A/N: Alright, commence selective amnesia now. At this point, Sasuke is still the 'redeemable and occasionally adorable bastard'. We cannot strangle him for things he has not done yet. (Yes, that's mostly a reminder to myself. And, yes, it was necessary to head this chapter with said reminder. I'm being haunted by the Ghost of Canon Past.)

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Twelve-

Ergophobia (Part I)

Sakura stared at Kakashi-sensei, silently begging him to change his mind, but his smile was as relentless as the summer sun. Naruto was darting looks between them, obviously confused and Sasuke-kun shifted uncomfortably, but her focus was on Kakashi-sensei. "I told you that even jounin don't like using fire," he told her conversationally. "But traditionally the Uchiha haven't been among that number. Sasuke's Katon techniques are extremely advanced for his age and it would be a pity to ask him to give it up, wouldn't you say?"

Sakura was shaking, both hands snaking up to grasp her upper arms. "...what's the exercise?" she asked in a strangled voice.

"Sakura-chan? Kakashi-sensei? What the heck is going on?" Naruto demanded. But he was ignored.

Her fear ratcheted higher as Kakashi-sensei formed familiar handseals, slow enough for her to follow them easily. At his side, three ferocious, sneering shinobi materialized and her throat seized tight, her hands dropping instinctively to her kunai pouch though she knew they were illusory. Sasuke was faster, his hands running through a series of seals so quickly she couldn't follow them, but when they slammed together in the final tiger seal, she knew what was coming.

He inhaled deeply, his eyes dark and focused, and when he exhaled, an enormous writhing sun in miniature roared into existence before it spun forward in an inevitable collision course with the enemy-nin. She recognized the Katon: Gōkakyū no Jutsu. She also recognized that if the enemy-nin were quick, they could have avoided the technique, which was predictable in its path and only as quick in its travel as a well-thrown kunai.

But they didn't.

Some part of her knew that it was only genjutsu, not even a particularly subtle one, but her memory supplied the stink of it, the sound of it, and she could only watch them burn in mute horror. And the Sasuke-kun in the illusion was not nearly as affected as she was. He looked to her, satisfied as a cat having caught a mouse, and fire gleamed in his dark eyes.

She did scream when someone grabbed her arms hard enough to bruise, their nails digging into her skin. "Stop it, Kakashi!" Sasuke demanded, though the strength of his grip had already broken the illusion. "Whatever you're showing her, stop."

Kakashi-sensei's voice was even in response, though as Sakura had wrenched herself away from Sasuke-kun and sunk into a crouch, hands clutching at her head as she tried desperately to shove the image away, he could have been shouting and she would have hardly cared. She kept seeing the illusory Sasuke-kun's smirk of triumph, something so familiar from dozens of taijutsu bouts at the Academy, so strange and different when partnered with the scene the genjutsu had shown her.

"I'm not doing it out of cruelty. There's going to come a point in your career when she's going to have to come to terms with your ninjutsu. Better here and now, without real enemies to take advantage of her distraction, rather than later. Though I have faith in Sakura's ability to work through fear in live combat."

Sakura was unmoved by the compliment, because she didn't find much admirable in a determination not to die, nor was she enjoying this particular moment enough to have room for much vanity.

"Sakura..."

She jerked away from Sasuke-kun's reaching hand, taking deep, gasping breaths. "Fine," she said tightly. "I'm fine." A smile was beyond her, but she repeated the mantra once more. "I'm fine."

Sasuke-kun frowned at her, but she didn't think he'd contradict her. "No," he said, to her surprise. "You're not. But I don't think what Kakashi did helped. What was the point of that?" he demanded of Kakashi-sensei.

"The point is this: after seeing that, how well can the two of you cooperate with each other? How much do you really trust one another? With you and Naruto, you've sparred and argued, but you're still able to work together effectively when it really counts. Are you and Sakura capable of the same thing?"

Sasuke-kun looked like he wanted to make a harsh retort, but as he glanced over at Sakura, he subsided. "What do you want us to do?" he asked gruffly instead.

"Sakura, you're right-handed, and Sasuke favors his left if given a choice, so let's do this. Hold hands."

"...what?" Sasuke-kun asked sharply. "Why should we?"

"Go on," Kakashi-sensei urged.

Sasuke-kun's put-upon sigh was an indication of his surrender, but Sakura felt no giddy excitement as he caught her hand in his own. His own palm was warm and dry, hers clammy. She found it embarrassing, but mostly it was just uncomfortable, as some part of her acknowledged that this should be something she enjoyed, while the rest of her worked to keep from pulling away. Was her attraction to him really so weak as to falter when confronted with an image of him setting people on fire?

