Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sakura and her squad reached the abandoned lab shortly before sunset. The clear, pale sunlight of late winter washed across the Land of Grass, making every snowdrift sparkle like mounds of crushed diamonds. 

Too bad they were headed into that rusty metal vault door set into the side of the hill. 

They'd been given the techniques that would unseal the long-empty installation. Orochimaru has assured both the incoming and outgoing Hokages of Konoha that this particular abandoned base of his was uninhabited. It contained only the remnants of some of his failed experiments. 

I still can't believe Lady Tsunade and Kakashi-sensei are letting Orochimaru just settle down in Konoha, as though he's never done anything wrong, Sakura thought, keying in the code to disable the electronic security system. He experimented on humans for years. He's done unspeakable things. 

And here we are, cleaning up his messes. 

Sakura glanced at her squad. Sai was here, and she'd always liked Sai, despite his oddness. And she had no problem with Chōji, of course.

But the third person on her squad was someone she really hadn't wanted to bring along at all. 

"Her?" Sakura had asked Tsunade bluntly. "Seriously?"

"Karin's looking for a place, now that the war is over," Tsunade had said, steepling her fingers in front of her face. She was still acting as Hokage while Sakura's old teacher Kakashi got himself up to speed. "She wants to be helpful. And her history is one of healing, not of human experimentation."

"It's Orochimaru's old lab," Sakura had objected, with a mild shudder. 

"All the more reason for her to want to scrub it. She's motivated, Sakura. I think you'll find that of the four of you, she'll be the one itching to clean up after his messes." She moved her hand enough to snag another sip of rice wine. "And if anything goes wrong, burn an instant message scroll. We'll move to your location immediately."

"Is anything going to go wrong?" Sakura had wondered.

Tsunade had tossed off the rest of her cup, then refilled it. "No — this mission is beneath your talents, I'm afraid. Orochimaru abandoned it. He says there's nothing dangerous left inside. This is just cleanup, but someone has to do it. Konoha appreciates your hard work."

Sakura glanced to her right to check on Karin. She was currently frowning through her glasses, finishing off a jutsu that would disarm the seals that Orochimaru had left in place to guard this facility against wanderers or enemy ninjas. The pale, flat sunlight made her hair a matte red, like old blood, and her breath steamed in the chilly air.

The metal vault door creaked open. Electric lights lurched to life down the hallway in sequence with audible jolts. 

I hope Tsunade was right, Sakura thought, examining the long, nightmarish hallway that snaked from the sunny hill outside deep into the earth.

"Well! Shall we?" she exclaimed with artificial enthusiasm to the others. 

Sai cocked his head at her quizzically. "We shall, for that is why we are here," he said in his precise, uncomprehending tones.

Chōji took a decisive step inside. "Let's clear this place out quickly. It gives me the creeps."

Karin barely glanced at Sakura. She shoved her glasses higher on her nose with one finger and frowned her way into to the hill as though it had personally offended her.

I'm the leader, yet somehow, I'm the one bringing up the rear, Sakura pondered, closing the door so no stray bandits or Grass nin would wander inside and give themselves nightmares for the rest of their lives.

She hustled down the hall after her squad, noting how Karin was moving with assurance. Sakura wasn't certain whether she'd ever been to this installation in the Land of Grass. Orochimaru had quite a few of them, scattered around anywhere he thought he wouldn't be noticed. A snake needs many dens, he'd said.

That may be, Sakura thought. But does a snake need this many creepy murder warehouses?

The hallway opened up into a medium-sized room with some equipment shoved against the far wall. Overhead lights cast dingy shadows against the concrete walls. A multitude of tables took up the bulk of the space, and they were covered with all manner of clutter that Sakura could not immediately identify — lumpy, deformed shapes that seemed to flicker in the inconstant light from the laboring electrical system above.

"What is all this?" Sakura asked Karin. Of the four of them, she was the only one who could possibly know.

Karin was moving through the tables, glancing left and right. "I don't know about any of this. They look like failed experiments, the way Orochimaru said. He really should have cleaned these up himself."

Sakura nodded. "If there's an incinerator, we'll want to use it. Or we could build a bonfire outside."

Karin stopped and turned back. "It's one of Orochimaru's installations. Of course there's an incinerator."

Sakura saw a flicker of movement at Karin's elbow, striking towards her arm from between two of the shapes.

"Look out!" she called, lunging forward, hand outstretched.

Later, she would wonder why she had reached out her hand. If she'd led with a weapon, maybe none of the rest of it would have ever happened. Didn't she have a hammer, or an axe, or something tucked away into her weapons scroll? Wasn't she adept at drawing a weapon quickly when needed?

But none of that was what actually happened.

Instead, she felt two fangs sinking into her hand, while watching the other end of the same snake — what should have been the tail end, only instead, it was another head — sinking its two fangs into Karin's wrist.

Sakura's eyes met Karin's. There was a bright burst inside her skull, like all of her senses were overloaded at once.

Then there was nothing but darkness.

Sakura's consciousness came back slowly, and something about it came back wrong. She felt fragmented, disorganized, jangled up in ways she didn't understand. Perhaps this was what being drunk was like. Since she'd had immense chakra reserves and world-class control for so long, she couldn't really get drunk anymore; not the way civilians could. Sometimes she envied them.

Although, if this was what being drunk was like, Sakura decided, she most certainly did not envy them after all. Her limbs were floppy and heavy feeling, and it took them at least a second to respond when she tried to make them do something. That might as well be forever, in shinobi time. If her body was like this, she definitely couldn't fight.

She was working to sit up, blinking and trying to make her hands work, but she was only achieving moderate success.

"She's awake, Lady Tsunade," Sai's soft voice came from somewhere to her left.

Sakura laboriously turned her head towards her left and found that she was in a Konoha hospital room. Sai was giving her one of his strange little glancing smiles, and then leaving through the room's one door.

Huh. I'm all the way back home, and I don't even remember the journey. That two-headed snake must have really whammied me, Sakura thought, reaching inside herself to make an accounting.

She stopped, taken aback. That wasn't right.

Tsunade came into the room and paused, looking at her.

Sakura frowned up at her former teacher and tried not to let her panic show through in her voice. "Lady Tsunade? Where the fuck is all my chakra?"

Tsunade sighed. "Glad you have you back, Sakura. Your mission ran into a bump, I'm afraid. We're bringing Karin in. Then I can talk to both of you at once."

Sure enough, there were more people at the door — Karin, pale and limping, being supported by an orderly.

"I told you to wheel her in here," Tsunade snapped at the attendant.

"Don't blame him, Lady Tsunade. I don't want a wheelchair," Karin said. "I can still walk."

"Damn shinobi and their self destructive streaks," Tsunade muttered, taking up a position where she could see both Sakura, still sitting up in bed, and Karin, who had settled into one of the room's two chairs. "You're all the same. I don't know why I bother to keep any of you in one piece."

"What's going on? Where's my chakra?" Sakura asked. She was feeling too panicky to pretend she wasn't, at some very base level, freaking the fuck out.

When she looked inside herself, her almost endless well of chakra just wasn't there anymore. She had barely enough chakra to stick to a wall — less than some civilians had.

Tsunade will explain, she reassured herself. Tsunade will fix it. Tsunade will know.

Tsunade sighed and glanced between them. "So, first off, as you have probably remembered by now, you were both attacked by one of Orochimaru's little experiments. Sai neutralized the snake, and we have it here for study."

Karin nodded, grim and pale. "I should have noticed it there."

"Yeah, you should have," Sakura agreed. When Tsunade raised her eyebrows, Sakura gave an aggressive shrug. "What? It was her old boss's hideout. She should have known there were creepy double-headed snakes. So what did it do to us? Chakra suppression?"

"Nothing so easy, I'm afraid," Tsunade said, then seemed to gather herself up. "Orochimaru was working on a way to create a sort of chakra battery to draw on when he got too depleted himself, and the snake was part of that. Are you familiar with how a battery works?"

"Not really," Sakura admitted. Karin shook her head.

"A simple battery has three main components — the anode, or negative terminal, is the part where a chemical reaction causes electrons to release. The cathode, or positive terminal, is the part where the electrons are accepted. And there's a bridging substance between them, sometimes a liquid or a gel, called the electrolyte, that bridges the two of them."

She paused, then continued.

"Orochimaru was working on a forbidden jutsu he called Chakra Twinning. It requires two victims. One to serve as the source of the chakra. The other to serve as the control."

"What does that have to do with the snake?" Sakura asked, not liking where this was going.

"When the snake bit you both at the same time, it created a link between you," Tsunade explained. "The snake was the bridge — the electrolyte, if you will. Karin, you are the source of the chakra. The anode. And Sakura, you're the cathode, providing control."

"I'm not a cathode," Sakura said, but her lips were feeling numb. "You're saying —"

Tsunade sighed again. "I'm afraid that you two have become the two components in Orochimaru's forbidden Chakra Twinning Battery."

"Gross," Sakura commented after the silence had gone on a beat too long. "All that from a snakebite, huh? Well. I suppose it could have been worse. We have the snake, right? We know how it works? So just — reverse what it did to us. Put us back."

Tsunade stared at her in irritation. "Do you think that wasn't the first thing I tried? The snake has created a higher order link between the two of you. It exists on a plane of pure chakra, independent of both your bodies. I can't just 'put it back,' any more than you can put an omelet back into the eggshells."

Karin was frowning, too. "Lady Tsunade — are you saying that snake ate all my chakra? I can't feel mine at all anymore."

"Neither can I," Sakura said, reaching again for that well of bottomless power that had been her constant companion for as long as she could remember — her very core, the soul inside her soul. Her chakra.

To have it simply be gone was unacceptable.

"It's not gone. It's just sequestered," Tsunade said.

"Sequestered??" Sakura objected.

"That means it's hidden from us," Karin chimed in.

"I know what sequestered means," Sakura almost growled.

"We're working on reverse engineering the technique," Tsunade said, raising her eyebrows. "But right now, we don't have a way to free your chakra from the jutsu. Until we can determine a path forward, you're both grounded from missions indefinitely."

"What?" Sakura objected, leaping to her feet — or trying to. Her body wasn't cooperating, and she ended up still sitting in bed, but sort of jolting forward in an awkward way. "I can't stop doing missions. There's so much rebuilding work to do! Not just in Konoha — everywhere! We're needed!"

Tsunade crossed her arms. "I'm afraid you don't have a choice right now. Haruno Sakura. Uzumaki Karin. I'm sorry to report that, for the foreseeable future, the two of you are now one. You are to stay together at all times, or the connection may fray. We have no idea what will happen if it breaks."

"Our chakra could all come rushing back!" Sakura suggested, flaring with hope.

Karin shoved her glasses higher on her nose. "Or it could all dissipate back into Nature, leaving us permanently crippled."

Well, isn't she just a ball of sunshine, Sakura grumped to herself. I can see why she's the negative part of the soul battery.

"Karin is right. We can't risk it," Tsunade agreed. "I'm assigning both of you to live in the same apartment. And Sakura, I'm directing hazard pay into your account for the inconvenience."

