Chapter Text
a type of three-sided polygon where there are no congruent sides; each point is differently distant from each other.
Her fingers tremble and ache in a way only a medic's could. There'd been a point in her sea of hospital shifts where the chakra could no longer be summoned; just pathetic little sparks that can barely wash away a headache, let alone repair a sliced abdomen. She had no choice but to go old-fashioned and dive in the classic way with a needle and thread, suturing and directing others to pour and heal base wounds while she quite-literally knitted flesh to flesh.
It's a consequence, she reminds herself, of war.
To be brought down from the high of victory, to be sobered up after the win. Patching together the people is her expertise and it's where she's had to bury herself. She could never hate her teacher for giving her these demanded skills, could never hate those who get injured and stretch her shifts further, or hate the many demands asked of her.
(This, among other duties to her village, from the most glorious to the most sacrificial.)
She jams in the little brass key that's always in her breast pocket, missing only once from the sheer exhaustion that carves into her bones. Sitting on three and a half shifts make her feel weary and aged, and nothing will be better than a protein bar, a hot shower, and a mattress. Fuck the paperwork that's followed her here.
Pushing the front door open, she nearly trips on the sandals that are thrown haphazardly before the step. Odd considering how she's the messiest in the house by comparison.
Tiredly, she slips hers off and slides them to the side before doing the same to the bigger, black pair. When she feels the sensation of something wet and thick, her features twist. Then the smell wafts up.
Blood.
Dread grips her heart and in a split second, she drops all the folders in her arms, a bag, her medic's robes, and follows the smattering and smear-tracks like a hound. They stop in the living room where a bloodied hand is stamped onto the pristine white lampshade—the only thing on and illuminating the walls in a gruesome, fingerprinted red.
Dearly beloved, her mind rings ominously as her stomach swoops and she stumbles on, numb and empty. We are gathered here today to celebrate the holy union of three parties.
But it's a dreary vision, framed by red roses and a casket.
Here lies—
"—Sasuke Uchiha," she whispers in the silence, "do not die on me. Do not."
She presses quivering hands to the hole carved into his stomach, summoning forth the chakra at the very bottom of her soul, the bare minimum that keeps her lungs breathing and heart beating. He's icy to the touch but he's always like that: cold and aloof, unfeeling, marbled skin and wintry eyes. Like the walking, living dead, beautiful and broken and distant.
And dying here in their living room.
The little glow begins to flicker and panic robs her of breath. She pleads from within, searches desperately for the thin thread that she can scrounge up because all she needs is just a little, just some, to manipulate efficiently, perfectly, to mimic the sutures she'd been doing, to save—
Pinwheel eyes shoot open, glowing red and eerie in the dark and the corners of her spotted vision hallucinates the battlefield, the war, the way this man scales the ground and crams his fist unapologetically into her chest. Her hand retracts hastily and she starts backing away like a startled animal, and when he moves to stand slowly, she hysterically asks for time.
More time.
"I need more time to save them! I can do it!"
I can't give you time, Yamato says hollowly. This is it.
"Sakura- Sakura!"
Sasuke takes her shaking hands and pins them to her sides, glaring until the incessant babbling stops. It only makes her beg harder, louder, and he moves to the pressure point at her neck.
She goes silent at the familiarity, snaps from one realm to the next and flinches so violently that he's forced to freeze. She stares at him like she's staring at Death: terrified.
Expectant.
He bares his teeth, growling, hating the look, and she wonders drunkenly whether he will finally do it. She thinks they all tip-toe around one another here, but she does so the most of all. One wrong move and something will happen—maybe that something is that he will go from touching her neck to snapping it.
Sometimes, she believes it will be the kindest thing he's ever done for her.
"—What the hell happened here?"
The foreground sounds fuzzy, like white noise mixed with cotton and she collapses against the couch—with non-bloodied cushions—while Sasuke rises to meet whoever else is yelling.
