Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Twenty-five-

Asthenophobia

It took Sakura a long time to realize she was losing short patches of time. Or maybe it was only a short time to realize and a long time she was losing. When she tried to look up at the sun to gauge the passage of time, a hot wave of not-quite-pain radiated out from her neck and she found she couldn't tilt her head back any further.

That was okay, she decided, feeling Bull's head pressing against her back in an effort to keep her upright. If she didn't remember stopping, found herself staring blankly ahead with the ninken whining encouragement at her knees, that was okay. Even the pain, which seemed to get worse with every step, was okay.

These things were evidence of survival.

Only she was allowed to decide when it was time to lay down and die.

And that was going to be a long, long time from now in a soft, super fluffy bed. It would be warm and comfortable and it would be just like falling asleep at the end of a long day. A good day, where she'd done something that didn't involve dead men and the memories they'd carved into her. Someone would be there, she decided as she made a conscious decision to take one more step. Everyone died alone, but she could have someone at her side until that last moment, and when she'd gone on, he'd follow. He wouldn't leave her, even for death—she'd go first, she decided, and took another step.

She tried to picture Sasuke laying at her side, fingers interlaced with hers, breath slowing in time with hers, but found she couldn't picture an old Sasuke at all.

As she stumbled and nearly fell on top of Guruko's limp weight, she realized she couldn't picture herself old either. Her long, long time from now seemed like someone else's dream.

But she clung to it tenaciously. Maybe she couldn't imagine it properly, but that didn't matter. She was going to live long enough to see it.

"We're almost to Konoha," someone said encouragingly. She had to blink several times to get her eyes to focus on the ninken speaking to her. Bisuke, she thought, inordinately pleased with herself after the effort it took to retrieve his name.

"C'mon, Sakura, you've got this beat," Shiba said, prancing from side to side in a way that made her feel like she was going to throw up again.

Sakura blinked at Shiba and Bisuke, then realized she was missing dogs. Several of them. "Where did everyone...?"

"They've gone to find someone to help," Bisuke said.

Sakura nodded dumbly, but she kept walking because she'd driven it into herself that walking was good, was synonymous with not dead, and she was still not dead. So she walked.

Straight into a barrier that gave, just a little, but it was enough to stop all her forward momentum and she sunk down on her heels, still clutching at Guruko. Forcing her numb fingers to release his fur, she patted down her leg until her hand closed over her knife.

"Whoa, hold up there," someone said. "I happened to see Kakashi's ninken running through the street like there was an even bigger fire somewhere else and when I ask them what's the matter, they tell me one of his students is injured. And here I come to find that not only is his student a cute little miss, she's entirely prepared to stab me. That sort of breaks my heart."

Sakura glanced up as far as she could before the pain stopped her, then rolled her eyes up, trying to take in her...something. Her first, overwhelming impression was hair. Lots of hair, rough and white, like...

Her mind failed her as she tried to think up a suitable metaphor, but then all that hair shifted as the man crouched down. She was immediately struck with the impression that she knew this man, but didn't know him. "You're...Orochimaru's teammate," she said when she failed to remember his name.

His head sagged and when he looked up again, his smile was slightly rueful. "You know, it's been years since I've been sidelined as "Orochimaru's teammate," but sure. My name is Jiraiya and let's just cut off introductions there for now, before you do something very dramatic like die in my arms. Good fiction, bad reality." And without a single indication of effort, he picked them both up.

Sakura's stomach lurched, but it seemed like a tremendous effort to throw up, so she kept up her interior litany of just another minute, you can get through it, it will get better.

She and Guruko were quickly handed over to some sort of field clinic, where the medic-nin made a lot of noise and Jiraiya promptly disappeared. And the sight of his long, spiky hair—past his hips—swaying with his stride was the last thing Sakura remembered as the medic-nin put her under.

[Kill Your Heroes]

Judging by Asuma's thunderous expression, he'd found his student. Kakashi briefly considered putting on his best "giving a damn" expression, but he didn't and there were bodies burning in the streets, so he didn't.

"What were you thinking?" the other man demanded. "Sending genin after a monster like Gaara?"

"Sorry," Kakashi said with mock-pleasantry, "I must have overlooked all the jounin with nothing to do in the middle of a joint invasion."

Asuma didn't back down. "You send genin to get civilians into the emergency shelters, you don't send them hunting jinchūriki."

"Well," Kakashi drawled, "Suna did forget to send a note about that one. Maybe you should take it up with the Kazekage."

"I'm serious, Kakashi. They could have been killed."

