A/N: I'm aware that Kurenai is also genjutsu-type, but when we first meet her when they're divvying up the teams, she's only been recently promoted to jounin and no one in the series reacts to her like she's a household name. And, really, in the series she's the only other confirmed genjutsu-type sans Sharingan, but in KYH, the three types not only describes said shinobi's strongest discipline but also speaks to how they learn. Genjutsu-types are the intellectual powerhouses, which means in the rare combination of genjutsu affinity and enough chakra, you get people like Orochimaru and Itachi, who are capable of learning almost any jutsu but whose strongest skill is their ability to manipulate people. Sakura, unfortunately, just didn't hit the genetic lottery.

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Twenty-

Allodoxaphobia

Kakashi kept silent until Naruto was all but squirming in his seat, while Sasuke attempted to give some impression of alertness rather than wrung-out exhaustion.

"Ne, ne, Kakashi-sensei, can I—"

He cut Naruto off. "No."

"But I—"

"No, Naruto. Teuchi's business won't collapse if you don't get celebratory ramen. Instead, why don't you tell me a story," he prompted, keeping his tone that lightly mocking, unreadable calm that had served him well since his father had fallen from grace. Untouchable, it said without saying, Indifferent. And mostly it was the truth—he'd stopped investing himself in people at the same time he'd stopped believing that heroes were infallible.

Unfortunately, this team was different. He owed Minato and he'd promised Sarutobi and the ninken were awfully fond of Sakura.

Just thinking of it made him tired.

"...a story, sensei?" Naruto asked incredulously.

Even Sasuke darted a disbelieving glance at him.

"Yes, a story. Unless it actually was raining blood while I wasn't looking and Sakura just happened to be caught in a sudden shower. In which case, feel free to keep silent. And, yes, Naruto, that is sarcasm. I'm not willing to wait for a written report—the two of you are going to tell me what happened in the Forest."

Naruto and Sasuke shared a glance and it was unsurprisingly his blond charge who took the lead, Sasuke only interrupting when Naruto got carried away. Or when he'd been absent. And he'd been absent for things that made it difficult to keep up his expression of neutrality—and when Naruto re-entered the story, he stopped trying.

"Naruto," he interrupted the blond, sounding out the syllables of his name with exacting preciseness, "What made you think it was a good idea to charge ahead when your enemy is clearly more powerful than you are?"

"Even if Sasuke'd given him the scroll, he wouldn't have let us go anyway," Naruto protested indignantly.

"I didn't ask about the scroll, Naruto. Sasuke could have burnt the scroll himself or pitched it, I don't care—I want to know why you thought it was acceptable to stay and fight at all."

Naruto had that kicked-dog look, the one that said he didn't understand what he was being scolded for, but Kakashi was in no mood to spare his feelings. "We couldn't—we couldn't just run! I'm not a scaredy-cat," Naruto said, looking inexplicably betrayed. "And who knows if we could've even made it anyway."

Kakashi's voice was hard, as sharp-edged as his kunai, when he spoke again. "Naruto, there is a fine line between being a hero and being the fool who got everyone slaughtered because he couldn't tell the difference between a battle worth fighting and one that was over before it ever started. And you crossed it. There are reasons to fight losing battles, but you didn't have any of them. You weren't holding the line, you weren't making some noble martyr sacrifice for the cause, you weren't protecting anyone. Frankly, I don't even know what you were doing.

"Was it a pride thing? Here was your best opportunity for some one-upmanship Sasuke and you just couldn't resist driving it home that you were brave enough to fight and he wasn't? Explain it to me, so I can tell you to never do it again. Those that abandon their teammates are trash, Naruto, but a person who makes their teammates decide between abandoning them or facing a fight that's too much for them to handle? That's something worse than trash. I want you to think about how you'd have felt if Sakura died, or Sasuke, just because you thought you could go toe-to-toe with someone who you should have recognized as a major threat."

A gamut of emotions had run across Naruto's expressive features—indignation, anger, guilt—and his eyes looked suspiciously shiny as he stared down at his clenched hands. Kakashi didn't feel even reflexive guilt. Thanks to the Kyūbi's regenerative properties, it was impossible that pain would teach Naruto caution—it was easy to be fearless when even fractured bones healed within the day—but it was likely that if he wasn't set right now, he'd assume that his teammates could take just as much punishment as he did with as little consequence. And Kakashi knew where that would lead. Courage had its place, but he knew exactly what overconfidence could cost a team.

It was a measure of how seriously they were taking this that Sasuke wasn't smirking at Naruto, was instead staring very steadily at the rail of Sakura's hospital bed.

He considered what he might say to him that he hadn't said already, but if Sasuke didn't already realize that Orochimaru was bad news—and that probably needed to be in blazing capital letters—it would take more than just words to change his mind. But if he couldn't address Orocimaru, he could address the other issue.

