A/N: May I just say that your reviews and encouragement continue to be fantastic motivators? At this rate, we're going to reach over three thousand reviews before we reach the end. So, here you have it, another chapter. As a cultural note, Japanese graveyards commonly feature higanbana-the red spider lily. You'll understand why you need to know that if you keep reading. Please enjoy.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Thirty-Nine-
Ommetaphobia
Sometimes there were days in which Sakura wondered exactly which avaricious, murderous warlord she'd been in a past life to merit playing such a crucial role in the interesting times of their day.
Even though Naruto had come home again, those first days of his return had been as close to normal as a shinobi's ever got. She'd listened patiently to him whine about being assigned to teammates-of-last-resort for the duration of the exam, partially out of guilt. Not that he'd be taking this exam by himself, she'd been chūnin before he'd ever left with the Toad Sage, but because when she'd been deciding whether or not to pursue her jounin promotion, she hadn't spared a second's thought for where that would leave Naruto.
He hadn't said anything about it yet, but Sakura wondered if he actually hadn't realized or was simply pretending not to know that even if he was promoted to chūnin, he'd be assigned to a chūnin squad and missions commiserate with his rank. Even considering his...circumstances. Maybe especially considering his circumstances.
But before it had come to the point where Sakura might have tentatively brought up career plans or Kakashi-senpai had either intervened or decided it was time to take another mission and left a 'by the way' sort of letter behind—you could never tell with him—their luck soured.
They'd been with Naruto when the summons had come and if she'd had the time, Sakura might have cited the chūnin who'd brought the message that they—Kakashi-senpai and she—were wanted by Tsunade-sama. Her clear anxiety had drawn Naruto's interest and he'd dogged their steps, shouldering his way inside Tsunade-sama's office despite Sakura's half-hearted protest. There was no one else in the village who'd have dared to address the Hokage like he did, let alone demand he be told what was going on.
Yet, somehow, he ended up attached to the mission.
Jiraiya had exchanged words too softly spoken for her to catch with Naruto, but she'd felt the less-than-casual pressure of his hand when it closed over her shoulder. "Remember, camellia," he'd murmured before they were running toward Suna and the chaos that had awaited them.
Less by luck and more by ninken intervention they'd been able to intercept Temari on her journey home, which had proved useful as they'd found the leadership of Suna in disarray. The village had suffered considerably from the machinations of Orochimaru, not just in the sense of loss of shinobi, though several of their best jounin had died in Konoha's streets, but from the turnover in senior leadership when the people who'd lost their loved ones discovered that their elders and advisors had allowed themselves to be manipulated by someone masquerading as their Kazekage.
It hadn't mattered to them that an invasion was enough in line with the previous Kazekage's character that no one had thought to doubt the orders, only that there were scapegoats within reach. Many of the older members of the advisory council had been forced into retirement, leaving Suna with a much younger, less experienced group of people to manage things in the face of a kidnapped Kazekage.
She'd had little time to admire Temari's ability to make men and women years her senior follow her orders, instead being presented with a puzzle worthy of Fū at his most devious. She'd kept in touch with both Fū and Zen since the Taki exam; as they were all young shinobi still making their names, they kept in touch by letter more often than in-person.
Fū—who still preferred stonefish toxin and his cruel serrated knives—had been the one to invent the game. Every month he sent her a new compound. The challenge was to identify its components correctly within whatever limit he set in the letter; if he won she owed him a visit, if she won he'd send something deadly harvested from his little menagerie. Her home laboratory hadn't been fully sufficient for the task, so she'd taken to using the public labs—civilians had such things as music studios to rent, shinobi sometimes needed access to the technical equipment of their trade as well—which had drawn Tsunade-sama's attention.
She'd taken the whole thing in good humor, remarking that she'd never thought she'd live to see the day when shinobi exchanged poison as a puzzle rather than a weapon, and one morning Sakura had found a stack of Tsunade-sama's personal journals waiting for her. The Hokage had never said a word about them and when she'd finished with them, she'd left them just where she'd found them.
After that she'd won more often than she lost—visiting him when she could because she could—and it hadn't been lack of skill or ingenuity on Fū's part. When Kankuro had looked like he might remember the conversation, she told him that he owed the Taki-nin a thank you note and perhaps a new spider or something, which had earned her weak chuckle.
She was surprised by the depth of Temari's trust. "Since he's not here to do it himself, I guess I'll just have to keep the village safe for him," she said grimly. "Bring my brother back to me. Not just for me though—this village needs him."
Sakura nodded solemnly, the muscles in her jaw tense as she watched Kakashi-senpai try to temper Naruto's charge ahead! philosophy. "We'll find him," she promised. "We'll bring him back." Unspoken between them was the knowledge that it might only be a body they returned, but they would bring him home.
