A/N: Soudai (whose name is actually an adjective meaning magnificent, grand, or splendid) is a Javanese cat, which is effectively a Siamese with a long-furred tail. The coloration is flipped—rather than having dark points, he has light ones and seal brown fur, but otherwise he's true to the breed.
Also, thanks for over two thousand reviews!
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Thirty-Six-
Toward Better Days (Part V)
[gerontophobia]
Sakura was clever, competent, and followed orders well, which meant that people genuinely liked working with her. It wasn't like placing his other students, who would have been headaches for very different reasons. She'd built a tidy little reputation before being assigned to Aihara Cho, a chūnin who had a reputation of her own. The older chūnin had a very low tolerance for recklessness, after what had happened to her first team—one of her teammates had been convinced that despite their sensei's orders he was more than ready to be a part of the war effort and managed to get both himself and Aihara's other squadmate killed when he hadn't been—and he supposed he'd let himself get complacent, let himself trust in Aihara's "better cautious than sorry" selection of missions.
What he'd really wanted to do was shake Genma until his teeth rattled once he discovered how Sakura had even come into contact with someone like Gozen Reiji, but unfortunately the other jounin had been out on a mission. So he'd settled for ambling toward the little cluster of houses that was essentially an ANBU retirement community. It was a very small community and insular; it took a certain kind of person to survive ANBU as long as most of them had and being nice wasn't necessarily one of the requisite attributes.
He remembered his own stint in ANBU with no particular fondness. Mostly it had been S-rank special-ops, high-risk missions run in unallied countries with no support or reinforcements if things went sour. Those hadn't been so bad. They'd been enough to keep his mind on the here-and-now. But there was a reason that they were called Black Ops. The "necessary" but ethically and morally dubious ones...
Being a shinobi was being asked to sacrifice your body for your country; being ANBU sometimes felt like selling pieces of your soul for it. At the time he'd thought that he was so numb to everything it wouldn't make any difference what his body was doing, but it had. It had.
Kakashi had been the prodigy of his generation, but he was wise enough to know that there was always someone. Someone better, someone faster, someone deadlier. Uchiha Itachi and before him, Uchiha Madara had made their names famous by being unfathomably dangerous.
Namikaze Minato. The Senju Hokage. The Third. Those were the heroes of the village; they were the names every genin knew. They'd cast long shadows, and in those shadows lived shinobi whose names never became famous because they'd spent their entire careers behind dehumanizing masks. Especially in the early days of the villages, when it had been spilt blood and piled corpses deciding which villages would survive the chaos, which ones would eventually become the Shinobi Godaikoku, the Five Great Shinobi Countries.
Kakashi redirected his thoughts from their dangerous course, but just at this moment reflecting on Sakura wasn't comfortable either, because it wasn't as if she'd met the woman they called Grandmother Nightmare only a week or two ago. She'd known her long enough and well enough that there was a mask in her house that had seen more carnage than most shinobi saw in their entire careers.
Somehow, even though he now did such things as movie nights and sparring matches with his former student, he'd managed to forget that Sakura wasn't like the others. She'd smile, play pretend that all was well in her world while internalizing her problems, attempting to solve them on her own. She didn't demand to be taught new techniques, whether through shouting or sulky silence, she'd just taken what little he'd had to give and made do, searching out things on her own. Surprising him, mostly in pleasant ways, but seeing that grinning red visage had shaken him as badly as Sasuke's decision to leave.
It ate at him, that he hadn't been able to discern the nightmares that had followed her home from Wave from those that might have come from whatever she'd been doing with Gozen. Sakura knew who she was, what she'd been, what that mask meant, because otherwise she would have never bothered to deflect that question. His question now was just how far that familiarity went. Kakashi didn't think he'd like the answer—Sakura had been the one without all the inescapable history; if she'd taken up creating her own, he didn't know what he'd do.
Except maybe more of the same thing he'd been doing his whole life for the important people in it: showing up too late to do anything but help the odd survivor limp away. And there were so few of those.
And then he was at the home of the woman who'd once worn that toothy mask and there she was, a little old woman sitting on her porch, hands full of a knitting project. He waited, to see if she'd acknowledge him, but there was only the rhythmic clicking of her needles.
He cleared his throat. "Nice day, isn't it?" he asked conversationally.
