Archive of Our Own ^beta

"You know, in another world, I killed you." Those words weren't what Sasori expected when he returned to his hideout from a meeting with one of his informants to find a pink hair woman sitting atop his work station desk like she belonged there.

He assessed the stranger through clinical eyes; a pink haired kunoichi- obviously- of petite build, dressed in a red qipao and a pair of beige shorts. A taijutsu user, judging by the combat gloves stretched taut over calloused knuckles and the wry muscles on her frame. He spies a purple diamond on her forehead and knows of only one other in the shinobi world who wears it (or dares to). "And pray tell, how did you kill me, kunoichi?" He doesn't insult his hypothetical would-be killer by implying she's anything less.

She's entirely relaxed- sure and confident- as she looks at him. She judges him as much as he does her."Your grandmother helped- but I was the one who delivered the killing blow." She points at him. "Straight through Hiruko, and through whatever modifications you made-to the chakra core at your center."

"That old hag?" He sneered. He tries to ignore the way his chakra heart skips a beat, a slight irregularity in face of the mere possibility that his immortality can be snatched from him. Taken down by a ninety-year old pile of bones and a pink haired medic, he thinks dryly. He wasn't sure how embarrassed he should be on behalf of his future self, but he's sure that somewhere beyond death, his future self is embarrassed enough.

The unknown kunoichi hummed in agreement. "If it makes you feel any better though, she died shortly after bringing the then Kazekage back to life." She shrugs, as if it is all old news- to her, it probably is.

Sasori raised an eyebrow at the girl’s callousness from under his Hiruko. That sounds like a long tale to behold, he thinks. Especially if she managed to live through all his poisons; he's sure that his future self must have hit her with enough poison to down a horse, but here she is. There are more pressing matters to handle though.

"Have you come for a repeat performance?" He asks dryly. He doesn't quite show his back to her, but given that she willingly lost her element of surprise, he can't say he's too concerned about his imminent death.

She startles, green eyes wide with surprise." She stops kicking his desk. “Oh, no. No, nonono. I'm definitely not here to kill you."

"Then what do you want, Kunoichi?" He asks, exasperated. His desk now sports two heel shaped dents, he observes. Three guesses who her mentor was.

She grins, sure and slow. "I don't want to kill you- I want to learn from you."

What?

In the coming days, he learns from her as much as she does from him (though her way of asking is unique).

She is Haruno Sakura, twenty-one year old pupil of Slug Sanin, Senju Tsunade, who killed him and neutralized his poisons at sixteen, saved the world at seventeen, and retired to be a housewife at eighteen.

She is a time traveller - "dimension traveller," she corrects. "Time is a nonlinear stream that flows; it may loop and twist, but it never returns to where it has once been. Dimensions, on the other hand, overlap each other on parallel planes- it is much easier to hop between planes than it is to guess where time will flow."

A seal master - "not at all that uncommon" was her nonchalant response when he asked once- "only the Uzumaki and Konoha are really loud about having seal masters. The really good ones won't even appear on the Bingo Book. They know better than to something so phenomenally stupid.”

A medic- "I was always a paper ninja," she said with a hint of old bitterness in her tone. "My chakra control is in the 99th percentile- combat medic made sense."

All at once. Of all her epithets, the only he questions the most, is housewife.

"Why?" he asks just once, a million questions in one word. A combat medic neutralizing his poisons on the fly- impressive, but believable. Chakra-enhanced strength to make up for the weakness of a medic? Admirable- and would make sense, given his puppet army. The end of the world? Sure- why the hell not. But after all that- to be a glorified wallpaper decoration?

Amusement flashes through her eyes- a glimpse of younger days- "I didn't want to fight after the war, and things slow down in peacetime, I guess. Maybe I just got tired of my old teammate's bitching in the end and married him just to shut him up."

As always, there is a tale behind everything she says, but Sasori knows to pick his battles. He stays quiet.

