Three months since they left Konoha, Sakura thinks to herself as she rolls up her seal diagrams and calculations. One week to Wave Country, two and a half months at Zabuza's hideout, and one week to find a contract and a boat. Three months in hiding, three months preparing to play bait for Itachi. She touches the ribbon in her hair and misses the weight of her forehead protector.

The small boat rocks with the wind and the waves, plowing eastward toward River Country where a small harbor town wants their feudal lord removed, and wants the death blamed on his own son. Most hidden villages are reluctant to play politics without a correspondingly high price, so underhanded assassinations usually go to missing-nin, who already have an unsavory reputation and generally need contracts badly enough that they'll work cheaply.

Naruto doesn't like the mission. Sasuke doesn't care. Sakura took a day to ask various merchants and sailors about the lord, his son, and the town council. She concluded that the council was most likely corrupt and simply trying to avoid the lord's taxes, but she'd be willing to kill the nobles for free. She shivers now, remembering the darkness in one sailor's eyes when he talked about his sister. Some people simply don't deserve to live.

"Hey, hey, Sakura-chan! Lunchtime!"

Naruto flips down from the railing around the bow, where he's been fiddling with the small front sail -- the jib, Tazuna called it. Sakura stands, takes a second to find her balance on the moving deck, and follows Naruto down into the cramped belly of the boat where Sasuke's put together sandwiches for the three of them. He looks curiously at her rolled-up papers, but doesn't ask.

Sakura grabs her sandwich and sinks down onto her bedroll. Today it's dried chicken and an unfamiliar brownish seaweed -- she'll be happy when they reach land again and can eat something fresh and unsalted. Sasuke has a deft touch with their small store of spices and sauces, though, and the sandwich tastes better than it probably has any right to taste.

"Will the wind hold through the afternoon?" she asks, trying to sound casual.

The boys exchange a look she can't quite read, and then Naruto says, "I can't feel a storm and he didn't see one, so yeah, probably. Why?"

Sakura pats the notes that lie by her side. "I think I figured out Sasuke's seal."

Sasuke whips his head around and stares, his eyes flashing from black to red, and Sakura does her best to push down any thoughts and emotions except confidence and honesty. Deep down, Inner Sakura is screaming and throwing a fit because he doesn't trust her, but Sakura refuses to let any hint of anger show on her face.

"When?" Sasuke asks, letting the Sharingan go.

Sakura flicks a glance at Naruto, who winks at her and nods. Yes, he's noticed that Sasuke isn't keeping up that twenty-four hour watch any more. And yes, he'll keep the boat going while she's busy.

Sasuke taps his foot. From anyone else it would be nothing but impatience, but from him -- along with the subtle lift of an eyebrow -- it says that he caught that exchange and would they please stop acting like he's blind and stupid.

Sakura grins; they'll suck him into their games sooner or later. "I just finished. If you're willing, I'd like to test my theories," she says to Sasuke. "Come up on deck where there's light."

As she follows Sasuke up the ladder through the narrow hatch, Sakura clutches her papers and mentally crosses her fingers. She's pretty sure her plan will work, but pretty sure isn't certain and the curse seal is the most complicated bit of ninpou she's ever worked with. It took her a month of calculations to get the barest glimpse into its inmost workings -- including one week straight where she put a sleeping jutsu on Sasuke each night and prodded at the quiescent seal with fingers, ink, blood, and chakra, trying to feel out its basic pattern and the ways it linked to Sasuke, to its maker, and to whatever it used as a power source. It's taken another month of diagrams and numbers, experimental jutsu and seals, and a few quiet conversations with Naruto on what it feels like when he draws enough of the Kyuubi's chakra to change, for her to feel confident enough to try tweaking anything.

The human body can only produce so much chakra, no matter how long and hard a ninja trains. Naruto gets around this by drawing on the Kyuubi. Orochimaru apparently learned about that side-effect of the Fourth Hokage's seal, and wondered if he could draw chakra from other sources, such as the streams of chakra generated by moving water, molten rock, storms, trees, animals, and all the varied cycles of the natural world. Nobody's ever managed to retune that power to meld with human chakra, but Orochimaru found a way around that. He's sick, insane, and evil, but there's no question that he's a genius.

The first level of his seals channels the power through tattoo-like markings, in effect turning a person's skin into a giant seal scroll. The second level... that's a little different. After a certain point, the power rips through that net of ink and pours directly into the body. And just as the human body can only produce so much chakra, a ninja can only hold and channel a certain amount of power before burning out and dying, either in a rain of blood and bone or as a scatter of dust on the wind.

If, that is, the ninja's body is still human.

That's Orochimaru's genius: to think of the unthinkable, and make it happen.

"Take your shirt off and lie down," Sakura says to Sasuke. "I think I can cut the connection to Orochimaru and keep the seal active under your control, but this will take several steps and I'll have to draw a lot of seals on you."

Sasuke pulls his shirt over his head, tucks it under one of the numerous ropes that crisscross the deck, and stretches out in the midday sun. Two wide, ragged lines of scar tissue run down his shoulder blades, and tiny dots from Haku's paralyzing senbon ring his neck, but the rest of his skin is pale and smooth. Sakura stares at the play of muscles in his back for several seconds before she notices Inner Sakura drooling. She smacks herself mentally. He's not interested, and anyway now is not the time! Then she opens her bag of seals and medical supplies, snags Sasuke's shirt to fold under her knees, and dips her brush into a jar of ink.

The first step is to paint a containment ring around the seal, to block its connection to Orochimaru. Then she prods Sasuke with the wooden end of her brush and tells him to draw a trickle of chakra through the seal, just enough to set the three black marks spinning.

