[Fic] "Hold These Truths" -- Naruto
I'm still not entirely sure this hangs together -- seriously, if you have suggestions or concrit, please tell me -- but I finally managed some sort of ending and I'm tired of staring at the screen until the words blur into meaningless syllables, so. Have a fic!
Summary: Sakura and Sasuke thwart an assassination attempt on Naruto during a political rally. SasuSaku, implied NaruSasuSaku. (2,800 words)
Note: This story is a response to the Cotton Candy Bingo prompt believe, and to a suggestion from
askerian that I write a Summer Camp & Politics story in which Sakura and Sasuke thwart an assassination attempt on Naruto. In retrospect, there is a slight conceptual mismatch between assassination and fluff, and also between discussion of political corruption and fluff, but what the heck, there's flirting and love and trust and a mostly happy ending, so I will call it fluffy if I want to. *resolve face*
[ETA: the slightly revised final version is now up on AO3!]
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Hold These Truths
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"Ino tells me the latest election odds are three-to-one we get a clear majority and nearly even for a coalition with either Peace and Justice or Will of Fire," Sakura murmured into her headset, covering the words with a slight bend of her neck as if she were glancing down at her tablet. Two meters in front of her, Naruto paced back and forth across the makeshift stage, his usual wild energy pulled in and concentrated until every gesture seemed like it ought to shift the entire world, just a little, from the sheer force of his conviction.
"Only if he lives," Sasuke said, his voice weirdly flat over the encrypted channel, unaccompanied by any background noise that might help her pinpoint him in the roped-off section of muddy municipal park they'd rented for the rally. "These rallies are a security nightmare. It's political suicide to search everyone the way we ought to, and quite possibly literal suicide not to."
Sakura smiled brightly at the gathered crowd when they cheered and clapped for a campaign promise she'd heard a thousand times. Beside her, Great Bridge's Assembly candidate for Kikkai province district four shifted in his seat, apparently unsure whether he should join the applause; to his left, the local mayoral candidate had no such qualms and was cheerfully shouting and waving to her potential voters. It was a good-sized crowd, well over a thousand despite the small size of the town and the torrential rain that had drenched the past three days and only cleared this morning. They probably wouldn't win the Assembly seat -- the other two district towns were utterly dominated by local machines affiliated with Root and Danzo -- but she thought they had a good shot at prying this town loose to serve as an example of what honest government looked like: a beacon of hope and a foot in the door for next time.
And there would be a next time, because Naruto wasn't dying on her watch. "Have a little faith," Sakura told Sasuke. "If you can't trust a security team I vetted myself, who can you trust? Besides, it's not like he doesn't have practice ducking."
She heard a half-second of laughter before Sasuke could stifle it, and clicked her tongue to let him know she'd caught him being human.
She swept her eyes over the crowd yet again, never focusing in on any one person in particular. That was folly. Far better to treat the crowd as a liquid, to trace its energy and flow in search of snags and eddies. But the only still points she found were Naruto's own security staff.
No Sasuke, though. He was too good at blending in for her to pick out with that trick.
Naruto shifted into an off-the-cuff rant about corruption, and Sakura abruptly began to listen in earnest, in case he said something that could be taken out of context and spun into trouble on the evening news. He'd gotten better about that since his first run for the Assembly as one of Tsunade's protégés in Will of Fire, but he still let passion run away with him sometimes. In person, that made for a powerful positive impression, but every virtue had its corresponding flaw and Sakura's job was to mitigate Naruto's as much as possible.
(Well. One of her jobs. Not all of which were officially covered under her shiny new 'chief of staff' title. Keeping him alive she did for free, and everything else was private.)
She hid a grimace with well-practiced ease when one of Naruto's "I'm not naming names but you know the kind of people I mean" descriptions got just that vital fraction too close to General Kawamura, the current head of the unified military command council and incidentally Sasuke's direct superior.
"Damn. Your week's going to suck," she murmured. "At least the apology sex will be good once Naruto realizes his slip."
"And the victory sex," Sasuke said.
Sakura wished there was a way to transmit a confused eyebrow-raise over the radio, and also that she was somewhere out of public visibility to indulge in such a gesture.
