A/N: Reading over the manga to refresh my memory of this arc—and all I come away with is that canon-Kakashi chooses teaching moments that make me deeply, deeply skeptical of the fact he was ever entrusted with students. Best time for a lecture? Obviously when facing or in pursuit of missing-nin capable of capturing jinchuriki and killing Kage.
I am still unhappy with this chapter, but here it is.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Forty-
Arachnophobia
They were again waiting for the moonrise, Sakura bedded down semi-comfortably and well on her way toward sleep—the ninken would be taking the watch so that the shinobi could get as much rest as possible—when the soft noise of someone settling next to her dragged her back up to full alertness.
Naruto, judging by the smell.
Not that he didn't launder his clothes, but you could only eat a diet that unvaried for so long before your body and your house became haunted by it. Soudai's fresh-fish-in-the-morning demands might have improved the texture of her hair, but she'd given up on trying to completely expunge the smell from the kitchen.
"Hey," he said very softly, "can we talk?"
Sakura considered telling him no, because tired was one thing she didn't want to be when confronted with the men capable of taking Gaara, but the part of her that kept trimming her hair recognized that there might not be any more time for talking after this. "Yeah," she said just as softly.
With the rustling noise of clothing shifting, Naruto stretched himself out next to her, lacing his hands behind his head and staring resolutely up at the sky. He was silent long enough that Sakura caught herself sinking slowly back to sleep, so she was startled when he finally chose to speak. "I don't know how much you know about Orochimaru," he said.
He left the statement so open-ended she had to ask, "What about him?"
"I mean—you know after he left the village? After he showed back up, he was part of the Akatsuki for a while. And, I was thinking...after we beat the hell out of them for what they did to Gaara, we should ask if they know where he's hanging out now. 'Cause, y'know, we've only got a little time left before Sasuke..."
Sakura didn't spend much time nowadays thinking about Sasuke; if her eyes caught occasionally on the picture that lived on her nightstand, she had more regret for growing up—which was ugly and brutal and hard—than she had for someone else's decisions. Sometimes she looked at his dark eyes and saw only a stranger, someone who'd she'd never really known, because how could that boy she'd studied with more intensity than any jutsu have grown up to be a traitor? Then her gaze would slide down to Tatsuo's shattered glasses and the feelings that welled up at the sight of them washed away the lingering remnants of regret she might feel over Sasuke.
While his defection had hurt her, that wound had healed up enough that it was only sore when someone prodded it. People no longer cursed him in the street and her by extension; she was no longer just the Uchiha's teammate. It wasn't like Tatsuo's death, which sometimes still took her by surprise—she'd forget, just for a moment, and think I'll tell Tatsuo next time I see him and then the grief would be a brief, blinding pain when she remembered that she'd see him when she was dead and not before.
Sasuke's leaving hadn't been like that, because all she and Sasuke had ever shared was something that might have been a team with more time and effort. Their camaraderie had never made it off the battlefield—Sasuke had been at his kindest when the threat of death or failure was nearest—and after all this time she had enough perspective to see that Sasuke hadn't been interested in having friends. Not that she'd likely been worth being friends with, but she could have been Senju Tobirama reborn and it wouldn't have mattered.
She wondered if Naruto, who could still shout at the Hokage like a toddler having a temper tantrum without an iota of shame, had ever wondered if this was one mission that was doomed to failure before it even started. "Naruto...Sasuke, he-he's been with Orochimaru for a long time now. He's not the same person he was when he left the village."
"You don't know that," came Naruto's swift reply, low and furious. "I mean, sure, he went with him to start with, but maybe he realized how stupid a decision it was and couldn't leave. For all we know, Orochimaru keeps him locked up in an underground room somewhere."
Sakura thought that Orochimaru didn't needs walls of stone or bars to keep someone prisoner, but she didn't say so aloud. Talking to Naruto was still strange and slightly uncomfortable and she couldn't be certain how much frankness was allowed. He sometimes seemed older, more worldwise, and then he was in the Hokage's office and god that still bothered her. She didn't care if he didn't speak politely to his elders—well, not much, anyway-but Tsunade-sama had earned her place and if he really wanted to be Hokage, he should at least respect the office if he couldn't be bothered to acknowledge the kunoichi who sat in the chair.
