Coincide

 

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It was hard to believe, in retrospect, all that had happened in Sakura’s life.

 

And as she washed down the steel exam table with a washcloth and a bucket of disinfectant, she reflected. Because that was what Sakura did when the work day was over, most of the time: reflected back on her life, how things had ended up how they did, why they did, and why she was happy they did.

 

Yet…there wasn’t much Sakura could really say any more. She’d turned the events over again and again in her head; examined all her courses of action; picked everything to pieces until she was exhausted both mentally and physically. And it always came down to one conclusion that served both as an excuse and a consolation to her: The Akatsuki weren’t evil. They were bad, sure, but they all strived for some greater, albeit selfish, cause.

 

That said, they’d all failed miserably, of course, and now they existed as more of a fraternity house than anything. There weren’t many members left, and those who were left weren’t interested in any more plans for world domination.

 

Well…okay, so the Akatsuki compound was more of a shelter, actually, because technically fraternities consisted solely of males who all proclaimed each other “brothers,” and—

 

A knock on the open door cut her train of thought off there, thankfully. She glanced up and smiled at the man who strode in slowly.

 

He removed his cloak dutifully and folded it over a chair. “Hello.”

 

She nodded. “Hey. Something you need?” She finished up quickly and put away the cleaning supplies, moving over to the sink to thoroughly wash her hands.

 

She heard him take a seat somewhere behind her. “I was injured sparring today.”

 

She glanced at him over her shoulder, shutting off the faucet and drying her hands with a paper towel. “With Kisame?”

 

He nodded.

 

“I see.” She knew from experience how serious Kisame could get when sparring. She couldn’t count the times he’d sent his partners in, either unconscious or damn near the breaking point. “Well, what’s the damage, then?”

 

He rolled up the fishnet covering his right arm. “It’s not as bad as it could have been.”

 

Sakura grimaced. “No, but it’s still pretty bad.” She sighed and reached for some scissors, proceeding to cut the fishnet shirt off of him. It wouldn’t do to aggravate the wound more by trying to pull the shirt over his head.

 

He didn’t seem fazed at all, just watched her intently, arm placed placidly on the armrest.

 

She disposed of the shirt and returned with gauze and some peroxide, humming as she cleaned the area around the wound. It was slightly difficult, seeing as Kisame’s Samehada literally shaved skin, and she couldn’t tell where his skin ended and the injury began.

 

She dabbed some more peroxide on him, and he flinched. Just barely. The peroxide fizzled and bubbled over the flakes of torn skin at the edges of the large wound. “You’ve really got to be more careful, Pein. You’re in here almost every other day.”

 

He made a noise that might have been content.

 

She glanced up at him for a second. “Are you just having a bad month this time around or something? It seems like you’ve been getting beaten up pretty badly.”

 

He shrugged.

 

She frowned and squeezed his arm, to which he winced at. “Pein.”

 

“Yes?”

 

Her frown fell into a worried pout. “Please listen to me. If something’s wrong, you can always tell me.”

 

“Yes.”  

 

And then Sakura gave up. She could talk until she was blue in the face, but this man would only reply with a curt nod or a simple, “Yes.” He was more infuriating than Sasuke had been, years and years and years ago.

 

She finally started the actual healing process, the light green glow of her chakra pressing into his skin, cooling it, piecing together and rebuilding his cells and his flesh, restoring whatever had been damaged. And when she finished not long later, the only thing left was a small, raised, pink section of skin on his right arm.

 

He thanked her and stood, gathering up his cloak.

 

She tossed the pieces of gauze into the trashcan and sighed for what must have been the hundredth time that day. “Pein.”

 

He paused.

 

“Please try and take it easy.”  She closed her eyes as she screwed the cap back on the peroxide, eyebrows upturned. “I don’t want you risking your life if at all possible.”

 

There was no answer, so she assumed he’d left. With a shake of her head and a scowl, she leaned over to place the bottle back on its appropriate shelf.

 

“It’s just sparring, Sakura.”

 

His voice, closer than she remembered and…well…there when he had presumably left the room, startled her into turning quickly around, dropping the bottle of peroxide and sweeping her arm unconsciously across the counter. 

