#madarasakura

[a-damson-in-distress]

The Protégé 6

Pairing: MadaSaku

Plot: In search of a new cellist for his prestigious orchestra, an infamously feared maestro stumbles upon a young rising star.

The Protégé 1 | The Protégé 2 | The Protégé 3 | The Protégé 4 | The Protégé 5

Note: I’m back and it’s been so long I completely forgot how all of this works. Enjoy, leave a comment, you know the drill. Buh-bye.

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Madara stared at his phone with a look of utter disgust.

He knew that number. He loathed that number.

The person on the other end of this call was like a piece of gum he accidentally stepped on when he was a kid and never could scrape off the sole of his shoe. Take the feeling of coarse sand getting on the inside of your swimwear and rubbing you in all the wrong places combined with that feeling of revulsion whenever you have to get that slimy clump of hair out of your shower drain and multiply that by a thousand – that was exactly what Madara felt every time he called.

Resigning himself to his fate, he moved his thumb to the accept call button while suspiciously eying the caller ID – it read DUMBASS in capital letters, though if it were up to the caller himself, he probably would have saved his number under BFFS 4EVA.

Madara’s thumb pressed down on the green icon and he immediately had to hold his phone away when he was met with ear-piercing laughter.

“Madara, old chap, how are you, how are things with the orchestra, are you still torturing your little musicians? You know what, I don’t care, what are you doing this Friday?”

Madara couldn’t supress the groan escaping from this throat. Still having this individual in his life was his own fault, really. After all, there were more than enough warning signs. You simply do not start a friendship with Hashirama Senju, when one of the first things he did after meeting you was convincing your teenage ass to piss into a river together.

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Sakura chose a simple white dress and ballet flats this time. Nothing eye-catching but still very much her style. She made a point of choosing outfits she felt comfortable in, so she didn’t exude the same self-consciousness she did at the after party two days ago. The fact that wrong wardrobe choices clearly made her maestro angry may have also played a role.

Although Sakura had to admit, having him touch her so intimately while getting her appearance in order was worth the disappointment she initially felt when she realised that he was angry with her. She may be naïve and sexually inexperienced, but even she knew that conductors spanking their musicians was not common practice. Tucking in her blouse so her dishevelled look wouldn’t tarnish the good name of his orchestra was one thing; she even saw him yank on Naruto’s loose tie once before a very important interview, so when he started arranging her clothes there wasn’t anything sexual about it at first.

But the feel of his big hands as they traced the back of her thighs, inching closer to her behind where he would eventually deliver a sound slap on her left cheek was something completely different.

That was two days ago, and Sakura still didn’t know what to think or how to feel about it. When Mr Uchiha returned to the after party a little after her and pretended like nothing happened between them, she took that as her cue to do the same. The only reminder was when Ino and Temari asked her about her sudden outfit change.

I guess now I finally know what Maestro Uchiha is like when he invokes rule number 2.

Her vague answer referring to the second item on his long list of obligations laid out in her contract seemed to have been explanation enough. After all, given their strict dress code, wardrobe changes were demanded often enough so as not to raise any eyebrows when it finally happened to Sakura too.

She learned her lesson, that’s why she was waiting for their next rehearsal to start wearing one of her favourite and most inconspicuous dresses. They were in Shanghai at the moment for their second China concert which would take place in two days’ time.

They’ve nailed all of their rehearsals so far, practiced for hours on end, and were at the top of their game. Their maestro couldn’t be any prouder, at least that’s what Sakura thought, until she saw him enter the stage with a frown so deep, you’d need scuba gear to dive down.

“Change of plans everyone, you’re not getting Friday off, after all. We’re playing in Shanghai two days in a row, and we’re changing the programme for Thursday. We’re ditching Holst and starting with Mozetich, take out your sheet music for Fantasia. Cellists, all eyes on Ms Haruno while she takes the lead. I need the accompaniment tenuto throughout the entire piece, you cannot be drowned out by the violins’ legato. Chop chop, everyone.”

While everyone scrambled to get their things ready, Sakura couldn’t help but think that something was wrong. Maestro Uchiha was always strict and demanding, but he seemed to be in an especially sour mood today. Not to mention that changing the entire programme of an upcoming concert two days before was not something Madara Uchiha did. He was so meticulous and orderly, he’d probably be annoyed if raindrops suddenly started falling at a different angle. Not wanting to incur his wrath again so shortly after earning her first reprimand, she kept her head down and tried her best to meet his expectations during the rehearsal.

A feat which proved to be more difficult than she initially thought. Maestro Uchiha was annoyed by the slightest things, reprimanded his musicians for the tiniest slip-ups, and gripped his baton so tightly at times, his knuckles turned white.

Once their most exhausting rehearsal so far was over, everyone was quick to pack their things and leave, when Maestro Uchiha said, “I need a word with all the principals, the rest are free to go.”

Ino and Naruto quickly caught Sakura’s gaze, both of them shooting her questioning looks. Sakura just shrugged, equally confused. They gathered together with the rest of the principal musicians and stood in front of their maestro’s podium.

“Due to unforeseen and incredibly annoying circumstances, I decided to change the programme for our Thursday concert. As you may have noticed, the seven pieces we’re performing will heavily feature one of the principal musicians. We start off with Mozetich, which focuses on Ms Haruno as the principal cellist. Our next piece by Copland is your chance to shine as principal clarinet, Ms Yamanaka. Arutiunian will put the spotlight on our principal trumpet, and so on. In other words, we’re pulling out the big guns for this one, so I cannot stress this enough: I need all of my principals to bring their A game. I know you do that for every concert anyway, but this… is different. Let’s just say, I need to prove a point, so do not let me down.”

While the other musicians gathered their things to leave, Sakura watched him put on his suit jacket out of the corner of her eye. Before leaving the stage, the conductor shot her a look and quietly said, “Ms Haruno, my room in an hour.” Sakura barely managed the obligatory Yes, Maestro, too caught up in her own thoughts running rampant in her mind about what he might be needing from her at 8 pm in the evening, in his hotel room, in private.

“What crawled up his ass and died?” Ino whispered with an eye roll while packing up her instrument.

Sakura’s jaw dropped in shock and she fixed the blonde with angry glare, “Oh my God, Ino, you can’t talk like that, he’s our conductor!”

“Oh relax, you fan girl. Even you have to admit he was exceptionally prickly today. Like pluck-that-string-wrong-and-I’ll-pluck-out-your-eyebrows type of prickly. And the bar for that is already incredibly high, because Madara Uchiha was basically born prickly.”

Sakura could hear Naruto snicker behind them as the trio went down the stairs on the left of the stage, making Ino groan in annoyance.

“Men and their weird sense of humour. You’re imagining him as a cactus now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but like, how can he conduct with his tiny cactus arms?”

________________________________________________________________

Madara knew he was being insufferable. He never was particularly liked by his musicians – respected, yes, but liked on a personal level, not really – but during the last two rehearsals he did his utmost to qualify for the Condescending Jerk of the Year Award. Even little Ms Haruno was starting to sweat halfway through his symphony of exasperated grunts and annoyed eye-rolls.

If only he hadn’t picked up that damned phone two days ago, none of this would be happening. He could have stuck to his original concert programme, enjoyed one or two relaxed rehearsals, and wouldn’t be pacing up and down his hotel suite racking his brain over his request.

He may as well have asked Madara to chain her to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster, and Madara would still think Sakura’s fate worse than Andromeda’s.

A soft knock interrupted his train of thought, and he went to open the door for his late-night guest. When his intense gaze landed on his little protégé and her doe-like eyes, he couldn’t help but ask himself – what was his role in all of this? Could he be the Perseus to her Andromeda?

Or would Cretus once again rise from the depths of the sea and plunge her into darkness?

“You asked to see me, Mr Uchiha?”

Madara wordlessly stepped aside and closed the door behind her. He took a moment to run an appreciative gaze over her slender figure and noted with satisfaction that she was once again wearing clothes she was clearly much more comfortable in. His gaze was drawn to her short pleated skirt as it swirled around her legs when she turned to face him. There was a soft, pastel pink cashmere sweater tucked into the waistband that was a size too large for her, as it was currently in the process of slipping off her left shoulder.

Madara had seen and done a lot of erotic things in his 39 years on this earth but watching something as trivial as a piece of garment expose her neck and shoulder had his dick twitch in anticipation like no porn ever could.

Thank fuck he had an actual reason to invite her into his hotel room this late at night or otherwise he would already have her face down, ass up.

“It’s about our concert on Thursday. The reason I had to change it… was you.”

Her eyes widened even more as she immediately started playing with the hem of her skirt. “Me? W-why? Did I do something wrong? I’ll do better, Mr Uchiha, I swear!”

“Relax, you did nothing wrong. You’re perfect,” he stepped closer to sweep her hair behind her ear, “like always. I had to change the programme, because I got a call from someone who is going to watch us perform on Thursday, and I simply needed to make sure that he’s… well, rendered speechless would be the ideal scenario, really.”

“I still don’t understand what that has to do with me.”

“Because that particular individual happens to be a renowned music journalist and critic, and he will be writing a lengthy review of our first Shanghai concert, including an extensive interview with you.”

Madara’s gaze landed on her full lips as they moved to form a surprised little o, and to make things worse, his little protégé had the gall to go ahead and lick them.

“I’ve never given an interview, Mr Uchiha. A-and to be honest, I’m not sure if I’m up for it. I don’t need all that attention and all the probing questions. What if I say something stupid? I don’t want to embarrass you.”

Madara had to supress a smirk at her words. The interview was supposed to be all about her, and yet she was afraid of embarrassing him. It was like this little girl was born with the sole purpose of pleasing him.

“I assure you there is nothing you could do to embarrass me.”

“Not true, what about the last after party, when I wore something you didn’t approve of?”

“You’re right, but I made you regret that choice instantly, did I not?” A blush crept up her cheeks as Madara took a step closer, “I disciplined you,” he raised his hand to her face while enjoying the nervous breath escaping her lips, “you took your punishment,” he grabbed the back of her neck and twisted his fingers in her hair, “and you promised to never do it again,” Madara tugged on her hair, forcing her head back and staring down at her, their lips only centimetres apart, “like the good little girl you are.”

He allowed himself one more moment to drink in the sight of her innocent blush and her adoring wide eyes, before he let go off her hair and leaned on the desk on the opposite of his bed.

“The individual you will have the displeasure of meeting has, well… to say he holds a grudge against me would be the understatement of the century. He will do anything in his power to try to get under my skin, and the fact that I noticed you did not go unnoticed by him, so I’m sure he’s hoping to use that to his advantage.”

“So you’re saying the only reason he wants to interview me is to spite you and not because he’s really interested in me as a musician?”

“No, sweetheart,” Madara put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them as a show of encouragement, “one would have to be blind and deaf not to notice your musical gift. As much as I hate his guts, he does have an eye for talent, I have to give him that. If I weren’t your maestro, he’d still want to interview you, it’s just this way he gets to kill two birds with one stone.”

Madara watched his little protégé pull her bottom lip between her teeth, and his dick immediately sprung to attention. Brushing his fingers over her shoulders clearly did little to calm her down. If he didn’t already think she was nervous about the interview, she gave it away the instant she started playing with the end of his tie.

“I’m too shy to give such a high-profile interview, I really wouldn’t know what to say. And I really don’t want to embarrass you, Mr Uchiha, so um… Can you… can you, maybe, I don’t know,” Madara watched with utter fascination as she twisted the end of his tie around her index finger, “can you teach me?”

The question came out as a shy whisper, but their faces were close enough for him to hear it.

“Teach you what, little girl? You’ll have to be more specific, because I can teach you a lot of things.”

Madara watched her suck in a breath at his little innuendo. He knew he was pushing his luck, everything about their proximity and the way he was talking to her was wrong and if she weren’t such a lovesick puppy, she would have reported his inappropriate behaviour ages ago. But he couldn’t help himself around her. For the first time in the nearly four decades he had spent on earth so far, he was falling victim to the danger and allure of the forbidden.

His hazy mind barely registered when his protégé opened her mouth. “Well, um… You know, things like…”

A shaky breath. A tongue sweeping out to wet her lips.

“What-… what to say and what not to say, or… or things like…” hesitant eyes travelled up to meet his own.

“Body language.”

Fuck.

Madara had a thing or two to say about body language, alright, their own body language at this very moment, to be precise. Sakura was still standing between his legs, nervously playing with his tie, much like she did a few days ago when he was fixing her outfit. It was moments like these when a part of him questioned whether or not she really didn’t know what effect she had on men like him with a behaviour like that. Her innocence was believable and authentic enough to land her a part in Sesame Street, but then she had to go ahead and whisper body language like that – what was a man to think?

“Body language, huh? Alright, let’s start with the most important lesson on body language. For an interview, you want to seem approachable, but not too much. You can use your body to create a necessary distance, to signal the other person certain parts of you are off-limits. One way to do that is to make sure you don’t show too much skin, an unwilling openness a reporter is only too eager to exploit.”

Madara’s right hand left her shoulder and made its way down her arm to grab the low hanging neckline of her sweater, slowly dragging it up while making sure to brush as much of her soft skin with his fingers.

“Wearing a sweater that constantly slips off your shoulder is not the way to do it, little one. What did we say about dishevelled outfits?” Madara fixed her with a stern gaze.

“Not to wear them, and I know I’m going to wear something more professional for the interview, but I didn’t think that you would mind me wearing the sweater now. I thought you would like it,” Madara heard her voice become quieter and more unsure toward the end, much like it always did when she was asking for his opinion.

The only logical thing for him to do as her maestro was take away that uncertainty, the only way he knew how.

“Oh, I’m afraid I like it too much, princess. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your effort to dress comfortably and appropriately the last few days. I’m very happy my lesson stuck.”

Madara took her chin between his fingers and raised her face. “Good girl.”

When he saw the telltale smile and blush spread across her face, Madara knew it was worth playing with fire.

Now to pour some gasoline on it.

“Say thank you, Sir,” he commanded in his gruffest dom voice.

Naturally, his little sub immediately obliged.

“Thank you, Sir.”

Her whispering was going to be the death of him. Madara released his protégé and went straight for the bar at the other end of the room in order to gain some distance. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact he was sporting a raging hard-on for a 20-year-old she was not supposed to see.

“Of course, Deidara will be in charge of most of the media mumbo-jumbo, he’ll also get a say in your outfit, but if it were up to me, I’d button you up to your nose, maybe even send you to the interview in a straitjacket.”

Madara drowned the shot of whiskey as if it had the magical ability to calm his libido, which of course it didn’t, especially when he heard Sakura’s melodious laughter behind him.

“But Sir, you can’t put me in a straitjacket. You said yourself, this reporter is a renowned music journalist, and you only want to present yourself and the orchestra in the best possible light. I admit, a baggy sweater would not have been my go-to look, but a straitjacket doesn’t really scream take me seriously either.”

“I don’t know, I quite like the idea of a straitjacket. At the very least, we can put him in it, so he won’t be tempted to touch you.”

Madara had meant it as a light-hearted joke, but he immediately regretted his choice of words when he saw her playful smile crumble.

“Why-why do you say that? Is he known to… touch women? You wouldn’t put me in the same room as someone like that, would you, Sir?”

He bridged the distance between them in three quick steps and immediately grasped her face between his hands to rub soothing circles on her cheeks. Madara hated the whole idea of the interview, but that was no reason to rile her up. Kicking a puppy probably couldn’t feel worse than being the one who put worries and doubts in her head.

“Never, little one. I would wring anybody’s neck who so much as looked at you wrong, I would never put you in any danger, trust me. I’m sorry for my poor choice of words, I absolutely didn’t mean them in that way. As much as I hate… that person, he is nothing but an absolute gentleman, and I can assure you he has tremendous respect for you. You’re going to be wonderful at the interview, I know it. You could just sit there doing nothing and he would sing your praises.”

