A/N: Just so you know, I blame all of you. That's right—it's your fault, with your supportive reviews, great comments, and awesome fanart, which prevents me from giving up fanfiction to concentrate on my original fiction. Shame on you all.
The newest offender on this list is Alumys, who did a fantastic version of Kagome from The Bone Eater over on deviant (spelled alumis there—Google-fu as usual).
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Fifty-Two-
Flying Toward the Sun
After the wild speculation of her childhood, it was almost disappointing to find out that beneath the mask Kakashi-senpai was only good-looking.
Not like Itachi was, or Zen was—the kind of eye-catching, breath-stealing beauty that was undeniable regardless of whether it was accompanied by debilitating personality flaws—but rather the more approachable kind of good-looking that was improved by acquaintance, fondness, and animation.
The skin that had been hidden beneath the mask was several shades paler than the skin that had spent years being exposed to sun and wind; there was a tiny scar at the left side of his mouth no longer than her pinky nail. Even at this hour, he didn't have much in the way of stubble, so he was likely one of those men who didn't grow facial hair well, as she couldn't imagine him bothering to shave twice a day.
It was really a pity, she thought with a kind of wry melancholy, that she wasn't attracted to Kakashi-senpai that way.
And then whatever thoughts she'd entertained about how he looked were torn away by what he'd said. "Rip holes in the world?" she asked sharply, her hand automatically coming up to frame his Sharingan eye, as if she could divine what techniques it made possible as easily as she could trace the chakra paths that made it function.
Some small part of her brain always asked whether she could recreate that route in someone else's brain, someone else's eyes and have something so close to a Sharingan it wouldn't matter what bloodline the bearer sprang from.
"Mm-hm," senpai hummed in the affirmative. When she would have opened her mouth and begun an interrogation on just how one discovered that such a technique was even possible, Kakashi-sensei slumped back to the mattress, biting his thumb and summoning a veritable wave of furry company that immediately got to work trampling on her ribs.
"Couldn't you have summoned them on the floor?" Sakura wheezed.
"And what sort of fun would that have been?" he asked with mock-innocence as he skillfully warded off eager tongues. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the cacophony of dogs, who were eager to express their opinion on cuddle party—which apparently ranked right up there with morning walks and extra treats.
In retaliation, Sakura summoned Soudai, who held his head high and stiff as he surveyed the roiling mass of bodies further down the bed. "Cretins," he sniffed haughtily and promptly abandoned her, leaping easily over the gap between beds to claim the empty one as his own.
[Kill Your Heroes]
Months piled up to become a year and more and they did not return to the village.
Witch and Hound hadn't become a household name, not by any stretch of the imagination—and without the inevitable notoriety of wartime Sakura really thought they were better shinobi for having avoided the notice of the masses—but they were certainly well-known by the mission office if the regularity with which they found missives awaiting them at prefectural offices were anything to go by.
They received news from the village itself far more irregularly than they received missions from it. However and whatever Naruto was doing, he wasn't making enough of a scandal that people outside it the village were talking about it, though she knew he'd made chunin.
That news came by way of Ino, who'd gone to a great deal of effort to make certain their paths crossed every few months. However, as he was no longer Sakura's teammate, Ino's interest was only nominal; it was partially habit and partially training that made her keep tabs on him.
Time had eroded much of the guilt Sakura had felt in regard to that almost totally lapsed relationship; without the common ground of being on the same team, it was only reasonable to expect that two people with such different personalities might grow apart.
The only reason she'd felt guilty in the first place was because the Academy had built up such unreasonable expectations for their genin team—they'd made it sound like it was something that would become their second family, a bond that would last forever. Which, in hindsight, was somewhat ridiculous—very few genin, no matter how intense their family training or their performance in the Academy, graduated with a specialization that was immediately useful to the village. And as they gained those specializations, teams were dissolved and reformed to suit the current needs of the village.