One virtue of knowing Sasuke for over twenty years, though, was that he could fill in her likely responses without needing her to deliver them in person. "Our bet," he clarified. "When you talked me into adding this detour to my inspection of Kasai airbase, you said you'd take care of the details so I wouldn't get flack from the UMCC. I said you couldn't control everything. And then you said--"
"Oh, right, that," Sakura said, cutting off what was likely to be an increasingly smug recitation of their entire conversation from last week. Just because she could hold her composure in public while Sasuke recreated phone sex in her ear didn't mean she especially wanted to inflict that kind of torture on herself.
"Yeah, that. You both owe me now, and I expect full payment. Maybe even interest." She could hear the insufferable half-smirk in his voice. She wanted to bite it off his face. And then bite some other places, too.
"No dividends?" she asked under cover of clapping at a pause in Naruto's speech.
Sasuke made a scoffing noise. "Fuck dividends. In fact, fuck anything that sounds financial in any way. Next you'll start talking about spreadsheets, and I swear by the light of the Eternal Flame, if I see a spreadsheet anywhere outside of my office for the rest of this fucking budget analysis project and up to a full month afterwards, I will not be held responsible for my reaction!"
Sakura counted to three, just long enough for Sasuke to start taking a deep breath in an effort to calm down and pretend he hadn't pitched a mini-tantrum over office work. Then she said, "Does that mean you'll set the documents on fire, or that you'll jump me in public?"
She took his silence as victory, and raised her tablet to hide the wicked tilt she couldn't quite keep from shading the corners of her smile.
Naruto wound up his speech to a thunder of applause, and then threw the rally open to questions. As people made their way toward both ends of the platform, waiting in untidy queues for their chance at a microphone and a personal answer from him or the two local candidates, Sakura switched her headset over to the general security channel. "Status?"
"Clear, so far as we can tell," answered Agent Nohara, who was running the security detail for the afternoon. "But who ever knows for sure."
"The gods, maybe," another agent chimed in.
"Iwase, what did I tell you about protocols and com silence?" Nohara snapped.
"Sorry, ma'am," the agent said, and then wisely shut up rather than attempt a longer apology. Sakura still made a note to schedule a remedial training drill that evening.
"We have two on each mike, two down at stage center, two behind the curtains, Meido up the water tower three-fifty meters south for a ranged view, and the remaining five on the perimeter, for what little that's worth," Nohara said. "Ropes and sticks are a shitty-ass barrier, ma'am."
"Don't I know it," Sakura agreed. She'd taken advantage of that fact a few times herself before she couldn't live with the person ANBU was turning her into. "Anyway, you're the expert. Continue as you see fit."
She switched back over to the private channel she'd set up for Sasuke.
"Miss me?" she asked.
"No. It's much easier to keep watch without your voice distracting me."
"Mmm. And Naruto is worth watching, isn't he?"
Sasuke made one of his vaguely dismissive noncommittal noises, then blatantly changed the subject: "Have you been following Tenten's latest case? Rumor around the Glasshouse says this one might make it past appeals all the way to the supreme court. Naming no names" -- ah, so Kawamura was involved, Sakura thought -- "a lot of people aren't happy."
"No shit. I still expect certain people to pull strings and get it quashed, or failing that, to get it held up until after the election, cheat like hell at the ballot box, and then introduce some retroactive bills to cover what Major Shikatsu got up to," Sakura said. "Which is, of course, yet another reason we need to win."
"And then hammer out a coalition and promise away half of the platform," Sasuke said. "Also, what do you mean, 'we'? I'm apolitical. None of this works otherwise. The military has to be subordinate to civilian--"
He cut off abruptly. Sakura switched her headset to multi-channel, effectively hooking Sasuke in to the general security frequency. "Alert. I repeat, alert. Target--"
"Down!" Sasuke shouted, loud enough to be audible to the crowd as well as over the coms.
Sakura dove forward and knocked Naruto flat just as a bullet cracked through the air over the stage. She thought she heard a second shot, but it was hard to tell over the ringing in her ears and the sudden chorus of screams.