"Hatake," Gozen responded reproachfully. "I am an old woman. I don't have enough time left for you to go around wasting it. You're here about Sakura."
"Ah—yes," he said, only momentarily discombobulated by her directness. "I noticed a mask, the last time I was at her house. Strangely enough, it looked like yours."
"Well, I did give it to her," Gozen admitted plainly. "So of course it did. It's hers now, whatever she decides to do with it. Just as with everything else I've given her."
He'd told himself it was impossible because of Gozen's history of hoarding her jutsu, even as his instincts prompted suspicion, but this...
"You've always refused to pass on your techniques," he remarked, somehow hoping that she'd agree, that she was referring to recipes, knitting patterns, even a kitschy saltshaker collection.
"That's still true," Gozen agreed and the tension ran out of Kakashi's shoulders, his breath escaping him in a sigh of relief. "I'll take my techniques to my grave. Inherited techniques are dead things; you learn them, learn them well, and you think that's all there is to them. It doesn't take genius to refine them, make them your own, to better accommodate and compliment your abilities rather than that of its creator; she can go to others for that. But jutsu you develop yourself, they're something living. It's like raising children. No matter how old you get, you're never quite finished. That's something I'll pass on to Sakura."
She paused for a moment and then smiled. "Aside from the character building aspects, it's not in my nature to be so generous as to let someone grow famous on my blood, sweat, and labor. If Sakura masters what I've shown her, it'll be because she's clever enough to do it. Not because she's got those damnable eyes," she murmured sourly, gaze drifting to where a Sharingan lay obscured by cloth and metal. "Or because she happened to be born to a family with the right kind of blood, the right kind of history."
The tension had returned to his shoulders, creeping up the muscles of his neck and threatening to inspire a headache. "Shown her?" he repeated with careful neutrality.
"She came to me with nightmares. I gave her better ones," Gozen replied. "She'll need them, if Orochimaru doesn't put down that Uchiha whelp before he's old enough to cause too much trouble."
Kakashi bristled slightly, both at the insinuation that Sasuke would make more trouble than he already had for the village and the certainty that Sakura would meet him in battle. "Even if she confronted Sasuke," he pointed out, "he has the Sharingan."
Gozen's lips twisted into a sneer. "Even with so many of them dead, you still believe in their myth, don't you? That boy's family made that mistake, thought that those eyes made them gods, but look what that got them. Even if they had been," she said with deep ironic emphasis, "even gods can be tricked. And they can die."
[epistemophilia]
Given Sakura's introduction to Gozen-san, she'd never asked outright to be taught any techniques.
So she'd memorized what genjutsu could be found in the library (not very many, though a person could drown in theory) and learned all of what Kakashi-senpai had to share. Which wasn't much. He hadn't said so, just implied that he'd always found them incompatible with his personal style. Judging by the way he'd collapsed in Wave and what Honda-san had said, using the Sharingan was almost as taxing to him as using the Byakugan was to Tatsuo, albeit less painful. Not many ninja made use of genjutsu anyway; when they'd bothered Kakashi-senpai simply hadn't judged them worth the chakra to collect.
So she'd focused on other things. Perhaps not easier, because if they were easy, wouldn't everyone be capable of chakra-augmented strength or medical jutsu? Poisons were easier than those, because other people used them and because they'd fought a war with Suna. There were dosage tables, endless suggestions on sourcing them, using them, enhancing them. And, suddenly—or it seemed sudden—she had preferences, field experience, recognized expertise.
But she'd dared, on a morning she was feeling miserable and worn and achy with the newfound nastiness that was the dark side of puberty, to do more than just dismiss the illusion of stinging red ants boiling up out of the ground. This time she struck back, hiding her handsigns in the loose dirt she was working in. Mugen: Jubaku Satsu.
She felt the pull on her chakra and saw the ghost form, the tree nearest Gozen-san reaching out to embrace her with deadly intent, Sakura's own body given the illusion of invisibility. It was an old illusion, almost traditional, really, popular among Konoha-nin because it made use of their native environment. More chakra intensive than she liked—the complex, constantly shifting camouflaging illusion that was the "invisibility" component was hugely draining, but it was bound up in the technique. She thought it was pretty good, the lines of the ghost firm and solid, her execution seamless, but Gozen-san only snorted and reached out, her hand parting the illusion like water. And just like that, it faded away.
