Chapter Text
Amegakure is heavy with humidity, its dark streets steaming from an earlier downpour. The red-light district pulses with neon signs and hushed, pleasured voices, a mix of hedonism and danger. Sakura keeps her pace steady, her senses sharp.
She and Kakashi are pursuing a target they can’t afford to lose, but engaging the enemy now would risk civilian casualties. They need to fall back, maintain their stealth.
Suddenly, Kakashi pulls her into a narrow alcove, her back meeting the concrete wall. He casts a glance around the corner. The full moon hangs high above, its light glinting off the wet pavement, but the alley remains obscured in shadow. The sound of distant footsteps grows louder.
Kakashi stands in front of her, one hand braced on the wall beside her head. There’s tension in his stance, but no urgency in his movements, only a ready calm. He turns toward her, their eyes meeting.
His voice is low, measured. “Can I kiss you?”
Sakura stares, startled. Her mind scrambles for an answer in the sudden rush of adrenaline. “What?” It comes out sharper than intended.
Kakashi’s eyes scan the dimly lit alley again. “We need to blend in,” he says. Sakura’s gaze flickers across the street, where a couple is crossing boundaries in plain sight. In another alcove further down, two people are tangled in a passionate embrace.
Understanding dawns on her. They’re in the middle of a seedy district. No one would blink at an act like this.
She swallows, her heart pounding. “Yeah, of course,” she manages to say.
Kakashi’s gray eyes hold hers for a second before he shifts his attention once again to the street. His untamable silver hair catches the moonlight. Then, without hesitation, he reaches up and pulls his mask down.
Sakura’s breath catches. For the first time, she sees his whole face, and it’s staggering. He’s handsome, distractingly so. His features are sharp and defined. Her lips part in surprise.
Before she can fully process it, Kakashi steps closer. “Hold on to me,” he murmurs, his breath warm.
Sakura’s arms instinctively circle his neck as his hands slip beneath her thighs, lifting her effortlessly. She wraps her legs around his hips without thinking. Her pulse quickens. Her eyes flutter closed.
And then there's the soft press of his lips, and he’s kissing her, deep and unhurried.
Her mind blanks. The world outside their alcove fades beneath the overwhelming sensation of his kiss.
Sakura only vaguely registers when the enemy passes, the sound of footsteps fading away as her senses tingle with awareness. But as soon as the threat is gone, Kakashi pulls away. It’s sudden.
He sets her down, and his mask is back in place before Sakura can fully comprehend the movement. In the next fluid motion, he pulls a kunai from his pouch, his eyes scanning the area.
Sakura blinks, her breath shaky, but her chakra thrums beneath her skin, ready for action. The professional in her snaps back into place.
“Come on,” Kakashi says as he leads the way.
They move swiftly, their mission still at the forefront. But Sakura feels something shift inside her.
The mission ends without a hitch. Clean extraction of intel, no casualties. Successful by all parameters.
They slip out of the Land of Rain just as dawn turns the clouds a soft purple. When they cross into the Land of Fire and reach the small inn a few miles from the border, Sakura’s pink hair is damp and dark from sweat, her uniform sticky against her skin, and her limbs ache with exhaustion. The first thing she does after shutting herself in her room is shower. The second is sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the wall.
She can’t stop thinking about the kiss.
It replays without her permission. The sudden lift of his hand, the tug of the mask, the beauty of his face. The warmth of his mouth and the weight of him between her legs.
It had been a strategy. She knows that. He asked and she agreed. But gods, he’d kissed her like it wasn’t pretend.
Sakura lies back on the bed and stares up at the ceiling. She needs to press the memory down and keep it from spreading. It doesn’t matter that it had felt disorientingly real. It wasn’t.
Sakura groans and throws an arm over her eyes. She’s not interested in Kakashi. She’s never thought of him in that way. But now all she's thinking about is how his voice dipped when he told her to hang on to him. How his lips felt. How his tongue had pressed against hers, hot and slow, like they had all the time in the world.
How her heart had punched against her ribs.
She’s twenty. An adult. A shinobi, for gods' sake. She can handle this. It was just a kiss. Sure, a great one, but still, just a kiss.
Yet when she closes her eyes, she swears she can feel his mouth on hers.
They've been real friends for almost three years now. After the Fourth War, everything had changed, for the world, for Konoha. Kakashi had struggled with the loss of his Sharingan, readjusting to suddenly having blind spots again, edges. Sakura had helped him recalibrate. It had taken patience and stubbornness, and more than a few bruises.
He’d done the same for her. He’d helped her navigate the bureaucracy surrounding her formation of the children’s trauma clinic, taught her how to channel her frustration into winning council arguments.
It had made them equals in a way they hadn’t been before. She thinks of that now, lying in the small, quiet room, sunrise brightening the sky outside. How easily and steadily their friendship had grown. How he'd become the person she shares her worries and excitement with. How she'd become the person he sits quietly with when the world gets too loud.
And now… now she’s thinking about how he tasted.
She turns her head into the pillow and exhales sharply, as if she can breathe the thought out of her body. It doesn’t work.
Later, she finds Kakashi in the inn’s café. He's at a table by the window, where the ivy blocks the bright afternoon sun, one knee hooked over the other, book in his lap. There’s steam rising from his miso soup. It’s so normal it feels like a slap.
Sakura stands there for a second, watching him. Waiting, she realizes, for him to look up and pause. To give her a glance that says, Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it too.
But when he does look up, he gives her a lazy smile, his lips curving beneath his mask. It's the same smile he's given her a hundred times. A thousand.
"Sleep well?" he asks.
"Fine," Sakura says, taking the seat across from him.
And that’s it. He doesn’t seem awkward or different or even aware that anything out of the ordinary happened.
She waits through the meal. Through the journey back to Konoha. Through the walk to the Hokage tower. But the entire way, he's what he always is. Kakashi, calm and composed.
It shouldn’t matter. It had been a tactical decision. But when she agreed, she hadn’t known it would stay with her like this, that it would echo in her blood.
She says goodbye after their mission debrief in the Hokage’s office. “You did good,” he says lightly. “Go get some rest.” And then he's off.
Sakura stands there long after he’s out of sight, the ache inexplicable. Nothing changed in that alley. At least, not for Kakashi. But for Sakura, everything feels different.