A/N: ...I really hate these tournament style matches. My working knowledge of martial arts is pretty nil and well, while I can skim enough articles to pretend that I earned my civil engineering degree at the university of Google in a little under an hour, correcting this lack of martial arts knowledge is a massive time commitment. And I'd much rather commit my time to something like, say, playing the entire Mass Effect trilogy. Which is where I've been. You only get to see me because Garrus is too busy with his calibrations to talk to me.
Oh, and for you visual people, if you Google 'karambit' and mentally lengthen the blade and give it a slightly flatter curve, you've got a good idea of Sakura's knives.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Eighteen-
Testophobia (Part II)
The time to surrender passed her by almost without notice as she wrestled with Sasuke's motive for catching her hand and Anko's contemptuous, "Alright, maggots, clear the floor," washed through her like the shock of bitterly cold water.
She wanted to call out wait, but social conditioning pressed down on her almost as hard as her teammate's grip. There was shame and embarrassment waiting there, whereas before it would have been a tactical retreat. And her old pride, which she'd thought trampled by exhaustion and pain and reality, was present enough that she couldn't muster the courage pull a Naruto and demand that Anko let her leave, go home, take a nap and let her teammates face the rest of the exam on their own.
She didn't know if he was really brave, or just oblivious, but whichever it was, she wasn't. And there would be another chance soon enough. It wasn't hard to lose a fight.
Still, she yanked her hand free of Sasuke's grip and stalked up one of the stairways to where she'd marked Kakashi-sensei earlier. Sakura was careful to not even glance toward Orochimaru, though she had the unsettling sensation of being watched, the fine hairs on her neck prickling. Just paranoia, she told herself. If he looked in their direction, it would be Sasuke he'd be staring at. She was just dross.
Kakashi-sensei glanced at her and his brow rose, but he didn't otherwise react. She didn't know why she'd expected anything different—he'd had plenty of time to take in the blood-spattered view. Naruto and his need for attention soon turned Kakashi-sensei's gaze elsewhere and Sakura listened in grim silence as Anko gleefully outlined the rules, which were pretty much the same as the Forest.
No whining if you ended up dead.
If she clenched her jaw any tighter, her molars were going to crack. Sakura let her arms, which had been crossed tightly across her chest, fall limply to her sides. She sidled closer to Kakashi-sensei, ignoring the proctor announcing the first match. Tenten—the kunoichi from Rock Lee's team—and Yoroi Akadō. She didn't need to watch. She had no intentions of competing in the third section of the exam and she'd had a bellyful of fighting in these days in the Forest.
Catching Kakashi-sensei's attention, she mouthed Bathroom? and he tilted his head toward one of the doors. "Turn left when you hit the junction. And don't leave this floor."
His tone was serious and Saskura nodded, accepting it for the warning it was. You didn't build a tower in the middle of a lethal forest for the scenery; you did it because whatever purpose the tower served when not in use in the exams, it needed the clear keep away that the Forest of Death and its inhabitants provided.
Most of the spectators, their attention fixed on the match, didn't even notice as she slunk out the door. And she didn't much care about the ones who did.
She found the bathroom just where Kakashi-sensei had said it would be, and after taking care of business, she spent long minutes at the sink scrubbing blood and mud from her skin. Sakura felt anger like a tight, hard knot behind her breastbone as she watched the water swirl down the drain, as dirty as she felt. The water was shockingly cold against her flushed face and when she pulled up her vest to check on what was beginning to feel like a second heartbeat, she flinched when she tugged at the corner of the bandage. Better, she decided after a moment, to let sleeping dogs lie if you don't have any way of putting them down again. There was nothing she could do for her hair, the blood having set as stiff and unflatteringly as overly-liberal gel. And her clothes were a mess—she'd either have to burn them or expend a lot of effort to get them clean.
It was a real pity that they'd been so expensive, because she'd really have preferred the burning option.
If I survive this match, Sakura thought, plucking at the stained fabric of her vest, I am going to thank my mother for doing my laundry for so many years.
