A/N: Kill Your Heroes now has cover art! All appreciation is due to sgcassidy, who can be found elsewhere as geekysoundcat—her work 'This is the End' is well worth a search so you can see it full-size. This chapter is the last stretch of the timeskip. Enjoy.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Thirty-Four-
Toward Better Days (Final Part)
[bedside manners]
Kakashi stared blankly down at his open novel, more to have somewhere to focus his gaze that wasn't there than with any real intention of reading it. All of his attention was on the reassuring noise of the medical machinery crouched in every corner of the room, confirming with every dispassionate beep that Sakura had made it through another terrible, silent interval.
He owed every one of those seconds to Aihara, who never left the village without a way to contact the network of extraction squads which were based throughout the country for rapid response. In this case, that response had come too late for most of her team. Upon the extractions squad's entry into the village—because of the nature of the distress call, several teams had rendezvoused before their assault—only five survivors had been discovered, one of whom had lost too much blood to stabilize, another succumbing quietly to shock during transport.
The former of those had been part of a pair of ninja that Aihara had ordered to retreat, because she hadn't judged their combat skills adequate enough to pit against such numbers.
They'd initially counted Sakura among the dead; if they hadn't had an extremely gifted medic-nin along or if Sakura had been any less tenacious, she would have remained there. Judging by the extensive bruising, the swelling of her brain and the lovely hematoma that went with it, as well as the broken ribs and the slow hemorrhage that were competing with the traumatic brain injury to kill her first, the responding medic-nin had assessed that someone had bashed her head against a wall until she'd lost consciousness and kept kicking her once she was down.
The slavers hadn't been interested in keeping Sakura. Not with the devastating path she'd left behind her, dozens of corpses bearing the distinctive marks of her knives. Not carnage, because that wasn't Sakura's style, which was all surgical precision and brutal efficiency. Even now that she had stamina to spare, she'd never lost the habits formed when she'd first gotten serious about being a shinobi.
He could still remember those days, when a brief sparring match would have her wheezing. Part of him wished they were still living them, that his team had had time to actually be a team, before two of them had went off with Sannin and one had taken up desperate last stands.
One death had been especially interesting to the captain of the combined extraction squads. A jounin missing-nin—not famous enough to be a household name, but annoying enough to earn himself a bounty—who'd apparently let himself be strangled by a small pair of hands, no other bruising or marks of restraint on his body at all. Kakashi had hemmed and hawed and avoided admitting that his former student was the present protégé of Gozen Reiji—or at least as close as that old bitch would ever come—though he didn't know if giving her the idea that Sakura had crafted a genjutsu capable of holding a jounin without any outside input at all was any better.
If it came down to it, he wasn't certain how he felt about it himself.
Proud, yes, relieved that Sakura had survived to come back to him when so many hadn't ever come home again, but there was a distinct line between the kind of thoughtless, childish cruelty that she'd displayed on occasion with Naruto and the kind of cruelty—or at least the level of dissociation, the lack of empathy, or perhaps the will strong enough to overcome any sympathy—that was required to use Gozen's brand of genjutsu. It was always possible that Sakura had used something else, something a little less like the reason so many genjutsu-types of any reputation tended to be infamous, but Kakashi had gotten into the habit of assuming the worst and being proved right.
And he was no stranger to bitter, bitter anger, but he'd never had the ability to express it as someone else's nightmares. Not the way a proper genjutsu specialist could. The technique he'd shown Sakura, that was a bludgeon, no build-up or subtlety at all, easily escaped by a halfway competent shinobi. Not enough to hold a jounin for more than a few seconds, certainly not long enough to strangle anyone.
Over two years ago now, Sakura had made her first kill and that had changed her irrevocably. This would do the same, but only time would tell how this whole miserable situation would change her.
He could only be there, offer what support he could, even if it was just repressing his dislike of hospitals to sit at her bedside and watch over her while she slept. It wasn't the obligation of a sensei to his student—he hadn't even been that in name for a long time. It was the same kind of warm regard he might have felt for a younger sister, if he'd ever had one; despite the disparity between their ages and experience, Sakura was a friend. And he had precious few of those, none of whom made him break his rules as easily or readily as Sakura.
