Since the gala and the negotiations had taken up most of her day, Sakura decided to retire to her office for the evening and get some of her paperwork done.
Personally, she couldn't quite understand how the Lady Fifth and the future Lord Seventh always managed to get themselves swamped in paperwork when she and the previous generations of Hokage had never had to deal with anywhere near that much make-work. She always had everything looked over, signed, stamped and approved before the day was out, even on busy days like today.
"Probably because Lady Tsunade kept slacking off and pushing her duties off to the last second," Sakura muttered to herself as she reclined in her desk chair, absentmindedly scratching the side of her breast. "And probably because Naruto wanted to do everything himself… and also because he's a bit slow with written stuff."
Lady Tsunade's tenure as Hokage was best described as a tug of war between a very hard-headed woman and an even more obstinate gaggle of has-beens. If Tsunade wanted things done her way, she couldn't leave her paperwork to the vultures in the civil service who served the eminence in shadow… but Sakura didn't have that problem. Most of the spoiled apples in the barrel had been removed by Kakashi, so she felt more at ease delegating the less important stuff, such as proposals to lower the purity of the steel used to make kunai by 0.1%.
That was the civil service's favourite trick: drowning out the actually important information in piles of meaningless drivel. Sakura simply used her Shadow Clones to filter out the important documents and drop the rest into her out pile, leaving the civil service to sort out their own messes themselves. Eventually, they got the message and stopped overstuffing her with information, since it clearly wasn't working.
"Come in… or at least, that's what I would have said if you'd come in through the door," Sakura suddenly said, still reclined in her chair as she stared at the ceiling. "Don't you know how to knock?"
Sakura rarely stayed up this late into the night since she usually got her work finished on time, but she was burning the midnight oil tonight. Not because she was still filling out paperwork, but because she had been expecting Sasuke's arrival.
"What kind of self-respecting shinobi would enter his target's home through the front door?" Sasuke's drawling voice echoed through the room. The darkness in the corner of Sakura's office deepened, and he stepped out of the lengthening shadows, his long black cloak billowing behind him. "You wouldn't want it to be known that we were alone in your office together, would you…?"
"Ah, but wouldn't a shinobi's quarry think to expect the unexpectable?" Sakura said teasingly as she sat up in her chair, placing her elbows on her desk as she leaned forwards and rested her chin on her knuckles, exposing a great deal of cleavage between her forearms. "If you think about it, the most unexpected thing to do would have been to enter through the front door…"
Sasuke sat on the edge of her desk and drew closer, until their noses were almost touching.
"The moon is beautiful, isn't it?" he said softly.
Tonight, the moon hung low and bright in the night sky outside the bay window behind Sakura's desk. It was rather large for this time of year… or any time of the year, for that matter. Seriously, it was huge, but that only made the moment all the more romantic. Bathed in the soft, silvery light of the moon, Sakura looked to Sasuke like a goddess descended from the heavens.
"I see you've been reading," Sakura said, smiling coyly. "Is that line from Jiraiya's new book series?"
"A man needs an interest or two," Sasuke said casually. "Otherwise, he'd just be boring…"
Sakura giggled coquettishly.
"I could never find you boring," she replied in lilting tones. "Sa-su-ke-kun~"
Sasuke closed his eyes and leaned in for a kiss.
This was it, he had successfully charmed her…
"Ouch."
A sharp twinge of pain blossomed on Sasuke's brow, and he opened his eyes to find that Sakura had flicked him on the forehead, just as his older brother used to do. Confusion filled his mind as he wondered whether she knew what that gesture meant to him.
"That's enough excitement for today, don't you think?" Sakura cooed. "As much as I enjoy this little game of ours, that's far enough… I'm already spoken for… ya know?"
Sasuke clicked his tongue in annoyance.
"The report for the month of November is the same," he said. "No trace of Obito; he seems to be lying low. No sign of Kakashi and Madara, either… it seems they really have left the continent for good. Still, if they return from overseas through any of the major ports, my contacts will alert me."
