Chapter Text
Humiliating.
Sasori could try to spin it as misfortune—wrong place, wrong time. The chances of encountering trouble while in transit were astronomically higher than they were while he was safely behind Suna’s walls. In retrospect, advertising to the whole shinobi world that the five Kages were having a summit was perhaps not the best marketing strategy when rogue criminal groups like Akatsuki were out there cock-fighting for a fat bounty. But security was top notch, they said. No one would dream of attacking the Kazekage’s own entourage, they said. They would be fired and perhaps drawn and quartered when Sasori dragged his ass out of here and back to Suna, mark his words.
Hands cuffed behind his back, his nondescript gi dirty and torn from the fight, and surrounded on all sides by concrete and steel bars, he was a rat in a cage. Akasuna no Sasori—grandson to one of the most accomplished medical ninja to have ever lived, youngest Kazekage Suna had ever known, excited to show off his country’s latest technological achievements at his first international relations summit with his fellow world leaders—had ended up captured and imprisoned after a single blow to the head caught him unawares.
Beyond humiliating.
The cell was dark and damp, musty with mildew and stale piss. It didn’t see the light of day at all. He’d tried finagling the cuffs, but there was no breaking them. His chakra was shot to shit; he suspected he’d been drugged for how sluggish his movements were—tongue a fat sponge in his mouth, eyelids drooping, muscles aching. They would torture him, he knew. He’d trained for this since before he’d learned how to read, knew this bloody rhythm like breathing. It didn’t make the prospect of it all any more appealing.
He would die here. They would have to kill him before he sold out his country and his people.
And on the one hand, fine. There was a version of his life that had always been careening head-first toward this dank, subterranean cell, sticky with the blood of his enemies and resigned because he was pragmatic, goddamn was he pragmatic (and this was truly his worst quality to hear his favorite student, Kankuro, tell it). But the air was damp with the memory of the thunderstorm that had attacked his entourage with as much ferocity as their blade-wielding assaulters, and the narrow, wooden door that led to the dark hall beyond was old and scarred from years of abuse. Sasori had been down in this pit for an hour conscious and he knew, in his current state, there would likely be no way out of here unless it was in a body bag.
“You only see the worst in things because you choose to,” Kankuro would berate him if he were here. “You’ve always been such a martyr.”
Kankuro’s insight, however, was looking increasingly more myopic the longer Sasori was stuck here, completely alone with no knowledge of what had happened to his entourage or even if they were still alive. Martyrs died for a reason; a thousand miles underground in a solitary cell with only the rats to mourn him, Sasori would die simply by inevitable fact and not a soul would know it. That, more than the disgusting moulder of his cell, he could not abide.
A loud crash against the wooden door drew his immediate and hyper focus. It opened in protest, and a body tumbled in, poked and goaded by a guard in a black, cloth mask obscuring his face.
“Move,” the guard snarled, gruff and masculine and afraid. He wore no descriptive symbols on his black scrubs, a ghost without pity except for himself as he forced a woman with a sack over her head into a cell adjoining Sasori’s with a cattle prod. “I said, move.”
“Eat shit,” she snapped.
She earned herself a jolt from the cattle prod as a reward for her cheek and yelped. But like a madwoman, she grabbed the rod and yanked it out of the guard’s hand. He made a startled gasp, and the woman managed to turn the cattle prod back on him.
Her little rebellion did not end well for her.
The shock barely fazed the huge, muscly guard, and he punched her squarely in the face for her trouble. She went down like a sack of bricks and didn’t get up again.
The guard spat on her. “Stupid cunt.”
Sasori watched it all in silence. The woman coughed and raised her trembling, cuffed hands to the bag covering her face. He couldn’t see her well in the gloom. When the guard locked her in her cell and left them alone, Sasori said, “That was foolish.”
The woman startled like she’d awoken from a deep sleep and shot up. “Who’s there?” She fumbled with the bag over her head—her hands were cuffed tightly in front of her—and yanked it off to reveal a riot of pink hair and dilated, green eyes.
Sasori was thankful for the gloom of their prison, lest she see the embarrassing flicker of shock on his face. He was so drained that he couldn’t even recognize the chakra signature of Kakashi’s head medical ninja. “Haruno,” he said, his voice strained. In relief that he was not alone down here or in pity that she was consigned to the same miserable fate as him, he did not know.