"Come here, girl," Gozen-san said, beckoning her over. With more than a little trepidation, Sakura did as she was told. "Your hand," Gozen-san said impatiently when she'd reached her. Bemused, Sakura extended it. Strong fingers, hard and bony, snatched her wrist and before she could do more than widen her eyes in surprise, she'd scraped Sakura's hand along the bark of the tree so hard that there were droplets of blood forming up on the stinging skin.
"These canned illusions," Gozen-san said with distaste. "They make you lazy. You make some signs and trust it to take care of all the details. It's not like that evocative genjutsu that you favor. That reaches into your victim's mind and tears out the image you need; they're providing all the details, you're simply providing guidance and chakra. Invocative genjutsu are all about the details. I've told you that before, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in. If I can't feel the texture of the bark rasping against my clothes and my skin when the branches are closing, if I can't hear the creaking and groaning of the wood as it moves, if I can't smell the bark and the lichen, if the pressure feels like a flat iron band rather than a rounded limb, you're doing it wrong," she remarked flatly.
"You're not dealing in illusions," Gozen-san continued, never releasing her hold on Sakura's arm, leaving those droplets to become slowly drying rivulets. "The world is experienced through the senses; all we know of the world is perception. You have to make it real. You're not peddling dreams to your target, you're changing their world. All the way down to the fragments of bark left behind in a scrape."
She emphasized her point by sweeping her thumb over Sakura's red skin, making her wince. "You have to create a situation in which to disbelieve your genjutsu is to disbelieve all of your senses. You've had nightmares for as long as I've known you. How hard is it to tell yourself it's only a dream while you're living it? But you have to do better than that. The mind tricks itself while it dreams. It knows what details in needs, but you won't have that advantage when you turn a genjutsu on someone else. Humans give sight primacy, but it's not the only thing that matters.
"With enough chakra, you can overwhelm the shortcomings of a genjutsu, but it's ugly. Beneath you. Anyone with enough chakra can do it, like beating someone over the head with a cudgel until they agree with you that the sky is green. You're too weak for that in terms of chakra; too skilled for that in terms of potential. Their ways isn't yours. You can't replicate fire by simply looking at it; if you have to burn your hand a hundred times to truly experience it, then that's what you do. Do you understand?" Sakura nodded weakly. "Now, try again."
Gozen-san was endlessly critical and apt to interrupt Sakura's focus by turning her own genjutsu against her and giving it teeth. Gozen had nothing but scorn for using the illusions without understanding how they were created, the way most shinobi utilized genjutsu. Without that basic knowledge, they could not modify them, let alone create them freely the way that Gozen-san seemed to.
It wasn't that Sakura didn't have the knowledge, precisely. Sakura had an excellent grounding in theory, buttressed by a solid medical understanding of how and why genjutsu fed false signals back to the brain. But creating new jutsu? That wasn't something they were taught at the Academy or something that was expected of chūnin. Especially as Gozen-san seemed to insinuate that, with the right technique, all invocative genjutsu were one.
Not one jutsu for ants, another for spiders, another for fire—just one, ultimately flexible technique that allowed one to project nightmares limited only by your imagination. Though, she admitted, having a dozen or so scenarios you had so perfectly memorized they were instinctive was useful. And every evocative genjutsu required its own technique.
Though, Gozen-san pointed out, it wasn't only nightmares that could be useful even if she enjoyed them most. Tranquility. Joy. Desire. All of it could be manipulated, twisted to serve a purpose, and for the first time Sakura thought it was a good thing that Gozen-san dealt in fear. The thought of being confronted by illusions meant to evoke desire at every turn...
Well, the spiders with their clicking mandibles and hairy legs were finally preferable to something.
But the others—the call of a familiar voice, the scent of a summer's day, the feel of home—all of it could become tiny, fatal distractions.
She worked with the Magen: Jubaku Satsu, breaking it into its component pieces until she was only working with an illusionary tree. Sakura tried working with it as the ghost and found it too intangible; consultation with Gozen-san returned the fact that, yes, you could turn a genjutsu on yourself. She hadn't liked the beneficent look that had accompanied the answer, but it hadn't taken long to work out that genjutsu stood to be the ultimate drug. You could see anything, feel anything, be anything so long as your chakra held out.
