Anbu Confessions

by MissPeonie

Summary:

ANBU masks hide everything—names, faces, and the dangerous pull of hearts caught between duty and desire. Sakura becomes Foxglove, fighting in the shadows beside Kakashi and Itachi—two men who don’t know it’s her, and who can’t seem to stay away from each other either. A slow-burn triad of secrets, blood, and impossible confessions.

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Notes:

Hey! I’ve been in the hospital again between working on my other writing. It’s been a thing and a struggle and a half. But I’m back! With more Naruto fanfiction goodness for you!! This time with poly angst! Fear the triade! Anyway! Hope you enjoy, comments and kudos are appreciated. And!!!

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Chapter 1

 

Chapter One: Foxglove’s First Mission

 

 

Night in the Forest of Death was a living thing.

It clung to the skin like oil, pressed against the ribs like an iron weight. Every sound was sharper here—the snap of branches, the wet drag of roots shifting beneath the earth, the crisp whisper of steel withdrawn and held in a palm that did not sweat.

 

Foxglove moved through it like she belonged to it.

 

Her breath was measured. Her steps were lines of ink on dark paper. The porcelain mask betrayed nothing of the girl hidden behind it. No pink hair, no too-bright eyes that always gave her away, no trace of the medic everyone thought soft. Only the silhouette of an ANBU operative—silent, efficient, faceless.

 

On her left, the hounds of Konoha’s Copy Ninja prowled unseen. Kakashi Hatake’s presence was a cool tide at the periphery of her senses, the brush of restrained chakra kept habitually low, as if the dark itself might be startled by it. His hair, pale as foxglove flowers in moonlight, was a dull ghost-light between treetops. He moved like someone who had worn stillness until it fit like skin.

 

On her right moved Uchiha Itachi—quieter still. He was younger, but there was nothing of youth in how he placed his feet. Quicksilver, sharpened. The weight of him was a blade turned sideways—felt more than seen. The Sharingan hid under his mask and lids, but she could feel its attention when it opened; even shuttered, his focus had the gravity of a star.

 

Their first mission as a unit was simple in theory: intercept a courier carrying scrolls lifted from a border watch-post, extract intel, eliminate if necessary, return unseen.

 

Simple. Bloody. Forgettable.

 

“Two clicks,” Kakashi’s voice rasped, low enough that even wind would hesitate to carry it. “Formation.”

 

They flowed into it without thought: Hound in point, Foxglove at center, Raven on the wing. The forest thinned; distant lantern-light trembled through branches—three points bobbing with the rhythm of a hurried gait.

 

A hush fell. Not silence—Foxglove didn’t believe in it—but the particular hush that breasts the moment before violence.

 

Kakashi’s hand lifted once, then fell. Steel left fingers like rain.

 

The first scream cut short; the second never arrived. Paper bombs sizzled, flared, guttered in damp night air as Itachi’s genjutsu swallowed the sound with a velvet hand. The reek of iron bloomed. Foxglove slid into the clearing as if she were the shadow of a tree and not a person at all.

 

The courier hit the ground with a wet cough and a rattle, clutching at a thigh split to bone. He scrabbled for a seal; Foxglove’s palm snapped down on his wrist and chakra pulsed, blue-white and exact. Muscle fibers went slack. His eyes rolled—she saw his pulse stutter at his throat.

 

“Alive,” she said, voice flat through porcelain. “For now.”

 

Kakashi’s arm bled in a slow ribbon down his sleeve. There had been a knife’s kiss in the first clash, shallow but dirty—a smear of poison Foxglove smelled more than saw. She didn’t wait for permission. She caught his wrist, pivoted, and pressed two glowing fingers to the wound. The flush of venom met her chakra with a cold, crawling anger. She drove it back.

 

Kakashi didn’t move for the length of one measured inhale. His single uncovered eye held hers a fraction longer than necessary, the weight of suspicion and something more like recognition flickering there—then he looked away as if neither thing had existed.

 

On the clearing’s far edge, Itachi watched with the impassivity of a winter pond. Foxglove couldn’t see his eyes but felt their cut. It pricked like needles at the back of her neck, and she had to fight the young, stupid impulse to tuck a stray strand of hair that wasn’t loose.

 

“Secure,” Kakashi said softly. “Raven?”

 

“Perimeter held,” Itachi answered. His voice wore patience like armor. “We are not alone.”