Kakashi's brows swept toward his hairline and masterfully didn't gesture back to the arena, where there were dead genin enough to make the point that there wasn't any guaranteed safety in times like these. "Were they?" he asked instead.

"Not the ones I brought back with me," Asuma admitted after a grudging pause. "Shikamaru is suffering from nothing worse than chakra exhaustion. And both your students will recover."

"Both? I have three."

"The third is just proof of what I've been saying. When Shikamaru told me that your kunoichi had stayed back to meet an ambush—of no less than eight chunin with just your dogs as support—I left him and your two to limp back to Konoha while I doubled back on their trail."

"And?" Kakashi prompted.

"And she must have gotten lucky—one of ours must have interfered. There's a trail of dead chunin and a blood trail that a blind man could follow that dead-ends outside Konoha's walls. You'd just better hope that your dogs were enough to make sure it was a Konoha shinobi that took her."

Kakashi frowned, because while he'd acknowledged that sending them out was a risk, Konoha's military strength was nothing to be scoffed at. There'd been enough jounin and chūnin to occupy the invasion force's time—four genin shouldn't have drawn the attention of two squads, not outside the walls when the real fight was inside them. For all that Naruto was what he was, he was also soundly sealed, and Sasuke's Sharingan hadn't evolved to the point where it was indelibly burned into his chakra signature. If they'd been chasing fleeing genin just for the fun of it, it was sloppy and undisciplined.

He crossed his hands behind his back to disguise the clenching of his fists, but his loss of control was only momentary. He smiled, eye creasing with the force of the motion. "My guess is that no one interfered," he told Asuma as he bit down on his thumb hard enough to draw blood. A pulse of chakra—his reserves were low enough that it gave him a faint headache, but the Sharingan was an insatiable pit he'd learned to live with—had Ūhei at his feet, muzzle stained with blood.

"Kakashi," the hound said, relief heavy in his voice. "Sakura, she—"

"Oh, you're about to get the news," a familiar voice said as the Toad Sage dropped without warning from a nearby roof. There'd been enough jounin in the arena that Kakashi and Guy had moved onto the streets, helping to reduce civilian casualties by the simplest expedient—killing all the invaders before they could kill anyone else. Guy had, of course, tried to make it a competition, slightly more serious than their usual ones.

Kakashi wasn't that crass, but he was winning.

He cocked a brow at Jiraiya, who said, "Someone really did a number on your kunoichi, Kakashi. I'm impressed she managed to escape and make it as far as she did. For such a cute little miss, she's got some real grit."

Kakashi glanced back down at Ūhei. "What happened? Asuma tells me you fell back to lay an ambush."

Ūhei perked his ears and ducked his head. "Yes. Two combat squads. We brought them all down before they could reach the others, but the last one got Guruko and Sakura. She brought him down, though, and Bull finished him," he said, baring his teeth in a fierce canine smile. "Three of the kills were hers outright and she finished off another while he was in our teeth—and she could have killed the last one. The medic-nin say she'll probably recover without complications, but it was very close, Kakashi."

Kakashi's eyes strayed over to Asuma, who was staring slack-jawed at the hound, his cigarette threatening to escape his lips. "I told you I didn't think anyone interfered," he said evenly to the other jounin.

"Wha—Kakashi—," Asuma trailed off, shaking his head. Then he sighed, sucked in a noisy breath, and said, "I have to go check on the rest of my students," before bounding off.

Jiraiya was staring thoughtfully at the hound, brows deeply furrowed, but his expression relaxed when he caught Kakashi's glance. "For such a cute little miss, sounds like you're raising her pretty hard, Kakashi."

Kakashi chuckled, a flat, humorless sound. "At this rate, its less like I'm raising her and more like she's surviving me. I put her in a position where she killed on her first mission outside the village and then she went and managed to impress Orochimaru during her chūnin exam."

Jiraiya's gaze sharpened. "She did identify me as "Orochimaru's teammate." Did he try to recruit her?"

"Oddly enough, he told me she was too dangerous to keep. Of course, that was right after she'd lost her preliminary round."

"Losing usually doesn't impress Orochimaru," Jiraiya pointed out, curiosity heavy in his tone.

"It does when your opponent almost dies twenty minutes later because you've got poison smeared on your blades. And she'd almost killed his entire genin team and she survived an encounter with him personally in the Forest of Death, just a few days earlier—Sakura made quite an impression. He was hunting the Sharigan, though. I didn't think he'd turn it into a full-scale invasion," he said darkly.

