Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Twenty-Six-
Hypnophobia
Sakura didn't see much of either of her teammates in the following days, though she saw enough of the ninken and Kakashi-sensei. It was only her very early morning practices that continued as they had—for now, there wasn't enough leisure time to casually hold squad practice. She could only assume that Sasuke and Naruto were still doing their own morning solo-practices as well, because she, the other genin, and most of the chūnin had been tapped as labor and had been separated into work teams supervised by civilians. Beginning the day after the Third's funeral, for an entire week, Konoha turned every available resource toward rebuilding, including its human resources.
No battle was ever fought that cleaned up after itself. The large summons that had been present and some of the more impressive ninjutsu had destroyed a lot of infrastructure. Almost forty percent of the village was without power and twenty percent was without running water. Hundreds had emerged from the shelters to find their homes destroyed and their shops ruined. It was to those shops and homes that the younger ninja were assigned—it was the jounin who were dealing with the bodies, dredging them out of the rivers so they couldn't contaminate their drinking water, doing mass burning of the Oto-nin before insects and vermin turned them into vectors of disease.
It was, in short, a disaster. And in order to fund the recovery, jounin and chunin were going to be dispatched in large numbers once they 'd returned from escorting the shaken dignitaries home. Most of those had stayed long enough for the Third's funeral, both out of respect and because they'd been made to understand that until the ninja had secured the village and had time to assess that they weren't going to meet any nasty surprises on the way home, it would be far safer to stay a few nights in the village.
Sakura had heard most of this from Kakashi-sensei, when he had informed her that she'd be working under a construction foreman after another team had cleared an area of rubble and salvaged what they could. The combination of her chakra-enhanced strength, excellent grounding in practical mathematics, and her ability to walk up vertical surfaces guaranteed her a career in the construction industry if she ever got tired of the kunoichi life, Kakashi-sensei had told her dryly before making himself scarce. She had no idea what Naruto or Sasuke had been roped into doing, but somehow she was pretty certain that Kakashi-sensei was avoiding anything that even looked like heavy labor.
As for her, though she was mostly fetching and holding and carrying for real carpenters, it was considered more skilled than carting rubble. Which meant that most of her crew was older, some of them even chūnin. They'd intimidated her the first day she'd reported to the address that Kakashi-sensei had given her, but except for one or two of them who couldn't seem to pass her without heckling her, they were all nice enough.
Sakura fell into a kind of routine, one helped by the fact that she wasn't sleeping well at night again, which meant she was bone-tired by the time she dragged herself home in the evening. She cleaned her knives, inventoried her kit, scrubbed at stains that would never come out of her shemagh. Eventually, she'd fall asleep—usually after she'd given in and moved to a room that didn't have a window that opened onto a balcony. She sort of liked the shower—there weren't any windows in the room and with enough pillows, the guest futon, and a blanket shoved inside the room, it felt a little like one of the nest-forts her father had helped her build as a child. After rigging the door, it was very cozy indeed. She knew it was not necessarily healthy, but it was what it was and it was her routine.
Until the morning the ninken didn't come.
Bemused, Sakura stowed away the guest futon and refolded her blanket very neatly. By the time she'd dressed and the pack hadn't appeared, she was worried, but also half-convinced that Kakashi-sensei had left on a mission without telling her and taken the ninken with him. When she'd finished eating breakfast, she'd reconsidered that, because as much as she liked to harp about how irresponsible and irritating Kakashi-sensei was, he'd never left her without the ninken in the morning before. Not since Wave.
Sakura was probably the only one of her team who knew their sensei's address, though it had been Pakkun and not Kakashi who had given it to her. She'd never used it before now, but urgency and worry were their own excuses.
Sakure eventually made it to his apartment building, though she'd taken a least two wrong turns and resorted to asking directions from an old man setting up a takoyaki stand. Sakura lived in a neighborhood of nice single-family homes, where entrepreneurial types ran things like bakeries and flower shops on the ground floor. Pakkn had told her that they and Kakashi-sensei lived in an apartment building. She just hadn't expected quite what she found. Clean, well-maintained, but clearly showing its age, its units very small if she judged by the space between doors. The whole neighborhood was like that, clean but rundown, the streets more narrow than she was accustomed to.
Of course, now that she'd seen it, she couldn't have said what she'd been expecting. As far as she'd observed, all Kakashi-sensei really needed was a dry space to store his smutty books. He hadn't even bothered to personalize his uniform and she'd never seen him use anything other than standard ninja kit. If it weren't for the ninken, she could almost have believed that he bunked with a different woman every night like that one rumor said. Or, more likely, took up space on unsuspecting people's couches. Maybe had longsuffering friends with guest bedrooms.
Sakura was staring up at the balconies, trying to make sense of the numbering system, when she heard a door open and shut somewhere on the fourth floor. She automatically looked in the direction of the noise, but she was surprised to recognize the person pacing agitatedly back and forth on the balcony. "Genma-sensei?" she called up to him.