“I believe you. But then what did you mean with that part about him touching me?”

Madara contemplated a few short seconds what to answer to that question. Of course, the simple truth was he was just being a dumb, territorial gorilla, but he would rather do shots out of Naruto’s belly button than allow Sakura to think of him in a simian fashion.

“Let’s just say, I know him from my childhood, and he always revelled in stealing my toys. And I told you when I signed you on, I tend to be rather possessive of my musicians.”

That seemed to have been the right answer, judging by the grin tugging on her pretty little lips. Before Madara could say anything that would dig himself deeper into the hole he called sexual frustration, he grasped Sakura’s arm and gently turned her toward the door.

“I’m sure I’ve given you a lot to think about. Take the rest of the evening to think things through about the interview, maybe think of questions that are off-limits, so we can make sure there won’t be any unpleasantness. Tomorrow, we’ll get together with Deidara and his PR team, he’ll straighten out the rest.”

As he was about to open the door to usher her outside, she turned around one last time, her skirt enticingly flowing around her slender legs. “What about the tips you were going to give me? You know… the training?”

“Miss Haruno, if I were to teach you everything I know, you wouldn’t get a wink of sleep tonight.”

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“You’ll want to avoid words like never and always, or any kind of absolute statement for that matter. You a Star Wars fan? Never mind, there’s this character who wisely said that only a Sith deals in absolutes. Siths are the bad guys in Star Wars, FYI. So instead of saying ‘Maestro Uchiha is always rude to us during rehearsals’, you want to say things like ‘We are eternally grateful for his constructive feedback and his willingness to help us improve our craft’, see the difference? Another thing they like to do is talk about your fears, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, yadda yadda yadda. The best way to answer these questions is like you would answer them during a job interview. So don’t bullshit around with some made-up weakness, that is actually a strength like ‘I am very focused on details and therefore sometimes need longer for an assignment’. Journalists can smell bullshit a mile away, and this particular one is like a genetically enhanced bloodhound. What you want to do instead is be honest, but not too honest. You’re not going to come out and say you have a crippling porn addiction. Choose something that seems like a genuine weakness, but nothing too major that would inhibit your performance. And most importantly, follow it up with a statement underlining how you’re already working on bettering yourself. A good example would be ‘Sometimes I am too direct with my feedback and criticism and my colleagues may take it the wrong way, but I’ve already learned to word it in more neutral terms, so nobody gets offended’. Are you writing any of this down?”

Sakura could feel herself shrinking under Deidara’s disapproving gaze. Quickly grabbing the pen she brought along to her tutoring session, she continued writing down the tips he was giving her in preparation for her interview.

“Next, questions about your private life. We are not politicians, so don’t even pretend to be one with those ‘I can neither confirm nor deny it’ answers. You should give him some sort of answer, otherwise you’ll seem unapproachable, but you can control how many details you want to give…”

Sakura droned out the publicist’s voice while staring absentmindedly at the presentation slides. In her mind, she knew what the words really meant, but in her subconscious, they re-arranged themselves to form an entirely different sentence.

If I were to teach you everything I know, you wouldn’t get a wink of sleep tonight.

That could mean anything, right? It could take him all night to teach her all about whiskey for instance, or the difference between a two-stroke engine and a cylinder. If they were to talk about music, that may have taken them several nights in fact, not just one, because he was a bottomless well of knowledge when it came to that.

But it couldn’t mean…that.

Sakura was chewing on the other end of her pencil while still pretending to be enthralled by whatever Deidara was saying. The fact of the matter was, Sakura was his protégé. Their professional relationship was bound to take a different turn compared to the way he handles all his other musicians. Mister Uchiha said so himself, it was his duty to train her, to mould her to be the best possible version of herself. He couldn’t do that if he wasn’t allowed to give her a little bit of extra attention every now and then. And she never had an official mentor in that capacity before, Tsunade certainly never called Sakura her protégé. What’s more, she was embarrassingly inexperienced when it came to physical intimacy with the opposite sex. The line between appropriate touches and those that bordered on intimate seem to be drawn differently for every person, at least if her friends’ stories were to be believed, and it couldn’t be more confusing to her to try to understand when that line has been crossed if you explained it to her in Latin.

Sakura shook her head and tried to re-focus her attention on Deidara’s media training, but it was to no avail. In her mind, she kept replaying last night’s visit to her maestro’s hotel room and how he comforted her by stroking her cheek, or how he teased her by slowly dragging up her sweater up her shoulder.

Sakura had no idea what they meant, but she knew one thing: Lying was a cardinal sin, and she would end up in the deepest pits of hell if she were to ever tell anyone she didn’t enjoy Mister Uchiha’s touches.

It was time to cash in on her friendship with the promiscuous principal clarinet.

________________________________________________________________

“I’m confused, why are you asking me all these questions? Sakura, did someone touch you inappropriately? If so, that’s a major offense and we need to report it ASAP.”

Sakura felt her panic rise as Ino stared her down with a worried look in her eyes. This was not the direction she planned this conversation to take. She knew she was a klutz when it came to talking about physical intimacy, but this was awkward even by her standards.

“No, no, nothing like that. I’m fine. It’s just, that… I saw two people from the stage crew, they looked cosy with each other, and I was just wondering, you know, if that means they… like each other, or anything…”

The blonde musician breathed a sigh of relief. “Phew, for a moment there I thought I was going to have to pull out a doll and ask you where you’ve been touched. But seriously, jokes aside, if anybody makes you feel uncomfortable, in any way, it doesn’t even have to be physical, you let me know, or any of your other friends. Or better yet, tell Mr Uchiha.”

Threats of wringing people’s necks suddenly popped into Sakura’s head. Telling Mr Uchiha anybody made her feel uncomfortable, even in the slightest, was a battery charge waiting to happen.

“Thanks for the tip. But seriously, what does it mean if a man puts his hands on a woman’s shoulders? It seemed…comforting. But I basically have zero experience with that kind of stuff. Naruto is always teasing me that guys could have I’m sexually attracted to you tattooed on their forehead and I wouldn’t get that they’re flirting with me.”

“It could mean anything. Couples touch each other on their shoulders, much like friends do. Even colleagues, who have no relationship outside of work, might comfort each other like that if someone has a rough day. It depends on the person who’s doing the touching. With Naruto, for instance, it doesn’t mean much, because he’s insanely physically affectionate. He hugged you the day he met you, and he regularly shows his affection with small physical gestures. Doesn’t mean he’s attracted to you. Shikamaru for instance was different. He was your predecessor. He was always too lazy to make new friends or even show his appreciation for the ones he already had, so in the rare instances he would hug or comfort someone, it really meant a lot. Does that help?”

Nope.

Sakura had no idea what the normal scope of Mr Uchiha’s physical affection was. Sure, he was always meticulously professional during rehearsals and public appearances, but it wasn’t like Sakura had the means to ask his friends how he behaved in private. And she couldn’t very well ask Ino what it meant if a conductor touches his protégé’s cheek or pulls up her sweater.

It could really just be harmless comforting of an inexperienced and nervous musician. Sakura was, after all, his protégé, she was already treated as the orchestra’s most recognisable poster child, she was about to give her first major interview. Mr Uchiha was just covering all of his bases and making sure she was representing him to the best of her abilities.

Yeah, that had to be it. The more Sakura thought about it, the sillier she felt for even entertaining the thought there could be more behind her maestro’s touches than the simple comfort and guidance a mentor feels obligated to give his students when he sees them struggling. Mr Uchiha was, after all, so very much out of her league and she would have to mature at the speed of light to catch up with the women he was probably interested in.

Sakura couldn’t supress the laugh that escaped her lips at the thought as she put her arm around her friend. “You’re right, Ino. I’m hugging you now, doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to start developing romantic feelings for you.”

The blonde just shot her a seductive grin. “Be careful what you wish for, baby.”

________________________________________________________________

 They were brilliant.

Of course, they were always brilliant. It was his orchestra, after all. But Madara had to hand it to his musicians: Tonight, they were magnificent.

He couldn’t remember the last time he felt anything akin to nervousness before a concert, but tonight’s special guest set his teeth on edge. Everything had to be absolutely perfect, or he would have never heard the end of it in his next article.

Strutting proudly around the backstage area and congratulating his ensemble for a performance well done, he was headed straight towards his dressing room, where the highly unwelcome intruder was waiting for him. Only when he opened the door, he was nowhere to be seen.

“Madara, there you are.” Hearing his supposedly best friend’s voice was always a sensation similar to nails scraping on a chalk board. Madara never missed a chance to remind him of that fact, too.

“Hashirama, you know I hate it when you yell like-“

“I know, I know, don’t get your conductor’s panties in a bunch. Pretty sure the interview’s already started, so I’m sure you’re free now. Let’s go grab a drink to toast tonight’s concert, you guys really were amazing. Come on.”

Madara’s arm reached out to grab the man’s shoulders, digging his fingers uncomfortably into his skin. “What do you mean, the interview’s already started? He said he made an appointment for tomorrow.”

“I’m pretty sure I saw him enter her dressing room just a moment ago. You know how he is, he likes to catch his prey off guard. But don’t worry, I’m sure your PR team briefed her and everything, she’ll do fine. And if not, it’ll be a baptism by fire. Better learn from the tough ones, he’ll raise the bar so high, she’ll never complain about another interview partner again.”

Madara was sure if he could grind his teeth any harder, they would splinter into a million tiny pieces. The thought of Sakura alone with him, completely caught off guard, goaded into talking about things she wasn’t prepared for made his hair stand on end.

He quickly navigated the maze of dressing rooms until he found the door with her name on it. Madara could already hear their voices seeping through, and to his surprise he even heard Sakura’s telltale giggle.

Not bothering to knock, he swung the door open and found his protégé with a bouquet of flowers in one hand, the other trying to hide the grin on her face, which was clearly reserved for the man in front of her.

When Sakura saw him enter, her playful expression changed into a surprised one when she happily exclaimed, “Mr Uchiha, look, I got flowers! I don’t mind giving interviews if they all start off with such a nice gesture.”

She shot her interview partner a grateful look, which only made Madara’s insides boil.

“Trust me, Miss Haruno, flowers are a special gesture reserved for buttering up only my most interesting interview partners.”

Great, he flirts now, too.

Just as he was rolling his eyes in annoyance, the man in question turned to finally face him with a knowing smirk on his face.

“Long time no see, Madara.”

Madara puffed up his chest and let out a disapproving grunt as he eyed his worst nemesis.

“Tobirama.”

[stillxnunpxidintern]

Playtime

My first MadaSaku fic, hopefully I wrote Madara okay. It has off screen consent

Opening the door to the two story house, Sakura could tell something didn’t feel quite how she left it this morning. Instead of worrying about it at that moment Sakura kicked off her heels and instantly felt better as her feet were flat on the plush carpet, what felt great on her aching feet.

Dropping her bag by table by the door, then closed the door properly before locking it, double checking it as Halloween drew closer the more people tended to act out, especially in the area that she lived, even with justus on the widows and doors, it was better safe than sorry, especially now that the Uchiha clan was once again back in Konoha, no thanks to Sasuke messing about with his Rinnegan.

She knew he wasn't trying to bring them back and it was all an accident but she could really do without a few Uchihas, who constantly gave her headaches.

Continue reading

[dipsyru-blog]

NEON LOVERS

some practice with “toxic” colours

[niolast-blog]

@madasakuweek

I recently heard that there will be a weekend dedicated to Madara and Sakura and I told myself what a great opportunity to express my gratitude for all the wonderful madasaku stories that made me like this pair.

This is dedicated to all the fantastic fic writers that inspired me to draw them together.

I got the inspiration from you all and because I’m not good with words, this is my way to show my appreciation for your hard work.

[raendown]

Another follower milestone gift fic. This one is for @sarcastic-mommy for the prompt word obdurate.

Pairing: MadaraSakura Word count: 1249 Rated: G Summary: Sakura knew a lot about Madara before they ever even met. Loved him, maybe, from the first time they talked.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

KO-FI and commission info in the header!

Hard Headed, Soft Hearted

She saw him for the first time on the day Madara moved in to her building, scowl in place because he hated this town, hated having to leave his home, and Sakura remembered laughing from her window as she watched this new guy with crazy hair argue with his own boxes like if he could only yell loud enough they might pick themselves up and walk right in to the elevator for him. She remembered wondering why there was no one around to help him move but it was none of her business. The wondering only lasted about a month until half the building jolted upright at three in the morning to the sound of uninhibited sobbing while a man’s voice rang through the hallways saying, “But you didn’t tell anyone you moved again! Are you moving on? This is so healthy for you, Maddy! I’m so happy I found you!” 

By then the sound of Madara’s shouting was familiar enough that Sakura went back to sleep, perfectly assured that everything was okay. He didn’t sound angry. Sakura didn’t bother to question the way she already knew his moods by the tone of his yelling. 

It was something close to a year of living in the same building but a floor apart before they actually met officially and Sakura found herself laughing again as she gave her name, amused at the flabbergasted expression on Madara’s face when he offered a grunt of “Uchiha Madara” and all she could say in return was, “You should call Hashirama more often.” It wasn’t like he lived his life very quietly but Sakura grew up with two boys for best friends whose default volume was screaming in each other's faces. She was used to it. 

After that it was like the universe began carefully pulling at their strings, dancing the two of them back and forth through life only to trap them in that same dingy elevator together time and time again, never anyone else around and always such a coincidence that they managed to be there at the same time. Their schedules didn’t even line up. Yet there they were again and again until finally Madara scrubbed at the back of his head and asked if she wanted to stop off at his floor for a while. Sakura asked him why he’d waited so long. 

There were a lot of things about Madara that she knew before they ever met, things she picked up from the voices that shouted through the floor while she did her yoga routines and scrubbed out the bathtub. She knew that Madara liked his coffee black, knew he couldn’t stand his best friend’s little brother, knew he’d grown his hair long because his baby brother asked him to. She knew that same baby brother had passed away the year before they met and Madara had run to three different cities trying to escape the pain before he landed here in her old ass apartment building. There were a lot of things she knew. But knowing something and experiencing it for yourself were two very different situations and if Sakura had thought she knew what stubborn meant before, well, now she was convinced the definition of that word should be changed to simply a picture of Madara’s face in the dictionary, scowling like he was now over the rim of his soup bowl. 

“Do you or do you not live in the twenty-first century?” she asked him with a roll of her eyes. “You’re so old fashioned sometimes that I think about buying you a pocket watch. Or an ear trumpet.”

“I am not! And my hearing is fine!”

“You think women can’t propose to men? Hello? Get with the times, grandpa.”

Either it was the heat in her eyes or maybe the way she wielded her soup spoon like a tactical weapon but something made him sit back in his seat, crossing both arms over his chest with a snort, looking away like her gaze was too heavy to hold. 

“I never said women can’t propose to men, I said I don’t want you to propose to me.” 

“Still kind of a pig thing to say.”

His eyes flashed back, all fire and brimstone with the anger he carried always just beneath the surface. If she didn’t love it so much Sakura thought maybe she would hate it except she couldn’t ever imagine hating anything about Madara. Not even when he glared at her the way he did now, soup pushed to one side and one hand coming out to point accusingly in her direction. 

“Take that back,” he demanded. “I am nothing if not a gentleman.” 

“Yesterday you let the apartment door slam in my face while we were leaving,” Sakura pointed out. Then she bit the inside of her cheek as he flailed the hand between them. 

“I thought you had gone back inside! You said you needed to grab your purse!” 

“Okay, I’ll give you that.” After all, he couldn’t have known she meant the one that was sitting right beside the door. She did have a lot of purses. He complained about that all the time. 

Madara snorted. “See? Now take it back.”

“I don’t get what the big deal is! We talked about it, we’re gonna get married someday, what’s so bad about it if I’m the one who gets a bunch of roses and goes down on one knee and all that crap?”