"What are we supposed to do all day?" Sakura asked in something of a panic. She was a shinobi. She didn't know what to do with herself if she couldn't go on missions, couldn't train, couldn't do — anything that made life worth living. She'd only be able to visit Ino's family's flower shop so many times a day before it got weird.

"I advise that you stay together and keep each other company," Tsunade said. "We'll probably need you both back here at regular intervals for testing. We'll be in touch."

Well, fuck me, Sakura thought, sinking down into a morass of self pity. No missions. No chakra. No purpose.

It was hard not to resent Karin, who seemed to be taking this whole situation in perfect stride, from the poised way she was sitting on her hospital chair.

Her old boss is the one responsible for this, Sakura thought, feeling the edge of her temper rising up inside. She should have known there would be weird shit in his old lab. That's the whole reason we took her along.

Could Karin have known about the Chakra Twinning snake battery thing? Could this all have been a setup, just to take Sakura out?

No — unlikely. Sakura could easily imagine Karin sacrificing herself like that. The woman was worryingly quick to throw her own body in the way of anything dangerous — that wasn't the issue. But doing it just to take out Sakura didn't make sense — she wasn't a high enough value target. Maybe if Naruto had been the other half of the battery, it might have been a purposeful attack against Leaf. But this? This was just dumb, stupid, bad luck.

"You can rest for now. Then, after lunch, I'll discharge you both," Tsunade was saying, wrapping up a conversation she'd apparently been having with Karin that Sakura had completely missed.

"Fine," Sakura said, lying back down and turning towards the wall. She knew it was rude to turn her back on her former teacher and the village's Hokage — well, former Hokage, but since Kakashi-sensei wasn't really doing the job yet, Tsunade might as well still have worn the hat herself.

But she couldn't care that it was rude. Not when everything inside her felt as dead as one of Orochimaru's abandoned labs.

Sakura missed her old apartment, which had been destroyed during the war. Her parents had relocated to a new place, so she supposed it only made sense that she'd have to, as well.

She just hadn't figured on relocating with company.

Karin was remarkably silent, trailing after her slowly as Sakura made her way into the new place. It had all the typical features of jōnin housing, plus a sliding door out onto a balcony overlooking a stretch of rubble that had once been shops and warehouses.

"Looks like Lady Tsunade made sure we'd have basic supplies," Karin said, looking inside the refrigerator. "Soy sauce. Eggs. Miso paste. Some vegetables. We'll need more."

"Are you volunteering for kitchen duty?" Sakura asked.

Karin narrowed her eyes. "We should switch off. And whoever doesn't cook, washes up."

"Fine." Suddenly, Sakura didn't want to be here in this brand new apartment, with this interloper in her life. She wanted her own place; her own friends. She wanted her own life back.

Before she could say anything even more rude than she'd been already, Sakura headed into one of the two bedrooms to get a moment to herself.

The room had a very basic bed, dresser, and shelf. It wasn't much for someone who had recently helped save the entire ninja world — but then again, it was probably more than she'd be able to earn if she was grounded from her work indefinitely.

"Sakura? I want to go to the store," Karin said from the other side of the door. "We're going to need more groceries."

Sakura sighed, then got out of the chair. She did like eating.

"Fine. I'll come along." She wasn't about to let Karin out in the village unsupervised. It's true she currently had no powers to speak of, and wasn't technically Leaf's enemy anymore, but Sakura didn't trust either the Leaf villagers or Karin to respect that fact.

While Karin shopped, picking out a wide variety of things that Sakura had no interest in tallying up, Sakura gazed around at the village that she'd managed to help save after all. Some parts were still rebuilding after Pain's attack of several years earlier, and then the Fourth Shinobi War had caused even more stress. Still, the village still existed. There were still children; there were still other shinobi.

Sakura was just realizing that if they didn't manage to fix this chakra battery thing, she would never return to her place in the shinobi world. All those years of training, of pain, of sacrifice, would be for nothing.

What was she supposed to do with her life? Just shop, and cook, and clean, and find some stupid job selling shoes, or cups, or scarves?

The thought made a kind of blind, animal panic rise up in her. She had dedicated her entire life to becoming the best shinobi she could be. Without the benefit of a powerful clan at her back, she'd had to make her own way, discounted and spurned at every turn. Her teammates were both scions of powerful bloodlines — not that she'd known that about Naruto for a long time, but still — while Sakura came from nothing. She'd had to fight her way against the current, pushing herself relentlessly until she was worthy to apprentice under Lady Tsunade herself.

And what was that all going to amount to? Nothing. Now she was half of a fancy chakra toy meant for a man to use to draw down, to deplete, in order to enhance his own power.

It's what Sakura should have expected from life, she noted to herself grimly. Nothing about the shinobi world had given her the idea that its people were valuable resources. Of course Orochimaru decided to use other people for his own gain. How was he any different from any of the village leaders? Even Leaf sent its children into battle.

Her unwilling other half seemed to be done with her shopping, and was balancing a series of bags in her arms precariously.

"Let me take some of those," Sakura said. No doubt her coin purse was lighter, but at least they'd eat well tonight. Assuming Karin could cook.

Back in the apartment, while Karin was doing something in the kitchen, Sakura was bored and antsy. She also felt an urge under her skin that wouldn't let her rest.

She sat in the chair. She looked out the window. She lay in the bed. Sleep was as far away as the Land of Earth.

Finally, she huffed at herself in exasperation. It was barely four o'clock, and she didn't need a nap. She needed to do something.

There was one thing that had never deserted Sakura in all the years she'd been striving to improve her skills. Even weak and depleted as she was, she could always train.

I'll take it easy, she told herself. I'll go slow, and see if I can still do anything beyond walking up a tree.

Honestly, even walking up a tree might be asking too much of herself. Still, she was determined to try.

"I'm going out," she announced to Karin, who was pulling everything out of the kitchen cupboards and reorganizing it all.

"I'll accompany you." Karin stood up from her deep squat to get into the back of a cabinet, holding some appliance Sakura could not immediately name. She looked as on edge as Sakura felt.

"No — I think I need to be alone," Sakura replied, heading for the door.

She felt weird. Why did she feel so weird?

She made it down the stairs, to the street outside, and halfway down the block towards the training field before the itch under her skin turned into a tug, which turned into a pull, which turned into pain.

She bent over double, leaning against a building, clutching it with one hand. Out of habit, she tried to pull her strength — she didn't want to collapse yet another building, not by accident, anyway — but then she realized there was barely any strength for her to try to muzzle.

Her hand was a slim, pale, powerless thing, resting against the red brick of the wall. This hand had wrenched off one of Kaguya's horns — this hand had leveled mountains!

This hand was currently trembling with pain. Something was very wrong.

She needed to be near Karin. She needed to go back.

Sakura turned around and started limping back the other way. As she went, the pain lessened, and turned into a harsh pull, that then reverted to a tug, that then turned back into the restless itch that she had first noticed.

Turning the corner onto her block, she saw Karin coming towards her, eyes wide behind her glasses.

"Something's wrong with me," Karin said.

"Yeah — me too. I should go back and sit down," Sakura said, moving past her.

"Wait — you don't look so good," Karin said, reaching out to grab Sakura's bare arm.

Sakura reeled in place. The sensation of Karin's hand on her skin was like being punched in the head, through a wall, but she was still standing in the middle of the sidewalk like an idiot, her vision narrowing before expanding, her skin flushing and then turning cold before flushing again.

Karin's hand had felt so good. It was not like any touching Sakura had ever done — and she was a fully grown woman, a shinobi who'd had plenty of opportunities in the past, and who had sometimes taken advantage of them. She was someone who knew her own body and what it could do.

This feeling wasn't anything that her own personal body could do.

"What was that," Sakura gasped, wrenching her arm back and taking a huge step away. She stared at Karin, shocked.

Karin was staring back and swaying in place slightly. Her breath was coming faster than usual.

"You felt that too?" Karin muttered, pale and wary. She rotated her hand in place and flexed the fingers, as though they missed Sakura's skin.

"Yes — I — that was intense," Sakura said, still struggling to come up with words. She stared at Karin's hand. How had something so small and weak had such a gigantic effect on her?

"I suppose it makes sense for two parts of the battery not to touch," Karin said. "Maybe if we touch again, something even worse could happen."

"Well, let's just make sure not to do that, then," Sakura said, taking a deep breath and then squaring her shoulders before starting to head back to the apartment. "Ugh. I feel like I've just broken out of a bad genjutsu."

"Maybe it had a genjutsu component," Karin mused, falling in beside her — well outside her reach, Sakura noticed.

"I'm so curious about how it works. It's so unfair that my chakra manipulation is gone," Sakura complained, forcing her feet to move faster. All of a sudden, she really wanted to be back in the apartment. "If only I still had it, I could find out how it's doing this. There has to be a way to reverse it. Can't they just ask Orochimaru?"

"I believe Lady Tsunade is doing that very thing," Karin said as they made their way inside.

"Well, can't she do it faster?" Sakura grumbled. "The last thing I need is to be tethered to someone like you this way."

"Someone like me?" Karin demanded, stopping in place, hands on her hips. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I just meant — the last thing I need is to be tethered to someone," Sakura tried to recover. "Anyone, really — I didn't mean you specifically."

Karin glared at her, unimpressed.

"Look, I'm sorry," Sakura said. "We've both had an upsetting day. Let's, uh, go to our rooms and rest. And then make dinner in a bit."

"Fine. But you're chopping all the vegetables," Karin said darkly.

Sakura went back to her empty, impersonal room. The echo of Karin's handprint burned all up and down her arm, making her hot and cold at the same time.

Chapter Text

"This is good," Sakura said in surprise after her first spoonful of miso soup with spring vegetables. Karin had made rice, too, after learning that Sakura had never really learned how to cook.

"Well, I should hope so," Karin said. Sitting the way she was, with her elbows and knees tucked in close, she looked like one of those temple gods who only gets revealed to the public once a year.

Sakura scratched her knee, feeling sprawled out and uncouth in comparison. She tried to rearrange herself in her chair to look more mature and controlled, but gave up. "I'm surprised you know how to cook. Did you have a lot of time on your hands when you were on the run with Taka?"

Karin shot her a glance. "Guess who was the one woman in Hebi, then Taka? Me. Guess what all the guys thought that meant?"

Sakura frowned and sat forward. "They made you cook just because you're a woman? That's complete bullshit!"

"I pounded Suigetsu into the ground the first time he suggested it," Karin said. "But that didn't work on all of them forever. At least Jūgo was willing to help."

Sakura was still angry. "Kunoichi have enough uphill battles without having to deal with gendered chores."

Karin gave a half-shrug. "It wasn't all bad. It can be fun to take stupid ingredients and turn them into food. Sometimes the guys would come back to the lair with the weirdest things, and I had to figure out what to do with them." Her gaze turned reminiscent as she took another ladle of soup. "Feeding Jūgo was fun — he likes everything. But Suigetsu was a pain. He's way too picky."

Sakura giggled. Hearing minor domestic details like this about the other side was amusing.

"How about Sasuke?" she asked, out of sheer curiosity. Back when they'd been on Team 7 together, she'd known everything about Uchiha Sasuke. She was pretty sure that at one point, she'd charted out everything he'd eaten for a month. All part of her relentless obsession with him at the time.