"So, Sasuke," and he was satisfied to see the genin in question flinch almost imperceptibly, "is there a reason that you wouldn't let Sakura forfeit?'

Sasuke wouldn't meet his eyes and he mumbled his response.

"What was that?"

"Because I thought she could do it," Sasuke repeated, his words edged in irritation that likely came from embarrassment if the faint flush at the tips of his ears is anything to go by. "And I didn't want to go into it with just the dead-last."

"You didn't know she was hurt?"

Sasuke hesitated, then, "I didn't think she was hurt that badly. She didn't say anything. When we were at the Academy, you could always hear Sakura and Ino complaining if they got too roughed up during practical."

"And you didn't think that she might have matured since then?" Kakashi asked dryly.

Sasuke scowled and dropped his gaze. "Not that much," he grumbled. "She was always trying to get my attention. She should have said something."

Kakashi remembered, vaguely, that the same someone who'd told him that there was a phase when girls would be more interested in boys than in training had also told him that that was the same time they started keeping secrets and while they would outgrow the boys, they'd never outgrow the secrets.

He was beginning to believe them.

"I'll give you one very good piece of advice about women, Sasuke—what they say out loud is only about thirty percent of the message. I like that you have confidence in Sakura's skills, but you might want to put a little bit more trust in her judgment. Especially as it relates to her own body."

Naruto was staring at Sasuke. "Wait, you stopped her from forfeiting? Back when scary-lady-in-the-fishnet-stockings was giving the give-up-now speech?"

"So?" Sasuke retorted.

Naruto's brows furrowed. "I don't think Sakura should have given up then either, but it's kinda weird that you would even care."

"She's my teammate," Sasuke replied defensively.

"I'm your teammate."

"You're an idiot."

"Stop squabbling," Kakashi chided them.

He was met with obedience and recalcitrant expressions, but both of them seemed subdued.

Naruto rubbed at the back of his head in an awkward gesture, then asked, "Hey, Kakashi-sensei?"

"Yes?"

"Did Sakura-chan, I mean, did she mean to y'know, poison Temari?"

"How do you 'accidentally' poison someone?" Sasuke muttered scathingly.

Let some people near a kitchen and you can find out, Kakashi thought, but kept it to himself. He didn't want to break the tone of this conversation, not when Naruto was taking it seriously. Kakashi considered downplaying the poisoning, but decided that enough was enough. This was like Sakura and fire, all over again—if he didn't acclimate them now to the idea that their female teammate was their equal, it might burn them in live combat.

They might be stronger physically, though Sakura was rapidly gaining ground, and would always be her better when it came to raw chakra, but she'd learned a very different lesson on that bridge than her two teammates. It put her in a very different place, emotionally and developmentally.

That thought made him feel faintly guilty, but it wasn't a fresh, cutting guilt, just a resurgence of the old regret that poisoned everything. Just another person he'd failed to protect. There was a private memorial in his mind, one that he revisited in spirit when his body couldn't be at the one carved in unforgiving stone.

"Naruto, what did you think of Sakura's battle?"

Naruto hesitated, which told Kakashi that he hadn't been completely oblivious to the change in Sakura's behavior. For himself, the moment he'd seen her expression, he'd known exactly what was in store for the other chunin candidate. And given what the kunoichi's teammate had done, he didn't know that he'd have reacted any differently.

"Uh, well, it was more...aggressive than Sakura-chan usually is," Naruto said at last. "I mean, the proctor's all 'Begin' and Sakura's all like swoosh and she's got those knives out—where did she get those knives, anyhow?—and she, um, looked kinda scary. Kinda like she wanted to kill Temari," he ventured hesitantly.

"There's no 'kinda'. If we hadn't had medical staff on-site, Temari would have died," Kakashi said flatly, deftly ignoring the question about the knives.

He could see the struggle on Naruto's face as he tried to reconcile his 'Sakura-chan' with someone who would make that kind of decision. Sasuke's expression was harder to read. "...maybe she didn't know how bad the poison was?" Naruto ventured hopefully. "She was the one saying it was just a test. Sakura-chan wouldn't kill someone for that."

"Not for a test, but when someone's teammate slaughters someone in broad daylight for a test and your opponent doesn't flinch, that might be a good indication that she doesn't share your values system. And Sakura wasn't willing to die for a test either."

"She could have forfeited," Sasuke remarked.

"She could have. If she'd been thinking clearly, she might have, but from what the medic-nin told me, her fever was already bad going into the fight. When it's life-or-death, a kind of tunnel vision that only accepts one outcome isn't that unusual. Sakura wasn't going to die, so Temari had to." A harder edge crept into his voice. "And, failing that, she was going to make certain no one survived."

"...why?" Sasuke asked after a long, charged moment. "That's not like Sakura at all."