He's not entirely sure why he accepted her semi-aggressive way of asking- for all she has already proven herself half-competent by locating his hideout and gaining entry without disabling the traps, he has no reason to entertain his once killer. Perhaps he is as his future self suggests, in need of a pupil to pass down his art. Or perhaps he is just bored, working monotonously day in and day out as a missing-nin.

Haruno Sakura is undoubtedly the most interesting thing that has happened to him since his defection years back, he admits without shame. Immortality brings with it tedium- a small price to pay for his art, but she brings with her a vibrancy rarely seen- flash of color- as she crashes into his life, fist first.

He doesn't regret taking her in as his pupil; she has potential, Sasori thinks. Her casual disregard for human life goes beyond the shinobi way; she has a keen sense of the line between life and death and how to pull and push that line to her liking. She learns quickly and thoroughly, her memory only second to her creativity. Her background in medicine shows, in the way she handles the puppetry equipment with professional ease- the way she holds the scissors with four fingers, the way she blades a scalpel and sews the wounds shut, how she jabs a needle at precisely the right place without hesitation. 

Rather unique circumstances aside, Sasori is glad for such competency; he doesn’t suffer fools, and he has no time for novices. He doesn't hold back in his teachings- once they've establish that she isn't here to kill him in any way- to have such a competent and interested pupil is a gift to any master, and Sasori is no different. He teaches her the basics of puppetry- sits down and grinds out the movements of a chakra string painstakingly slowly for her- and allows her the privilege of practicing with his old wooden puppets.

To her credit, Sakura observes his action with keen eyes only once, asks a couple of well-thought out questions, before short, flickering strings of chakra began to glow between her fingers. When he was learning puppetry as a child, it took him a week to perfect his chakra strings. It takes Haruno Sakura three days.

"How do you manage to cut through the body without altering the chakra network?" Sakura asks thoughtfully, her twitching fingers making first puppet dance to an invisible tune. She finished her first wooden puppet; a small quarter-life sized version of her named Sacchan, outfitted with a white sundress and a wide brimmed straw hat. She twirls in all her wooden glory and takes off her hat in an actor’s bow.

Sasori didn't look up from where he was tinkering his next project- a particularly unfortunate hunter nin from the Mist who wields the Hyoton. "I created a special contrast medium that injects into the veins and lights up through the chakra network when my own chakra is applied as an overlay." It wouldn't take her long to move onto human puppets- talent of her calibre is simply wasted on mere wooden puppets- but one or two wooden puppets would teach her the basics of their art.

"That's ingenious," she admits, and adds after a moment, her mind running a hundred miles an hour: "but I think I can do better." 

Sasori turns with a raised brow to see her jade eyes glittering in thought. "And pray tell, how would you do that?"

"I presume that the contrast is a poison of some sort- a chakra responsive accident that you created?" Sakura asked. Sasori nods. Accident isn't what he would call a poison designed to shut down the chakra network, but sure. Why not.

"The chakra network runs closest to the body's lymphatic system," Sakura draws her fingers together, making Sacchan sit prettily on the table. "The quickest way to make the contrast run through the body would be through the arterial system, or failing that, the venous system. Usually the chakra vessels run in close conjunction with both, but there are some places where they diverge- about ten percent of the time. Counting anatomical variation, it can be anywhere from three to thirty. Whereas with the lymphatic system, they follow that almost one hundred percent of the time. If you could make the contrast circulate long enough where it gathers through the lymphatics, you would lose fewer chakra vessels to the process and have a more responsive puppet and have less chakra bleed through, either in the form of chakra signature or as visible chakra." 

Sasori ponders upon her point- he did consider the very idea once upon a time, but he shot it down in the end; the loss of a few chakra vessels wasn't worth the trouble of keeping the heart beating for longer. And even if he could make the organs work with a few well placed strings, the body would just be circulating deoxygenated blood, which causes damage to the muscles in the long run and makes for a weaker puppet instead. He says as much as a reply.