She had been such a dumbass kid.

Karin's body language shuttered, and she dropped her eyes to her bowl. "I don't recall."

"Oh, I'm sure that's not true," Sakura said, snagging some more rice. It went well with the miso soup. Did they need some sake for the apartment? Tsunade had not included that, which seemed rather ironic, considering her drinking habits.

"He did what he wanted," Karin said. Then she pushed herself back from the table. "So. I cooked. That means it's your turn to do the dishes."

"I'm not done," Sakura complained around a mouthful of rice. "What's the hurry?"

Karin was already in the kitchen, pouring the leftover soup into a container for storage and wiping down the counter.

"How long do you think it'll take them to figure out how to fix us?" Sakura mused, carrying in her things and making a start on the dishes. She frowned, realizing she couldn't use chakra to shield her hands from the heat of the water. She'd either have to suffer, or use rubber dishwashing gloves, like a civilian. And they didn't have any of those.

Every single aspect of her life was going to be ruined as long as this chakra situation continued.

"To be honest? I don't know if they'll be able to at all," Karin said. The glare on her glasses shielded the expression in her eyes, but from her body language, she was feeling completely hopeless. "I think we'll be stuck this way. Orochimaru's experiments don't usually end well for the subjects."

"What?" Sakura waved her soapy hands in the air as she spoke, sending a few stray bubbles into the air. "Orochimaru and Tsunade between them know everything about chakra networks. They have the snake that bit us! Orochimaru is cooperating!" She plunged her hands back into the too-hot water and bit back a wince. "There's no way they won't be able to fix it. We just defeated a god to save the world!"

"Defeating a god is one thing. Orochimaru's experiments are something else," Karin said darkly. "I should know."

Sakura couldn't even respond to that, so she took out her frustrations on a dish, scrubbing it until it gleamed.

That night, Sakura had a difficult time falling asleep — something she had rarely experienced before, and only on the eve of a big battle. But there was nothing urgent happening tomorrow. With no missions, all they had to do was sit around at home, growing fat on rice and vegetables, and driving each other crazy.

I'll visit Ino tomorrow, Sakura decided. That'll give me something to look forward to.

"What are you doing?" Sakura groaned. "Why are you up?"

The bond tying her to Karin had dragged her out of bed at some unholy hour of the morning. Now, she was huddled on top of a hard wooden kitchen chair, watching her unwilling other half.

Karin was squatting next to a wooden tub of something that smelled vaguely yeasty. The sleeves of her sleeping robe were tied up at the elbow so she could knead whatever was in the tub with both bare hands.

"I'm tending the pickle pot," Karin replied brusquely.

"The what?"

Karin shot her an annoyed glance. "I'm certain that the Village Hidden in the Leaves has discovered the magic foodstuff called pickles."

"I am a ninja, Karin. I don't have time to do domestic chores like cooking. If I want pickles, I buy them at the store." Sakura yawned. Why did she have to get out of bed for this?

"Well, doesn't your mother keep one? She's a civilian, right?" Karin asked. Now that Sakura was watching, it seemed she was submerging cut-up fresh vegetables into a sand-like substance. From the way it clung together, it was slightly wet. From the smell, it was imbued with things like garlic, ginger, maybe a little bread, maybe a little beer...

It actually smelled kind of good, which irked Sakura to no end. She crossed her arms.

"I don't know what my mom does to get pickles."

Karin hummed, but didn't say anything right away. Sakura watched her arms and hands move, because there was little else to do in the shadowy kitchen at whatever horrible time of the morning this was.

Karin had semi-circular marks on her arms, and a lot of them. Sakura's eyes narrowed. Those were bite marks.

Of course she knew that biting Karin could refresh someone's chakra. That had been Karin's primary purpose when she'd been in Sasuke's group — to serve as a mobile charging station for him.

And now, Orochimaru's using me the same way, she thought. Her stomach clenched. The last thing she wanted to do was end up like Karin — just a thing, an accessory for powerful men — and let's face it, it was always men — to carry around in case they needed their hit of extra power.

She distracted herself by throwing more sass at Karin, because she was there.

"Why do I have to get out of bed for this?" Sakura complained.

"Because apparently you can't stay away from me," Karin snarked back. She smoothed the top of the sand-like substance, frowned at it critically, and then poured a drizzle of beer on top.

"What?" she asked, looking at Sakura's face. "The rice bran was a little dry."

"You feed pickles with beer?" Sakura demanded.

"Well, I forgot to get rice wine, which is what I would prefer. But beer will do in a pinch."

Sakura yawned again as Karin put the wooden lid back on the tub and returned it to its place, which was apparently a low cabinet, then washed her hands.

Karin glared at her. "I suppose you want to go back to bed."

"No; it's too late for that. I'm up now, and there's no help for it," Sakura huffed.

"Fine. How about breakfast?"

After breakfast, and then lazing around the apartment until a more normal hour of the morning, they made their way to the Yamanaka family's flower shop. The original shop had been destroyed during Pain's attack, but the rebuilt one was even more spacious.

Still, Sakura missed the first one, the one she remembered from her childhood. She remembered going there with her mother when she was very small, before she'd joined the Academy.

Had her mother bought stuff for pickles, too, like Karin had said she probably did? Sakura couldn't remember. Back then, she'd been so obsessed with becoming a shinobi that she hadn't really bothered to notice anything much about her parents, or about the daily routine of life as a civilian. She had been so sure her destiny was as a shinobi.

Ino's mother was coming out from behind the counter and exclaiming over her, making much of her role in ending the war. Sakura did her best to smile and act appreciative. Ino's mother didn't know what she was struggling with. That she might not be a real ninja anymore. That maybe, that fight with Kaguya had been the last one of her life.

Go out on a high note, I guess, Sakura thought, but it was grim, grim humor.

What would life hold for her if she couldn't get her chakra back? If she didn't want to sell things at a shop, like this, maybe she could teach children, like Iruka. But no — she wouldn't even be able to do that. Not with the miserably small amount of chakra she still had. And it would be torture to see the new generation of ninja clan children coming up through the school system, while knowing that she would be forever barred from living her real life — the life she had dreamed, the life she had trained to achieve.

Karin was across the room, looking at a large display of ranunculus. Sakura spent a moment noticing how her auburn hair contrasted with her lilac-colored tunic, and how both were set off by the rich creaminess of the flowers.

She really was pretty.

"Hey Sakura," Ino's voice sounded from behind her. A long, pale arm snaked around her shoulders, pulling her back into a half-hug.

"You should know better than that, Ino!" Sakura teased, punching up and turning into that restraining arm so she could square up and toss Ino off of her.

They grappled in place for a bit, until Sakura, out of breath, had to tap out.

Karin was looking at them both with bemusement.

"So what's up?" Ino asked when they'd both settled down. "Read any good books lately?"

"As if I have time to read!" Sakura replied out of habit, before realizing that in fact, she now had nothing but time to read.

Crap. I'll end up like Kakashi-sensei after all, she thought, momentarily downcast. Wandering around the village without a purpose, my nose buried in a book.

At least she'd be sure to pick something that wasn't so, well, porny.

"I can loan you a book I think you'd like," Ino said. "It's up in my room. Want to come up and help me find it?"

Sakura narrowly bit back a giggle. "Seriously? That line barely worked when we were chūnin."

"But it did work, I recall," Ino said, leaning a hair closer.

"Maybe once." Sakura was feeling a little bit off kilter at the obvious flirtation, but this was just Ino. She and Ino had history, so it was all right. It even felt a bit comforting — like if she just sank back into this, she could forget her current problems.

"More than once, I'm certain." Ino's blue eyes were gazing at her, and Sakura had a flash of sense memory — herself and Ino, pressed against each other, hands roaming tentatively, lips seeking each other out before retreating, confused and horny.

Karin had walked back closer to them both. Now she crossed her arms and glared, clearing her throat loudly. "Sakura? Is this lady bothering you?"

"Huh? Oh, no — that's just Ino," Sakura said, resurfacing out of whatever deep pool of memory she'd fallen into. She swatted Ino's arm. "She's just messing with me. What was that — Mind Body Transmission Technique?"

Ino smirked. "Nope. Just staring into your gorgeous eyes. How is it that you're still single?"

"Who's had time to pair up? We just had a war!" Sakura objected.

"Don't remind me." Ino's face abruptly shuttered and she stepped back.

Crap. I reminded her of her father, Sakura realized. Yamanaka Inoichi had been lost during the conflict, one of the many victims of a Tailed Beast Ball. And the worst thing about that was that Ino had probably felt every second of it through their bond.

Redirect. Redirect. What can I distract her with?

"Ino — you'll have something to say about this, I'm sure. Sense my chakra," Sakura said abruptly, thrusting out her arm.

Ino's eyebrows quirked. "Are you sure you don't want to come up to my room?"

"Just do it," Sakura huffed in exasperation. Karin was still glaring, and it was getting kind of uncomfortable to be in the vicinity of all that concentrated vitriol, even if she wasn't actually doing anything about it.

Ino placed one hand over Sakura's and closed her eyes, before opening them in shock. "What the hell. It's gone!"

"Yeah, I know. Believe me, I'm very aware." Sakura couldn't stop thinking about it — like a sore tooth that you can't stop poking at with your tongue, even though you know it won't do any good. Something about the pain of the hollow space where her chakra used to be felt good. It reminded her of what she used to have.

And what I'll have again, once Tsunade figures out how to reverse that whole snake battery thing, she promised herself.

"You always have an incredible amount of chakra! How can it all be gone, just like that?" Ino demanded. "What did this?"

Sakura sighed and lifted up her hands to tick points off on her fingers as she made them. "The short version is — one, Orochimaru's creepy abandoned lab wasn't as empty as we thought; two, forbidden chakra twinning battery jutsu and now I'm bonded with Karin here; three, they don't know how to fix it yet."

Ino pulled her hand back as though she'd been burned. All traces of her previous flirtatiousness were gone, wiped from her face with military efficiency.

"Tsunade is working on it," Sakura offered, feeling she had somehow misstepped. "I'm sure she'll find a way to fix it soon."

Ino glanced between the two of them, then beamed. Sakura didn't need any sort of mind-sensing jutsu to know that it was a fake, customer-service smile.

"Well, don't be strangers!" she said in a chirpy voice. "Please consider Yamanaka's Flowers for all your floral needs."

All the way back to the apartment, Sakura felt the same itching tug under her skin whenever she got too far from Karin.

"It's shrinking," Karin announced when they were back inside. "Yesterday and overnight, we could be farther apart without distress. Now it's down to about twelve feet."

"Twelve feet. Twelve feet," Sakura muttered, banging around in the kitchen. It was her night to cook, and she resented it greatly. She had insisted on picking up prepackaged food at the konbini on the way home, but apparently it still needed to be put on plates. She resented that greatly, too.

"Would it kill you to be more polite?" Karin asked from the doorway, where she was leaning, crossing her arms.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Sakura said with false brightness, turning to confront her. "I didn't realize that my top priority while being sidelined from my entire life needed to be your feelings. Now that I'm aware, I'll be sure to take that into greater consideration."

