Stumble [Rewrite]

Crash

No one could keep a front up forever, and Sakura knew that most of all.

It was just that when she thought she'd finally crack from the pressure, it would be an angry outburst at her reflection in the mirror or a sobbing rage she'd inflict on a training ground that wished her no harm. She thought she'd have time—perhaps a few years at most before she lost control.

It wasn't.

It had been a merely a day after her return from her mission with Ibiki and Genma, and all it took was an apology she didn't expect and a crying girl that stopped her for a moment.

No, Sakura didn't think she'd break down in the middle of a busy street.

And she certainly didn't expect Kakashi there to witness.

::

Ibiki opened the cabinet above the sink, hoping to eat a bowl of cereal before heading down to his office where millions of piles of paperwork he missed the duration of the month would mock him the next several days. And instead of finding something decent, the oddly difficult tug of the handle revealed that the cabinet was actually no longer a cabinet, but a cooled containment unit that held several rows of filled vials.

Poisons, probably.

"Sakura!" he called. Her voice filtered out from somewhere down the hall.

"Yeah?"

"Where did you put the cornflakes?"

"Um... try the cabinet to the left!"

And he did. But he was rewarded with another difficult tug and another cooled containment unit with even more vials. "It's not this one!"

"Then the one beneath the sink?!"

That one had three jars in it. One filled to the brim with dead snakes, one crawling with the spiders from Suna, and the third filled with a dark liquid he was pretty sure was blood. To who or what it belonged to, he didn't know. Sakura entered the kitchen and peered over his shoulder.

"Huh. I was pretty sure I put those somewhere else," she said. "Did you try the pantry? That's where most the food is."

He stood and walked over to it. "You sure there's not a dead body inside?"

"Ha! I wouldn't keep dead bodies in the same place twice, old man. Keep up!"

And besides, it's not like the body was human. It was just one of the enormous centipedes from Training Ground 44 and she cleared out everything in there before stuffing the body inside for later use. Ibiki hadn't minded in the slightest, now far too used to her quirks at this point, and told her to make sure none of its bug juice got on the rugs or curtains. Genma screamed bloody murder when he came over for a snack. Anko laughed and high-fived her for doing a good job.

Finally finding the cereal in the body-free pantry, he plucked a bowl from the drying rack and watched Sakura work away at some formulas in her notebook.

"Poison work?"

"Yup."

"The two cabinets with the ones you already have ain't enough?" he asked. She clicked her pen and opened one of the cabinets to pull out a line of poisons and set it on the counter.

"Oh, they're enough. I'm actually working on the antidotes right now because literally every vial you saw is filled with pure toxin."

He stuffed a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth. "I hope you realize this is a kitchen. You know, where we store and prepare the things we need to live."