 

A glass bottle—she guessed it was just rubbing alcohol, but she wasn’t sure—rolled off the counter and toward the floor, and she gasped, reaching out to grab it at the same time as Pein.

 

He caught it before her, of course, the bastard, and when they both straightened, she realized that he was far closer than she had originally thought.

 

She stared at him for a moment, giggling inwardly at the fact that his cloak hung open around his frame, revealing his bare chest, before he looked away and held up the bottle innocently.

 

“Here.”

 

She took it, confused at the warmth in her cheeks. “Thank you. And sorry. You scared me for a minute.”

 

He huffed softly and still refused to look at her.

 

This was getting ridiculous. Sakura was the only medic-nin in the whole goddamned compound, and if he didn’t like her, well…then he’d just have to learn to deal with it.

 

She grabbed him by his sleeve harshly, half intent on leaning heavily on him, but was thrown for quite the loop when his cloak simply slid off his shoulders.  And before she knew it, her balance was shot, and there was the ground, ready to kiss her face.

 

She was going to catch herself. Really, she was. What kind of shinobi was she if she couldn’t retain her balance after something like that?

 

But…she decided that clutching to Pein’s outstretched arms was a wee bit more satisfying.

 

She looked up at him, fingers gripping his arms as his hands on her sides attempted to steady her.

 

He cocked his head to the side, those strange, reddish-orange eyes finally locking with hers. “Are you okay?”

 

She set her jaw. “Yes, fine, but I have a question for you!” Even when she stood up straight, he still didn’t release her. “Why do you hate me?”

 

He blinked hard. “Huh?”

 

Well, at least she was seeing some emotion from him. If nothing else, that was good. “Don’t ‘Huh’ me! Something’s wrong. You come in here constantly but you never want to talk. And yet get anyone else within five feet of you and you’ll talk their ear off!”

 

He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off. “Are you just sexist? Chauvinistic? Do you simply not like me?”

 

“I’m not—”

 

She hunched her shoulders around her, staring angrily at a tear in his pants just above his thigh. “I mean, I know I’ve got my faults—everyone does—but do they really bother you all that much?”

 

“You—”

 

“I can understand if you don’t like that I get angry easily, but damn it, I can’t help it sometimes.”

 

“Sakura, d—”

 

“And I…I’m kind of bossy, too, I know, but I like to be in control of things. I’m a medic! I like to—”

 

It was Pein’s turn to cut her off. “You know, you’re making it increasingly difficult for me to prove you wrong.”

 

Her gaze snapped to meet his eyes, and as soon as they did, his lips were on hers. He stepped closer as she stepped back, meeting her with every tentative withdraw and sound of surprise.

 

She managed to pull back before things got out of hand. “P—Pein?”

 

He wasn’t really making much of a facial expression that she could make out. Frustration, but with her or himself?

 

“Pein…”

 

He rubbed the back of his neck absently. “I don’t hate you. Why would I hate you?”

 

She shrugged.

 

“If I hated you, you’d be dead.”

 

She closed her eyes in agitation. “Good point.”

 

And then before she open her eyes again and demand why he’d been acting so off-handed and why he had kissed her, for fuck’s sake, he was grabbing her wrists, holding them together and behind her with one large hand.

 

She frowned into his face. Not because she was angry. Not because she was aggravated. Because she was confused. Pein wasn’t stupid by any means at all, and he knew just as well as she did that she could easily break the hold—however firm it may have been—on her and kick his ass all up and down the exam room. It’d be a fight and a half, but hell, she could do it.

 

His free hand fingered the zipper at her throat as he pressed his lips to hers again, angling his mouth in such a way that she actually reeled for a second. The insisting presence of one of his hands holding her arms behind her back, the other pulling the zipper down to reveal more of her chest, and his body pinning her very snugly against the counter became just a nagging little thought in the back of her mind as the kiss took up all of her attention. And when one of the spikes through the corner of his lower lip grazed against her lip, that dizzying sensation came back.

 

“What…?” she managed through all of whatever it was he was doing to her, pressing her harder against the counter every second. It was almost starting to be painful.

