A/N: Photo reference for Kakashi's hairstyle, from pinterest: 332210909989521220. When browsing for different hairstyles, I saw some really sexy versions where his hair was longer and coaxed to lay flat by some obliging rain, but then I tried to imagine my Kakashi styling his hair in the morning and utterly failed. As always, you guys have gone above and beyond on your reviews—I love reading them. I'm having a lot of fun with the pairings/no-pairings dialogue, which makes me laugh. Or cackle, occasionally.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Fifty-Four-
Eosophobia (Part II)
Sakura padded silently after Itachi as he led her to through a series of corridors and down uncomfortably narrow stairways until they came to a stop in an unremarkable hallway. They were deep enough in the earth now that the air had a distinctly subterranean chill.
Itachi slipped a kunai from an equipment pouch and drew the well-honed blade across the pads of his fingers, his eyes shifting to Sharingan crimson as he did so. Blood welled instantly, which he encouraged as he flexed his hand before he smeared it across the wall in what turned out to only be the first stroke of many. It was only when Itachi had opened up a third bloody line on his fingers that she began to see the emerging character.
"Daito?"
He paused for a moment. "I'm surprised you know how to read it."
If it wasn't for the weight of the man laying across her shoulder, Sakura would have shrugged. "It's certainly not one somebody's going to guess," she said wryly.
Itachi hummed a sound of affirmation. "At eighty-four strokes, it certainly reduces the chance of that."
As he finished speaking, he drew the last stroke and the lines of the three dragon characters began to gutter with red-orange light. They writhed and twisted until they weren't words any longer, but pictures of dragons, as detailed as anything Sai might have painted. They swiftly pierced through the three cloud characters, which dispersed like smoke, before they circled back on one another and intersected to become a creature with one head and three tails. And it was along the trajectory of these three tails that the rockface opened, the stone drawing back with nary a rumble.
"There are protections in place that will keep anyone from sensing my chakra once I'm inside, but the vault is also airtight when it's shut. There is a very good chance that I will be unconscious when this is finished, so I would appreciate it if you retrieved me before the seeming of my demise becomes a reality."
Sakura blinked at him. "…why didn't you just tell me?"
The red was fading from Itachi's eyes when he replied, "About?"
"That you thought there was a mastermind behind Akatsuki and this wasn't just about Sasuke."
Long, heavy lashes briefly veiled his eyes, perhaps hiding some expression, for when he opened them again all Sakura could read in them was the kind of exhaustion that had nothing at all to do with physical health and everything to do with spending too long in the darkest corners of the shinobi world.
"You did not need to know…and it did not occur to me to tell you," he admitted. "It has been like hunting a ghost and I could not risk anything that might lessen our chances our success. If I had told you, you would have been honor-bound to report it to your Kage, who would have begun her own investigation. Perhaps they would have failed to find him; I was more afraid of what might happen should they succeed. I doubt any of them would have returned to report their success. Not intact, at least."
His gaze had grown distant by the end of his speech, but his eyes suddenly focused on her again. "If there isn't anything else, you should return to the hall. According to the crows, Sasuke's team will be within the range of his sensor very soon. Kisame will intercept his team, but I doubt that will keep Sasuke from charging ahead."
"Just one more question. Your Sharingan-specific abilities. Are you going to be able to use them like this? When we first met, it was one of the tell-tale signs that it was only a simulacrum."
"The distance was much greater then and I had far less of my chakra invested in that body. And I have been practicing. There will be a lag, because I will have to draw my chakra back into this body before I can make use of the jutsu. It will be clumsier than usual, as well—there will be no helping that. But as I have been careful to maintain the illusion of my body failing, it will, with any luck, only be something that Sasuke should be quick to take advantage of."
Sakura nodded, then stepped back and watched as the stone sealed itself shut behind Itachi.
"Should have asked him if he was certain that non-Uchiha blood would open the vault," she muttered to the unyielding stone, which kept its silence, but hopefully not its secrets when the time came. Not that there wouldn't once have been non-Uchiha allies housed in a structure this vast, Sakura mused as she retraced their steps through the halls, but she doubted they would have been allowed to access that area without an escort to open the way.
Though, she allowed sourly, perhaps this was just another of those things that Itachi had anticipated and made arrangements for. Not that this made him some sort of omnipotent seer—if she'd had almost a decade and all the information that Itachi had access to, she too would have had plenty of time to think about what needed to go right and what could go wrong.
