A/N: Mostly a transition chapter, lighter in tone than most of the others, but I anticipate the next chapter will answer your need for violence. You'll be seeing it after a new chapter of Absolute Magnitude goes up. For those of you who read TRUS, you know I can't resist pontificating in space.

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Twenty-two-

Aichmophobia (Part I)

Her hair was still damp from the shower when Sakura made her way the arena, nibbling gleefully at a stick of syrup-coated anko dango.

She'd never known a true calorie deficit until she'd met the ninken, but nowadays she ate more than she had before just to maintain her weight. And what weight she did have was beginning to be distributed differently, lean muscle reshaping her arms, legs, and abdomen. Sakura hadn't been precisely out of shape before, but the day-in, day-out conditioning had changed not only what her body was capable of, but what she thought her body was capable of.

That in turn inspired a certain amount of confidence as she passed beneath the guest entrance. Perhaps she wouldn't stand on that field today, but she no longer felt herself to be so deeply unequal to most of them. Just most—she could take twenty years and not feel equal to doing anything more than running from Gaara.

But she had one significant advantage on the competitors—she could enjoy the vendors that had turned out in force as the wealthy and the curious of four countries turned out for a rare exhibition match. She was also clean, put-together, and likely to stay that way. Just days before she'd finally been in to see the specialist and she no longer had the scar on her face staring at her every time she looked in the mirror.

There'd been a strange, faint tinge of regret when she'd seen it absent on her skin, when she hadn't felt the faint tug of it when she smiled, but it had been nearly buried by the relief of no longer having that visible reminder of Wave. She already carried quite enough of those.

She followed the directions of the ninja on crowd control and maneuvered her way through the civilians crowding the stairways until she came down to the front rows, which had been reserved for shinobi. The idea being that though the competitors were expected to have the common sense not to use attacks that could injure someone in the stands, they all understood that competition effected judgment and therefore were forming ranks of human shields in front of the daimyō and diplomats who might be understandably perturbed by a stray kunai.

The stands were already filling and Sakura was trying to pick out someone familiar to sit by, not having much success at it. With Ino and the rest of Team Seven in the final round, she was left with few options among people who own age—transitioning directly from crippling shyness to being the best friend of the most popular and capable kunoichi in their class hadn't earned her many friends. And she didn't know many older shinobi—Genma-sensei was proctoring and Raidō-sensei would spend the day serving as Hokage-sama's aide.

She was beginning to think she should have invited the ninken along to keep her company when Sakura came to an odd realization. Before, the idea of sitting alone, the implication she didn't have anyone to sit with, that she didn't belong to a group, would have made her chest tight with anxiety. To a preteen girl—and maybe a preteen boy, for all she knew—not belonging anywhere was worse than belonging to a group that treated you badly. Now—now, that all seemed so petty. What did it matter that she was sitting alone? She'd killed alone, fought alone, trained alone.

So she chose a seat with a view she liked, helped herself to another stick of dango, and settled in for the competition. If the stranger at her elbow—she'd chosen an aisle seat—made her uncomfortable, it wasn't any sense of social embarrassment any longer, just an unhealthy paranoia that was still dogging her through her nights and into her days.

She would never admit to anyone that those first few nights back from the Forest she'd shoved her bed just far enough away from the wall for her to slip into the crevice, feeling safer sleeping there for all that her tactical mind knew that it might limit her mobility if someone actually attacked her in her own home.

But there was too much ambient noise and energy surrounding her for her to slip into herself; even the shinobi were excited by the prospect of the competition. This year was heavy on names that carried a certain weight—the last of the Uchiha, the prodigy of the Hyūga, the demon come up out of the desert. Everyone else might have been window-dressing for their matches, especially as they were guaranteed a match between the first and the last and the odds were heavily favoring the winner of that match to face the Hyūga in the finals.

Sakura couldn't disagree, given what she'd seen, but something like odds wouldn't stop Naruto from beating his head against a brick wall until the wall bled.

The third round opened with Tenten and Rock Lee, who'd taken the "exhibition" to heart, giving the audience an intense display of shinobi technical skill without serious aggression driving their fight. And they didn't throw themselves at each other recklessly either, each clearly pacing themselves in anticipation of several more rounds.

