one who notices him, looks surprised but doesn't make a move. Sasuke glances up at her pause then turns, raises a brow in question. Neji clenches his fist and stalks upstairs, ignoring the sound that one of them makes when standing up, meaning to walk to the cupboard for another setting.

Sasuke comes across them purely on accident. Shikamaru had sent him down to the library with his diplomatic clearance and a scroll soaked in his chakra signature granting permission on his behalf.

The case in Kusa is reaching something like a dead end but there's some hope—a passing merchant checking in at the lower levels of the Hokage Tower bumped into Shizune while she was transporting documents. The leathered, weary man cooperated to a simple T-and-I interview and had mentioned recognizing the juvenile symbol scrawled into a corner of Shikamaru's notes during his absentminded thinking.

"That symbol, the crescent moon with three slashes," he'd said, voice thick with Kusa's accent, "belongs to the Mikazuki Clan. Pillagers, murderers, a family full of blood who sacrificed a child every third night of a new month. Long dead."

"Supposedly," Shikamaru had muttered on the other side of the one-way mirror. Sasuke glanced at him before looking back, watching Ino patiently speak to the merchant.

"You think it's the Mikazuki?" he'd asked. The strategist shrugged half-heartedly but he knows better than to take it as an uncertain move. "Not the ramblings of an old man?"

"No, I don't think so." Shikamaru thumbs Asuma's old lighter, contemplating. "The name, perhaps dead. The people..."

"A traveling family?"

"A scattered clan." Ino smiles sweetly and thanks the merchant for his time. He replies with a wrinkled but kindred grin. "The Mikazuki were warmongerers. They had many enemies."

Sasuke glances at the paper sitting in the interviewing room, the one from Shikamaru's notes that Shizune had dropped and the merchant had seen. A single crescent moon, slashed with three horizontal lines. "Do you think they reformed? Survivors reunited?"

"And enacting revenge? Likely." Shikamaru flips the lighter open, rolls the side without activating the flint. "But we need historical records. We know nothing about these guys' fighting styles aside from the fact that they're a clan designed for war. The psychological attacks are enough proof of it."

"Do we have that kind of information?" Sasuke asks, crossing his arms. Ino exits with the merchant and the two men give kind nods and gestures of thanks before she escorts him away.

"Maybe. I'll check the Hokage's records," since he's only one of two people from their class in the village with that leverage, "and I suggest you check the library."

"I don't have access," Sasuke says, frowning. He has jounin-level clearance to archives, nothing above A-rank at best like most shinobi. Only a handful can touch anything higher.

Shikamaru already has something to quell that; they head to his office where he stamps his chakra-infused ink across a permissive parchment. "Just show this to the keeper at the upper levels," he directs, scrawling a written allowance on the scroll. "You'll probably only have an hour at best since it's not your clearance and I'm not with you, but it's enough time. Pull anything related to Mikazuki and bring it to the keeper to have them bookmarked and sealed for transport. Come at noon tomorrow so we can cross-reference our stuff."

"And you?" Sasuke asks, taking the permissive scroll.

The Nara shrugs his jounin vest off. "I'll go to Hokage-sama and ask to have a look at the village records. They're a Kusa clan but maybe somewhere in Konoha's history, we might've encountered them."

Sasuke nods in understanding, then teleports out of T-and-I. That brings him here.

After gaining access and being warned about his hour-long time limit, he steps carefully into the room full of pristine but ancient texts harboring history. For a moment he gazes at the long lines of shelves, somewhat sidetracked by the fact that time as early as Kaguya from millennia ago sit here. Somewhere, Team 7 and the recent war and the goddess' revival is present, sitting on a shelf for someone else in another millennia to read about.

Mildly disturbed at the existential route his thoughts are taking, he turns away and skims the plaques for an organizational pattern, then walks the row towards 'M.'

It's halfway down the first set containing 'Ma-' to 'Me-' where he hears voices. Not quite whispering, but hushes, he crosses the walkway to reach 'Me-'s continuation and glances.

He halts, wide eyed at seeing Sakura and Neji sitting at a table, surrounded by books and ease.

Dimming his chakra, he quickly reaches the opposite shelves and skates along it carefully, turned away so that the black of his clothes and hair keep him in shadow.

"Neji," Sakura calls quietly. A book is slid. "Here—another passage about Hamura. I think that account might be connected to this one."

Neji hums. "There's a missing part though," he says, thoughtful. "This one accounts for before he became his mother's and the moon's guardian, this one is after."

Sakura makes a determined noise in the back of her throat. "I believe Hamura might've honed his Byakugan in the time between." She rustles a few pages. "His became as powerful as his mother's before his death. It might've been then."