Sakura knew she was being rude — maybe even ruder than she meant to be. But it was like she couldn't stop herself. And why should she stop? No one should have to put up with the situation she was in — sidelined from everything she had trained for, cast out of her very identity as a shinobi, stripped of all power, and now indefinitely bonded to an outsider without her consent.

"How do you think I feel, stranded here in enemy territory?" Karin snapped back.

"Leaf isn't your enemy!" Sakura said, louder than she'd planned. Were they yelling? Could the neighbors hear?

"Well Leaf sure isn't my friend!" Karin was breathing harder than usual. "I spent years of my life trying to take down Konoha. Then, after your sensei captured me, Leaf interrogated me and kept me locked up for months! If I hadn't found a way to break out, I'd still be in your stupid village's stupid prison, and Lady Tsunade and Sasuke would both be dead. And I guess that means that Kaguya would have won the war, right? So really you should be on your knees thanking me!"

"Well, thank you, O Most Amazing and Illustrious Uzumaki Karin!" Sakura fired back. "Leaf trembles in gratitude for your fucking service!"

"You damn well should! It's miserable being here! I hate everything about this battery jutsu just as much as you — more than you!" Karin said, causing a brief twinge of something painful that Sakura did not stop to examine. "You've home safe in your village. Surrounded by people. Pension for life, free housing. You're a fucking hero; what more do you want?"

"I'm not a hero," Sakura objected, even as she felt, obscurely that they were fighting about the wrong thing.

"Oh, that's exactly what heroes in Konoha are supposed to say." Karin changed her voice to an offensively sing-song parody of itself. "'I never set out to be a hero, but I'm just so brave and selfless, and it was The Right Thing To Do!' Isn't that the sort of thing you people say? Why don't you pose for a recruitment poster while you're at it?"

"'You people?' What's that supposed to —"

"What am I?" Karin barreled on. "Nothing! My parents are dead. I never had a proper teacher, like you. I didn't have a real team, like you. I don't even have a village — Whirlpool was destroyed decades ago! Destroyed by the other villages, like Leaf! And now that I'm stuck here in Konoha, literally glued to your side, you expect me to be your best fucking friend?"

"You're certainly not that." Sakura was vibrating with suppressed tension. She really, really wanted to hit something. Preferably the person right in front of her.

"Oh I'm aware. It's quite obvious that position's been taken by Ino. I do have to wonder what other positions she's taken?" Karin asked, syrupy sweet.

Sakura felt a blind sense of towering rage. "You don't get to mention her," she hissed, moving closer. She was absolutely enraged to realize that every step she took eased the painful, annoying itch under her skin.

She had a flash of gratitude that her chakra was gone. If she still had it, she would have been hard-pressed not to use it to smash the whole apartment building apart like a pile of sticks.

"I don't get to mention your girlfriend?" Karin asked in mock confusion.

"Ino. Is not. My girlfriend," Sakura said, taking several more steps across the room until she was right in front of Karin.

This close, Sakura could see her eyes through her glasses. They were medium-reddish-auburn, matching her hair almost exactly, and right now they were wide and flicking rapidly over Sakura, assessing her as a threat.

"You could have fooled me," Karin said, staring at her, body tense, fists clenched.

Sakura sighed. She hated to admit it, but she felt noticeably better now that she was standing right in front of Karin. It was like finally freeing yourself from something that had been binding you into place. Feeling the blood flow return; feeling your nerves waking back up.

Karin's skin was really pretty, Sakura noticed. She kind of wanted to bite it. But of course, that was nonsense, because Sakura wasn't injured, and didn't need to be healed. And Karin couldn't heal anyone right now anyway.

It was dangerous to stand this close to her, Sakura was just realizing. The jutsu wanted them closer together. And whatever the jutsu wanted was bad.

"We need to stay apart as long as possible," Sakura said, turning and crossing back to the far side of the room. She ignored the resurgence of that aching pain. She would just have to get through it, one way or the other. "This stupid battery jutsu is pulling us closer together, notch by notch. I'm worried that if we give in to it, we won't be able to go back."

Karin crossed her arms. "Fine. The very last thing I want is to be around you."

"Oh, for once I completely agree with you."

"Fine."

"Fine."

Sakura wanted to slam out of the room, down the hallway to her own impersonal bedroom, so she could be alone. She wanted to smash something. Or cry. Or train until she couldn't walk straight. Or do literally anything else except stand here, staring at Karin.

But she couldn't let one thing Karin had said pass by uncontested.

"Something you said just now was wrong," Sakura said, taking a deep, cleansing breath.

"Oh, do go ahead and tell me exactly how I'm wrong, Hero of the Fourth Shinobi War," Karin said.

"You're wrong about being nothing," Sakura said. "You're not nothing. You're definitely something."

"High praise," Karin said, but her voice sounded a tone less certain than before. She shoved her glasses higher on her face, and Sakura suddenly wanted to take them off her and see what her eyes looked like without them.

Without another word, Sakura grabbed her plate of food and slammed her way down the hall to eat in her room.

The fact that she ended up sitting on the floor, pressed against the wall closest to the kitchen, to ease the awful aching pain under her breastbone, was just shit icing on the shitty cake that Sakura's life had become.

Chapter Text

It was two days later, and they had to spend all their time in the same room, now. They didn't talk about it.

They dragged a mattress into Karin's room, and Sakura slept on it, because being in her own room by herself was too painful. Neither of them could sleep if they were too far apart.

So instead, Sakura got to lie awake in the dark, painfully aware that there was someone else in the room with her, and that it was Karin, who had been their enemy for years. Karin, who was from an ancient, prestigious bloodline — the Uzumaki — and therefore some sort of cousin to Naruto. Karin, who had tricked her way out of Konoha's jail, who had shattered parts of Obito's giant wooden statue during the final battle of the war. She was actually much more formidable than one might think from the mild-mannered act she often put on.

Karin had insisted on going to the library and checking out every book about Whirlpool and its destruction. Why, Sakura didn't know, and she wasn't about to ask. Maybe so Karin could nurse the grudge she seemed to have against Konoha.

Too bad she was tied to Sakura with something even stronger than her adamantine chakra chains. Not that she had those anymore. 

Yesterday, it was twelve feet, Sakura thought one morning, attempting to read a book on chakra pathways, and failing. Her eyes kept passing over the same text without her mind absorbing a single word of it.

Today, it's ten.

How much longer do we have to fix this? Before it clamps us together permanently?

A knock came at the door of the apartment, and Sakura immediately tried to send out her senses to sense who it was, only to inevitably fail. Her chakra was a tiny, sullen trickle, good for nothing.

"I'll go see who it is," she said, getting up with a suppressed sigh. There really was no end to the indignities of regular civilian life. 

The person at the door turned out to be Jūgo, Karin's former teammate from Taka. His large, tall frame blocked most of the light from behind him, and Sakura immediately felt defensive. Jūgo was known for his blind, bestial rages, and right now she would be barely able to defend herself from a kitten.

"It's for you," she called back over her shoulder.

Karin appeared and her face split into a relieved smile. "Jūgo! It's good to see you! Please, won't you come in?"

Jūgo's large face was smiling back at her, tilted down, since he was so much taller. Sakura found herself resenting his tallness. That, and his muscles, and the way he was smiling at Karin, all set her teeth on edge.

"Do you mind if I...?" Sakura said, making a vague gesture.

Karin was busy ushering in her guest and digging around in that pickle pot of hers, and barely spared a glance at Sakura. Which was fine. Sakura would be just fine in her own room, down the hall.

She made it about halfway down the hall before the annoying itch under her skin turned into an unbearable tug, which was verging on outright pain. It seemed to be pulling her back down the hall.

Gods forbid that Orochimaru would let the two halves of his battery get too far from each other, Sakura thought bitterly. That might inconvenience him for half a minute.

Sakura was jaded enough to realize that if there was one thing a powerful man in the shinobi world would not stand for, it was being inconvenienced.

She wanted to ignore the pain and just grit her way through it, alone in her room. But she was irked to realize that Karin was feeling the same thing. If Sakura insisted on staying apart, it would ruin her visit from what seemed like maybe the only friend she had in the world.

Fine, Sakura thought, reluctantly turning around. Guess I get to just sit there like a third wheel while they visit.

She leaned on the wall across the hall from the kitchen door, just at the outside edge of Karin's range. Through the door, she could see Karin busy plating up some snacks and making tea, looking disturbingly domestic.

"How are they treating you?" Jūgo muttered to Karin, who was standing near her. He bent his head and lowered his voice, obviously trying to be discreet. 

Karin leaned up and closer to Jūgo to answer, and Sakura did not like it, not one bit. Didn't she know that Jūgo was dangerous and right now, neither one of them would be able to fight him off? He had far too many muscles, most of them on display.

Men, Sakura thought, narrowing her eyes. Always posturing.

"Could be worse," Karin murmured to Jūgo, just on the edge of Sakura's ability to hear. Then she added something so low Sakura couldn't hear it. It might have included the name 'Orochimaru,' which would make sense, from context. Both Karin and Jūgo had been his experiments.

Sakura found herself wondering how close the two of them were, exactly. What had Karin said the first evening — that Jūgo had always been easy to please? Did she mean, with food? Or had she been referring to something else?

Now they two of them were heading to the living room, Karin with a tray that contained a teapot, three cups, and a few plates of snack foods.

Sakura pasted a smile on her face and settled in to observe, since she could hardly pretend to ignore them.

"How have you been spending your time recently, Jūgo?" Sakura asked, willing him to say something like 'planning to move far, far away from Konoha and never visit, thanks for asking.'

Jūgo smiled, which transformed his face from a somewhat stolid and unremarkable kind of handsome into a much more engaging kind of handsome. Sakura didn't trust it. He was an unknown quantity, as far as Sakura was concerned.

She accepted a cup of tea from Karin and blew across the top to cool it down, since her chakra wouldn't be enough to do the job.

The conditions she was reduced to.

"I've been settling in here just fine," Jūgo said, dashing Sakura's hopes. "The people of Konoha tend to be very bright and lively. Your new Hokage welcomed me himself. Said there was always room here in Leaf for people who are eager to better themselves and the world around them."

That does sound like something Naruto would say, Sakura thought with a burst of fondness for her former teammate. Fighting at his side one more time against Kaguya had been an honor — Team 7, back together, saving the entire world this time. They'd come a long way from their first days as genin. 

Maybe, if that fight really had been her last, it wouldn't be so bad. Maybe she could at least go out on top.

"Are they sending you on missions?" Karin asked Jūgo, and Sakura's attention snapped back to the conversation.

"No, not yet," he answered, taking something off a plate and popping it into his mouth. "Mmm! This is good — what is this?"

"Pickled bamboo shoot," Karin replied. "It's fresh right now, since it's still early spring. I'm eating well, at least. Better than when we were stuck underground that one time."

Jūgo gave a crack of laughter. "Ha! Remember how Suigetsu wouldn't stop whining?"

"It haunts my dreams," Karin said gravely, and Sakura found herself examining her face to see if she was joking. Why had the members of Taka been stuck underground at some point? She found that she simultaneously wanted to know and also did not want to know, in case it was the result of something that could be blamed on Konoha.