No point in winning the first round if you faced chakra exhaustion at the beginning of the second. For a long time, it looked like it could go either way, and then Lee made some move she couldn't quite follow with her eyes and Tenten was down, his hand at her throat in an echo of his signature opening stance.

When Genma-sensei called the match in Lee's favor, Sakura could just make out a rueful smile on Tenten's face as Lee shifted his hand away from her throat and pulled her to her feet. Her hand clapped down on Lee's shoulder in a friendly gesture and her body language made the short exchange that followed look like encouragement.

It was...nice, Sakura decided, to see a team who could enter into even a high-stakes competition like this and still treat each other with respect. Of all the things they'd displayed on the field, that impressed her the most. Team Seven wouldn't have been able to replicate that, not for all their Sharigan eyes and impossible chakra reserves.

The match that followed it was about as unlike the first as it could be without actual homicidal intent, Hyūga Neji all cool dignity while Naruto shouted, and raged, and seethed. She was glad she couldn't make out exactly what he was saying, because while time had tempered her resentment, she hadn't forgotten what she'd felt as Hinata picked herself up again and again and flung herself against an enemy she wasn't skilled enough to beat. Tell her it's enough, she'd wanted to shout, Tell her it's alright to quit. Tell her she doesn't have to hurt for someone else's hate.

Some part of her knew that Naruto had only wanted Hinata to stand up for herself, to defend her pride and her skills, but what would it mean to absolutely commit yourself like that and lose anyway?

But whatever impact that match had had on Hinata, whatever effect all that impassioned yelling had on Neji, it was Naruto who won the match.

The next match was slated to be Sasuke's, but he still hadn't made an appearance. There was a sharp fragment of worry there, but a stronger sense that he was with Kakashi-sensei, who would probably be late to his own funeral, told her that they were just late.

Shikamaru's match followed on the heels of the announcement that they would postpone the highly anticipated battle between Sasuke and Gaara. Given the nature of the match that followed, Sakura thought it would have been disappointing for the civilians even if they hadn't been anticipating anything else. Much like Kakashi-sensei, but without his flare or his ability to goad others into doing what he wanted them to do, Shikamaru would expend exactly enough effort to meet his goals and no more. In the Academy, that had mostly been passing grades except on multiple choice tests, which didn't involve nearly as much effort as essays. She couldn't help but think that some sort of bribery was involved, to keep him in this match when he looked so plainly apathetic.

But not enough, apparently, to secure the effort for a second round.

It was frustrating, to watch the opponent who'd beaten her be handed her victory by someone who just didn't care enough to take it, but it was clear by the expression on Temari's face that she found it infuriating. And she thought, Good, but there wasn't the vehemence there that she'd felt in Naruto's match against Neji.

Paranoia had turned to a faint sense of shame, because she'd tried to kill her and Temari, probably knowing that, had refrained from doing the same. She'd judged someone by their teammate, which was a stupid thing to do. It was part of the reason she'd hated being slotted into a squad with Naruto, because she'd known that what people thought of her would be tainted by what they thought of him.

She wasn't Naruto.

And Temari wasn't Gaara.

She was glad when the two of them cleared the field and Ino and Shino took it. Sakura cheered for Ino, even though she was aware it was a bad match for her skillset since she wouldn't be willing to kill Shino's kikaichū, devastating his colony being far more traumatic than destroying his favorite kunai. Ino lost, but she did it with style, collapsing dramatically to her knees as a cloud of chakra-eating bugs lifted from her shoulders, not bloodied and bruised and beaten, but seemingly untouched.

If she had to lose in a public arena like this, this kind of ending was the kind best suited to Ino, especially when she tried to stand and her legs almost collapsed again and both Genma-sensei and Shino moved to catch her.

Ino had always been the heroine in her own story. She'd come to the Academy with a team waiting for her, tailored for generations to support her skills. Her skills had been unquestionable, from sparring matches to flower arrangement, coupled with, if not perfect social grace, then a real sense of her own place in their little microcosm. A kind of social command, Sakura would have called it. She might not have been universally liked, but no one made fun of Yamanaka Ino.