"—don't know! She just fucking went insane—"
"And you? What the fuck are you doing here?"— A weapon pouch thumps against the ground. Shuriken clatter. "—ever think about maybe she hates you?—"
"Rich!" Sasuke snarls angry words, punches and breaks stuff lining the fireplace. "—from the one fucking his own teammate before his wedding—"
"What excuse do you have?" his opposer seethes dangerously, "how much of the Five Nations have you slept with before your wedding—"
"—You're no better!"
"You run like a coward!" A kunai is launched. "You've been gone for six months!"
"You're one to talk," Sasuke growls menacingly. "You were gone for five before me."
"Fuck you."
"Fuck you," Sasuke hisses. "I'm going to the Fifth tomorrow to end this goddamn arrangement and I'll get petitioners if I fucking have to."
"Fine," is spat back. "Three years of this farce was three years too many."
Sasuke growls, says something angry and condescending, then turns around to leave. Seconds later, the second-floor room on the rightmost side slams closed. The one left behind sighs aggravatedly, his storming chakra in turmoil. He smells like stamping ink and fresh reams of paper and anger and disappointment.
He stands there and somewhere in the hyperventilating, distant haze in Sakura's head, she thinks he must be staring at her.
Then he steps carefully, quietly, over all their broken belongings and nameless displays of disposable "decorations."
"Sakura," he mutters. His voice is of a similar quality to Sasuke's, Sakura thinks, and in a fit of realization, stumbles to take hold of the thought. It's the first calm, coherent thing to pull through the induced cloud of memories and regrets. "What happened?"
He's always sounded patient, polite, but that's all it's ever been. Between their courting period where she found him with Tenten, and their sham exchanged in the form of vows, he'd always been good at the lack of inflection in his voice. He's only ever shown two things: appearing collected or shouting in anger.
Like Sasuke.
"I-" Her throat hurts. "I thought he was dying."
He wasn't though. Now, without the panic stuttering through her lungs, she knows he wasn't. A kunai wound was what he had, a simple stab injury that felt maybe only half an hour old, fresh; she could've knitted it with a millilitre of chakra if she wanted, but she saw more than there was. The blood on his shoe, on the floor, and on the couch wasn't his; the handprint was a result of him putting pressure on the stab and touching the lampshade.
But she saw gore and death and him crowding her chest with his hand, grabbing for the heart that's always belonged to him, intent on crushing it physically because emotionally and mentally wasn't enough.
She saw the faces of the people she failed to save, the ones she did save who killed themselves anyway because war stole their families, their loved ones, including hers but she's alive, right? She's the lucky one.
Right?
Yamato shakes his head in her mind and tells her that he can't give her any more time, feels him pulling her hands away from her dying parents' bodies as the seventh wave of enemies is seconds upon them.
Then a kunai is lodged into her mother's temple and it's over anyways, the chance is gone.
The glass beside her is moved aside and suddenly her vision is filled with liquid mercury.
"Go to bed," Neji tells her, a foot away and miles gone. His eyes are hard, slightly uncaring, and a touch irritated. "We'll solve this tomorrow."
She doesn't know what he might mean: this little fight out of many, or their damaged marriage.
Neji shuts his bedroom door, exhaling loudly. It doesn't rest the agitation in his bones but it keeps him from crossing the hall and punching the Uchiha's lights out. Running fingers through long hair, he leans against his desk, reaching carefully with chakra until it trickles downstairs.
Sakura edges into his awareness, an empty well and a bundle of tightly coiled nerves. He recognized what she'd started going through for what it was: a post-traumatic episode. An induced hallucination triggered by a million terrible memories—and who's the cause?
Sasuke.
His jaw clenches tightly, wired like it's stuck. Six months Sasuke had been gone, off on a requested S-Rank to god-knows-where while Neji was stuck here, proctoring the next ANBU exams, having to return to an empty house or an empty woman.
Both were equally hard to see.
Sakura, he knows, runs herself so hard into the ground that soon, it might be into an early grave. They are all workaholics but that's only one of three things they have in common, the other two being ANBU-grade and hailing from the same village. Since their ordered courtship, engagement, and subsequent marriage, the three of them had become nothing but strangers sharing ownership of a single house.