All Sakura wanted was to master it, so she spent hours with one palm pressed against a real tree, the other against its mirror. And she kept at it until only her memory and the tug on her chakra were the only indicators as to which was the original.
It was only the first piece of an endless puzzle, the world transformed into a place not to be just experienced, but painstakingly memorized. As Gozen-san had promised, the things she feared came easiest, almost imprinting themselves on her memory as she bit down on one hand and tried to keep the other from trembling as she allowed things with too many legs and poisons glands to crawl across the back of it. Instead of just ignoring pain, working through it, she carefully committed the feel of a cut, the agony of a burn, the ache of a blow.
Other, more pleasant things took on a new intensity as she captured not just impressions in passing, but lingered until she knew the exact texture of a petal, the feel of silk, the scent of a home-cooked meal. She put together scenarios with painstaking care, until she could call them up with only the handsigns and a moment's attention. And one of Gozen-san's friends—he lived two houses over, with a garden full of lilies and a closet full of skeletons, like all the ex-ANBU—introduced her to his son, who was a T&I specialist. It was from him that she learned what there was to know about evocative genjustsu, dredging up treasured and dreaded memories both from the depths of an enemy's subconscious.
It took her more than a year until she'd grown confident enough in her collection to call it a technique. Gozen-san never once disclosed what she'd called hers and Sakura had never named anything. Not her knives, not her cat.
But she called this Kanashibari, that awful moment when waking from a nightmare in which one found oneself paralyzed, unable to move or speak.
[ereuthrophilia]
Sakura was all but basking the warmth of the day, which was why she was comfortably settled against a tree in one of the parks within Konoha rather than reading at home. Soudai had accompanied her, but he'd melted into a furry puddle in a dappled patch of sunlight almost immediately on arrival. He wasn't usually content to sleep, even when she'd rather he did, so the sight of him stretched out on the grass had prompted a wry, fond grin.
Then she'd turned her attention to her book and set the world and all its worries aside for a while. She had her own customer loyalty card at Lemon&Lime and, to her embarrassment, was as well-known for her tastes as Kakashi-senpai was for his. She'd once tried about the first three chapters of the first Icha Icha novel, but that had been enough to know that it was written by a man for men, which was fine, she guessed, but not something she'd read voluntarily.
She'd found her own niche genres. "Another fem-dom lite? Or is it an empowered reverse harem heroine today?" was Akemi-chan's familiar, teasing refrain. Sakura had read and reread all the Tsunami to Tsundere-kun novels, so until the next one came out, she was searching out new authors. None had quite measured up to Tsunami, but she'd found others she liked. This one—safely hidden behind the barrier of a medical text to allow for public reading—was a new recommendation from Akemi-chan, who worked at the store to facilitate a ferocious reading habit that appreciated the employee discount and the ability to read book blurbs on her breaks.
Kongaragaru was the first of another multi-book series, this one featuring an embittered jounin trap-master who'd been badly injured both physically and mentally when her lover/partner—who'd been a habitual piece of nastiness who'd undermined her confidence in herself as a person, though he hadn't been able to touch her confidence as a shinobi—had betrayed her. She was therefore none too receptive to the attentions of her gentle Hyūga medic-nin, whose goal had become to restore both her health and her heart despite Beniko's somewhat acidic personality.
With a combination of some sort of Jūken-derived chakra-massage that had started as physiotherapy and quickly become quasi-erotic and Beniko's practical skills at restraining enemies used in ways that Sakura wasn't certain she was quite comfortable with—but Hyūga Jinichi seemed to enjoy—she was treading ground very strange to her. Tsunami had been easy to emphasize with. Beniko was a little harder to understand when she was touched by the trust displayed in Jinichi's easy submission.
She was on a page with an illustrated plate and was trying very hard not to glance over at the art—and that looked like a seriously complex series of knots and she was trying hard not to remember that there was an appendix to this novel that had directions and if it was this bad before any actual sex Sakura didn't know if she'd survive the later novels—w hen she heard raucous laughter.
Looking up in guilty instinct, she found Tenten almost sobbing with laughter against Neji's shoulder. Lee just looked bemused, but Neji looked very close to spontaneous combustion. And he was looking at her.