And for all the things that Sakura knew about Madara, now and before they ever met, there was one thing that she often forgot in the heat of the moment when his voice reached impossible octaves and his volume attracted yet another call in an endless succession of calls to the police for one more noise complaint. Sometimes she just forgot how soft his heart was underneath all that bluster. It struck her again now, like it had so many times before, watching his face burn a sudden cherry red, pushing away from the table abruptly to stomp across the room and dig his hand around in that one broken light fixture they just never got around to fixing. 

When he pulled out a tiny blue velvet box Sakura could swear all the oxygen in the room vanished. 

“You can’t propose to me,” Madara growled, shaking the box like a threat. “Cause then I can’t propose to you! Quit ruining my plans, Haruno!” 

“M-madara…”

Pouting, he cradled the box to his chest and stomped off towards their bedroom with his nose in the air. “Now I have to find another hiding place for this. Vile woman. You know you make my life so damn difficult. Hmph. No, don’t get up, I have to call Hashirama. We need a new plan now.”

Lukewarm soup splashed across her work blouse when Sakura let it slip from her fingers and fall down in her forgotten lunch. She didn’t notice. For a minute or so all she could do was blink sightlessly while her brain tried to catch up to the revelation that apparently her boyfriend had been planning to propose. And that she’d ruined the surprise. Eventually a smile stole across her face and Sakura leaned back in her chair, peace stealing through her veins and warmth in her skin that had nothing to do with the sun streaming through the window. 

Gods but she loved that he was stubborn enough to do it right even when he didn’t have to. 

[sialidasa]

傷痛（斑櫻）

究竟傷了多少，才會哽咽至此？她也不清楚。

又是一個放晴的日子。

和同事簡單交代一些事項後，櫻走進了重大罪犯──宇智波斑所在的地下病房。

「例行診察。」

她推開了門，拿起放在房內的藥物箱，熟悉的醫療包中補充裡頭的東西。

 裡頭坐著上半身幾乎都被繃帶包住的宇智波斑。

 安靜讓整個流程變得沈重，但是她也不清楚該說些什麼給這位重大罪犯聽。

 「斑……其實除了無限月讀這件事以外，我對你沒有任何敵意，我只是換藥，好嗎？」

她還記得當初為了讓斑讓自己更換他腹部以及肩部的繃帶，她說了這句話，對方才像隻放下爪子的老虎，安靜的讓自己進行流程。

 櫻說的是實話，對她來說，憎恨無法解決任何事情，過去的就該過去了，持續傷害根本毫無意義。

 「小ㄚ頭，第三代火影在世時，村子有什麼劇變嗎？」

斑在櫻拿出繃帶時，似乎是想要打破現在這種難受的沉默般，緩緩開口問著。

「有啊。」

她盡量把一些有建設性的事情告訴了班，後者僅僅笑而不回答。

 那時她覺得斑有些奇怪，平常應該是熟悉這樣的沉默，但斑打破了。

今天櫻不是第一天幫斑換藥，只是她習慣看到棉花棒沾上藥劑後，斑那不悅的眼神。

大概不是那麼喜歡藥的味道吧。

她猜。

 一個星期過去了，他們除了這幾句對話外沒有多說些什麼。

直到斑又再度叫了她。

「喂，小ㄚ頭，說點什麼吧。」

比起疑問句，更像是變相的命令句。

「我想想……。」

 櫻隨口說起了佐助的事情，她還記得那天被各個高層逼迫答應的事情。

 除了斑以外，村子沒有人知道，春野櫻被逼迫每日記錄宇智波佐助的行蹤，哪怕他只是待在木葉中的自家，也要記錄

因為他可能又會叛變。

就為了這種不合理���原因。

 「小ㄚ頭。」

斑再次呼喚了櫻，依舊是用那令櫻不悅的語氣與稱謂。

「我姓春野。」

像是想轉移話題似的，斑開口說了：

「你知道為何囚禁我於此嗎？」

「因為你是重大罪犯。」

斑淺淺地露出笑容，搖搖頭。

「不，因為他們畏懼我所知道的歷史。」

櫻綁好繃帶，注視著眼前的人。

「很莫名其妙吧。」

「是啊。」

 收拾空了的藥罐時，櫻像是在說給自己聽似的，說了很多宇智波佐助種種，加上一些她內心的想法。

 「他其實是個很溫柔的人。」

 「想哭就哭吧，都已經哽咽成這樣的聲音了。」

斑輕輕地揉揉春野櫻的短髮，緩緩嘆了口氣。

「早已渾身是傷的人，是你，春野櫻啊。」

 是的，不是其他更出名的男人，是她，春野櫻。

她的心早被扯成了碎片，卻堅忍下來，不讓任何人知道。

 END

[dipsyru-blog]

I love them! <3

[dipsyru-blog]

Some of my old paintings, They are adorable, kids always so cute, especially when this kids are MadaSaku)

I wish I could write explanations for all of them, but I`m exausted, so it up`s to you!

[raendown]

A commission for @sarcastic-mommy.

Pairing: MadaraSakura Word count: 6940 Rated: M Summary: It took yelling and insults and everything but an outright accusation for Sakura to get through to him - and then she got under him.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

KO-FI and commission info in the header! 

A Pleasure Doing Business

She was wearing a new suit today. Madara’s eyes followed the woman closely as she marched down the hallways, hard green eyes staring bluntly forward, refusing to meet his gaze yet despite the clear glass walls making it all too easy. Almost every day for the past several weeks he had seen her stomping past his office with fury in every line of her body and always she wore a tidy power suit tailored specifically to draw his eye. Today’s suit was a crisp mint color that set off her bubblegum hair like a double stacked ice cream cone he craved to run his tongue over. 

The door of his office slammed against its own rubber stopper with an ominous rattle when she pushed it open. It was only in the past week that she’d finally bullied her way past the army of secretaries and assistants to approach him personally, tired of being given the run around by old men determined to talk circles around her without answering a single question. Madara was of two minds about this. On the one hand he would never say no to a pretty lady’s company, especially one with a mind as intelligent as hers, but on the other hand he was getting tired of being on the business end of that sharp tongue. 

Haruno Sakura was a name he had only vaguely recognized in articles from his local newspaper until the day she slammed in to his personal space with vitriol hidden in the legal jargon dressing up her temper as something almost polite. Then he was forcibly reminded of the girl he’d had a minor crush on in his senior year of university. He felt no guilt for forgetting her, it had been years since his school days and it wasn’t like they’d had any classes together; he’d never even really had more than a handful of conversations with her back then. For the first several times she barged in to spit the most politely worded acid he’d ever heard Madara thought she might have forgotten him as well. She disabused him of that the first time he caught her sneering at the MBA certificate hanging on his wall. 

She spared another glower for the intricately framed document now, something that had almost become a ritual of her visits. 

“Not only is everyone you employ morally bankrupt,” she growled, forgoing any pretense of friendly greetings, “but their boss is crooked beyond repair!” 

“I am their boss,” Madara pointed out.

“Yes. I do not retract my statement.” 

“Well a good morning to you as well, Haruno-san. I take it you received the latest proposal we sent you?” 

If he were honest Madara had only a very vague idea of what that proposal contained. Owning the company didn’t necessarily mean he needed to micromanage every piece of paperwork that left the building. That’s what he paid other people to do. Every member on the board of directors had been handpicked by his father, people he knew that he could trust to take care of the boring day-to-day. No need for him to bother them all by shoving his nose in to every little thing.

“This?” Sakura held up a folder he hadn’t noticed her carrying. “If you’re talking about this rag, I don’t know how you can dare to call it a proposal!” With a scoff she tossed it down on his desk. Madara watched the papers slip out with a mild expression, irritated to have a mess made of his work space but unwilling to show it. 

“How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not the one to yell at? Go talk to my board of directors.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in charge of them? How can you let them do things like this?”

Slamming her hands down on his desk put her in a rather suggestive position. Were he someone with a little less tact Madara noted that he could have slid his eyes down for the perfect view inside her top. It didn’t matter how attractive she was, though. He wasn’t a pig. And despite the base urges of his body to crawl between those deliciously strong thighs he wasn’t sure he would survive a woman who clearly hated him so badly. 

Instead he deliberately yawned and flicked some of the papers back towards her, turning back to his computer in a clear dismissal. 

“Yeah, I’m in charge,” he said. “Which means I delegate responsibilities and I have delegated the unpleasant task of listening to your childish rants off to someone else. Go bother them.” 

“Ugh! How can you be so infuriating!? I don’t care what the rest of my colleagues think! Without me signing off there will be no contract with your company and I refuse to do business with someone who can turn a blind eye to such disgusting practices!” 

Keeping both palms flat on the desk, she glared at him over the massive wooden surface as though the weight of her ire alone could force him to break. Madara stared back at her with as little expression as he could muster. If nothing else these little visits were excellent practice for that fabled self control his brother was always nagging at him for lacking. So maybe he had a bit of a temper. Big deal. At least he hadn’t snapped yet and thrown anything at her no matter how many times he’d been tempted by the various heavy objects within arms reach. 

His lawyers had advised against doing that anymore.

“Nothing that goes on here is in any way illegal, I've been assured of that,” he said. 

“Oh you’ve been assured. Of course. I forgot how lazy you are. Still riding through life on daddy’s coattails and letting everyone else do the work for you.” Sakura dragged her palms back and straightened with a look of derision. “You haven’t changed at all, you know that?”

“I’m still as handsome as ever?” Madara grinned, enjoying the twitch of her left eye. 

“What does the outside matter? All I see are your ugly spoiled insides.”

He let the sound of his careless laughter follow her out the door, watching her storm down the hall to go bother the people who had actually written the proposal sent to her company. Only when she was well out of sight did he allow the expression to drop. Hands clenching in to fists, brows furrowing, he lowered his eyes to the mess on files spread across his space. Whatever was in there couldn’t be all that bad, could it? It wasn’t like they were doing anything illegal. 

Alone now, there was no one there to watch him consciously loosen his fingers only to drum them agitatedly against the deks. Letting your opponent see that they had gotten to you in any way was a weakness one could not afford. He’d learned that from his father. What bothered him was how right she was about the fact that he’d gotten most of what he had in life simply by being Tajima’s son, a fact he usually found some way to justify so he didn’t have to admit it even to himself. There was just something about Haruno Sakura that got under his skin the way no one else had ever managed to. Afterimages of those green eyes staring at him with disappointment made him scowl even as he shot one hand out to gather the paperwork together, dragging in towards himself.

Maybe he’d gotten in to university because his father paid off the school. And maybe he’d risen through the company so fast because no one dared say anything about their boss’ son. Yes, maybe he had even stepped in to the position of CEO because he inherited his father’s majority shares when he passed away of a lingering illness a few years back. None of that made him incompetent. Madara liked to think he was a smart man with more to offer than just his last name. He would show her. Whatever was in this stupid proposal that riled her up so badly, he was sure he could figure out a way to placate Sakura in to signing off on it. He might not pay as much attention as he probably should but he knew enough to tell that the shipping company Sakura sat on the board for was the cheapest and fastest way to ship the goods his company produced. 

Over the distant sounds of someone else getting screamed at Madara was able to read through every document in the folder. And with every line his grew wider and wider in horror. The part of his brain that desperately didn’t want to believe what he was seeing tried to come up with some plausible situation in which Sakura might have fabricated everything on these papers no matter how ridiculous but even as his thoughts raced for an excuse he knew that none of them could be true. There was no denying the signatures on the very last page. 

“What”-he whispered quietly to himself-“the fuck.” 

After reading through everything he organized the lot of it back in to the order it was meant to be and read through the whole thing again just to be sure he hadn’t imagined anything. It was hard to believe something this full of bullshit had come out of a company with his name on it. Suddenly all the times Sakura had leaned over the desk to scream at him felt much more appropriate. 

Distracted as he was by such awful discoveries, Madara nearly leapt straight out of his chair when the door opened with a smack of someone’s hand against the glass. He looked up to find the woman he’d just been thinking about storming back in to the room. 

“I didn’t mean to leave that with you,” she said, reaching for the folder he’d only just closed. 

“You’re taking it?” 

“Get your own copy if you want something to gloat over,” Sakura growled. 

Reaching across the desk, she took hold of the folder only to stop with an exasperated sigh when Madara put his hand down to keep the papers in place. “I’ve just read these,” he said.

“Congratulations. Now give it back.”

“I hadn’t seen these before.”

“Not keeping up with everything happening right under your nose? Figures. That sounds like you; just as lazy and entitled as you always were. Now let me have my documents!” 

Madara pressed down harder to keep them in place while his brows furrowed in irritation. “We’ve shipped with your company before. Have all the contracts we’ve made with you looked like this?” 

Seeing that she would not be getting the papers back until they had the conversation he wanted, Sakura took her hand back and folded both arms with a scowl. It was an unfairly good look on her and a testament to how shaken he was that Madara couldn’t even concentrate on the way anger lit up her features.

“Obviously some of the things in there weren’t part of the proposal, I printed them off myself as evidence to back up my claims against your frankly disgusting practices. How do you live with yourself?” The heat of her glare would no doubt have been much more effective if he weren’t already reeling with disbelief. Sakura gave him a rather suspicious look when he relinquished his hold, allowing her to slide the folder over and pick it up. 

“I didn’t authorize any of that,” he said. 

“Yes you did!” One of her perfectly shaped eyebrows lifted in judgment. “Are you or are you not in charge of this company?”’

“Well- I mean yes- Haruno-san, I’ve never seen those documents before in my life! I swear to you! I had no idea any of this was happening!” Madara leaned forward as though a closer proximity might help impress upon her just how serious he was. Whether or not that worked, she didn’t look all that impressed. 

“Just because you’ve been complacent and made a clown show out of your own job does not absolve you of the responsibility. You turning a blind eye allowed for your company to take part in these disgustingly unethical practices and I refuse to do business with someone whose morals can be bought with compliments and a fancy office. Find someone else to ship your slave-made, cheaply sourced, landfill fodder goods! So long as I sit on the board it will not be us!” 

She turned to leave, stopping to look back when Madara stood from his chair with a loud clatter. “Wait! You don’t understand!” 

“Oh?”

“If I had known any of this was going on- you have to believe me, I would never have let any of this happen. Will you…” A scowl touched his face to match her, hating the words even as he forced them out of his mouth. “Will you help me?”

Sakura blinked. 

“Help you?” she asked in surprise. Madara pointed to the files she was holding. 

“You said you dug up a bunch of that evidence on your own. I can’t just fire my entire board without cause. Especially not since I’ve allowed them to take over so many things, they’ve probably got more power than me over this shit. Father told me I could trust them so I always figured there was no point in another pair of eyes looking over everyone’s shoulders. I just let them do their jobs and never gave much thought to whether or not they were actually doing it right.” Admitting that much stung. The rest he forced out between his teeth, guilt heavy in his chest but so unused to asking others for help. “I’ll need to get as much information as I can before I start making any accusations, I need to know exactly what’s been going on here and how much I’ve overlooked. Will you help me?”

“Well. I was not expecting that.” All the aggression seemed to flow out of Sakura’s body, shoulders lowering and one hip jutting out as she propped her weight on that side. Under better circumstances he might have been distracted by how the movement pulled at the skirt of her suit, by the way he wanted to tear that mint cotton off her skin with his teeth, but not now. He could think of nothing but how to prove his question was a sincere one. 

Bruising his pride a little was the only thing he could come up with, a sacrifice he hadn’t made for anyone since he was very young. Taking a deep breath, he took a quick glance on either side to make sure they weren’t being watched through the walls, then spoke very quietly. “Please.” 

“Just tell me one thing. Why should I?”

“Because you’ve been in here yelling at me about corrupt morals and shit for weeks now,” Madara growled, nearing the end of his patience. “You were the one who said we need to clean our shit up; I’m offering a chance for you to show me all the messes these people have made right under my nose.” 