"Remember that time you found those old tins of beef?" Karin asked Jūgo between sips of tea. "They were so dusty! I think they'd been stashed there since the First Shinobi War."

"How could I forget?" Jūgo made a strange face. "I still can't believe we actually ate them."

"We were hungry. We ate them and liked them," Karin corrected, rotating the plate. "Here. Try one of these. It's a baby daikon. Sakura, try some too."

“Oh — no, no thanks,” Sakura said. Was there a polite way to say ‘I don’t really want to try something you fermented in a barrel under the sink’? Sakura tended to prefer prepackaged foods. At least you knew what was in them, because it was printed right there on the label. 

Karin and Jūgo chatted and made their way through Karin's snacks, and the pot of tea, while Sakura alternated between staring out the window and wondering exactly how thick Jūgo’s neck was, and if she could wrap both hands around it if she really tried. 

"How does it feel to have another Uzumaki in the same village?" Jūgo asked Karin after all the snacks were gone.

Karin shrugged. "I don't really remember anything relating to my Uzumaki heritage."

"But you could find out," Jūgo suggested.

"I borrowed a few books, but they're not telling me anything I didn't already know." Karin made a face. "I remember my mother, of course, but she fled Whirlpool for Grass. She never talked about where she came from, or why she decided we had to leave."

Sakura surprised herself by interjecting, "It's a good thing she did. If she'd stayed in Whirlpool..." Her voice petered out.

She bit back a wince. It was probably bad form to remind someone about the wholesale death and destruction of her ancestral village. 

Both Karin and Jūgo were looking at her in mild surprise. 

“If my mother had kept us in Whirlpool back then, I’d be dead,” Karin agreed. “As it was, I ended up with Orochimaru. Doing things you probably don’t want to know anything about.”

Jūgo inclined his head towards her. “You made my time in Taka bearable,” he said in his grave, measured way. 

Sakura did not like that at all. She needed to do something — anything — to cause a distraction. 

She took the last pickle on the plate between her fingers and then popping it into her mouth. 

It was crunchy and salty, fragrant in ways Sakura couldn't immediately describe, but that reminded her of her favorite savory tastes and smells — garlic, ginger, and something tangy and alive feeling in her mouth.

"This is actually really good," she said in some surprise.

Jūgo gave out a crack of laughter. "Ha! I should say so! Karin works miracles in the kitchen. One time, we were cornered for five days and had nothing to eat but crackers. Yet somehow she made those crackers into a feast fit for a daimyo!"

"That's not how I remember things at all," Karin said, pushing her glasses higher on her nose. She seemed discomfited, and Sakura wondered why.

Did Karin have a problem with being praised?

"That doesn't surprise me," Sakura said, watching Karin carefully. "I've only been living with her for a few days, but she's made magic in the kitchen every time it's her turn to cook. She's really very skilled."

Karin's face flooded with a bright pink blush, like a vivid sunset over a dark forest.

"I'll just take this to wash. And make more tea," she muttered, standing up and gathering the tray.

Sakura watched her leave. She was stalking out of the room, her posture slightly hunched forward.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Karin was more than ten feet away, and the distance was starting to cause the familiar pain inside Sakura's chest, forcing her up and after.

"I'll just — go help," Sakura said to their guest, leaving him alone in the living room.

Karin was adding some peanuts to a bowl and glaring at the teapot, willing it to boil.

"I wasn't lying," Sakura said from the doorway, arms crossed. "Your food is delicious."

"Well, it's better than yours," Karin sniped. "I hear the konbini down the street is renaming their SPAM musubi to the 'Sakura Special.'"

"That's pretty funny," Sakura said, seeing the water was about to boil. "Here, let me get that."

"No, it's fine, I'll get it," Karin objected, reaching for the teapot at the same time.

Their hands brushed, and the next thing Sakura knew, she was across the kitchen, panting, staring at Karin. Her whole arm was on fire. It felt like being stabbed with thousands of tiny knives made out of ice, and heat, and pleasure.

Can I have an orgasm in my arm? Sakura thought distantly, trying to quiet her heart. Is that what just happened?

Karin was bent over, clinging to the edge of the counter. She was breathing heavily, too. After a long moment, she straightened back up. Her face was red, and her eyes slid away from Sakura's.

"I'll just," she said, and then poured the water for more tea before escaping back into the living room.

Sakura couldn't help following after her, feeling like iron filings drawn after a magnet.

Well, touching doesn't make us explode, she pondered, watching Karin pour more tea. So that's probably good.

Wasn't it? Ugh, Sakura just wanted to know what was going on. Why were they being kept in the dark?

They were partway through the boiled peanuts and the second pot of tea when a summons came from Lady Tsunade, requesting that the two of them report to Hokage Tower immediately.

Jūgo said his goodbyes, a development of which Sakura heartily approved.

Is this it? Sakura thought, striding towards Hokage Tower. Her heart was pounding with anticipation. Have they figured out how to reverse the jutsu? Is this where they free me?

Free us, she corrected herself with a glance in Karin's direction. Now that she thought more deeply about it, Karin must have been resenting being trapped even more than Sakura had. She was in a foreign nation, with maybe only one actual friend left. And Sakura hadn't been too friendly to her.

She didn't like this guilty feeling.

They were ushered to a medical examination room, where two medical-nins proceeded to weigh and measure them, poke and prod them, and take more blood samples. They even ushered each of them separately to a bathroom so they could pee into cups.

I wonder if they'll need any of my spinal fluid next, Sakura thought in mild curiosity, before deciding that she shouldn't even think that, in case thinking caused it to come true.

"Does Lady Tsunade want to see us in person?" Sakura asked hopefully as the last medical technician cleaned up his supplies.

"Not today," he replied. "But rest assured, she's doing everything possible to figure out how to break your curse."

"Great," Karin said from her spot on the opposite table. She was holding her arm in the air to help her small puncture wound heal before bandaging.

"It's not a curse," Sakura said, before wondering why she'd quibbled over a minor word choice.

Karin glanced at her. From across the room and through her glasses, her reddish eyes were unreadable. "It might as well be," she said.

Sakura couldn't really argue with that. Something Karin had said in their fight the other day had stuck with her.

"Do you really feel like you're in enemy territory?" Sakura asked, once the med techs had cleared the room.

Karin was standing up and getting her things together to head back out. "Am I not?"

"No!" Sakura said, hopping off her own table and frowning. "I know Sasuke was trying to destroy Konoha for awhile, and I know you were part of that. But that's all in the past now. Naruto and Sasuke seem to have — made up." She made a vague, all-encompassing gesture.

"Great for them," Karin said flatly.

"They have!"

"And I said that was great for them." Karin huffed out a breath of exasperation. "Sasuke can give him a hand in running the village, or whatever."

"Weeeeell, so, about that." Sakura started, managing not to laugh until the very end, when it surprised her by bubbling up and out of her like a mountain stream. "He. Uh. Might not be able to do that."

Karin froze for a second, and then her face shifted, and then suddenly, she was laughing too, screwing her eyes closed in laughter so intense and frantic that it almost seemed like crying.

"Because," she gasped. "Because — his hand. Oh gods."

That set Sakura off even more. She laughed and laughed. She laughed until her ribs hurt. Every time she thought she was done laughing and started winding down, taking in big, gasping breaths, she would catch Karin's eye, and Karin would look at her, and one of them would mouth the words 'give him a hand,' and that was so fucking funny, it was so utterly hilarious that Naruto and Sasuke had blown each other's hands off at the end of the war, that Sakura couldn't help bursting into laughter all over again.

She ended up wheezing, doubled over, clinging to the edge of the table, before finally, her laughter died down into hiccups.

Karin was mopping at her face with a tissue. Amazingly, her skin didn't get all blotchy when she laughed herself sick, unlike Sakura's.

"Oh, fuck. I needed that," Sakura said. She felt as though she'd just cried for an hour. All cleaned out on the inside, like a spring storm had just blown through the inside of her skull and her chest, and swept out all the cobwebs, leaving her sparkling and newborn.

"Yeah," Karin said, her voice surprisingly strong, although still a little wet-sounding. She cleared her throat. "I did, too."

"We could go shopping," Sakura suggested.

"What do we need?"

"Karin! I'm surprised at you. Shopping isn't always about what you need. It can also be about what you want."

"Fine. I'm bored here anyway," Karin said. "There's nothing to do."

I mean, that's not technically true, Sakura thought, getting her sandals on to venture outside. I could keep on saying things Karin to see if I can make her blush again.

It was a surprisingly fun hobby, and one that Sakura found she was pretty good at.

She had to wear a light jacket over her uniform, because the spring winds were chilly, and she didn't have chakra to buffer her against the cold.

"Don't you need a coat?" Sakura asked, seeing that Karin was still just wearing her regular lilac-colored tunic, with nothing over it.

"No, I'm fine. I'm used to the cold," Karin said, crossing her arms obstinately.

Sakura shrugged, although part of her wondered whether Karin getting cold or sick would affect her through the Chakra Twinning Jutsu. Maybe they'd both get sick? Or maybe Sakura's greater sense and hardiness would prevent Karin from getting sick in the first place.

That would be fine, Sakura decided, leading them to one of her favorite shops. It was a consignment store filled with the most unusual, random, unpredictable things. One time, Sakura had bought a stuffed weasel there. Another time, she had seen a book of advanced jutsu techniques at a price she could never afford. When she came back the next month with her paycheck, it was gone. The shop keeper had told her the Hokage himself had to make sure such dangerous techniques didn't fall into the wrong hands.

Sakura had kicked herself for years over not having enough money to buy that book when she'd had the chance.

I wouldn't be able to use that book now, even if I had it, she thought, poking through the shelves of disparate objects all jumbled together. One side effect of the war was that the shop was flooded with objects that had belonged to the fallen. Right now, it was overflowing with things.

Tucked into the back of a shelf was a village headband. Only, instead of being Leaf, or the recent headbands of the Combined Shinobi Army, it was an older headband, from Whirlpool.

"No way," Sakura breathed, tugging it out and taking a better look at it.

The headband wasn't a replica; Sakura could tell that right away. It was the real thing. And sure, maybe they weren't that rare. Maybe it wasn't a big deal. But after the conversation this morning with Jūgo, Sakura wondered if Karin might like something from Whirlpool, even all these years later. Even if she couldn't remember the village of her birth.

She glanced up. Karin was about ten feet away, examining something high up on another shelf.

Sakura tucked the headband underneath something else she was planning to buy, and went to settle up. She secreted her find at the bottom of her shopping bag, pleased that Karin apparently hadn't noticed her subterfuge.

Sakura had been pretty mean and rude this whole time, she was realizing. None of this had been Karin's fault. She was even more stuck than Sakura was. And even more alone.

Sakura should try to be nicer.

After all, we might be stuck together for awhile yet, she thought, watching Karin make her own purchases. For the first time, that honestly didn't seem so bad.

Her arms were slender under her lilac-colored outfit. Sakura remembered seeing more of her pale forearms in the kitchen in the middle of the night. They had been covered with bite marks, she remembered, and suddenly, the unfairness of it flooded through her. Karin had to experience pain in order to heal other people, and that was all well and good — that was the shinobi world — but who was in charge of healing Karin?