 

Of course they weren’t. Foxglove felt the approach a heartbeat later—light feet, not quite careful enough. She had already reached for the slender blade hidden in her sleeve when the first of the cleanup crew slipped between trunks. Three men, loose grips on their weapons, eyes untrained for night. The courier’s support, late and unlucky.

 

Kakashi could have handled them without waking the birds. So could Itachi. Foxglove didn’t need to. But ANBU meant redundancy; it meant no single failure could take a team down. It meant, more than anything, that no one’s blood hit the ground alone.

 

“Let me,” Foxglove murmured.

 

Kakashi’s chin tipped infinitesimal consent.

 

She moved. Not a blur—blurs were for show. She slid past the first man and opened his throat with chakra as thin and bright as a thread, turned her wrist, and brushed the second across the jaw with two fingers. He dropped as if his bones had been lifted out. The third managed a strangled startle before a crow landed on his shoulder and drove a beak—not a beak, Foxglove knew; Itachi’s chakra—into his eye. He folded with a sigh.

 

After, the forest breathed again as if pleased.

 

They worked quickly. Scroll secured. Bodies turned to nothing with blank-eyed gentleness. The courier hogtied and hooded, stuck with a small senbon that would keep him docile and alive. Kakashi’s arm sealed; Itachi’s sleeve wiped clean with a square of cloth that vanished as soon as it appeared.

 

“Move,” Kakashi said. Not a question.

 

They moved.

 

 

 

The rain found them two hours before dawn, a slate sheet poured from a sky that had been patient too long. The dirt road they had been following turned to a slick ribbon; underfoot roots went from bones to eels. Itachi led them off the path along a ridge and down into the hidden mouth of a small cave, all wet stone and echo. The air was metallic and cold.

 

Kakashi rolled the courier just inside the threshold and wedged him between two natural pillars. He didn’t look at Foxglove when he spoke. “Raven, sweep. Foxglove, check him.”

 

She knelt, porcelain face a blank moon over the man’s slack one. She could feel Kakashi’s attention like a wire drawn taut to the point of singing. Itachi ghosted into the rain and away; his presence thinned until it was only memory.

 

Foxglove drew off her gloves. The cave air kissed the fine scars across her knuckles, the faintest quiver of sensitivity she had taught herself to ignore. She laid two fingers at the courier’s throat and counted. Slow, steady, too steady—the sedative was a hair strong.

 

“Alive,” she said. “Blood pressure low. He’ll rouse enough to speak when we want him to.”

 

Kakashi’s reply was neither pleased nor displeased. “And when we don’t?”

 

“He won’t,” she said.

 

He grunted—acknowledgment, not argument. He shifted his weight; cloth rasped. Foxglove could feel him staring and not-staring, like a man standing on a cliff edge not looking down.

 

“What is it?” she asked, before she could stop herself.

 

“What is what?” His tone was lazy. False.

 

She kept her hands steady. “You’re listening.”

 

“You breathe like a medic,” he said, so mild she almost laughed. “In—hold—out. Counting. Efficient. Precise.”

 

“How many medics do you know in ANBU?” she asked.

 

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The count was low. Too few who wanted the shadows, fewer still who could stand them.

 

“It suits you,” he said finally. “The mask.”

 

It caught her off guard that it warmed her and not the other thing. She slid her gloves back on and stood.

 

Itachi returned like a thought that always comes back. “Perimeter clear. Two fox dens nearby. No human prints but ours since the last rainfall.”

 

Foxglove set the smallest of seals on the courier’s chest and checked Kakashi’s arm again, if only so she would have an excuse to stand close enough to smell the storm on him. He tensed the smallest fraction at her touch, barely there—then relaxed as her chakra smoothed over scar tissue old as memory. She tried not to think about how many times she had done this without porcelain between them.

 

“You’re thorough,” Itachi observed. He had to have been watching both of them, always. “Foxglove.”

 

“Someone should be,” she said lightly.

 

“Mm.” He sounded like someone filing a piece of information away. “Uncommon codename.”

 

“They picked it,” she lied easily. “Not me.”

 

“What would you have picked?” Kakashi asked, curiosity making his voice soft enough to feel.

 

She looked at him. The mask turned everything into a mirror—she saw their silhouettes where her face should be.

 

“Something that doesn’t grow in anyone’s garden,” she said, a little too quickly. “Something no one can put in a vase.”

 

Kakashi’s eye creased at the corner. It might have been a smile. It might have been the mask digging into his skin. She looked away first.