 

The only answer he gave her was to finish unzipping her shirt and pushing it aside, and then slipping his hand underneath her bra to—

 

She gasped and drew back. “Pein! What the hell are you doing?”

 

“A long, long time,” he murmured, breathless, the hand clutching her wrists squeezing lightly. “Too long…” The thumb of his other hand passed briefly over her nipple, and she bit her lip.

 

Okay, so she wanted to do this. She’d never said she didn’t. Pein was absolutely gorgeous in that sort of…odd…rugged way, but there were so many forces telling her how wrong this was!

 

“What if someone catches us?” she tried to reason, glancing to the door he had shut upon walking in, but he drew her attention back to him with his mouth on her neck, teasing the underside of her jaw just below her ear, tracing some tendon and oh, God, she could swear he was letting those lip piercings graze her skin on purpose, because it was making her mind go black.

 

“Then let them catch us,” he said after a while, and Sakura had to seriously strain herself to remember what she’d asked. Oh yeah. Door unlocked.

 

Fuck the door. Fuck locks. She hated locks. Fucking…doors with their locks and their wood and their…their fucking—ohh—doorjambs…

 

She almost laughed at herself and her inward incoherency. Well, at least she wasn’t trying to outwardly express herself.

 

She did the best she could with this equal states of arousal thing, but it was hard to do anything she knew with Pein when a) her hands were behind her back and b) he was bent over her, making an area of skin on her neck red and sore.

 

Quite on a whim, she leaned forward as best she could and drew the first earring into her mouth, tongue tracing the loop and then slipping through to touch the soft skin behind his ear, and she literally felt him groan against her.  The grip he had on her—on her wrists, on her breast, on her body—all tightened imperceptibly.

 

Well. Bid to continue, then.

 

She leaned even further, which was quite a task in itself, to run her lips along the curve, trailing along each individual earring until she darted out her tongue to slick up and down that one long bar through the entire length of his ear, brushing over his skin occasionally.

 

His breathing changed from deep and heavy to completely uneven and ragged, and he rolled his hips once—twice—into her, moving his hand from her breast to the small of her back to push her tighter against him.  He kept her wrists pinned, though, and Sakura wondered if this was a sort of fetish of his.

 

“What do you want to do?” she asked softly, her lips feathering his earlobe, her cheek barely touching his.

 

“Fuck,” he answered hoarsely, strained, ending the single word with a tense sort of sigh.

 

She laughed quietly and managed to tug her arms free of his grip—finally—in order to pull loose the drawstring of his pants.

 

She heard his breath hitch and slipped her hands under the waistband, pulling them down around his hips. “Good,” she whispered, making a bold move and placing one small, cool hand around his length.  He bucked into her fist on a grunt, and she felt oddly satisfied. “Because so do I.”

 

She pumped him experimentally, and judging by the sounds he was attempting to muffle by burying his face in the crook of her shoulder and her neck, she guessed she was doing something right.

 

In between pants and those little sounds of pleasure that made Sakura throb, he muttered her name into her hair, his hands lifting her bra to her sternum. 

 

He urged her to stop—it was so dizzyingly delicious being able to make a full grown man plead with her to quit it—so that he could lift her up and set her on the counter. It was a low counter, really, and it was the perfect fit when he pulled off her skirt and shorts and her panties, to boot, tugging her to him so that she wrapped her legs around his hips. She should have been amused that all she had left on was the shirt hanging uselessly around her shoulders, open, the bra pushed up to damn near her neck, and her boots.

 

“Sakura,” he said again, and when he nuzzled into her cheek and her neck—something that was quite new to Sakura and her few experiences with men that she’d obtained in the twenty-something years that she’d lived on this earth—the balls at the end of the barbells running through his nose grazed her skin, giving her chills that alternated between cold and inexplicably warm, but overall very delightful.

 

He didn’t even give her a warning, which was a bit selfish, in retrospect, but the surprise at the sudden fullness inside her made her whimper. He was hot and thick as he slid in slowly to the hilt, stilling when he could go no further. And then he simply whispered, “Thank you,” before pulling out and slamming into her again, and Sakura could swear she saw stars.