“Oh if only I could go back to that first year in university and tell myself this moment was coming.” Smug was a damn good look on her, he had to admit that much. 

“So are you going to help me or not?” He demanded. 

He had his answer in one decisive nod and the way she too looked around furtively to make sure their conversation had no chance of being overheard. Then she stepped back over to hold one hand out across the desk. When Madara took it she squeezed his fingers with a grip much stronger than her slight frame belied. 

“I guess I do need to put my money where my mouth is. We should meet up somewhere private. I’ll gather everything I’ve dug up so far and all the contracts and proposals we’ve had from Uchiha Tech over the last few years.” Sakura let go of his hand to flick the hair back over her shoulder. “It’ll take a while for me to get it all together but I’ll contact you when I have it. Do you have somewhere we could meet?” 

“My place should do.” Madara scowled when she lifted an eyebrow at him but didn’t bother to defend his suggestion. Let her think what she wanted of him. 

As far as he could tell no one took much notice of Sakura when she left that day. It wasn’t exactly an uncommon sight by now to see her marching through the glass hallways with all the regal bearing of a queen traversing her own kingdom. Madara watched her go until the shape of her form was distorted by so many walls between them before leaning back in his chair and tilting his chin up to stare at the ceiling. He tried to imagine how he would have reacted to being openly accused of even half the things he’d just read, the terrible working conditions, the unethical demands, the work hours listed that clearly meant whoever produced their tech was either not taking breaks or working too many hours or both. Probably with scorn for the accuser’s overactive imagination or anger that someone could dare believe such things of him. In all the many rants Sakura had gone in to she’d never once outright accused him of anything, only hinted, something he realized he should have been grateful for. 

Now he sat and counted the ceiling tiles above him to distract his mind from instinctive rage as he tried to come to terms with the idea that she was right, he was responsible for everything that had gone wrong in this company. Whether or not these practices had been going on when his father was alive Madara couldn’t say but when he took the helm himself - well. He could see now that he really had been the lazy spoiled child Sakura had called him many times. Just because he hadn’t actively taken part in any of these barely legal activities didn’t mean he was blameless. He was supposed to be in charge. 

Yet here he sat in the quiet of his office and he knew that if he continued to sit here for several more hours not a single person would disturb him. He was so far removed from his own company and he had only himself to blame for it. 

Gathering evidence from his end wasn’t exactly some top secret mission dodging around the people who supposedly answered to him. Copies of almost everything sat right there in the room with him. Madara was horrified to realize that everything his directors had done had been with his full and completely ignorant approval. Every contract, every major decision, every change to the staffing policies, all of it had been laid politely on his desk and then filed neatly away after a quick glance at the cover so he could go on pretending he had any idea of what the fuck his actual duties were supposed to be around here. 

The easy life of luxury he’d been enjoying for years was slipping between his fingers with every file and folder he pulled out to actually read in detail but Madara couldn’t find it in himself to be too angry about that part. Lots of people worked hard for their money. It was probably about time he joined those ranks. Much as Sakura didn’t seem to think so, he really did have a work ethic hidden somewhere inside him; it was just that he’d thought he could trust the old geezers here and they’d seemed happier when he stayed out of their way. As a young man barely out of school being handed so much at once he’d thought it was all a dream come true and left it at face value. 

What a naive child he’d been all these years. 

Actually removing all the files he wanted for evidence took much longer than finding them in his mockingly well organized office. When Sakura told him she needed time he had chafed at the delay but in the end he was grateful for it, heading home each day with bits and pieces hidden in the briefcase most assumed was just for show. They’d been right up until recently. 

By the time Sakura contacted him on his personal cell - a number he would have loved to know how she’d got ahold of - Madara was only too glad to welcome her in to his home and the living room that now looked more like the archives of Uchiha Tech than a place to relax in. He felt validated in some strange way to see the approval in her eyes as she looked around at all the mess he’d made. 

“Well, someone certainly has been busy,” she noted.

“You’re not wearing a suit,” Madara blurted, immediately wanting to slap himself upside the head. Of course she wasn’t wearing a suit outside of work. It wasn’t like he’d never seen her in more casual clothes before, just that it had been so long the sight of her in little shorts and a plain tshirt did things to his belly he wasn’t all that prepared to deal with. 

Sakura lifted one eyebrow with a dubious smile. “I worry for your intelligence sometimes.” 

“Hey!” 

“Anyway, I’ve got almost this much crap myself but hauling it all here would have taken too long. Luckily my company likes to have digital copies of everything so I’ve brought a couple flash drives. Have you got a computer we can use?” 

“Yeah, hold on.” 

Madara left her alone just long enough to gently bash his head on the wall and grab his laptop from the next room. By the time he came back Sakura had made herself comfortable on the sofa, one pile of the papers he’d gathered pulled in to her lap where she could flip through it with ease. 

“These aren’t anything sensitive, are they? No client information from anyone else or the like?”

“I’m not stupid,” he grunted. 

She hummed distractedly and paused to look closer at something. “No, not stupid. You do have a brain in your head for all that you’ve insisted on wasting it.”

“Look.” Madara threw out a hand to slap down on the pile of papers she was looking at, blocking her view of them and capturing her attention for himself. “Fuck off, alright? If you just came here to gloat or whatever then you’re no longer welcome. You were right, I already admitted that, I can see how much of a willfully ignorant bastard I’ve been - but I’m making an effort here to change that, alright?” 

“Change what, exactly?” 

“My ways or however you want to say it. I want to do better than I have been. Be a better person, a better worker, leader. To do that I need to start with figuring out how deep this corruption in my company goes and how large of a chunk I need to cut off before I start cleansing the wound.”

For nearly a whole minute Sakura remained completely silent, staring at him with something unreadable in her eyes. “Medical analogies?”

“My best friend’s a doctor.” He shrugged. 

“I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid,” Sakura murmured. 

When she broke eye contact to look away Madara studied the shape of her jawline, realizing suddenly how close they were. 

“Really? How did you end up here, then?” 

Her expression remained far away until she looked back to him again and Madara took several moments to study her even closer, anxious that he might be misinterpreting something. That look in her eyes was a familiar one. He’d seen it on dozens of women before, though he never would have expected to see it on her after the interactions they’d had. When the heat only intensified, however, all he could do was cock his head to the side and stare back, leaving the next move up to his guest. Lust was a game he was all too willing to play no matter how unexpected it was. 

Sakura didn’t seem very aware of the way her tongue darted out to wet her lips, all of her focus locked on to him. All it would take was misinterpreting this one moment and Madara would have lost his only ally in taking down the ones he’d allowed to undermine him. Despite knowing that he still couldn’t quite stop his eyes from following that small flash of pink. 

“I’ve been asking myself that same question,” she said finally. He got the distinct impression she wasn’t talking about her career. “You really are putting in some effort here, aren’t you? Trying to be better?”

“Obviously.”

“Why?”

Madara balked. “What do you mean why?”

“This is a big life change. What motivated you to do it?” 

“Well”-he floundered for a moment, trying to put his thoughts in to words-“it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

She moved so fast and so unexpectedly that for a moment it didn’t entirely register what had happened. It took a few seconds before Madara groaned and let his eyes slide closed, cradling the back of Sakura’s head to pull her closer for a deeper kiss. Hopefully she could tell him later what the hell he’d said to get her going but for now he was happy just to enjoy the taste of bitter coffee on her tongue. 

After the many times he’d seen her channel so much passion in to her work it shouldn't have surprised him to see it again now, shoving him down on the couch with surprisingly strong arms and crawling in to his lap all without breaking their kiss. Madara grunted when his head glanced off the armrest but ignored it. His attention was better spent tracing the shape of her hips down to where denim gave way to smooth pale thighs. She kissed like it would give her the oxygen to breathe, like a beast let out of its cage after holding herself back, and that was definitely a feeling he could relate to. 

“Fucking stupid sexy asshole,” Sakura growled in to his mouth. “I hated you so much when we were in school.”

“Oh yeah, I really feel that hatred now.”

“You just had to grow up to be even more arrogant, even more hot!” When she pulled away he garbled out a protest only to fall silent as she tore her own shirt off, baring her teeth like an animal. “I kept telling myself ‘don’t look, just don’t look, he’s not worth it’. Then you had to go and be a good person? How dare you!” 

“Mph!” 

Whatever reply he could have given was swallowed in the fire of another kiss. Delicate fingers pulled at the hem of his own shirt and Madara responded instinctively, working a hand between their bodies to where he could cup the outline of one petite breast. It wasn’t like she was wearing any special sort of lingerie, just a plain bra with little blue polka dots, and still she was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen in his life. Probably it had something to do with the way she looked like some vicious lioness on the prowl. 

He truly did not mind being her prey. 

“Good to know we’ve always been on the same page,” he managed to get out between hot kisses. Sakura let out a filthy moan as though his words had hit something deep inside her. 

“Shut up and fuck me!” 

“Ha! You don’t get to tell me what to do!” Mindless of the papers that scattered in every direction or the hours it would surely take him to clean it all up later, Madara took shameless advantage of his larger frame to sit them both up and slam them back down on the opposite end of the couch, pausing a moment to enjoy the sight of pink hair splashed out underneath him. “I’ve wanted to do this ever since you waltzed in to my office in one of those stupid power suits. Do you know how good you look in those things?” 

Gasping for breath, she pulled him down without bothering to respond. That was all the invitation he needed. 

Removing the rest of their clothes wasn’t so much of a romantic process as it was an animalistic tearing of cloth, hands palming flesh wherever they could as they devoured each other with lips and tongues and teeth. It felt like only moments ago they had been nothing but partners in stopping crime. Now they lay naked with their hips rolling together, hard flesh grinding against coarse pink curls, long thighs parting to wrap around his waist. 

“I swear to god if you don’t have a condom-”

“Vasectomy,” Madara gasped. “Hate kids. Tested last month, I’m clean.”

“Then what in hell’s name are you waiting for!?”

“I thought you swore to god,” he said, grinning down at her. “But I can give you hell if that’s what you’re in to.” 

Sakura glared. Then her eyes softened to half mast when he reached down to trace her entrance, wet with a need he felt just as strongly, arching in to the touch. He could feel the muscles in her thighs loosen deliberately as he took himself in hand and lined up with the bliss waiting so eagerly for him. 

“Oh fuck!” The words hissed out from between clenched teeth as he slid inside, instantly overwhelmed by the heat that sheathed him in a perfect fit. 

For once in her life Sakura didn’t seem to have any words, although she clearly seemed to agree with his sentiments if the way her heels dug in to his back was any indication, pulling him impossibly closer. He was only too happy to comply. Curses filled the air as he sank deeper, rocking his hips in shallow thrusts until his pelvis lay flush against her. Then she moaned at him to move and that too was an order he was happy to follow. Pulling away was such sweet torture rewarded with the pleasaure of sliding back in and feeling her clench around him. It really had been too long.

Whether it had been a while for her as well or if she was just that desperate to feel him he couldn’t tell but either way Madara felt a little smug about the way Sakura arched her back when he slid one hand under the small of her back to hold their chests together, pulling her body in to his with each sharp thrust forward. He might have been embarrassed by the unfettered noises punched out of him again and again by such overwhelming pleasure if not for the fact that Sakura echoed him every time, filthy moans and gasps and sharp curses spilling from her lips without a single thought for decorum. It was driving him wild. He always had liked a woman who wasn’t afraid to show that she was enjoying herself - and he would be willing to bet Sakura had never been afraid of anything in her life. 

Her mouth now occupied driving him higher and higher, Madara busied his own with nipping a trail down the side of her neck, tracing his tongue down the ridges of her clavicle, worshipping every inch of pale skin he could reach without folding his body in a way that would interrupt the rhythm of their hips. If the world fell down around his ears he wasn’t sure even that would convince him to stop now. Not when Sakura was holding him tightly, arching up as though offering her breasts for his wandering teeth to feast on. 

“Is that all you’ve got?” she asked, breath hot between them, lips parted in a grin that promised blood. Madara wondered if it was possible to fall in love so quickly. 

“That a challenge?” he demanded in panted syllables.

“Give me everything you’ve got.”

In that moment he would have given her whatever she asked; his time, his fortune, his very heart. He was almost glad she didn’t. A challenge had been issued and he was nothing if not a very proud man. Curving his spine ever so slightly gave him room to work a hand between them, scratching blunt nails down the soft skin of her belly just to watch her squirm, through the curls between her thighs. When he pressed his thumb down on just the right spot Sakura cried out sharply, trembling. 

“Like that?” Madara was aware of how smug he sounded. He didn’t care. 

Neither did she, it seemed, as long as he kept doing what he was doing. So Madara made another circle with firm pressure and grit his teeth when she clenched around him in response, knowing that if he couldn’t bring her over the edge soon he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back for much longer.

“Harder!” Sakura demanded, writhing like she could barely contain the pressure building inside. 

“Anything you ask,” he promised. 

His thumb pressed harder, circled faster, hips rocking back just to watch her cry out for him and then sinking back in with enough force he would not be surprised to find bruises on both their hips the next day. One more circle around her clit and Sakura convulsed like a woman possessed. Her body twisted underneath him, clenching around his length. There was nothing he could do but press inside one last time with a guttural moan spilling between his teeth even as he spilled himself inside her. Madara fell still, letting his head drop forward to rest against the top of her shoulder and breathe through the shudders wracking his body. He was far from the playboy many seemed to label him as but he’d had his fair share of partners throughout the years; none of them had ever been like this before. Nothing had ever left him feeling quite as shaken as the weight of Sakura’s fingers twisted in to his hair as though she never planned to let him go. 

When he felt more in control of his own shivering muscles he pushed himself up just far enough to look down at the woman spread out beneath him, this glorious powerhouse all wrapped up in a tiny perfect package. Sakura looked back at him through hooded eyes.

“I don’t suppose I could convince you to respect me in the morning?” she asked with a hint of amusement. Madara let out a soft bark of laughter. 

“Maybe if you stayed the night.”

“Weren’t we supposed to be working?”

“Hey, you’re the one who jumped me,” he pointed out. 

Sakura puffed out both cheeks with annoyance, a startlingly cute display after leaping at him like a wildcat. “I would hardly say I jumped you!” 

Rather than argue the point, for once Madara decided to just let it go. Pulling away to sit up, separating their bodies, was as distasteful as it was necessary. Thankfully he didn’t have to go far. In one swipe he managed to grab some tissues from the nightstand and his pants from the ground before sitting up even farther to allow Sakura some room to clean herself up a bit. Sex was always a messy afair. 

In an effort not to stare like a creep Madara bunched his pants over his lap and took a moment to look around at the mess they’d made of his neatly piled paperwork. Cleaning that all up and reorganizing it was going to take hours but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that; he would have knocked over every crate and pile in this room for the chance to have this woman underneath him willingly. Not that he’d ever planned on mentioning that. He peeked sideways, wondering what it would take to have this again, already addicted after just one taste yet not entirely sure now was the time to ask for more. 

“Can you see where my shirt went?” Sakura asked. “If you want me to look through any of this I need a shirt on. Men always get distracted when there’s breasts flying about.” 

“Just appreciating nature’s good work,” he replied in a dry tone. His movements were sluggish as he reached for the shirt, trying and failing to be subtle about taking one last glimpse just in case this was his last chance to do so. She rolled her eyes when she caught him.

“You can see them again later - after we’ve actually gone through some of this.” 

Madara swallowed back the urge to squirm like an eager child but his voice was still embarrassingly hopeful when he snapped his head around to say, “Yeah? Again?”

Soft cotton slid through his fingers like the ghost of her touch, Sakura’s expression careful but open as she pulled the shirt from his loose grasp and tugged it over her head. Her finger lifted to twist the hem seemingly of their own accord while her gaze held his own. A thousand answers waited for him in those eyes. He wished he knew how to read them. 