Jiraiya chuckled, low and bitter. "I don't know that anyone knows what goes through that head of his anymore." Then he shrugged, almost like he was throwing off an invisible weight. "Well, lots of fires to put out, damsels in distress to rescue." And just like that, the Toad Sage was gone.

[Kill Your Heroes]

Sakura woke up in time for the Third's funeral, the hole in her cheek reduced to a long, shiny scar.

She touched it gingerly as she examined her reflection, suddenly nostalgic for the cleaner line of her knife scar. This one was wider, a little ragged looking, but they'd regenerated enough flesh before sealing it that it wasn't puckered or twisted-looking.

It had, of course, bruised spectacularly, but the swelling was almost gone and it wasn't to the sickly yellow stage yet. The medic-nin had put most of their effort and chakra into healing the much more dangerous stab wound, which was still very tender, though they'd apparently found enough time to put her spine back into alignment. More shallow cuts they'd left to heal on their own time—Kakashi-sensei had been by this morning to help her change the dressing on the long cut down her shoulder-blade, which had taken four stitches.

Sakura pulled her fingers away from the scar, returning to the reason she was in front of a mirror at all. It was a miserably overcast day, which leant the right sort of melancholy for the funeral of a man as great as the Third, but she also wanted to be her neat, presentable best when they paid their respects.

Her hair, unfortunately, took on a life of its own in humidity, so it was less a matter of styling it and more a matter of taming it. By the time she'd managed something respectable—though no amount of product had stopped her hair from parting itself back into rough spikes—it was time to rendezvous with the rest of Team Seven. She idled a few extra seconds in front of the mirror, tugging at her clothing, though she'd ironed it very carefully that morning and already done a thorough ninken-hair inspection.

Even her knife rig had been carefully cleaned, so that it no longer smelled like old battles.

When she couldn't delay any more without actually risking being late, she left her house. She kept her eyes mostly on her feet, because she didn't want to see the damage that had been done to the village or all the signs of mourning. Sakura hadn't heard anyone come out with any official numbers, but the simple fact that they wouldn't release any casualty reports meant it was bad. Like, significantly-weaken-their-military-strength-and-lose-clients-to-other-villages-and-invite-other-attacks kind of bad.

But she tried to shove that aside. Today wasn't supposed to be a day about numbers, profits and losses, it was supposed to be able the people those numbers hid. She would do her utmost to respect that.

Neither Sasuke or Naruto said a word to her, though Naruto did give her a limp sort of wave and such a pathetic smile that she wanted to pat him on the head like he was one of the ninken. Sasuke's eyes lingered on the vivid scar across her cheek like he wanted to say something, but he turned away instead and led them to where the service was being held.

It started raining in the middle of it, like the village itself was crying, and she thinks that it was perfect and fitting, though she's also pulped the stem of flower she's meant to lay on the coffin in an effort to keep her own tears at bay. When the official ceremony was over, people started to break into tight knots, talking in low voices. Sasuke and Naruto both disappeared, but Sakura didn't try to find them.

She was surprised when a friendly hand clamped down on her shoulder and she looked up to find a solemn Inuzuka kunoichi. It was the same girl who'd been helping her during the invasion. "Hey," she said, in that pleasant, slightly husky voice that seemed to be a common trait of her family. "I don't think we ever had time to properly introduce ourselves." A huge dog plopped itself down inches from Sakura's feet, wagging its tail slightly. He or she wasn't like Akamaru, was instead like one of the huge wolf-dogs she's seen other members of Kiba's clan with, this one ruddy-colored.

"Haruno Sakura," Sakura offered somewhat timidly.

"Inuzuka Mariko. And this is Rie," she said, tilting her head down at the dog.

"Thanks," the dog—she—said. "For helping Mariko out." She bared her teeth, but it was a silent gesture. "Stupid, to ban the ninja from bringing their companions if they're full-grown. Apparently we make the diplomats nervous. As if we're all that eager to bite them—if you can get past the stench of their cologne, you can taste it."

Mariko grinned down at her companion, then sobered quickly. "When it was all over, we decided we'd find you and thank you. Good manners and all that, since you probably saved our lives. Good thing your hair stands out, though you could stand to grow a couple feet. I didn't realize you were so young."

"We?" Sakura asked, but Mariko was already motioning to others. Familiar faces, ones she recognized from the stands. Sakuya was there too, which was a relief, and he and the others formed up around her in their own little cluster of conversation. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Team 10, but then someone said something and her attention was drawn back to the chūnin who'd stood with her during the invasion. They were strangers, some of whom whose names she would doubtless forget, some of whom she might never speak to again, but for now they were companions, united by experience and grief.