 

The position they entertained—Sakura half laying, half sitting on the counter and Pein standing up as he trust into her, hands gripping her waist to steady her—made the pleasure double for Sakura, and she wondered if Pein had known this when he’d lifted her up here. Either way, he’d set a rhythm that was damn near impossible for her to meet, but she tried as best she could, running her hands up and down his chest, slightly amused but definitely not surprised when she found a nipple ring and thumbed it carelessly.

 

He shuddered and murmured her name, eyes closed tight, mouth drawn into a grimace of sorts.  And then he slammed into her forcefully, and Sakura realized that he wasn’t going to last.

 

That was simply not fair. He was going to come before she had a chance to have her mind go completely fuzzy and arch into him.  So she took one of his hands and brought it to her sex, urging him to—

 

Oh, he was a fast learner. He slipped a finger in immediately, brushing over her clit, and the double stimulation soon had Sakura crying out and leaning up, threading her fingers into his hair.

 

He groaned into her shoulder, sucking on that tender area of skin once before moving to simply rest his forehead against her collarbone. He brushed over that particularly sensitive area again with his finger and Sakura bucked and muffled another cry against him, and he seemed to realize that yes, he should do this again, several times in succession, in fact. So he did, and Sakura started to shudder and pant in breaking waves, not finding the presence of mind to do anything but lay back and close her eyes tightly, breathing his name and pleading with him to never stop.

 

He came first, of course, because even as he continued touching her, she could hear him try to stifle a rather loud, groaning, “Sakura,” and she completely missed the warm, sticky mess that filled her, because he hadn’t stopped with his finger, and now his other hand was teasing her breast, and it was just too much, and there were those stars, and—

 

She mumbled his name beneath a whimper, and then that whimper turned into a soft moan as her hips arched out toward him, her nails attempting to claw through the tile of the counter for something solid to clutch. A long, winding shudder shot through her as something tightened and tightened and it wouldn’t stop, and then it snapped, and she was breathing harder than ever right before she came on a hurried murmur, not quite sure what she was saying…

 

When she was able to calm her heart down enough to open her eyes, chest heaving still, she saw Pein, hovering over her, smiling in a relieved, satisfied way. Lazily, still panting just as hard as she.

 

She smiled, too, and he huffed a small laugh before collapsing, resting his cheek on her sternum. “Thank you.”

 

She put her fingers in his hair, playing with the strands of rusty orange, reveling in the fact that Pein, of all people, had actually…with her…

 

“Thank you for what?” she asked, brushing his hair back from his forehead.

 

He sighed. “For this?”

 

She laughed. “For this, or for the fact that I’d like to do it again sometime?”

 

He lifted his head off of her, disbelief apparent in his eyes, and when she didn’t waver, just smiled bashfully, he leaned forward and kissed her, grinning against her lips.

 

“I just can’t believe,” she said when he pulled away, “that you actually liked me all this time.”

 

He shrugged.  “I didn’t want you to know.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I didn’t like the possibility of a ‘No.’”

 

She rolled her eyes and sat up, and he did the same, helping her fix her bra and zip up her shirt.  She thought it was adorable when he handed her the skirt, pants, and panties, but when he started smoothing down her hair and fixing it perfectly, she shooed him away.

 

He righted his own clothes, draping his cloak around his shoulders again.

 

“I’ll have you know,” she said, buckling her skirt and smoothing out the wrinkles, “that there are repercussions to this.”

 

He stared at her intently, looking worry, for all intents and purposes.

 

She held up a finger. “One, you have to take me on a date. Okay? Two, you can’t pretend like this didn’t happen.” She poked him in the chest with said finger. “Because it did. And no more being stoic and quiet! I hate that.”

 

He nodded. “I wasn’t going to, but okay.”

 

She paused her a moment, and he waited patiently. “…Also, you have to take a shower with me, because I just realized that I’m really sticky and sweaty and gross.”

 

He shrugged. “Fair enough.

 

They walked off toward the shower at the back of the lab, still slightly radiating from their actions not moments before.

 

Sakura grinned. “I’d like to see you take off all those piercings, anyway.”