"Not if you have a medic on hand," Sakura rebuts with a smirk and tugs her gloves up. She nudges her way over to where Hiruko was bent over their newest project. "Here," she says, her hand glowing an ominous green, "Try the contrast now," she says. He watches she colors the body green, and acquiesces.

Three weeks later, Sakura christens his new puppet "Haku". He doesn't care what she calls him- the response time on him was a dream.

"Wouldn't you want to do something else other than puppetry?" He asks on the off-hand once. He shakes off drops of rainwater off his hat- making a trip out to Ame was always tedious, but at least he got a new project out of the whole trip. He tugs the body bag through the air with a chakra strings and sends it to the processing area on the far end of the cave.

"Hm?" Sakura asks, her reading glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. She slides a bookmark in her latest book- a tome on the bloodlines of the Mist- and turns to him. 

"You did travel across dimensions." Don't you have something better to do than to be here? He asks in his mind. They always do- everyone always does. 

"No, not really," she shrugs apathetically. "Oh, the end of the world, you mean?” She speaks of it so causally, Sasori almost sighs. Like airing out laundry.

“I slipped Shishou a scroll on the events of the future through Katsuyuu. I forged her handwriting, so she probably thinks she's the one who sent back the scroll. If it all pans out, she should be Godaime a lot sooner than before, and she's not going to let the Fourth Shinobi War happen again." Sakura shrugs. “Once Shishou puts her foot down, it stays down… No matter who happens to be underneath.”

"I was bored," she continues. "I could only sit around and pine for so long- I got to doodling seals, and well Naruto was trying to recreate the Hiraishin and left his notes out- one thing lead to another, and this happened."

She shrugs again.

Sasori sees, but doesn't quite comprehend the enigma that is Haruno Sakura.

"It was really just something your dead self said," Sakura says the next day, casually discussing his murder like the weather. "When I pulled the core out, your last words were that maybe, in another life, I could have been your student."

She strips her latest project- her first human one- and inspects for any lingering wounds with a clinical eye. A customary swipe of a green hand reveals no wounds. "I didn't think much about it at the time to be honest, since we had the end of the world and all that comes with it. But when I really sat down and thought about it- I thought, why not?"

Why not indeed, Sasori thought drily. He could hardly imagine someone as sanctimonious as the Slug Sage approving of his bastardization of the medical practice; it is essentially anatomy class- for the non-medically inclined.

Sakura sterilizes a bucket of water with one chakra-green hand and gathers her equipment. She scrubs up with the efficiency of one long-practiced in the art. "After the war, Suna tries to find your hideouts, you know. They didn't get very far," she says with a grim twist of her lips.

No, he imaged they wouldn't have, he thinks- his smile mirrors hers.

"And besides, something as delicate as an art like this can't be learned through notes," she says offhandedly. “That’s like trying to learn how to heal from scrolls.” She scoffs at the idea, tugging up her sterile gloves in one smooth motion. 

Perhaps somewhere deep down in his core- he feels a bit of warmth. Or at least, a lot of smugness, that someone would travel dimensions to be his pupil. Of course, not that he thinks his art deserves any less.

He watches her cut with cold eyes. Her cuts are different from his; he cuts for the aesthetically pleasing- or for convenience for where he plans to insert various bits of weaponry and poison.

She cuts along anatomical planes, along the most avascular planes as a practiced surgeon would. She fits her weaponry along the curves of muscles, hides them amongst networks of vessels and natural tunnels- undamaged by her care.

He alters the body to house his weapons; for the puppet to be the exterior that best showcases the poisons and artillery at its core. 

She alters the weapons to fit the body, for the body's kekkei genkai or style to shine, and the poison or the weapon to be second- to work around the body's own capabilities.

She chooses to keep the ash grey color of the dead, their eyes unseeing. She keeps them as anatomically intact as possible. He chooses to turn them to the red-brown of wood, for the aesthetics of a puppet. Her works are more chakra responsive, faster by milliseconds, more subtle in weaponry- as subtlety goes. His have more firepower, and his army speaks for itself.