“Well, I mean, it was good. No denying that. Apparently I misjudged who you really are underneath all that bluster and that stupid cocky grin; I wouldn’t mind digging a little deeper.” She shrugged, an attempt at being casual that worked about as well as his own attempt, and that was enough for him to understand.

“Right. Let’s get to it then.”

He strove for nonchalance and an offhand tone even though inside he was floating, lighter than he’d felt in years. When he asked for Sakura’s help he really hadn’t meant to ask for anything more, convinced she was only helping him because their agendas had finally aligned, but he was hardly going to complain about getting closer to someone who had always seemed far beyond his reach. He wasn’t one to question good fortune when it landed so nicely in his lap. 

“Now that your eyes are open, first we doctor whatever poison has spread through your company.” Sakura stood from the couch to pull her shorts on, prodding  her neglected underwear aside with one toe before looking up at him to wink. “Then maybe I’ll let you show me what sort of man you can really be when you put your mind to it.” 

Madara scoffed but it did nothing to hide the smile growing on his face. Courting this woman promised to be as much of a challenge as arguing with her was - and that was a challenge he found himself excited to face. When this was all over and the two of them had salvaged what they could of his company, maybe he should offer her a job. To have her light in all facets of his life; now that sounded like a worthy adventure. 

[raendown]

I noticed that under your shipping armada that there's a star next to MadaraSakura. I don't ship the two, but I have an idea applied to them ( if not I'm going to write another pair) I want to make a fic. Maybe the two meeting on a cold or hot night, just to screw with my readers. Lol. Would you like me to write it for you?

Maa, anon, you’re allowed to write anything you like! The stars in my shipping armada are to help point out the ships I have at least some fondness for and will be more willing to read or write. I’m just...picky about MadaSaku lol.

I find in many things for them there’s a weird power dynamic where one of them is super controlling or overbearing and its treated as just very normal despite the other person never reacting positively to this behavior. So long as none of that happens I would be more than happy to read anything your heart desires to write! ^^

[raendown]

@silverfire13 won second place in my 1500 Followers Giveaway and this was their request! Honestly, I wanted it to be longer but these idiots just weren’t having it. 

Pairing: MadaraSakura Word count: 5083 Rating: T+ Summary: A cautionary tale on why you shouldn't play with things that don't belong to you which doesn't turn out very cautionary.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

Halves To The Whole

Long hair and associated vanity aside, Madara was pretty sure that his brother was the more feminine between the two of them. Hearing his own voice reach octaves which shouldn’t have been possible after puberty did its work was enough to make him question that surety – or it would have if he weren’t currently batting for control over his own body. Fingers groped at his flesh in odd places and Madara scrambled to stop them before they could go anywhere interesting. They were his own fingers, damn it, it shouldn’t be this hard!

“Not there!” he wheezed, clamping one of his hands around the wrist of the other.

“What the fuck is happening!?” It was weird having someone else speak through his own vocal chords, feeling the movement and hearing the sounds but knowing that he himself did not speak a word. Madara’s brain derailed briefly to question how she managed to make him sound different.

“Just calm down,” he snarled back. “We can’t figure out what happened if we’re panicking.”

“I don’t want to be a boy!”

Madara rolled his eyes then yelped when his own fingers pinched his side in retaliation. “What the hell! You’re only pinching yourself too, you know!”

His companion didn’t answer but he could feel her seething somewhere inside him, which was pretty much the opposite of any experience he had ever imagined between the two of them. If he had a choice he would have preferred to feel himself inside of her rather than the other way around, although he still wouldn’t have wanted it to happen quite this way. Clearly Sakura agreed with that last point.

“Didn’t I warn you that sneaking around Tobirama’s labs wasn’t a good idea?” Together they wobbled toward the table, both of them trying to guide the legs of their shared body and sending all sorts of confusing signals to the muscles. Madara sighed. “But noooo you can’t control your curiosity can you? You’re as bad as my cats!”

“Alright! There’s no use complaining about it. We’ll just have to ask Tobirama how the hell to reverse, uh, whatever this is.” Her words faltered and it was enough for him to interject with scornful pique.

“What if I don’t want to go begging to that bleached asshole?”

They paused and he could feel the gears of her thoughts turning, control of their body shifting entirely over to him for a few blessed moments as she hesitated before speaking again. “Sometimes you say things and I wonder if you know that it means two things. Do you know what a bleached asshole is?”

His response was little more than a growl at first as she began to instinctively struggle for control again and nearly sent their body toppling backwards. Neither of them spoke for a little while after that. Getting out the door and down the path took much longer than it should have and his frustration was only increased by the fact that he couldn’t truly be mad at her for that. She couldn’t help the fact that her brain was trying to tell her current legs to walk at the same time that his was. Two minds in the same body were bound to create a bit of disparity, whether they meant to or not.

Eventually they made it close enough to the main house to wobble over to the fence, hold on for dear life, and holler for Hashirama. Who was not actually home at the moment, as they discovered after a short battle for control over his sensing abilities.

“Fuck.”

“You watch your language, young lady.”

“Excuse me but right now I’m a young man and you can shove my language where the sun don’t shine.” Sakura paused. “After I get out of your body, though. Don’t shove anything anywhere until I get the hell out of here.”

“I hate every single thing about this,” he grumbled.

Wrenching control over to herself for a moment, Sakura sent them both slumping down to the ground and propped them up against the closest fence post. “Yeah, yeah. Me too. Look, I didn’t get stuck a hundred years before I was even born just to also get stuck in your body so don’t whine at me like you’re the one getting the short end of the stick here. I never wanted a penis. Now I’ve got one. So cool your jets and let’s just wait here to see if help comes, alright?”

Madara stewed wordlessly for a moment, knowing she could feel his irritation. Eventually the curiosity overwhelmed him and he just had to ask.

“What are jets?”

“That’s what you got out of that? Ugh!”

“You didn’t answer me,” he pointed out. She groaned again. It sounded much harsher coming out of his throat than it would have coming from hers and he didn’t like it.

Sakura tended to make delicate sounds which belied the terrible destruction she was able to wreak upon the world around her. From one moment to the next she could switch from laughter as sweet as birdsong to bringing an entire building crashing down with the flick of a single finger. Madara sort of hated how intriguing he found it. She’d never made a secret of how wary she felt around him, even now several years after she found herself stuck in the past – a revelation that still struck him every so often.

Gaining this woman’s trust had taken more effort and energy than building a whole village had and he still wasn’t sure if he had succeeded entirely, which made it incredibly hard to decide how to interact with her. If he was even a little bit surer of his standing in her eyes he might have had the courage to ask her to dinner. As it was, he wasn’t sure she wouldn’t immediately put her fist through his chest just for suggesting it.

Waiting for Hashirama to come home was an exercise in excruciating boredom interrupted with brief periods of bickering. Sakura could be just as sassy as his younger cousin Hikaku but at least she looked cute doing it, not to mention that she never went for the low blow unless she was actually mad at you. Madara shamelessly took advantage of her touchy nature to start a few fights as they sat there on the ground. It was better than staring off in to space doing nothing, in his opinion, and although he would never admit to it he did rather enjoy their little spats. They quite often provided opportunities for him to admire her quick mind.

Nothing like a good argument and rapid fire insults to show off a bit of creativity.

He knew he was pushing his luck when he felt his teeth begin to grind together but luckily that was when Hashirama finally wandered up the street, humming to himself and swinging his arms in exaggerated motions. He very nearly walked right passed them towards the front of the house but stopped when Madara and Sakura both tried to call out to him at the same time – which, of course, meant they accomplished nothing more than gargling loudly in his direction.

“Madara? What are you doing sitting on the ground over there? Did Mito kick you out again?” He made his way over and stopped to look down at the man on the ground strangely when he began to snicker, followed immediately by a scowl directed at nothing.

“Shut up! Stop laughing!”

“Uhm…I didn’t?”

“Not you. Where is that infernal brother of yours? I have a…situation.”

Hashirama tilted his head to one side curiously. “What kind of situation would have you sitting on the ground in my backyard? That you need my brother’s help with?”

“I–“

“We’re stick together!”

“Shut up I was going to tell him!”

“Well there’s no point in beating around the bush.”

“I know that; would you just shut up and let me talk?”

“Are you feeling okay?” Hashirama asked slowly, taking one careful step back. Both Madara and Sakura glared at him in the first united motion they had made so far. Madara crossed their arms petulantly.

“Yes I’m fine. But I, er, we might have, ah, touched something in Tobirama’s laboratory which did something…interesting. If I sound like I’m arguing with myself it’s only because Sakura-san also happens to be occupying my body at the moment.”

Rather than waste time gaping in surprise – he’d seen his fair share of weird things come out of Tobirama’s lab over the years after all – Hashirama nodded with a reflective hum as though this was all very reasonable. “I see, yes, that does explain. Ah, if I might ask where Sakura-san’s body is? Did you fuse together entirely?”

“No, we left my body back in the lab,” Sakura answered with Madara’s mouth. “We can barely manage to walk; carrying me around was a non-option.”

“Right. Okay, well. I suppose I should go get Tobirama. He should be able to fix you two right up!”

Madara managed to shake his fist at the retreating man’s back only because his body buddy wasn’t paying attention. “Walk faster you nincompoop!” he shouted. Hashirama laughed as he rounded the corner. “I hate him.”

“You love him.”

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t.”

His only consolation was in the fact that she didn’t fight the pout he settled on to their face. The surety in her voice was worrisome. If she was that confidant in his toleration for her then it wasn’t that big of a leap to assume she might suspect his affection as well. Very worrisome indeed.

Not wanting Tobirama to see him lolling about in the dirt without any shred of dignity, Madara scrambled to regain his feet while Sakura tried to detach her mind so that he could do as he wished. She did lose her concentration when he tried to wipe the dirt off the back of his robes and both of them contributed to the heat in his face when his hand accidentally groped his own ass.

“I didn’t mean to,” Sakura blurted.

“Well I certainly wasn’t the one who did that!” he snarled back. Of course not. Did he believe his ass was one of the finer pieces in the village? Yes. Did he feel the need to stroke it in public? No!

“Are you suggesting that I did?”

“There are only two of us in here. Or at least there better be. I don’t know if I could handle having a third person stuck in this mess as well.”

“You’re a mess,” Sakura mumbled weakly. Madara’s hand went instinctively to his hair.

He was still trying to come up with a suitably intelligent reply when the air a few feet to one side of them displaced and Tobirama stepped out of nothingness to stare at them with narrowed eyes. Madara stared back at haughtily as he could with Sakura trying to shift his features in to a smile. The results of their conflicting signals probably left his face twitching like a mad beast.

Which, admittedly, wasn’t so bad. Tobirama already thought of him as a mad beast and he’d done very little to discourage that opinion over the years.

“My, my. What have you gotten yourself in to this time, Uchiha?” How Tobirama managed to pack so much judgment in to the movement of a single eyebrow was a mystery he didn’t care to solve. Madara glared harder.

“Fuck you,” he snapped.

“Ah, that isn’t smart. If you wish for me to fix this situation then you’d best be polite, else I might decide it’s too much trouble.”

Sakura shook a clenched fist with the arm not holding on to the fence. “You wouldn’t leave me in here like that! Senju I swear I will feed you your own teeth if you don’t get me out of here right now!”

“Hn.” By the twitch on Tobirama’s features, it was clear he was much more cautious of Sakura’s revenge than Madara’s and he probably hadn’t expected her to be able to speak up for herself. Hashirama must not have explained the situation very well. Either that or Tobirama had heard that Madara got himself in to trouble and rushed over to gloat without waiting to hear the details. That sounded very like him.

Without saying anything else, the man turned away and motioned for them to follow along as he retreated back up the path they had wobbled their way down before, heading towards his laboratory behind the Senju main house. Madara and Sakura struggled to follow behind. Their steps were just as uneven and jerky as they had been before but it seemed like they might actually be getting the hang of this; they managed to take at least a few steps in sync without swaying dangerously. Sakura grumbled about longer legs and how she wasn’t used to being so high above the ground.

Madara took the compliment even if it wasn’t meant as one. It wasn’t very often he got to feel tall when his best friend was a bloody tree and himself barely above average.

By the time they made it in to the lab Tobirama was already seated at one of the work surfaces with a bunch of his notes spread out around him, fingers drumming along the line of his chin in arrhythmic patterns. A frown appeared on his face and Madara echoed it without thinking. Whatever Tobirama had to frown about probably wouldn’t bode well for them.

“I have good news and bad news, Sakura-san,” he said at last.

“Oi, I’m in here too!” Madara’s scowl deepened when Tobirama continued to ignore him.

“The good news is that I can reverse the merge and return your consciousness to your own body. However, the bad news is that I won’t be able to reverse the merge entirely.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sakura demanded. They propped their hands on theirs hips indignantly at the same time.

Tobirama sighed and rubbed at the crease between his brows. “It means that you should stay out of my personal areas and not play with things you don’t understand. The seal was meant to swap your bodies but it wasn’t complete yet and instead you were woven together into one. I can return you to your own body but your minds will stay linked. Forever, I’m afraid.”

“Forever!?”

“Indeed.” The man shrugged heartlessly. “The seal was experimental. I’ve no idea what precisely it did so I’ve no idea how to reverse it either.”

“Unacceptable,” Madara growled.

“Do you want your bodies back or not?” Tobirama asked him in a deceptively mild tone. Neither Madara nor Sakura answered with more than affirmative grumbles and he nodded decisively. “Then I shall get you both back to where you belong and neither of you are going to complain about it. This mess is your fault; deal with the consequences.”

The two of them subsided to wallow in their shocked disappointment.

It actually took a surprisingly short time for Tobirama to go through his notes and ink out a seal which he hoped would do the trick to send Sakura back to her own body, although neither of them were about to complain about that. Waiting was made difficult by the way they could barely stand still properly but they did their best to remain quiet until finally he lifted the scroll he was using and waved it through the air to dry the ink, peering down at the floor where still no one had bothered to move Sakura, to her annoyance.

“Hopefully this works,” he muttered.

“What do you mean hopefully?” Madara jabbed a finger at the other man. “It’s your stupid experiment, it had better work!”

“It was an unfinished experiment, you boob.” Tobirama glared back at him until Sakura rolled Madara’s eyes and took control long enough to smack him upside the head with one of his own hands. He squawked irritably, although that was more because she did so right in front of Tobirama than for any sense of pain.

With much grumbling from both men they converged on the table in the center of the room. Tobirama cleared enough space to lay out the scroll and instructed them to place one of their hands in the center – easier said than done. Both of them tried to move at once without thinking and sent the hand flopping off wildly to one side. Madara snarled to just let him do it and he could feel Sakura trying but their second attempt still didn’t quite go where they wanted it to. On the third attempt he left that hand to her and took control of the other, making him look like a child flailing at the scroll with both arms, but he was pleased to note that it worked, at least.

Darkness filled their vision for a moment and Madara could only describe the sensation he was experiencing as having his insides torn out all at once. It wasn’t exactly a physical feeling and yet it left his body reeling with nausea and an instant headache, neither of which had happened when they merged together before. In a burst of distrusting suspicion, he wondered if Tobirama hadn’t taken the opportunity to do something nefarious, a thought which didn’t help him stay calm at all. Then his vision restored at last and as he crumpled to the floor he caught a glimpse of Sakura stirring in the corner, limbs twitching and eyes fluttering open.

It didn’t feel like they were separated. Her presence was still very much right there inside his mind, her thoughts a murmuring in the background and her emotions muted like music playing from one room over. The only difference was in the way he could sense that he was the only person in control of his body now without having to fight against another mind.

Madara’s vision returned slowly, his eyes seeking out Sakura first and watching her rub at the side of her head while Tobirama inspected her eyes, presumably giving her a medical once-over to ensure she had suffered the transfer without any negative side effects. He could feel the nervous edge to her emotions and the way she was forcing herself to stay still. She was clearly feeling the same restlessness he was yet managed not to disturb Tobirama’s checkup until the man stood up straight and waved to indicate that she was fine. Then she slumped and Madara felt the waves of relief washing through her.