In the Academy, she hadn't understood that Naruto felt loneliness and isolation, let alone that those feelings likely lay behind the way he acted out, but sometimes when it was the snide voice in her head directing her thoughts and making commentary on his conversations with Chiyo, she wondered if he thought that was worse than Kakashi-senpai's childhood. Which, as far as she could tell, hadn't happened at all.
But Kakashi-senpai hadn't said a word, had just explained to Chiyo the bond that Naruto felt lay between himself and the other jinchuriki with that distant, self-effacing humor of his and Sakura wasn't certain it was her place to make a fuss when Kakashi-senpai clearly preferred that his past remained unexamined by prying eyes and ears.
"The jutsu that sealed Shukaku inside Gaara. I did it," Chiyo had admitted. "I did it to protect the village and the villagers suffered for it; now the village that I spent my career trying to bring to its knees is the one who's come to save us. Maybe I wasted all that time."
Kakashi-senpai had reassured her that she was still young enough to achieve anything she wanted, but Sakura kept glancing thoughtfully over at Chiyo until the old woman had noticed.
"Something to say?" she'd asked.
"...did they ever consider appointing you as Kazekage?" Sakura asked. "When the Third disappeared, I mean. You weren't older than our Sandaime and you'd been a major influence in village politics for a long time. You had control of the Puppet Corps—you'd basically trained them yourself."
Chiyo threw her head back and laughed. "And now I know the two of you are trying to make me blush. If you'd seen our Council, you'd know why. To this day, we don't have a single woman on it. I think young Temari will be the one to change that, but at first they listened to her only because she was first the daughter of a Kazekage and then because she was the sister of the Fifth. It took work to make them recognize her as a person. I wasn't interested enough in the title to make a stand for it; I was content to play puppetmaster off the battlefield as well as on it. That is one thing I am glad to have lived to see begin to change—someday perhaps we will have as many kunoichi as we do shinobi." Then she laughed again. "Or at the very least, maybe we'll catch up to Konohagakure's ratio."
Recognizing that her thoughts were drifting and that she was being uncharitable because she'd been running for days on end with only the promise of a confrontation with S-ranked ninja to look forward to, Sakura refocused her attention on Naruto. "We'll ask," she promised.
But that was the only thing she promised.
[Kill Your Heroes]
Sakura was relieved to see Neji and Guy's teams, even if the Hyūga flushed and refused to meet her eyes. When ignoring the issue of her reading preferences hadn't worked, she'd scraped up the courage to attempt to talk about it, but that had only resulted in the discovery that Tenten snorted when pressed too hard with laughter. Now it was Genma snickering and she knew that if she happened to survive this, she was going to hear about it later. He and Neji had been pulled from another mission; Guy and Shino had just returned to the village from after an assessment mission and hadn't even had time to turn in a verbal report before being sent out again.
But their reunion was brief—they hardly had enough time to greet Naruto before they were following the directions provided by the Byakugan to destabalize the five-point seal that was providing a barrier to the cave. The trail had led them to one of the great plateaus that dotted the country of Rivers, like islands in a sea of trees, the stone have been worn into its present configuration by an ancient glacial retreat. Their targets appeared to be sheltered in a cave, which wasn't that unusual, though mostly bandits didn't manage to seal themselves inside so securely. Judging by what they knew of the men inside, Sakura would guess the elaborate sealing array was the work of Sasori of the Red Sands, perhaps using another infiltrator.
As if the hulking great rock wasn't enough. Sakura surveyed it with narrowed eyes through the lenses of her combat glasses. "The reports from Suna—they described an explosives expert and a puppetmaster. Do you think one of them is capable of earth manipulation on this scale? Neji didn't say anything about anyone else inside."
"Does it matter?" Naruto demanded, his eyes wild and his expression making it clear that patience was not one virtue he was willing to practice today.