"Lemme up, they're gonna kill someone!" Naruto protested, thrashing under her weight.
"Yeah, you. Stay the fuck down, idiot!" Sakura wriggled her way up his body, trying to cover as much of him as she could with her own body. Human flesh and bone weren't much use as a shield against bullets -- the whole point of bullets was to smash human bodies into so much ground meat -- but the margin between life and death could be as slim as a few folded sheets of paper and there was no way she'd let Naruto die on her watch.
A third gunshot cracked from the chaos in front of the stage, and then another trio in rapid succession before Nohara's "Clear!" came crisp into Sakura's ear. She raised her head and glanced forward.
Two men lay flat on the ground, one apparently dead from point-blank shots to his chest and head, and one barely visible under a pile of shouting civilians whom Nohara and her team were cautiously trying to untangle and examine for injuries. One woman sat in a dazed slump, hand loosely pressed to a spreading bloodstain on her left side, and a man sat thin-lipped beside her with the sharp edge of a broken bone sticking out of his forearm. The crowd surged like a living thing as people pressed toward the exits of the park.
Sasuke was nowhere in sight.
Naruto read the situation nearly as fast, and eeled out from under her. "Hey, Sakura, I gotta fix those two before anyone else dies," he said, and dropped to the muddy grass with the faint shimmer of ethereal foxfire already gathering around his hands.
Self-sacrificing idiot. Sakura wondered what, exactly, she'd done in a past life that was bad enough to saddle her with two of that breed.
(Not that she'd give either of her boys up for anything in the world, but still. They had to be a punishment for something.)
Sakura rolled to her feet and snagged her abandoned tablet from her chair. Then she got to work: called the police to deliver her (redundant) report on the situation, sent a pair of interns and a security escort to buy and distribute as much bottled water as they could find in nearby stores, herded the two local candidates into a convenient location to reassure distraught civilians, caught Naruto when he tipped over from pouring his own lifeforce into other people's wounds, intercepted the police and kept them from clashing with Nohara's people, posted a request for people to send her copies of any video they'd recorded, reassigned one of the interns to keep an eye on the social media situation, told the road crew to start dismantling the stage and fence, and all the other myriad tasks necessary to turn chaos into order.
The last vestiges of twilight were fading into night when she finally slipped through the door into her hotel room and let her aura of confident authority fall away.
"You could have stayed to help," she said to the figure stretched across the queen-sized bed, a slightly darker patch of black in an already shadowed room.
"That would cause more trouble in the long run," Sasuke said. He sat up and turned on the low-watt lamp that stuck out from the wall over the headboard. "It's already pushing things for me to attend Great Bridge rallies where nothing happens. I can't be associated with anything important."
Sakura locked the door and sat down beside Sasuke, close enough to press their thighs and shoulders together: her dusty red dress rubbing against his bloodstained black slacks and a faded blue t-shirt she remembered from their last year at Leaf Shadow summer camp. "Why not? You saved his life -- probably a bunch of other people's lives in the bargain. It'd make a hell of a human interest piece."
Sasuke shook his head. "You know better. I've been watching the feeds. The rumors about the assassins being current or former special forces? True. I recognized the training. Someone in the Glasshouse is running scared, and we can't afford for me to look any more potentially biased than I already do."
Sakura slotted that fact into her picture of the day's events and frowned at the resulting patterns. Illegal orders or illegal mercenaries, either way it stank. And either way, the UMCC would be scrambling to spin a cover story and toss a distraction to the Assembly and the media. Sasuke was a public figure despite himself, grudgingly respected rather than liked, and his conviction that the military has no place in politics was well known.
"You would make a beautiful scapegoat, wouldn't you," Sakura said. She tipped her head sideways, using his shoulder as a narrow, lumpy pillow. "Fuck this. I am so tired of trying to shake the world into shape. The higher we get, the further we see, the more impossible everything looks."
Sasuke sighed. Then he tipped his own head to rest against hers. "Yeah. But that's why we have Naruto. You'd get distracted by mastering the strings. I'd burn it all down. He sees a way through and drags us along with him."