When she had been riding inside his mind as an unwanted passenger her emotions hadn’t been half as prominent. Perhaps, he theorized, it was because his body belonged to him and prioritized his reactions over her own – or perhaps their reluctant savior truly had fucked something up in his efforts to clean up their mess. There was no way of knowing which at the moment.

“Ah, you’re not dead,” Tobirama noted with disappointment shading his words. Madara scowled.

“Wish you were,” he growled.

“Hn. I’m sure you’re fine. If you want a medical examination then go find my brother.”

“Now hold on a moment!” Madara flung one hand out to grab on to the edge of a nearby table and slowly haul himself to his feet. “I could be dying of something you did for all we know and you’re not even going to take the time to check?”

Tobirama blinked at him slowly. “No. Now get out of my lab.”

The only thing that stopped him from breathing out the biggest Grand Fireball he’d ever created right there in front of many explosive materials was Sakura’s hand around his wrist, dragging him around and leading him to the door while her exasperation rang clearly in his mind. He couldn’t quite decipher the words she was thinking but even just the gist of it was enough to tell him that he was in for a hard lecture if he didn’t smarten up his act – a sentiment he resented. She was neither his wife nor his keeper so she had no right to be modulating his behavior in any way.

Only halfway between the laboratory and the Senju main house, Sakura came to an abrupt halt and spun around to face him with her cheeks turning red.

“Whatever you were just thinking about, stop it!” she demanded.

“I’ll think whatever I want!” he shouted back. Just because he could, he imagined her in a frilly little apron, standing by the stove and waiting to serve him dinner like a good ‘socially acceptable’ wife should.

“Stop it!”

“No!”

They glared at each other, fists clenched at both of their sides. Sakura looked away first when the blush on her cheeks spread out to the tips of her ears and Madara could feel the way she both shied away from and yet longed for whatever images she was seeing inside her own mind.

“Wife. What absolute nonsense! I am not your wife!”

“I never said you were,” he insisted. “But if it bothers you so much then let me think about it even more!”

Closing his eyes for a moment, he deliberately imagined the two of them holding hands and strolling down the street together, doing his best to ignore the strong pull of desire he felt for the scene to be real. He winced when a wave of shock rolled over him and he realized his companion had felt the wanting he was trying to ignore. Madara cracked one eye open cautiously, half expecting to see an angry fist coming straight for his face just for taking such liberties when his thoughts concerned her.

He found her biting her lip and staring at her toes instead, weight bouncing on the balls of her feet. Faint traces of nervous anticipation drifted across their strange connection.

“You want me…to be your wife?” she asked slowly. Madara spluttered.

“Who said I wanted–? I never–! Well obviously you’d be a good match for anyone but no one said it had to be me!”

“Hmm.” She peered up at him, demure yet thoughtful. “But you do want it,” she concluded, extrapolating from his disjointed ramblings. Madara’s face contorted and his jaw opened and closed several times while he searched for a way to answer.

In the end he slumped and crossed his arms defensively. “As I said. You would be a good match for anyone.”

“Ah-ah! Be a big boy and admit it! You like me!”

“Gloating does not become you, Sakura-san.”

“But being a perfect little wife would, huh?” She flashed him a dangerous looking grin that warned him not to agree. He already knew better than that anyway, even if he had shared such an opinion.

“Perfection is boring,” he muttered, looking away as though bored. “I much prefer a woman with a brain in her head, one who can keep up with me both in battle and otherwise. Someone who rolls over on command and waits at home to simper over a perfectly cooked meal could never satisfy me.”

The feeling of her amusement was overwhelmed only by the triumph rising like an inescapable tide. Madara was straightening his back with pride before he even realized that it was her emotion instead of his own.

“I see,” she said quietly, in direct contrast with how loud her feelings were to him.

“You – what do you see? What?”

“Lots of things. For instance, I see how you have your weight settled back on your heels the way you always do when you’re uncomfortable but trying to act all stoic instead.”

Madara wrinkled his nose in distaste for being so obvious.

“I also see the way your hands keep clenching unconsciously only to unclench when you realize it; an effort to appear casual, I’m sure.”

“You think you know everything, don’t you?”

“Well you’re not that hard to figure out,” she told him. “Besides, I still have this weird echo of you in my head and you don’t feel very upset to me; you feel nervous and worried and – dare I say it – yearning but not upset” Her lips bowed upwards in a victorious smirk that was more attractive than it really had any right to be. Madara huffed, searching for any words at all that he could pull together in to a rational sentence.

“Shut up,” was all he came up with.

“Maybe I’ll shut up if you kiss me. But don’t take all day about it. We’ve already wasted enough time dancing around each other, wouldn’t you say?”

His jaw hung open in shock at her boldness and it took a few seconds before he was able to muster a response to that. Sakura waited patiently. Likely she could hear the mental static going on inside his head and understood that he wasn’t dismissing her, only startled and still trying to reboot his brain.

Finally Madara gave up on coherent words and opted for just reaching out to pull the woman in towards him, holding her as tightly as he dared as he bent the short distance between them to kiss her. It felt like being whole again. Madara didn’t bother to wonder if that was due to their odd connection or the feelings he had been hiding for well over a month now, using his dwindling brain power instead to catalogue the quiet happy sigh she made and the way her palms rested gently against his chest as though to capture the beating of his heart.

Completely sunk in to the kiss, he was jolted back out of it when he felt her sharp fingernails dig in and scratch their way down his chest suggestively. His entire body shivered under the pleasant sensation.

“Don’t start things that you do not intent to finish,” he growled warningly, pulling back to narrow his eyes at her and shivering again when he saw the way she was looking up at him, something heated and feral behind her eyes that reminded him of a cornered predator.

“Oh I very much intend to finish this,” she corrected him. “Several times before dinner, maybe again after if you’re good.”

“You are a wicked woman, did you know that?”

Sakura winked and stood up on her toes, speaking with her lips brushing against his own. “Yes, I did know that.”

He didn’t have the time to say anything else before a flare of chakra drew their attention away from each other, over to where Tobirama now stood at the top of the path with his arms crossed over his chest and a look of distaste curling his upper lip. While his face went through a few more contortions, Sakura made a point of burrowing deeper in to Madara’s arms.

“It’s not polite to interrupt such an intimate moment,” she called over. He bared his teeth.

“Perhaps you should not defile my personal property with such displays, then. Go make your poor choices somewhere that is not my backyard.”

“Excuse me?” Sakura’s lips turned down in an offended pout. “Are you saying I’m a bad choice?”

“Only that you are making one, my dear.” The two men sneered at each other with mutual distaste.

He did have a point though, as much as Madara hated to admit it. They were terribly exposed here, visible to anyone walking along the street who might peeking over at just the right angle. Besides that, Hashirama still hadn’t returned from wherever he wandered off to and Madara wasn’t willing to risk that he wouldn’t decide to come home and interrupt right when things got interesting. With that in mind he stepped away from Sakura and took her by the hand.

“My home is close and perfectly empty at the moment,” he offered. “There will be fewer irritating interruptions if we adjourn there.”

“What an excellent idea,” she purred.

Tobirama shifted and raised his chin to watch them go until Sakura turned back to look at him and call out once more in a deliberately light tone which could probably be heard several streets away.

“Later, Tobes! I’m off to ride Madara in to the mattress! Thank you for all your help!”

While her friend choked on his own tongue and cursed the both of them for that mental image, Sakura pranced away with a smile on her face. She was forced to drag Madara along as he seemed to having difficulties remembering how to work both of his legs at the same time. It looked quite similar to the jerky wobbling gait they had managed when sharing a single body. Madara tried not to imagine how much of a fool he looked like at the moment, desperately hoping Sakura meant her words despite having too much pride to actually ask.

After he was finally able to gather his wits he hurried to walk with her rather than trail after her like an eager puppy on a leash. Then he bit the inside of his cheek and looked away as the image of her holding his leash popped in to his head. He was not prepared for how much he enjoyed the thought of that.

Sakura halted in her tracks to stare at him with wide eyes.

“Whatever you are thinking of now: yes, I approve, let’s go.”

“Ah, I don’t know that I wish to share that particular thought.”

“You share it, I’ll do it.”

“Right! Shall we–?”

Now it him rushing ahead while Sakura laughed. The sound of her laughter was almost as sweet as the sensation of her genuine fond amusement bubbling up inside him. Perhaps there was a silver lining to this strange situation after all: he would never have cause to doubt his standing with her again. Being able to feel the way she reacted to him, the intensity of her emotions and the way she seemed to want this just as much as he did, was an incredible gift. How many times had he wished in the past that he could be granted a way to see inside her head for just a moment?

Softness could come later, though. The first thing he planned to do with this gift was, of course, show her just how much fire he had built up inside of him from all the time he’d spent watching and wondering. He couldn’t wait to feel her fall apart beneath him – and to hold her together for as long as she would have him.  

[raendown]

@fineillsignup  Well I’m glad you didn’t expect any urgency, considering how long this took to finish. *nervous smile* Enjoy! 

Pairing: MadaraSakura Word count: 8323 Summary: She comes in to the world with a birth date already scrawled across the skin of her arm, signifying that her soulmate was born before her. What sets her apart from others is the date which tells her that they have already been dead for decades. At first she wants to know who it is - until she wishes she didn't. For most of her life she is grateful they will never meet - until she wishes she could have him.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

Memorias Decem

i.

She learned her numbers far later than most children did. When she was very young it didn’t really occur to her to wonder why; the idea of soulmates was a hard thing to wrap your mind around when one is only just learning to speak and the entirety of one’s world is wrapped up in the arms that tuck you in to bed at night. The love of her parents was something Sakura had never once had to question so when all the other children began learning their numbers and she did not, it was easy to take their placating words at face value.

“Of course we’ll teach you dear,” they said. “But not yet. You’re not ready.”

Because she trusted her parents and she was young enough to still believe that they knew everything, Sakura didn’t question them. At least, she didn’t then.

When she grew old enough to leave the house alone and follow the well-trodden path from her home to the Yamanaka compound, Sakura finally learned something which made her question the wisdom of waiting. Ino’s sleeves were proudly rolled up to display the golden ink on her forearm and she was grinning as she read the numbers out to a confused Sakura.

“It’s their birthday, see?” Sakura took a closer look and wrinkled her nose.

“My birthday?”

“Nooooo.” Ino poked her in the forehead she was so self-conscious of. “It’s your soulmate’s birthday. Since I was born with it on my arm that means that my soulmate is older than me – that’s why it was already there, because he was already there. And see, here, this number means he was born in November.”

“But how do you know that?”

Ino grinned, happy to keep showing off. “All the months have numbers. November is the number eleven month!”

Humming in thought, Sakura tugged up the long sleeves her parents insisted that she always wear. For years she had been content to simply wait until the academy to learn her numbers but now she found herself curious. As long as she could remember, this golden writing had decorated her skin; had she been born with it too? Were these important questions? If they were important then she was annoyed with herself for not thinking to ask about it all.

For a moment she considered shoving her arm under Ino’s nose and demanding that her friend tell her what the numbers meant but after thinking about it she pulled her sleeve back down and hid them away. She wanted to be able to read them for herself. It was her soulmate so it should be her discovery.

As Ino chattered on about trying to convince her father to look in to personnel files to help her find her soulmate, Sakura quietly snuggled down in to the fluffy pink bedspread she was sitting on. As soon as she got home that night she was going to have to have a stern talk with her parents. Everyone else got to learn their numbers; she should be allowed to as well!

  ii.

Sometimes it didn’t pay to be a ‘smart girl’.

It didn’t take very long for Sakura to get the hang of her numbers and as soon as she did, she regretted it. At first she hadn’t understood why the number on her arm was a bad thing. Still young, the concepts of dates and centuries were still a bit much for her to wrap her head around.

When she did understand, however, it was a devastating blow. To realize that the birthdate scrawled across her forearm was from almost one hundred years in the past was to also realize that her soulmate had been dead long before she had ever been born. Her parents had to have known, had tried to put off her terrible discovery for as long as possible, and like a fool she had demanded that her own heart be broken.

Already teased enough for the size of her forehead, Sakura knew quite well what the reaction would be if anyone ever found out about the date on her arm. She vowed to herself that she would never show it to anyone, that she would find a way to always keep it covered, and that no one would ever know her secret shame.

 iii.

Naruto got caught trying to break in to the records building a lot. It wasn’t really all that exceptional; trying to break in to the records room was so common that it was almost considered a rite of passage by most of the adults. What caught Sakura’s attention was that he just kept getting caught, which meant more than one thing: he was a lot more tenacious of a person that she’d expected and he didn’t know who his soulmate was yet.

Despite her annoyance that she had to be on a team with someone as loud and annoying as him, Sakura couldn’t help but feel a slight kinship with anyone still searching for answers about who their soulmate was. During her time at the academy it had been difficult to hide her mark when those around her had all shown theirs off so proudly. After he learned her birthday and confirmed that it didn’t match the date he carried on his own arm Naruto had never once bothered her about her soul mark; he was desperate for attention and he did like to stick his nose in to any business he could possibly make his own but Naruto wasn’t nosy about personal things. It was one of his more tolerable qualities.

When their new sensei was late to training for the fourteenth time in a row Sakura watched Naruto sneak off towards the records room and made a snap decision. Her teammate blinked owlishly at her when she flippantly declared that she would help him try to get in but quickly tried to play it off with an ostentatious declaration that he appreciated her helped even though he was sure he would have gotten in on his own this time.

She said nothing about her own motives for helping. The date on her arm was need-to-know information and Naruto did not need to know.

Both of them acted as though they weren’t surprised when the plan they worked out together actually got them inside the building. Naruto looked like he might faint from the shock, like he’d never actually believed he would make it this far, but he was quick to tell his new partner in crime that the plan had only worked because he was so awesome. Ignoring him, Sakura suggested they split up to see if they could figure out the filing system in here.

“Do you want to see my arm?” Naruto asked her. “So you know what I’m looking for, you know?”

“Oh…sure.”

Keeping her secrets to herself, Sakura gave her teammates arm a perfunctory glance before marching away to the other side of the massive room, her fingers delving in to layers of dust and her heart praying for at least a good chunk of time before anyone noticed they were in here.

You would think, she ruminated to herself as she tugged out folder after folder, that it wouldn’t be so hard to get at these records. Everyone in the world had a birthdate on their arm and she didn’t understand why this information wasn’t open to the public. What harm could it possibly do to help soulmate pairs find each other more easily? She didn’t particularly care since she would never meet her other half anyway but it was a thought that wriggled in and wouldn’t let go, occupying her mind while she explored.

Neither she nor Naruto spoke at all while they searched, keeping quiet so as not to attract any undue attention. Twenty minutes passed and Sakura had started grabbing files at random when a loud whoop almost made her jump right out of her own skin.

Incredulous, she stuck her head out of the aisle she was in to look several shelves down at where Naruto was doing a rather noisy victory dance.

“What is wrong with you?” she hissed. He was completely unconcerned, turning towards her with his typical brilliant smile and a thick folder held between both hands.

“I found them, Sakura-chan! Found them!”

“Great,” she said quietly. “Now shut up!”

With the racket he was making they wouldn’t have much longer. Sakura grabbed the drawer of the closest filing cabinet and yanked it open, coughing her way through a cloud of dust. Her fingers chose something at random to pull out and she was nearly floored to realize that, while the date certainly wasn’t a match, the year was close to the one she had been branded with.

“Oi! What are you doing in here, kid?”