"I know you will," Temari said. "We'll send one of our jounin with you—even with the Copy-nin's tracking skills, it'll be useful to have someone familiar with the terrain."
"Who?"
A voice came from above them. "I'll represent the Sand village myself," a voice made dry and raspy with age proclaimed.
Sakura's head snapped up and she had to peer against the unrelenting sun to make out the shape of a woman she'd only heard about in stories until today. Even the Sannin needed compelling villains to give their careers heroic scope. From the sands of Sunagakure it had been Chiyo, the Spider, who'd brought poison and puppets and was considered more dangerous than any four average jounin put together. She'd been a Name, feared by one side and revered by the other.
Sakura's eyes narrowed further as she considered the reality rather than the legend. Time had not been kind to the woman. Her skin sagged, lines of care written deeply on her forehead and bracketing her mouth, and dark age marks discolored even the small expanse of skin revealed by her clothing. But her eyes were still clear and sharp as Sakura's knives and she didn't quite trust her.
She said nothing, though, just as she'd said nothing about the wisdom of putting a jinchuriki within easy reach of the Akatsuki. Kakashi-senpai was in command of the mission and he, like Tsunade-sama, had earned the right to give her orders.
"Lovely," Soudai pronounced in tones of disdain as she summoned him. She couldn't tell by his sweeping glance whether he meant the scenery or the company. Kakashi-senpai was knees-deep in eager ninken, but while they were better scent-trackers and one a decent sight hound, Soudai was the superior chakra sensor.
It was a measure of Naruto's focus that he made no comment about the cat as they moved out, Chiyo leading them to the area where they'd discovered Kankuro and their trail began. Soudai chose not to run alongside, instead draping himself across Sakura's shoulders and keeping himself steady by means of chakra.
"Of course they'd be smart about dispersing their trail," Kakashi-sensei murmured when they'd arrived and the ninken had declared that it smelt like something had traveled down all the trails leading away from the site.
Soudai leapt nimbly from his perch, pacing the area as he examined the trailsign before declaring, "This is the one Sakura and I will follow. You may do as you please."
Kakashi-senpai's brow twitched faintly in irritation. "On the off chance that his highness has gotten it wrong, would you mind following the other trails?" he asked his ninken.
A mixed chorus to the tune of "You've got it, Boss!" was his answer and the dogs split into pairs to follow the other tracks. Soudai returned to his sentinel post on Sakura's shoulder and she raised a hand to idly stroke his head as he settled in, needlessly digging claws into the reinforced shoulders of her flak jacket.
They traveled in tense silence for the rest of the day, resting only briefly as they waited on moonrise, the pattern stretching into the next day. Sakura had fallen into the rhythm of hard travel, but she kept herself alert to their surroundings, though they encountered no one as they crossed from spare deserts into the greenery of the Land of Rivers. It was only there, the sound of her footsteps being swallowed by the lush, forgiving grasses that she felt Soudai tense. "Someone ahead," he whispered in her ear and within a few distance-eating steps she sensed the presence too. Her eyes caught the flicker of red clouds writ on a dark cloak—Akatsuki.
"Stop!" Kakashi-sepai ordered, throwing his arm in front of Naruto, whose head jerked back like he'd been struck.
"Uchiha...Itachi!" he snarled between clenched teeth.
Partnering with Kakashi-senpai had taught her a lot she'd never have known about Sharingan, though Gozen-san had taught her more. The old woman hadn't hesitated to tell her anything, while Kakashi-senpai had been reluctant to experiment with the new Mangekyo phase in front of her, though he'd regularly let her spar against him with the Sharingan active. Though he could now deactivate the doujutsu at will, he still wore his forehead protector pulled down across that eye, jokingly telling her that it threw off his depth perception to have two functioning eyes. She understood that he did it in part to protect her, because meddling in clan secrets like that was dangerous even when the clan was mostly memory and gravestones.
So she knew enough not to meet the eyes of the man looming so large in front of them, but she wished that her hands didn't feel so cold with fear, the small hairs on the back of her neck prickling as a chill telegraphed itself down her spine. The cloak obscured his body, concealing his build and any armor he might have been wearing, covering even his hands which made her even more uneasy.
She hardly heard Chiyo's whispered advice to Naruto on ocular jutsu, her attention on the weight of Soudai shifting so that he crouched on one shoulder. "Something's not right," Soudai murmured, so low she almost couldn't make out his words.
Now what? she thought worriedly, her eyes skittering across their surroundings as she tried to see evidence of traps or further ambush.