"Mmm. Not drags. Asks."
"And you can't help wanting to follow."
"Yeah."
Sakura moved her right hand onto Sasuke's knee. He placed his own hand over hers, wove their fingers together. They sat in silence for a time, close enough to feel each other's breath and pulse, proof that they were alive and safe and here together.
"He'll probably wake up soon," Sakura said eventually. "We should get some takeout sent to his room and start eating without him, see if that brings him around any faster."
Sasuke laughed, a nearly soundless chuff of breath that stirred loose strands of her hair. "Not ramen. We already know that works. We should try something new, for science."
"Hamburgers," Sakura suggested as they stood.
"Too plain. Bacon cheeseburger with extra tomato," Sasuke countered.
"Add lettuce, pickles, and grilled onions and you have a deal. And don't worry if you can't find somewhere that does delivery. I have interns."
Sasuke made a vaguely assenting noise and pulled out his phone, presumably searching for a local restaurant that fit their criteria.
Sakura stopped with one hand wrapped loosely around the doorknob and set her other hand flat against Sasuke's chest. "Hey. Sasuke. I don't say this enough, and I don't want to forget: I love you. And I don't care about the odds. We are going to win."
She leaned toward him on tiptoe and pressed a gentle kiss to the corner of his mouth.
Sasuke raised his free hand, slid it around to cradle the back of her skull and pressed his forehead to hers. Sakura felt the strength in his fingers, the heat of his palm radiating through her hair and into her skin. His eyes were cast down, as they always were when he got like this: he could face cruelty and challenges head on, unflinching, but kindness only sideways, as if it might prove a mirage upon close examination.
"Thank you," he said, his voice moth-wing quiet across the space between their lips.
Sakura curled her fingers into his shirt, her hand a cage over his beating heart. Then she broke the moment so he wouldn't have to.
"You'll have to take a rain check on the apology sex, of course. I'll kill Naruto myself if he tries to do anything strenuous so soon after he drained himself, and I think it counts as cruel and unusual punishment to make him watch but not touch." She turned the knob but held the door shut for one more second while Sasuke pulled back to recalibrate. Then she grinned and tapped his chest. "The victory sex, on the other hand, is still negotiable."
Sakura stepped into the hallway and strode toward Naruto's room, trusting Sasuke to follow.
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End of Fic
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In terms of series continuity, this happens after Zero-Sum Fallacy, in which the trio are about twenty-eight and before After Frost in which they're about thirty-four. This time I actually sat down and did a little structural thinking about the political setup in this weird AU version of Fire Country, and my conclusions are as follows:
Fire Country has a unicameral parliamentary system with an independent national judiciary system. There are various provinces (you may notice they tend to be named after kekkai genkai or other signature clan techniques) each of which is divided into several Assembly districts. District seats are won by whichever local candidate gets a plurality of votes, and then there's some system of seat compensation to top off whatever parties got more than a certain percentage of the nation-wide vote, but I don't know or care about the exact details. The Fire Lord is the ceremonial head of state but has very little legislative or executive power.
Will of Fire was the old national unity party backed by the Senju clan; it's the vehicle of all prime ministers through Tsunade, but it began fraying badly during Sarutobi's last two terms of office and he had to enter coalition with Root in order to form a majority government. After his death, the party only held together because of Tsunade's personal reputation. Peace and Justice is one of the smaller splinter parties formed from Will of Fire's disintegration; so is Great Bridge. Root is partly Danzo's own personal fief and partly a way for corrupt members of the military hierarchy to get a foothold in civilian politics. There are some other parties that I haven't named because they're not relevant to this particular story.
The Glasshouse is the nickname for the UMCC headquarters. I have no idea what Major Shikatsu was doing, but it was definitely illegal and there was an equally illegal attempt at a cover-up. Sasuke was inspecting Kasai airbase because its financial reports have had some really weird discrepancies lately, he hates corruption, and the UMCC is currently willing to let him actually make some changes as part of their bid to improve the military's public image.
I'm not actually sure if Great Bridge wins the election Naruto is campaigning for in this fic, or whether they're a junior partner in a shaky coalition government that only lasts a year or two, after which Great Bridge wins the next election.