After arriving in the hall, Sakura carefully deposited her passenger on the throne when she felt a very bizarre pulse in his chakra, causing it to become a tangible repulsive force. The vague stare that had been the man's only response to being packed around like a sack of grain vanished as Itachi filled his skin, like a body was only a set of clothes that could be stolen or borrowed or lent. A moment later, it was as if the other man had never existed—there was only Itachi, this illusion far more convincing than the one that had been built into Sasori's framework. Sasori's specialization had been puppetry—Sakura's was genjutsu and perhaps medical ninjutsu. Together, they had created something awful.
Some small, appalled part of her brain wondered whether something very similar was at the root of Orochimaru's immortality.
"How's the integration feel?" Sakura asked.
"Very smooth," was Itachi's reply as he dexterously manipulated his fingers, the enveloping fabric with its red-tinted clouds making it difficult to tell if he was testing other muscle groups as well.
While he made himself comfortable in his borrowed body, Sakura slowly turned, taking in the hall properly now that she didn't have someone draped across her shoulders. There, she thought, eyes lighting on a row of stonework protrusions high above the entrance. The last tattered remnants of now unreadable banners still hung from them, but they seemed wide and deep enough to offer a comfortable seat, if not a clean one.
Striding across the vast space, Sakura sprung lightly up onto the little outthrust bit of stone, finding her estimation had been right—it was indeed wide enough to support her pretty comfortably. Settling in, she nipped at the space left bare by her gloves just for this purpose. With her blood, she summoned Soudai, who stretched himself comfortably across her lap as he peered down below.
"Seems that we're in for a show?" he queried, rumbling his pleasure as Sakura stroked his silky fur.
"Mm-hm. Though, according to Itachi, the brother vs. brother battle to the death is just the opening act. Apparently, we're here for whomever comes to collect Sasuke when it's all said and done."
"Sounds more interesting than two brothers squabbling," Soudai replied as he began to wrap the first threads of his not here illusion around them, Sakura automatically layering her own over and under and through his until it was an impenetrable mesh of chakra.
"Somehow, you don't sound surprised."
"I am allergic to surprise. I can be pleasantly diverted by unexpected things, but it is nothing so plebian as surprise," Soudai sneered.
"Right," Sakura drawled, scratching him between his ears, marveling at the tiny, fragile skull that housed such an enormous ego.
It was strange, she reflected as they waited quietly for Sasuke to arrive. Anticipation stretched the seconds out into somehow almost painful and she had a queer moment of self-reflection. Who'd have thought, so many years ago, that she would become someone who watched behind a veil of illusion as two people—one whom she'd once shaped herself around, another whom she'd briefly begun to regard as an interesting companion before he'd revealed himself as a textbook enabler—prepared to face something so emotionally wrenching that it could have been plucked straight from a melodrama. She'd helped set the stage in ways that were exceptionally questionable ethically; she'd help close the jaws of the trap regardless of whether the bait—Sasuke—was destroyed in the process.
Her child-self would have thought that there wasn't any need to worry about becoming Orochimaru any longer, as she'd clearly slipped over the line some time ago. Her adult-self, however, was beginning to think that there wasn't anything so clear or simple about it, because her understanding of Orochimaru—the concept, not the man himself, though what she thought about him had shifted as well—had changed.
There was no guilt as she watched Sasuke stride into the room, so focused on the man sitting on the throne that she might as well have not bothered with the genjutsu. Just a strange sense of empowerment that probably explained why voyeurism existed.
What followed next was a testament as to why, when they'd been plotting treason, the entire clan had been handled with ruthless efficiency. There are gods and monsters in our world, Araki Kenta had written in his madman's memoir, and often they are the same thing.
Even fighting through a puppet-body, which he had claimed would make a lag in his Sharingan-specific abilities, Itachi was…
She almost didn't have words for Itachi, who controlled the battle from opening movements to closing notes. Aside from Gozen-san, she'd met very few people who used genjutsu as it was meant to be used, not just as an illusory ninjutsu. Itachi manipulated Sasuke with half-truths and illusions and just the right amount of real violence for the whole thing to culminate in what might have been a moment that might have made her heart quake had she not just witnessed him—helped him—engineer the whole scene. Never trust someone who's good at genjutsu, Gozen-san had cackled at her once. It's all an illusion.
And Sasuke—she couldn't deny that Sasuke had found some strength when he'd sold himself over to Orochimaru. Borrowed strength, dearly bought, in the case of the seal—the rest wasn't anything he couldn't have learned on his own in the village, even if it would've taken longer if he hadn't been being raised like a prized animal for the slaughter. There was a danger in raising up dangerous beasts, though, and as Sasuke stared blankly into the middle distance, his eyes blooming in a strangely elegant Mangekyo state and the shattered remains of the wall behind him the only thing keeping him upright, Sakura had never been more tempted defy her orders.
