Chapter Text
“You have to talk to us about what you see sometime, Sakura.” Sasuke claims, arms crossed across his chest. It’s just the three of them again, Kakashi-sensei had disappeared again after Sakura had failed to throw off another simple genjutsu. Something about hanging a chuunin by their toes because, “slotted her for genjutsu my ass,” but to be honest, he’d barely caught the words.
“It’s not pretty, Sasuke. What I see.” Sakura explained flatly, expressions smoothing out, betraying nothing. Even her chakra smoothed out, the little spikes of emotions tempering into vague ripples. Naruto frowned, concentrated a little harder on his teammate’s signature.
“How’d you do that, Sakura-chan?” He exclaimed. “Make your chakra hide your emotions like that.?” Her eyes cut to Sasuke, and there was reluctance in the way her lips quirked down at the corners.
“I saw it,” she said after a long pause. “What else,” Sasuke prompted, “did you see.” An unspoken order to tell him hung in the air between them, poisoning the already tense atmosphere. They locked eyes, and Naruto swore Sakura’s chakra shuddered and ballooned out in fear and determination, but with how fast she tamped it back into a rippling pool, he couldn’t be sure. However, the grim smile he and Sasuke both saw gave him a bad feeling.
“Well, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura crooned, voice so sweet and yet cutting, “I saw death! Your death, my death, Naruto’s, Kakashi-sensei’s...You name them, I saw them. But mostly mine, you understand?” She cocked her head to one side, and her smile grew pained. It was the sort of smile you saw on the not-safe-for-genin jounin. The sort of people who were one trigger away from snapping in a bad way, the kind you didn’t want to scare new genin with, let alone Academy prospectives. The sort Naruto glimpsed sometimes through not-quite-curtained windows on the psychiatric floor during his yearly game of avoid-the-doctor, when he was supposed to be getting his physical and check-up.
“I don’t get out of them until I’m dead, you see?” Sakura continued. And then she laughed, loud and harsh. “Apparently, there’s quite a bit of seer blood on my mother’s side of the family.” She said bitterly, turning her head away, finally breaking her staring contest with Sasuke. “I’ll understand if you guys want me off the team. It’s a crippling weakness.”
Sasuke surprised Naruto and Sakura both with his completely serious words. “No.” he declared, “We work well enough together, all of us. I’m not breaking in a new teammate, who knows if they’ll work well with me, let alone the deadlast!” Sasuke finished, without too much teasing towards Naruto, before bulldozing right over the blond’s offended yelp, “You’re a dependable teammate, Sakura. We’ll figure something out.” Finished, Sasuke uncrossed his arms and stalked off back towards Konoha proper, leaving Sakura and Naruto in his wake.