Angel of Mercy, a naruto fanfic

Love can kill, and hatred can save. Believe me. I know. Shh; he's sleeping, now …

Length: 3048 words excluding author's notes.

Rating: T for minor swearing, sensitive themes, death, violence.

Fandom: Naruto (AU; diverges from end of Part 1).

Pairing: Sasuke/Sakura.

Angel of mercy.

"To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream …"

(Hamlet, William Shakespeare)

"Oh how I wish
For soothing rain
All I wish is to dream again
My loving heart
Lost in the dark
For hope I'd give my everything"

(Nemo, Nightwish)

mercy

1. compassion or forbearance towards defeated enemies or offenders or as a result of quality.
2. act of mercy.
3. done out of compassion.
4. thing to be thankful for.

euthanasia

bringing about of a gentle and painless death in the case of incurable and painful disease.

You have to understand that I loved him.

Please.

I love him, and that's why I killed him.

It sounds contradictory, doesn't it? Ridiculous, even. Naruto loves me and he'd kill himself before letting death deliver me; I think he'd even abstain from ramen, forever, it he thought it might somehow lend me protection from the dangerous and cruel realities of a shinobi's life.

When you're a child, they don't tell you about the true nature of the job—no, let me correct myself—of the life of a shinobi. They don't lie, precisely, they just don't tell the whole truth. They exalt and exaggerate and emphasise and extol until your silly child's head is clouded with dreams of defending your country, your friends, your family. The baker, the dressmaker—imperative to the community but vulnerable, weak—need you to be their bulwark against the invasion of greedy enemy countries that wish to steal Konohagakure's wealth. These romanticised visions are suffused with the pure golden light that streaks over the merrily bubbling streams and streets of Konoha on that first, idyllic day of summer. While you're still naïve and impressionable they stuff you so full of heroic dreams that any other career seems unsatisfying.

You see, in the old days, Konoha had hundreds of clans of warriors. But over time, through both civil wars and clashes with other countries, these have withered away. We've only a few left: the Hyuugas, the Inuzukas, the Yamanakas, the Naras. The Uchihas once, of course. And Konoha needs new blood to pave the way to prosperity and security. But the parents are scared to offer up their children like sacrifices to a violent and unrewarding God.

"But what about the risk? The average life span of a shinobi is thirty-one years."

"Which is six more than it was in my parents' generation. We have better teachers, better facilities. And can you think of anything more sweet and fitting than to die protecting your country?"

But parents of this generation understand the value of a life compared to the empty promises of arrogant patriotism. They've lost brothers, sisters, partners—and they don't want to lose any more precious people.

So Konoha stops asking the parents to donate their offspring, and turns directly to the children.

It's clever, really: they get them while they're young, soft like unbaked clay; easy to mould. The blood, sweat and tears you will sacrifice to your homeland sounds like a poem, a prayer, rather than the death sentence it is. Stick you in the oven and you're stuck like that. The visions and ambitions are seared into you.

I want to be strong, like a shinobi.

Unlike the banker and the grocer, who are able to return to their homes at the end of the day and be only themselves, men, brothers and fathers and sons, I am always Sakura, the kunoichi. Sakura, once the Godaime's apprentice. Sakura, head of the hospital, now that Tsunade is dead. Never just Haruno Sakura, the girl. You see, a shinobi is not a profession, a means of putting bread on the table, an identity that you can shrug off as the sun sets and you eat dinner with your family: it is a state of being.

Now, let me tell you that I know love can kill, so does it follow that hatred can save?

Yes.

I believe it does.

Uchiha Sasuke, as with the first hypothesis, is my proof.

Can you imagine hating someone so much that you would bring them back from the brink of sweet death, just so that you can deal the fatal blow yourself? Can you imagine the intensity of this poison burning through your veins, corrupting and destroying all that is good and precious? What unforgivable wrongs a person must have done you to give birth to such hatred!

(Motionless bodies. Blood red moon, floating malevolently in a dark chasm of sky.

"—Okaa-san … Otou-san—Nii-chan, WHY?")

Sasuke hated his brother thus.