Her genin team had been doomed in the womb; even without Sasuke's betrayal, their wild imbalance would have sent them careening toward dissolution sooner rather than later.
On the rare occasions when she tried to understand why they had decided that that particular team, placed under Kakashi-senpai's dubious guidance, was a good idea, she could only conclude that it had been one last sentimental gesture, one last weakness in Sarutobi Hiruzen's twilight.
In contrast to her almost total ignorance on Naruto's advancement, she knew exactly how Ino was doing in her career and how she felt about it.
Sakura had listened to her describe how she appreciated the security of knowing exactly how her team was supposed to function and having all the support and training she needed for the role, but also the occasional feeling of being absolutely stifled by having been locked into a single path since birth. On the whole, though, when all was said and done, Ino felt that her satisfaction was to be found in exceeding the expectations placed on her rather than rebelling against them.
After all, her father had controversially decided that his daughter deserved to be the heir of their clan regardless of her gender; how could she fail to live up to that?
On the personal front, Ino had still been with the Tsukigawa boy she'd caught her with, but the last time they'd met Ino had confessed that she intended to break up with him when she returned to the village. It was nothing that Kaoru had done wrong, Ino had been quick to explain—so quick, in fact, that it hadn't required Sakura paying attention to her tone of voice to know that she was conflicted about her decision.
The problem was that Ino was certain that Kaoru was serious about her and Ino wasn't certain she was ready for the kind of serious that ended in a marriage. There was nothing that she particularly disliked about Kaoru except the fact that he was the first boy she'd dated and she didn't want him to be the only boy. She'd asked Sakura if that made her terrible and Sakura hadn't been able to give her a good answer.
Her own dating history hadn't prepared her to make any judgments to what was very clearly a morally grey area; it wasn't fair to Kaoru, but she could understand Ino's anxiety as well—they were only seventeen, after all, and while there was always the chance that the next mission might be their last, there was also the chance that they were going to be like Gozen-san and live for a long, long time with the choices they made.
Sakura had her own dilemmas in her personal life, but none so pressing as Ino's decision—though their last conversation had been weeks ago, so in theory it was not so much pressing as already carried out.
Aside from her actual "secret boyfriend," whom she'd graced with only two more perfunctory visits in the intervening time before declaring her healing finished and her part in that farce nearly over, she'd "cheated" on Itachi with Zen—if she'd really had a secret boyfriend, she'd certainly have visited him more often than she rendezvoused with Itachi and she had to go somewhere when she was establishing her cover.
Their first date had been a matter of luck and chance. The terms of their alliance with his village allowed them to pursue Konohagakure's criminals across the borders of the country that Takigakure was situated in, but when they'd discovered their target, he'd been partnered up with a rogue Taki-nin who had to be duly turned over to his country of origin. Both of them had been middling chūnin, so they'd separated; Kakashi to deliver his to the nearest prefectural office in their country and she to hand over the other one to Taki. She'd sought out Fū while she was there and while Fū had been out of the village, Zen had not.
Unlike Ino, she was not conflicted with Zen. He was not her forever boy, but he was beautiful and exciting and willing to obey the prime dating directive—he respected "no," even without her having to come out and say it. Sakura hadn't had sex with him yet and probably wouldn't; it wasn't just that awful thought: what if she found her forever boy and he was perfect otherwise but compared badly in bed?
It was also because whatever her stance on premarital sex—and despite the fact that some such activities were carried out at the village's behest, kunoichi were often still judged like it was something low and shameful and not at all like the triumphant seduction of a mark that a shinobi might undertake—she at least wanted to enter into such a relationship believing that it was going to last, whatever the actual outcome.
Sakura was also seventeen. While she'd been on a battlefield since she was eleven, that hadn't made her immune to insecurity. The idea of coolly propping open the appendix to Kongaragaru next to the pillow sent her into fits of blushing embarrassment. Sex was already an act of trust that was very easy for some shinobi and very difficult for others—to introduce something less than well-accepted into that relationship seemed to raise the hurdle impossibly high and yet Sakura wasn't prepared to pretend that her interests were anything but what they were.