If only I had my chakra back, Sakura thought, insisting that they stop for dango before they headed home. I'd be able to try to heal her scars, even though they're scars from using a bloodline technique. I'm sure Lady Tsunade could give me some advice on how it could be done.

Karin was surprised at her first taste of dango, making a little face of wonderment before immediately devouring that stick and tearing into a second.

Sakura was delighted. "Do you like them?"

Karin looked at them suspiciously. "They are unusual. I didn't expect them to be so sweet."

"That's just like you," Sakura said, seeing if she could set up another conversational ambush that could make that blush happen again.

"Just like me to not know anything about your village?" Karin asked, somewhat belligerently. "I'm sure that's exactly what you expect. I'm still a stranger here, remember?"

"No," Sakura said, calculating her words, leaning forward. "They're like you. Sweet, unexpectedly."

Karin's face turned even brighter red than before, and she blinked her eyes very fast.

Sakura leaned back with a grin. "We should finish up and get home," she said. Watching Karin blush and glitch out was better than any other entertainment she had at the moment. It definitely beat those horrible Icha Icha books Kakashi was always pretending to read.

On the way back, a storm broke over their heads, pelting them with icy-cold rain. Sakura squealed and ran, making sure that Karin was running, too. Their feet splashed through frigid puddles, drenching them, and their breath steamed in the cold air.

As long as she was running, Sakura didn't feel cold, but as soon as they stopped inside the door, it caught up with her. The jacket she'd been wearing had shielded her from most of it, but her legs and feet were soaked through and her face was tingling.

Karin was completely soaked. Her wet-black hair slicked to her skull, her glasses covered in droplets and fog from her panting breath, her clothes stuck to her body.

"Oh, shit, you're all wet," Sakura observed inanely. "Come on. Gotta get you into a hot shower."

"I'm fine," Karin said.

"Get into the bathroom now," Sakura said threateningly. "Or there will be consequences."

"Like what?"

"I'll make you eat Sakura Special for dinner," Sakura said with a grin. "Come on. Into the shower with you. I don't want you getting sick — maybe that could get me sick, too. Who knows how this jutsu works! No one, apparently!"

Karin allowed herself to be forced down the hall and into the bathroom, which was quite a feat, considering that Sakura couldn't actually touch her without risking another one of those explosive incidents.

What happens when you just let the anode and the cathode interact with each other for a long time? Sakura wondered, lingering outside the bathroom door. Do they both deplete each other and die? Do they explode?

When they touched before, they hadn't exploded, and it hadn't felt bad. It had felt shocking, and powerful. Intense. But not bad.

It had actually felt... really good.

She kind of wanted to do it again.

Okay, she more than kind of wanted to. She definitely wanted to.

Of course, if it was dangerous for them, then she shouldn't put herself into temptation's path. She should stay a respectable ten feet away and wait for Karin to be done with her shower.

It was taking a long time, though.

"Are you okay in there?" she called through the door.

There was no immediate answer. Sakura listened to the sound of the water to see if she could discern any changes that indicated Karin was showering, but didn't detect any.

"Do you need help?" Sakura tried again.

Still no answer, which felt strange. What if Karin had slipped and fallen over and hit her head? Without her chakra, she might actually die in some dumb way. Civilians died all the time, like guinea pigs, fainting to death at the shock of seeing a cat.

Not that Karin was a guinea pig. She was more like a cat herself. Slinky and suspicious, quick to find the best angle, and with claws of her own.

"Hey, Karin," Sakura called again, pitching her voice to be louder. "I asked, Are you okay in there?"

That's it — I need to go in and check on her, Sakura decided when there was still no answer.

The room was filled with steam. The shower was pelting down hot water.

Sakura crossed to the shower and peered around the curtain.

Karin was standing in the hot water, crying silently, her back to Sakura.

Her whole back was covered with scars, and they were not all bite marks, although a distressingly large number were. Sakura could see the outlines of many different people's jaws, carved into her skin — some wide, some deep, some shallow or glancing.

But there were other scars, too, that Sakura could see as Karin shifted in place. Some of them looked like battles scars, but others looked clean and almost surgical. Or maybe they were surgical. Orochimaru had used her as an experiment, right? What exactly did that mean? What had he done to her?

Sakura breathed in a shocked gasp, and Karin suddenly realized she was there, turning and flailing in the water, grabbing at the wall and the faucet behind her to stay on her feet.

"I'm sorry," Sakura started, but then stopped, because the look on Karin's face was one she'd never seen before.

Without her glasses, her reddish-auburn eyes seemed huge. They were staring at Sakura with a mix of desperation, anguish — and, was Sakura fooling herself?

Was that desire?

"I just wanted to see if you're all right," Sakura continued, knowing that she sounded inane. Now that she could see the front of Karin's torso, she saw more bite marks — even bites on her pretty little breasts.

Those fucking monsters. No one should be biting Karin there, Sakura thought.

No one but me.

Despite the room being flooded with steam and the sound of hot water pounding down, turning Karin's hair into an oil slick down her back, Sakura's mouth was dry.

"Do you want," she started.

Karin was trembling, and Sakura was upset with herself, upset with herself for not noticing, for being cruel before.

Sakura reached out her hand, watching it get wet in the spray of the shower.

"Do you want," she repeated, raising her eyes to meet Karin's. "Because if you don't, I'll go."

Karin's mouth opened and closed. She has pretty lips, Sakura noticed. Time seemed to be slowing down around them, stretching long and soft, like amber slowly hardening into shape.

"Yes," Karin said, staring into Sakura's eyes so hard she thought she might be the one about to faint. "I want."

Karin reached out and took her hand, on purpose, for the first time, and pulled her in.

It was like a series of controlled explosions. With more of their bodies touching at once, no one point was so explosively painful as before, when their fingers had just brushed. This was more like two planets smashing into each other — huge, unstoppable, all-encompassing.

Their mouths met each other, seeking, probing, devouring. Karin tasted like dango and hot water from the shower, and she was kissing desperately, as though Sakura was going to change her mind and pull back.

As though Sakura could change her mind. As though that was possible, with that same feeling back in every cell of her body — that feeling of being stabbed, or kicked, or knocked through a wall, but it didn't hurt, wasn't something this strong supposed to hurt?

Sakura knew pain. And from the scars that littered her pale, lithe body, Karin knew pain, too.

What they didn't know was pleasure that felt like pain, pain so strong that all they could do was keep on pushing into it, keep on kissing and touching and pulling each other.

Karin got her pinned against the shower wall, sucking at her neck, fumbling at her soaked clothes, trying to get a hand in between her thighs.

"No," Sakura said, reaching around behind her to get two handfuls of that glorious pale ass, and kneading. The shocks of pleasure, of rightness, went directly to her brain. It felt like overloading on something.

"Please," Karin said, almost begged, trying again.

"No — let me," Sakura breathed into her ear before biting it. She snaked her hand in between Karin's thighs and let her fingers explore. The water made everything tacky and difficult, but if Sakura reached back a little bit farther —

Oh, good, she's spreading her legs, Sakura thought, and then that same thought circled around and collided with everything she thought she knew. Uzumaki Karin was here, spreading her legs, on purpose, for her. For someone with no clan, no heritage; someone who had grown up always being sidelined from the rest of the shinobi world.

Her fingers weren't idle. They were probing back, finding Karin's entrance, dipping up and in, finding her even hotter and wetter inside than the shower.

Karin moaned — a real, honest moan — and it was intoxicating, like what Sakura imagined being drunk would be like. It made her blood fizz in her veins.

She alternated between kissing Karin's mouth and kissing her neck, interspersing them with bites — light ones. She would never add a scar to Karin's collection of abuse.

She kept her hand pressing forward, providing firm pressure into the front of Karin's mound, while she stroked her wet fingertips along the sides of Karin's clit, the way some women liked. Sakura was one of those women, and it sure seemed like Karin was another. She was bucking her hips forward, seeking more contact, clutching at Sakura's back and pulling her closer, gasping into her mouth.

"I'm, I'm gonna," she slurred, her red eyes falling closed.

Sakura stared at her — loose and undone, slick and ready. She was about to come; Sakura could feel it. It was starting low and spiraling up, pulling everything into itself, forcing itself up and out like a waterspout sucking up the top layer of ocean before exploding it back out and down.

"Yeah, do it," Sakura breathed into her ear. "Wanna make you come."

Karin wailed; a high-pitched, thin, staggering cry, like a kestrel calling to its mate. Her hips surged against Sakura's hand, and she clenched the fronts of her thighs so hard Sakura was briefly worried about her fingers.

"That's it," Sakura said, kissing up her neck to the side of her face. She had such a pretty face. How had Sakura never noticed it during all those years when Karin had been an enemy of Leaf? She should have noticed earlier that she needed to be rescued, not fought.

Karin was breathing wetly, but she didn't seem to be crying anymore.

Every place Sakura was touching her felt deeply right and happy, like all was well with the world and always would be, forever.

Why had Sakura insisted they stay apart, before? That had been dumb. Past-Sakura had been dumb. They should never be apart again.

"We should sleep together," Sakura said.

Karin reached behind her and turned off the water. "Do you mean — sleep? Or sleep?"

Sakura smiled, shaking a bit of water off her face and blinking so she could see Karin's beautiful, grave eyes looking back.

"Well, yeah, I suppose there might be some sleeping involved," she said, feigning thoughtfulness. As though she would need to think about this!

Karin leaned forward to bump their foreheads. "I'll allow you in my bed."

"Yeah!" Sakura cried in triumph, momentarily channeling her inner Naruto. Both of her hands were still busy lazily stroking Karin's hips, so she couldn't pump her fist in the air, but she thought about it.

"On one condition." Karin grabbed a towel and dried herself off in a businesslike fashion. Sakura's eyes were caught on all the new territory she was revealing — the tender skin over her sternum, the tiny ripples over her ribs, the unutterable secret flesh of her inner thighs.

"Name it," Sakura said, staring openly. She really was so very pretty.

Karin huffed. "Shouldn't you hear what it is before you blindly agree?"

"Nope," Sakura said with a smile, leaning back in to nuzzle along Karin's collarbones. There were even bite marks here — those fuckers, Sakura thought. How dare other people use Karin that way.

"I'll allow you in my bed, as long as we don't just sleep," Karin said, tilting Sakura's chin up with one hand. "I've had far too much of lying awake listening to you breathe the last few nights."

Sakura stared. Blooming across Karin's face was not only the loveliest little blush, but also — a smile. A real, honest, smile.

She surged forward, kissing the smile until she would remember its shape with her lips.

"Come on," Karin said, slinging a towel around her hips and handing another to Sakura. "Don't make me wait."

"I won't," Sakura promised, fumbling at her wet clothes.

She couldn't get to the bedroom fast enough. 

Chapter Text

The bed wasn't very large, but that didn't matter. Pressed together on their sides this close, the two of them didn't take up a lot of space.

Now that she'd started kissing Karin, she didn't know if she was going to be able to stop. It wasn't like other kissing Sakura had done before — maybe because of the jutsu. Probably because of the jutsu. The more she kissed Karin, the lighter and airier she felt, as though she was dissolving or learning to fly.