"If someone in there can manipulate a stone like this, I want to know about it before I walk into a cave and they bring the mountain down on my head," Sakura replied tightly.
"But you can use doton techniques, can't you?"
Sakura glanced incredulously from the rock to Naruto and then back to the rock again. "There are doton techniques," she said finally, "and then there are doton techniques." While she could use doton manipulation to shatter a rock this size as an extension of her chakra-enhanced strength, her ability to manipulate the element in more productive ways was limited to smaller structures.
"It's likely the explosives expert," Kakashi-senpai said. "Unless you disagree?" he asked, turning the question on Chiyo.
"It has been many years since Sasori left the village," was Chiyo's reply. "I wouldn't even venture to guess what that boy is capable of nowadays."
Kakashi-senpai nodded. "Still, I think I'll flush out our explosives expert and leave the other one to you three. The others will reinforce our position, but I don't think they'll let us wait around for them to get back. Hyūga, Shirunai, you can help Sakura's team; Guy, if it isn't too much trouble, you and Aburame can help me if I haven't already brought down the target."
"By yourself?" Naruto asked sharply, over the sound of confirmation from the others. "You don't want us to pair off?"
The edges of Kakashi-senpai's lips curled up in a smile, his eyes crinkling. "Sensei might have a trick or two you haven't seen yet," he said, reaching out to ruffle Naruto's hair, which made the younger ninja scowl. Kakashi-senpai's hand curled into a fist and he gently thumped his former student on the head. "Remember," he cautioned, "keep a leash on that temper and chain of command means Sakura's in charge when I'm not there."
Startled, Naruto glanced over at her, which made Sakura straighten uncomfortably. Then, when she considered whether she'd rather be uncomfortable or go inside this tomb without a battle strategy, she decided that she'd shove aside all the complexities of working with Naruto again. She opened her mouth to speak, paused, and then reminded herself that her death was waiting behind that stone.
And if she hesitated, it would catch her.
"Don't engage him directly," she told Naruto, whose expression scrunched up in a prelude to a protest. She cut him off before he could speak. "No. Now is not the time for a field test for whether or not the Kyūbi can safely metabolize complex poisons. A puppetmaster walks into battle with an army—you'll be mine. And whatever you do, don't let any of his weapons touch you."
She could see the muscles in his jaw flex, but he nodded tightly. "'Kay," he said roughly. "We'll do it your way."
"Well," Kakashi-senpai said, leaping agilely up to crouch over the seal. "Sounds like the others are ready. Why don't you knock, Sakura?"
And so saying, he ripped the paper from the rock's surface.
"Get flush against the cliff and watch out!" Sakura snarled as she surged forward—recalling that Neji had reported that Gaara was prone on the floor, the Akatsuki closer to the rockface, and prayed that this wouldn't end this mission in more ways than one—her fist impacting the rock face with enough force she would have shattered every bone in her hand if she'd had less control of her chakra.
As it was, the stone reacted like it had seen the loving attentions of a demolitions team. It exploded inward, thousands of shards of rock turning the interior of the cave into a killzone.
Or it would have, had not a counter-explosion further parted out the boulder and sent it whistling like shrapnel toward Sakura's position. With a smothered curse, she threw herself prone against the ground, raising a much smaller barrier than she'd used to divert Uchiha Itachi's fire technique.
When the sound of rubble settling had finished, her hair and back now coated with a fine layer of crushed rock that threatened to pour down her collar and itch like nobody's business, she shoved herself up and joined the others in the interior of the cave.
There were two shinobi inside, just as promised, and the young, blond one scoffed at them. "Ne, ne, Sasori no Danna, did you see that? That might have been exciting, if it had actually worked. But you might have hurt your poor little Kazekage, you know. Well," he said with a chuckle, "not that it would have really mattered."
"I'm just glad they stopped gossiping outside," the other ninja replied. "I was getting tired of waiting."