She'd read some of the more mainstream romances, whose sex scenes had a strong element of insert-name-here. All the women enjoyed assertive, aggressive men, their default dialogue was "Harder!" because languid or gentle sex was not a thing with partners they'd rarely known before the start of the novel, and they had never met a sex act introduced by their partner that they didn't like.
And yet she still was not convinced that she was wrong for having opinions. But how did one find the courage to assert that she would never, ever perform oral sex and that she'd rather be the one on top and in control? And that if her partner wanted to make an issue of it, it would be something that he'd have to attempt to solve with words, rather than cowing her physically like the men in the movies and manga, as it was very, very unlikely that he would win when it came to brute force.
However, all these things lurked very low on her priority list, not just because she was far more interested in securing that theoretical long life than indulging in the hormonal impulse of the moment, but because if the situation had progressed to the point where she was required to shed her clothes at certain periods during the last several months, an awkward conversation would probably have ensued.
Though if anyone walked in on them at the moment, that would be awkward too, Sakura reflected wryly as she smiled into her arms where they were comfortably crossed in front of her chin. Sai was straddling her thighs as he used her back as a canvas, her hair carefully braided and pinned up so that it was out of the way. She was as bare as the day she was born except for a pair of boyshort panties, which had only embarrassed her about the first two times they'd done this. Well, provided that he was working on her back and not her front; that was still embarrassing.
It had only taken that long to realize that when Sai was looking at her, he didn't see an object of sexual desire—he saw only a human-shaped canvas. Part of this was probably shaped by the fact that he found her request more interesting than her body, whatever she felt about that; the other was that he'd been conditioned to sublimate human impulses into "useful" activities.
The time since they'd met wasn't enough for him to have overcome what had to have been a thorough and comprehensive system of emotional programming, but in these last few months of consistent meetings she'd witnessed a slow unfurling of Sai the person rather than Sai the shinobi. Sakura wasn't so self-centered as to attribute the cause to herself; at best she was only helping to reinforce that the change was both something desirable and worth the effort. Everything else was Sai.
And Sai disliked raw fish, enjoyed fried foods, and was experimenting with impressionist landscape painting as he tried to unbury responses to the world around him that weren't directly linked to its suitability as a combat environment. Even during those times, though, she never saw Sai more himself than when they were collaborating on the sealing array that had made her body at times a fantastic combination of inked artwork and intellectual exercise.
It had been Sai who'd assessed that applying the array she wanted as a complete work would at best kill her instantly and at worst cripple her chakra channels entirely. Instead, they'd been applying it in layers—and Sakura had finally discovered just how Sasori had gotten his ink on the inside of human flesh. Provided that the ink itself was infused with chakra—and here it was a very good thing that she'd been taking so many missions with senpai, because the ink was appallingly expensive—she could force it beneath her skin, making it invisible to the naked eye and a permanent and irreversible part of the array. Trying to separate the layers back out was extremely painful; she'd only tried it once out of a sense of curiosity.
While it was still on her skin, though, she could test how it interacted with the rest of the array and have Sai amend it if it was unstable or unreliable—you couldn't be too careful when you were filtering raw natural chakra into your own system, after all.
They were currently at the most pleasant stage of the process. Despite the mutual lack of attraction, there was something incredibly pleasant and sensual about the feel of his brush drifting over her skin, especially as the chakra in the ink reacted to the chakra she was very carefully and very evenly emitting from her skin in the sections Sai was working on, which would cause the chakra in the ink to bond to her internal chakra system. It was more tedious than difficult, at least for Sakura, but she was aware that most shinobi would have found it difficult if it had ever occurred to them to try.