And I think that's everything I dealt with in this fic. If you want to know anything else, please feel free to ask!
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
Summary: Sakura and Sasuke thwart an assassination attempt on Naruto during a political rally. SasuSaku, implied NaruSasuSaku. (2,800 words)
Note: This story is a response to the Cotton Candy Bingo prompt believe, and to a suggestion from
askerian that I write a Summer Camp & Politics story in which Sakura and Sasuke thwart an assassination attempt on Naruto. In retrospect, there is a slight conceptual mismatch between assassination and fluff, and also between discussion of political corruption and fluff, but what the heck, there's flirting and love and trust and a mostly happy ending, so I will call it fluffy if I want to. *resolve face*
[ETA: the slightly revised final version is now up on AO3!]
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Hold These Truths
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"Ino tells me the latest election odds are three-to-one we get a clear majority and nearly even for a coalition with either Peace and Justice or Will of Fire," Sakura murmured into her headset, covering the words with a slight bend of her neck as if she were glancing down at her tablet. Two meters in front of her, Naruto paced back and forth across the makeshift stage, his usual wild energy pulled in and concentrated until every gesture seemed like it ought to shift the entire world, just a little, from the sheer force of his conviction.
"Only if he lives," Sasuke said, his voice weirdly flat over the encrypted channel, unaccompanied by any background noise that might help her pinpoint him in the roped-off section of muddy municipal park they'd rented for the rally. "These rallies are a security nightmare. It's political suicide to search everyone the way we ought to, and quite possibly literal suicide not to."
Sakura smiled brightly at the gathered crowd when they cheered and clapped for a campaign promise she'd heard a thousand times. Beside her, Great Bridge's Assembly candidate for Kikkai province district four shifted in his seat, apparently unsure whether he should join the applause; to his left, the local mayoral candidate had no such qualms and was cheerfully shouting and waving to her potential voters. It was a good-sized crowd, well over a thousand despite the small size of the town and the torrential rain that had drenched the past three days and only cleared this morning. They probably wouldn't win the Assembly seat -- the other two district towns were utterly dominated by local machines affiliated with Root and Danzo -- but she thought they had a good shot at prying this town loose to serve as an example of what honest government looked like: a beacon of hope and a foot in the door for next time.
And there would be a next time, because Naruto wasn't dying on her watch. "Have a little faith," Sakura told Sasuke. "If you can't trust a security team I vetted myself, who can you trust? Besides, it's not like he doesn't have practice ducking."
She heard a half-second of laughter before Sasuke could stifle it, and clicked her tongue to let him know she'd caught him being human.
She swept her eyes over the crowd yet again, never focusing in on any one person in particular. That was folly. Far better to treat the crowd as a liquid, to trace its energy and flow in search of snags and eddies. But the only still points she found were Naruto's own security staff.
No Sasuke, though. He was too good at blending in for her to pick out with that trick.
Naruto shifted into an off-the-cuff rant about corruption, and Sakura abruptly began to listen in earnest, in case he said something that could be taken out of context and spun into trouble on the evening news. He'd gotten better about that since his first run for the Assembly as one of Tsunade's protégés in Will of Fire, but he still let passion run away with him sometimes. In person, that made for a powerful positive impression, but every virtue had its corresponding flaw and Sakura's job was to mitigate Naruto's as much as possible.
(Well. One of her jobs. Not all of which were officially covered under her shiny new 'chief of staff' title. Keeping him alive she did for free, and everything else was private.)
She hid a grimace with well-practiced ease when one of Naruto's "I'm not naming names but you know the kind of people I mean" descriptions got just that vital fraction too close to General Kawamura, the current head of the unified military command council and incidentally Sasuke's direct superior.
"Damn. Your week's going to suck," she murmured. "At least the apology sex will be good once Naruto realizes his slip."
"And the victory sex," Sasuke said.
Sakura wished there was a way to transmit a confused eyebrow-raise over the radio, and also that she was somewhere out of public visibility to indulge in such a gesture.
