A/N: Thank you very much for your reviews! I hardly ever respond to them personally, but rest assured I read them all and they make me very happy~.

In this chapter, liberties are taken with senjutsu. I am aware that I am taking liberties with it, but as I'm taking liberties with just about everything in this series, I will take critical reviews regarding this with a nod and move on. I only mention this because this, like Sakura's being taught Hiraishin by Kakashi, seems to trample on the godly domain of Naruto's special abilities and people are weirdly touchy about that after surviving fifty-nine chapters of Sakura-centric fiction. Enjoy.

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Fifty-Nine-

Yir'âh

Konan's hand closed over Nagato's wasted arm, her grip firm and reassuring. Her hands no longer trembled when they were finished with necessary things and he regretted the loss, for Konan deserved better than this cold acceptance of the horrors he asked of her.

One day she wouldn't have to fold herself away, displaying the same able mastery over herself as she evidenced over paper.

One day he would be strong enough to bear the weight of the needful fear alone and he would let her go free.

He wanted her to choose to stay; he wanted her to choose to leave.

He wondered if she would smile at him when she went; he knew that even if he was strong enough to crush the world, he would never be strong enough to watch her walk from his side with a genuine smile.

But if he could not provide the kind of world where Konan was free, everything would have been for nothing. Yahiko's death would have been for nothing.

"Danzō proved himself even more a monster than expected," he rasped, voice soft and low. Ruined, like the rest of him. "Moreso as he and Tsunade-sama discovered their devotion to their village exceeded their personal differences about how best to serve it."

"Aside from Hatake Kakashi, I'd never heard of a successful transplant of the Sharingan outside the clan," Konan murmured. "Hatake is lauded for his one eye; what kind of terrible potential that man must have possessed to survive doing such a thing to his body."

"Evil men endure things that would cause good men to crumble and come out the stronger for it," Nagato sighed, eyelids slipping shut as he sensed the approach of someone he'd once thought was the best of men. Even tempered by time and experience, he still thought of him as a good man, but a weak one. One who couldn't bear to watch children suffer before his eyes, but who was content to take part in the cycle of violence that was at the root of that suffering.

He was like his Slug Princess in that way. She'd learned to hate war when it wasn't her taking things from others, but she'd drowned her guilt in alcohol and had never lifted her hand to heal the sick or alleviate someone's suffering when her village wasn't paying her to do it.

There was an Uchiha accompanying Jiraiya. Even with their chakra signature muted or disguised, there was always a faint sense of unbalance eddying from them as they walked through the world. He knew of two living members of that clan. He doubted it was Uchiha Sasuke, who was determined to revenge himself on the world; he doubted even more that it was the masked Uchiha playing deep games.

It was vaguely plausible that Jiraiya had found some heretofore unknown bastard, but he really thought it more likely that this was Itachi, playing games of his own.

He considered mentioning this to Konan and decided against it. Nagato had not assembled himself a company of true believers and zealots; his first consideration had been to acquire shinobi strong enough to make the world shiver by whatever means necessary. Itachi had served his purpose and though his little brother wasn't nearly the ninja that his elder brother was, Sasuke was angry enough to burn the world without much prompting. At the end of the day, Nagato was indifferent to which he used to collect the last missing pieces of his puzzle.

He knew Jiraiya was probably expecting a confrontation, but that wasn't what Nagato had in mind. What he wanted was an understanding of this manifesto he was writing in the destruction of cities. Jiraiya would be his mouthpiece to Konohagakure, who needed to know that this wasn't mere reprisal for the killing of Akatsuki agents. No, this was a reordering, one that would touch the whole world.

[Kill Your Heroes]

"They say," the low voice rasped, "that the best argument against war is to live through one. But that can't be right. How many wars are finished only for the people who fought in them to find some other enemy to turn their sights on after a day, a week, a year? Besides, human memory is short and uncertain. Each generation is condemned to learn the lesson fresh and sometimes the victors decide the spoils outweigh the sacrifice. Take Konohagakure, who fights her wars far from home and is strong enough to keep her enemies from her gates. She sits fat and happy among the trees, powerful and content, a symbol of what might be obtained if only you are willing to peddle just a little more death.

"And I asked myself, what might be done to interrupt this cycle? Peace through peaceful means? No," he said and Jiraiya felt a shiver work across his skin at the resolve contained in that single word.

"Our economy is built on the commodification of force and while a farmer might say he wishes that the world were a more peaceful place, he also wants to feed his children. So he sells his crops so that they may feed soldiers. Even if he thought to do otherwise, he tells himself that there are always other farmers. If he doesn't sell to them, someone else will. And if all the farmers in the world decided that they would no longer support the villages, well, the balance of power will always be in favor of those who have access to chakra. Farmers can be replaced, their lands and goods given to people with fewer morals and better business sense. So we cannot look for a peaceful refusal of the masses to keep the villages in check.