She was...pack. The family that he'd chosen and been chosen by.
So despite the antiseptic smell that turned his stomach, Kakashi stayed. The mundane matters were being taken care of by others, so that he could be there when Sakura woke.
Any kills conclusively identified as Sakura's that carried a bounty had already been processed and the funds deposited in her account, the bounties which belonged to deceased shinobi having been given to their families alongside the death settlement. In this case, the bodies of all the Konoha shinobi had been successfully retrieved, so there had been that closure.
Genma, who'd delivered an absolutely riotous bouquet, was feeding both the ninken and Sakura's furry terror. The ninken, at least, were capable of reacting with sufficient gravity, curling in miserable little piles around Sakura's bed when they'd come to visit, but the cat had planted himself on Sakura's sternum and started kneading his claws in her blanket, those uncanny eyes focused on her face as if he was either gauging her expression or demanding she wake and pay attention to him. Kakashi had removed him by the scruff of his neck and the cat had taken sulkily to second-guessing the nurses.
Kakashi glanced up as someone slid the door open and he was surprised to see it was Aihara. "Should you be up?" he asked, taking in her sallow skin and a mouth turned into a thin, tightly compressed line by her refusal to admit to pain.
"I'm well enough to look over what's left of my team," she replied as she walked stiffly to Sakura's bedside. She was silent for a long time, then without looking over at him, she said, "I'm recommending her for promotion. Even if they don't make her jounin, she's ready to lead a team. I was going to wait until she got over whatever she has against elemental ninjutsu, but I see now that she doesn't need it. It'd be useful, of course, but she has the mentality and the skills."
"When?" he asked quietly.
Now she glanced over at him, her eyes cold and knowing. "I turned the paperwork over to a courier this morning. That's the way this village works—you survive something that could be reasonably expected to break a civilian for the rest of their life and it asks you to do it on a regular basis. It won't be easy. But it will be a damn sight easier for her if she has something better to do with herself than wallowing in what she lost. She would have been reassigned regardless; not enough of us survived for this squad to be a viable unit any longer. I'm just making certain she gets the acknowledgement she deserves."
Her expression softened, but just slightly, just enough for Kakashi to get a clear sense that for all her detached mien, Aihara was suffering. "She made me proud to be her captain. Right until the end, she never stopped fighting."
Having apparently satisfied her need to check up on Sakura and having said her piece, Aihara took her leave and left Kakashi to his vigil, which was interrupted by the parents of her partner, his mother bearing an armful of peonies as pink as Sakura's hair, still tightly furled. Though he'd heard about them, this was his first time meeting them, which made the greeting exchanged between them stilted and awkward, Tatsuo's mother escaping the tension by arranging her flowers on the table beneath the window.
"I cut them from my garden," she said as she arranged them prettily, all effortless elegance next to Gemna's riot of color. She ran the petals between her thumb and forefinger, looking the kind of reflective that would have been a prelude to tears if it weren't for stalwart Hyūga dignity. Kakashi was grateful for that, because there was nothing in the world to make you feel gawky and awkward like someone crying. "Sakura admired them so much when they bloomed last year, so I thought it would be a pity if she missed them this year. I offered to part them out, so she could have her own, but she just gave me this look...," she trailed off, letting her hand fall away.
She swallowed uncomfortably and her husband took up the thread of the conversation. "We'll be by again when she's awake. Just because...," and it was his turn for that moment when the muscles in his face tensed as he forced emotion down, mastering himself, "just because Tatsuo isn't here any longer doesn't give her an excuse not to visit. For us, for shinobi, the squad is your family—and just because you lose a member of it doesn't mean you stop being family. The dead never really leave us."
"I know," Kakashi replied. And he did. His whole life was full of ghosts.
But Sakura wasn't one of them, not yet, and so he stayed until she woke up, stayed while she cried, and promised himself this time, with this team—even if parts of it were scattered—it would be different.
[the things that don't kill you]
Sakura locked the door carefully behind her, sinking to the floor with her back against the comforting solidity of it.