Sai had, though to be fair he had also been using a shadow clone to apply his own seals at the time and was therefore suffering from the reduced abilities that came from separating out your consciousness. It was for this reason, rather than lack of chakra, that medic-nin like Tsunade-sama didn't use the forbidden technique in the field and those few infamous individuals throughout history that had the kind of chakra to do so simply hadn't cloned themselves into an army. Something someone should have told Naruto, way back when, Sakura had reflected wryly when Kakashi-senpai had taken it upon himself to actually explain how and why the technique worked.
Sai's seals were not a copy of her own; one bound him to silence on the fūinjutsu arrays and the journal from which they came—and he had been the one to insist on that—while the other was a counterpart to the modified "king" seal that was at this point was a dismal failure. Sakura was aware that Team Nine had required at least three people linked by the jutsu just to provide stability, but that was a more intimidating conversation than one about sex. Most people got around to having sex and presumably talking about it; Sakura imagined much fewer people were up to participated in fūinjutsu experiments, even leaving aside that the source of said seals was an ANBU team with a dubious concern for personal safety.
She'd asked Kakashi-senpai, who'd just raised his brows incredulously and dryly replied, "I think there's enough invasive experimentation in our relationship already."
Sakura thought timing was at least part of the issue on that; she hadn't been able to come up with a plausible excuse as to why she would suddenly "discover" the solution to the Sharingan's inevitable degradation. So she'd bided her time and a few less-than-pleasant men and women had helped her to discover what could be done in lieu of showing senpai a full illusion like she'd done with Itachi.
She had felt…dirty, when the idea had first occurred to her. But the thought had proved as insidious and terrible as Gozen-san had always promised her genjutsu could be and there had come a day when her ethical concerns had been outweighed by an alarming realization that as awe-inspiring as the ability to tear holes in the warp and weft of the world was, it was also probably going to leave Kakashi-senpai blind within five years.
And that was not acceptable.
Sometimes it seemed that all her lines were drawn in sand and when the tides of her life shifted, they were all drawn out to sea. This had worried her in the past and would worry her in the future. But it was Kakashi-senpai.
So she had swallowed down her hesitation; it wasn't hard to find evil people in the world, if you knew the right places to look and she'd gotten awfully good at looking while Witch and Hound had been on the prowl.
Sakura knew, instinctually and intellectually, that the fact they were awful people did not make it right, what she had done. Sometimes the guilt was gnawing, and she lived in fear that one day Kakashi-senpai might discover what had been done to secure his sight, but most of the time the vicious satisfaction of the knowledge that Kakashi-senpai's vision was safe—for she had been successful in correcting his eyes, as she had been successful in correcting Itachi's—and that he himself was safer for that was worth any amount of nightmares.
She felt Sai shift atop her, his weight settling more firmly on her thighs, which drew her out of her reverie. Sakura felt his fingers ghost over several parts of the pattern, never quite touching, but close enough that the fine hairs on her back prickled and a shiver worked its way up her spine and crested over her scalp. Sakura didn't otherwise move—fūinjutsu required a strange combination of surgical precision and artistic vision. Sakura had a lot more of the former than the latter and so left the application itself to Sai, but she knew better than to shift while he was at work on the array.
"This layer is complete," he pronounced. "How does it feel?"
Now the parts that she disliked began. The body drew in small amounts of natural chakra as a part of its basic function, processing it not unlike a tree might process sunlight, but intentionally drawing it in could cause wild cell mutation if done incorrectly. And if that mutilation progressed too far, it wasn't something that could be reversed by simply waiting for the body it "digest" it. It did not hurt, precisely, but using fūinjutsu to facilitate the process? That changed everything, though admittedly the pain was relatively brief in comparison to what one stood to gain.
It was Sakura's learned opinion, after all these months of careful study and application and experiment, that it was probably not any easier to use seals rather than the meditative process of the Sages. Especially if they hadn't been building on the bones of geniuses. The difference was that the knowledge of the Sages was carefully hoarded, but fūinjutsu, while a neglected discipline just as genjutsu was, was something that would have been available in a building blocks sort of form to any shinobi of the appropriate rank. The end result, if one managed to get there without destroying one's chakra channels, was far more stable and difficult to interrupt—or so she imagined.