When she couldn't find anything else to straighten or tidy and she was only wasting water, she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and made to return to the arena. And nearly barreled someone as she flung open the door and stepped through it with a certainty she didn't feel. Luckily, the near-victim was quick on his feet, dancing back out of the way in a movement that seemed somehow playful, hands help up in mock-surrender. "Ah," he said, recognition breaking across his face. "Onee-san. You made it to the party after all."
Sakura bit her lip to keep back a biting comment about his definition of parties. "Thanks again for what you did back there," she said instead, because it was the boy from the forest. It came out a little strained, because she was exhausted and bloody and he was wearing those star-shaped barrettes and those too-long sleeves and looking like he'd strolled out of the Academy after a session with a lecturer with a sense of humor.
He shrugged it off. "Just took advantage, is all. Going back to watch the fights?"
Sakura nodded.
"Mind if I come along? The jounin processing forms for my teammates recommended the view. There's apparently a ton of paperwork involved in retrieving and removing bodies," he said lightly. "Though they're more bits, from what I saw of what the Sandman left behind." There was a that hard, brittle look in his eyes again, at odds with the lightness of his voice. "Silly of them, you know, to try something like that while I was scouting. But I got back in time to watch the climax of the show. A little more bloody than yours, nee-san. That reminds me, did you use my present?"
Sakura had almost forgotten about the little container, which she'd tucked away in favor of dealing with Sasuke and hadn't had time to think about since. She fished it out of her pack and was relieved to find it hadn't broken or leaked, the amber substance still safely behind the container walls. "I don't even know what it is," she confessed. "Or your name," she said with a frown.
"Umehara Fū. Yours, onee-san?"
"Haruno Sakura."
He grinned. "See, there is such a thing as serendipity. What I gave you—it's venom. Black mamba. Sometimes you pick out things you think suit people and there's all different ways of killing in the world, so I thought I'd give you something that matched your style. You're clean in your strikes. You don't play around, don't cut just to see someone bleed. So I thought it suited you." Fū unsheathed his own knife and laughed when Sakura tensed. "No need to fear, nee-san. Just look." And she did, because his knife was just as cruel and strange up close as the first time she'd glimpsed it. Long, broad, with that deep, hooked serration she'd noticed before, it was more designed to tear than slash.
Despite herself, she moved a little closer. "What are those grooves?" she asked. They traced from the hilt to the tip of each serrated edge, almost like...
Almost like a snake's fangs.
"They deliver the venom payload," he explained, confirming her suspicions. "Venom has to enter the bloodstream to be effective—provided you don't have ulcers or open sores in your mouth, you can drink the stuff. But you lose potency smearing it on a blade. So there are channels engraved in the metal and they're sealed with a very thin clear polymer. I'd explain the delivery system, but that's a secret," he said teasingly. "I call it Reciprocity. Do you have a name for yours?"
Sakura shook her head slowly, hand coming to rest on the hilt of the damaged knife. "No. They're...they're just tools. Like the blades you'd use to cut brush or rice, just...people, instead."
Fū made a thoughtful humming noise deep in his throat. "Cold," he said, "very cold. They might feel unloved like that."
Sakura had no intention of naming the knives she'd taken from the body of a dead man. "That poison you used—what was it?"
He grinned disarmingly, looking startlingly young again. "The secret behind the name Reciprocity. The venom I gave you is extremely lethal, but almost painless. Nuerotoxin, cardiotoxin. Mostly tingling in your fingers and progressive paralysis until your heart stops. Useful, but not much fun. What I use doesn't kill, just causes pain so extreme that it's debilitating. Pain for pain. I'll admit the source is a little less glamorous—the stonefish doesn't look like much, but stepping on it isn't a mistake you make more than once unless you're too stupid to live. And that's all I have for show-and-tell today, onee-san."
Fū sheathed the knife smoothly, then shuffled around behind Sakura so he could shoo her onward, back toward the fights. Sakura protested being herded, but it didn't dissuade him at all, just made his eyes gleam with mischief as they emerged back onto the balcony just in time to see Rock Lee prove that his taijutsu was more than a match for the eerily familiar body manipulation used by Misumi. It didn't matter that the purple-clad genin seemed boneless in his flexibility; Lee's sheer speed made watching the match like watching a wasp kill a caterpillar.