She's so pretty, Sakura kept thinking, letting her hands roam over every part she could reach. How had she never noticed that before?

Karin broke away and held Sakura's head in place when she tried to follow.

"No. You're going to lie still now," Karin said. Her red eyes were black in the dim light of their shared room, and she was looking at Sakura as though she was prey.

Sakura dug her heels and shoulder blades into the mattress as Karin moved down her, touching with her hands and mouth and teeth, and then parted her thighs.

"Oh fuck," Sakura moaned when Karin's fingers and tongue started her down the path to an inevitable end. "Oh fuck." She twisted her hips, not sure if she was trying to get away or draw Karin's fingers inside farther.

How many was that? At least two, Sakura thought, and she was curving them inside and rubbing up and in. But the more intense feeling was the hot-wet-alive feel of Karin's mouth, tonguing her right there, right there —

Maybe she was just pent up from going a long time without, or maybe the jutsu was helping them learn how the other liked to be touched. Because Karin had come very quickly in the shower, and Sakura was coming very quickly right now — almost embarrassingly quickly, as though she was an untouched teenager.

~ She's beautiful when she comes, ~ the thought flashed through Sakura's mind. And closing her eyes, she saw herself as Karin must be seeing her, right now — pink hair dimmed by the shade of the room, bright eyes screwed shut in rapture, strong arms knotted with the intensity of her pleasure.

Karin? Sakura thought.

A feeling of surprise, then a strange combination of pleasure and resignation.

Sakura was still trembling. She reached down clumsily and managed to pet the side of Karin's head, still wet from the shower.

Can we read each other's minds now? Sakura asked, managing to open her eyes. It was a great feat. At the same time that pleasure was still singing through her whole body, she was also swamped with a great hunger for more.

~ Don't worry. We're barely getting started, ~ Karin's thought appeared all at once, like a jewel that someone had plopped down into Sakura's hand.

"I'm not worried," Sakura said out loud. "I don't have anywhere to be except right here."

Karin was still touching her, dragging her palms up and down Sakura's ribs, her hips, down to her thighs, then around to the back.

~ I've always loved your ass, ~ Karin's thought appeared. It was so strange how the entire thought just materialized in Sakura's mind as a singular object.

Really? Sakura thought back.

~ Well. Not always. But recently. Yes. ~

A flash of someone else's sense memory appeared in Sakura's mind — herself as Karin saw her, walking ahead of her, hips flared out from her trim, muscular waist. She'd been turning her head to point something out, and Karin, behind her, had barely managed to drag her eyes up to not be caught out as a pervert in public. They were on their way somewhere — now, where was that? The memory supplied some clues — they were carrying their shopping bags, it was afternoon, Karin had felt hungry —

"Were you checking out my ass while we were walking to get dango?" Sakura blurted out, delighted. She'd had no idea.

~ Apparently we can read each other's minds now, ~ Karin's thought appeared. ~ So you know I was. ~

The thought had a strange flavor to it — still tinged with the same resignation from before, but also a type of suppressed excitement. Sakura tried to poke into that to understand it better, only to be distracted when Karin's hands found her rear and began kneading at her two butt cheeks like a cat on its favorite blanket.

"Mmmmm," Sakura said, wriggling to get more contact. "Kiss me again."

She felt that she should probably be more worried about suddenly acquiring telepathic powers. Ino might have something to say about this, when Sakura told her. Maybe there were jutsu that could control it. Maybe —

A fierce wave of dislike came through the bond, making Sakura's thoughts stutter.

She cast out her mind with an inquiry, and got back a flood of images — Ino bending towards Sakura, her eyes alight with interest; Ino blatantly checking Sakura out at a moment she'd been turned away to look at some flowers; Ino sending a look of complete dismissal at Karin.

And it wasn't just the images — it was the feelings that had come along with them.

She felt the bone-deep weariness of someone who didn't have a home, and who was realizing that she would never have one here, either. Not as long as people in Konoha looked at her the way Yamanaka Ino was doing — as though Karin was a threat.

"Ino isn't like that," Sakura objected, struggling to prop herself up on one elbow.

~ Could have fooled me. ~

You can make a home here, if you want, Sakura thought, surprised at how fervent she felt about it. I'll make sure no one bothers you. If they do, they'll have to answer to me. And Naruto, too!

A flood of amusement came back through the bond. Karin arranged herself next to Sakura, reaching to cup one breast and start playing with it.

Two can play at that game, Sakura thought with a grin, recapturing Karin's mouth and exploring one of her sweet little breasts at the same time.

Karin's skin felt textured under her fingertips, like paper that has been balled up and then smoothed out again. It was warm, and alive. Every tiny divot or groove was evidence of Karin's pain; of how someone had used her.

~ Of my power ~, Karin corrected. ~ Of how I chose to use it. Do you think I was just a victim of Orochimaru? No. For a long time, I was one of his lieutenants. ~

More sense memories flashed through Sakura's mind. Karin, in some dank underground hideout, terrified yet resolute, determined to do what she must to earn her place at Orochimaru's side. Karin, one of Orochimaru's inner circle, finally feeling that she had a place in the world. Karin, walking through one of his facilities with a clipboard, checking on the —

On the —

Sakura wrenched herself back, staring at Karin. "What the fuck was that."

Karin pulled away, pressing herself back into the wall. Her breaths were high and tight. She stared back at Sakura.

The thoughts were swirling too fast for Sakura to make out now — like a tornado carrying too many things. If Sakura reached out, she would only get hit with something.

Still, she had to try. She reached out one hand, and her thoughts, at the same time, willing one or the other to make contact, so she could try to understand more of what she had seen, of what Karin had done.

Jars. So many jars, large ones and small ones, and in every one, something was alive, something was growing. Floating. Many things were being nurtured, and Karin was checking on them, frowning down at her clipboard through her glasses, marking off which ones had been fed and when, so that Orochimaru could —

~ I told you that you didn't want to know anything about my time with him, ~ Karin's thought appeared. It was bundled up in a tight ball that felt spiky in Sakura's mind.

I thought he experimented on you. I didn't know you helped him experiment on others, Sakura thought.

~ Then you're naive. In this shinobi world, it's always both, ~ Karin's thought came.

It doesn't have to be, Sakura thought stubbornly. Her hand had landed on Karin's shoulder, and she was making little rubbing motions up and down, hoping it felt comforting.

~ You're worse than naive. You're deluded, ~ Karin thought. ~ Every shinobi is a predator. We train our children to kill. Even civilians are predators in their own way. The baker is God of Death to the colonies of yeast that she immolates every day. The farmer is no less guilty than Orochimaru. Ino's flower store would be a shop of horrors in the plant world. ~

"Do you really think picking radishes from the garden is the same as culling a human population?" Sakura asked, curious and horrified at the same time.

Karin was already pressed back against the wall. Sakura got the distinct impression that if she could have phased backwards right through it, she would have.

"Do you not?" Karin asked, with her mouth this time. Her voice sounded a bit rusty. "Be realistic, Sakura. You're a big girl. You know how the world works."

Sakura closed her eyes and concentrated on twining her mind through Karin's, teasing apart her thoughts, untangling them from the angry tornado.

Buried in the middle of the tornado was a nest of memories packed tightly together, like tiny silver fish in a can. Sakura teased one tendril of her mind inside, and the whole space suddenly opened up to become Karin's mind as it must have been a very long time ago, when she was very young.

Centered in the middle of it all were two immovable pillars. One: That her mother had loved her. Two: That her mother was dead.

Twining around them was the ivy of belief that in a way, her mother had chosen to die. That she had left Karin on purpose.

That Karin must be bad, if her own mother had wanted to leave her.

~ The shinobi world is cruel, Sakura. You know that, ~ Karin thought. ~ You've seen it. We don't treat people with any consideration. We are gardeners, or worse. ~

Do you really think your mother was worth no more consideration than a radish? Sakura thought gently.

~ That's not — that's different, ~ Karin thought. More memories were appearing now, springing up faster than Sakura could comprehend them. Young Karin, standing on a stool so she could help her mother measure the rice. Her mother, bending over her bed to kiss her on the forehead. Being held in her mother's warm arms.

The sight of her mother's lifeless body after she had let too many wounded Grass ninjas use her chakra healing abilities. They had drained her dry.

~ She knew the risks and she took them anyway, ~ Karin thought, scrabbling in her mind. ~ She made the decision that her life was worthless. ~

But her life wasn't worthless. Not to you, Sakura thought, willing Karin to nudge her mind closer.

~ It was worthless, because she didn't have power, ~ Karin thought angrily. ~ If she'd had more power, those Grass nin would have fallen at her feet. The way people fell at the feet of Orochimaru. You know that Jūgo sought him out? He begged Orochimaru to keep him under control so he'd never hurt anyone else without orders. ~

Sakura was surprised at the spike of angry jealousy that spurted up in her at just the thought of Jūgo's name.

~ Oh, ~ Karin thought, arrested. Amusement and discovery sparkled along every line of her mind.

"Shut up," Sakura grumbled, trying in vain to shield her thoughts.

~ Oh, ~ Karin's thought came again, so very pleased; practically purring with it. ~ You were jealous. ~

"I was not!" Sakura objected, coming to terms with the fact that she had been; she had been desperately jealous without realizing why, and now she was still jealous, even though she was the one in Karin's bed. Not Jūgo.

~ Keep telling yourself that, ~ Karin thought smugly, moving back forward to touch Sakura again.

Sakura felt that she should probably object to more kissing when they still had large outstanding issues to resolve. Then again, Karin's body felt so good against her. That was a difficult argument to ignore outright.

She pulled Karin closer, finding her mouth again and opening it easily to let her tongue push and pull at Karin's, two tides both searching for their shore.

~ Pull my hair a little, ~ Karin thought at her. ~ I like that. ~

Sakura obliged, tugging at Karin's hair enough to make her give pleased little murmurs.

Their bodies started another fire that their minds were falling into, both of them moving against each other, through each other. More flashes of Karin's mind entered Sakura's as their excitement spiraled higher, their fingers seeking each other, teasing and flicking and rubbing and stroking, finding out what felt good.

Sakura saw another flash of herself — this time, during the final battle, breaking off one of Kaguya's horns with her mightiest attack.

You saw that? Sakura thought, surprised.

~ The whole world saw that, ~ Karin replied. ~ You do know you're kind of a hero, right? ~

The word 'hero' had a lot of feelings wrapped up in it. Sakura saw herself as Karin saw her: A beautiful, strong, talented woman, deeply embedded into Team 7 and Konoha as a whole, known by everyone, taught by the legendary Hatake Kakashi and Senju Tsunade, a world-renowned medical-nin with unholy amounts of chakra control.

It doesn't feel like that from the inside, Sakura returned, showing Karin some of the many ways she'd been humiliated for not coming from one of the ninja clans. How so few people took her seriously. How everyone thought she was stupid, or annoying, or clueless, or just a fool for Uchiha Sasuke.

Karin's mind gave a twinge of recognition at that. 