"Shinobi, then? As the cause of all this, surely they ought to also be the solution. But they can't be, can they? Their earliest teaching moments are filled with learning to despise those who hesitate at the sight of blood. Cowardice—which is what they call pacifism—is still rewarded with death in some villages; the more civilized ones trust the weight of social censure to keep their people in line."

"And how does burning Konohagakure fit into this?" Jiraiya asked when the wasted man fell silent. He was impatient to go, to save what could be saved of his village, but he recognized that no matter how weak this man looked and even with the advantage of Itachi at his side, he doubted it would be an easy battle. Even ignoring the cool-eyed woman at the man's shoulder, there were the two orange-haired shinobi in Akatasuki colors flanking him.

"Because the change I desire is strangled in the cradle, I decided that I could not wait for some miraculous internal revolution among the collective consciousness of shinobi. Not while they believe that all beauty and glory is to found on the battlefield. And there is beauty there, in the burning," he said, turning his strange eyes briefly toward the smoke-shrouded village. "Strange and terrible. The Foxwife in her unchecked glory, Hatake Kakashi hunting his prey like the favorite hound of some war god, Haruno Sakura more than half a dragon and fierce even when dying from it. A thousand little acts of heroism. It is in part this great, enduring myth of sacrifice and nobility in battle that convinces people that so long as a cause is worthy enough, it is fine to die for it. It makes it more palatable to die for some great thing rather than the financial advantage of your village.

"Which is why," he told Jiraiya gravely, "there will be no battles. There will only be a slaughter and by it I will break the spirit of first this village and then hold it up as an example for all others to follow. I will do so by destroying their lives, rendering all their blood-bought material possessions to ash, and then raising them up again to walk in the wasteland of their own creation. Since their conscience has fallen short, I will lay down a law to govern this world. My message is simple. Learn to live without violence or be destroyed by it. You've come too late to do anything more than carry that word to your Hokage. All that is left is the resurrection. I wonder, when they walk again in the world, how many of your people will still have a taste for war?"

[Kill Your Heroes]

A breeze stirred the grass, carrying with it the smell of sunlight. Sakura opened her eyes cautiously, but a vast and spreading cherry tree sheltered her—sheltered them. Without raising her head or even glancing over, she gently squeezed the hand entangled with hers. It was no longer calloused and they fit together differently than she remembered, but it was the assurance of dream knowledge that she knew to whom it belonged.

A warm, familiar chuckle rewarded her.

"Hey," she said shyly.

Tatsuo shifted so that rather than laying side-by-side on their backs, he was stretched out alongside her. His hand slipped out of hers when he moved and it went to pillow his head, but his other hand soon found hers again.

There was open fondness in his expression as he said, "You can't do things by half-measures, can you?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Injuries of the earthly flesh vanish in death," he told her. "But the things you do with your chakra reflect on your body in the shinkai. You've been meddling in natural chakra."

Sakura blinked at him before raising her free hand and holding it up to the light, finding it recognizably human.

"You haven't come to the river yet and there's still an echo of your human self," he said in answer to her unspoken question. "We who have taken life are too heavy for the bridge and not welcome at the ford and must swim the Sanzu-no-kawa. When we come up out of the water we no longer wear our human shapes. We are become yōkai. For most of us it will take us a long, long time to regain a human form or have an opportunity for rebirth. So long, in fact, that most of them—us—forget that they were ever anything else."

"You've got one," she said softly, wondering how her use of natural chakra changed anything if she was already meant to lose this form. In life, she would have been terrified of being consigned to the deep, demon-infested waters of the least pleasant of the Sanzu river crossings, but after the shock of death there was only the mildest of anxiety. Everything was distant and mild and pleasant and she wondered if this was what being drugged was like.

"I've bound myself in service to one of the kami. You can think of this body as being on loan," he replied.

She frowned. "I thought you would be free," she said, "and at peace."

"That would take a much better man than I've yet managed to be. The shinkai isn't that different from the world you just came from. There are rules here, laws, those who rule, and those who serve. Escaping that takes lifetimes. But I'm freer here. With yaoyorozu-no-kamigami, there are a hundred thousand paths of service, if that's what you want, or you can exist as a yōkai or a spirit without the patronage of a kami.

"That is if you haven't been meddling in natural chakra, which anchors you to the human world. When you've crossed the river, you're going to go somewhere I'll have trouble following," he said with a sigh. "Inari only lets old, old foxes leave the shinkai when it isn't festival night."

His opalescent gaze was intense and his expression sober when he spoke again.

"You're going to be a dragon, Sakura. Not many shinobi are brave or stupid enough to try to use natural chakra without the aid and guidance of a contracted spirit. If they make a mistake, it destroys their physical bodies, but their souls—their selves—go on to join the family of whatever animal spirit showed them the path. If Jiraiya lost control, he'd just be reborn as another toad of Mount Myōboku. Dragons are the world at its most elemental; when you lost the path, that's what you were channeling. You won't have the protection of a sacred mountain," he warned her. "Choose the kami you ally yourself with wisely. Contracts are binding and they last a long, long time.