Sasuke is most famously known for the hundreds of solo missions under his belt, Neji, known for being a fearsome ANBU Captain. Sakura's skills are in higher demand at home than on the field, so she's forced to stay here and stitch together those that are torn apart. It had to be the worst possible pairing to be thought of, but the Councilmen approved, and the clanheads and the Hokage agreed (the latter albeit reluctantly, but playing favorites wasn't something she could do this time). There were few who really objected to the arrangement.
But it's like living among the dead when he's around here because any of them are always gone, whether it's in mind, body, or spirit.
He's always seen himself settling down with Tenten in the future—he'd even gone as far as to ignore the ordered courting of Sakura to continue meeting with his former teammate. But he'd found it'd only been sex to Tenten—during the post-war checkups, her egg count cropped up low and carrying to term deemed was dangerous. And she'd admitted to slowly falling for Lee. Neji became a ghost after that, then resigned himself to this sham that the higherups put him to.
He reaches again, feels Sakura still downstairs but reclined against the couch. Her signature is like a dying ember and there's no sleep on her person, but unconsciousness. A pinprick of guilt highlights his chest at leaving her down there, but then he swats it away. They're grown ups and not each other's responsibility.
Of course, he thinks, embittered, freshly showered and dressed for bed. Of course this is how it ends up.
The most powerful of his generation from the Hyuuga, the heir and survivor from the Uchiha, and arguably the strongest kunoichi alive, a daughter-figure to the Hokage—on paper, they're irrefutable matches, logical and perhaps even perfect in a way.
In practice, they couldn't be more different.
Tsunade glares at Sasuke, drilling fiery holes into the scowl that he dares shoot to his Hokage.
"No."
"But—"
"No!" She slams her desk and stands, and even though she's shorter than him, her menacing presence is still towering. "And do you know why no?"
"Because you don't care about her—"
"You finish that sentence," she hisses dangerously, vindictively, "and I will remove you from active duty, brat."
His hackles raise and the pinwheeled flower in his eye spins to life. She barks a laugh.
"You dare turn your Sharingan on me?"—and the statement is punctuated by movement at the edges of his awareness. ANBU, responding to the killing intent he exudes. He sucks air through his teeth, snarling in a way, then shuts the bloodline off. "Now that you've so graciously decided to become human again," Tsunade sarcastically quips, "you will stand there and listen to me say what I said in the beginning when I first told you why this arrangement is the way that it is."
"I—"
"Ah," she stops him, her smile an angry, vicious mix of irritation and dislike. "No talking." Her hands settle on her hips, eyes narrowed. "Now you know that after a war, a baby boom follows. In war, we lose thousands of lives and risk a thousand more for the generation to come—how do you think that generation comes to be?"
Sasuke scowls. He's not here for the birds and the bees talk but Tsunade takes sick pleasure in the annoyance on his face.
"Of course, two years after the war and what do we have? No baby boom, but we sure as hell know everyone's going at it like rabbits." She crosses her arms now. "So we check the health and sex of all of our people."
The Uchiha refuses to blanch at the topic. He remembers that irritating period when everyone was getting a physical and the questions started getting too personal.
"And would you look at that. The normal is nine-percent men, eleven-percent women are infertile at any other time. Come away with the war, and men are triple that and women are quadruple."
Tsunade sits now, regal in her Hokage robes. She stares at him, all amber eyes and wisdom.
"The revival of the old marital law was a necessity, Sasuke. Dozens of bloodlines are at stake, including yours and the Hyuuga. Nearly fifty percent women are infertile and over half of that number can't carry to term—so you do the math."
"Did you have to make it arranged?" Sasuke demands, teeth gritted. "Did it have to be Sakura and Neji?"