Sakura’s head whipped to the side as she listened to Naruto sass off to the guard he had stupidly alerted. Then she jerked her attention back to the cabinet in front of her, both hands moving in a mad rush. Naruto wasn’t smart enough to lie when they asked if he was alone so there wasn’t much time left; but she was just so close! Keeping one ear cocked towards the other side of the room, Sakura dragged out file after file, not even bothering to put them back in their proper places anymore. Some of them bore names from impossibly old clans like the Senju and the Kurama clans, neither of whom had any living descendants in Konoha.

Footsteps were coming in her direction when she pulled out one last file and her eyes were still glued to the fading ink when a spiky head popped around the edge of the aisle she had somewhat destroyed.

“Here she is,” a familiar voice said. “Found her, Izumo!”

“Well then let’s get them out of here before Sandaime-sama finds out we let the little twerps get in.”

Kotetsu laughed casually and dropped a hand on to Sakura’s shoulder. When she didn’t respond he very gently tugged the folder she was holding out of her frozen fingers, setting it aside. Sakura blinked at the empty air without seeing anything. The hand on her shoulder guided her forward and she followed along with no protest, walking on numb legs, barely registering when she reached a bouncing, excited Naruto.

The two men led them out of the building and set them loose with a short lecture on staying out of places they weren’t supposed to be in. Immediately Naruto launched in to enthusiastic rambling about how he’d found someone with the exact birthdate embedded in his arm, how he was going to go find them, that surely they must be his soulmate and wasn’t that exciting? Sakura tried to respond but it came out as little more than a faint wheeze. Luckily Naruto didn’t need much more acknowledgement than that. He was up and gone and yelling thanks over his shoulder before even he seemed to realize that his feet were moving.

How she made it home, Sakura had no idea. She neither heard nor saw her worried parents on the way up to her room. Only once she had perched herself carefully on the very end of her bed did one single emotion break through the haze which had fallen over her all the way back in the records room.

Greif, she thought distantly. This was what it felt like to mourn, although it surprised her that she was able to feel so intensely about the situation. All things considered, she would have thought that finally discovering the name of her soulmate would barely make her feel anything. She’d known he was already dead, known for years now, so how was it possible that just learning his name had the power to stop her entire world from spinning? It felt like a shadowed hand were reaching forward through the decades to plunge inside her chest and grip her heart, squeezing unrelentingly.

Uchiha Madara, the betrayer of Konoha. How could someone like her be bound to a monster like that?

The tears found her only moments before her parents did but no matter how many questions they asked Sakura held her silence. It was ridiculous to think that they would see her any differently if they knew who her soulmate had been – they were her parents, they would always love her – but still she kept her secret. This was her shadow to bear.

 iv.

“So you found them?”

“No.” Slouching down and pulling up tufts of grass, Naruto scowled. “Well, yeah and no. She didn’t have my birthday on her arm.”

“Well tons of people probably share the same birthday. It’s not really a big surprise that you didn’t get them on the first try. Maybe they live in another village.”

Naruto sighed despondently and craned his neck to see if their sensei had arrived yet.

Beside him, Sakura tugged at her elbow protectors to make sure they were still in place, covering just far enough down her arm that no one else would ever see the writing on her skin. Uchiha Madara had died in darkness and he deserved to stay there, in her opinion.

She hoped he was scowling in his grave.

 v.

Fifteen years old seemed like a great age to have her first boyfriend. It had at the time, anyway. Gorou was the fifth son of a wealthy merchant, a civilian with basic shinobi training to protect him on the road between villages, just enough to give him a healthy admiration for the village’s militant guardians. He was smart and independent and he was enraptured by the muscle tone which had developed in her arms ever since she had come under the tutelage of the Godaime Hokage. Sakura liked him.

But that was all.

The fourth date was drawing to a close and still her heart had yet to flutter in anticipation even once. Sakura choked down a sigh as she listened to Gorou tell her about how amazing his trip to Waterfall Country had been the year before. It was an interesting story with fascinating anecdotes and really funny jokes and Sakura ignored the whole thing in favor of trying to convince herself that she wanted to kiss him. Was she trying too hard? Emotions were finicky things, after all, and she was definitely the sort of person to dig in their heels when someone tried to tell her to do something, even if that someone was herself.

It was the same old story. Sakura had found plenty of guys cute over the years since puberty had violently smacked her in the face. Admiring a nice body never seemed too much trouble yet building a real emotional connection was always where trouble reared its stupid head. Was she broken? Was she some kind of sociopath, unable to feel love?

No, that was stupid. There were plenty of people that she felt a very deep love for. Her problem was that all of those loves were platonic, friendships and family, and Sakura’s young heart longed for romance. She wanted so desperately to be swept up in someone’s arms and declared the love of their life, no matter what numbers were written on their arms. She wanted someone to see her as something more than a preordained empty fate.

Because it wasn’t fair that her fate had ended before it ever began.

After eating dinner at a sweet little café that she’d never been to before – but would definitely be coming back to later – Gorou walked her home, strangely silent. He’d filled the rest of the evening with pleasant and interesting chatter; now that the date had reached its end it was as though he had simply run dry of words. Not that Sakura could blame him. It probably wasn’t very encouraging to talk so much with so little reaction from his companion.

“So this was…something,” he said as they reached her front door. Sakura groaned in mortification.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered. “You’re amazing, Gorou, really. It’s just–”

“Just not for you. That’s okay. My parents told me last night that we’re leaving for the Land of Tea anyway.” Gorou shrugged. “At least I’m not leaving any broken hearts behind, right?”

Sakura smiled a little, grateful that she wasn’t sending him off with a broken heart either.

Fifteen years old had seemed like a great age for a first boyfriend but it looked like she still had a bit of growing to do before she could start thinking about epic romances. Maybe her mother was right and she should find someone to talk to about how her situation made her feel. Someone professional. She wasn’t sure that she was fully comfortable with the idea of it yet but she was slowly coming around to it.

One thing she did know was that she did not want to follow in the footsteps of her two greatest role models. Kakashi and Tsunade were both amazing people but they had both let the phenomenon of soulmates ruin their happiness, Tsunade by the loss of hers and Kakashi by never finding his.

If Sakura had to beat her own heart in to submission she would find someone to love, someone who would love her back even if they both had to bind their arms and never think of numbers again.

 vi.

War was a terrible place.

Sakura thought longingly of the innocence she had clung to only a year before, knowing she would never un-see the horrors and atrocities which had taken place right before her eyes since then. For the rest of her life she would remember the screams of the medics’ encampment, the helplessness as another life faded under his fingers, and the dark consuming lack of hope she could see in the eyes of those who waited for her time.

War was indeed the most terrible place to lose the final vestiges of her childhood but Sakura could not think of a single place she would rather be. Here she could help, even if that help was to keep only a small handful of lights from winking out. Any life saved was worth it.

Those were the thoughts Sakura clung to as she felt her sanity tremble and fray, while she watched the reanimated form of her own soulmate wreak havoc upon the collective forces of the Elemental Nations. Madara was as dark as the legends had built him up to be. His gaze was restless and his words insane, his resolve unwavering even as he stood alone in the face of armies. Some distant, shriveled piece of her heart cried out at seeing him and, even as she understood why, she did her best to silence that voice inside her.

Why should she care about the ages-old pain only too visible in his eyes? What should she care about his reasons? He was a killer, would never be more and had never been less.

She shouldn’t have been there when he was revived. Sakura couldn’t have even said how she made her way from fighting that giant wooden statue to the barren field where Naruto and Sai were attempting to seal Madara. Her memories were hazy and her body strangely drawn, as though she had been pulled here like a magnet, some bell in the back of her consciousness chiming out and begging her to follow. Without knowing why, she did.

Just as she watched Sai’s tiger bite down on Madara’s arm in preparation for sealing him, a massive wave of chakra seemed to emanate from him and boiled the ink creation. The heavenly gates keeping him in place splintered outwards and when their enemy rose he was no longer a reanimated corpse.

Uchiha Madara had been reborn.

The three teammates watched in horror as Madara stood and raised both arms in front of him, a manic grin already spilling across his face. And then he paused, his eyes widening, until a moment later they were confused to see their own horror mirrored in that wild expression.

“Impossible,” he growled, pawing at the skin of his own arm. “Impossible.”

“What’s he doing?” Naruto hissed out of the corner of his mouth.

Neither of his two friends answered him but Sakura had the strangest notion that she knew. He was scratching at the exact same spot where her own soul mark rested; could that have had something to do with his sudden distress?

“Something has happened. This is wrong. Impossible, wrong, wrong! What did that fool do!?” Madara snarled and clawed and pulled at the naked skin of his forearm, his feet stumbling as though the sheer weight of his own mania were throwing him off balance. As he shifted he turned at just the right angle for them to catch a glimpse of the writing which was now framed in the red marks scored by his own nails. “Illusion! Why will it not come off!?”

“Doesn’t matter, I guess,” Naruto said. “Whatever ghosts this guy is seeing aren’t important; we’re still gonna kick his ass, ‘ttebayo!”

“Back off before I exterminate you and all your friends, you insignificant worm! This is important. What have you done that can fool even the Sharingan!?” As he snarled at them Madara rotated his arm to again display the golden numbers written there, causing Sakura to cringe.

Since it was all old news to her, she felt her time was better spent watching the madman in front of her for any signs that he might attack them but her friends, apparently, had attention to spare for certain other details.

“Hey, isn’t that your birthday, Sakura?” Her entire body stiffened when Sai spoke up, a curious lilt in his typically flat voice.

Madara’s gaze found her immediately and it was impossible to tell if he was angry, confused, or terrified. Her bets were mostly on angry once he started grinding his teeth together and leapt towards her with murderous purpose on his face.

 vii.

Having two international criminals in the basement was enough trouble without all the other villages calling for their blood. Owning up to the fact that the most dangerous and unstable villains always seemed to come from Konoha only added to the whole kerfuffle.

Despite her own reservations about the whole situation, Sakura couldn’t deny the joy in Kakashi-sensei’s eyes just at the chance to spend time with his old friend, the one whose death had set him on the path which made him who he was today. Obito himself wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows about everything either but it was nice to know that at least one person was getting a little happiness out of this mess.

Madara was obviously not.

After his distraction led to a rousing defeat of both him and the enslaved Obito, Madara spent most of his days raging at whoever stepped close enough to listen. Just remembering the fact that ‘mere mortals’ had been able to best him was enough to have him ranting at the top of his lungs and yet that wasn’t even the source of his greatest upset. The numbers on his arm had turned out to have a greater significance than anyone would have thought.

Evidently he had never possessed a soul mark during his life, believing to his dying day that there was no one in the world for his soul to connect to. It was part of what had driven him so mad and one of the main reasons he had so easily cut ties to everyone he had once cared for; waiting year after year for a mark that never came, his obsession and paranoia growing deeper and deeper over time, had led him to some very strange conclusions. Once his brother passed away he had slowly convinced himself that anyone who claimed to love him was simply lying, that he was simply incapable of being loved.

Sakura very carefully managed not to think about how much she might be exacerbating that stupid idea by refusing to speak to him in the jail cell he had been sealed within. Or, at least, she managed not to think about it for close to a year after she and her friends stumbled home from war.

The thing was: knowing that your soulmate died long before you were born only to suddenly find them very much alive again was a bit of a strange thing to wrap your head around. Mostly she tried not to think about it because whenever she did she wasn’t sure which thread to follow or how she felt about it when the thoughts crept up on her. How did one come to terms with the fact that one’s soulmate is a megalomaniac and a mass murderer to boot? As a shinobi she had taken her fair share of lives but it seemed the Uchiha clan was chock full of idiots willing to take those numbers to the extreme.

Yet here she was almost a year later skulking in the shadows as though she were the one who had something to hide away. Madara might as well have been in isolation for all the human contact he was allowed. Other than the psychiatrist he was forced to speak to twice a week, there were very few other times when he was given to chance to interact with anyone else; even his own guards preferred to melt in to the shadow as though they weren’t there.

Probably they wished they weren’t.

His cell was on a basement level by itself, away from the other prisoners and especially away from Obito, who flew in to a frothing rage at the mere sight of his one-time captor. Even the other prisoners either scorned or feared him and it had caused enough unrest that their new Hokage chose to move him somewhere where he wouldn’t bother anyone.

Watching from the shadows, Sakura could see that all this time alone was doing Madara no favors. It occurred to her that he had probably gotten enough of that from the time he had spent in the cave where he lived before capturing Obito. She observed him silently as he prowled around the edges of his prison cell, wild black locks floating like a cloud of angry snarls behind him. It looked as though he hadn’t brushed his hair since being reanimated – and smelled as though he hadn’t taken a bath either. Despite understanding their motivations, Sakura had just enough of a moral compass left to be disappointed in her fellow shinobi for so badly neglecting someone placed in their care.

Madara paced for a long time and it looked as though he were doing it more out of boredom than any sort of explosive anger. Lower security prisoners were allowed out in to an exercise yard every day but someone like him had to be kept behind layers upon layers of chakra suppressing seals. Sakura wondered if he was even allowed to visit the psychiatrist or if whoever it was came down here to see him.

“I know you’re there,” his voice filled the room suddenly, his pace unchanging. Sakura very nearly lost her grip on the stones keeping her stuck to the ceiling. “You smell of freshness and open air, so unlike this dismal hell. Have you come to exact revenge, stranger? I’m sure they would let you.”

Fingers tightening, Sakura swallowed thickly. The way he spoke was so calm, so blasé, and she wondered if he truly didn’t care that someone might have come to kill him. Sure, this wasn’t exactly a great life in here but – no, actually, she could very much see how living in these conditions would cause a man to lose his will to live. All things considered, he was probably handling this a lot better than most people would.

“Come out, come out, stranger. If you’ve come to kill me then be done with it. I abhor dawdling.”

Around and around his little cell he continued to wander at an even pace, all of his muscles completely relaxed. Sakura hesitated a moment longer before sliding back down to the floor and slowly making her way out of the shadows.

The moment he spotted her Madara’s entire body coiled like a sprung trap and his lips peeled back in an angry hiss. Her hackles shot up in response and suddenly they were glowering at each other through the barred wall. Sakura clenched her fists and tried not to think about the mark on her arm.

“You,” Madara growled. “What are you doing here?”

“That’s my own business,” she shot back.

“Leave, you insolent pretender, unless you have come to end my misery and free me from this world of ridiculous lies.” He had stopped pacing and now stood as still as a statue but for his eyes which tracked every minute twitch on his visitor’s body.

Sakura rolled her own eyes. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about. You aren’t the one who’s had to live their whole life knowing their soulmate was a betrayer!”

“I betrayed nothing. It was them who betrayed me first. I opened my eyes to the lies around me and saw that I would have to be the one to bring truth to this world. Now you and your ilk keep me from setting you all free, like children refusing what is good for you.”

“What lies, idiot?” Propping both fists on her hips, Sakura lifting one eyebrow judgingly. “I’m not exactly happy to have you as a soulmate but at least I–”

“NO.”

She just barely resisted jumping in surprise when he slammed forward against the bars, eyes wild and boring in to her as though the heat of his anger could melt the iron barrier between them.

“I will not hear of it,” he snarled.

“Hear of what?” A moment passed before Sakura realized what had upset him so and instantly she felt her own anger rising to meet with his. “Oh would you just grow the fuck up? Really? You’re upset that I said we’re soulmates? Well newsflash, asshole, this wasn’t good news for me either but it looks like I’m handling things a lot better than you!”

“We are not! I have no soulmate. You are nothing, no one, not mine!”

“Go fuck yourself.” Sakura squared her feet and leaned forward until they were breathing in each other’s faces between the bars. “You don’t get to pretend that this wasn’t hard on anyone but you. Do you think it was easy knowing that my own soulmate died decades before I was ever born? Huh? You think it was fun hiding my numbers so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the pity? Being blank would have been a mercy, you stuck up maniac!”

Madara snarled in her face menacingly but she did not back down. They were so close together that a single tilt of her chin would brush her skin against his and she could barely separate the conflicting urges to lean in or lean away.