"Inari granted me the forty-nine days until you crossed the Senzu. I thought you could use a friend," he said simply.

"…just a friend?" she murmured, remembering long ago promises.

"A friend," he said firmly. Gently. "The time of the shinkai and the human world aren't in sync. It was a long time for you. It has been more years than my human lifetime for me. This isn't a world of waiting, like I thought when I left you. Souls grow and change. We live on, even when we die."

"I understand," Sakura sighed after a long, silent moment in which she let the last gauzy tatters of that dream flutter free. The dimming of her human emotions—the rage and grief and anxiety that she should surely still feel after that abrupt and very painful end—and the very real gulf of time between those promises and the present was what made possible this easy acceptance. "We never could get the timing right, but it will be nice. To have a friend here."

"I watched over you," he told her. "When I could. That won't change. Not unless you want it to."

Sakura only squeezed his fingers in reply.

"I thought it would be more like an ending," she said at last.

"Only a very, very few beings manage to step outside of existence. For all the rest of us, there aren't any endings. We just stop telling the story."

Sakura hummed thoughtfully, watching the light dance through the blossoms of the tree. "How far to the river?" she asked.

"Not far at all," Tatsuo assured her. "We can lay here awhile longer. Life will get hard again soon enough."

"…Kakashi-senpai?"

"Don't worry. There were friends waiting for him too," he assured her. "One of them had been waiting for a long, long time. She told me to thank you when I saw you again, because before he became your partner, she was convinced that the first words she'd say to him after all that time were going to be angry ones. You don't know how happy it made her, that he was actually living instead of just waiting for the mission that finished him."

"You seem fond of her," Sakura observed.

Tatsuo smiled. "She was already watching over him and she's the kind of woman that thinks the people important to her friends are important to her as well. You were probably the most important human in his life and I was your partner. I suppose you could say that you introduced us."

"I'm glad," Sakura said, and meant it.

So she talked and laughed and dozed beneath the boughs of that vast cherry tree, where the blossoms never fell and she wasn't hungry or cold or aching. It was as beautiful by moonlight as it was by sunlight and she relearned her friendship with Tatsuo without regard for the river she'd have to brave or the battle she'd left behind.

And then the world shuddered, like she was a fly on its skin, and Sakura yelped as something cold and unforgiving grabbed her ankles and yanked. Tatsuo's eyes were wide and panicked as he tried to catch her hands, but he missed and she was dragged down into the not-here-nor-there. Staying there might have been a mercy as she was shoved savagely back into her twisted body, which rebuilt itself around her.

Teeth receded into gums and her jaw gave a vicious crack as it was reshaped; elongated bones and extra vertebrae collapsed like she was clay being molded by an angry sculptor. Ribs rejoined her sternum and locked tight around her lungs, which beat against their bars as she tried to breathe through the smoke and the dust and the pain. Reawakened nerves screamed, but she couldn't through her choking.

And beneath it all, her chakra, wild and unruly and scorching. She was no longer drawing in natural chakra to supplement her own, but she'd let it overflow the boundaries of her coils and now it was a restless animal trapped inside her body, like it was determined to make of her that dragon that Tatsuo had said was what waited for her on the other side of the river. Blisters formed and burst even as her skin healed over, only to do it again. Sakura thought with shattered longing of the state of perfect remove from negative emotion and physical pain that she'd experienced in death. She tried to put herself back in that place, all her years of meditation and genjutsu discipline bent toward regaining control of her mind so that she could pacify the war in her body.

As if responding to her state of mind, the natural chakra settled as her mind centered and her thought patterns were no longer desperate fragments focused on whatever pain was most overwhelming.

She managed to get her shemagh worked up over her nose and while it didn't improve the foul and acrid air, it was at least enough to calm her coughing. She lay prone, breathing raggedly, for long minutes before she worked up the will to stagger upright.

Her eyes were watering and she ground the filthy palms of her hands against them to temporarily ward off the burning until she could retrieve her combat glasses from her kit. She was leery of using her chakra again so soon, but she risked it and when she wasn't struck by crippling pain, she fished a gas mask out of her supplies. Of her mask, there was no sign.

Breathing more comfortably and less blinded, though the glasses couldn't do anything for the hazy quality of the air, Sakura observed the devastation surrounding her. There wasn't an orange-tinted glow on the skyline, so she presumed the fires had been extinguished as mysteriously as she'd been resurrected. Most of the buildings she could see were damaged, if not outright destroyed. There was movement in the distance, vague and shadowy figures that resolved themselves briefly into people who looked just as lost as she was before they disappeared from her line of sight.

That did away her indecisiveness. No matter what sort of larger schemes were in play or how strange it felt to be back in this body and this place, she was part of a team that had been entrusted with the safety of a group of civilians. Without orders to the contrary from her Hokage, they were her priority.

Konohagakure would need them in the coming days.