"Yes." Her reply is unrepentant. "Neji is the last male closest to the main line of Hyuuga. You're the last Uchiha. Sakura is not only fertile, but politically secure, and chakra control is genetic and dominantly passed, the same way the Byakugan and the Sharingan are. This kills multiple birds with one stone."
He growls and she smirks sardonically.
"The world is unfair, Uchiha. You think I would've paired her with you two? The girl I look at as a daughter? Not a chance." She threads her fingers beneath her chin, inquisitive, eyes bright. "But ever since we all decided to fight in that war, we've decided to do everything for the sake of ensuring our childrens' future. For the three of you, this is your part."
The trio are anything but a functional coupling. Their marriage had never been consummated—it only marked the end of other trysts, other connections. Before their vows were exchanged, Sasuke had a habit of picking up women when off on long missions, Neji had Tenten, and Sakura indulged herself after hard shifts and sleepless nights. They had lovers—none of them each other.
They'd never kissed, never desired, no plans about children or families had come despite the conditions. The house they live in is Sakura's because she owns it; Sasuke used to have an apartment and Neji, the Hyuuga Compound. It became less of a home to her once they moved in, filled it with the barest necessities, nothing personal except the faint scents left behind and the clan insignias on their backs. Her parents used to live here when their original house was decimated in Pein's Attack, but since their death, she has taken the master bedroom, Sasuke has taken her own, and Neji, the guest.
The men have never known why there are three living quarters here, nor why her parents had never come to her wedding.
They're faceless in the sea of war losses, death impactful on their only daughter. No parents, no siblings—the Harunos were only three people and two out of the three are dead. She assumed that her husbands thought her parents didn't come because it was too much to see their babygirl be wed off to two clan heirs in what would be termed as the "Baby Machine" Marital Law.
No illusions exist, not even to their friends, to the citizens of the village. The smiles are strained, the atmospheres hard; Neji is tense around his former team, Naruto is stiff with Hinata on his arm, Ino slips away early with Sai after a few awkward laughs. The Uchiha-Haruno-Hyuuga union was a historical affair but everyone knows that it was nothing more than duty, and while others have settled and fallen in love after weddings, they have not. They're too different.
This marriage is simply a label and they all live under it.
Neji heads to the house once, mentally exhausted. He and Shikamaru had been poring over a rising case to the west; Grass hasn't seen activity since the Snake Sannin—until now. But with Orochimaru and Kabuto quietly on Konoha's side, who could be causing the uproars?
They had little clues except for a bloody symbol drawn on a scrap of clothing, bright and stark red among a pile of charred bodies.
Sakura is assigned to the forensics team, analyzing pieces of genetic information left on the scene, and in charge of autopsies on recovered corpses; Sasuke had been on the dispatch squads that brought them to the village.
He picks up the reference material that he'd needed, then leaves the house. Sakura must be finished with the first autopsy by now so he makes a beeline for the hospital morgue. Nodding to the people at the front desk, he descends into the basement where the temperature is crisp and cold, like a giant freezer for the dead.
Passing through to the help station, he asks for Doctor Haruno and is directed to one of the many halls spiderwebbing the area. She's in the third hall, in the furthest room down.
The closer he comes, the more he sees that Sakura is not alone. She's out cold, face plastered to the icy surface of one of the metal tables, a dead body flayed open behind her. He ignores the uncomfortable feeling crawling along his shoulders; he's killed plenty times and seen those killed many more, but there's something unsettling about the way she can freely be unconscious with an opened up human at her back.
Frowning down at the top of her head, he drops the file and surveys the area, noticing notes scrawled in unintelligible handwriting with equally difficult words. The body behind them is marked with a pen, notable features highlighted. Skin is pulled back over muscle, meticulously divided up into layers and peeled open for inspection. Some areas are drilled down into bone, well-kept organs as showpieces. Jars of them are preserved on a nearby cart.
The brain is the most eye-catching thing on the corpse, cracked open and on display in an almost grossly artistic manner.
"Ugh, fuck."
Neji's lips press together as he looks away, seeing Sakura groggily lift her head and rub at a temple. She doesn't seem to notice him standing behind her on the other side of the gurney, instead pressing a little button that brings up the intercom.