 

“Rest in shifts,” he said. “Foxglove, you’re on first. Raven, then me.”

 

“I’ll take last,” Itachi said.

 

“Of course you will,” Kakashi murmured, and Foxglove heard fondness where most would have only heard dry. A strand of warmth uncoiled low in her chest, unexpected.

 

They were quiet while rain wrote its long letter to the mouth of the cave. The courier breathed in slow, forced swells. Foxglove sat just inside the threshold, every muscle loose and ready under her cloak. Itachi leaned against the cave wall, head bent in a posture that might have been meditation. Kakashi made a pillow of one arm and lay as if sleep were a trick he could do on command.

 

It wasn’t the cold that kept her too alert for dreaming. It was the distance between the three of them, and the way it wasn’t there at all.

 

Near midnight, a ninken padded into the cave on silent paws—one of Kakashi’s, a small thing with bright eyes and a steady nose. It sniffed the courier, huffed, and settled beside Kakashi’s shoulder. The copy ninja’s hand dropped into fur without his eye opening. Itachi’s head tilted toward the sound, and even in the dark Foxglove could feel his attention move from dog to man with a gravity that tugged.

 

He cared. He hid it. He cared anyway.

 

We will break each other open, she thought, sudden and breathless. Or we will keep each other from breaking. Maybe both.

 

Her shift passed. Itachi’s began. He slipped from the wall to the cave mouth without a sound, but not before his shoulder brushed Kakashi’s knee. Too light to be accident. Too lingering to be coincidence. Kakashi’s eye didn’t open. The ninken’s ear flicked, as if it alone would bother to admit it had seen anything at all.

 

Foxglove let herself sleep.

 

 

 

They woke the courier an hour before dawn.

 

It was not cruel, though it would have read that way to anyone unaccustomed to the economy of ANBU. It was precise. Foxglove adjusted his blood pressure gently upward. Itachi slipped a talisman under the man’s tongue that would make lies tangle. Kakashi knelt where the courier could not avoid his eye.

 

“What’s your name?” Kakashi asked.

 

“Doesn’t matter,” the man said, fogged and belligerent, which was a kind of courage. “Just take it and leave me with enough breath to reach a temple.”

 

“We will,” Itachi said, distractedly kind. “If you don’t make mine a waste.”

 

The man stared at the dark fish-hooks of Itachi’s ANBU mask and went pale in a way that spoke of rumors. Then he looked back at Kakashi and went paler in a way that spoke of truth.

 

“Route maps,” he said, much too quickly. “Chokepoints, they wanted the chokepoints. Fire country border between the north pass and the old watch-post—it’s undermanned, they’re trying to… trying to test how long you take to respond.” His breath quickened. “It was supposed to be clean. A trade. I didn’t—”

 

“What gate?” Kakashi asked.

 

“Three,” the man whispered. “Gate Three.”

 

Foxglove watched Itachi’s head angle the slightest fraction toward Kakashi; watched Kakashi’s fingers tap once against his knee, a code only they spoke. There was trust there that had taken longer than one night to grow. There was gravity there she could fall into and never strike bottom.

 

“Thank you,” Foxglove said to the courier, and meant it.

 

He looked at her mask and flinched as if a flower had bitten him.

 

They left him alive, tied to a root under the overhang with a rope that wouldn’t slip if rain swelled it. The talisman under his tongue would dissolve without a trace before anyone found him. Kakashi marked a tree two kilometers east with a sign only Konoha’s scouts would read: alive, safe, enemy-adjacent—do not lead back.

 

They moved again. The rain softened to a mist that collected like pearls along Foxglove’s lashes under the mask. The world had the temporary, tender quiet of breath before an apology.

 

By the time they reached the ridge above Gate Three, the sky behind cloud had gone a weak, formless gray. The watchtower was a dead tooth in the mouth of the hill. A single lantern burned, nervous in the wind.

 

“Two,” Itachi murmured, already mapping the patrol cadence by sound alone. “No—three. There.”

 

Kakashi’s hand flicked. Foxglove’s heartbeat sped by one count, then settled.

 

“Raven, the tower,” he said. “Foxglove with me.”

 

They ghosted down the slope. A guard turned at precisely the wrong moment and saw precisely the wrong thing. His mouth opened; Itachi’s genjutsu kissed the back of his neck like the hand of a lover and he folded into dream, breath muted, heart slowed but not stopped.