Staring blankly at the ceiling, she tried to swallow down the sick feeling creeping up from her belly, the growing certainty that she could not do this. When her breathing was as steady as it was going to get—which was really just a generous way of saying she wasn't light-headed from the panicked wheezing that had started from the moment she'd resolved to do this—she let her head drop to stare at her hands, flexing them as green medical chakra played like living fire across her fingertips.
This is a bad idea, a little voice warned, you shouldn't be trying this without supervision. You shouldn't be trying this at all.
Before that timid, cautious voice could talk her out of this, Sakura raised her hands to her eyes and began.
Eventually she heard Soudai, yowling on the other side of the door. "Sakura? Sakura, what are you doing in there? Answer me."
But Sakura couldn't, couldn't move, couldn't stop, for fear that her microscopic adjustments to the interior of her eye would leave her permanently blind when she opened them again. Delicate muscles, miniscule veins, some of the most fragile chakra channels in the whole body and she was manipulating them without ever breaking the skin, working only through excellent memory and a strange kind of sonar peculiar to medical chakra.
She could hear claws tearing at the door and Soudai snarling, but she ignored him. "Sakura, let me in. Let me in. If you don't answer, I'm going to do something drastic."
Sakura could only answer with silence and he finally said, "Fine, you irritating creature. If I'd been born with hands, I would rip open this door and strangle you until you came to your senses, but things being as they are, I'm off to summon Kakashi."
She could hardly redouble her efforts, because medical chakra just didn't work like that, but she kept panic at bay and finished what she'd started. By the time it was Kakashi knocking on the door, she'd moved to the far wall, her head held in her hands, too afraid to open her eyes and see what she'd done. "Sakura?" Kakashi asked cautiously as she heard the knob turn and the door open. "Sakura," he said again, his voice closer to her now as he knelt. "Sakura, what's wrong?"
-x-
"What's wrong," Tsunade-sama said sternly as she brought a clipboard none-too-gently down atop Sakura's head, "is that you have a shinobi with entirely too much talent. Your eyes are fine. Better than fine. Don't think I didn't notice the little improvements, like those shunts you burned into your chakra circulatory system to avoid inflammation caused by chakra spillover." she told Sakura, who winced when it seemed the clipboard would impact again. But instead it came down softly on her hair. "Good job, kid. You could cycle chakra into your eyes all the livelong day if it suited you."
Keeping the clipboard in place, Tsunade-sama frowned down at her. Contemplatively, which was not as reassuring as it might have been. "Hatake, take a walk," she ordered brusquely.
"Hokage-sama?" Kakashi-senpai queried, his one visible brow rising.
"You heard me. Take a walk. A long one, well off hospital grounds. I'll see to her discharge and you can scold her yourself later. Now, shoo."
And without another word, Kakashi-senpai went.
Tsunade-sama sighed and slumped into the chair beside Sakura's bed. "Good. Now, we're going to have a talk. No, don't make that face. I'm not going to yell at you. You clearly knew what you were doing and took a calculated risk. That's not something a good commander discourages. In fact," she chuckled, "it almost makes me wish that I'd had a hand in it. But in a way it's good that I didn't."
"What do you mean?" Sakura asked.
"Because I'm a Senju, which means I'm bound by all the old agreements. As my student, you would have been a Senju by extension, so far as the clans are concerned. You, however, are free to do as you please. And you have a someone close to you who is slowly going blind, if chakra exhaustion doesn't manage to kill him first."
"You mean—?"
"Yes, him. He won't like it very much if you try to help, but feel free to ignore his opinions. We have enough suffering in this world without people choosing it," she told her, abruptly shoving herself to her feet. "I look forward to our interview, Haruno."
"Interview?" Sakura asked blankly.
"For your jounin assessment. I'll tell them on my way out that you're cleared to leave. Judging by your records, you'll be able to take care of your own paperwork." And just like that, she made to stride from the room, only turning back when she was in the doorframe."Oh, and Haruno?"
"Yes, Tsunade-sama?"
"The secret to a really good impact crater? It's not just pure chakra. It's a simultaneous doton manipulation."
[picnics with the dead]
When you're ready, we'll take you to the Hyūga shrine.
We parted out some of Tatsuo's ashes for you, during the bunkotsu.