She'd known he was fire-natured. She'd heard about the Uchiha ninjutsu, seen him use it. But she'd failed to acknowledge what that meant.

So the fluttering of her heart when Kakashi-sensei bound their hands together with a strip of dark cloth had everything to do with feeling trapped, rather than titillated.

"The exercise is simple. Or it would be, if you were working alone or could coordinate your movements well. We've done part of this one before, Sakura. I'm going to give you a destination. The two of you will have to work together to get there without 'dying'. If I get in a clean hit with these," he walked over to the posts that he'd once tied Naruto to and hoisted a bag, "you're dead and you'll come back here and try again. Die five times and you'll fail the exercise."

"What are 'these'?" Sasuke-kun asked suspiciously.

"This time it's rubber balls coated in red chalk," Kakashi-sensei replied cheerfully. "Don't worry. They'll leave some nasty bruises, but they probably won't break anything. Rules—well, I don't have to tell you no ninjutsu. No weapons. The goal is to dodge, not deflect. Any questions? No? Then, you're aiming for the northeast border of the training ground, where there's a split elm with a pink ribbon tied to one trunk and a blue ribbon tied to the other. When you've got both ribbons, you'll be safe."

In theory, it wasn't very different from the exercises she'd run in the mornings on Wave.

In practice, it was a different beast entirely.

Sakura had several weeks of training in escaping multiple pursuers, in anticipating the points at which Kakashi-sensei would choose to attack, and in tracking a course while in full flight. Her stamina and her ability to dodge was more honed than it had ever been. And Sasuke-kun was, well, Sasuke-kun. It should have been easy.

It wasn't.

They 'died' twice in quick succession, neither time precisely the fault of one or the other, but simply because they were working at odds rather than together. Once while they were still attempting to adjust to running together—even though they were almost the same height, stride length had been less of a problem then Sakura's instinct to settle into the pace she'd learned she could maintain and Sasuke's desire to press them into a slightly faster one—and then because they tried to dodge in different directions, which had resulting in some stumbling that might have been funny if she'd been the one watching.

As it was, her shoulder was still a little sore. "This isn't working," Sasuke-kun muttered as he pulled them both in behind the shelter of a massive tree. "We'll have to...call it, or something, whenever we notice Kakashi."

Sakura wasn't used to such uncertainty from Sasuke-kun, but she nodded without really looking over at him. She knew she wasn't really helping, keeping more space between than she usually would, but every time she drew close, she thought she smelled smoke. Whether it was real or a product of her overactive imagination, it didn't matter. It was just making the exercise more difficult.

So she left Sasuke-kun to lead, but even though he was taking this very seriously now, his Sharingan activated, and Sakura was using her time with Kakashi-sensei to maximize her own usefulness—he wasn't actually trying to kill them, after all, so he almost always broadcast his location in a way they'd notice if they were paying attention—but though they made it farther than any other attempt, Sasuke-kun ended up with another red splotch smeared across his shirt.

"I'm not deaf, you know," Kakashi-sensei called down dryly from his position in the trees.

Sasuke-kun scowled up at him and they trudged back to the starting point in silence.

If it had been before Wave, Sakura had little doubt she probably would have been exhausted by this point. The distance he'd assigned them for their course wasn't insignificant and, if you compiled their attempts, they'd more than run it once already. But now, she'd only worked past the first wall of discomfort, and she was ready for their next attempt. She finally snuck a glance over at Sasuke-kun, easily reading his frustration, then down at their linked hands.

What if...?

She made herself sidle closer to Sasuke-kun. Who immediately noticed the lack of distance, his eyes turning toward her though he didn't move his head.

"This is just a suggestion, but," she said in a low voice, "what if we use pressure?"

"Hn?"

"What if we shift our hands so our fingers are interlaced? That would be five points of contact. What if we assigned a direction to each finger? Like, forward for the index finger, back for the pinky, left for the middle finger, right for the ring finger, and down for the thumb?"

Sasuke-kun was quiet for so long she was beginning to think he disliked the idea and would prefer to pretend they weren't holding hands at all. "That might work," he breathed at last. "Practice on the way back?" And he shifted his hand so that her fingers were laced with hers.

Her heart seemed to skip a beat and it wasn't entirely because the boy she liked was holding her hand in a way that felt much more personal than the passive grip they'd had before. It was also because Uchiha Sasuke, best shinobi of their graduating class, had agreed to her plan.

And because that scent wasn't only in her imagination. Sasuke-kun did smell faintly of smoke.

She shoved it aside, concentrating instead on cooperating with Sasuke-kun, because it would be embarrassing if she was the one to mistake the directions, given that she'd been the one to assign them.