 

At the gate, the iron pins that held the crossbar were swollen with rust. Foxglove pressed her hand to the metal and thought of bones. Chakra slid into the iron’s lattice like water through a comb, coaxed a hairline fracture wider, wider, and then—with a sound no louder than a tooth cracking—the pin parted cleanly in her palm.

 

Kakashi’s eye glinted once in the wick of the lantern light. Approval, brief and practical. He lifted the bar with her and eased it down. The gate sighed open.

 

Inside, the watchhouse was a narrow throat of a room with maps pinned along the wall. Not many. Just enough to show her how thin the guard here had grown, how easily some opportunistic hand could reach through and pluck something tender.

 

Kakashi and Foxglove worked quietly, quick eyes memorizing, quick hands copying with an economy borne of practice. Itachi dropped soundlessly from the tower and joined them, breath mild despite the climb. His gaze skimmed the maps and then their faces. For a moment the three of them stood shoulder to shoulder, close enough that she could feel the shape of them like heat through her cloak. Close enough that Kakashi’s knuckles brushed her wrist as he folded a map, and Itachi’s sleeve brushed Kakashi’s hand as he reached, and no one moved away.

 

“Done,” Kakashi said.

 

It should have ended there, clean. But the forest does not always accept how people write their plans. A twig snapped outside the door. Heavy boots where there should have been none. Foxglove moved without thought, Kakashi with her. Itachi’s hand flicked and the lantern died as if it had never been.

 

The door banged inward. A big man filled it, drunk or just stupid, a sword on his back and a question on his lips. He didn’t finish either. Kakashi’s forearm crashed into his throat, Itachi’s fingers pressed behind his ear, and Foxglove’s hand slipped over his heart with chakra gathered into a needle-fine point. The man sagged between the three of them like wet cloth.

 

They lowered him together. Three breaths, one rhythm. Foxglove kept her palm on the man’s chest until flutter steadied into thud. She did not look up when she felt Kakashi looking at her. She did not breathe differently when she felt Itachi look at Kakashi.

 

It would be so easy, she thought, sudden and savage, to step sideways into this and drown.

 

They left the watchhouse with the dawn making pale lace of the world. The path back to the forest mouth felt shorter than it had coming in, though Foxglove knew that was the sleep in her limbs speaking. At the treeline, Kakashi whistled under his breath, and a ninken she had not seen since the night before trotted out of the ferns and bumped his shin.

 

“Good work,” he said, like it was the dog’s alone. The dog’s tail ticked once. Itachi’s silence had softened at the edges in a way only someone very close would notice.

 

“Report,” Kakashi said, once the tower was three bends of the path behind them and the trees had taken back their watch. “Raven?”

 

“Minimal resistance,” Itachi said. “Courier cooperative after encouragement. Gate compromised by negligence rather than intent. We corrected what we could.”

 

“Foxglove?” Kakashi asked.

 

Her own name fell from his mouth too easily. She swallowed the ache of it and answered like he had addressed a stranger.

 

“Maps secured,” she said. “One living witness at the gate. The courier will survive. Scouts will find him in—” She looked up. The rain had thinned to a pearly mist, the kind that clings to skin and refuses to be wiped away. “—four hours.”

 

Kakashi nodded. “We bring the intel. Captain will decide the rest.”

 

They were almost to the river crossing when a gust shoved the mist aside and the sun’s rim bared itself over the world. It caught on Kakashi’s hair in a bright ring and turned Itachi’s cloak to the color of raven wings dipped in oil. The light slid over Foxglove’s porcelain and threw back only their reflections.

 

Kakashi adjusted the strap of the courier’s satchel across his shoulder and spoke without turning. “You did well.”

 

Foxglove’s mouth found a smile behind the mask and wore it where no one could see. “So did you.”

 

Itachi’s pace matched theirs without conscious effort. If Foxglove listened too closely, she could hear the quick, nearly silent friction of his glove against Kakashi’s as their hands swung in parallel and brushed once, twice, a third time, and then still kept time as if they’d done it on purpose.

 

Sakura’s chest burned under the porcelain, a clean steady heat she knew better than to name. Neither man knew who she was. That was her protection. It was also the most dangerous thing she carried.

 

At the river, the three of them leapt together—three shadows long across white water—and landed on the other bank as one. The forest swallowed them, and behind them the gate they had unlidded blinked and seemed to sleep again.