“Lord Kazekage?” She wiped her split lip with the palm of her hand, staggered to her feet, and pressed her face in between the bars with a childlike sort of bewilderment. “Oh gods, they got you too.”
Too? Sasori did not like the sound of that.
“We were attacked leaving the Summit,” she explained. “Kakashi-sen—I mean, the Lord Hokage ordered me to go back to the city and sound the alarm, but there were so many of them, and I…” She averted her gaze, her long bangs obscuring her face from his view. “I didn’t make it.”
Her shame was as sharp as the kunai that had dug into the wound on Sasori’s shoulder, shoddily bandaged and still bleeding a little. From what he knew about her (not much, not since the mission she had participated in to recover Gaara from Akatsuki years ago, but that was enough of an impression to remember her monstrous strength for the rest of his life), she was not the type to surrender even on pain of death. The ronin must have ambushed her the same as they had him.
He took stock of her—her weight balanced mostly on one leg in favor of the other, old blood and grime rimed her hairline and streaked upon her bare arms, a tear in her red vest, her lip split and swollen from the latest punch she’d taken—and imagined he looked little better. It was the least of their problems, but it was just another indignity. At least she had some control over her arms cuffed in front of her.
“I can see that,” Sasori said flatly.
A flash of anger flared in her brilliant eyes, but that was more than good. She wasn’t beaten yet if she still had it in her to get righteously pissed. Perhaps he could use that energy to help get them both out of here alive.
Alone, he had a slim chance. But together, he at least had options. Wild cards. Their captors could sap his chakra, but they couldn’t blunt his mind. As long as she wasn’t an idiot or an emotional wreck, they might just stand a chance.
She peered critically at him and, in low tones in case the very walls were listening, she said, “You are injured.”
The iron stench of his own blood wrenched in the back of his throat, blissfully forgotten in favor of his own existential mortality until the moment she reminded him of it. “Not much either of us can do about it for the moment.”
It was at this, above all else, that she took some degree of visible offense, as if her lack of chakra robbed her of her agency and worth to anyone, including herself. Sasori supposed this was her first encounter with enemy occupation. Training could only get one so far, after all. He didn’t hold it against her, but he also had no intention of indulging her frivolous panic when he needed her to remain calm and compliant in order for him to get them out of this mess.
“No, I suppose not,” she said tightly. She rattled her bound hands uselessly in front of her.
There was a creaking sound of metal on stone somewhere far above them that could have been anything. Their captors were as unknown to Sasori as his current whereabouts—he could have been miles away from Kiri or miles beneath it. The general humidity even underground suggested the latter, but he hadn’t decided whether that was good or bad. By now, his small entourage would have gotten far away from Kiri and the site of the ambush, if they knew what was good for them. Temari would follow protocol, and she would bully the rest into following it too, even the overly stubborn Baki. Sasori had to believe that she had escaped since she wasn’t down here with him, and that at least was some comfort.
The creaking grew louder, and Sakura had the sense to shut up, wary. Her mouth was pinched, her brow furrowed in confusion and dread. Footsteps on the heavy, metal staircase beyond the scarred door approached, and she pressed back against the wall of her cell.
“When they interrogate you, say nothing,” Sasori said, his voice a low growl. “They have kept us alive for a reason.”
Sakura’s frightened eyes met his, and to her credit, she did not tremble. “Okay.”
Her obedience pleased him in a grim sort of way. Not an idiot, then. Not yet a wreck, either. Perhaps they would survive the night yet.
A brown river weed of a man entered through the door. Unlike the meat who tailed him, he wore no black mask to hide his sinewy face. He also wore no headband, and that spoke volumes. Sasori clocked his movements, controlled and deliberate in a way that belied his shinobi training, yet he was nothing to look upon. A man who did not want to be known was a dangerous man, indeed.
“Oh, good, you’ve settled in,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back.
Neither Sasori nor Sakura said a word.
“I’ll make this easy for you.” He paced in front of their cells, panther-like. “Ronin life is hard. Rough. Few will do business with us. It really grates on the old self-esteem. Even my crew’s begun to notice, and let me tell you,” he chuckled to himself, “they’re not exactly, uh, sympathetic.”
Sasori imagined they were not. The life of a ronin leader was a difficult one, and notoriously short-lived. The established families hoarded wealth and opportunities, making it nearly impossible for the entrepreneurial sort to maintain their own crew for long. The system simply was against them.