It would be boring, he supposes, if her style was an exact copy of his. Every craftsman has his own signature, and their difference in the interpretation of the concept of human puppetry define them as artists. At least, they both agree that that the Sandaime Kazekage is a true masterpiece, Sasori thinks ruefully.

He doesn't think it'll be long before she leaves for hunting trips herself. So long as the last vestiges of morality leaves her, he doesn't particularly care.

She returns from her foray to the outside with a body bag in tow.

“Had a successful trip?” Sasori asks, tinkering with his beloved Hiruko.

“Oh yes,” she says with a particularly vicious smile.

Sasori judges her expression and decides that this one must be personal. He waits for her to spill and doesn’t have to wait long.

She hauls the bag up as if it was made of air and unzips it. “This” she says, holding up a corpse by the hair, “is Yakushi Kabuto- Orochimaru’s greatest experiment and your once-spy”. 

He sees her coo lovingly to the ash-pale face and think that this person must have done a great deal of damage to her, once upon a time. He’s not particularly wrong.

Kabuto, or “Mushi”, as she has taken to calling him as a bad pun, takes her more than a month to finish.

The project reaches a halt when she decides to keep his kekkei genkai.

“His bloodline limit works by regenerating damaged cells at a phenomenal rate- a form of mitotic regeneration” Sakura murmurs, a lock of pink hair curled behind an ear as she works out chemical equations for her own special brand of preservative- to keep the aesthetics of the puppet as close to its living appearance as possible. “But since the cells of the puppet are dead, there’s nothing for them to regenerate.” 

Sasori thinks that this person must have been useful, once upon of a time, if he had this sort of bloodline and managed to be a medic at the same time. It doesn’t solve Sakura’s problem in the least; he leans over and peers at her equations with keen eyes. With a single chakra string, he twitches the pen out of her hands and casually corrects the math.

“A self-regenerating puppet would be useful,” he agrees. Especially since Sakura’s puppets have a tendency to look rather human-like in death.

“Yes, but the cells can’t regenerate if they’re dead,” she says, frustrated.

“Then restore them, if they can’t regenerate” Sasori points out.

There’s no difference between then, she opens her mouth to say. Then she pauses- but there is. Her mind whirring at a mile a minute, she hastily flips the piece of paper over and sketches a seal. Within seconds, she fills out the circular diagram until there is nothing left but scribbles cramming their way sideways onto the margins. 

Sealing, is something Suna lacks, Sasori thinks drily as he watches Sakura design a seal, her pencil a blur as it flies across the page.

“A time space component- to restore to a set point in time,” she mutters. “And the kekkei genkai to push the seal to near instantaneous speed... to remove the telomeric limit on cell regeneration.”

Sasori leaves her to her work; after all, teachers must let students learn on their own. Nonetheless, he sees her green eyes narrowed in thought, her lips pursed, and he wonders if such a look of concentration was ever echoed on his own face.

The day she finishes Mushi is the day she releases her hold on morality.

She cuts with no hesitation, thinks with no limits. The mark of a master herself, Sasori thinks; there is a warm, bubbling feeling that comes with the thought, and he isn’t quite sure what to think of it. Pride, he supposes.

Nonetheless, there is still- and always will be- room for improvement. As her master, it is his duty to polish those flaws until the diamond in the rough shines bright and clear.

She brings home projects, each more difficult than the last. To Sasori’s endless amusement, she seems to take genuine pleasure in poaching off the Snake Sanin, hauling home his prized Kaguya one day.

“It’s not like anyone will miss them,” she says, defensively. “They’re all missing-nin anyways.”

Still, Sasori spies a twisted glimpse of pleasure shining bright in her eyes, and he thinks that it is simply more than that. 

“He has a lung disease that needs a bit of work,” she admits, “but the kekkei genkai should be intact.”

She holds up a piece of bone to her eye, as if it was a piece of fine china for inspection. “This bone- it’s not really bone. It’s calcium phosphate; this kekkei genkai causes the body to build up an abnormal amount of calcium and phosphate- in the expectation that it will be expelled outside of the body. But that build up- when it isn’t cleared- stays inside the body... mostly in the lungs as granulomas.”

