[Naruto] Seeking Rin -- Chapter 12

[skylar_inari]

Title: Seeking Rin
Chapter: 12 - Grazioso
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 3875
Summary: When Sakura, newly in a relationship with Kakashi, finds out about Rin, she makes a choice that's hard on them both. Even worse, there's a mysterious illness cropping up in Konoha that even Tsunade can't heal. And what does Ino have to do with it? Kakashi x Rin, KakaSaku.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 12 of ? Unbeta’d.



Kakashi isn't in his apartment.

Sakura knows they're already too late but says nothing as Shikamaru curtly tells her to search for any clues as to his whereabouts. His mission packs are gone. She knows what that means. From the grim cast to Shikamaru's face, he knows what that means too.

Temari, as always, remains inscrutable.

(Sakura doesn't understand what Shikamaru sees in Temari. She's both deadly and lovely but she's so cold.)

She hopes Kakashi really is off on a mission and not caught up in this… mess. Not right now. Which is a silly hope but one that buoys her as she pokes through Kakashi's bathroom for 'clues'. She finds enough drugs (primarily painkillers), including three that he shouldn't have, to kill half the Konoha.

But, frankly, that's not unusual in the village and Sakura deems it acceptable and after making sure there's nothing else that's unusual in the bathroom she heads down to the bedroom. Behind her, Sakura can hear Shikamaru and Temari taking part the living room and kitchen.

Kakashi's bedroom makes her throat ache with memories and she wonders again if her breaking up with him had even been her idea.

Had it been Ino's?

Sakura isn't sure what she wants the answer to that to be. Neither sits comfortably with her. Her reasons for breaking up with him had felt so solid--but that's the way Yamanaka are supposed to make it feel, if they're messing with someone's mind. She knows this. Ino is her best friend.

(Still is, despite everything. Sakura wants answers, but that doesn't change anything else; Ino would never do something like this without a good reason or five, and orders from the top.)

Her search is decidedly lackluster in Kakashi's bedroom. It was her idea to come to his place and now… she doesn't know where to go from here, since Kakashi has already left. She sits down on his bed and pulls her and Ino's journal out of her bag.

Flipping through the pages, she comes to the end and just stares at all her accusing questions. Sakura bites her lip and glances around the room.

And freezes.

She gets up carefully, sliding the journal back into the bag, and peers around the furnace grate. There had been a light there, she's sure of it. An unnatural light, different from the sunlight that streams in through the window, unfettered by curtains.

Kneeling by the grate, Sakura pries it off the wall. It's stuck fast but it's no match for her strength, not after years of training with Tsunade-shishou. She sets aside the grate, placing it down silently-not because there's need to do so but because it'd be sloppy to let it clang-and sits back on her ankles.

The tiny video recorder taped to the inside of the grate looks harmless.

It makes her blood run cold. Kakashi had been under observation. Sakura gets up, leaving the grate off, and begins to search the room again-this time, thoroughly.

She finds three more recorders and is working on revealing another before Shikamaru looks in on her. Sakura says nothing as she finishes detangling the latest recorder from the back of Kakashi's night table. Shikamaru comes up behind her and watches her work.

Without looking at him, she knows he's glancing around the room, where she's left the other records visible. He lets out a low whistle.

"The kitchen's clean," he says, as his way of acknowledging that the bedroom really, really isn't.

"They had him under observation," Sakura says, frowning. "While he slept. But I don't understand why they wouldn't have done the same while he was awake."

The dossiers hadn't said anything about that. Shizune hadn't said anything about that. For the first time, Sakura contemplates exactly how much Shizune might not have known.

It's a scary thought.

She gets up. "I think that's all of them," Sakura says. "Five cameras to watch a man sleep. In a lab setting that would make sense but… this isn't a lab."

That makes her pause.

Shikamaru meets her eyes, the same thought dawning in his gaze. "That means there's a lab somewhere."