This time, when Kakashi-sensei gave them the signal, they moved off in almost perfect unison. Sasuke-kun seemed a little surprised when she began augmenting her own speed with chakra now that they were on their second-to-last life, matching the pace he'd been trying to set earlier, but he fell in readily enough. And her pressure system worked, their determination making them both hyper-attentive to the signals being sent by the other. It wasn't pretty, nothing like what either of them would have been able to manage on their own, but it was functional.

It got them to the elm. And it won them their blue ribbon, but Sakura knew all about last-second ambushes and Kakashi-sensei. The moment she met Sasuke-kun's eyes, bright with triumph and dark as night, she knew what was about to happen.

"No—!"

He'd already ripped the ribbon free, revealing the paper seal that had had been cleverly disguised beneath it. It activated, triggering nearby traps that had been hidden so thoroughly that he hadn't spotted them with his Sharingan. And without it, he didn't have the reaction time to keep from being hit.

But Sakura had moved almost before she'd choked out her abbreviated warning. She chose to ignore that his look of self-satisfaction, of self-assured triumph, was a mirror of the one Kakashi-sensei had shown them in the genjutsu. One day, that might be real. And she would deal with it then, would have to decide whether she'd been more horrified at the act itself or that she'd done it or if the lingering trauma was caused by some mixture of those factors and other things. But today was not that day. Today, Sasuke-kun was her teammate.

Their bound hands made it awkward to do anything but throw herself forward, wrapping her free hand tightly around Sasuke-kun's torso. She used everything she'd learned about chakra manipulation, shoving them away from the tree so quickly the world became streaks of color, one dark splotch that made her tighten her grip almost certainly Kakashi-sensei. She'd thrown them up in an arc that would land her feet-first on the other elm trunk, but she was entirely vulnerable in midair.

And when her feet smacked solidly down on the other trunk without either of them being bludgeoned, she understood that this was what Kakashi-sensei had wanted. They hadn't won. They were being allowed to pass the test.

She snatched up the ribbon regardless, flinging them out of the way of another round of traps. Maybe one improbable day, she'd be good enough to win outright against Kakashi-sensei. But for now, she'd take his approval.

Provided, she thought with dismay, seeing how quickly Sasuke-kun was to put her at arm's length, Sasuke-kun was still speaking to her after she'd effectively manhandled him.

[Kill Your Heroes]

Sakura had an audience as she stood in front of the mirror, wearing all the pieces of her new outfit together for the first time. She'd made good progress on breaking in her boots, but she'd buffed them back to a dress shine to get the full effect. Her overskirt was shorter and of significantly less fabric than her dress had been, a shade of purple-tinted pink that made the panels look almost like the squared petals of a flower. Her dresses had been cut down into sleeveless vests and she wore her shemagh, which she'd finally become adept at tying.

Her hair had been swept back out of the way into a loose, low ponytail, her forehead protector still in its usual place at the top of her head.

And, as Hasekura-san had promised, her knives sat comfortably flush on the outside of her thighs, with built-in storage for her kunai and shuriken. He'd worked some light padding into the panels that sat against her leg, for long-term wear comfort, and as it was a full rig, he'd explained that it would be easy to add and remove attachments as needed at her beltline. It made her feel very much an adult.

Normally that would a very good, empowering kind of thing. But at this moment, in these circumstances, she was uncertain that an adult was something she wanted to be. Tomorrow was the registration deadline for the chunin exams. Which meant today was Kakashi-sensei's last chance to announce to the boys that they were taking the test, if he'd decided they were ready.

Her fingers stretched out, as if to brush against the mirror, but she drew them back before she left fingerprints. "So, what do you think?"" she asked her audience, turning to face them.

Tails wagged in a kind of quiet applause, though as Guruko's eyes were closed, she didn't know how genuine all of it was. She was struck by a sudden nostalgia for her friendship with Ino. The first time she'd worn her new qipao dress, it had been Ino sitting on her bed, applauding her modeling.

She liked the ninken, strange as that was after what they put her through on a regular basis, but it just wasn't the same.

So, with a sigh, she took their compliments as the best she was going to get and let herself and the pack out of the house. They soon wondered off, to do whatever it was they intended to do for the day, and Sakura did the same. Without an appointment to meet up with Team Seven until much later and with her rivalry with Ino leaving a gaping hole in her time where their friendship had been, Sakura just sort of drifted. She window shopped for a while, but just looking wasn't as much fun on her own, and it was too early to eat, so she was actually sort of grateful when she heard a familiar voice.

Though when she discovered Naruto playing ninja with Academy students, she didn't know whether that was the proper emotional response.

And the implication that she was his girlfriend was entirely uncalled for. She would have let it pass by, because she was a genin now and genin didn't get into fights with Academy students, but when Naruto blushed, scratched at the back of his neck, and said, "You think so?", that was entirely too much. Him she could smack upside the head.