There weren't exactly enough Sages lurking around to quiz them on it; the only one she knew was Jiraiya and that was only in a vague, former-teammate-of-my-commanding-officer kind of way. Even if she hadn't been in the habit of secrecy nowadays, that distance would have been more than sufficient to keep her from prodding.
As it was, Sakura focused on her breathing, keeping it slow and even as she cautiously siphoned chakra from their environment.
Chakra ran through the body in rivers that pooled in a lake or a sea or if one was lucky or talented, an ocean; the array overlaid that and acted like locks, dikes, and canals that allowed one to take advantage of a world-inundating flood rather than drowning in it.
Many minutes later, she decided she was satisfied with the result of this layer—there was less conscious guidance from her now and more "mechanical" processing occurring as it the array helped to filter and direct the natural chakra into her own channels. Though she wasn't certain mechanical was quite the right comparison; it was more like she was growing a new organ, a metaphysical one, that specialized in filtering chakra just like the liver filtered toxins.
With the array still incomplete, if she just yanked natural chakra blindly into her body, it would quickly overflow or rupture her channels. This was where practice in meditation was a requirement for success, not just something that made the process easier.
In the center of her sea of chakra, she visualized a vast whirlpool, one which drew her chakra into a tighter, ever-more-compact construct that was something like scorching blue sun or something like a pearl that radiated light or maybe something like neither of these things. The whirlpool made the sea deeper and wider by its motion—slowly, because just like the motion of real water wearing away the earth in its path, there was very rarely anything instant about the benefits garnered by meditation and if there was, it was usually accompanied by a good dose of devastation—and drew in the chakra from the rest of her body, which naturally replenished itself from natural chakra. A source of energy far, far more endless and efficient than taking it into the body as food.
Sakura eventually allowed the whirlpool to settle, the rivers of chakra flowing through her body resuming a more leisurely flow as she mentally braced herself for the next part. When they'd first begun this project, they'd allowed more time to elapse between the first application and when she pulled the ink beneath her flesh, but Sakura had become attuned to what it should feel like and was no longer in the habit of making excuses or putting things off.
She controlled another shiver as Sai moved away, returning quickly to silently proffer a wad of cloth that would keep her from biting through her tongue or breaking her teeth during this unpleasant little interlude. This was one of those unfortunate cases in which she couldn't risk deadening the sensation with anesthetics, because if she skewed the array at this stage, it would render null and void all those months of hard work.
It felt like she was being branded, her screaming nerves making her hyper-aware of each stroke of the array—if she closed her eyes, as she did now, she could almost see them limned in red. It wasn't the chakra. That would have been painless and the journal had indicated that the first experiments had been conducted with blood and chakra (and sometimes "volunteers"), which were far more forgiving in terms of no permanent damage done to the channels, but "eroded" without constant maintenance until the patterns fixed themselves. Which could take years, and that was time she did not have.
The ink, on the other hand, was permanent at the price of dredging foreign molecules through her skin—which was sort of like traditional tattooing, except this tattooist was a well-prepared sadist with thousands upon thousands of needles and they were piercing deep, deep, deep and burning as they went.
Sakura was all but sobbing by the time she yanked the material out of her mouth, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Meditation could be used as a pain management technique, but while she was quite good at manipulating her chakra in increasingly complex ways when in relative quiet and comfort and even in chaos and confusion, she was still working at the self-discipline required to ignore pain without the threat of death and the adrenaline of battle to distract her.
She buried her head in her arms, staring blankly at the floor as she promised herself that the pain would fade, just as it always had. In the moment though, it was more difficult to believe that. It was safe now to treat the pain, but shifting—either her chakra or her torso—would make the pain flare to unmanageable levels.