You'll always be welcome here.
Forty-nine days. The time it took a soul to sever all ties with the world.
And, though she wasn't ready, time for her to say goodbye properly.
There was a cultivated peacefulness to the garden, a sense of remove despite its location within the Hyūga compound. There were high whitewashed walls which buffered the sound of people and intensified the impression of being alone with the dead. One enormous memorial stone dominated the center of the garden, bearing the family name in livid, living red, but only the heads of the line had individual stone markers even though this was where all Hyūga came to rest. For everyone else, there was a tiny little building that recorded the names of the deceased on slats of bamboo, rolled into a mat that traced the dead of the clan to before the founding.
Tatsuo's father had explained the tradition, the urns of the heads of the clan—containing only the better part of their ashes, the rest shared by their immediate family—were buried beneath a seedling fruiting tree. No one ever ate from them even when they came of age; their fruit was for the animals, the spirits, and the gods. Choice of tree was dictated by personal preference. Peaches, pomegranates, one ancient, gnarled apple past fruit-bearing age that predated the village.
Her tiny urn, her part of Tatsuo, rested on her bedside table, next to his shattered glasses—she wasn't certain whether she was grateful or not that they had managed to follow her home—next to the photo of her shattered team. Sometimes it was almost enough to make her feel obligated to light incense and leave offerings, but instead she wished him good morning when she woke up—she'd been trying to get back into the habit of sleeping in her bed because her father had been home those first weeks and concerned for her and she didn't feel the need to tell him she'd spent days in the past sleeping beneath the comforting shelter of the kitchen table—and faced that terrible moment where she had to decide to get out of bed and face a world that there wasn't any waking up from.
That was the beautiful thing about nightmares and the terrible thing about dreams. They ended. And because people spent every night escaping the things that terrified them by the simple expedient of waking up, it was perhaps a natural human impulse to consider how much easier existence would be if it came to such an end. But it was only in those first moments between here and there, between dreaming and waking, that Sakura ever let herself think of how much she wished she could go back to sleep and never have to face the things waiting in the world and that only in those first days after she came home.
Life was hard and brutal and likely brief, but she wasn't so deep in her misery that she'd forgotten that there were other things besides Tatsuo and missions gone awry in it. It wasn't even really about the loss of her partner, the loss of the squad, the almost-loss of her own life. It was about being bone-tired, soul-tired, along with all the tender bits deep inside that still felt strange and fragile whenever she moved.
But Sakura made herself get up and get on with it, replacing ruined gear, exercising muscles made weak by chakra-healing and bed rest. She'd replaced her broken and unrecovered knife, spending the best part of her bounties on the special steel capable of channeling chakra; if she'd thought sealing scrolls excessively expensive, it was on par with having a knife custom-forged at ten times the rate of a good carbon steel one. She'd seen pictures of weapons made with the steel before, had noted that they were all black, but she'd thought it was a stylistic thing.
As it turned out, the same quirk of the steel that made it capable of channeling chakra meant that it had a glossy black sheen. And because it was so rare, which was part of why it was expensive, only truly talented swordsmiths worked it, which meant that she'd been breathless with admiration at the artistry of the hamon and the sharp, vicious elegance of it when her commission was presented to her. That had been a strangely formal moment, all tea and ceremony and being glad that Kakashi-senpai was there and feeling like she was accepting art rather than a tool.
She'd brought it with her and she was wearing her new boots—she could hear Ino even now, that knee-high boots with built-in knife sheathes were the epitome of kunoichi sexy and they even looked half-good on Sakura—and a new, sleeveless shirt in black that looked very stark against her pale skin. Its flatteringly tailored lines would look better when she regained the weight she'd dropped, though as it was worn under her flak jacket, it wouldn't matter regardless.
She had a whole pile of new shemagh, because she hadn't had the heart to tell her father that she didn't have anywhere to wear pretty dresses or anyone to wear them for and she'd known he was trying. His sigh of relief when she'd gently steered him toward an outfitter's rather than a boutique hadn't escaped her either, had made her laugh and feel just that little bit lighter. Today's was one she'd never wear out in the field, all green and pink and white. And her hair had been carefully, meticulously braided.