When Naruto and I finally caught up to him—the rush of that fateful waterfall, hundreds of thousands of volumes of water freefalling seemingly from the sky and pounding into the rocks below with enough strength to force the ground to retreat over time and sending a white spray of foam ricocheting off the smooth stones—filled my ears.

"SASUKE!"

Naruto's voice cut through, a dagger, so full of passion and grief and anger and hope that I thought, Oh, Naruto, and blinked the salty spray from my eyes. Here we were, the slug and toad and snake, reunited for what I sensed was the final time, and yet—

"That's not Sasuke-kun," I said quietly.

It was a devil, perhaps, a demon; grotesque and monstrous, features blackened with rage. Or an animal, wounded, blinded with fear, deserted of conscious thought so that it lashed out at friend and foe alike. Pure instinct. Ruled by emotion.

The polar opposite to the Sasuke of our childhood. Sasuke, the third member of Team Seven, with his quiet, assured manner and his tight control. The Sasuke of golden days long gone, who locked away his emotions and swallowed the key—

(—But Naruto, and I'd like to think I helped a little, had gradually battered down the door, worn the wood away with his sheer magnitude of energy.)

And Naruto squeezed my hand, our beautiful boy who lit up the world, and I knew that he understood me. God, he was scared. I remember he was trembling so violently, tremors rocking his body, that I almost wondered if he was having a seizure; and at first I thought it was due to anger, or some strange form of anticipation that our goal was in reach. ("Sakura-chan! Time to bring Sasuke-teme home." Big cheesy grin, fingers flashed in a V for victory.)

But there were fat tears hugging the curves of his cheekbones to evaporate on his whiskered scars, and I realised with a sick hollowness that he was shaking with despair.

I hope, with all the sincerity my damaged but still beating heart can muster, that you never have to choose between the two loves of your live. Your moon and your sun; the people you want to spend the brief (oh, so fleeting!) eternity of your life with. One to go to sleep with and wake up to in the smiling morning, matching wedding rings on your fingers; one to amaze you with their skill at devouring ramen and share your laughter and joy.

I lied that day. I'm still not sure if it was the right think to do. If there was another way. (And there are always other options; hundreds of possibilities of futures stretching out like threads farther than the eye can see, fragile as butterflies—) But I was Sakura the shinobi, not just Sakura, a girl in love, and the being in front of me was not mine anymore, and the boy next to me was.

So I chose.

In honesty, it's an easier decision to make than you'd think, easy to force your broken body into action and to wrap your hands around his throat (in a harsh mockery to the lovers' caresses you dreamed of, and still do) and crush with the super strength your dead mentor taught you (rest in peace, Tsunade-shishou—), when you see your best friend hanging over a waterfall, dangling by the throat, face purple from asphyxiation. Veins in sharp relief against the leathery tan of his face. Azure eyes clouded in agony. Life slipping away like a thief into the night.

It's not that one love was stronger or bigger than the other. I'm not sure love can be quantified. It's emotion, spirit. Despite what they teach you about chemical reactions and impulses to the brain.

I just chose the love that had a future.

"Sakura-chan." Naruto's voice, from the head resting in my lap, is fragmented with loss. "Why?"

It's called euthanasia. Mercy killing. As an issue of ambiguous moral nature it is highly debated by the medical community, philosophers, politicians, society. Veterinarians use it, sometimes, if an animal is in agony and unlikely to live; perhaps they might have a crushed skull from an accident, or an illness that eats away at their insides, their essence, or maybe they're the victims of abuse. The animals-doctor fills a syringe with a strong dose of anaesthesia and administers it, slips the needle into the warm cavern of the vein.

The pain melts away, and the animal sleeps.

Few people know this, but for a segment of his life, Uchiha Sasuke was an insomniac. Not as bad as Gaara, perhaps, but he had his own demons as he once explained to me when I blinked my eyes open from sleep to find him wide awake. This was during one of our last missions as the original Team Seven. Before we fell apart.

"I can't imagine," I murmured drowsily, the firelight already lulling me back to sleep although I wanted desperately to share the still serenity of this starless night with Sasuke-kun. "Does that mean you can't dream?"