Triumph flashes in her viridian eyes. “That is the basis of his lung disease. But maybe if I just tweak the kidneys’ function a little....” she waves a green hand over the chest cavity and another over the abdomen.

Sasori doesn’t know why she bothers, exactly. The Kaguya is dead. Whether the lungs are filled with tumors matters not- just cut it all out and fill it with something else.

But Sakura is a meticulous craftsman like that; if it will improve the performance of her work by one second- one millisecond- she’ll fix it. Whereas Sasori has not the patience to bother, Sakura sits and gets to work.

Her poaching continues steadily until one day Sasori asks when she’ll go after the Sanin himself. It’s only logical, he thinks. Even he has the Sandaime Kazekage as the glorious center piece to his collection.

“What?” Sakura looks up, elbows deep in what appears to be amorphous goo. She blinks, a bit dazed at Sasori’s suggestion that she dare tackle a Sanin.

He doesn’t see why she can’t; she’s poached just about all of the man’s henchman, including this absolutely fascinating specimen who can turn his entire body to water. He’s almost tempted to ask just how she manages to locate rare kekkei genkai with astounding accuracy, and then the remembers the dimension travel.

If he was more juvenile, he would remark on the unfairness of her knowledge. But he won’t. Maybe.

Ruefully, he thinks that the world would be rid of all its future powerhouses if it was him who was going back in time. He imagines himself collecting them all, each a prized chess piece for his collection. Perhaps it is for the best for everyone involved that his skills in sealing does not extend that far.

He’s intrigued to see how she will work the chakra strings with a puppet that literally melts; with nothing to hold onto, can a puppeteer still play? He is confident that with her genius, she will find a way. Sasori looks forward to seeing the end product. It will be- has to be- magnificent.

“I can’t possibly take Orochimaru,” she says with a laugh and a dismissive wave of a hand. She doesn’t clarify “take” in what sense, he notes shrewdly. Whether the Sannin is a decorative souvenir or an opponent remains unseen.

But Sasori is as always, dead serious.

“Alright, I’ll think about it,” she concedes finally.

He knows it’s the most he’ll get from her, from the stubborn set of her chin. So he turns to his own work.

She returns to the lair with not one, but four corpses trailing behind her one day. One has extra arms, another has an extra head.

Sasori raises an eyebrow. 

“They were trying to find me,” she confessed.

“But I found them first,” she said with a toothy grin and a playful wriggle of her fingers.

Both of them knew how dangerous the motion could be in their art.

He shrugs and points out the obvious. “You’ll have to figure out how to split the chakra strings evenly with the extra tenketsu if you want to find any use in them.”

She thinks for a bit- “Hm, good point. I didn’t really consider that. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure it out somehow.” She hauls her prize onto the nearest dissection table and starts scrubbing up.

It really is a nuisance, Sasori think. If he was controlling a puppet army, surely having one or two specific puppets that have special needs would slow him down more than anything else. If it was him? He’d just saw them off, surely. 

But each to his- or her- own.

The day they face Orochimaru is the day Sakura’s puppet brigade is completed.

She puts finishing touches on a rather peculiar puppet- one dyed scarlet. She is blood red: everything from hair to eyes to glasses and clothes. “The Black Widow,” she christens this one.

“This one’s a healer, of sorts,” she says, cocking her head. “More of a sensor than anything else,” she amends. She holds her scarlet puppet gently, as if she was a friend than a corpse.

Her team holds the highlight of her collection: her Mushi, her Black Widow, the Kaguya, the Hozuki, and a transformed beast of a man she simply calls “Curse”. They’re her best team- second to the mutation quartet (as Sasori has taken to calling them).

While he revolutionalized human puppetry, Sakura refined it. Her puppets have the ability to heal- to regenerate- because she herself can heal. Between her seals and her medicine, her puppets can regenerate an astounding amount of damage. She’s since made some alterations on his puppets- where able- so she can regenerate his as well.