Sakura nods. "Yeah," she says. "And if Ino's as sick as she should be, that's probably where she is. I'd know if she was in the normal hospital, even the restricted rooms. There's no way I'd miss her chakra signature. Or Kakashi's."

Or Naruto's. She still doesn't know what to think of him being involved.

What's going on? Why wasn't she in on the project, especially if all her important, precious people are?

Had Kakashi known anything? Looking around the room, Sakura thinks that he hadn't, though it seems hard to believe that he wouldn't have noticed the cameras.

A frown creases Shikamaru's face and she knows the echo to it is on hers.

"Have you cut the power to any of them?" he asks.

She shakes her head. "No point," she says. "Not when we have what amounts to permission to snoop and it would have been too late by the time the first camera was found to use stealth. I wasn't very cautious entering the room. They," whoever was watching the feeds, "would have known I'd found one right away."

"And they're recording everything we do and say now," Shikamaru says. "Let's not stay here."

He leaves the room and Sakura follows, giving another look to the room, before closing the door behind her.

She finds Temari seated at the kitchen table, arms crossed as Shikamaru murmurs over a hastily formed shadow-map of the bedroom to her. They both glance at her and she sits awkwardly at the table.

Right. She's their captive.

Which-okay, that was melodramatic. They're her babysitters until… Sakura wonders what will be decided. How long are they going to be left to look into things? It's clear that they're not supposed to but, at the same time, they did have permission of a sort...

Giving another look at Shikamaru and Temari, hating them just a little, she pulls out the journal again and flips to the back page.

Underneath her accusations and questions, there's more writing. Ino's writing. Sakura forces herself to keep breathing and not look shocked.

Temari snorts-at her lack of input in the conversation, Sakura thinks-and ignores them.

Forehead, Ino writes, why did Shizune tell you anything?

She stares down at the writing and wonders how it even got there. She hasn't put the journal down since she last looked at it and Ino hasn't been anywhere near it.

The question is one that she doesn't know the answer to. Twirling her pen around her fingers, Sakura debates writing that in. Would Ino answer her?

Or is it a goad?

Or… something timed to appear.

She knows there's jutsu that can do that, even though she's never mastered them. They're fiddly in ways that make her brain ache to think about. Much like her and cooking-she's just never been able to get a handle on them, never been able to move beyond the very basics.

(She'd been lucky that Kakashi had been a good cook.)

It had been Ino, she remembers abruptly, that had taught her about timed jutsu. Hidden ink. Sakura's thoughts race as she keeps her face bland and refuses to let her emotions have control.

Look underneath the underneath.

The first lesson Kakashi had taught her and the one Ino has invoked with the journal.

Briefly she wonders how many messages Ino has hidden in the book she holds. Sakura bites her tongue and says nothing to her minders.

Ino has left these messages for her. Until she knows more… she'll keep them to herself.

Why would Shizune go behind Tsunade-shishou's back to tell her what was going on? Shizune has been loyal to Tsunade-shishou for longer than Sakura has been alive.

It doesn't take long for Sakura to connect the dots.

The only reason Shizune would have gone behind Tsunade-shishou's back… is if Tsunade-shishou had ordered it.

She hesitates a moment, then another one because the idea just seems too awful to be true, and then writes that underneath Ino's question. Sakura ignores the way her fingers tremble.

If Shizune did it because of orders, does that mean that Shikamaru and Temari are also part of the situation?

Sakura studies them from beneath lowered eyelids and thinks that Shikamaru's never been that good an actor and if he'd known about this plan then... he hadn't known that Ino was sick. If he knows anything, he doesn't know it all. Temari is harder to read.

Logically, she knows that Temari shouldn't be in on whatever is going on, because Temari is a Suna shinobi and this, so far, has been an extremely internal affair.

On the other hand, Temari has pull enough with the ANBU to have kept Sakura from being taken into custody so long as she remains with them. By all rights, she shouldn't be able to do that. Not even as Suna's diplomatic ambassador.

She puts a mental question mark next to both their names and glances back down at the journal. A smiley face in Ino's purple pen has appeared in the margin. Just that.