She was still working on her lip-reading, but the shape of an expletive was easy to make out. Genma-sensei swung himself easily over the railing, landing enviably lightly on his feet.
"What's wrong with Kakashi-sensei?" Sakura demanded.
Gemna-sensei scrubbed a hand through his hair. "All of his students have fantastic timing," he grumbled, then sighed deeply. "Kakashi was involved in an incident. A classified incident," he clarified when Sakura opened her mouth to ask for details. "He's injured and out of commission for a little while, that's all. They're waiting on a...specialist," he said after a significant pause.
"Oh," was Sakura's soft, startled exclamation, because she'd only ever seen Kakashi-sensei exhausted, never really injured, even against Zabuza. "...but he'll be alright?" she asked hopefully.
"We'll see," was Genma-sensei's less than encouraging reply. "But it might be awhile, Sakura. Dammit," he said with feeling. "You're going to be finished with the work group in a couple days. And I've already received a list of assignments thick enough to choke on. But I'll try to work something out—at the very least, pull you down some D-ranks or something. Give me until the day after tomorrow, alright?"
Sakura could only nod silently, then she glanced up at Kakashi's apartment. "Can I go see him?" she asked quietly.
Genma-sensei's hand came down on her head and, rather than ruffle her hair, simply rocked it back and forth. "Sure, princess," he said gently. "I'll even let you take care of Kakashi's dusting."
[Kill Your Heroes]
Genma-sensei was as good as his word, though his words as he led her to the site of her next assignment were something less than encouraging. "Just...be respectful," he said quietly, his hand on her shoulder. Sakura glanced up at him, then at the house they'd been approaching. It looked picturesque, a tidy little house shadowed by low, fruiting trees. It was outside the walls, far from urban center of Konoha in one of the small communities that had developed as the population overflowed the bounds of the original village. The only sounds were the rustle of grass, the song of birds, and the hum of bees.
She darted another glance back up at him. "It's usually chūnin who come out here to run errands," he said, still in a low voice. "You can think of this as a kind of...retirement community."
"Running errands is usually kind of a genin thing," Sakura observed, her own voice almost a whisper.
"Yeah, well," Genma said, staring at the porch and its single rocking chair, "they called her Grandmother Nightmare."
And that was the phrase echoing in her head as she tentatively rapped on the door. "Ma'am?" she called, "I'm Haruno Sakura. I'm the genin that was sent to work for you this morning."
Sakura heard the sound of very soft footsteps only just before the door opened. With an introduction like "obāsan no akumu," she'd braced herself for all sorts of things. What she got was a woman who stood no taller than she did, who smelt faintly of talcum powder and lavender, and whose smile lines were etched deep.
As the woman's eyes brushed over the new scar on her face, Sakura resisted the urge to duck her head. Of course people looked—if it was someone else's face, she'd do the same. It was only when they stared that her cheeks started to burn and she was torn between anger at them and anger at herself. It was nothing to be ashamed of. One day, she'd have repeated it to herself until she believed in it like she'd once believed that following the rules would keep her safe.
Today wasn't that day, but then the woman looked away.
Sakura scrambled in her memory for her real name, because she couldn't think of a quicker way to make a bad first impression than calling her Grandmother Nightmare to her face. It came easily enough, because she'd asked Genma-sensei about it. Her name was Gozen Reiji, and though Reiji was a common enough name, it was also generally a man's name. Genma-sensei had just glanced down at her and given her an enigmatic smile, senbon flicking.
"Um, it's a pleasure to meet you, Gozen-san," Sakura said, ducking her head.
The woman's brows rose faintly, but she smiled. "We have a busy day ahead of us," she said. "Haruno-chan, wasn't it?"
Maybe it was because Kakashi-sensei had been her taskmaster, but as the morning slid by, she only found Gozen-san demanding rather than nightmarish. She asked things to be done in just the way she wanted them, quickly and without mistakes. And she rewarded success with more complicated instructions, some of which she briefly suspected Gozen-san of making less than clear on purpose. And stopped suspecting almost immediately, because she knew it was probably just prejudice based on that nickname.
That was before she kept catching sight of things—creeping things, crawling things—in her peripheral vision. Before she helped replant flowers and more things crept over her fingers than by rights should be in any square foot of soil, especially as there was nothing there when she jerked her hands back. Before shadows in the towels she was folding kept growing legs and flexing mandibles.
She suspected genjutsu, but even when she subtly interrupted her chakra flow, she couldn't sense the moment when it broke. Or the moment when she was caught in another one. But she kept her mouth shut, did what Gozen-san asked, and showed up promptly at the appointed time the next day.
Sakura wanted less and less to go, but she kept at it, for four long days so full of subtle genjutsu that even when she'd left the house and stopped the chakra flow that would dismiss a lingering illusion, shadows still kept creeping at her in her own home. She'd stopped trying to sleep in her bed entirely and she'd tried leaving the lights on when she went to sleep, but found that only cast darker shadows. So she stayed in the dark, told herself that she would not be beaten by an old woman, and took frigid showers to wash away the sticky, clinging sensation of exhausted nightmares.