Even the Sandaime Kazekage in all his glory is destructable if his iron sand can be penetrated. But with Sakura’s puppets, anything less than a fatal blow on a human is regenerated. The first puppet of Sasori’s that she alters is the Sandaime; she’s nearly as fond of him as Sasori is. He’d be wary of her (now for a different reason altogether- the Sandaime is his, dammit) if he didn’t think that Orochimaru makes a far better centrepiece for her gallery.

A hundred of her puppets would hold a candle to his three hundred, easily.

She didn’t find Orochimaru as much as the snake found them first- he announced his arrival as a man like him would. 

Sakura reflexively catches viper lunging towards her jugular with one hand, the dripping fangs two inches from her neck.

“Not now, Sasuke,” she says with an impatiently. She was busy performing maintenance for her Widow- tinkering with the seals that make the kekkei genkai work to improve the sensing range.

“Sasuke?” A voice asks curiously from the entrance. 

She barely spares him a glance. “My husband,” she replies curtly. She hardly seems surprised at seeing her unwanted visitor.

He glances at the diamond on her forehead, then at the medical gear scattered around her and raises an eyebrow. He knows full well that Tsunade hasn’t taken an apprentice aside from Shizune, so who is this kunoichi? Curiouser and curiouser.

“How peculiar,” he muses, striding closer. Sakura clenches her wrist, quietly sending Suigetsu  behind Orochimaru and Kimmimaro in front. She twitches her right index finger, and the Kaguya smoothly whips out a bone blade.

‘Guess I’ll be wrapping this up soon,’ she thinks with a sigh and closes Karin’s chest cavity. She wipes her down with polish and sets her sitting up with another flick of a wrist.

“My! A medical puppeteer. And you kept their kekkei genkai functioning at that.” If anything, Orochimaru appears absolutely fascinated by the medical work involved in Kimmimaro’s creation. However, Sakura is not fooled in the least- there lies beneath the grin a spark of madness. She feels an uneasy fear crawl up her back, as is her instinctual reaction to Orochimaru since their very first encounter in the Chunin Exams.

But she is no longer twelve, and this is not the Forest of Death. She summons her other puppets from her hammerspace seal and tugs on her gloves.

To her side, Sasori appears unaffected, but she sees his puppets seemingly meld from the clay-red walls to join hers, staring at the intruder with unblinking eyes.

He knew it was really all a matter of time before the Snake Sanin comes knocking; he isn’t surprised that he bypassed the traps set at the entrance. A tad resigned, for surely they will have to move locations after this. But he pulls out his puppets for her- all three hundred of them and his beloved Sandaime.

Soon, the cave descends to pandemonium as four hundred puppets swarm the Sanin at once. Sakura jumps into the fray with her beloved masterpieces, coordinating them around her own movements.

It would be nice if she could work on not causing a cave in, Sasori thought dryly as the ceiling shook once more. Soon, he’ll have to send the Sandaime’s iron sand to hold up the structural integrity of the roof. He’s sure the man would be absolutely scandalized if he was alive: it’s one of the many reasons why he isn’t. Nonetheless, he sends his puppet back into the pileup with a swipe of a hand.

In the end, it is cunning and trickery that spells an end for Orochimaru. In between dodging the Iron Sand and various pieces of bone, even Orochimaru missed Suigetsu’s presence.

That is the genius of Sakura’s design, Sasori thinks. For a medic nin to be able to heal a person, they must be able to align their chakra signature to the patient’s chakra signature- or else there would be chakra poisoning and acute rejection. Sakura’s 99th percentile chakra control serves her well in this, and she is the one holding the ends of Suigetsu’s chakra strings. She utilizes Suigetsu’s bloodline limit with her own chakra control to mimic the target’s own chakra even when Suigetsu is turned to water.

No one expects an attack from themselves- from within- and thus the body automatically ignores its own chakra signals. And by proxy, a medic nin’s.

