Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Four-

Doxophobia

Water walking came to Sakura as instinctively as tree climbing. Perhaps it was because her chakra was weaker than Naruto's or Sasuke-kun's, but after only partial submersions—she'd been cautious enough use her new skills to cling to a rock while she got the feel of it—she began to understand how to interface her chakra with the natural flow of water to firm it beneath her feet.

By late morning she was strolling cautiously further out into the sea, where the spray wasn't as bad and she didn't have to account for the rolling wavelets. Though she was still taking care, it didn't take so much concentration as to prevent her from scowling down at her dress. It was soaked from the waist down and the panels of wet fabric kept slapping at her legs and clinging.

It had been a present from her parents and an expensive one at that. And when it wasn't sopping wet and she wasn't expecting it to defy gravity, it had been a much-loved garment. It was cute and distinctive, combining the feminine with the practical. Or so she'd thought.

Maybe if I have it cut down into a top? She considered that possibility and decided that might be the best course. She'd liked the way the way the skirt had helped to take attention from the fact she didn't have hips to speak of yet, so if she bought a shorter overskirt...

Her thoughts trailed off. Usually the thought of shopping would have eked away the restless irritation that had been building as she dealt with her dress's limitations, but today it remained a hard, stubborn knot in her chest.

She turned her gaze back to the shore and found she'd come further than she'd thought. Though water walking was more taxing than a stroll in her yard, it wasn't so chakra-intensive she was in any danger of having to swim back for hours yet. But there was—it was hard to explain, even to herself—a fierce need to move.

Changing the way her chakra was keeping the water a solid surface beneath her feet, she allowed it to gain a consistency less like flooring and more like mud. Shifting her weight forward, the water welled behind her heels like nature's own sprinter's blocks. There was a moment where she firmed the surface tension and then she was off like a bird that had caught sight of a cat. She ignored her breathing in favor of turning her attention to her feet, in not only keeping the water firm, but in also getting that perfect angle to build her momentum. In throwing all her weight forward against what was essentially an endless series of starting blocks, she was suddenly going faster than she'd ever managed on land. The rocks came up quicker than she anticipated, the steep slope of them like someone had dropped a wall in her path, but a sudden fit of daring meant she didn't slow.

Instead she used momentum rather than chakra to scale it as high as she could and at the very apex, she succumbed to l'appel du vide. She shoved off, giving it everything she had so she'd be clear of the rocks. Everything, including chakra.

It was instinctive, thoughtless. Bad.

Because suddenly she was flying blindly backward in a much higher arc than she'd planned and surprise and more than a little fear slowed her reactions. She didn't flip herself over in time, so she came down with hands outstretched rather than landing feet-first. Sakura panicked, focusing so much on making the water solid that she didn't even consider that without a working knowledge of how to reinforce her wrists with chakra, the impact was going to be much worse than if she'd simply turned it into a dive.

The first hand to come down gave with an ugly twinge and she toppled sideways, the water rushing up to meet her like a slap from the hand of a god. The impact drove all the breath from her lungs and when she gasped desperately for air, she inhaled water instead. Some sense of self-preservation managed to pierce the cloud of drowning! that occupied the higher centers of her brain. She thrashed gracelessly to the surface, coughing violently and it was only after several minutes of treading water awkwardly that she remembered she'd mastered water walking.

She dragged herself out of the water, wincing as her wrist protested. Her entire side felt like it was going to bruise. Sakura was still occupied in retching up the rest of the water when she became aware of Kakashi-sensei. Or, rather, Kakashi-sensei's sandaled feet, which appeared in her currently limited line of vision and were as a matter of course connected to the rest of him.

"While an impressive display of aerial acrobatics, Sakura-chan," he drawled, "you might have been getting ahead of yourself a little there. Is your wrist alright?"

Sakura flexed her fingers, then tightened them into a fist. She was aware that she was lucky—she could have broken it. Instead, she was left with what felt like nothing more than a painful sprain. "Yes, sensei," she whispered. She drew herself slowly to her feet, good hand clasped over her aching wrist.

She chanced a glance up from under her lashes at Kakashi-sensei, bracing herself for a scolding. But his expression didn't hint at anger. If anything, he looked a little bemused. She was still adjusting to his ability to be so expressive with so little of his face visible, but she didn't think she was misinterpreting it.