“So, I find myself asking, what is a poor oyabun such as me to do?” He stopped in front of Sasori’s cell and smiled. “And then I thought, hey, the Hidden Villages have plenty of fat to spare. Why not skim a little off the top for myself?”
Sasori merely stared, unblinking and unimpressed being compared to the marbled lard of a wagyu steak. Truly, had he succumbed to something as cliché as a ransom kidnapping? Absolutely pathetic. He would never hear the end of it when he got out of this place.
“And then, wow! I managed to nab the honest to gods Kazekage himself. Congratulations, Esteemed Koya!” He clapped for himself. Sasori clenched his fists behind his back.
“I gotta say, though,” the Esteemed Koya went on, “for a Kage, you sure didn’t put up much of a fight. You on your period or something?”
Sakura, damn her, could not help but let out an indignant little scoff at that comment, and she drew Koya’s full attention.
“Something on your mind, sweet peach?”
It took everything Sasori had not to roll his eyes at that.
Sakura, true to her promise, remained mum.
The weed undulated closer to her cell and peered through the bars at her. She kept her chin up well enough, but the silent leering was starting to get to her. She began to fidget her fingers, and she tightened her thighs as if to protect herself.
“I wonder how much Konoha will pay to have their head medical ninja back in one piece?” he mused. Seconds passed as he continued to leer at Sakura. He licked his lips. “I imagine you’re worth quite a lot.”
“Go to hell,” Sakura spat, because she just could not fucking help herself, apparently.
In a blink, Koya appeared before Sakura, his hands on the wall on either side of her head. Impossibly, he had phased through the iron bars like a ghost, a duplicate of the one who remained beyond the bars. “What a loose mouth you have,” his copy mouth-breathed all over Sakura. “Makes me want to stuff it up with something.”
Sakura kept her mouth shut this time, and instead channeled her rage into her knee, which she drove hard into his balls. Unfortunately, her knee passed clean through him, and he shimmered into shadows with a laugh.
The original hummed just shy of the bars of her cell with a wolfish smile. “Well, you’re not boring, I’ll give you that.”
Sasori fantasized about pulling the teeth out of his grinning mouth one by one with a pair of rusty pliers and shoving them individually up his ass until he shat coins.
Their captor looked between the two of them and withdrew to the staircase door. “Stay warm, you two.”
Sasori waited until Koya’s and the meat’s footsteps died away to turn on Sakura. “What the hell was that.”
She shot him a nasty look. “I didn’t tell him anything.”
“You provoked him unnecessarily.”
“I don’t think he needed any provocation to be a scumbag.”
Sasori’s skin flushed with anger. “What you did was stupid. When I give you an order, I expect you to follow it.”
Sakura marched over to the bars separating them. “With all due respect, you are my political ally, not my superior.”
Sasori was not tall like Baki, nor bulky like Kankuro. All his life, he was underestimated for his softer, almost feminine features. But as one who had devoted his life to studying the human body, how best to enhance it beyond its natural capacity as much as how to cut it down to its bone and gristle parts, he was acutely aware of his own body and how to wield it as effectively as any of the battle puppets for which he was infamous.
He walked quietly to the bars dividing him from Sakura, each step an encroachment that echoed painfully against the concrete and stone walls, claiming the empty space for himself and his presence, and he loomed. “Do you know why they named me Kage?” She held her ground, which was not nothing, but she shrank under the full weight of his glare. Sasori did not give her a moment to interject. “I have lived longer than you, Haruno. I’ve spilled blood and ravaged entire countries. Suna’s vanguard led me into the War, and when they fell, I raised their corpses and led them myself.”
Sakura’s breath hitched, perhaps in shock, perhaps in fear. She should be afraid.
“I’m a legion and a legend. I’ve been beaten and poisoned and tortured. I’ve landed in damp shitholes far worse than this, and I’ve survived it all.” He leaned as close to the bars as he could without touching them. Even though Sakura was nearly of a height with him, she was small as she looked up at him now, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly parted, arrested. He never once raised his voice to her. “So when I say I’m getting us out of here alive, I expect you to believe me. Anything less than absolute loyalty will end poorly for us both. Am I understood?”
Sakura’s breathing was shallow. He imagined her heart pounding in her ribcage with all that monstrous strength she was famous for. “Yes.”
Her breathy agreement twisted something dark and coiling in Sasori’s belly. It vibrated at his fingers, which itched with the need for chakra and for control, and begged to take it in any way he could. He lowered himself closer to her face, mere inches away. “Yes…what?”