"But what did he do to get there?"

Sakura blows softly into the air, thinking. "We checked 'Dojutsu,' 'Hamura,' 'Kaguya,' and 'Byakugan," she says, "but maybe we need to check Otsutsuki?' The Sharingan and Byakugan were derivatives of one another. Maybe if we trace it back into the family's blood, we can find a method they used to harness novel chakra?"

Neji must've nodded because the scratch of a chair followed by the gentle thump of footsteps move. Sasuke steps backwards and around just as she passes, only a few shelves down from where he is. He heads to 'Mikazuki,' clears the shelves of everything with the name or the symbol, then heads back to the keeper.

The Hyuuga has been denying his offers of training—and for what? Library dates with Sakura?

Sasuke frowns, glaring at nothing in particular while walking the hallway back to police HQ. Is it payback? For keeping Neji out of loop with dinner? It's not his fault that the guy stomped out of there like a petulant child finding out his friends hang out without him.

Besides, that's just home life. Something soft, almost pointless. This is about training, polishing, being the best shinobi this village has to offer, and Neji has been choosing to opt out just to frolic with another frivolous activity with Sakura?

Irritating.

Sakura knows it for what it is: envy. Growing up from a superficial girl, into a woman that sees herself as less-than-competent has made her become close friends with the Green Demon.

So she knows the little thing crawling like a frightened animal in her chest when she comes to the training grounds one day. Sasuke hadn't been at police HQ so she'd distributed the skillfully made onigiri amongst his peers at the station, hoping against hope that the feeling in her heart isn't disappointment (god knows she's been trying to saw that damned tether connecting her to him, including all the things he makes her feel).

In an effort to still do something with her day off, she remembers the little notebook that's covered in notes over the Byakugan and decides that yes, maybe it's time she and Neji convene again and talk about the last thing she'd read about. Hamura enjoyed a type of meditation that made him one with the celestial bodies; the myths said his eyes are the color of opals because he'd absorbed moonlight and gained sight of all in space and time.

Moonlight meditation might be the key. Rather than tuning his chakra to the physical and spiritual environment, perhaps he had to reach further, into the Nothingness in between the Something.

Excited, she'd stopped home to pick up the journal that chronicled her theories and went out in search of Neji, probably at the training grounds they'd used to test their ideas. The clearing ended up empty and she frowns; today is Neji's day off, she's certain.

A plume of fire flares across the treetops and Sakura snaps her head in that direction, knowing only one man capable of producing a firestorm that large.

Darting into the trees, she skids to a stop on a high branch and gazes with wide eyes as Neji and Sasuke trade fists, skills, weapons. Their roughened hands skate against skin and leave blood in their wake; glints of ruby and pearl tell of two dojutsu meeting just as often as their jutsu.

They make each other hurt physically, she sees, but there's nothing there that talks about the emotional brutality they used to inflict on each other. Instead there's a camaraderie, an ease in which they move, like the great phoenixes and the great thunderbirds meeting in the middle. They dance, waltzing to the tune of swords shearing against one another until the crackle of sparks ignite between two gliding metal bodies.

And suddenly Sakura is brought back to the day in Wave where she'd sat there like dead weight, her two teammates protecting her and in the process, abandoning her.

Neji and Sasuke are something else entirely. And they know it, revel in it.

When they come together, Neji blocking Sasuke's katana with his tanto, they part and stand on opposite sides of the clearing. It's Sasuke's smug smile and Neji's snarky quip paired with mocking laughter that has Sakura backing away and leaving. Faces they've never shown her. Spars they've never invited her on, never spoke about.

Insecurity returns and she feels small and young again.

She's always known Sasuke and Neji would some day find even footing. They're cut from the same cloth.

The difference is that they're silk, crushed velvet, and she's worn leather ripped at the seams and bleached in the sun.

Sakura arrives at the Hokage Tower just as Tsunade is preparing to send a summons out. Surprised, the blonde woman she sometimes calls mother, sometimes calls warden, unties the scroll and has an ANBU return the hawk to the aviary.

"...I was just going to send for you," she says, citrine eyes regarding her apprentice from toe to head. She looks somewhat haphazard, breathless, not completely there. The verdant quality of her stare is hazy at best, like a pond polluted with algae. "I need you on a mission."

After a few moments, Sakura finally appears to join the moment. "Ah," she mutters, before catching herself and clearing her throat. "Yes. What's the mission about?"

Tsunade gazes at her critically for several more seconds before pulling out a scroll. "I'm assigning you to an ANBU squad that's doing recon on the cases in Kusa." Sakura skims the report, one ear listening. "Kakashi tells me you've developed a sort of- ah- second defense when it comes to psychological attacks. Paired with your skillset and close work with the cases, I believe you will be an important asset to the team."