Letting him live is a mistake, she thought with an eerie certainty. Sasuke had always, always been driven and single-minded in his focus. Seeing him now, so shattered and so strangely empty, Sakura felt a chill travel up her spine and crest on her scalp. Emotions could be addicting, just the same as anything else. And Sasuke had clung tight to his hurt and his rage and his need-for-vengeance-damn-the-costs for too long for it all to simply vanish and she wasn't like Itachi, who hoped that he'd find better things to fill the void.
Just as Sasuke's life was controlled by his anger, Sakura's was shaped by her fear. Fear was the mother of both caution and cruelty and she'd embraced both—her instinct was to strike first and without mercy or hesitation. Better to be certain than to be sorry.
But she didn't move from her hiding place among the rubble even as it began to rain, because those were not her orders and orders were a part of that tenuous but extremely important line that separated the likes of her from the likes of Orochimaru. And because what separated her from Sasuke was an ability to see beyond the fear to the repercussions of her actions—for all that Itachi was willfully blind concerning his brother, he was probably the most competent shinobi she would ever meet and if he hadn't been able to track and kill the man claiming to be Uchiha Madara, then she would allow Sasuke to have this second chance.
The red faded from Sasuke's eyes like the blood being rinsed away by the driving rain, his expression still empty as his head slowly turned to look at Itachi's fallen body. Then came an expression difficult to interpret, the angle of his head and the oppressive rain conspiring to hide his eyes even from her enhanced vision. But an odd smile had tugged up the corners of his lips. Was it melancholic? Smug? Satisfied?
Eyes sliding slowly closed before she could come to any conclusions, Sasuke sagged, toppling face-first next to his fallen brother.
She'd detected something unusual about the chakra of the chamber just after Sasuke's dramatic entrance even before Soudai dug his claws into her thigh in silent warning, but it had been oddly dispersed, almost more like a jutsu than a person's presence.
It had vanished shortly after Sasuke's collapse, but Sakura held her position in the rubble despite the rain that was seeping down her collar and tracing a long, tickly path down her spine.
She was eventually rewarded by the emergence of a man atop the wall beneath which the two bodies were laying. Behind her mask, Sakura's eyes narrowed, because while she had seen teleportation techniques before, she'd never seen anyone unfold themselves out of space quite like that. His chakra signature was oddly muted too—if she hadn't been accustomed to picking out the disturbances that heralded genjutsu at work, she might never have sensed him. Judging by how deeply Soudai's claws were imprinting themselves into her shoulder, his clever claws somehow finding purchase even through her vest, he didn't much like it either.
"You're too slow," the man commented, his face hidden by a nearly featureless orange mask and his build hidden by the concealing Akatsuki cloak. There was nothing distinctive about his roughly shorn black hair either—if it weren't for his voice, he could as well have been a woman. With the right kind of medical jutsu to manipulate his vocal chords, he still could be.
Or, she amended as she watched a man-plant grow out of the ground, perhaps Soudai had been warning her of the approach of what she was fairly certain was their watcher in the wall. She had seen several strange kekkai genkai in her time with Kakashi-senpai and Itachi had briefed her on the different members of the Akatsuki, but this…
Rapidly sequestering thoughts of chloroplasts and rigid cellular walls and symbiotic parasites, because in this moment it did not matter whether the thick, fleshy pads of the Venus flytrap erupting from the man's shoulders were functional or cosmetic or otherwise, Sakura observed them both like she was preparing them to integrate them into her genjutsu arsenal.
"Well, excuse me for not being able to move at the freakin' speed of light," the man-plant grumbled. Zetsu, she recalled. This one was Zetsu. And by physical appearance, the other one was Tobi, but his actions didn't correspond to the character that Itachi had described and he was too new to the organization for Itachi to have gotten a glimpse of his abilities.
Too new or too old and too canny?
"Did you make certain to record the whole thing while you watched?" Tobi asked.
When Zetsu spoke again, there was a jarring kind of dissonance—his voice was deeper and rougher. "Relax. I got everything. Though you could've just come and watched yourself. It's not like you had anything better to do."
Tobi chuckled. "It wasn't worth the risk. But I will enjoy viewing it later. For now, take Itachi's corpse. We need to leave immediately, before someone decides to investigate why the sky was on fire and a mountain exploded."
He hopped down and collected Sasuke, tossing him over his shoulder before he folded himself into space again. Sakura kept herself still and her breathing steady through force of will as Zetsu approached the corpse that still retained Itachi's appearance. When the paper-white hand reached down to hoist the body up, black flames roared to life, slithering up his sleeve and burning the flesh beneath with unnatural quickness. The dark voice started cursing, ripping off his cloak, but it wasn't normal fire—it was like some mad animal that had tasted blood and wouldn't be dislodged so easily as that. Abandoning the body he thought was Itachi's—which was already well on its way to becoming overcooked meat and shattered bone—he retreated underground, where Sakura was unable to tell if the fire followed.