The other ninja—it was he who'd left those strange tracks, which hadn't resembled any human she'd ever tracked before and had drawn comment from the ninken. A puppet body? Sakura thought uncertainly. Any deformation of the human spine that severe would have left a person unable to walk without excruciating pain; it also should have started manifesting in childhood, which Chiyo hadn't mentioned, or she supposed it could have been an illness.
Sakura favored the puppet explanation, as her luck didn't tend to trend in the direction of half-crippled opponents.
"Well, I'm sorry you feel that way," Kakashi-senpai drawled, but Naruto stepped stiffly forward, every line of his body stiff with tension.
"Where is Gaara?" he demanded, baring teeth gone too sharp to be human, his hair rippling with the force of a chakra that made Sakura's lizard-brain tremble and threaten to bolt. Raw chakra like this usually didn't make her think of anything in particular, but this was like the hot, blasting winds that plagued the deserts of Sunagakura, like the breath of an angry beast.
It reminded her of Sasuke's curse mark too much for comfort.
Sakura was nursing a private theory, one that ran a little like this: the Kyūbi might have worn the shape of a fox, but it wasn't a fox, not really. It wasn't animal instinct that Naruto reverted to when he was like this, but a stupid, unthinking rage. There was nothing subtle about it, but when you had this kind of strength, did you really need surprise? He surprised her, though, keeping himself in place through a force of will visible in the trembling of his hands, which were fisted tight enough that blood was trickling from between his fingers.
She might have had to clench her teeth, but that Akatsuki only looked amused. Or the blond did. "Oh, him, hmm? He's right here," he said, shifting aside so that they had a better view of Gaara.
His lifesigns were so faint as to be invisible from where she was standing; it was only the knowledge that Neji would have pronounced him dead if that was the case that kept her from believing it.
But alive now didn't mean much, not when there were two Akatsuki members between them and the fallen Kazekage. If they hadn't brought Naruto along, perhaps they might have just abandoned him and foregone the fuss of a confrontation, but they'd never know whether or not that was true.
Naruto's eyes—strange, feral—settled on Gaara's unmoving form. And then, ever so slowly, they settled on first the blond, then the puppetmaster. "You're dead," he promised. "Now, give me Gaara back."
"Hey, hey," the blond laughed. "You're doing that wrong, you know. You're supposed to promise to let us live if we hand him over to you. Or," and his voice turned sly, "offer to trade yourself for him. Since you're a jinchuriki and all, we might have a deal."
"I'm not a liar," Naruto promised them soberly. His eyes flicked over to Kakashi-senpai, a silent demand that said if the older ninja wasn't willing move, he would.
Kakashi-senpai's response was a put-upon sigh, but almost faster than even Sakura's chakra-enhanced eyes could track, he was darting forward. Unfortunately, he was up against S-class ninja, the blond throwing a handful of small—honestly, they looked like tiny figurines, but they flew, as in deviated from a straight path and then detonated almost in senpai's face flew. Kakashi-senpai had managed to avoid the force of the blast, but the larger bird-sculpture that had been looming in the background swallowed down Gaara's body like a pelican would a fish, the shinobi leaping astride its back in a movement that spoke of familiarity with the tactic.
And, just like that, it took to the air and Sakura tried not to let herself contemplate just how much chakra it would take to put that much weight in the air and keep it there. She consoled herself with the thought that senpai had been famous even with a parasitic eye—and when they'd mopped up the trouble on their end, Guy-senpai and Shino would make certain that they brought Gaara back.
Naruto darted toward the entrance of the cavern, heedless of his orders, but Sakura's hand closed around his arm.
"No," she hissed at him.
"But Gaara...!" he snarled back at her and for a moment her hand prickled unpleasantly at the point of contact, like fireants biting at her skin.
"Senpai's orders stand," she insisted. "Don't you trust him?"
He didn't give her words, just a frustrated roar of rage and frustration as they'd apparently reached the end of Naruto's tolerance; where there'd been one blond-haired shinobi quivering with tension there were suddenly a dozen and a full eight of them were twisting back toward Sasori and charging forward, hands going in an identical movement to equipment pouches and flinging a barrage of kunai toward their opponent.