"Yes, Sakura-sama?" He recognizes the voice from the front desk.
"Same cause," she mutters half-heartedly, rubbing her eye socket with the back of her wrist. "I'll have the reports down; send someone to wrap up the body. Bring in the fifth corpse for prep."
"Of course, right away."
He feels like he's intruding almost. There's practically never a time after the war where the old Sakura exists—the one that curses like a sailor and grumbles at the air, and he's never in the hospital or around hospital staff enough to see the self-confident presence she seems to give off.
She's almost always timid and jumpy, scurrying off at the sight of him or Sasuke.
—Wait, fifth?
She leans back in her chair, pops the bones that ridge along spine and shoulders, then stands, brushing strands of hair that has fallen from the thick bun it's always in. Upon turning around, she freezes at the sight of him like an easily scared deer. Gone is the woman from seconds ago, the one who reminded him of the person who'd punched a goddess.
"...Neji," she says finally, eyeing him and especially his hands. "What are you doing here?"
Stone settles onto his face like home and he crosses his arms slowly. "I brought an interrogation report from one of the prisoners." He nods to the files on her desk. "And a piece of reference material from the house on what we saw. Shikamaru and I are cross-referencing our evidence and thought we should get some of your findings on the bodies."
She wipes her hands on her medic's robe. "Right."
Green eyes glance to the body between them before she hesitantly moves to stand at it's head. She motions for Neji to come closer to where the crown is peeled back and skull cracked open. She slips gloves on, wields a scalpel and long, thin medical tongs, prying open brain matter and tissue until she picks apart an empty cavity within the folds.
"Located here was the hippocampus." Her head nods to one of the jars on the cart labeled so. "It was abnormally small when I extracted it—possible signs of foul play."
"What is its usual size?" he asks, picking up the jar and peering at the odd, seahorse shaped organ.
"Approximately three to three-point-five cubic centimetres in volume in an adult," she says, removing the tongs and scalpel. Her features twist in contemplation. "It's believed that the larger, the better your memory."
"And this one was smaller?"
"By quite the margin." She removes her gloves, tosses them in the bin. "Only about two-point-four cubic centimetres." He puts down the jar, a slender eyebrow moving up in silent question. Her head tilts, shaking hair from her face. "I believe the hippocampus was compromised. Tampered with in order to induce amnesia so that these so-called 'merchants' that happened to be dead nearby the base aren't actually merchants. They're enemy nin."
His mouth hardens, eyes narrowing. Enemy nin.
"Your reasons to believe that?"
Sakura's lips purse and suddenly there she is, a glimpse of the girl from the war. "Genjutsu, is what I'm saying. This hippocampus looks like a drained version of a normal one. Various portions of the entire brain looked to have undergone some kind of trauma—abnormally concentrated swelling, for example. Small-scale versions of the swelling happens when a genjutsu is cast, since your opponent's chakra acts as a mental barrier to cut certain processes, altering your reality." She waves absently to the open cranium between them. "Long term blockage results in this—light hemorrhaging, which indicates memory interference."
"Someone removed their memories?"
"Someone replaced them," she corrects, tone leaving little room for rebuttal. Not that he can—this isn't quite his forte. "What did you guys find?"
"Shikamaru mentioned that Yamanaka found a psychological barrier. Missing parts in the psyche."
Sakura nods almost distractedly, chewing on her lower lip just a bit. "Makes sense. Ino's technique almost always enters the mind through the frontal lobe, which is one of the many places where the swelling is concentrated. It was the same for the other three bodies before this one."
Neji takes this in, begins the mental process of cross-referencing all that he's just learned. "What use will a fifth autopsy yield if you're so sure?"
"To make sure that we're seeing correlation and not just coming to the wrong conclusions," she simply says. "The amnesic episodes might just be a coincidence—instances where they happen to be a team unlucky enough to be there, for example, and the real enemy planted them as distractions. Rough-housing for another, and the violence has compromised their long or short term memories. Unfortunate timing, substance abuse, latent trauma, among others. A fifth will confirm correlation, but we need causation as well."