But you're an actual Uzumaki, Sakura thought, letting some of her awe at Karin's ancient clan bloodline into her thoughts, letting her fingers probe while her other hand worked at Karin's breast. It was so handy to be able to talk while they kissed at the same time.

~ As though that means anything ~, Karin returned. ~ Everything from Whirlpool is gone. ~

"Oh!" Sakura broke away to shout. She beamed at Karin's confused face. "Wait here!"

"Sakura, where the fuck are you going? I'm not done with you!" Karin said, reaching both hands out as Sakura hopped off the bed.

"Just a minute! Hold that thought!" Sakura said, tearing through the room to find her bag from the shopping trip before.

~ Can our mental link extend if we're not touching? ~ Karin thought. Then, a pause. Then, ~ Huh. Guess it can. Should we tell Lady Tsunade about this? ~

Probably, Sakura thought. She had found the headband from Whirlpool and was hiding it behind her back, coming back to bed with a huge smile on her face. But not right now.

~ She's so gorgeous. Her hair is just like cherry blossoms, ~ the stray thought popped from Karin's mind into Sakura's, before she realized she'd let it slip and clamped her mind down harder, blushing.

"Cherry blossoms, hmm?" Sakura said out loud. 

"Shut up." Karin was blushing again, but it wasn't the same as the blush she got when she was complimented. Sakura immediately wanted to make her blush every different way so she could catalog them all, map them all out with her fingers and lips and cheeks. 

"You're the gorgeous one," Sakura said, approaching the bed. "And here. This is for you." She held out the Whirlpool headband with both hands.

Karin stared at it, then looked up at Sakura's face, searching for something. She paused for far longer than Sakura would have expected. 

Sakura was starting to feel kind of weird, standing here naked, still slightly damp from standing in a shower before, her skin cooling off rapidly in the open air, without a word or movement from Karin.

Do you like it? Sakura thought. I thought you might like something from your home village. It's authentic. You can tell from the metal.

Then she was suddenly back on the bed, face-up, with Karin straddling her, pinning her two wrists above her head.

"You got this? for me?" Karin hissed, her eyes flicking from the headband, which was still clutched in Sakura's right hand, down to her face.

Yes? Sakura thought, trying to catch up. Was Karin displeased? Upset?

Karin was pouncing on her, pressing down into her, pinning her, kissing her frantically. The thoughts were spiraling high again, but Sakura thought she could figure out the general shape of them. Bits of wonderment shone out from the maelstrom, quickly hidden by the next rush of feelings.

A burst of feelings reached out and pulled Sakura in, and then she was inside the maelstrom herself, spinning through Karin's inner world, colliding with snippets of her life, all mixed up together.

— Orochimaru, looking down at her with his pale, chiseled face, saying, 'I think you'll find that life is exactly what you make it — no more, and certainly no less. Wouldn't you agree?'

— Some faceless Grass chūnin, taunting her for 'not being from here,' telling young Karin to 'bite me, bitch — oh no, wait, guess I'll get to bite you instead!' and then laughing and laughing and laughing.

— Sasuke, saving her life in the Forest of Death, and actually smiling at her — he smiled at her —

— The man at her mother's hospital grabbing Karin by the arm and pulling. His hand was too big, and he was pulling her down the hall, and it hurt. 'Your mother wimped out on us, so guess what. You're next.'

— Kabuto, smirking at her from the shadows of the Southern Hideout as she completed her daily checklist of tasks, coveting her healing abilities.

— Her mother's face as she said, 'Never forget how much I love you, little fish.'

— Her obsession with Sasuke getting her though her long, lonely days and nights as Orochimaru's lieutenant.

— Orochimaru and Kabuto leaning over her, discussing her healing abilities with each other, seeing if they could harvest it for themselves. 

— And being bitten. Sakura flashed back to so many different people biting Karin, taking their healing from her. She could remember Karin's memory and feel the chakra flowing out of her and into them; it was as though it was really happening all over again, it was as though —

"Karin!" Sakura gasped, her eyes flying wide open.

Karin had her mouth on one breast and was busily working at the other with fingers, while she reached in between Sakura's legs. ~ Mmmm? ~ she thought.

"My chakra. I can feel it again! Well — just a little," Sakura said, squinting in concentration.

It wasn't just the memory of Karin losing chakra to the many, many people she had healed over the years. Sakura could feel a trickle of her own, authentic chakra, welling up inside her like a secret forest spring.

And then it was flowing away, but it was flowing away into Karin, so that was all right. Because, if Sakura concentrated, she could sense that some chakra from Karin was flowing back into her.

"It's coming back," she breathed in delight, cupping Karin's face and peppering her with kisses. "Our chakra is coming back!"

Karin stuttered in place, then dove down to kiss Sakura hungrily.

"Never mind that. You got me something from Whirlpool," she said. Her eyes were glistening in the dim light from the hallway. "No one's ever —"

She made a complicated gesture, and Sakura didn't need to read her mind to know what she was saying. No one's ever cared enough to notice that I missed it. No one's ever bothered to think about what I might like.

Maybe even, No one's ever bought me a present before.

"Do you want to wear it?" Sakura asked, giving the hand with the headband a little shake to remind Karin that she was still holding it.

"Yes," Karin breathed, taking it with reverence and looking at it on both sides. She gathered up her damp hair and use the headband to tie it back, with the metal plate centered and square on her forehead.

Sakura grinned up at her.

"That's a good look on you," she said happily, with a wriggle of her hips. "Now get back to what you were doing before."

Karin moved herself back down, settling between Sakura's legs as though this was her S-ranked mission and she meant to complete it.

With her hair out of the way, Karin dove deeper, nestling her face home and lodging there as though she didn't need to breathe at all. Her tongue stroked and pressed, wet and shocking in its twinned strength and delicacy, finding out how to lick and suck and kiss Sakura between her legs until she could barely string two thoughts together.

Every stroke of her tongue, every push of her fingers inside, was forcing more chakra up and out of Sakura. She couldn't see it, but she could sense it flowing through her skin, seeping into Karin's body like rain refreshing the desert.

And she could certainly feel the answering rush of Karin's chakra flowing back into her. It was a deep, pulling kind of feeling, but it was also pushing into her just as firmly as Karin's fingers, which had found a certain spot up high and to the front of Sakura's inner channel, and which were rubbing at it and rubbing at it and rubbing at it.

Sakura writhed and wailed, clutching at Karin's head, feeling the smooth metal of the Whirlpool forehead protector and the spiral carved into it. That spiral, the Uzumaki clan crest, formed most of the Leaf symbol of Konoha.

I'm actually having sex with an Uzumaki, Sakura thought, overwhelmed by the flow of Karin's chakra. It was wild and free and relentless, rushing into her like whitewater. She's actually licking me — 

~ I could hear that, ~ Karin thought amusedly. She gave another lick and a firm suck. ~ I can't believe I'm sucking off the hero of the Fourth Shinobi War. And she likes it. ~

"I do like it — I, uhhh!" Sakura tried to wail, only to realize her mouth wasn't fully functional right then. She wailed, thighs tensing around Karin's face, trying to squeeze her away, but Karin kept the pressure exactly the same, didn't let herself be dislodged, stayed right there, right there where Sakura needed her.

~ Think that again. Think that you need me, ~ Karin's thought appeared, demanding, almost desperate.

Yes, yes, I need it, I need it, I need you —

Sakura screamed as her orgasm slammed through her, swirling into every corner of her body and mind and scouring them all with waves of pleasure that just seemed to go on and on and on. And Karin was there, twining her chakra through Sakura's, riding her pleasure as though it were her own. Sakura thought she was coming, too, from the reflected glory of what she had done to Sakura's willing body.

Finally, Sakura slumped back to the bed, unable to do much beyond twitch.

Karin crawled back up her, wiping her mouth before nestling her face into Sakura's neck.

~ Good? ~ she thought.

Sakura huffed and managed to raise her arms to pull Karin closer.

As though you don't already know.

Tsunade regarded them both over her cup of sake.

"So you're telling me you've managed to fix it yourselves?" she asked with some suspicion. "I know you both have medical training, and Sakura, I know you have a lot of chakra control. But this has eluded our top minds for the past two weeks, and the two of you just solved it on your own?"

"We did borrow some books from the library," Karin said, her face innocent.

"And it took us days of effort," Sakura added.

Days. Days and days when their fingers had barely left each other's skin, and they'd parted only long enough to eat and drink. Days that all blurred together into one long, dreamlike time, that was arousing Sakura all over again just by the strength of its memory.

She hadn't known she could come that much. She hadn't known she could make another woman come that much, either.

"Hmmm." Tsunade tapped her fingers on the Hokage's desk. Kakashi still wasn't here doing his job, and Sakura wasn't sure whether she was grateful for that or not.

Which one of her senseis would be more likely to take one look at her and Karin and know exactly what they'd been up to?

Tsunade looked them both up and down, as Sakura broke into a cold sweat.

She knows, Sakura thought towards Karin.

~ Obviously, ~ Karin replied, keeping her face still.

"From examining you both, I can confirm that your chakra is back, as healthy as ever," Tsunade said. "One might even say — healthier."

Sakura pasted a vague smile on her face and thought calming thoughts. 

"We'll have to run more tests," Tsunade continued, "but I think you're fine to resume missions."

"Thank you, Lady Tsunade!" Sakura said. 

"Karin — I want to let you know that of course Leaf would understand if your recent traumatic experience here meant that you didn't feel comfortable continuing to reside with us. We'd be happy to arrange a convoy to transport you to Grass, or Fire, or any other nation you might care to name, out of gratitude for your efforts during the war and afterwards."

"Oh, no, thank you, Lady Tsunade," Karin said. No one would have known, but Sakura could sense a low, simmering amusement inside her, like the lowest setting on the burner at home.

At home, Sakura thought, distracted. They had so many more things to do with each other at home. Karin was talking about tying her up with the headband next.

~ Focus, Sakura, ~ Karin thought. Out loud, she continued, "I would like to re-pledge my fealty and continue to offer my services to Leaf. Konoha has been very welcoming."

"Yes, I'm sure that it has," Tsunade said rather tartly, pouring herself some more wine and tossing it off. "Well, if that's all — be gone, the two of you. I have a lot of work piling up since that no-good sensei of Sakura's doesn't see fit to show his face at Hokage Tower for more than two hours a day."

"Yes, Lady Tsunade," Sakura said, turning towards the door in relief.

Maybe over the summer, we can make a trip to where Whirlpool used to be, Sakura thought towards Karin.

~ It could be an experiment in how far apart our mental sharing and chakra pooling extend, ~ Karin agreed. After their days of nonstop lovemaking, they'd found they could now freely move away from each other. It seemed the jutsu had been pulling them together as part of its first phase, but now that they had unlocked their powers, they had regained control. 

Having Karin in her mind all the time was actually kind of nice. She had a sardonic humor and an incisive mind. Sakura was no slouch, but sometimes it felt like she was just along for the ride as Karin thought her way past twelve obstacles at once.

"Oh, and Sakura? Karin?" Tsunade called to them when they reached the door to the office.

"Yes, Lady Tsunade?" Sakura asked, turning back.

Tsunade glanced from one of them to the other. "I'd recommend a spring wedding. Maybe when the cherries are in bloom."