Who blocked them all without blinking with a long, segmented tail that arched over the back of the puppet like a scorpion's. That it sprouted like a tongue from a face that took up the whole of the back just made the whole thing grotesque, which might have been the intention.
"It's called Hiruko," Chiyo told her curtly. "Think of it as a suit of armor, with all the capabilities of any other puppet. Except with this one, you won't be able to watch his body language. While I might have created the Puppet Corps, it's Sasori who created the modern combat puppet. The ones you've seen Kankuro use? They're his design. From before he defected from the village."
Sakura cringed internally, but externally she spared Chiyo a short nod before as she sprinted forward to follow-up Naruto's rush. She didn't pull her knives—wood and metal would only dull them when they were meant for flesh and her control over air-nature chakra was tentative enough that she had to concentrate on giving her black knife an edge that could cut through anything.
She couldn't do that and dodge senbon launched from a puppet's open mouth without losing her forward momentum or her life, so she didn't. Her throat was tight with anxiety, but intense conditioning kept her breathing and her heart rate even.
Thank you, ninken, she thought as she shoved chakra into her feet and skidded to one side to avoid another spray of senbon. She'd learned never to leap if there was any other way—she didn't have a deft enough touch with air to maneuver in midair. Sasori lifted Haruko's misshapen left arm, palm outward like he was warding her off.
Somehow, she failed to be surprised when the whole construct from the elbow down launched at her. She swept to one side, avoiding it, but almost got herself turned into a hedgehog when it detonated and launched more of the tiny, spiky needles in a wild spray. Only a hasty wall of earth yanked up without handsigns—thin and so unstable it hardly held against the impact of the needles—saved her from certain poisoning.
She let the wall crumble, righted herself where she'd gone slightly off-balance and plunged forward again, accompanied this time by a fresh barrage of kunai from her allies. From the corner of her eye she caught sight of the tail and gritted her teeth, but when its path was suddenly arrested she didn't spend much time on why. Instead she took a leap of faith, shoving off against the hard-packed earth and launching herself into the air, her foot impacting with the carved nose of the face leering up at her from Hiruko's back.
It was like flattening a cockroach, the carved body giving beneath her with a crunch, but unfortunately no soft innards leaked from the exoskeleton. Instead she was suddenly standing almost nose-to-nose with a pretty boy whose soft, indifferent smile made her feel like she'd swallowed lead. Her mind was trained to catalogue impressions, sensations, so it noted the eerie, almost unnatural perfection of his skin, the strange way his eyes reflected light, the scent of some fragrant wood and an equally delicate oil. She heard Chiyo, faintly, exclaim in surprise, but he was very, very close and she didn't have the attention to spare.
"You might almost be interesting," he told her, shifting only slightly to let a large windmill shuriken do no more than ruffle his hair, which Sakura took as an opportunity to retreat to a safe distance. Safer distance, she amended. "If you don't disappoint me, perhaps I will do you a favor and let you experience true art. It has been difficult, finding kunoichi worth my time. I wouldn't want to make you wait, so I think I'll show you the prize of my collection. If only because he was so difficult to acquire."
He produced a scroll from within his cloak and a deft maneuver of his wrist revealed about a foot of the interior, which bore a single character. San. Three. Three puppets? Sakura thought as she watched the puppeteer carefully. No, sounded like just one.
Sasori didn't leave them to wonder for very long, but when the smoke cleared, Sakura thought perhaps some more taunting might have been in order to prepare her for the figure that hung suspended before them.
The Third Kazekage.
She heard Chiyo's hiss of recognition, but it was competing with her own involuntary sound of dismay. In terms of strength relative to their other Kage, the Third had been unequivocally Suna's strongest. Somehow, Sakura just couldn't make herself believe that Sasori had made a puppet as a homage. There was something here, something strange and sinister.
Chiyo figured it out before she did. "That doesn't just look like the Third, does it? What have you been doing, Sasori?" she accused.
"Why that tone?" Sasori challenged. "Behold the fruit of your teachings, old hag."