Itachi had been silent, content to let them talk, but Sakura stilled like a rabbit before the hawk when he finally deigned to speak. "It has been a while, Kakashi, Naruto," he said, his voice pleasant, cultured, educated. Sakura couldn't help the prickle of unease that swept through her.
She and Kakashi-senpai had taken only one major mission before this—there'd been a man in the Land of Snow who'd spoken like that. And when she'd shown him his mother in a genjutsu, he'd stabbed her over and over and over, his hips thrusting forward with the final blow and his voice had been warm and sincere when he'd complimented her on her illusion, telling her it had been almost as good as the first time.
Sakura settled her hands on her knives to ward off trembling. That one had manipulated their battle from the beginning, using her fear and her anger to distract from their surroundings. She'd used chakra-enhanced strength and found herself slipping into the frigid waters of a frozen-over lake; she could only imagine that Uchiha Itachi would be much, much worse.
"Well, you know how it is," Kakashi-senpai drawled with too much tension in his voice and far too little of his usual dry humor. "You get busy, you forget to visit. Luckily, the last time you came 'round was pretty memorable. As in, the usual tricks don't work against you and those eyes. But it's not exactly a picnic for you, either, is it? Those eyes come with a cost," he said, shifting his forehead protector out of the way so that his own Sharingan was on display, though not his own Mangekyo shift. "Not just in chakra. How much of your eyesight have you lost?"
Sakura glanced sharply over at her partner, who'd never mentioned any trouble with his sight, which was stupid and irresponsible and not something she could afford to think about right now.
"Kakashi," and there was a depth there that had her attention immediately returned to their opponent, who she had an alarming feeling was now aware of Kakashi-senpai's Mangekyo shift. "Are you...?"
Kakashi-senpai was silent for a heartbeat and then he shifted the conversation. "Anyway, you won't catch me napping this time," he said.
"Yeah!" Naruto added. "And if you think I'm the same, well, you're making a big mistake."
"I'll take care of him, Naruto," Kakashi-senpai said sharply.
"...oh? You might be careful, making such boasts," came Itachi's smooth voice. "After all, if you die and I take the jinchuriki, who's left to plant camellias on your grave?"
Camellias? Not red spider lilies? Why would anyone plant—no. No. Please no. As she looked up to meet eyes as red as the higanbana and just as steeped in death, she thought that if she survived this, she would do something terrible to Jiraiya.
And just like that, when his eyes met hers, she found herself caught in a genjutsu. It was subtle—very subtle—but it wasn't inescapable. That fact made her relax only fractionally, but she still drew her knives from their sheathes.
"Our time is limited, so if you have questions, ask them quickly." Uchiha Itachi said without preamble. "Jiraiya warned me that he hadn't made you aware that the request was mine, so I expect some resistance."
Gozen-san had been right, Sakura thought bleakly, when she'd implied that it hadn't been a psychotic break or just sheer pleasure in the killing that had motivated Uchiha Itachi to do what he'd done. She liked the world a little less every time one of the old woman's scathing statements proved to have merit, because Gozen-san's world was relentlessly indifferent when it wasn't actively cruel and she didn't like to think she lived in that world.
But Jiraiya, for all his faults, wouldn't have sent her to help him otherwise.
She tried to believe that this was some trap, that somehow Itachi had intercepted the Toad Sage's communication, that he'd tortured her contact until he'd confessed, but the reasonable voice in her head sneered at that and asked why Uchiha Itachi would bother. If he wasn't her contact, he'd have killed him or her and that would have been the end of it.
She both wanted and did not want to ask questions, a whole floodgate of anxiety threatening to overflow, but she instead tried very hard to pretend that she trusted that Jiraiya would not get her killed.
At least not one purpose, came the cynical voice.
"What do you need me to do?" she asked simply, surprising him. Or at least she thought she had, but he was difficult to read. All his emotion lay in his eyes and she was afraid of those eyes.
And because she was trapped anyway, dead anyway, she took a moment to study the face of the man who'd ruined Sasuke's life while doing 'the best thing he'd ever done for this village'. She'd seen photographs, but all of them had been of a younger Itachi. From before a village of assassins learned to call him a mass murderer. He was like Zen in that he was more beautiful than handsome, those deadly eyes elegant and heavily lashed.
"It is fortuitous," Itachi said after a moment's silence, "that we were able to meet in this time and this place. If we hadn't, the chances that you would be able to observe this jutsu in person again are slight. I had other plans, but I think this one offers the best chances of success. You might not have noticed it yet, but I am not actually present—it is why I cannot use my Sharingan to compress time so that we could speak at length. The technique belongs to Sasori of the Red Sands—he has made someone into a living puppet, a vessel for my chakra, who wears my appearance. I think it would suffice for the purpose I intend to put it to, so I suggest that you watch closely and lay claim to the body when this battle is finished.