Tenten raised her head, wiping tears from her eyes, and seeing that Sakura was looking at them, stepped towards her. Sakura managed to shove both her books into her messenger bag before she was very close, but the knowing grin on her face told her she was fooling no one except maybe Lee.
"Um, something wrong, Tenten?" she asked.
"Not really," Tenten replied, the grin widening. "You must have been pretty into that book."
Sakura did not rise to the bait, willing down the flush that wanted to color her cheeks and set the tips of her ears to burning.
Tenten didn't seem disappointed. "Guy-sensei was just with us," she said. "He happened to see you here, studying in the park, and held you up as an example of youth and virtue to us all." Her expression turned positively wicked. "Only, it looked to me like you were enjoying it just a little too much, you know. So I coerced poor Neji into taking a look at what you were reading. One look at his face and it was pretty easy to tell that wasn't a medical textbook. Care to share?"
Sakura's eyes darted over toward Neji, who was all but gaping at her. She shushed the terrible, inquiring part of her brain that wanted to ask if Jūken could even be used like that and settled instead for being embarrassed and feeling it served her right for following Kakashi-senpai's example.
[trichophilia]
Sakura gained some things and lost others when her team left.
Tatsuo was one of them.
No one except Ino had brushed her hair for her since her grandmother died and it had never occurred to her to want anyone to.
But they'd both seen the movie before and she was multitasking from the floor in front of the couch, taking notes as she read over a new study on abnormalities in the eye that could cause debilitating symptoms when chakra was used to enhance them. The stabbing pain hadn't improved with practice—when she enhanced her eyes for shunshin for long periods, she began to feel first pain, then a gradual loss of color vision, and just the other day she'd scared herself when vision in her left eye had degraded to foggy shadows. She'd eventually come to suspect that she might be only very slightly astigmatic, which didn't affect her day-to-day vision, but when amplified by chakra to force her eyes to process visual stimuli at a rate humans weren't normally capable of, she exacerbated it into optic neuritis due to spillover from her channels.
While it wasn't really pleasant, especially if she permanently blinded herself before she corrected it, she'd taken it as an opportunity. She had a feeling that Tatsuo's vision problems, while more extreme, might be linked to the same damage caused by chakra spillover from damaged paths. By insisting on correcting her own vision issues herself, rather than confessing the problem to a proper medic, she also provided a neat excuse for the borrowed books that littered her room without making any promises she might not be able to keep.
Before they'd settled in for movie night tonight, Sakura and Tatsuo had engaged in a long, grueling practice session that pitted her ability to dodge against his Jūken, so she'd showered as soon as she'd made it home and left her hair loose to air dry while Tatsuo took his own turn in the shower. She was regretting that now, as every time she leaned forward her hair spilled over her shoulders, getting in the way and leaving wet tracks on the paper. Sakura scowled at it, having worn it tied back so long she'd forgotten the irritation of wearing it loose for anything but going straight to bed.
She'd started growing it out for Sasuke, even though its texture meant that it would never be as smooth and sleek as she'd like it to be. Not like Ino's. She'd kept growing it out of habit and because another few inches of ponytail was as easy to wrap as doing the rest of it.
It also made her feel pretty, perhaps a little more feminine, which mattered, sometimes. Not in the field, but at home, out with friends. Mariko had been proven right in her predictions—with some new height and her morning walks, she had fantastic legs, now that she was developing the hips to complement them. But her bust was, well, a bust. And despite the pleasant implications of that later in life—no back problems or fear of the inevitability of gravity—it was in the now a sore spot that wasn't soothed by the fact that she wasn't nearly old enough to have her full growth in any way just yet.
Shoving her hair back over her shoulders, only to have it fall forward once more, Sakura glared at Tatsuo when he chuckled. "Hold that thought," he said, disappearing upstairs only to return with comb and brush in hand. Settling himself on the floor with his back supported by the couch, he shoved the coffee table to one side until there was room enough for Sakura to settle herself in front of him.
It wasn't until he'd worked the tangles out that she noticed what an unexpectedly sensual activity it was, the firm, even stroke of the brush across her scalp, his fingers deftly managing the length of her hair. She went very tense and still, suddenly aware of Tatsuo in a way she usually wasn't. She spent her days with him, bunked with him on missions, sparred with him and fought beside him. She was more comfortable with him than she'd ever been with another person, but in this moment "comfortable" was not what she was feeling.