"And how do we do that?"
Her responding smile is slightly surprising. Grim, he sees, knowing. Aged. "You have to ask Sasuke for that."
Someone knocks on the door and three medics come in—two to wrap up the current body and one to prep the place for the next.
Sakura steps back but continues: "Have him use the Sharingan. With a Mangekyou, he has the ability to survey the finer presence of residual chakra traces. If he recognizes genjutsu indeed on all five of these bodies, then we have causation."
"What about the two living men?"
"That's for the Byakugan." Her attention is leaving, truly professional mask slipping on. "If you can spot disruptions in the cranial tenketsu, the evidence is damning."
He hums. "I see."
She smiles again, tilted and hesitant and for a moment the confidence disappears because she seems to always be like that around him and Sasuke—unsure. Her fingers fidget.
"Well. If you will excuse me."
Sakura turns away just as a fourth and fifth medic appear at the door, body bag on a gurney and greeting, "Haruno-sama" on their tongues. He takes it as his cue to leave.
It's poetic tragedy almost, how well they seem to function together in everything except for where it personally matters.
They all have nightmares.
It's obvious Sasuke would—he suffers underneath the wicked bloom of his brother's Mangekyou but instead of just seeing Itachi kill off their clan, he watches him cut the heads off his parents' shoulders in their bedroom, then turn the sword on himself.
"Know that I will always love you," Itachi would say, crying bloody tears with an equally red smile stolen from their childhood, before he jerks the blade sideways and slits his own throat. And Sasuke, small and young or tall and old, will still scream and cry and feel like he wants to join them wherever they go.
So he'll shoot wide awake, sweating, throat raw and in pain. He'll tear off his shirt and throw his blankets away. He'll knock his head against the headboard to return to earth, Sharingan fluctuating, then riot out of the house through the window.
Neji also has nightmares. He remembers the day he hears his father is dead for the sake of his uncle. He can feel the burn that sears through his forehead, linking dangerous, constant chakra to his eyes so that if ever he died, his bloodline will seal closed. It's like a trigger always at the ready, pressed to the temple. He knows the feeling so well but he can't help the wretched sounds that leave his body when he falls asleep alive and wakes up dead.
In the aftermath, he sits, face buried in his hands in misery. Hiashi is dead because he'd pushed Neji out of the way and taken the hit meant for Naruto by the Ten Tails. Gai is forever wheelchair bound, Tenten didn't love him back, Lee's his strained best friend.
Life falls apart little by little for Neji but it stands on thin legs and he has to keep going anyway. So he puts bandages to his forehead and meditates in the moonlight, intent on forgetting where and who he is.
Sakura is someone people would never think has nightmares, but she does. She does in vivid and graphic detail. She remembers the war a lot and how she summoned Katsuyu and divided up the slug's body to heal people. She can feel the stress on her control and her chakra from the sapping, how just the slightest mishap and thousands upon thousands of nin would be killed if she wasn't careful.
She remembers the way Naruto dies and she has to force her hand into his chest to manually pump his heart. And how Sasuke shouts at her to keep his left eye safe while he goes in to steal the Rinnegan. And how she impaled herself on a chakra rod to give her team the opening on Madara. How Sasuke wanted to kill her handfuls of times, how she loved him anyways, how she punched a goddess and rocked the earth and saved many and lost more.
And how she was right there to heal her parents, just milliseconds away, just a little more fucking time—but she hesitates, the kunai's handle-deep in her mother's temple and—what use was there?
Neji and Sasuke were damned to events out of their control. It's in Neji's house traditions to get marked; Sasuke was much too young to hurt anything, let alone save anyone.
But Sakura was a grown girl, sixteen, Tsunade's prized disciple and just unlocking the diamond seal on her forehead and she still lost her parents.