She'd gone on missions with Sakuya's team once she was cleared for duty again and with her agemates, but she'd saved her new things for this day. Not only would she say goodbye to Tatsuo, within the next week she'd begin the series of supervised assessment missions that would decide whether she'd be reassigned to a new squad or receive jounin status. Eight separate A-rank missions, each conducted with a different jounin partner who'd have a say in whether she deserved the promotion, followed by a one-on-one interview with the Hokage.
Part of her was honored, because she and Hyūga Neji—who was a widely acknowledged prodigy—would begin their assessments at the same time.
However, more of her only wished for the courage to say, No, I don't want to do this anymore, because aberrations seemed to be her reality and how much worse would it be when the missions were meant to be dangerous? But she hadn't. Because she did not want to come to feel accepted and at home with a new team, only to have it snatched away again. She'd lost two of them; she'd decided that next time, it would be her partner who was left behind, however callous that seemed.
And Kakashi-senpai was a jounin as well as the only person she trusted to survive, no matter what happened. So she'd bite her tongue, give her all, and hope that would be enough.
But first she had to get through today.
Sakura clutched in one hand a carefully packed bento and because that hand had started trembling as she'd passed through the threshhold, she clasped her other hand tightly over it.
"When you're ready," she echoed with bitter irony, punctuating the statement with an uncomfortable giggle. "I wonder when that would be."
Fingers clenching tighter on her burden, Sakura forced her feet to carry her forward, eventually seating herself on a rock whose worn, moss-free surface testified to other mourners having made their way here. She carefully unwrapped the salted rice onigiri which had been sharing space with a shallow ceramic bowl and a bottle of hanazake that had required a careful request to Mariko. She'd wanted sake, for tradition's sake, but she needed something above 80 proof for what she intended. Hanazake was 120 proof and not a regular resident of her parent's liquor cabinet.
Shoving half of the riceballs to one side and pouring a cup of the hanazake for someone who wasn't there to drink it, Sakura nibbled at her own allotment, snuffling as the salt of her tears mingled with the salt in the rice. She only managed to eat half an onigiri before she had to stop, her stomach clenched tight from grief. She hadn't allowed herself to cry since she'd been released from the hospital and she'd put this off until she thought she might be able to get through this without sobbing, but this all made it all so very final, the goodbye she'd never gotten.
Stealing a sip from Tatsuo's cup for courage and wincing at the taste, Sakura poured the alcohol into the dish she'd brought until it was a little over half full.
If you could see someone you'd lost, even if it was only for an hour, would you be strong enough to resist making your memories into something you could touch?
Sakura wasn't.
Not when all it took was chakra and will to see Tatsuo sitting across from her, one leg drawn up to his chest, the other extended comfortably. "Hey," he said fondly, his voice resonating with all the warmth that dwelled in her memories.
"Hey yourself," she choked out, smiling through her tears.
That familiar grin quirked his lips, but faded quickly into concern. "What are you doing, Sakura?"
"I just—just thought that you should be here for this," Sakura told him. Told herself. "Maybe you're really watching, even though they say you should be safely somewhere else by now, but..." she rose, Tatsuo coming to his feet as well, and she reached out until their hands were palm-to-palm, their fingers interlaced. She could feel the warmth of his skin, the texture of skin beneath the pads of her fingers, the resistance of bone beneath the thin flesh.
This is a terrible thing, she recognized even as she basked in the moment. Some part of her realized that this was something as cruel and certain as any of Gozen's nightmares—offering someone something that they could never have again, granting them the desires that they never voiced to others. Giving them one moment and taking all their others.
Killing them with kindness.
But that was a thought for the battlefield, for the future, and in the now there was Tatsuo as she remembered him. As the thought traveled through her mind, for a moment the genjutsu wavered and it was Tatsuo with his neck gaping and his eyes fading, but she firmed her will and he was whole and hale again. She reluctantly released Tatsuo's hands, stepping backward, and he mirrored her movement. "I wanted—" her throat clenched so tight she couldn't speak. "...I think I could have loved you," she told him plaintively. "You were everything that I didn't know to want in a partner."