It should be frustrating but Sakura knows what that means. She's on the right track.

"Should we be staying here?" she asks, closing the journal. "I mean, he's not here. We don't have to stay here, right?"

Shikamaru folds his shadow map back into the shadow of his body absently. "What were you thinking?"

Can I trust you? she wonders. Can I trust Temari?

Sakura knows better than to say that. Or even hint at it. If this is a giant conspiracy and she's in the middle of it, feigning ignorance is the only defence she has until she knows more about what's going on.

"We could try tracking the signals on the cameras," she suggests. "To where they're feeding the video to."

Temari doesn't smile, though her expression goes less harsh and more... thoughtful. "It has potential," she decrees. "Shikamaru?"

"I'm no good at electronics," he grouses and Temari kicks him in the shin. "Dammit, woman, stop that." Shikamaru rubs his shin and scowls at the both of them. "Do either of you know how to track this sort of thing?"

"I've never done it," Sakura admits. "A chakra pulse through the wiring should be something we can follow though, right?"

"Yeah," Shikamaru says, with a sigh. "If you want to electrocute yourself."

"It should be a job that's perfect for you then," Temari says dryly. "I was going to suggest the same thing as Haruno. What do you have in mind?"

"The same thing she wants," Shikamaru says, getting up and heading towards the bedroom. "Only, the thing is, you've got to match the current with your chakra and that's not easy."

The urge to suggest that she do it is on the tip of her tongue but Sakura bites the urge down and just follows as Shikamaru and Temari bicker about what the frequency of the current could be. If this is part of the trap then volunteering herself would just be ridiculous. It would be walking right into it.

"Is there anything we should be doing while you're channelling chakra?" she asks, watching as Shikamaru inspects one of the recorders. Temari is leaning against the dresser.

Sakura wants them both out of Kakashi's room with a vehemence that surprises her. It's ridiculous, they're not even going through his things--she's the one that had done that and they'd left her to do it alone.

But paranoia keeps ninja alive and she feels like she's going to choke on it.

"Just keep watch," he says absently, the sharpness of his voice having faded as he concentrates. "If I start smoking, pull me away from the current. Don't throw water on me. That would be bad."

She wrinkles her nose.

Temari looks amused. "We'll try not to let you cook," she says, which earns her a faint smile from Shikamaru.

Sakura just shudders away from the mental image. No thanks.

They watch in silence as Shikamaru slices the wire that the camera is attached to and holds his finger over it. His eyes fall closed and she waits, feeling his chakra ruffle against her senses like a cloud made tangible. Feeling his struggles with changing the frequency of his chakra, Sakura is glad to not be the one to do this.

"I'm not good with electronics," Temari murmurs disparagingly. "Ass."

"Oh?"

"He's good at this," Temari says, after a pause. "It's just uncomfortable, so he doesn't like doing it."

That figures, Sakura thinks, Shikamaru's always been lazy and if it's not pleasant on top of that, she can see why he'd want to avoid it. "Is it hard to learn?" she asks.

"It's a rare skill," comes the answer. "Adjusting your frequency to match another human's? That's fairly common. There's enough jutsu based on that principle that even if people aren't good at it, they can usually do one or two. It's the fact that it's inanimate that makes this difficult."

"Would the both of you shut up?" Shikamaru asks grouchily. "You're ruining my concentration."

"Sorry," Sakura says softly. Temari just shrugs her shoulders.

Neither of them take their eyes off Shikamaru. Smoking, she thinks, is a very real possibility.

It doesn't happen. After an interminable fifteen minutes, Sakura has never thought she'd grow to hate Kakashi's alarm clock, of all things, but she has while watching it tick by too slowly, Shikamaru opens his eyes.

"What a mess," he says, staggering slightly as his chakra signature wavers all over the place.

"Ground yourself," Temari says sharply. "There's no need to advertise what we've been doing."