Tatsuo was her partner. A person way, way before he was a young man. Not now. Not with the warm heat of him so close, his woodsy, musky scent tickling her nose. She almost yelped when he nudged her in the ribs with his knees. "Relax," he admonished her.
How? she demanded plaintively in her head, but over her sudden discomfort, she reminded herself just who it was at her back. And with that, it was easier to disperse her tension by folding her legs tight against her chest, tucking her arms securely around them. The movement turned her back into a sensitive curve and she shivered as the thin fabric of her t-shirt provided little protection against the gentle stroking that was chasing pleasant sensations down her spine.
Tatsuo kept it up until she'd been lulled into a pleasant drowsiness, which was why she made a sound of protest with the brushing stopped. There came his soft chuckle again, then an insistent tugging sensation. "What are you doing?" Sakura murmured.
"Your hair," Tatsuo replied teasingly. "Now, hold still or it'll be uneven."
Sakura did as she was told, until he draped her hair forward over her shoulder. "When and why, exactly, did you learn how to do a fishbone braid?" she asked bemusedly, though she had to admire what a neat job he'd done of it.
"Trade secret," was his reply. "Not bad, though?"
"No, it's really good," Sakura reassured him. "...thanks," she said shyly, twisting around to glance at him.
Hyūga eyes had once looked very strange to her, like the milky eyes of dead fish when she was at her most unkind, but she could read good humor, kindness, warmth in them now. And something more than warmth, something like heat, an expression she had little experience interpreting but which spoke to deep instincts. She'd known from the moment that she'd met Tatsuo that he was good-looking, but it had never felt so immediate and visceral as in this moment. And all those things tugged at her, made her realize all of a sudden that she was very lucky to be this close to him, to have met him at all.
There'd only been one other moment when she'd been so aware of someone else, but that moment with Zen had only been an instant, not this slow, languid build towards...something. It also sparked another thought. What would it be like to kiss a friend, instead of a stranger? To kiss Tatsuo?
There was something in the moment that prevented her from weighing good idea against bad idea, from considering consequences, more curiosity and the heady sense of being admired driving her rather than outright desire. She twisted around to face him fully, flexible as a cat, her hands pressed flat against the floor on either side of his hips. She caught a flash of Tatsuo's widening eyes in her peripheral vision, but she was intent on getting the angle just so, because she wasn't so long in the moment as to be immune to the embarrassment of messing this up.
Her first contact was gentle, tentative, her lips barely whispering over his, but when she drew back a little to regroup, she shifted all her weight onto one hand so that she could slip the other behind his neck, committing more of herself to the motion. Their second kiss was longer, more reciprocal as he shifted, his hands coming up to grasp her shoulders.
Sakura felt the sting of both embarrassment and disappointment as he gently put space between them, which spurred her to duck her head and try to make a dignified retreat. But he held her fast, one hand leaving her shoulder to nudge her chin up until she met his eyes.
"To be clear," he said, "this isn't 'no.' But my temperament isn't suited for doing something like this for curiosity's sake. I've had to let go of too many things already to keep doing it with grace. You're a wonderful partner and very pretty, but you haven't had enough people tell you that yet. When you make jounin—" he silenced her automatic protest at that, "when you make jounin and you've left enough men breathless, if you still want to, if you still want a Hyūga whose eyes are so thoroughly ruined the elders removed his Kago no Tori no Juin, we can do this again. I promise I'll be waiting."
[gamophobia]
Sakura gained some things and lost others when her team left.
Tatsuo was one of them.
He'd given her time and a choice, but as she gripped his sunglasses like her hold on them was the only thing keeping her world intact—one lens cracked, both smeared with blood—she understood that was a choice she'd never have to make. There was a strange numbness in her, uncurling from her belly, up her spine, into those hands that weren't shaking from the fear and grief and rage.
They'd been contracted for a kidnapping. Wealthy merchant's daughter who'd been traveling incognito. He'd been unwilling to wait for a ransom note, had been quick to commission a B-rank that had Aihara-taichou's entire squad on the trail. It had led them to a little town on the coast, which had been unexpected but not entirely strange—urban environments offered more anonymity, but they'd expected to eventually discover an isolated farmhouse or something similar, an environment where you could hold someone captive without anyone raising a fuss.
