#but then again. good excuse to skip class & sleep for 48 hours straight & have people be nice to me.

[intertexts-moving]

staring so suspiciously at this nasty cough that is surfacing currently -_-

[phoenixyfriend]

Sasuke/Karin, 48+100

Fanfiction Trope MASH-UP Rules: Send me two (2) tropes from this list + a ship and I’ll describe how I’d combine them in the same story.

48. Fake Dating 100. Accidentally Saving the Day

Okay so I have been struggling with this one because it just feels really mean to Karin but I finally have an idea.

Takes place after Sasuke kills Itachi, but before he goes after Killer Bee.

Also available on AO3

————

“I’ll stay with Sasuke-kun!”

Karin latches on to Sasuke’s arm and presses her cheek to his shoulder. Sasuke doesn’t want anything as little as he wants human contact right now, but there’s a pitch in Karin’s voice that isn’t usually there, and her nails are digging in to Sasuke’s arm. It’s enough that he doesn’t immediately shake her off, trying to figure out what she’s getting at.

“Oh,” the man who claims to be Madara says, voice low and rough. “I wasn’t aware you two were so… close.”

Sasuke isn’t close with anyone. Not Taka, not Naruto, not Sakura, not Ita–

“Hn,” Sasuke says, looking away. Karin giggles in a way that sounds like someone else, someone that doesn’t have scalpels in her soul, and rubs her cheek against his arm. She nuzzles, like a cat.

“Aren’t you a little young to be sharing a bed?” Madara asks, tilting his head.

“Aren’t we a little young to be international criminals?” Karin challenges back.

Madara scoffs. “Teenagers.”

He disappears in a whirl, right into his eye, and Sasuke moves away from–

Her lips press to his ear, and she whispers, “he’s still watching us.”

She pulls back, and when he meets her eyes, there squeezed half-shut, looking at him over her glasses. There’s a blush in her cheeks, an embarrassed smile on her face, and she tucks her hair behind her ear nervously. “I mean, um, if you want to, Sasuke-kun.”

Sasuke doesn’t remember how to smile. He doesn’t remember what it is to act like he enjoys somebody’s presence. His soul feels like it’s scrubbed raw, clawed open, scooped out and filled back in with pitch and tar.

He inclines his head, and says, “I’m… not in the mood.”

He just killed his brother, and Karin is implying that she suggested something like out of those dirty magazines Naruto used to look at for ideas on that stupid pervy jutsu of his.

“Of course,” Karin says, with a soft smile that does not belong on her face. She’s acting like–like Sakura. Sasuke doesn’t want soft and sweet around him. Soft and sweet get ripped up and spit out by the world. He picked Taka for a lot of reasons, but they’re all Oto brats. They’re all assholes, even Juugo sometimes. “I’ll stick to my side tonight, okay?”

There is no ‘her side.’ They’ve never shared a bed before, except that one time all four of them had been on a single mattress, and that was only because the bed had been big enough for six. For some reason. It was cheap, he hadn’t questioned it.

“Thank you,” Sasuke says instead. He meets Suigetsu’s eyes and narrows his eyes just a tad. He almost casts a genjutsu to share information, except if Madara is still watching them somehow–and Sasuke trusts Karin, if she says he is–then there’s no way to do it either handsigns or Sharingan, both of which Madara would notice. Sasuke isn’t that good yet. Very few people are.

“Let’s lie down,” Karin suggests, a hand on his upper back propelling him towards the bed in this room. Sasuke doesn’t want to leave Juugo with just Suigetsu, but whatever’s going on must be important. It has to be.

Karin wouldn’t be pulling this shit if it wasn’t.

She changes a few feet away from him, as if it’s normal for him to see her half-naked, which it isn’t, even if she’s seen him nearly naked for battle reasons, medical reasons, onsen reasons and…

Well, Karin doesn’t strip as often as Sasuke does. Most people don’t, but Karin is even more concerned about keeping her body covered than, like, that one Hyuuga in his Academy class. Karin’s got her scars, and that’s more than reason enough.

Sasuke wonders if Itachi had scars. If he’d--

“Hey.”

A hand lands on his shoulder and squeezes. He doesn’t shake it off, much as he wants to. “What.”

“You’re spiraling,” she says, like they’re actually together, and not just... whatever this is. “Come back to me.”

Is this what couples are like? He’s not sure he likes it. Sasuke’s not sure he likes anything right now.

“Come to bed,” she coaxes, like they’ve done this a million times. “You’ll feel better with some sleep.”

“I’ve been asleep for days.”

“No, you’ve been unconscious for days, it’s different,” she insists. “Listen to the medic.”

Karin isn’t, technically speaking, a medic. She’s a biological researching with a working understanding of the human body. She’s the closest he has, though. She’s probably right about this.

“Hn,” he says, but slips into bed anyway. She follows, and pulls at him when he tries to curl with his back to her.