The vein in her throat throbbed, and if he had his hands, Sasori would have been tempted to press his thumb into it. “Yes, sir.”
Oh.
The coil in his belly roiled and sent a rush of heat up his spine to the tips of his fingers. Unable to help himself, and pleased with her submission, he curled his lips into a smirk. “Good girl.”
Only then did he remove himself from her personal space and retreat to a more respectable corner of his cell. Sakura watched him go, stunned, but not for long. Soon her walls were back up and her back was stiff and straight.
They didn’t speak again for a very long time.
Sakura wasn’t sure how many hours had passed since she’d landed in her new accommodations. There was no telling night from day down here, and she’d received only one meal on a metal tray, lukewarm (the worst temperature) and suspiciously spongey. She’d forced herself to eat it to maintain her strength. Sasori had not touched his, which initially seemed like a colossally stupid decision on his part for all his browbeating her (hypocrite). And then she remembered his hands were still cuffed behind his back. The indignity of eating directly off the tray with his teeth was clearly out of the question. She had it in her to offer to help him, but thought better of it. After the way he’d bullied her into their current hierarchy, she wasn’t feeling particularly generous.
Which she knew was not a useful emotion considering their current predicament. Logically, Sakura knew he was right. He had years of experience on her, he was technically her superior being a Kage, even one from another village, and his reputation for massacring his enemies to live another day was known far and wide. She would never forget the exhilaration of fighting alongside Temari and him to recover Gaara’s stolen corpse from that blond Akatsuki maniac years ago. They’d had little contact since then, and she’d all but forgotten about him and his grudging praise for her performance as she resumed her training under Tsunade, graduated to Jounin, and assumed the role of head medical ninja under Kakashi’s new Hokage administration.
In fact, this was the first meaningful, personal contact she’d had with Sasori at all. She wondered what it said about them only ever meeting bruised and bloodied and facing a mutual enemy. Certainly nothing optimistic.
He paced in his cell, had been for the last twenty minutes. Maybe he was thinking of a brilliant plan to bust them out of here. Good luck, she thought. The cuffs were nothing special, but the bars of their cages were spelled with chakra eating seals, which was as efficient as it was annoying. So long as she and Sasori were behind bars, they were as vulnerable as a pair of newborns.
Can’t raise an army without any puppets or chakra to control them, she thought bitterly. Her petty resentment did not make her feel any better, though.
Even her Yin seal was a no go. Try as she might to draw upon the chakra she stored there, the seals all around her syphoned it faster than she could channel it to her fists. All she’d succeeded in doing was wasting more of her precious reserves.
Sasori muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like “fuckery.” Tired, bored, and too exhausted to remain actively afraid for her life, Sakura scooted closer to the bars dividing them. “Are you all right?”
He spared her a glance, and it took her aback. In her limited acquaintance with the man, Sakura was sure she had never seen Sasori look pained. A thin sheen of sweat glistened upon his brow, and his knuckles were white where he clenched his fists behind his back. Immediately, she rose and studied him with an alert, clinical eye. The wound on his shoulder still looked wet, but it was not actively bleeding anymore.
“Where are you hurt?” she demanded. “Let me see.”
He shifted his weight as he faced her. “Nowhere that will kill me just yet.”
“All the same, please let me take a look.”
He watched her with such an intensity that he could have won a staring contest with a corpse. It took a lot of willpower just to meet him halfway, and then he averted his gaze. Before Sakura could question the oddly shy reaction, he said, “I need a favor.”
Sakura’s fingers found one of the bars and curled around it. The iron warmed where chakra seals pulsed with power, power they had stolen from her and from him. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. “What kind of favor?”
Sasori warred with himself, and after a moment’s struggle, he set his jaw and met her gaze once more. He may have been about to command an entire legion into battle with the severity of that look. “I would never piss myself,” he said, toneless. “Not if I had a choice in the matter.”
Oh.
Sakura’s gaze dropped to his pants and the hands she couldn’t see because some moron had cuffed them behind his back and left them here for hours unattended. Sakura closed her eyes and breathed through her nose, prayed for a boulder to drop from the heavens and crush that moron while he shat unencumbered on the toilet, and steeled herself for what she was about to do.
When she opened her eyes, Sasori was looking at her, still as a statue because of course he had his pride, at least for a few more seconds. “All right. I’ll help.”