Her own characters writhe and coil, boiling off his skin and burrowing into his body to form a latticework cage around the seal. "Now use the Sharingan," she says as she holds a mirror over Sasuke's shoulder, "and tell me where it's trying to escape the cage."

Sakura grins when he points to three spots in her sphere of ink, and scribbles seals on narrow strips of specially prepared rice paper. Then she wraps the wards around three senbon, and stabs through each weak point, one by one by one. Sasuke doesn't even wince as the needles bite into his neck.

"I'm glad you never talked shop with Haku," Naruto remarks from over her shoulder. He shudders theatrically. "This looks way too familiar already -- if he goes unconscious, I'm gonna start looking around for Zabuza."

"Shut up, Naruto," Sakura says as she absently backfists his knee. "Go... tack the sails, or boom the jib. Do boat things. Just don't interrupt me."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going." Naruto kicks Sasuke companionably in the shin, avoids Sasuke's retaliatory strike, and ambles off toward the stern with a coil of frayed rope slung over his arm. Sakura wastes a minute watching him slice out the tattered sections and start weaving the good bits back together. His hands are quick and sure, and he looks utterly calm, as if there's no question that she'll succeed and Sasuke will be fine. His hair shines like gold in the sun.

Sakura shakes off her distraction and turns back to Sasuke. She has the connections pinned; it's time to release the cage. She forms three hand seals, concentrates, and dips her brush into the suspended ink. It swirls around the soft bristles like dye in water, then abruptly loses cohesion and patters down onto Sasuke's back like colored rain. The senbon and their wards stand untouched in the center of the puddled ink.

This is the moment of truth. Sakura pulls a special kunai from her bag, one she paid Tenten's father to forge on auspicious days, carving wards, seals, and unbinding spells into it at every stage. She wraps a final strip of rice paper around the hilt, gathers her strength, and slices the senbon in half. Shorn steel falls to the deck, rings against the wood, and rolls away. She draws the remnants from Sasuke's neck and waits. The curse seal spins. One breath. Two. Three. No new marks form.

Sasuke touches his neck, traces the spinning marks, and examines his ink-stained fingertips. His eyes shift from black to red and back again. "Is that it?"

"Um." Sakura meets his eyes and tries to look calm and encouraging. "No. That's just step one." She holds up her brush and Sasuke sighs.

This time she makes him sit against the mast while she paints seals on the deck, recalibrating her symbols so they don't just paralyze any outgoing chakra, but also haul the strands into the visible spectrum. Sasuke draws the curse seal out to cover his body, and Sakura fights back both a scowl and a giddy smile when her cage wraps tendrils around nine streams of sickly green chakra. The scowl is for how deep Orochimaru's fangs are sunk into Sasuke. The grin is for the way her predictions were right. This seal is second only to the one on Naruto's stomach, and she's figured it out!

Nine senbon, nine rice paper wards, and nine slices with her kunai. "One last step," she says, and Sasuke nods. He's far from stupid, after all; he can see what comes next.

The last containment ring wreathes around the mast, up along the sails -- Naruto hovers nearby while Sakura clings to the ropes, just in case she loses her grip -- and down into the belly of the boat. She's not taking any chances here; if she misses even one connection, the seal might be able to reconstruct the whole net that ties it back to its creator.

Sasuke draws chakra, and more chakra, and still more, until Sakura almost feels like a miniature thunderstorm is building around him, ready to explode in a shower of lightning. Naruto leans against the port railing, deceptively relaxed; his eyes are red and his fingers clawed, and Sakura hopes that neither of her boys loses control, not out here on the water, miles from shore. Her scrolls are ready in her pockets, but if they fight, she doesn't think she can seal them before they wreck the boat.

And then the thunderstorm draws inward, and Sasuke changes.

She's never seen the transformation, but it's fascinating to watch, in a gruesome way. Sasuke's body darkens, strains, and deforms. Giant things burst from his back, like malformed hands or shrunken batwings, and suddenly the source of those twin scars is clear. Horns twist down over his dead white hair, and claws and fangs grow to match Naruto's.

Oni, Inner Sakura murmurs. He's an oni! A night-haunt! How could he do this to himself?

But underneath the monster, she can still see Sasuke. Same face, same stance, same I'm-too-proud-to-admit-that-I'm-uneasy expression in his unnatural eyes. She can see that Naruto's not moving to attack. And she can see twenty-seven strands of sickly green chakra leading out from Sasuke's tenketsu, shackles that bind him to Orochimaru.

Twenty-seven senbon. Twenty-seven wards. Twenty-seven strikes. Sakura dissolves her seals and steps back to watch her boys.

Naruto and Sasuke look at each other, considering. "So," Naruto says eventually, "you're still special." He lets go of the railing and saunters over to poke at one of the misshapen hands. "Can you do anything useful with those things on your back?"

Sasuke blinks. "...I have no idea."

Naruto grins, a white flash of fangs against his tanned face. "Hey, hey, I dare you to try flying!"

Sasuke blinks again. "Moron. Why should I?"

"'Cause it'd be cool!"

"No."

"Come on."

"No."

"Scaredy-cat."

Ten minutes later, Sakura finishes mopping up spilled ink, tosses her broken senbon overboard, and leans back against the stern rail. Naruto perches on the tip of the main mast, waving his arms and yelling as he weaves and throws one incomplete Rasengan after another. Sasuke dives and soars overhead, dancing over the choppy winds the same way he slips through trees and shadows, with eerie, effortless grace.

This is the way they were always meant to be. Three of them, together, against the world.

Sakura closes her eyes to bask in the afternoon sun, and smiles.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

End of Story

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