His profile was silent, contemplative. (If only I'd known at the time, what he stayed awake all those nights thinking of, planning to do—! Perhaps I could have helped him. Healed him, leaving only soft scars of memory, before the closing wounds were cruelly reopened by monsters I pray suffer for all of eternity and beyond.)

I've boarded the ship of sleep and it is about to depart the shores of consciousness on a voyage to the realm of the unconscious when he replies: "I haven't dreamed in a long, long time."

We use euphemisms a lot, to disguise, to cover up; to decorate in gaudy jewellery and costumes the things that we fear, so that we fear them less. But euphemisms are pretences. Deceptions, illusions, mirages.

Death is death, by whatever name you call it.

It was easy to pull him off Naruto and cradle the fragile yet strong support of his face in my healer-killer's hands and squeeze.

Harder was finishing what I'd started. Memories flashing through my mind like strobe lights, faded like old film, igniting a fierce fire of nostalgia.

What a picture we must've been—a girl whose pink hair was dyed blood red and a demon of a boy, not yet adults, rolling on the ground trying to strangle each other to death. Naruto was unconscious a few feet away, so he didn't see Sasuke's murder, and I'll never tell him this as long as I live.

I lied, because I said Sasuke was not himself. But the truth is that he did recognise me, in those final moments.

My tears fell on his face and—to this day I don't even know how, I can only guess that the curse seal was weakened this close to the edge, or that Naruto's efforts really did light the way—some semblance of himself returned to the murky obsidian depths of his eyes. The broken, sensitive child who'd hidden so deep inside that he was lost, letting the rage consume the vessel, clawed his way to the sunshine with every bit of will he possessed.

"Sa…kura—" he wheezed.

And I froze. I swear to God, the world halted in its spin.

"Sasuke-kun—" The endearment slipping out amidst my shock. I almost missed his next crucial, haunting, hoarse whisper.

But Sasuke was fading; the demon regaining control. The child cried out, banging against the closed door with bloodied fists. Darkness swallowing him again.

And like an epiphany it slammed into me, all the weight of the world behind it—the combined weights of Naruto, Kakashi, Sasuke, Ino, Tsunade, my parents, my world—that resolution to kill.

"Sasuke's been dead for a long time, Naruto." It's a pretty day, I notice absent-mindedly, though the leaves will fall soon enough. The sky is the blue of Naruto's eyes, a sea upon which fluffy white clouds sail to unknown horizons. Shikamaru would enjoy the view, from where he lay on the grass at the make-shift infirmary, legs crushed from the Akatsuki's attack on Konoha.

Too beautiful a day for such sorrow.

"When he killed his brother, I think all the rage and hatred and pain just swallowed him, Naruto—I think a part of him, that child-self, was so horrified at the blood of his own brother staining his hands indelibly, that he recoiled from himself. Sasuke just … retreated, into himself. The Sasuke that we love, who at heart is loyal and courageous and self-sacrificing and smart and everything beautiful, leaving only the ugly parts to move his physical body.

"That's no way to live, Naruto," and my voice is shattered with tears and exhaustion. "It isn't living at all. He didn't want to be a monster, Naruto, you know that. He just wanted to be at peace. And now I think he is."

"… Sakura … I want—to sleep …"

So why did I lie? Why didn't I just tell Naruto that our Sasuke, in fact, had not been so lost to us after all?

Because Naruto is more prone to hope than anyone I know.

And hope can be lethal. There's no despair if you have no hope initially. I think despair is the hope that takes flight but whose wings fail. It crashes and it burns.

And I couldn't bring myself to hurt Naruto in that way. Naruto, who has such passion for life. Even though he's a shinobi, he's still naïve in many ways, and it's this inability to dwell on the darknesses for too long that gives him such power and charm and energy. (In this way, he was the converse of Sasuke. For him, the darkness was overwhelming, seductive. Too dense for our light to penetrate.)

When you're a doctor and you see people in such excruciating pain that they pray to the high heavens for that release—well, it makes you wonder.