One virtue of knowing Sasuke for over twenty years, though, was that he could fill in her likely responses without needing her to deliver them in person. "Our bet," he clarified. "When you talked me into adding this detour to my inspection of Kasai airbase, you said you'd take care of the details so I wouldn't get flack from the UMCC. I said you couldn't control everything. And then you said--"
"Oh, right, that," Sakura said, cutting off what was likely to be an increasingly smug recitation of their entire conversation from last week. Just because she could hold her composure in public while Sasuke recreated phone sex in her ear didn't mean she especially wanted to inflict that kind of torture on herself.
"Yeah, that. You both owe me now, and I expect full payment. Maybe even interest." She could hear the insufferable half-smirk in his voice. She wanted to bite it off his face. And then bite some other places, too.
"No dividends?" she asked under cover of clapping at a pause in Naruto's speech.
Sasuke made a scoffing noise. "Fuck dividends. In fact, fuck anything that sounds financial in any way. Next you'll start talking about spreadsheets, and I swear by the light of the Eternal Flame, if I see a spreadsheet anywhere outside of my office for the rest of this fucking budget analysis project and up to a full month afterwards, I will not be held responsible for my reaction!"
Sakura counted to three, just long enough for Sasuke to start taking a deep breath in an effort to calm down and pretend he hadn't pitched a mini-tantrum over office work. Then she said, "Does that mean you'll set the documents on fire, or that you'll jump me in public?"
She took his silence as victory, and raised her tablet to hide the wicked tilt she couldn't quite keep from shading the corners of her smile.
Naruto wound up his speech to a thunder of applause, and then threw the rally open to questions. As people made their way toward both ends of the platform, waiting in untidy queues for their chance at a microphone and a personal answer from him or the two local candidates, Sakura switched her headset over to the general security channel. "Status?"
"Clear, so far as we can tell," answered Agent Nohara, who was running the security detail for the afternoon. "But who ever knows for sure."
"The gods, maybe," another agent chimed in.
"Iwase, what did I tell you about protocols and com silence?" Nohara snapped.
"Sorry, ma'am," the agent said, and then wisely shut up rather than attempt a longer apology. Sakura still made a note to schedule a remedial training drill that evening.
"We have two on each mike, two down at stage center, two behind the curtains, Meido up the water tower three-fifty meters south for a ranged view, and the remaining five on the perimeter, for what little that's worth," Nohara said. "Ropes and sticks are a shitty-ass barrier, ma'am."
"Don't I know it," Sakura agreed. She'd taken advantage of that fact a few times herself before she couldn't live with the person ANBU was turning her into. "Anyway, you're the expert. Continue as you see fit."
She switched back over to the private channel she'd set up for Sasuke.
"Miss me?" she asked.
"No. It's much easier to keep watch without your voice distracting me."
"Mmm. And Naruto is worth watching, isn't he?"
Sasuke made one of his vaguely dismissive noncommittal noises, then blatantly changed the subject: "Have you been following Tenten's latest case? Rumor around the Glasshouse says this one might make it past appeals all the way to the supreme court. Naming no names" -- ah, so Kawamura was involved, Sakura thought -- "a lot of people aren't happy."
"No shit. I still expect certain people to pull strings and get it quashed, or failing that, to get it held up until after the election, cheat like hell at the ballot box, and then introduce some retroactive bills to cover what Major Shikatsu got up to," Sakura said. "Which is, of course, yet another reason we need to win."
"And then hammer out a coalition and promise away half of the platform," Sasuke said. "Also, what do you mean, 'we'? I'm apolitical. None of this works otherwise. The military has to be subordinate to civilian--"
He cut off abruptly. Sakura switched her headset to multi-channel, effectively hooking Sasuke in to the general security frequency. "Alert. I repeat, alert. Target--"
"Down!" Sasuke shouted, loud enough to be audible to the crowd as well as over the coms.
Sakura dove forward and knocked Naruto flat just as a bullet cracked through the air over the stage. She thought she heard a second shot, but it was hard to tell over the ringing in her ears and the sudden chorus of screams.
"Lemme up, they're gonna kill someone!" Naruto protested, thrashing under her weight.