I can't give you time, Yamato says in the background, emptily, like he thinks she should just accept it but how can a single daughter accept the death of her only family when she was right there, a talented medic, brilliant and powerful; just a second more and they'd be stable and alive and they died anyway. This is it.
Useless.
Useless, useless girl.
She wakes from this bloody kaleidoscope of nightmares with the most heartbreaking sobs of all. She drags the blankets off her bed and sits in the corner by the window, rocking herself, bathed in the moon until dawn.
What a lie her life is quickly turning out to be.
It's a rare moment when they're all home at the same time. Sakura is sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, papers scattered around her like leaves falling from a tree. Her hand is unceasing, scrawling thin and thick, curving words across anything that required her hand. She's in so much of a zone that she almost doesn't notice when Sasuke appears in the hallway from upstairs, casually dressed and holding a report scroll.
Almost being the key term—it's hard to miss the man she's loved and hated all her life.
She tenses up so, so slightly, that if he weren't such a seasoned, elite shinobi it might've gone unnoticed. But he did see the smallest flex of her fist, the way she pauses a nanosecond over a word before continuing to write it out, that his eyes narrow and he puts on a coat of winter in response.
Like a wraith, he travels to the loveseat that's adjacent to the couch she's leaning against—the very same one she often finds him bleeding out on after missions. He sits, puts one ankle on top of the other knee, spreads the scroll and begins writing.
There's nothing but scratching that fills the air paired with the occasional piece of paper rustling. It's almost peaceful in a way, the company tolerable to an extent. Sakura's still wary and Sasuke's still irritated.
But what else is new?
Then the front door softly swings open, shuts, and Neji appears, carrying a folder with a ream of paper tucked inside. He must be fresh from HQ or TI, fatigue written on his nosebridge and across his shoulders.
A look of confusion highlights his features at the sight of two ticking time bombs in one room but it's schooled quickly into indifference. He ignores them, heads upstairs to work on whatever he's brought home with a condescending frown.
Sasuke clenches his jaw then gets up with a scoff. He walks into the kitchen and out the backyard door, not slamming the sliding glass shut but closing it firm enough to make a point. Outside he works in the grass, beneath a tree and avoiding everybody else.
Sakura stops, buries her face in her hands and almost physically tries to sort the mess in her head with shaking fingertips.
They tip-toe, she reminds herself, around one another. One day, one of them will snap in a manner that will permanently end something. Or someone.
Is it too much to hope for that it'll be her?
They almost never interact. Everything is polite and distant and more often than not, cold.
Sakura is only home once every two or three days. She gets to the house at around one in the morning, makes herself a small snack or crams a protein bar down her throat, showers, and locks her door to sleep. Then she's gone four hours later.
Sasuke is only home once every three or four months. He gets to the house at any time in the day but usually through his bedroom window, will eat two tomatoes, seals his room to rest and then head out to train in his downtime.
Neji is the only one who goes home regularly, usually every day except for the occasional one or two spent at HQ or with Shikamaru, or the missions that crop up requiring his expertise and Captainship.
He comes through the front door, takes off his sandals and sets them aside. He doesn't call out to anyone and never flips on the entryway light—only the kitchen and living room ones. He makes himself a simple dinner of rice and fish, sometimes indulges in soba herring, has chamomile tea, then hits the switches to go upstairs. He does paperwork for an hour, showers, then goes to bed.
He doesn't lock his door because they would never come to his room. He's hyperaware of his housemates coming and going at random times.
Funny. They're all technically bonded by marriage and that's all they are.
Housemates.
Sasuke rubs at his eyes, irritated beyond belief. When Shikamaru asked for him to be there at the TI headquarters for an interrogation, he thought it'd be a quick ordeal. Turns out, all seven merchants they captured and thought were civilians actually fell under the new enemy organization—the two that are alive and the five that are dead confirmed as much.
They needed the expertise of the Sharingan to detect foul play and pick apart the mind, perhaps even unlock the unedited versions of their brains. Turned out to be a lot harder than expected; it's actually why Neji happens to be on the couch while he's at the loveseat, equally exhausted and equally rubbing at his eyes.