But on day five, when the shadows started creeping, she didn't have to form any handsign at all. It was sort of like consciously blinking, if you happened to have hundreds of eyes. She "blinked" a lot that morning, the genjutsu growing more obvious and aggressive as her day marched toward lunch. And when her onigiri turned into a handful of maggots, she didn't even bother to dispel the illusion. It still tasted delicious.
That earned her a slightly different smile, one with sharper edges. Gozen-san pulled her elbows onto the table, supporting her chin with her hands. "You're a genjutsu-type," she observed.
"Yes, ma'am," Sakura answered, uncertain as to where the old women intended to lead the conversation.
"They send them to me occasionally. Want me to teach them," she confided. "Or that's what they call it. I call it theft." Her eyes were very hard, a strange hazel with a starburst core of green, as she met Sakura's gaze. "In my day, they did not welcome kunoichi. Women were wives and mothers and if they fought, it was an extension of that role. To protect their house, their children. Even that was frowned upon. Even now, you hear constantly about the great," and there was a wry twist to that word," shinobi of the past. Their triumphs, their wars. How many kunoichi do you hear about in the Academy?"
"There's Tsunade-sama, ma'am," Sakura replied when her silence demanded an answer.
"Who was a medic," Gozen-san replied sharply. "I won't degrade her skills—they saved a lot of lives during the wars. But healing—that's been a woman's art since we came out of caves. And Tsunade-sama might seem ancient to you, but I can remember her as a child. My father never really reconciled himself to having a girl child. It wouldn't be until almost seven years after I was born that my mother managed to give him the son he wanted. And her health was never the same again."
Sakura was beginning to feel like an insect under a magnifying glass, Gozen-san cataloguing her reactions to each revelation. "I was taught very little," the old woman continued. "But I decided that only I could make decisions for me—and I was going to be everything they told me I couldn't. I grew up in a time of war, so there was always the opportunity for practice. I experimented, tested, perfected dozens of genjutsu. I was the first female operative in ANBU—they declassified my file five years ago, so it's not quite a crime to admit that now. They called me the Foxwife. And I was the best damn saboteur they'd ever seen."
Sakura swallowed nervously. "What happened?" she asked.
Gozen-san's eyes narrowed. "They tried to assign Uchiha to my squad. I'd never liked the Uchiha, even before then. Everything they saw, they thought was theirs to take. A technique perfected over a decade, copied in the space of ten seconds."
"Did they eventually force you to take one on?"
The smile widened and for a moment, if she pictured skin smooth with youth, she could see why they'd called her the Foxwife. "I married a Hyūga and he moved into my house," she said, every word fierce with victory. "The Hokage was wise enough to see that I would not stand for it, so that was it until after I retired. And then that proud, proud man—Uchiha Fugaku—decided that it was beyond time that I pass on my techniques. I was an old woman, my husband was dead, and I had no children. And who better than this magnificent prodigy that happened to be his son. Uchiha Itachi. Called it an obligation," she spat. "It was a good day the day he stormed out of this house."
"So you never taught him?"
"No," Gozen-san said, some of the tenseness leaving the set of her shoulders. "He was a strange, quiet child. After his father had had enough, he came to me in person. I was prepared to turn him down, but instead he apologized for his father's temper and his presumption. Killing his clan was the greatest favor he ever did for this village."
Sakura couldn't react at all for a moment, her brain unable to process what Gozen-san had declared as decisively as her favorite type of jam. "How can you say something like that?" Sakura managed to force out at last, not quite shouting. Her mind was awhirl with the implications of that terrible, blasé statement.
She hadn't realized she'd half-risen out of her chair until Gozen-san said sharply, "Sit down. You were too young to remember what they were like. You have only stories and too many people are afraid of telling evil stories about the dead. For now, take it as my opinion—and I am entitled to that."
Sakura tried to swallow down the sick feeling, but it wouldn't leave her. "Did you ever teach anyone?" she asked, searching desperately for a question to ask when all she wanted to do was leave.
"Not formally. And none of my techniques in full. The closest I ever came was with Orochimaru—there was a clever, curious child."
"You—you're—," Sakura shook her head.
"A monster? Oh, probably. There comes a time when you're too old and too tired for hypocrisy and I spent my youth keeping enemies awake for nights on end with terrors. I know what I am. And I thought I knew what you were. I thought Hatake had sent you, to make one last attempt at forcing me to choose someone to pass my techniques onto before I die. But as it turns out, you're just a genin who doesn't give up when faced with a mean old lady." She chuckled and withdrew her hands to her lap. "I've found you very helpful, Haruno-chan. Until your sensei wakes up, I think I'd like to have you continue to help me. If you come back tomorrow," Gozen-san said as she shoved away from the table, "there is one rule in this house: you assume nothing. What you think you know about your village, its history, its shinobi, washed in revisionist patriotism and the need to make things fit tidily into some half-hearted morality scheme—leave it at the door."