Slowly, yet all at once, Suigetsu rose up like a vengeful shadow from behind Orochimaru and wrapped unforgivingly around the Sanin’s neck, onto the head and to the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears. Anywhere, really. The man stumbles, as most people would, and Sasori twitches his finger the same time Sakura does; the Sanin is suddenly short an arm and a leg respectively.

The snake bites down hard on Suigetsu, tearing off chunks and pieces. That too, was well within the design- running through the bloodstream of the puppet are at least twenty kinds of poison (that Sasori spied, at least). When ingested, it was absolutely lethal... even to someone nearly immortal like Orochimaru.

The two of them were about to slice off the other two limbs, when the Sanin’s neck suddenly elongated and bent, opening wide.

“Sasuke did say that your actual body was an eight headed white serpent,” Sakura remarked, fairweather attitude same as ever. She shaded her eyes with one glowing hand as the serpent rose to fill the cave almost entirely. Clouds of green acidic poison ate away at the stone surrounding them, melting it off the cave walls. Even Sasori, immune as he is, felt uneasy by the concentration of poison around him. 

“Well, time to get some air circulation around here,” Sakura said matter-of-factly and punched straight through the ceiling.

Sasori sighed.

Their fight with Orochimaru ends in victory for them and a brand new project for Sakura.

They didn’t win without sacrifices though, and the two artists mourn their losses and repair what they can. In particular, Sakura agonizes over her repairs for Suigetsu. They move, rebuild, and soon find themselves in another cave.

“You didn’t have to help,” Sakura said one day over their work. To her left, Orochimaru drifts in a tub of formalin mixture, all four limbs reattached and whole. “I know the Sandaime got damaged too. I’ll fix him up later.”

Sasori waves her concerns away. “It’s no great loss,” he says. “The Sandaime is repairable. The rest of them, if irreparable, are replacable. Consider it... a graduation gift.”

In reality, Sasori wasn’t sure if it was his gift to her or his to him. Seeing her fists fly in the midst of a battle, her viridian eyes flashing, her back to both her puppets and his... he finally understands how his future self loses to her. And why it is no great loss, no great embarrassment to lose to her.

He sees her as a point of pride, even- that she was the one to defeat his art, and to come back across dimensions only to prove it.

Deep in the recesses of his mind, he thinks quietly that it’s perhaps a good thing that she’s not so prone to calling him “Master” the same way his once-maybe-never student does. He’s not entirely sure if his mind can take it.

And he isn’t her master; the title is not fitting to the role. She bows to no one. She stands not beneath him as a student but beside him as an equal. A queen fit to his king.

With a faint smile, he idly flips through his project notes until he finds the ones he made on himself. Perhaps he has just one more graduation present for her.

When the Akatsuki comes knocking one rainy afternoon, Sasori greets them coldly. He has no desire to bow and scrape to a wanna be god, especially since it puts him in the warpath of the likes of Hatake Kakashi and the remaining two Sanin.

“I have no need for an organization,” he says bluntly. He is not his other self, plagued by ennui to the point of being lead on a leash to his death.

The blue kunoichi looks at him with a hint of curiosity.

“You have a partner,” she says, amber eyes keen. Her eyes flicker to the far back of the cave, attention caught on a particular signature. She’s a sensor, by the looks of it.

“I’m afraid she’s... otherwise preoccupied at the moment,” he says mildly. And would be, for as long as the process takes. It would be foolish to try and hide from a sensor like her. He doesn’t even bother trying.

He twitches a finger, and Orochimaru serves them a tray of tea.

The kunoichi’s gaze is drawn immediately to the Sanin, dark eyes and porcelain skin same in death as in life.

“We,” Sasori emphasizes, “Have no need for your organization.”

She looks at her cup of tea but makes no motion to pick it up. Slowly, she smiles and gets up. She takes her leave without a further word. Sasori offers her no words of farewell, except to send Orochimaru to see her out.

He has more important things to do; for one, his queen needs him to take notes, and she's quite bossy about it.