“Sasuke,” she says, a request and a reprimand all in one. “Let me see your eyes.”

He stiffens, and her hand presses lightly to his shoulder.

“Please?” she asks, and the faintest pulse of chakra on his lightning-charred pathways taps out ge-n-ju-tsu. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

He rolls over and lets his eyes come to life, meeting hers and trapping them both in... it’s not Mangekyo, not yet, he doesn’t want to bleed for this, to bleed away Itachi’s gift on a farce of subterfuge, but there’s a bit of time-compression anyway. He knows how to do that much.

“Oh thank fuck,” Karin swears. “Thank you for playing along, Sasuke, you have no idea wh--”

“Talk,” Sasuke says.

She blinks, and pouts, and huffs, and adjusts her glasses. “That man is mad as a hatter and I don’t know exactly what his intentions are, but they’re not anything good.”

Sasuke crosses his arms and waits.

“He’s lying about being Madara, obviously,” Karin says. “And he’s... I don’t know, he’s got some technique that lets him be here-but-not, probably a variation on that teleport he showed off. I think he’s spying on us after he leaves, so I needed an excuse to just... yeah.”

“Okay,” Sasuke says. “What else?”

“Whatever he said about Itachi and the village... he’s holding back the whole truth,” Karin says. “He told some of the truth, and obviously I can’t tell exactly what he’s hiding, but there was... I dunno, satisfaction? Vindictiveness? He was, like, proud. Of Itachi getting pushed into killing the clan. I don’t know if he was involved in it or not, but my money’s on this fake Madara manipulating the clan, Itachi, the Hokage, or... I don’t know. All three? Anyone else that was involved? I don’t have enough background information to know for sure.”

Sasuke’s mental representation of himself squeezes his fingers into his biceps. He can’t keep this genjutsu up much longer without it getting suspicious. “Is he still watching us?”

“Yes.”

Fuck. “I still need to kill--”

“Sasuke, no,” she says, coming closer. “Please, just... just hold off on the revenge until we know more about what’s going on.”

“But Itachi--”

“Sasuke, please,” Karin says. “You killed Itachi. You did that, because you didn’t have all the information, and you were being manipulated and lied to by people older than you. What did I just say was happening?”

“You said he told the truth,” Sasuke says. “That Konoha--”

“FUCK Konoha,” Karin says. “Who do you trust more, me or the guy that wears a full face mask and lies about being a hundred-year-old relative?”

“But--”

“Who do you trust?” Karin demands. “Me or him?”

Sasuke doesn’t trust anyone.

“He is telling you what you want to hear,” Karin says, teeth grit. “But you met him a few hours ago, and he’s clearly incredibly suspicious. Please listen to me when I tell you that it makes more sense to collect information first. Hell, we can break into Konoha’s archives if you want. We can, I dunno, find your old team captain and tell him what fake Madara told us, and get him to break into archives for us. But, Sasuke, please remember that you picked us. You picked this team, and part of the reason you picked me is because I am the best goddamn sensor on the continent, and I know when people lie.”

She’s not wrong.

But... Itachi.

“We’ll talk again in the morning,” Sasuke decides, and breaks the genjutsu.

Karin pouts at him for a moment, and then wipes the look away and smiles at him, kind and pitying. “It gets better,” she says. “Eventually. Usually. Um, I mean, we’ve all lost a lot, but Juugo killed his parents by accident when he was four, ya know? He probably has all that ‘similar life experience’ stuff going on.”

“Can we not talk about this?” Sasuke asks, trying to talk like a... he doesn’t know. Like an upset boyfriend, maybe. “Just... I need to sleep.”

“Okay,” Karin says, and tries to take one of his hands. He pulls it away before she can touch it, and she freezes, then pulls her hand back to her own chest. “Good night, Sasuke.”

“Good night.” He sounds stilted even to his own ears. Hopefully, fake-Madara will attribute that to the trauma and grief instead of the awkwardness of not actually being in a relationship with Karin.

-------------

From there on, things drift sideways into Sasuke making slightly better decision on account of not trusting Obito as much, and trusting Karin to tell him when something’s a bad idea. He still makes bad decisions, because that’s just who Sasuke is as a person, but those decisions tend to skip over things like “attempts to kidnap Killer Bee” and just goes straight for Danzo. Obito is tired of his shit, but so is Kakashi, so Obito lets it slide. Sure, he’d rather have the Hachibi in the statue, but Sasuke’s causing grey hairs in a man that Obito half-hates and half-is-in-love-with, so it’s not all bad.

Zetsu does not agree, but Zetsu’s opinion is trash so we don’t care.

Technically Karin’s choice to fake date Sasuke in order to get him information does save the day, if only in the sense that the world is slightly less-fucked-over by the end of the fourth war, because Sasuke was faster about getting his head out of his ass.