"What part of what I taught you involved the deaths of three Kazekage?" Chiyo retorted. "Ten years ago the Third disappeared and now both the Fourth and the Fifth, dead at your hands or through you being complicit with the plans of that snake. If it was only degrading yourself by becoming a criminal, well, I'd have been content to let my line end naturally. As it is—well, I can't lay down for my dirtnap while my grandson is intent on tearing down everything I've built up."
Her words were sharp with feeling; Sasori only blinked languidly and corrected her. "I wasn't actually involved with the Fourth. I just let Orochimaru use one of my agents. He would have brought him down even without my help."
"So you helped Orochimaru kill Gaara's dad?!" Naruto demanded.
"Even though he's no longer a member of the organization, he and I still trade favors."
"The kind of favors that means you know which rock he's hiding under?"
Sasori's head dropped to one side. She thought in someone else it might have been a birdlike gesture, but in him it sent of quiver of unease up from her toes, because he'd looked for a moment like nothing more than a puppet whose strings had been fumbled. There was something inhuman there, like there'd been in that forest with Orochimaru.
And unlike Orochimaru, she didn't think he'd be content with toying with them.
"I think that's met our quota of small talk," Sasori said in the same moment that he sent the Third swooping toward them like some vengeful spirit. Not toward Sakura, who was nearest, but toward Chiyo, its arm sprouting blades until it was a wing feathered with things that could rip and tear.
Sakura crushed the instinct to treat the puppet as her enemy; no matter how elaborate, it was only a weapon, like a sword, like an illusion, and you fought the person wielding a weapon, not the weapon itself. This was one fight that not one of them, not even Naruto of the bijū-enhanced healing, could afford to let go on for very long. Walking away from a fight with an S-class ninja was already a victory. The probability of leaving that fight without a single injury that breached the protection of the skin?
Maybe someone with a doujutsu like Uchiha Itachi's could have done it, but Sakura couldn't.
She wasn't even on the level of Kakashi-senpai. She wasn't good enough to cover for the mistakes of others, not in a fight like this, could only flood her eyes and body with chakra and press forward.
She caught a twist in Sasori's lips just before he made a slight motion with his left hand, which was her only warning before she was suddenly awash in a sea of grasping hands, like suddenly being ducked in a tank of upset squid. The kunai that launched themselves from between the long, ropy cables that masqueraded as arms might have just been hooks set in tentacles—it was only because she was busy dodging them that she caught the shadow of the ropes that would have made them makeshift harpoons.
But because she was busy dealing with the real and present threat of impalement, she'd failed to notice the canisters until they deployed.
Nose, mouth, throat—the sensitive tissues, the mucous membranes, and the list would have included her eyes if it weren't for her combat glasses—it was like someone had lit thermite in the nerves there, an awful, screaming pain that made inroads toward her lungs. It took long moments for her to realize that it wasn't just her nerves screaming, she was too, and it took a force of will to stop, to still the heaving motion of a body desperate for clean air, to hold her breath when it felt like she was holding something that burned and scorched inside.
Nerve gas, the little thinking part of her brain registered. Localized, limited dispersal.
And, I'm asking senpai for a gas mask for my birthday, even as she forced limbs to move, using chakra to shove herself in a wild arc that just about sent her tumbling.
Several Narutos were instantly at her side, asking questions, demanding a response, but Sakura took several shuddering breaths, feeling the rawness in her throat, in her nose, the slow pins-and-needles fade of pain and then she charged doggedly back toward Sasori.
She knew that Naruto had been serious before, intent and barely controlled, but hearing her scream had apparently crossed another invisible line. The Rasengan that tore through the mass of arms and left the Third's body twisted and mangled on one side was enormous, way outside what Naruto had been capable of when he'd left.
Unfortunately, the Third was no longer human. And when his head swung to one side and those lifeless eyes seemed to be staring at them, Sakura had the eerie feeling that Sasori had let the strike hit.