"Yeah, you. Stay the fuck down, idiot!" Sakura wriggled her way up his body, trying to cover as much of him as she could with her own body. Human flesh and bone weren't much use as a shield against bullets -- the whole point of bullets was to smash human bodies into so much ground meat -- but the margin between life and death could be as slim as a few folded sheets of paper and there was no way she'd let Naruto die on her watch.
A third gunshot cracked from the chaos in front of the stage, and then another trio in rapid succession before Nohara's "Clear!" came crisp into Sakura's ear. She raised her head and glanced forward.
Two men lay flat on the ground, one apparently dead from point-blank shots to his chest and head, and one barely visible under a pile of shouting civilians whom Nohara and her team were cautiously trying to untangle and examine for injuries. One woman sat in a dazed slump, hand loosely pressed to a spreading bloodstain on her left side, and a man sat thin-lipped beside her with the sharp edge of a broken bone sticking out of his forearm. The crowd surged like a living thing as people pressed toward the exits of the park.
Sasuke was nowhere in sight.
Naruto read the situation nearly as fast, and eeled out from under her. "Hey, Sakura, I gotta fix those two before anyone else dies," he said, and dropped to the muddy grass with the faint shimmer of ethereal foxfire already gathering around his hands.
Self-sacrificing idiot. Sakura wondered what, exactly, she'd done in a past life that was bad enough to saddle her with two of that breed.
(Not that she'd give either of her boys up for anything in the world, but still. They had to be a punishment for something.)
Sakura rolled to her feet and snagged her abandoned tablet from her chair. Then she got to work: called the police to deliver her (redundant) report on the situation, sent a pair of interns and a security escort to buy and distribute as much bottled water as they could find in nearby stores, herded the two local candidates into a convenient location to reassure distraught civilians, caught Naruto when he tipped over from pouring his own lifeforce into other people's wounds, intercepted the police and kept them from clashing with Nohara's people, posted a request for people to send her copies of any video they'd recorded, reassigned one of the interns to keep an eye on the social media situation, told the road crew to start dismantling the stage and fence, and all the other myriad tasks necessary to turn chaos into order.
The last vestiges of twilight were fading into night when she finally slipped through the door into her hotel room and let her aura of confident authority fall away.
"You could have stayed to help," she said to the figure stretched across the queen-sized bed, a slightly darker patch of black in an already shadowed room.
"That would cause more trouble in the long run," Sasuke said. He sat up and turned on the low-watt lamp that stuck out from the wall over the headboard. "It's already pushing things for me to attend Great Bridge rallies where nothing happens. I can't be associated with anything important."
Sakura locked the door and sat down beside Sasuke, close enough to press their thighs and shoulders together: her dusty red dress rubbing against his bloodstained black slacks and a faded blue t-shirt she remembered from their last year at Leaf Shadow summer camp. "Why not? You saved his life -- probably a bunch of other people's lives in the bargain. It'd make a hell of a human interest piece."
Sasuke shook his head. "You know better. I've been watching the feeds. The rumors about the assassins being current or former special forces? True. I recognized the training. Someone in the Glasshouse is running scared, and we can't afford for me to look any more potentially biased than I already do."
Sakura slotted that fact into her picture of the day's events and frowned at the resulting patterns. Illegal orders or illegal mercenaries, either way it stank. And either way, the UMCC would be scrambling to spin a cover story and toss a distraction to the Assembly and the media. Sasuke was a public figure despite himself, grudgingly respected rather than liked, and his conviction that the military has no place in politics was well known.
"You would make a beautiful scapegoat, wouldn't you," Sakura said. She tipped her head sideways, using his shoulder as a narrow, lumpy pillow. "Fuck this. I am so tired of trying to shake the world into shape. The higher we get, the further we see, the more impossible everything looks."
Sasuke sighed. Then he tipped his own head to rest against hers. "Yeah. But that's why we have Naruto. You'd get distracted by mastering the strings. I'd burn it all down. He sees a way through and drags us along with him."
"Mmm. Not drags. Asks."
"And you can't help wanting to follow."
"Yeah."