Seeing her attention on him, he chuckled and ran his hand through his peculiar silver hair. "It was some very impressive chakra control. Even at the end, though you might not think so. But let's get you to the clinic. You might have pulled your stitches."

Sakura tentatively reached up to check her bandage and her fingers came away a watery pink. "I wasn't supposed to get it wet," she said blankly, only now recalling that admonishment.

"Ah," Kakashi-sensei said in acknowledgement. "Well, there is a long tradition among shinobi of doing things against medical advice."

Sakura nodded dumbly and began the stiff, uncomfortable walk to the clinic. She was somewhat surprised to find Kakashi-sensei accompanying her, but the clinic was much closer than Tazuna-san's home and by this point, Gatō would know that the bridgebuilder was no longer being guarded by a single genin.

"There at the end," Kakashi-sensei said casually, "do you remember what you did?"

"Used chakra," Sakura muttered.

"Correct," he replied with audible amusement. "But do you remember how you used it?"

Sakura was made newly aware of how sore her face was as she considered it. She remembered the impulse, but any specifics had been lost in the wash of fear that followed. Sakura shook her head.

"Ah. Well."

Sakura glanced over at him. "...did I do something wrong, Kakashi-sensei?" To her, the answer was clearly yes, but she was still waiting for his criticism.

"More unexpected than wrong. We'll work on it. Even with your landing, I think it's safe to say you've got the basics of water walking down. Naruto and Sasuke will be jealous, ne?"

Sakura winced, remembering that brief flash of antagonism from both boys when Kakashi-sensei had used her example to bait them. She didn't care what Naruto thought about her. But she cared deeply what Sasuke-kun thought. She didn't want to be his rival. She wanted to be his girlfriend. Kakashi-sensei apparently interpreted her less than friendly glance correctly, for he held up his hands in appeasement. "Mah, mah, no need to look so unfriendly."

They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. Or, at least, Sakura felt uncomfortable. Kakashi-sensei was reading again, which made it hard to gauge his mood.

That was not the case for the doctor, who was naturally outraged. Sakura just hunkered down and waited it out. It wasn't as if she wanted worse scarring or complications, but the acid tongue she might have turned on Naruto and the other idiots her own age just sort of withered in the face of adult anger. So it was a thoroughly miserable Sakura that exited the clinic, holding an ice pack to her wrist. It was only a sprain and a relatively minor one at that, but it was yet another discomfort added to a growing list.

It and the shock were bad enough that nausea lay curled like a sleeping snake in her belly. Not enough to actually throw up, just enough to make her feel miserable.

And she was soaked again.

Sakura struggled not to cry.

She'd cried after—well, after, and that had been bad enough. Crying just because she didn't feel well was something babies did. So she gritted her teeth and spent the rest of the day stalking patterns beneath the bridge, blaming any dampness on her cheeks from the spray. She'd tried jogging, but while she didn't have any visible bruises forming yet, she'd hit the water hard enough that it hurt. Movement kept her muscles from stiffening and gave her something to do that wasn't reliving those long moments in the air. The anticipation of impact had been eerily reminiscent of the day before—that same hyper-awareness of time, each second long and distinct, like the heartbeat thudding in her ears. The world had shrunk to a tiny sphere of I don't want to die, the fear louder than any other sound.

Sakura clutched at her upper arm with her good hand and walked faster.

The day eventually burned itself out and she could go back to Tazuna's. Sakura was both eager to be away from the bridge and dreading the moment when she would be expected to sleep. The only thing that made the prospect of oncoming night tolerable was Sasuke-kun and she was in almost as sorry a state today as she was yesterday.

But Sasuke-kun wasn't there. Neither was Naruto. Neither had returned for dinner, which was enough cause for concern that Kakashi-sensei went to check on them, only to report that they'd almost mastered the tree climbing exercise and to let them be.

With a sourness that had never before marred her thoughts on Sasuke-kun, she wondered why he was taking so long to master something that was far less difficult than his fire ninjutsu.

Once she'd helped Tsunami do the dishes from their evening meal and showered, taking care not to get the bandage on her face wet, there was nothing to do but sit with Kakashi-sensei in their shared room and begin the long, tedious process of cleaning and oiling her weapons since they'd taken just as much of a soaking as she had.