Sakura blushes prettily at the compliment and humbly states her gratitude. "When will I leave?"

"In two days at dawn. Pack for a long one. I don't expect you all to be back until at least three months for now."

Sakura wonders on the length, then wonders on this style of summons. "Shishou?"

"I called you separately because of how closely you've been working on this case," Tsunade reiterates, fingers lacing together. "You're co-captaining and calling the strategic shots, Sakura. You've seen what they can do and I know you and Shikamaru have shared notes over the history. I'm telling you this because you'll have your own side-mission."

Pulling out a secondary scroll, smaller with thinner pages, Sakura catches it in the clip of her hands and reads swiftly. Frowning, she wets the paper with a small suiton and lets it crumble.

"If you can capture a few of those you're able to discreetly assassinate, I want you to perform field autopsies. Confirm your lab findings and compare with fresh corpses to make sure it wasn't a fluke. If you can, seal a few and send them back."

"I understand."

"Good." Tsunade props her chin up, eyes lidded but sharp. "Report to me through Katsuyu every three to five days. If we ever lose contact for more than five, I will assume the worst and send an extraction team."

"Yes, shishou." She bows when given the go-ahead to leave, turns, and flees carefully from the watchful eyes of her mentor.

She hopes she doesn't look too eager to leave the village. It's bad enough everyone knows about how terrible her marriage is; it'd be the worst if even her own mentor begins to convey her pity too.

The day following that, Sasuke steps into the threshold of the house, expecting to be hit with the smells of spices and the sounds of something simmering. Instead he walks into an empty kitchen with no one home.

Raising his brow at the change in dynamic, he contemplates the shift for several minutes before grabbing a tomato from the refrigerator and walking to his room. He ignores the weird feeling that wells up within, wondering when exactly meals with Sakura have become the norm.

Across the village, Neji stalks through the hospital with intent and asks to see Sakura at the administration desk out front.

"I'm sorry," the mocha-haired nurse says with a sympathetic crinkle in her brow, "but Sakura-sama is denying all visits except for the appointments that are scheduled for her today."

"Why?" Neji prompts, frowning.

She shrugs honestly with a small smile. "She is very busy."

The second day, neither men see hide nor hair. Their spar is distracted at best and they stalk off the field on opposite sides when it's done, thoughts parallel.

But this should be alright, yeah? They've done this before, the whole "ignoring" each other thing. Since when had she become such a normal fixture in their lives anyways? They've gone by well enough.

Sasuke grits his teeth at the thought and returns to normal spars with Naruto, occasionally turning Neji down. Neji clenches his jaw at how reliant he's become and works closely with Shikamaru, poring over their Kusa case.

It's on the third day that they both find out she's been sent on a longterm mission over the very same case, put on an ANBU squad assembled specifically for recon. Tsunade mentions it while they come reporting about new findings. The two men who are supposed to be her husbands give each other sidelong glances masking incredulity; Naruto notices and crosses his arms with a huff.

"You guys didn't know she's ANBU?" he asks, standing next to Tsunade while looking at them. "She beat out bastard and I."

Sasuke's head snaps up. "What?"

"Five years ago," he says matter-of-factly.

"She was put on reserves when your courting order was issued," Tsunade explains, harrowed at talking about the moment when her daughter-figure's life fell apart. "Before that she served as an ANBU combat medic."

Neither Neji, an ANBU Captain of six years, nor Sasuke, a famed ANBU soloist of four, had known. Maybe they worked different divisions, maybe she always wore a mask. Maybe it's beyond that. Naruto scoffs.

"How could you guys never notice?"

Then the answer to that dawns on them.

Sakura had slowly learned to patch things up with Sasuke but there'd been a turning point in their relationship just before the law went into effect. It might've been around then that she'd been put into reserves and pulled fully off the Black Ops playing field. Before that, she and Neji rarely interacted.

And after their marriage, there'd been no chance.

They've never intimately touched. They've never seen the mark on her arm that would've given away her previous status, nor the faded quality to the ink that signified the time since.

They know nothing about her.

Two and a half months later, Sakura's near-dead self is lying face down a mile before the gates, on top of the still warm corpse of one of her teammates. Her whole squad had been killed and her and this body were the only ones alive upon escape but the lost legs of her comrade had bled out when she collapsed.

Sasuke's the one to come across her. He'd felt panic burst his eardrums and his soul slipped away upon flipping her over to check for a pulse: faint, very slow, and the hole punctured through the middle of her torso is so wide, he can see the dead body of her squad member through it.

Then he picks her up, takes her home at the speed that lightning strikes, praying that he will make it on time.