"Tsk," Chiyo hissed from somewhere behind her. "Stealing all the glory. Can't have myself sitting here like a useless lump, not when this is Suna's problem."
Sakura hadn't been keeping track of the old kunoichi, didn't dare look at what she was doing. But she was reassured that between Naruto and the woman who might have been the Third's successor in another world, they could hold off something that had the Third's face and likely his abilities, but none of his spirit.
Sasori's faint smile shifted to a sneer as Chiyo did something behind her. "I wonder what you think you're going to do with those toys."
Chiyo's chuckle was nothing like the hearty laughter she'd indulged in on the run here. This was the amusement of the Spider, full of venom. "The Mother and The Father? I think you, like all foolish children, will find yourself surprised."
She reminded herself of her allies' strength as the puppet-Third's mouth dropped open, steams of dark sand pouring out. She reminded herself of it with each pounding footstep as that sand took shape—spears and shields and once a sheer crushing mass—but she was equal to the challenge. What couldn't be dodged could be smashed into the ground through brute force, which fed her confidence, because these large, unwieldy geometric forms weren't the nightmare she'd feared.
Sasori allowed her to get within twenty steps of him before he made the nightmare real.
"Satetsu Kaihō," he told her conversationally before the world exploded into black spines.
Sakura skittered and stretched and twisted and somehow ended up fifteen feet in the air, nestled in the negative space between the bars of a black iron tree.
She felt the warm, heavy liquid sliding down her cheek, where she hadn't been quite able to turn her head fast and far enough.
Such a small cut. But enough to introduce the poison into her bloodstream and with her heart beating at its current wild tempo, it would travel fast. Almost as quickly as that information had filtered through her mind, her knife had scored as deeper gash over the shallow cut and her other hand glowed with medical chakra, forcing the veins and tiny capillaries to constrict, to spill the tainted blood down her face instead of into her body.
And then, with only the reassurance of Naruto's voice and Chiyo's as to their survival, she tried again to make her way to Sasori, slithering through the sharp-edged obstacle course that he'd left her with shunshin speed.
This time it was five steps.
Just five.
She didn't have time to dodge, just barely enough to redirect fractionally, to choose the point of entry for the spiked thing that had punched through the front of Sasori's Akatsuki cloak. It was a 'best of bad choices' situation, because there just weren't any good options for an impalement in the abdominal cavity, all those organs tightly packed together. She managed to direct it very low, slightly to one side—the part of her brain that spent do much time looking at medical texts and charts diagnosed she'd likely need immediate medical attention for a gastrointestinal perforation and though it was difficult to judge from this angle, he might have destroyed one of her ovaries.
That voice was very cold, very small, especially against the roar of pain. Her throat was still very tender from the gas, but the scream spilled out anyway. It was pain and rage and defiance, even against this, even when bladed wings snicked into place behind Sasori's back, shredding his cloak and revealing just how little of his humanity was left.
I will not die here!
With the strength of that thought, she poured chakra into a genjutsu, flinging it toward Sasori, who'd been dragging her in like a fish on a line. She'd known he wasn't human, but he still perceived and that was all she needed, that moment of hesitation. It wasn't one of her illusions, no, she didn't trust that would be enough, but she reached in and yanked up one of his, inspired the one clear shift of expression he'd revealed during this entire battle. The Mother and The Father. He'd been bored, impatient, but only that had managed to draw out real emotion.
She forced her unwilling body forward, which drove the corded knife deeper, but she had him down and pinned and her knife pressed against the strange canister rooted in his chest, which looked more organic than anything else.
His eyes met hers, clearly inhuman now, but still strangely steady, and part of Sakura seized up in it's a trap!, but the rest of her was poised to drive the knife home.
"Nothing to say?" he asked.
Her mind flickered to her promise to Naruto, then considered the man beneath her. How dangerous he was, the time she had left before either the poison stole her strength or the cramping in her abdomen became so violent she wouldn't be able to function. Naruto wanted to chase Sasuke and that was fine, but they'd get their answers somewhere else. Jiraiya was a spymaster and he owed her a favor.
She drove the knife home.