Her mood grew darker with the sky. But it wasn't until Kakashi-sensei said offhandedly, "If you polish that kunai any more, you'll be able to use it for a signal mirror," that she'd been mindlessly working on the same kunai for the better part of an hour.

She set it carefully on the ground in front of her, staring down at its sharp-edged, practical form. "Kakashi-sensei, have you ever thought...about why you're a shinobi?"

Kakashi-sensei made a thoughtful noise, which he followed with a long silence. Sakura was beginning to think he wouldn't answer, when he finally spoke. "No. But I don't know how to be anything else, so it's not a particularly difficult question."

Sakura mulled that answer, which was about as unsatisfying as every other response he'd ever given about himself. "Does it...does it get better? The fear?" she clarified.

He sighed very softly and put his book away. "For some, yes. For others...no. It doesn't. There isn't any sort of rulebook or protocol for that, Sakura-chan. How you deal with the fear is something you decide yourself."

She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "What if...," she said in a low whisper, "what if there are more of them next time? What if they're stronger than I am? I can't stop thinking about it. Can't stop dreaming about it," she said, voice breaking.

"Sakura," Kakashi-sensei said, his voice firm without being harsh, "stand up."

Confused, Sakura did as she was told, following him obediently outside. The moon was just cresting the treeline, full and heavy, casting long shadows that turned the familiar landscape into something strange and alien. When he'd led her away from the house, stopping at the edge of the forest, he turned to face her. It might have been intentional or it might have been coincidence, but a bold slash of shadow obscured the visible portion of his face, erasing most of his expression.

And in that moment, Kakashi-senpai seemed just as strange and alien as the rest of the landscape.

"Sakura, have you ever thought about why you were assigned to this squad?" he asked in an echo of her earlier question.

"Iruka-sensei said it had to do with our grades," Sakura answered hesitantly. Or, more specifically, Sasuke-kun and Naruto's grades. She couldn't remember if hers had even been implied in that discussion. Usually she had excellent recall, but that day had contained several very distressing incidents.

"And the other squads, were they also assigned using that criteria?"

Sakura hesitated, because she'd never considered it, but it couldn't be. Most scores were publicly announced in order to encourage competition, but Sasuke-kun had been the only shinobi to have such high scores in almost every area and Naruto had been, well, Naruto. Everyone else had fallen into a more normal range, performing well in some areas and worse in others. "No?"

She'd made it a question. Kakashi-sensei's answer was more straightforward. "No. Every squad, including those who failed and were sent back to the Academy, were carefully assessed and selected in order to meet a need of the village. Asuma's team will specialize in intelligence. Their placement was almost guaranteed, given how successful past squads formed from their families have been. Kurenai's team will specialize in tracking. Now," and there was a slightly mocking edge to the word, "what do you think Team Seven's designation is?"

Sakura flinched, but considered her teammates, not just as she'd known them in the Academy, but what she'd learned about them since. Her eyes flicked over to the man who'd been designated as their sensei. Something uncomfortable settled in her chest and she felt even more isolated than the events had of the last few days had managed to make her feel. Because if she left herself out of the equation, it was obvious.

"Combat," she said softly. "Team Seven is a combat squad. But I-"

He lifted one hand in a sharp gesture that severed the uncertain trail of her words. In the harsh moonlight, he was a stranger, a sharp, slim curve like an unfriendly smile. "You," he said, "were assessed to be a genjutsu type. Even in the Academy, you should have been aware that they're rarer than either the ninjutsu or taijutsu type. Were you ever curious why you weren't assigned to someone like Kurenai?"

Sakura shook her head. She'd been assigned to a squad with Sasuke-kun, which had been her goal. Why would she have questioned that?

"Ah." It was a sharp, weighty syllable. "Did you know that tree climbing used to be taught in the Academy? Now it's not even discussed as a theoretical technique, to keep over-confident students from trying it unsupervised, but once it was used to measure a student's aptitude for controlling their chakra. Chakra capacity is relatively easy to gauge, while control is much harder to assess. It is only once a student is capable of tree-walking that they were considered to have the control necessary to learn a wide range of functional jutsu. Can you guess why this might have been important?"

Sakura wasn't used to not having the answers a teacher demanded of her. It unsettled her, made her nervous. But she could only shake her head.