As it turned out, none of the captor's neighbors would have done more than recommend a buyer. They'd stumbled onto a generations-entrenched slaving operation, reinforced by missing-nin talent.
Jounin-level talent. Not many, but it only took one. Just one to see beneath the henge and decide a Hyūga was too much of a threat to their operation to leave the village alive.
It had all gone wrong, so, so quickly. She—they—hadn't known what they'd happened upon, weren't given the chance to form conclusions. They'd gone in together, because that was what partners did, because that was what their orders were. Two others to make up a full squad, Tatsuo their face in the crowd, their infiltrator. Sakura's transformation jutsu were flawless, but he had a touch with people that she didn't, so she'd always interacted less directly on these kinds of missions, kept an eye on the place, the people, her partner. In a town this size, this had taken the form of shadowing him in a way that civilians wouldn't normally have noticed.
But they weren't civilians. And if Tatsuo's reflexes had been any less honed, he'd have been dead when the first missing-nin struck.
One of their squad had gone for help, the other had gone to reinforce Tatsuo's position, and Sakura yanked both canisters her tear gas solution from her vest as people spilled into the street like a disturbed hive of hornets. Some part of her had acknowledged that this was it then, the place where it ended, because retreat was the only certain path out of this place. She was fast enough. Fast enough to outrun them all.
But not fast enough to leave Tatsuo behind, not when she could see him at the end of the street.
Despite the quickness of the residents' response, there was a distinct lack of military precision in the armed chaos below. Her initial impression was correct—like bees or ants, they were only following the first to strike, mindlessly operating to eliminate the threat in their midst before carrying on with their lives. Some of them were hardly more than ordinary people wielding whatever was at hand, grass sickles and butcher knives, protecting a livelihood.
She'd already been wearing her combat glasses, her shemagh pulled snug across the bridge of her nose, so there was no hesitation as she pitched the canisters into the thick of the crowd. She was in this moment immune to the gradations of guilt and culpability—if it was within reach of her knives and carried or had carried a weapon, it didn't matter if it screamed, cried, or tried to flee, she cut them down. Men, women, half-grown children. It was like the crowd on the end of the bridge all over again, except this time she was Zabuza, and it was a slaughter.
Between the gas and the whirlwind the slavers were reaping, Sakura had enough space to maneuver without the press of bodies overwhelming her with sheer numbers, but not enough of them were fleeing and too many of them were capable of using chakra to keep the roofpaths from being an advantage. She was briefly, fiercely jealous of anyone who could have used a ninjutsu to turn the streets into a graveyard in one massive expenditure of chakra. But even if she killed herself with the effort, Sakura couldn't have done it, so she didn't waste the energy, let it fall away because the world outside demanded her all her attention.
Everything was the flash of steel under sunlight, the subtle shift to avoid an oncoming blow, the strain on her wrists as she swept her blades through flesh and cloth and sometimes bone. She was such a part of the rhythm of this terrible, mad dance she almost didn't realize she'd fought her way to Tatsuo's side, but there he was, those graceful killing hands lashing out with a quickness that would have been impossible to follow if she wasn't seeing the world with eyes enhanced with chakra. Their styles were a good match for fighting side by side; neither of them used ninjutsu, each had a precision, an economy to their movements.
The third member of their squad was there too, tried to lead them out of the carnage, but the moment he made the rooftops more skilled missing-nin targeted him. He was like the rest of Aihara-taichou's squad: chūnin, more than competent enough when the mission only went sideways, but in these circumstances, against these odds it was only a matter of how many he cut down before he fell himself.
Sakura heard shouting when she saw him go down in her peripheral vision, realized that the full squad had arrived. Some part of her fluttered in gratitude; the rest thought that they were here to die, that the right decision would have been to retreat, to report to the village and let them send in a team capable of taking this on. Would she have made the same call? She wasn't given time to reflect on it, just to keep killing, having to keep moving because footwork was becoming difficult around the bodies.
Her head began to hurt, her arms began to ache, and she was bleeding from a half-dozen grazes she'd been too slow to avoid. It would only get worse, she registered dimly, as she grew more tired and the real shinobi stepped from behind their meat-shields to take down their exhausted prey. It was good tactics, if you had them stomach for them, and it wasn't you being harried into the ground.