"We just didn't have enough time," Tatsuo replied. "Relationships aren't something you just have. They're something you have to build and repair and maintain."
Sakura smiled faintly, because those weren't his words. They belonged to another Hyūga, a wholly fictional one, but it didn't make it less true. "Love is a house," she murmured. "It's all about the foundation." She took a deep, unsteady breath and unsheathed her knife. Not the new and shining one, but the one with discolored steel, familiar and comfortable in her hand.
With her free hand, she pulled her braid taut, and in a single smooth motion, she severed it at the base of her neck. The shorn strands fell forward, just brushing her shoulders where they were hunched by the movement and with tension. She'd never thought about how heavy all that hair was until it wasn't there anymore, almost as strange and disconcerting as being without the armor of her clothes.
"I'm going to grow it out again," she told her illusion as she sheathed her knife, crouching to coil the long, braided length in the bowl of alcohol. "Not for anyone else, this time. Just for me, because I like it. But this, this was our moment, which sounds stupid and silly to say out loud, but...this will always be yours," she murmured, folding her fingers into an unfamiliar handsigns.
Katon, she intoned silently, not flinching from the great gout of flame that spilled upward from the bowl or the smell of melted hair.
She owed it to Tatsuo, owed it to herself, not to flinch away. So she refilled the bowl again and again, until there was no more hanazake and her hair was only ashes to be snatched away by the wind.
[red rice]
Her mother's fingers were clutched tight on her upper arms and Haruno Mebuki's eyes looked suspiciously damp, her usually stern expression forgotten. "Oh, Sakura," she sighed. "We are proud of you."
"But this isn't precisely what you had in mind for me," Sakura said softly, so she wouldn't have to. "I know. I understand. I really, really do. When I graduated the Academy, this wasn't what I had in mind for me either."
"We just don't want to lose you," her mother confirmed. "And we've come so close already. And jounin—we've never had a jounin in the family before. We can't—there's no connections, no secret jutsu we can give you."
"I don't need it," Sakura reassured her, her mind flickering to men who'd died because they'd paused for the sight of their mothers, their brothers, their lovers, who'd paid for having a heart. For men who'd been afraid of fire, who'd flinched at the sensation of fear, who'd grown careless when supplied with euphoria. Of enemies who hadn't needed any genjutsu to ease their transition to the afterlife. Not all A-ranks involved combat, just the risk of it, but for the assessments they'd chosen missions in which that risk was something closer to a certainty. And because she wanted jounin not for the rank, not for the money, but for the possibility of a partner who'd stay, she'd put all ofher talents on display even when she might have been able to offer swifter ends.
She'd learned to compartmentalize it, to push away the guilt, to shut down the strange moral quandary of was it worse to torture a man with horrible images or to take advantage of his softer nature. She wasn't past the nightmares, still felt the weight of it all, perhaps would never escape it, but every day it grew easier to just not think about it.
She shifted so that she was cupping her mother's elbows. Sakura met Mebuki's eyes earnestly. "All those secret techniques, all that prestige, all that tradition, everything that makes a clan—I didn't need any of it. So don't for a minute regret that it wasn't something you could give me. I'm not ashamed to be an Haruno."
But, she thought as her mother embraced her, I can't promise that you won't someday be ashamed of me.
[sagiso—my thoughts will follow you into your dreams]
Jaraiya gazed with bemusement on the letter forwarded to him by his editor, thinking that maybe he'd made some mistake when he was decoding it. But as he eyed first the original and then the one he'd printed out neatly as he worked with that hellish cipher his contact had devised, he discovered that his work was entirely accurate.
Which only left him with an ominous feeling building in his bones, because for the better part of a decade, his informant had only one question.
But now he had a request. A highly specific request.
Jiraiya's brow furrowed as he tried to puzzle out what exactly Uchiha Itachi had in mind when he'd asked for a medic-nin capable of staging his death, aside from the obvious. Why within the timeline he'd outlined? What had changed? What had he learned, after all these years?
But those were questions without answers and all he could do was burn both sheets of paper and resolve that when he took Naruto back to Konohagakure, he'd put an open-minded medic-nin on his shopping list.