"In that case, I have another job for you," Sakura said after a moment's thought. "I need you to investigate something for me."
After discussing Hashirama's plight with Naruto, Kurama had shared some special insider information on the Sage of Six Paths with them:
After defeating his mother and leaving the Ten-Tails' desiccated corpse on the moon with his little brother, Hagoromo remained on Earth with his mother's chakra sealed inside him… the Ten-Tails' chakra. When he began suffering from symptoms of Meridian Degeneration Syndrome, he released the Ten-Tails from his body and separated it into the nine Tailed Beasts we know today before seeking out a cure in a far-off land in the west, where a meteor had once fallen…
"If it's a meteor we need, why don't we take the one that belongs to Hoshigakure?" Sasuke grunted. "I can be in and out within the week without them ever noticing I was there."
"You can do that too if you like, but if you're found out, I'll have to disavow you and declare you a missing-nin," Sakura said pleasantly. "The Hidden Star are our allies, after all."
Sakura stood up and sashayed around her desk to Sasuke's side, her wide hips and her soft breasts swaying hypnotically within the confines of her little black dress. She clapped her hands, jostling her chest, and another Sakura peeled away from the back of her dress and fell limply onto the floor, naked as the day she was born and shivering in the cold of the night.
Sasuke frowned. Why was this Shadow Clone naked?
"Meet Haruno Tsubaki, my flesh-and-blood clone… physical age nineteen, blood type O, three sizes: B125, W60, H120, P-cup," Sakura said. "After I forced Orochimaru out of our bodies, I did try to rehabilitate her, but her sense of self is close to non-existent… I believe she only lived for a few months before Orochimaru took over her body, smothering her brain with his snaky mind and snuffing out her consciousness."
Sasuke gazed at the naked girl in shock.
"So far, I've been keeping her contained within my body using the Hagoromo clan's Kekkei Genkai; I haven't had much success eliciting any kind of meaningful response from her during my tea breaks, so I thought she might need something a little more… stimulating," Sakura went on, watching as her doppelgänger rose unsteadily to its feet. "She seems to have taken a liking to you, so I thought I'd leave her with you and see what happens~♥."
"Sakura, my missions aren't a walk in the park," Sasuke said crossly, once he had recovered from his shock. "I can't entrust my back to someone who can't fight… let alone keep her alive if the going gets rough."
Sakura shook her head.
"Oh, she's strong enough, since I inserted one of my Spiritual Plane selves inside her to help jolt her consciousness awake… though for that very reason, the transplant didn't fully take, so she's not much of a conversationalist," she said dismissively. "That being said, I did manage to make her forge a contract with Shikkotsu Forest, and she does have some of my memories and some of my fighting ability, albeit limited to the amount of chakra that would normally correspond to my P-cup self… that's about fifteen Kakashi's worth, by the way."
Sasuke was vaguely aware of how Sakura's Celestial Empress Lotus Seal worked.
Sakura used split personalities drawn from the Spiritual Plane to control the seal, and she kept it filled to the brim with senjutsu chakra to maintain her ability to enter Sage Mode instantly. However, the amount of senjutsu chakra the seal could hold was like a drop in an ocean compared to her chakra pool; the improved version of Lady Tsunade's ultimate technique had simply been powercrept by Sakura's busty physique, so it was no longer all that useful to her.
"Which one of your Spiritual Plane selves?" Sasuke asked.
The Spiritual Plane was a domain of perception, a collective unconscious inhabited by ephemeral dream versions of both real and imaginary people. The denizens of this plane who also existed in the Physical Plane were reflections of how people, including themselves, perceived them, so there were all kinds of Sakuras… most of them evil now, since the world saw her as a warmonger these days.
Sakura winked at him.
"I'll let you find out on your own," she cooed. "Oh, and by the way, you're free to do whatever you like with Tsubaki… as long as she's fine with it. She might not be me, but she does look a lot like me, so in a way, she is kind of like a sister to me."