It was a challenge to pace herself, to not roar aloud and throw herself against them with everything she had, but that was the road to a quick death and she was determined if she could not live, she would make them pay for it.
The thin, cowardly voice in her mind told her that she could still make it if she ran now. This dross, those jounin—none of them could catch her with her speed. She could take Tatsuo with her, could have tried it in the beginning, but she'd never have been able to take their squad of four out of harm's way. Even more impossible now, so she shoved it aside with a snarl as she drove her knife up into the hollow of a woman's throat, through the roof of her mouth and further to where the important things dwelled. It was as she was yanking her knife free of her sagging body that something caught her attention.
She half-turned, just in time so see Tatsuo sinking to his knees. It was a quiet, suspended moment, where it seemed like all the sound in the world retreated, leaving her an almost perfect silence in which to watch him fall. The veins around his eyes were bulging—he'd used the Byakugan in the end, perhaps brought about his own death with the pain of it. He didn't look afraid, or angry, just wore that intensely focused look he put on instead of admitting how much his eyes hurt him. For a heartbeat, she held out the hope that he'd get up, but then he turned painfully towards her and his neck was all meat and blood where his opponent's suntetsu had ripped a gaping path.
All Sakura's careful pacing suddenly became meaningless. Roughly thrust-kicking an opponent away from her with chakra-enhanced strength, feeling the give of his sternum, she was at Tatsuo's side in an instant, sheathing her knives and laying on desperate, useless hands. He was gone and it was with sharp, sour hate that she looked up at his opponent, who gave her a wicked smile and licked Tatsuo's blood from the sharpened points of his suntetsu, one hand beckoning her in an invitation. "How sweet," he cooed insincerely. "Well, I'm certain he'd be glad to know you cared."
Sakura knitted her fingers, forgetting any reservation she might have had about what it was to fight to kill and fighting to hurt. "Show me what you love,"Sakura snarled as she manipulated her chakra, sinking intangible claws deep in her target's nervous system, "let me return the favor and take it away."
It was evocative genjutsu, realizing all his deeply buried fears in terrifying detail, like the novel version of the flash fiction that was Kakashi-senpai's Hell Viewing. Genjutsu could be like dreams, complex ideas conveyed in very brief amounts of time, nightmares writ complete at the speed of thought. She couldn't enjoy the ghost, had to keep fighting, keep killing or be killed, but she could feel a pitiless satisfaction when he began to beg. And she let him, let him beg and scream and cry, caught in her genjutsu, until she laid bare hands over his throat and pressed with her thumbs until the cartilage of his trachea collapsed and he turned first red, then plum purple, then dead.
Breaking things, bones, people, she returned to Tatsuo's side, snatched up his broken sunglasses, closed his eyes for the last time. No time to do more than that.
And then she did what she hadn't allowed herself to do before, threw herself into it with a roar until she almost couldn't draw enough breath, almost couldn't lift her arms for the next blow. She took shelter for a little while then, fingering his sunglasses, feeling the growing numbness that settled in her belly. Her vision was already off-color, blurry, and the pain in her head was almost as bad as the pain where someone had driven a curved sickle into her hip almost to the joint. She couldn't do anything about the former, but she could and did seal the worst of her wounds, leaving only a faint, residual stiffness.
Sakura slowly rose to her feet, took a shaky breath. I don't want to die. That wasn't a revelation, there was nothing new about that instinct toward survival that made animals gnaw off their own feet in traps to limp through another day, that made people get out of bed in the morning even when there wasn't anything to look forward to. It had been the mantra that had seen her through Gatō, through Orochimaru, but sometimes will wasn't enough to change the world.
But she stepped back out into the sun anyway, fought until the world faded to shadows and her unblemished knife, never meant to be used with chakra-enhanced strength, broke off midway down the blade. She tossed it aside and buried her fist in someone's face, turning the curve of it concave as the skull collapsed under the force of it. And when she couldn't see anything, was reduced to lashing out blindly, she put her back against a wall and kept at it until someone's hand—huge, sweaty palm, calloused and hard—smashed her head against the wall.
Her world exploded in white pain, the hand took a firmer grip, and then she knew nothing at all.