Sakura moved her right hand onto Sasuke's knee. He placed his own hand over hers, wove their fingers together. They sat in silence for a time, close enough to feel each other's breath and pulse, proof that they were alive and safe and here together.
"He'll probably wake up soon," Sakura said eventually. "We should get some takeout sent to his room and start eating without him, see if that brings him around any faster."
Sasuke laughed, a nearly soundless chuff of breath that stirred loose strands of her hair. "Not ramen. We already know that works. We should try something new, for science."
"Hamburgers," Sakura suggested as they stood.
"Too plain. Bacon cheeseburger with extra tomato," Sasuke countered.
"Add lettuce, pickles, and grilled onions and you have a deal. And don't worry if you can't find somewhere that does delivery. I have interns."
Sasuke made a vaguely assenting noise and pulled out his phone, presumably searching for a local restaurant that fit their criteria.
Sakura stopped with one hand wrapped loosely around the doorknob and set her other hand flat against Sasuke's chest. "Hey. Sasuke. I don't say this enough, and I don't want to forget: I love you. And I don't care about the odds. We are going to win."
She leaned toward him on tiptoe and pressed a gentle kiss to the corner of his mouth.
Sasuke raised his free hand, slid it around to cradle the back of her skull and pressed his forehead to hers. Sakura felt the strength in his fingers, the heat of his palm radiating through her hair and into her skin. His eyes were cast down, as they always were when he got like this: he could face cruelty and challenges head on, unflinching, but kindness only sideways, as if it might prove a mirage upon close examination.
"Thank you," he said, his voice moth-wing quiet across the space between their lips.
Sakura curled her fingers into his shirt, her hand a cage over his beating heart. Then she broke the moment so he wouldn't have to.
"You'll have to take a rain check on the apology sex, of course. I'll kill Naruto myself if he tries to do anything strenuous so soon after he drained himself, and I think it counts as cruel and unusual punishment to make him watch but not touch." She turned the knob but held the door shut for one more second while Sasuke pulled back to recalibrate. Then she grinned and tapped his chest. "The victory sex, on the other hand, is still negotiable."
Sakura stepped into the hallway and strode toward Naruto's room, trusting Sasuke to follow.
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End of Fic
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In terms of series continuity, this happens after Zero-Sum Fallacy, in which the trio are about twenty-eight and before After Frost in which they're about thirty-four. This time I actually sat down and did a little structural thinking about the political setup in this weird AU version of Fire Country, and my conclusions are as follows:
Fire Country has a unicameral parliamentary system with an independent national judiciary system. There are various provinces (you may notice they tend to be named after kekkai genkai or other signature clan techniques) each of which is divided into several Assembly districts. District seats are won by whichever local candidate gets a plurality of votes, and then there's some system of seat compensation to top off whatever parties got more than a certain percentage of the nation-wide vote, but I don't know or care about the exact details. The Fire Lord is the ceremonial head of state but has very little legislative or executive power.
Will of Fire was the old national unity party backed by the Senju clan; it's the vehicle of all prime ministers through Tsunade, but it began fraying badly during Sarutobi's last two terms of office and he had to enter coalition with Root in order to form a majority government. After his death, the party only held together because of Tsunade's personal reputation. Peace and Justice is one of the smaller splinter parties formed from Will of Fire's disintegration; so is Great Bridge. Root is partly Danzo's own personal fief and partly a way for corrupt members of the military hierarchy to get a foothold in civilian politics. There are some other parties that I haven't named because they're not relevant to this particular story.
The Glasshouse is the nickname for the UMCC headquarters. I have no idea what Major Shikatsu was doing, but it was definitely illegal and there was an equally illegal attempt at a cover-up. Sasuke was inspecting Kasai airbase because its financial reports have had some really weird discrepancies lately, he hates corruption, and the UMCC is currently willing to let him actually make some changes as part of their bid to improve the military's public image.
I'm not actually sure if Great Bridge wins the election Naruto is campaigning for in this fic, or whether they're a junior partner in a shaky coalition government that only lasts a year or two, after which Great Bridge wins the next election.
And I think that's everything I dealt with in this fic. If you want to know anything else, please feel free to ask!
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