"Because war is a beast with an undiscerning diet and every village struggles to feed it. Once, candidates with advanced chakra control were shunted into classes designed to see them on the field as soon as possible. Think of it," and his voice was light and sharp, "as a race to manufacture weapons. Not all the potential in the world is useful if can't couldn't be utilized, so those students who could mould their chakra were put on the frontlines to buy more time to train those whose chakra systems stabilized later.

"Sasuke has middling chakra control. What you're seeing in his training is very close to the average. You, on the other hand, could tree climb after a single demonstration. You learned to water walk in a single morning. You," and this time the pronoun stabbed at her, "would have found yourself on a battlefield far, far sooner than eleven if you had been born in time to see that last war. Sooner than either Sasuke or Naruto. You would not have been ready, but if you had survived, your reward would be a field promotion to chunin. And then there wouldn't ever be a jounin-sensei there to save you."

Sakura was trembling. She clenched her fists and tried to breathe through her mouth, but it didn't help. It was as if the ominous, terrible weight of Kakashi-sensei's words were weighing her down like stones pressing on her chest, each sentence bringing it closer to collapsing beneath the strain.

"That is what real fear is, Sakura," he said.

And like the sun coming out from behind stormclouds, Kakashi-sensei stepped forward into the moonlight and all that terrible pressure vanished. She collapsed, gasping and flinched back from his hand when he extended it to her. But he only brought it down in that familiar head-pat. "You already know what it feels like. If you want to fight it, it does help if the skill-gap favors you. This time, our enemies are mostly thugs who were never ninja or missing-nin who, for one reason or another, never made it past genin rank. That means that on the whole, they're undisciplined. Which will make them more susceptible to what I'm about to teach you."

"Wh-what?"

"How to turn fear into a weapon. And the reason no combat squad was ever formed without a genjutsu-type in it. You don't have enough chakra or experience yet to make use of a lot of jutsu, but the Magen: Narakumi no Jutsu should be well within your abilities. It's the same jutsu I used against you the day of the bell test."

Sakura cringed as the image of a bloodied and broken Sasuke-kun flickered across her memory.

"An expert can use it to intensify the body's natural reaction to fear until your opponent hyperventilates. You aren't strong enough to cause anyone to collapse, but if you're outnumbered, it will give you time to get away. And then," he said more affectionately, "sensei can come rushing in to save you."

Sakura wished she could go back to the time when she would have wholeheartedly believed that.

But what he was offering was much better than nothing. So she focused all her considerable skills of analysis and memorization on this one jutsu, painstaking repeating the handsigns that Kakashi-sensei demonstrated to her until she could link them into a smooth chain. It was only then she cautiously began to channel chakra, committing to memory the way each sign helped to direct and manipulate it. It was harder than the water walking, slightly less intuitive, but by the time the moon was staring down at them from where it had crested in the sky, she was rewarded with her first flicker of something.

It was like a haze that had given her the briefest impression of a crumpled form in front of Kakashi-sensei before he dispelled it with a single handsign. "Good job, Sakura-chan," he congratulated her. "It's your first time seeing the ghost."

"The ghost?" she had quizzically, letting her hands fall to the sides. She felt a sense of satisfaction that was more peaceful than triumphant, but also like she would need another shower before she crawled back into her futon and collapsed. Even being as careful as possible with her chakra, she'd spent a lot on failed attempts. And it had been a long set of days.

"It's what genjutsu specialists call the image they see when they use a genjutsu. It's a reflection of what your opponent is seeing, superimposed over the real environment. It would be dangerous if you couldn't see both, ne?" Kakashi-sensei grinned at her.

And her answering smile might have been a bit tremulous, but it was present. She didn't think she was so tired that she wouldn't dream, nor did she think that the dreams would vanish, but she thought she had courage enough now to make it through the night. Maybe not tomorrow, or the nights that would come after, but tonight Kakashi-sensei would keep her safe from everything but her dreams. And those she had to learn to face herself.

She woke only twice, briefly, before drifting back into exhausted slumber. She never even noticed when Sasuke returned, smug and fresh from the triumph of mastering the tree climbing exercise.

A/N: Avez-vous déjà vu? L'appel du vide, the call of the void—it's when you're standing at the edge of a canyon and some part of you wants to step off the edge. Maintenant, oui.