She waited patiently until Soudai relaxed his grip and leaped gracefully to the ground, where he proceeded to eye the sky balefully. Sakura rose and eyed the body still crackling merrily but didn't approach it. Konohagakure had stopped trapping the bodies of their shinobi immediately after the last war—in part because in light of the reduced threat, families could have something to say goodbye to and in part because it didn't reflect well on the village when well-meaning civilians went to move the bodies and got caught up by an undiscerning trap.
ANBU Team Nine, however, had lived in a time of acceptable casualties, and were more than willing to sacrifice their bodies to buy a few more lives from the opposition. Without extensive modification, she'd always known the body wouldn't hold up to scrutiny; she'd expected Itachi to be hesitant, but in the end he hadn't expected his brother to be in any condition to meddle with his body and doubted his brother's team would disturb the corpse if their special guest failed to make his appearance.
"Let's go collect the baggage and get out of the rain," Soudai said crossly.
Sasuke and Itachi had been rather…thorough in their destruction and it would require earth manipulation and more than a little mental calculation to open the hallway to the vault. Closing her eyes, Sakura mentally rebuilt the room around her, resisting the urge to manifest it as a genjutsu. When she was certain she had the proportions worked out, which wasn't helped by Soudai twining himself impatiently between her legs, Sakura nimbly traversed the rubble until she found herself roughly above the hallway that crossed in front of the vault.
Sakura inhaled deeply as she set her feet more than shoulder-width apart, slicking back her hair where unruly strands had begun to slip free of their knot and then struck the stone with one open palm, the other hand folding into a handsign of concentration as she shaped both the force of her strike and the chakra that flowed into the stone. With a noise like rolling thunder, the rocks gave beneath her hand, shuddering like disturbed water as they rose up in small, jagged mountains to either side.
Soudai fearlessly led the way into the resultant pit, Sakura jumping down after him. Luckily the hallway was partially intact, which meant she did not have to play archeologist to discover the wall. Slipping out her discolored knife, she slit open somewhere with better blood flow and fewer nerves than the pads of her fingers, though it had looked very dramatic when Itachi had done it earlier. Painting her blood on the stone, she trusted that Itachi wouldn't have looked a detail this critical—though if he'd intentionally done so as a fulfilment of that martyr complex that had been on full display above, she hadn't met a wall capable of keeping her out yet and no damned vault was going to prevent her from forcing Itachi to see this through.
But just as they'd done for Itachi, the dragons pierced the clouds and the vault groaned open, Soudai slipping inside before the door had completely retracted.
Itachi's response time to her entrance was sluggish, his head rocking back in a way that said he wasn't in complete control of his body, his eyes half-lidded and glassy. Combined with his blanched skin and shallow breathing, he was a textbook example of chakra exhaustion. Even so, he tried to struggle to his feet and Sakura was there to catch him when he faltered.
Sweeping him into her arms, careful not to catch his hair, Sakura felt his warm breath feather against her neck as his head settled against the collar of her body armor. It would have been more comfortable for both of them if he'd responded to her murmured coaxing to put his arm around her neck rather than having it pinioned between them, but he didn't shift even when Soudai used him as a stepping stone on the way back to her shoulder.
The door had sealed itself behind them, but opened at her approach and Sakura found it broad enough that she didn't have to maneuver them over the threshold, though the hallway beyond was another matter. Shoving chakra generously into her legs, she launched them into the sky, hearing the stones shift as the vault was once again buried, feeling the strange sensation of something crawling beneath her skin as she woke Sai's tattoo.
The eagle coalesced beneath her feet with a proud, soundless shriek and Sakura used chakra to seal her feet to the construct as the wind and the rain tried to tug them back into the open sky. Maneuvering herself and her passenger carefully into a position that minimized their profile even as she willed the eagle to take them to their destination, Sakura pulled out her scroll and unsealed a waterproofed cloak from it, wrapping it around Itachi and half-smiling as Soudai vanished beneath the seal-brown material.
Having seen to her companion, her eyes fixed on the landscape flowing by like a river beneath them, the smile falling away into a thin-lipped line. This mission is over, she thought to herself, but nothing is finished.
A/N: I know, I know, some of you were probably expecting me to write out the Sasuke/Itachi battle in its entirety, but when thinking it over I decided I had no problems with the way the canon fight progressed, so feel free to enjoy the version with voice-acting and animation while imagining KYH Sakura tucked out of sight, watching over the battle.