A sharp glance at the others was enough to send them running, which wasn't a bad thing until the loudest and noisiest of the bunch slammed into someone else.

And that someone else was wearing a forehead protector with a symbol she'd only seen in textbooks. He was also very uncharitable about the whole thing, which she could understand, to an extent. Not quite to the extent where it was acceptable to hoist Konohamaru into the air like that, though.

Naruto was widening his stance and clearly threatening to escalate the situation with his body language, even if he hadn't said anything beyond his demand the stranger put Konohamaru down. Sakura, however, did not want the situation to become any worse than it already was, especially as she had a good idea why Suna ninja would be allowed to wander the streets freely. Intervillage incidents were bad, regardless of which village it was with.

So she bowed instead. "I'm very sorry," she apologized, her sincerity increased by her nervousness. Because while they were probably genin candidates for the exam, both of them were older than Naruto and her. But the older boy wasn't prepared to be appeased so easily.

While he was sneering at them, Sakura was searching for the right words to fix the situation, being careful to keep her hands clear of her knives. Because once weapons came into play, or even anything like real violence, it would be very, very difficult to get anyone to willingly back down. Well, at least that was her experience with Naruto and Sasuke-kun. She'd be more than willing to solve things with words.

But Sasuke-kun intervened before she could think of anything. And, just as she'd thought, the stranger was ready to meet Sasuke's rock with something else, though, luckily, she never discovered what it was.

As a third stranger, this one a younger redhead, joined the others, she had a moment's doubt whether it was really lucky. Because when he clearly controlled his teammates through fear, she didn't want to know what he'd be like if they met him in the exams.

But she bit her lip and didn't interfere as he demanded Sasuke-kun's name and Sasuke-kun received in return the name of Suna no Gaara. Let Naruto demand their attention. She would be happy if those intense, unsettling green eyes never fixed on her.

No one said a word about her new outfit.

[Kill Your Heroes]

Sakura hung back as the boys demanded answers from Kakashi-sensei. And if it was dismay she felt at the affirmative answer, she tried to hide it well. Because, after all they'd gone through together, she didn't want to be the one holding their team back. Naruto would whine, which she'd find irritating but bearable, but after their teamwork exercise and perhaps before that, she couldn't bear to disappoint Sasuke-kun. And he was clearly intent on their participation.

So she swallowed down her own reservations.

And if she waited until the next morning to fill out the paperwork, choosing instead to spend her evening obsessively checking her equipment and then spending several hours pressed into the corner of her room, the blanket from her bed draped around her shoulders as she tried to reason through what tomorrow would bring, there was no one else home to know.

By the time she woke up the next morning, she'd regained some composure and perspective. It was only a test, designed to measure their suitability for promotion. Their mission in Wave had been an aberration, one she shouldn't use as a measure for what was actually expected of them at this point in their career. She'd convinced herself that it would be much closer to their Academy exercises than the kind of action they'd seen on the bridge. The conditions, after all, would be controlled and the entrants would be monitored and it wouldn't make much sense to lose genin during the exam.

Especially the genin that belonged to foreign villages, like the Suna-nin they'd run into yesterday. She could imagine that might become a major point of contention, if it was all that common for their shinobi to die while within the walls of other villages.

And, upon consideration, when she'd told her parents about Kakashi-sensei's bell test, they'd told her stories about their own graduation exams. Her parents were chunin and if the exam was really so awful, she thought that would have been the moment for them to mention it. And most of the ninja in the village were chunin, even those that held noncombat positions.

So it had to be something that even those shinobi destined to work in the codebreaking office or in the aviary, like her mother, could pass.

So it wasn't confidence that they would necessarily win promotion that accompanied her out the door, but confidence about the nature of the exam. Regardless of what had happened after her graduation, she still remembered what it was like to do well at the Academy. If they asked her to do something like that, she had faith enough in her own skills to not be the one who held the team back.

And, judging by the expressions and body language of her teammates, both of them shared that opinion.

At first, nothing occurred to shake Sakura's certainty. Even if she'd been so unobservant as to miss the fact that the ground floor had been clearly labeled and they hadn't climbed enough flights to make it to the third floor, she'd sensed the use of genjutsu almost before she cleared the stairs.

The written exam that followed that bolstered her confidence magnificently, because while she found the questions challenging, they weren't so difficult as to cause her to think she'd gotten any wrong.

And if being told that none of that mattered at all, so long as they opted to stay in the exam as so dramatically evidence by Naruto, tore at her pride, it was nothing to what happened next.

The Forest of the Death was bad enough on its own.

But what found them there changed them forever.