“If your arm was blank then at least you had hope for a time. I never had hope. All my life I’ve known that you were gone long before I arrived and that I had missed my chance. Never even had one. That isn’t to say that your situation wasn’t shitty but don’t you look at me and think I didn’t mourn for something I never had a chance to know.”

“Would it have been better to know that you would never be loved?” he asked her in a mocking tone.

“It would have been better if I’d had a real soulmate instead of you,” she shot back.

Amazingly, those were the words which caused him to recoil, shock written plainly across his face as though she had slapped him. Madara stumbled back on unsteady knees until he had retreated halfway across his cell. There he stopped with his gaping jaw working soundlessly, hands clenching and unclenching in arrhythmic patterns.

It took some time before he was able to regain himself; Sakura used that pause to compose herself as well. Losing her temper had always been a bit too easy and she hated that she had exposed her weakness like that so easily, especially to someone like him. She should have nothing but hatred for this man so why was it that she felt so drawn to him? Something in her knew that the moment she left she would feel the need to come back – but for what?

“Why did I even come here in the first place?” Sakura wondered out loud, spinning on her heel and marching determinedly back down the hallway.

Before she was halfway to the stairs she heard the pounding of fists against metal and Madara’s haughty voice demanding that she come back. Bearing in mind his less than enthusiastic welcome, she felt no remorse in ignoring him now. He obviously didn’t want her and the feeling was very much mutual. There was nothing here for her.

Two weeks later found her back in that dark hallway, perplexed as to why she had bothered to come.

 viii.

It probably wasn’t obvious to anyone but her or the silent guards who regularly watched over their conversations from the shadows, but therapy was actually doing Madara some good.

Actually, sometimes it wasn’t that easy for her to tell either considering how jilted and awkward their conversations tended to be. Despite the sessions with his psychiatrist doing him well, therapy wasn’t an immediate fix and a bit of backsliding wasn’t entirely unexpected. There were still days when Sakura would find him with his arm covered in scratch marks from where he had tried to claw the numbers out of his own flesh to prove them false.

On the days when he was feeling well he was…interesting. After a few months Sakura gave up on hating herself for her need to keep coming back and decided it wasn’t worth the introspection to figure out why. All that mattered to her was the thrill running down her spine on the rare occasion she was able to make Madara smile, the rapt attention on his face as he listened to her tell stories of the current world, the palpitations in her chest the one time he had allowed her to reach through the door of his cell and touch his wrist. She’d only been brushing off the lingering crumbs of his dinner and his eyes had followed her movements as though expecting an attack but, still, he hadn’t pulled away nor had he asked her to stop and Sakura could perfectly recall the texture of his skin underneath hers, the steady beat of his pulse.

For whatever reason, the rhythm of those few beats of his pulse were on her mind today, her feet unconsciously following the same pattern in their journey down a familiar dark hallway. Several shadows shortened and fell back in respect for her presence as she approached the only prisoner kept on this floor.

“Ere she comes,” Madara’s voice drifted out teasingly from the far corner of his cell.

“Are you trembling in your boots?” Sakura asked him, feeling her lips twitch. He lifted one eyebrow and flexed the bare toes of both feet.

“Surely I would, Lass, but I don’t appear to be wearing any.”

Reluctantly, hiding it behind the rolling of her eyes, Sakura smiled. Who knew that a titan such as Uchiha Madara would be prone to telling bad jokes when he was relaxed enough to do so? She very carefully refrained from bringing any attention to the joke itself, however, in case he took offense to what exactly caught her interest about it.

It had been more than two years since she first began her visits to this dark and dismal hallway and that one joke was all the proof she could ever hope for of just hope much he had changed since then. The Madara who had first been imprisoned here would never imply himself to be scared of anyone, not even in jest. Sakura could almost say she was honored that he had played along.

He had grown – healed – in other ways as well in that time, however.

“And how does my wayward soulmate fare on this weathered day?”

“Weathered?”

“I cannot see the weather but I’m more than certain it’s still there in one form or another. Rain or sun, however, is beyond my telling.”

“You know, you’re not half as funny as you think you are.”

“Hn. Then why are you still smiling?”

Since she didn’t really have a rebuttal for that, Sakura said nothing. Instead she flopped backwards on to the bench she had dragged down here a long time ago and curled one ankle behind the other. It was still a bit of a thrill to hear him refer to her as his soulmate without screaming a denial in the same sentence. Her heart fluttered inside her chest still, stealing her concentration and making her forget whatever stupid inconsequential story she had meant to tell him today.

“For your information it snowed last night,” she said, allowing herself time to gather her scattered thoughts.

“Snow.” Madara’s gaze slid away from her and his expression grew distant. “I no longer recall what it feels like to stand in the snow. Logic tells me that it would be cold, of course, but the details escape me.”

“Maybe if you’re good I’ll bring you a snowball to play with.”

His eyes returned to hers and gave her such an unimpressed look that she was forced to bite her lip just to keep herself from bursting in to laughter. No matter how many bad jokes he liked to tell, Madara wasn’t exactly the whimsical type who would appreciate such a silly gift as a snowball.

“You’d be just as likely to throw it at my head,” he said. “I believe I shall pass on that offer. Perhaps someday I shall be freed from this rotting hole and relive the experience for myself.” That he managed to speak of the future with only minimal bitterness in his voice gave Sakura a burst of warmth in her chest, one which she refused to acknowledge as affection. Having any sort of affection for someone who most certainly viewed her as little more than his only source of entertainment was far from a good idea.

“Kakashi-sensei has agreed to revisit your case for the possibility of parole,” she told him quietly. Madara sat up quickly, his expression suddenly intense, hyper focused.

“Tell me.”

“Nothing’s been decided for certain. There’s a lot of people in the village – in all of the village’s – who would prefer to keep you locked up for the rest of your life, so it’s been difficult to argue your case in the face of so much push back. If Naruto weren’t the forgiving idiot he was then I doubt anyone would even stop to consider the idea. And if he didn’t have Gaara in his back pocket.”

“Remind me to send them both a gift basket,” Madara said dryly.

Sakura narrowed her eyes at him playfully before heaving a sigh and continuing. “There would be conditions, of course. Probably community service of some sort and I can’t say it’s likely they would ever allow you to access your chakra again. Actually, there are some people calling for you to be severed from your chakra permanently, which others argue would be likely to drive you mad. The arguments go back and forth and, honestly, I come out with a headache every time.”

“This has been going on for some time, then.”

“Ah.” Raising her head, she offering him a sheepish look. “I didn’t want to say anything unless it looked like at least a small possibility. To offer you such a hope only have it taken away…it seemed cruel.”

“I could describe you in many ways but ‘cruel’ is not one of them,” he agreed. Warmth filled her again and she ruthlessly shoved the feeling down.

There was no need for her to tell him that she was one of the few people advocating for his release; in part because she refused to admit to it out loud and in part because he already even though she’d neglected that particular detail. Despite her efforts to remain as aloof as possible it was painfully obvious that she had gotten attached to him in one way or another. All she could hope was that he wouldn’t realize just how deeply that attachment had taken root and to what lengths she would go for a man who, for most of her life, had existed as little more than a nightmare.

It was true though. No matter how long it took, so long as there was someone willing to listen to her arguments, she would continue to work towards Madara’s release. The rest of the world be damned, she was determined to see the day when she could have just one conversation with her own soulmate unseparated by bars of sealed iron.

 ix.

No one was truly able to tell for certain what age Madara’s body was when he had been brought back to life. From what he had been able to remember, it seemed he was at least somewhere in his late twenties and at most close to his mid-thirties. By the time he was released from prison he could have been close to his late forties yet there wasn’t any way to know for sure.

Sakura wished she knew what age he was. It felt important, somehow, in this moment.

No words she could think of could have properly described his face as he stood in the snow, ankle deep and without proper coverings for his legs. She had offered to bring him a pair of boots for the journey but he had refused and it was easy to see why, not having make it more than a few steps past the dry interior of the Interrogation tower before he came to a halt and simply stood in perfect stillness.

His hair whipped around him like a cape, tugged by the breeze and ruining the painstaking efforts he had gone to with the brush she’d brought him, attempting to look presentable for his return to the world outside. Rather than seem annoyed, he didn’t appear to even notice. His eyes appeared unable to decide what to stare at, the ground or the buildings or the sky or the fat white flakes falling in to his raised, open palms.

Sakura watched him in silence and waited patiently.

For nearly a decade she had waited to see him released from prison. A few more minutes wouldn’t kill her now.

 x.

“Your friend disrespects the very position he is trying to obtain,” Madara noted lazily from his perch.

Sakura looked down and squinted, trying to pinpoint what her companion had been looking at. When she spotted it she didn’t bother to hide the giggle which bubbled up; there was no one up here but the two of them after all.

Dozens of feet below them Naruto could be seen bounding across the rooftops, only just barely keeping ahead of the two figures chasing after him. Kakashi probably didn’t think much of having his robes dyed a virulent green but Obito, after being released in to the merciful hands of his one-time teammate, had become strangely overprotective. It looked more like Kakashi was chasing Obito who was chasing Naruto, the obvious culprit in this situation.

From her perch atop the fourth Hokage’s great stone head, Sakura shook her own. Naruto might be a mere year or two away from realizing his lifelong dream but he had yet to grow out of his love for pranks.

“I don’t think ‘respect’ is in Naruto’s vocabulary. Not the same way it’s in yours, at least.”

“Your definition would not be likely to meet my own standards either,” Madara pointed out. Sakura only smiled cheekily, completely unrepentant. She’d been his warden for long enough at this point to feel comfortable poking fun at him every so often; the big bad wolf wasn’t so scary now that she was the one holding the leash.

“A lot of things I do probably don’t meet your standards,” she joked in return.

In her mind she was referring to the fact that he despised her cooking and griped constantly over how poor of a housekeeper she was. Cleaning wasn’t exactly one of her strongest skills, much to the chagrin of the one who was now legally required to live under her roof. Sakura was of the opinion that if she had room to move around then it was fine. Madara wanted things spotless. He ended up doing a lot more cleaning than he thought he should but he never allowed such travesties to pass without a long wordy lecture which she happily ignored every time.

When she heard neither conspiratorial laughter nor exasperated moaning, Sakura looked beside herself to check that her companion hadn’t fallen off the edge of the monument or something. She was surprised to find a pensive, almost hesitant expression on Madara’s face. Before she could ask if he was alright he opened his mouth, paused to frown, then opened it again to speak.

“There is much about you that…meets my standards, as it were.”

Sakura blinked, confused. “Uh, thanks? I think.” He looked frustrated at her response, as though she should have understood his meaning from such a vague sentence.

“Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is much about you which exceeds my expectations. You are nothing like I would have expected, nor even what I would have thought to wish for, yet I do not find myself disappointed.”

“Well that’s, er, a good thing. Although I’m not sure what you mean by expectations. Look, if this is about me punching a hole in the yard last week–”

“No, this has nothing to do with you punching a hole in the yard last week.”

Madara pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers while Sakura cocked her head to one side, more confused than ever. He was obviously trying to communicate something to her but she had zero ideas about what it could be. No matter how many years had passed or how many sessions he continued to have with his therapist – one of the many conditions of his parole – communication still wasn’t his strong suit.

In an attempt to salvage the good mood he’d been in, one she had worked very hard to get him to after a long day of community service, she leaned over to bop their shoulders together casually.

“Well, whatever it is, I’m always happy to exceed anyone’s expectations. Not all of us can be super important from the moment we were born like you!” She grinned, but instead of taking the bait he turned his body to face her, his brows knitting together in a frown on determination.

“You are important,” he said.

“I’m head of the hospital, so, yeah I guess.”

“To me. You are important– We are– Humph.” Frown dissolving in to a full-blown scowl, he looked away for a moment and settled his gaze in the middle distance while he tried again. “I did not have a soulmate in my previous life. And now in this life you are here with me, willing to redeem me of my sins no matter that I did not want you to. At first. It is true that you are an important person to your village but what I meant was that you are important to me.”

“Oh.”

For a moment she very nearly forgot the mechanics of breathing and there was a very real fear that her heart might leap up in to her throat. After she’d convinced her lungs to draw oxygen once more she coughed and cast around for words that could express the feelings raging through her body.

Because she knew what he was trying to say now and just the thought of it had stolen the very earth from beneath her feet. She had dreamed about it of course, such intoxicating if impossible dreams, but to have it in reality had never seemed even remotely plausible, not with how strenuously he had fought against it from the start.

Eventually Madara looked away, his spine stiffening as he mistook her silence for rejection.

“If it should please you, I believe I shall return to my quarters now.”

“Home.”

He stiffened further. “What?”

“You could just say that you’re going home.”

“It is your home and I an interloper.”

“Why are you always so pessimistic?” she asked, neither expecting an answer nor waiting for one.

Not wanting to give the man a chance to run away, Sakura turned and raised herself up on to her knees all in one fluid motion. Madara grunted in surprise when she pressed her lips against his but he did not pull away and she counted that as a victory.

“I love you too,” she whispered against his lips, hoping she was right. Several heartbeats passed while she stared at the pale shade of his closed eyelids.

“That is…yes, well. Excellent. Expected. Unsurprising.” He had yet to open his eyes and Sakura was sure he wasn’t aware of the way his chin tilted up in search of her, unconsciously asking for another kiss. She was more than happy to indulge him.

And just because she could, because she had been holding the words in for too long now, she whispered once more, “I love you.”

Thin fingers wrapped around her arm, just beneath the elbow where they would rest against the warm golden numbers she had been born with, and Sakura kissed Madara as though all the lights in the world would go out if she did not.

[raendown]

Rae, darling, what are your ships that you like to write? I'm sorry lol it's hard to keep up with what everyone likes. I know madakaka, kakasaku, and shikasaku (?) cuz you always like my stuff. But what does Rae like to write?

Are you ready for a ship list, woman??? Here comes the flood. Now, we all know how obsessed I am with the ones you mentioned, but I also adore writing for any of the below:

MadaraTobirama

ObitoKakashi

KakashiYamato

MinatoKakashi (somehow this ship has even more stigma than kakasaku when it has a similar dynamic but with an even smaller age gap?? I try not to draw much attention to it but I adore fics/fanart of them once Kakashi grows up)

TobiramaKagami

TobiramaIzuna 

KakashiHana

KakashiIruka

KisameObito (I didn’t ship this until I got two requests for it for my Soulmate Collection and now I do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

HashiramaObito (Same thing here)

There’s a lot of other ships that I have never written for but would like to some day. I’m totally down to try any of these:

KisameSakura

MadaraSakura

GenmaIno

InoSakura

NarutoSakura

KakashiTobirama (you will never convince me that this wouldn’t be the hottest thing ever)

ShikamaruSakura (I adore every one of the fics you have written for them and while I’m not sure I could write Shika as well as you do I’d be very willing to try)

KakashiGenma

Ships I enjoy from afar but don’t think I would do well at writing would be:

GenmaRaidou

KotetsuIzuna

KakashiGai

InoSai

NejiTenTen

NarutoGaara

LeeGaara

ShikamaruTemari

I like reading about those ones but as a writer I don’t know that I would properly be able to express the dynamics or personalities in those ones. I would absolutely try if someone requested them, but on my own I wouldn’t. 

I’m super sorry for writing you an essay XD There’s probably even more that I have forgotten to write down. I am a chronic multi-shipper and I feel no shame about it. 

What are yours?

[dipsyru-blog]

So now I`m trying to finish one of my doujinshi, based on russian fanfic(it`s really good story and plot, I wish somebody could translate it into English), where Sakura was sent to the past and when she finally comes back to her time, you already know who was waiting for her all these years...

I will try my best to finish it soon, I wish I have had some time to make it digital, but anyway :)

[dipsyru-blog]

I don`t know how to comment this,  I just draw for my selfish desires х)