Whoever's replacing their memories must have a similar set of skills as the Yamanaka but with a lethality of a higher grade. Neji's Byakugan allowed for the finer visuals of the chakra network that makes up the brain, which squeezes apart an opening. It was under Sakura's direction that they aimed for the hippocampi on the living prisoners, followed closely by blockage detection.
"All places of memory," Ino had read off on the report. "Sakura thinks if we aim these places and undo the blocks, we can get a better read on the memories that got replaced."
It was a long, painfully tedious process, and while he and Neji have above average chakra control, it's not nearly as fine as Sakura's; not fine enough for a job that requires guiding hypothetical threads through needles.
So here are the two of them now, mentally beat, slightly irritable, and just a tad frustrated. They'd gotten about halfway through the first suspect before their chakras collapsed and they unfortunately fried his brain. They confirmed Sakura's (and all of their's) suspicions, but didn't get to see the unedited memories. Soon, they'd try on the second.
The front door opens and in Sasuke's exhausted haze, he senses their third party enter the room. Bone-deep weariness radiates off her like it always does.
She stumbles into the living room, pausing—probably to figure out what she's looking at. They must look odd, sprawled ungracefully across the cushions, actually here for once. There's hesitation written all over her like graffiti and he thinks that she's going to just leave them there.
He would.
But she doesn't because as much as she's terrified of him and wary of Neji, she's still Sakura, through and through. Naruto believes he can save everyone the same way Sakura believes she can fix everyone and it's understandable; it's what she's good at.
The medic in her must win out because she comes this way, nearly trips on her feet in haste. Both of her hands spark to life and he can sense the way she's on near-empty in reserves but it doesn't matter because all she really needs is a single thread, just a drop for each of them to mold like a healing feather.
But Neji doesn't like his forehead touched and Sasuke is not Kakashi, therefore does not like his Sharingan tampered with. They both pull away, harsh and rough, eyes snapping open to glare.
And she does it again—shrinks in fear, flinches away, one hand to her neck, lip abused by teeth.
And they do it again—stumble up the stairs and slam their doors closed like children.
The sound echoes.
The wedding is something no one ever talks about. All of them act like they don't remember any part of it, but in reality, they all think of the day at the most random of times.
Whether it's in the cold, hard rain on the borders of villages or it's in the lull between surgeries or periods of downtime from one meeting to the next, they think of their ties to one another.
Their courting period didn't involve any courting. Tsunade simply ordered that they would be married in six months' time—and what do they do? Sasuke takes on more missions, fucks women in other villages. Neji drowns in work, has sex with Tenten. Sakura fixes people, rides other men after death and a few drinks.
There are no bachelor or bachelorette parties. The night before the ceremony, Sakura is healing hickeys in the mirror, Sasuke has just come back from a three-month long mission, and Neji is alone because Tenten had told him she's seeing Lee about a week ago. They never take lovers again—not anyone else and certainly not one another.
The next day, Neji wears grey, Sasuke wears charcoal, and Sakura wears white, all dressed in ceremonial robes and standing before the Hokage even though the whole thing feels more like a funeral than a marriage. The right side of the temple is made up of the dark, regal colors of the Uchiha, insignia emblazoned proudly on his back and on the tapestries. On the left, the neutral, elegant tones of Hyuuga exist and the folded sensu and flame symbol decorates the banners and his clothes.
Sakura bears nothing of the sort. She only owns a circle on her back, empty, meant to be filled. Like a single, large manacle.
It's the only ring she has, coming out of this ceremony.
They're not sure if they trust each other.
Professionally, they do.
They trust on Sakura to pull them from death's door when they're taken to the hospital or even out in the field. They trust Sasuke to act fast and eradicate threats. They trust Neji to dish out orders and lead them to safety.
But personally, they don't.
Neji will never let them touch his forehead. Sasuke will never let them feel his eyes. Sakura will never bare her neck.