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Weaver
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Sasuke refuses to let her within two feet of himself. He offers no explanation, but Sakura knows he's wary of seals, wary of the way she can shut down his mind and body with a single touch. She feels no particular need to tell him that total anesthetic seals need at least two minutes' set up or that a determined and active ninja can easily guard against them. She also doesn't mention that she doesn't need physical contact -- give her some blood and she can work such basic medical ninjutsu from a distance of at least ten yards.

Sasuke's made no signs of abandoning her and Naruto, but she likes the security of knowing he's basing his moves on an inaccurate picture of her skills. If he changes his mind, or if Orochimaru can use the curse seal as a form of long-distance control, Sakura can take him down before he starts looking for an attack.

She was surprised, back in Konoha, to realize he had no resistance whatsoever to her seal... but on reflection, it would've been even stranger for Kabuto to teach people to resist his own skills. That man struck her as vaguely untrustworthy as long ago as their first chuunin exam, and Naruto and Tsunade's stories only cemented her dislike. Medic-nin can't keep the traditional healer's oath -- they're still ninja, still required to fight and kill and disable -- but they do follow its spirit as much as possible.

Tsunade-sama defends Konoha. She would do almost anything rather than start a war -- she's never said anything straight out, but Sakura's watched her teacher react to mission reports and pace her office, running her hands through her hair and twisting her face into a pained scowl, whenever Orochimaru's name comes up.

Sakura hasn't taken her healer's oath yet -- Tsunade-sensei was going to give her the final tests two months from now -- so she isn't breaking any promises by deciding to kill Itachi in cold blood. She doesn't have to wait for orders, or ask for an assessment of the costs and benefits of a human's death. She doesn't have to ask the kami for forgiveness and think of an appropriate penance for her transgression.

When Itachi is dead, she thinks, she wants to break Kabuto's fingers past the point of effective repair, and seal his chakra. Let him learn firsthand the pain he's caused others, learn not only the physical pain, but also the emotional pain of having his life's work, his most precious things, torn from him.

He claims he's a medic-nin. Sakura wraps her arms more firmly around her knees and glares into the tiny campfire that Naruto built and Sasuke lit. Medic-nin don't leave their patients tangled up into knots, unable to accept a helping hand. Medic-nin don't turn people into sociopaths.

Kabuto wants revenge for the destruction of his village during the great wars. Kabuto, who found a family in Konoha, who learned a skill, who could have made a home.

Physician, heal thyself.

"What're you mad at now, Sakura-chan?" Naruto asks, breaking into her thoughts.

"Oathbreakers," she says, and then clarifies: "Kabuto. When we're done, I want to kill him too."

Naruto shrugs easily and slouches back against a tree, firelight staining him even more orange than usual. He looks half asleep; Sakura knows how misleading that impression is. "Hey, I'll help you," he says. "I owe him for the last time we met -- he tried to kill Tsunade-baba." His grin emphasizes his too-sharp canines, and his eyes don't crinkle the way they do when he's happy. Sakura wonders when she watched him enough to notice the difference.

In the corner of her eye, she can see Sasuke's attention snap back from wherever his mind was wandering; is he interested in Kabuto or Tsunade-sama? She doesn't much care, so long as he isn't shutting them out. "Tsunade-sensei never told me that -- she just said you fought him," Sakura says. Probably she was embarrassed at being threatened by a man who perverts her own calling, or angry at herself for letting him get away. Tsunade likes to bury large pieces of her past.

"Yeah, that sounds like the old bag," Naruto grumbles. "She just doesn't want to admit that I saved her life."

"You fought Kabuto?" Sasuke asks, arching a brow over one red-and-black eye.

Naruto glares. "Yeah, I did -- I'm not a liar! But he used some freaky healing jutsu and put himself back together after I hit him with Rasengan. Hey, hey, do you like that creep or something, bastard? Don't tell me you care about people in Hidden Sound."

Sasuke shrugs minimally. "No."

Naruto and Sakura wait, hoping he'll volunteer more information. He doesn't.

"Remind me again why we bothered?" Naruto asks nobody in particular. Sasuke twitches, so slightly Sakura would never have noticed if she hadn't been hoping for the movement.

Good, she thinks, letting the conversation lapse. He does still care, even if he won't admit it to them. Actually, knowing Sasuke, he's probably not admitting it to himself either... or maybe he doesn't even know what he's feeling. It's funny -- for a boy whose eyes can see everything, he's always missed an awful lot. For some reason, he never copied normal human behavior, normal human feelings. Any normal boy would have dealt better with her and Ino -- would at least have told them flat out that he wasn't interested and didn't like them.

Not Sasuke. He just glared and seemed to expect them to read his mind.

Maybe that works for Uchiha and Hyuuga, who can see and understand the slightest nuances of body language, but most people can't read that deeply. Even with three years of training in human physiology and psychology, Sakura still has to guess and hope.

'Look underneath the underneath,' Kakashi-sensei always says. So. Underneath Sasuke's indifference and distrust, underneath his scorn and boredom, underneath his callousness... he never actually told her or Naruto to go away, not until the end. Even then, she thinks he might simply have wanted to keep them safe from the consequences of his choice.

That certainly didn't work very well.

They're a team, even during those three fractured years, even as they fumble to fit the broken pieces back together and scrape glass against raw wounds. They're bound together by battle, by friendship, by trust -- even now Sasuke must trust them to some extent or he'd be trying to leave -- and maybe... probably not, but a girl can hope... maybe by love.

A true ninja team is like a family, bound by blood. Their blood ties are born of death, not of life, but they bind all the same.

Sakura stares into the fire, letting Naruto and Sasuke's forms blur in her peripheral vision, one bright and one dark, fire and shadow, both simultaneously human and monstrous, shrouding inner horrors under a semblance of normality. Who would believe a cute, earnest, blond boy is a demon? Who would believe a pale, handsome, boy can become a twisted oni? Sakura believes. But she believes even more in their humanity.

Most people would look at the three of them and dismiss her -- female, soft, raised in a loving family, without a special power, doomed to fall behind. But Sakura's seen underneath the underneath. She knows the boys need her, need her to be a bridge, need her to remind them they're more than monsters.

She's a medic-nin. She can't turn away. She needs them to need her.

Right now, the boys need her to be confident and cheerful and reassure them that they've made the right decisions. Sakura unwraps her arms from her knees as a weight tugs on one of her trap-wires. "I think that's dinner," she says, drawing a kunai. "Sasuke, make a skewer. Naruto, find the seasoning."

She walks into the twilit forest without looking back. She knows the boys will listen. If they don't -- if they start arguing -- she can always hit them so they'll think twice next time. Sakura grins to herself as she follows her wires; Tsunade-sama may be the world's most incompetent person at judging odds, but she gives remarkably useful relationship advice at times.

Tsunade is also a good teacher. Sakura feels the reassuring weight of scrolls in her pockets, slapping against her thigh as she carries the strangled squirrel back to the clearing. She's been studying seals -- three years picking Kakashi's brain about the curse seal on Sasuke's shoulder, three years reading moldering records of what the Fourth Hokage did to Naruto, three years watching Tsunade-sensei bind and channel power. Kakashi didn't ward Sasuke's curse seal this time. She did.

She took a drop of Naruto's blood when they returned from Hidden Sand. She took Sasuke's when they kidnapped him from Hidden Sound. With blood and ink, Sakura can track those two seals -- track her teammates -- track her...her brothers -- to the ends of the earth. And if the webs of ink shatter on her scrolls, if the bonds of blood unravel, she'll track the killers and bring her family justice.

No matter how many oaths she has to break.

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