Sakura watched with admiration mingled with envy, because there was a smoothness and grace to his movements that she couldn't match even when she wasn't five days in to a survival test. Perfect balance, excellent control, clear experience was in his every blow. Some part of her wondered what she looked like when she fought, given that all she seemed to do in training was run away from the ninken and avoid Kakashi-sensei's projectile of the day.
She glanced over, once, to where her teammates were standing, and found that knot behind her breastbone tightened. Naruto would have gotten them killed in the encounter with Orochimaru. Sasuke wouldn't respect her decision to surrender.
In that moment, Sakura felt nothing but resentment for her team.
So she turned away, taking the opportunity to glance over at the posted results for the matches she'd missed. Tenten had won her match and Shikamaru had won the one that followed against Kin. Then the next match was announced, which turned out to be the very definition of the term 'grudge'. It was clear, despite a last-minute rally on Hinata's part, who was going to be the victor of that particular match. Sakura nearly choked on her anger as Naruto cheered her onward into cardiac arrest, Neji's deft and vicious mastery of their shared style not something that could be overcome by something as trite as Naruto's never-say-die philosophy.
Her fingers clenched around the railing, which gave a metallic creak of protest that had Fū glancing over at her. She relaxed her grip, unclenched her jaw, and pretended that her increasingly instinctive use of chakra hadn't left indentions of her fingers in a steel rail.
But his curiosity turned to something else as two new names blinked into life on the display. Dosu no longer looked disoriented, though any subtlety of expression was lost behind his extensive bandages, but his opponent was the redhead from Suna that had been so unnerving during their brief encounter.
It didn't help that Fū sucked in a breath and murmured, "Enter Sandman."
What came next would be something that would be forever etched on her memory, because if there was an imbalance in skill between Neji and Hinata, the distance between Gaara and Dosu was a chasm. Dosu was not an incapable ninja, she admitted grudgingly as she watched him press forward, confident in his ninjutsu, but Gaara—Gaara was a monster. He never moved, never seemed to breathe, hardly seemed to blink. Just stood there, sand dampening all Dosu's sound-waves, and then all that sand reached out like the hand of a god and crushed Dosu. There was a short, short scream, then blood was seeping through the sand, the crowd so silent she almost imagined she heard it dripping to the floor.
Gaara didn't preen or gloat. He just...released the lump of twisted flesh and broken bone to floor with a wet-sounding thump and walked away, rejoining his team as if this was just another exercise at the Academy. As if he hadn't just slaughtered someone without ever lifting a hand.
What made it bad was that not a flinch of surprise was displayed by his teammates or his jounin-sensei, although she thought it might be disgust that twisted the kunoichi's lips into a grimace. But not like someone seeing someone terrible, like a housewife catching sight of a dirty floor.
What made it worse was that Sakura's name was the next to be illuminated on the board. And her opponent was that kunoichi from Sand, who looked so composedly on the thing that until a minute ago had been a person.
They had to wait for them to clean the floor and even when it was pronounced fit for use, there was a fine layer bloody sand that they'd need to wash from the concrete later. Some part of her brain wondered if they had drains built into this floor for just this circumstance.
The rest of her mind was considering what it might mean to lose to this kunoichi.
The sand made a sound beneath her boots as she walked to take her place in the center of the floor, like a scritching, like something ugly crawling beneath the loam. Temari—that was her name—didn't have the smooth, glossy prettiness of a Konohagakure kunoichi. She was hard, sharp, prickly, like the foliage native to Suna, which might have been its own kind of beauty.
What it told Sakura was that this was someone else who also survived and that this battle would be like the bridge, like the Forest. And when Temari smirked, Sakura let any thought of losing intentionally slip away. She didn't know if she could win, but she wasn't going to end up like Dosu. And if that meant that Temari had to die, well, she could live with that.