"It is like Sakura, just not the Sakura you remember from the Academy. Which she hasn't been. Not for a while. The two of you need to recognize that."

[Kill Your Heroes]

Pain medication was good in the sense that without it the bruises the medic-nin had left to heal in their own good time throbbed enough to make her miserable, bad in the sense that it made thinking difficult, like her brain was functioning at half-speed.

Just fast enough to understand she was in trouble, not fast enough to produce excuses. But, grumpy and defensive, she didn't feel much like giving them either. She'd woken to only Kakashi-sensei in the room, though he'd remarked wryly that he'd made Sasuke and Naruto stay until Naruto had almost taken out some very expensive medical equipment when he'd toppled out of his chair.

That was fine with Sakura. She didn't want them here, anyway. Her fingers clutched at the thin blanket as she tried to swallow down her anger.

"Poison is something new for you," Kakashi-sensei said in that light, leading way he had. "They managed to save her, in case you're wondering."

Sakura frowned, filled with a very peculiar dichotomy of feeling. One part of her was relieved, because the fight was over and no one had died. That part felt a little guilty, because in retrospect it was clearer that Temari hadn't intended to turn the match into a duel to the death. She'd had the chance and hadn't taken it, even though she'd still been caught in Sakura's genjutsu when she'd dealt that final blow.

The rest of her was afraid. If it had ended with the match, it would have been one thing. But she'd used Fū's gift and Temari had survived. Now there was a primal part of her brain insisting that leaving enemies alive was a very, very bad thing and her world would not be safe and right again until she fixed the problem.

Her hands trembled on her covers and her blood pressure spiked on her monitor, neither of which she noticed until Kakashi-sensei's voice cut through the tightening spiral of her thoughts. "Sakura. Calm down."

Her eyes met his one, hers wide and panicked, his narrow with intensity. "Kakashi-sensei," she gasped through the tightness in her chest, "what do I do?"

"Do? About what?"

"Temari. What if she—"

He held up a hand to forestall her. "Stop. I think I know where you're going with that. And you need to stop. Take a deep breath."

She did as he instructed and her trembling quieted a little.

"Temari is from Suna. And Suna, in our line of work, is synonymous with poison. It helps that every third animal and second plant in their territory is poisonous, which they've used to their advantage in the past and will continue to in the future. Her teammate is a puppetmaster whose every needle, blade, and odd projectile doesn't see the field without a good coating of something unpleasant. It also means she's unlikely to hold a grudge about your use of it—from the sound of it, she was more upset with herself for not noticing it immediately."

Sakura's brows furrowed, trying to understand this alien point of view. "How long did it take for her to notice it?"

"A little less than twenty minutes. Venom doesn't work as well with open cuts, the blood flow means less of it gets into the bloodstream to do its business. And because your match ended immediately, her heart rate slowed as well, which gave her more time before the effects became noticeable. In the field, it might have worked regardless. With black mamba, you're unlikely to last more than six hours. And only about one of those conscious. Now, with that said, black mamba aren't native to Konohagakure and if it's a shopkeeper who sold it to you, someone is about to get their license revoked. Where did you get the venom?"

"It was a gift," Sakura admitted. "From someone I met in the Forest."

Kakashi's brow soared. "And you used it?"

"He told me what it was," Sakura said, staring down at her clenched hands. "I knew what type of venom it was. And...what it did. I just didn't expect for it to take so long to work."

"So you chose to try to kill Temari?"

"Yes," Sakura admitted softly. "Because I thought she'd kill me if I didn't kill her first."

"Alright," Kakashi-sensei said after an unnerving pause.

She looked up at him disbelievingly. "That's it, just 'alright'?"

"Sakura," he said patiently, "Every shinobi in that room had already signed a waiver that accepted the possibility that their match might end with them dead. You saw that in action when that Oto-nin went against Gaara. You were within your rights to make that decision. But you also have to live with that decision. As long as you do that, I won't say anything.

You're a genin now, which means more freedom to make your own decisions. And I recommended you for chunin, which would have seen you making decisions for a squad. I'm not your parent, nor am I one of your Academy instructors. I am your mentor and you are a working professional. Unless your judgment endangers you or others or violates the code, I won't tell you whether you're right or wrong. Every shinobi has to draw their line in the sand, decide what they will and won't do to achieve an end."

"I...guess that makes sense," Sakura said after a long pause.

Kakashi-sensei chuckled. "I'd hope so. Now, you're free to leave whenever you feel up to it. Naruto and Sasuke both won their rounds-" she felt less about that than she probably should, but there was nothing even resembling jealousy inside her at the news, "so we're not going to be meeting up for regular training. I'll be taking care of Sasuke's training personally, so someone else will be handling you and Naruto for the interim."

His grinned, his eye shifting into the familiar crescent that boded ill for everyone. "And, Sakura? Don't think that a few bruises gets you out of walking the ninken."