Sakura felt Sai's presence draw near again as he knelt next to her and she risked shifting her head to peer blearily at him. "This is awful," she croaked. "Why is it always awful?"
"Because it's unnatural?" Sai suggested blithely as he applied the first soothing, tingling strokes of a modified Chōjū Giga illustration, which had seen pulped herbs added to the ink. "Better?" he asked as that sensation spread, quenching the fire underneath her skin.
"Kami, yes," Sakura murmured, tucking her head back down into her arms again.
To distract herself while Sai brushed away the pain, she tried to follow the pattern he was painting on her back. The strokes were long and flowing, which made it more difficult to guess at the final shape.
The rattle of the door in its frame alerted her to an intrusion and Sakura turned her head to see Kakashi-senpai enter, Michi perched on his arm. "I tried to tell her that there was something inappropriate about carrying messages from your secret boyfriend while you were naked with another boy, but she insisted it was urgent." He surveyed the scene, his expression amused. "Strange. This doesn't look like fūinjutsu and yet doesn't look like any of the usual things teenagers have been known to do with the door closed and clothes off. I've seen yakuza with smaller tattoos—is that an eagle?"
"I have no idea what he's doing," Sakura admitted. "All I know is that it feels fantastic."
"It will also give you about fifteen minutes of flight when it's finished," Sai told her as he continued applying brushstrokes unperturbedly.
Kakashi-senpai gave a theatric sigh. "It's a sad day when I know I can trust you two alone even if all Sakura's clothes were off."
"Sorry, senpai. I really, really tried, but Sai says he loves me for my brain, not my body."
"I only told her that because I'm afraid of her, Kakashi-senpai," Sai volunteered in a distracted monotone that told her he was probably paying more attention to his painting than their conversation. "After all, she's so strong and vicious. She might have hurt me."
"I could still hurt you," Sakura pointed out.
"But you won't. Now you know I'm useful. If you hurt me now, who's going to finish your seals?" he asked as he finished the ink drawing, which dried as soon as it became a viable jutsu, and flopped a sheet across her back so that she could drape it around herself.
It was one thing for Sai to see her more or less naked; it would be awkward if she flashed Kakashi-senpai by accident. Not in that exciting, sexual tension sort of way, more in the vein of oh-kami-my-brother-just-walked-in-on-me. Knotting the sheet into place, she extended her arm and Michi settled solidly upon it, the dry, rough skin of her talons a sharp contrast to the softness of fur.
It had been harder to bond with her crows than it had been with her cat, in no little part because they were what connected her to Itachi, but also because they just weren't cuddly in the same way the ninken were or Soudai could be. Just about any child could tell you how to entertain a cat or please a dog, but what did you do with crows?
With Michi the answer to that had been, strangely enough, tea and conversation. Which was much messier with a crow companion than a human one.
The crow eyed the two shinobi, before fluttering her wings at them. "What are gawking for? Go, shoo! Girls only!"
"That seems like discrimination," was Kakashi-senpai's lazy retort.
Michi clacked her powerful beak together meaningfully and replied, "I can arrange it so you can stay."
"On second thought, I think we're overdue for some male bonding time," senpai suggested to Sai, who rolled his eyes.
"I decline to be part of your erotic literature circle," Sai said dryly. "But if by bonding time you mean sparring, I'd be honored to learn from you, Kakashi-senpai."
When the boys had left, Michi startled Sakura by launching herself briefly back up into the air before settling on her shoulder and sidling close. Her raspy voice was just loud enough for Sakura to hear. "There's a letter, but the message is this: the chick has gotten impatient in waiting to fly and has killed the snake keeping him in the nest. He thinks his claws are enough to take the weasel and the weasel is eager for him to try."
"Good," Sakura said darkly, one hand clenching so tightly into a fist that her knuckles stood starkly white against the flush of her skin, her heart thumping wildly in a mixture of fear and anticipation. "I'll leave as soon as I get dressed; I'd hate to make them wait."