"It will take us three days to finished extracting the Ichibi; the host will not survive the process if you fail to interrupt us. The process of extracting a bijū is...demanding, upon both mind and body," he continued unperturbedly, as if he hadn't just pronounced Gaara's death sentence. "We shall be left to our own devices for several days following the end of the process, regardless of the outcome. On the fourth day, you will meet me at a group of cottages maintained in the north of Fire Country by a Yado-san—we will have the Tsubaki House." Sakura tried to shove away the thought that she'd be alone with a man who'd killed more people in a single night than most shinobi would in their entire career, instead memorizing directions as he gave them to her in that terribly uninflected voice.
And because she was afraid, when he'd finished speaking, it was Sakura who dispelled the genjutsu, her eyes narrowing as she searched for the flaw that would say, This body is not what it seems, but if this was a jutsu, it was a fearsome one. She couldn't tell if she could actually sense an active genjutsu or if she was simply looking so hard for one her mind was tricking itself.
Then there was no more time for observation, because Kakashi-senpai had torn through Itachi like he was paper—and there was more substance to paper, for when the smoke had cleared, Itachi's doppelgangers flanked them on all sides. Naruto's hand dipped into his kunai pouch, but Sakura was following Soudai, who'd launched himself from her shoulder.
She ignored the shadows clones that Naruto 'killed' with his kunai, ignored the way he froze, because if he could face Orochimaru at eleven he could survive meeting an Itachi out to frighten him, for Soudai was the unerring needle of a compass. Kakashi-senpai drew level with them and then surged ahead, for while he might not like her cat, he respected his skills.
Their Itachi didn't attempt another genjutsu snare. He just moved, like fire sparking or lightning striking, shifting from restful stillness in one heartbeat to the final handsign of a fire-style jutsu in the next.
"Sakura!" Kakashi-senpai bit out sharply.
"Got it!" she retorted, sheathing her knives as Kakashi-senpai and Soudai skidded to a halt, leaving Sakura facing a roaring, immense sphere of fire that promised searing heat even at this distance. Sakura flexed her fingers through her own handsigns and with a sharp, primal cry, she drove her fist into the earth, which gave with a shudder and a groan, a rampart of earth thrusting itself up like prow of a ship. The fire broke over it, spilling harmlessly aside. She felt Kakashi-sensei's tap on her shoulder as used his own doton manipulation to go underground and when he'd vanished, she let the earthwork crumble, the rubble hiding her partner's exit, his own shadow clone at Sakura's shoulder.
She could have let her eyes flicker up then, shown Itachi Kanashibari, the technique she'd sacrificed a lifetime's worth of peace of mind for, but even if he wasn't what everyone thought he was, he was still dangerous enough that she wanted a weapon he wouldn't anticipate. Her knives back in her hands, she surged forward at clone-senpai's side. Itachi's eyes slid towards the clone, which jerked to an unsteady halt.
It was time enough for the real Kakashi-senpai to burst upward from the earth as Itachi's back, his Raikiri driving deep into the missing-nin's flesh with such force that his hand erupted from the front of his chest still swathed in arcing lightning. It bowed Itachi's body forward and it was only Sakura close enough to see the faint, satisfied smirk that creased his lips as he fell and became someone else.
Chiyo sucked in a surprised breath as she drew close and Kakashi-senpai cautiously rolled the body onto it's back. "That's...that's Yura," she said. "A jounin from Suna."
"Wait," Naruto demanded, "you mean that wasn't Itachi?"
"No," Kakashi-senpai remarked grimly. "That wasn't even close."
"I don't understand. That wasn't just a transformation technique, no way," Naruto said.
"You're right about that," Chiyo agreed. "I don't understand how they did it, but it's clear that the object of this was to buy themselves time. They've probably already begun the extraction."
"Then we have to hurry," Naruto replied, fists clenching tight and the whispers on his cheeks becoming more deeply etched as his temper flared.
He looked to Kakashi-senpai, who nodded and said, "We'll push on before resting."
Sakura knew she needed the body; she also knew it wasn't wise to acquire it with Chiyo looking on. So it was a genjutsu-self that fell in with them—Kakashi-senpai would probably ask, but better him than answering to Suna's interrogators.
Sakura reached behind her for the storage scroll that she'd finally managed to save up for, unfurling it beside the body. Acting quickly on the assumption that she wasn't good enough to fool the Spider for long, she sealed the Suna-nin's body inside the scroll and then sprinted toward the squad, until she ran within her ghost. She dismissed her illusion then, which made Kakashi-senpai give her a sharp look, but if Chiyo took note, she said nothing.
Sakura wished she could trust that silence.