He gives her a dirty look, takes a seat on Kakashi's bed (Sakura tells herself she's not allowed to shove him off it, no matter how tempting it is to do; Kakashi would hate a having a stranger on his bed) and breathes.

Slowly, his chakra signature stabilizes and begins to feel the way it should against her senses.

"What did you find?" Sakura asks when Shikamaru feels back to normal, if a bit tired.

"It's outside the village," he says, frowning. "Not far, but outside. Underground, I think."

Temari's frown joins his. "We can't leave the village with Haruno."

"Not even if I'm in your presence?" Sakura asks, hating the well of bitterness that bubbles up in her throat.

The other girl shakes her head. Sakura thinks she detects a bit of regret. "Not now. You were spilling secrets without decorum. You know the rules."

The worst part, Sakura thinks, is that Temari is right. She does know the rules. That's why it's so weird that even this-this isn't part of the rules, her being in Kakashi's house, here and now. She doesn't point that out.

"Would you be willing to go?" she asks. "You could turn me over to the ANBU. Or stick me with one of you and have the other go."

"Heading without backup into the unknown doesn't sound like a good use of resources to me," Shikamaru says mildly. "Though I know why you'd suggest it now. Ideas, Temari?"

"Is there anyone you trust with this?" she asks.

"Chouji," Shikamaru says promptly. "But he's out on a mission. Or Ino but…" he falters and Sakura feels pity for him and another surge of emotion for Ino.

She doesn't know now if she's angry or scared or worried about Ino. A mix of all three and combination settles uncomfortably in her stomach. Kakashi's situation makes her antsy. They need to get to the bottom of this.

It's that thought that leads her to what looks like a possible solution. It might turn out very badly, she knows, but it would get something done and Sakura thinks if they have to linger in the apartment for much longer that she might scream.

"Let's go straight to Tsunade-shishou," Sakura says. "If you can't leave me with her, you can't leave me with anyone."

Temari and Shikamaru exchange glances.

"That's not particularly subtle," Temari murmurs.

"But it could work," Shikamaru concedes, sounding disgusted. "We were so caught up in getting around problems that cutting right through didn't occur to us." He fixes dark eyes on her face. "You do know that it could go very badly?"

Sakura thinks of Ino, of Naruto, of Kakashi, of Shizune, and swallows the urge to start laughing and never stop. "I know," she says. "I don't know what I'm walking into but I know that much."

He nods. "All right," Shikamaru says. "Let's go."

Less than half an hour is all it takes for them to navigate through the village and through the administrative buildings to reach Tsunade-shishou's office. It would have taken them less time, but they'd gone slowly, to keep from rousing interest in other shinobi. The guard Chuunin watch them as they approach the door.

Sakura wonders if they're keeping her in the dark about something too.

She wonders if she's becoming paranoid and then dismisses the thought. As a kunoichi of Konoha, she's already supposed to be paranoid.

It's just not very comfortable.

"Is Tsunade-shishou in a meeting?" Sakura asks.

"You can go right in," one of the guards tell her. They're a new rotation--the rotation changes every few weeks and she hasn't had time to meet them yet though, clearly, they know who she is. Sakura wishes she knew their names.

"Thanks," she says, with a smile. It always pays to be polite, she tells herself, even when smiling is the last thing she wants to do.

The inside of Tsunade-shishou's office is comfortingly, and deceptively, familiar. Against her will Sakura feels herself begin to relax, the knot of tangled upset that's taken up residence in her stomach loosening.

All the hours she's spent here, feeling safe and wanted and being taught, have left their mark. She grits her teeth and presses a fingernail to the pad of her thumb. The sharp pain gives her focus without injuring her.

Tsunade-shishou is leaning back in her chair, the hat of her office carelessly thrown over the back of a lamp, and paper everywhere. Shizune isn't in and Sakura is glad for that. She might do something rash.

(As if this isn't rash enough.)

But words and actions have different degrees of severity. Sakura doesn't know what she's going to say to Tsunade-shishou, as Shikamaru and Temari mouth pleasantries and get them returned, but she knows that if Shizune were here, that she would do something. It's for the best that she's not.