Funny, all I ever did was for love—I killed Sasuke because I loved him too much. I lied to Naruto because I loved him enough to protect him, even at risk of him hating me for it. I'm not sure that he'll ever completely, wholly forgive me for murdering Sasuke—Sasuke, who was his impossible dream, I think. Naruto is Hokage now, of course. He's finding it everything he dreamed of and more; there's a shitload of paperwork, let me tell you, and supervising Konoha's reconstruction is no small feat. That dream was achievable. Saving Sasuke was not.

(I don't blame him. I can't forgive myself.)

In my position, Naruto wouldn't have acquiesced. He would have tried. And had he failed, he would torment himself always.

(What if, what if, whatifwhatifWHATIF—)

No need for us both to suffer thus.

I dream of Sasuke, you know. Often. He looks like he did when he was twelve, maybe a bit older. But the same clothes with the Uchiha crest, the same silly haircut that Naruto teased him over.

We're in his bedroom at the old Uchiha compound ruins. Only the ruins aren't ruins; the place is rebuilt, or maybe time is simply running the other way there and it's before the massacre, before Sasuke's world fell apart.

It's funny, because I'm the one who is sleeping in reality, but here I'm awake and Sasuke's asleep, cocooned by blankets. (Still, maybe this is a kind of reality, my dream-world?)

Light filters through the curtains. Sasuke's sleeping, and not quite smiling, but his expression is so serene I want to cry.

Itachi's there, next to me. Watching Sasuke like a guardian angel. He nods at me. Looks at the bedside table. There's a note there, which I pick up.

The characters are the perfectly formed ones of Sasuke's hand, of course. The words are echoes of his last to me, engraved on my heart—

(I wake up.)

"Thank you."

The words are slurred, his throat damaged. His eyes fluttered to a close and his chest rose, hung, full; the rhythm continued, faltered, slowed, stopped with his last breath.

Chakra gone now, the last of it having been used to slow the functioning of his body, I collapsed; lay on his corpse for a long time while the sun was veiled with clouds. But they shifted, and I gathered myself, and bent close to his face.

I kissed his cold lips. "Sweet dreams," I whispered.

"Is it hard?"

Inuzuka Hana looked up from the puppy she was playing with. It was an adorable pup, all tiny bones and soft fur and liquid eyes and so very fragile.

"What?"

I squirmed uncomfortably. "Putting them to sleep when … you know."

Hana's face was gentle. "Every time." She cradled the pup in her arms. "But Sakura—it can be a kindness. Life's cruel. How can death be worse?"

One day, in the near or far future, when I succumb to that final rest—killed in the line of duty, or perhaps a peaceful passing in my own bed surrounded by grandchildren (ha! I can count on one hand the number of shinobi I know who have died thus)—I'll see him. I'll wake up on the other side and he'll be there. Perhaps life is but a dream; who can tell?

I miss Sasuke-kun. Every waking moment. And every unwaking one.

But Naruto needs me, and Konoha needs me, and I have promises to keep; and miles to go before I sleep.

Sasuke, as he embraces the abyss, thinks this: Sakura, my angel of mercy …

So.

I'm not sure if it's clear enough, on the whole. It wasn't particularly crystal in my head as I wrote it—I changed direction several times—but I hope that also, perhaps, reflects the uncertain note to Sakura's thought. I was simply writing, to the wonderful soundtrack of Across the Universe. I feel it's a bit, erm, vague and babbly and I apologise for that.

Euthanasia is a sensitive topic, and I do hope I don't offend here. I realise this story seems supportive of it; that's not necessarily my opinion, so much what Sakura deemed the kindest action for the gravity of Sasuke's particular situation.

This is, of course a work of fanfiction set in an alternate universe to the current canon world of Naruto (unfortunately I've been too busy to keep up to date). Kishimoto owns Naruto naturally. I was just borrowing his characters to exercise my hands and mind.

There a few other fictional influences here too: there's a brief line from The Last Unicorn, my favourite movie in the world (can you find it?). I found parts Titanic-esque, too. The concept of murdering a friend was prompted by the book I just read, The Secret History. There was of course a line stolen from Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Penny for your thoughts?