There was a distant regret in Sakura that she would never be that girl, but the resentment was gone, as if her subconscious had finally recognized she no longer had a place in that story. She felt freer for it.

Sadder, but freer.

And then came Sasuke.

The last second entrance, his hair settling from an assisted shunshin, back-to-back with a shinobi infamous the continent over—everything was so perfectly calculated to heighten the drama of the moment that she knew Kakashi-sensei was behind it.

Why Kakashi-sensei was behind it was another question, because it would have been perfectly in character for him to simply amble in at the last minute, wave Sasuke on his way, and go back to reading his nasty novel.

Maybe, her eyes slid over to the Hokage's balcony, maybe he was late to give everyone else a chance to fight the first round without being overshadowed by this match.

Or maybe, she thought more wryly an instant later, Kakashi-sensei couldn't resist the urge to mess with this many people at the same time with so little effort on his part. That one was far less noble, but far more likely.

"Yo!" Kakashi-sensei greeted her, suddenly lounging on the divider rail, hands tucked in his pockets.

"Did you forget to set your alarm this morning, Kakashi-sensei?" Sakura asked dryly. "Because the ninken-slobber setting was working just fine on mine."

Kakashi-sensei chuckled. "Consider it practice for your first boyfriend. He too will wake you hours before you're ready just to slobber—"

"Sasuke would not-," Sakura retorted automatically before her brain processed the TPO. "Kakashi-sensei!" she hissed, ears burning a bright, embarrassed pink.

Her reprimand only made him chuckle again. "I suppose we should actually watch," he said laconically, turning back toward the arena. "Given the amount of effort Sasuke put into his training."

Sakura had been willing to be distracted from the match itself, had carefully shoved it into a dark corner of her mind and thrown a blanket over it. To her, Gaara was more monster-made-flesh than a fellow shinobi. She'd seen his sand, how easily and effortlessly he manipulated it, seen how little life meant to him. Dosu hadn't been an opponent, he'd been an annoyance, crushed more easily than swatting a fly and with as little remorse.

She didn't want to imagine Sasuke fighting him, because for all Sasuke's skill, she wasn't certain it would be a fight.

"If you keep frowning like that, you'll have wrinkles by the time you're twenty," Kakashi-sensei chided her. "I'm deeply hurt by your lack of faith. You didn't think I was just going to let Sasuke loose against Gaara without giving him a chance, did you?"

"You only had a month," Sakura murmured skeptically.

"Ah, but there are massive shortcuts that can be taken in training when you factor in a Sharingan. Especially when that month was spent on two things and two things only. A weapon capable of piercing that sand and the speed he'll need to use it."

"Oh? That's a lot of confidence you have in your student, Kakashi."

Sakura flinched as another man—another jounin-sensei, appeared on the steps above Kakashi-sensei. Not only had she not heard him approach, he was Rock Lee writ large, and that was painful for anyone with working fashion sensibilities. She might have been spending more time in blood and mud and less time on her hair, but at no point had she incurred brain damage significant enough to consider a clinging green jumpsuit anything less than spectacularly hideous. Even Sasuke wouldn't have been able to make it look good.

Sakura almost couldn't look away, but Kakashi-sensei ignored him.

Once the fight below started, Sakura found it an easy thing to replicate, because after a month's separation, with all her bruises and fractures healed and safely a bystander once again, it was hard to remember that she was angry at Sasuke when she was half-convinced that at any moment he was going to die.

Gaara's match with Dosu had been brutally short, but she'd thought she understood just how dangerous he was.

She'd been wrong. As frightening as he'd been when he'd crushed the Oto-nin, it was worse to see just how ineffective Sasuke's attacks were against him.

And when she learned what Kakashi-sensei had meant when he talked about a "weapon," she was impressed for all of the roughly forty-three seconds it took to understand that Gaara losing his composure wasn't an advantage at all.

Things were bad, her breath caught painfully in her throat, chest tight with anxiety, fingers locked on the edge of her seat with such force that there was an ominous groan of protest.

And then things got worse.