"Tsunade-shishou," she says, "what's going on?"

Shikamaru sucks in a breath. Sakura resists the urge to kick him in the ankles, steeling her heart with the fact that there's no way in hell that Ino would have resisted, and waits.

Tsunade-shishou's eyes are as comforting as ever. Somehow that makes this worse.

She doesn't invite them to sit down. That helps.

"You're under custody for discussing confidential information in public," Tsunade-shishou says. "I don't think you're on very stable ground already, Sakura. Don't push it."

"Shizune-san was a plant," Sakura says flatly. "I don't believe that she would have betrayed you for me."

That hurts less than it would have a couple years ago, back when she still believed that she should matter to everyone and any rejection hurt so damn much. Now it's just a fact and while it isn't one that she enjoys--she likes Shizune!--it's one that she can look in the face without flinching.

Progress is ugly.

Tsunade-shishou watches her. Sakura resists the urge to squirm. She believes that she's right. She does.

The silence goes on just long enough for Sakura to begin doubting herself when Tsunade-shishou nods.

"Temari-san, Nara-kun, you're dismissed."

Shikamaru's face turns grim.

Sakura knows why: Ino's condition is something that he wants to know more about. He doesn't like being knocked out of the loop, not when he's just discovered that there is a loop he'd been missing.

He stays silent and controlled though and leaves with a dark look at her, full of significance. Temari-san's expression is harder to read but she goes too.

Sakura knows that Shikamaru will find her, at some point, and demand more information.

She hasn't heard anything yet that would make her refuse to give it to him. Waiting for Tsunade-shishou to make the next move, Sakura wonders if there's anything that would make her keep that information from Shikamaru.

Orders only go so far. It's something that they all know and don't talk about. Shinobi are supposed to obey the rules, follow their orders, and keep their mouths shut on what they know.

But shinobi are also trained to seek out and discover information, to make connections, and to reflect on what they've figured out.

"Yes," Tsunade-shishou says, "Shizune was a plant."

Sakura nods and then asks the one question that's been plaguing her about all of this. "Why?"

That 'why' applies to so many things. Sakura doesn't try to narrow it down. The answer she'll get will tell her something--just like the answers she doesn't get will also tell her something. Underneath the underneath. She won't forget, she swears, promising Kakashi and Ino to get to the bottom of this.

Tsunade-shishou smiles wryly. "It was an aptitude test. You passed."

Sakura frowns, uneasy and surprised at the unexpected answer. "What did I need to pass a test for? I bombed on stealth and down the village will have the gossip mill working through any clue that hasn't been accounted for."

"And you'll be facing the consequences for that," Tsunade-shishou replies, looking down at a sheaf of paper in another folder for a second before back up. "That being said, despite the fact that your passing works out well for our intentions, I wish you hadn't passed."

Sakura is baffled. And, increasingly, alarmed. The hairs at the back of her neck raise as she wonders if, perhaps, the reason Tsunade-shishou wanted no witnesses is so that she can be 'gotten rid of' without interference.

There have been Kages who would espouse such treatment. Tsunade-shishou could probably get away with it.

"What was I passing for?" she asks instead. "How is it connected to Ino and Kakashi?"

There's no question in her mind that it is connected to them.

She wishes she had more weapons on her. It would be suicide to draw them on the Hokage, in her office, when things are already dicey. But having them would make her feel better. Sakura pines for them and catalogues what she does have.

Not enough.

Tsunade-shishou stands. She's not much taller than Sakura is but she's more imposing. Sakura resists the urge to back up a step; for the first time she's scared of her mentor.

It's an awful realization.

The fact that there's resignation in Tsunade-shishou's face just makes Sakura feel even worse.

"Come with me," Tsunade-shishou says. "If you want answers."

Sakura hesitates.

She's starting to think that the price of the answers is going to be more than she wants to pay.

But she follows.

It's too late to back out now.

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