 

ANBU do not dream, Foxglove reminded herself, and walked into the trees with her dreams pinned to her face.

Chapter 2: The Weight of Silence

Summary:

Silence is a weapon in ANBU—but silence can also be intimate. On a border sweep gone bloody, Foxglove’s healing draws Kakashi’s suspicion, and Itachi’s steady gaze cuts deeper than steel. Around the fire that night, masks feel heavier, and the space between the three of them begins to burn.

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Notes:

Surprise! Second chapter! Dunno how long this one is gonna be. We will just keep rolling till it’s done.

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Chapter Two: The Weight of Silence

 

 

Silence in ANBU was a different creature than silence in the rest of the world.

It was deliberate, heavy, worn like another piece of armor. Silence carried orders. Silence carried judgment. Sometimes silence carried more intimacy than words ever could.

 

Foxglove was learning how to breathe in it without suffocating.

 

The courier had been delivered, the gate’s maps secured, and their report filed in language that blurred blood and bone into something clean enough for the Hokage’s desk. Nothing of the rain, or the almost-touch of hands, or the way Kakashi’s voice had wrapped around her codename like he already knew who she was.

 

They had been dismissed at dawn. By nightfall, another order was waiting.

 

A border sweep. Routine, dangerous in the way storms are routine. They met at the ANBU headquarters, three masks in the dim hall of stone, and took their assignments without comment. Kakashi’s posture was as slouched as ever, but the shadows under his eye were darker than the ink in his file. Itachi looked carved from patience.

 

Sakura—Foxglove—stood between them and kept her pulse even.

 

 

 

The mission was nothing on paper: confirm rumors of a small cell of missing-nin gathering in the western woods. Intercept if possible, eliminate if necessary. Simple words. Always simple words.

 

Hours later, perched in the branches above a clearing, she felt the silence stretch between them like wire. The missing-nin hadn’t arrived yet. The three of them waited.

 

Kakashi leaned against the trunk beside her, one knee drawn up, casual as if he were sitting in his own living room. His mask tilted toward the forest floor, but his lone eye flicked sideways every so often—to her.

 

“You’re quiet,” he murmured, so low it barely stirred the air.

 

Foxglove kept her gaze forward. “We’re ANBU.”

 

A huff of breath—dry amusement. “Even for ANBU.”

 

She almost smiled. Almost. But Itachi’s voice reached them from the other side of the clearing, smooth as poured ink:

“You both should be quieter.”

 

He had not turned his head, but Sakura felt his gaze cut through them anyway.

 

 

 

When the missing-nin finally came, they came in a pack of four—sloppy, arguing, too loud for men who had supposedly survived exile. Foxglove felt Kakashi’s chakra ripple as he measured them, his weariness slipping behind the sharp edge of a predator. Itachi shifted with silent grace.

 

The fight was brief. Brutal.

 

One of the men had senbon dipped in some back-alley poison. Foxglove saw the flicker of movement too late—Kakashi took the hit to his shoulder instead of his throat. He moved like it hadn’t happened, dispatching his target with surgical precision, but when the clearing went still, blood dripped slow and steady down his arm.

 

Foxglove was on him before he could wave her off. Green chakra flared under her gloves. She pushed the venom back, steady, steady, until it burned away. Kakashi’s mask tilted toward her—his eye sharp, studying, suspicious.

 

“You’re good at this,” he murmured.

 

Too good. The words hung unsaid between them.

 

On the other side of the clearing, Itachi was watching. She could feel the weight of him, unblinking. When their eyes met, his mask dipped just slightly, as if he’d been cataloguing every detail.

 

Her chest tightened under the porcelain. If he spoke, if he guessed—

 

But he said nothing.

 

 

 

They burned the bodies. The flames cracked in silence.

 

Kakashi crouched by the fire, shoulder bound where she had closed the wound, and for a long moment Foxglove let herself look at him. Really look. The curve of his neck, the way exhaustion sat on him like a mantle, the strange gentleness in the way he rested one hand on his summoned ninken’s head.

 

Itachi sat opposite, cross-legged in the glow, the mask turned toward the firelight. He looked carved from patience again—but the light caught on his hands, folded just tightly enough to betray tension.

 

For one moment, she wondered what it would be like to take both their masks off. To see the men beneath, not the soldiers.

 

Then she forced the thought away.

 

ANBU did not dream.

 

But Sakura did. And the dreams were getting harder to ignore.