Only now did he betray his humanity, a thinning of his lips and a dejected nod she returned, a silent promise between them: We are tough. We are survivors. We will make it out of this concrete sphincter alive.
And for fuck’s sake, let us never breathe a word of this to anyone.
Sakura put all her focus into the discrete steps to accomplish her task, cold and clinical. Which was normally a very natural way to be for her, being a doctor and subjecting herself to all sorts of sordid ailments and wounds and body parts on a daily basis. She channeled that part of herself as she shoved her hands in between the bars and dipped her fingers beneath the waistline of the Kazekage’s pants to loosen them one button at a time.
There was no good place to look, but there were definitely worse places to look, like directly into his eyes. Closing her eyes seemed highly inappropriate too, as if she were secretly enjoying disrobing him in handcuffs. Looking at his pants was also out of the question, considering there was about to be significantly less of them in moments and she had a thing about explicit consent that currently did not extend to permission to look at his junk, as a favor or otherwise. In the end, Sakura settled for a point on his shoulder, the one that didn’t have a hole punched through it, and prayed her clumsy fingers wouldn’t forget how buttons work.
It worked, thank the gods, and the moment she’d released the final button, Sasori all but recoiled out of her reach and marched to the far side of his cell, where a privy bucket had been shoved in the corner. Sakura stood there, a little dazed, until the sound of him relieving himself snapped her out of it and she had the good sense to turn her back to give him the privacy he deserved.
She had taken such a keen interest in a network of cracks in the concrete that looked a bit like Rock Lee eating a hotdog if she squinted that she jumped to hear Sasori addressing her again. He was turned slightly away from her and out of reach, and he was as taut as a bowstring.
Sakura leaned close to the bars. “What is it?”
Impossibly, his fists clenched tighter than they’d been before. To his credit, he looked her dead in the eye when he spoke, because he was not a coward. “It seems up is bit trickier than down.”
Sakura forced herself to hold his eyes and not look at his pants, which were definitely open and lower on his hips than before and would remain so unless she did something about that. “Okay. Please come here.”
This next bit proved too much even for his conceit, and he didn’t look at her as he turned and paced back to the dividing bars. Sakura did him the basest courtesy of looking away as well. A fierce and violent fury struck her with lightning force in those few seconds as he returned to her. This was a specific and gutting humiliation that she would not have wished on her worst enemy, and though it was not her fault, she felt compelled to comfort him anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it.
Sasori sighed, petulant, a betrayal of his youth despite the gravitas of his station. “I wish they had just tortured me a bit.”
Levity did not feel right coming from her in this moment, much as she appreciated it from him. She let him have his little moment of weakness, hell, she had no idea how she would be holding it together so well if their positions were reversed.
“I will be as quick as I can, sir.”
The honorific mollified him a little, and they locked gazes briefly. “Go on, then.”
That was as clear a consent as she was like to get from him, so Sakura dropped to her knees and resolved to get it over with as quickly and as gently as possible. Whatever degradation she felt being stuck in this situation, she knew his was a hundred times worse, and she would be damned if she didn’t give him her best attitude and professionalism. She took it step by step just as she had going the other way, one button at a time, careful to touch him just enough to tuck him in safely without causing any discomfort. Absorbed in the mechanics of it, she ignored everything but the menial task of button, tuck, pull, button, until at last she finished with the final button and immediately removed her unwelcome hands from him.
“You can get up, Haruno.”
Sakura realized she’d been kneeling with her head bowed, hardly breathing, waiting for Sasori. He had stepped away, the cool façade back in place, like it had never happened. Sakura pulled herself to her feet and forced herself to meet his gaze, determined to put the incident behind her as much for her own sake as for his.
“Thank you,” he said.
Sakura stared at him, arrested as she’d been when he’d asserted his dominance before. Except this time, there was no ego behind his words. How curious to be able to go from gleeful conceit to a warmer, more humbling sort of pride. Even his eyes were warmer, a glimmering shade of honey that made her think he could be good if he wanted to be.
“I’m glad I could help you,” she said.
The next time their jailer came to bring them food and water, Sakura threw the entire contents of her privy pail at his stupid head and threatened to do the same every time he came down unless they fixed Sasori’s cuffs.
Sasori didn’t say a word to her about the racket she caused, or the smell. Getting his cuffs re-fitted so that his hands were now in front of him and the delicious schadenfreude of watching the meat mop up a puddle of their combined piss and excrement was enough to earn her a free pass this time.