Kill Your Heroes
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alethephobia (Part I)
The hard, unforgiving ridge of Kakashi-sensei's bookshelf dug into her shoulder where she'd pressed herself so tightly in the corner, but Sakura ignored it. She ignored Ūhei, who was clutched tight against her chest, her knees drawn up on either side. Her forehead lay against the rise of his shoulders, a warm, breathing thing in her arms.
She ignored them all, because she could not ignore what Gozen-san had told her.
There was nothing worse than being told something awful about something you loved and finding no way to dispute it except primal, emotional denial.
But, now that someone had called her attention to it, wasn't it strange? An entire clan had been massacred, but it had slipped so quietly into history that Sakura had almost forgotten it. At this, her face and ears burned, recalling a few very stupid comments she'd said to Sasuke after being assigned to Team Seven. It had happened when she'd been very young, young enough that her impression of the event was limited to a sense of restlessness from the adults and Sasuke taking a long leave of absence from the Academy.
That was before her crush, back when Ino was the axis on which her social life revolved. She'd hadn't paid it any special kind of notice, any more than when Shino was sick for days at time as his body tried to adjust to hosting his colonies.
In fact, before coming to Kakashi-sensei's, she'd actually gone to the library and spent hours in front of the microfilm viewer, reading back issues of the Konoha Daily. There'd only been a week of headline articles, then it had just...slipped out of the village's social consciousness, appearing further and further back in the paper until it wasn't mentioned at all. She'd ignored the dirty look of the librarian as she'd retrieved the roll that had the edition of the paper released exactly a year after the massacre, but there'd been no mention of it.
Almost like it'd never happened.
Uchiha Itachi, she whispered to herself inside her head. She'd parroted that name back at Gozen-san, intuiting that he was someone she should have known from her tone and a vague recollection that it was a name she'd heard before. Until the papers, she hadn't realized that he was Sasuke's older brother, though reading it had reminded her that it had been a name she'd heard a lot at the Academy. And then she hadn't and not for a moment had she stopped to wonder why.
The death of a clan, fallen almost entirely out of popular memory.
Sakura shivered, wondering just what else had faded so easily out of the history she knew.
The question wasn't whether she believed Gozen-san.
The massacre had happened. That was indelible fact.
Uchiha Itachi had been officially declared the perpetrator. That was what the papers said.
People wouldn't have put it aside so quickly if they'd been better liked, if Gozen-san had been alone in her resentment of the Uchiha. That was what deductive reasoning said.
The question was whether or not she wanted to go back to Gozen-san, to hear whatever else the Foxwife might have to say. To live, every day, with the memories she would carry home. To hear things she didn't want to hear about her village and its heroes, who she wanted desperately to believe were good men. No, not good men, infallible men. Her grip on that belief was already pretty tenuous, thanks to Kakashi-sensei. Who came, but late. Always late.
But if she didn't go back, some part of her mind said, that was like trapping a spider in a Tupperware container and shoving it into a cabinet. Some part of her would always feel like it had escaped and was biding its time, waiting for revenge. Better to kill it cleanly, better to know than not.
It was easy to think that, but no part of her wanted to do it, any more than any part of her wanted to step onto another battlefield. Just curling into herself like this could still make her ache in half-real, half-remembered pain. But she would, she thought as her tears soaked silently into the fabric of Ūhei's vest.
She would.
[Kill Your Heroes]
She'd cried against Ūhei until she'd fallen asleep and woken many, many hours later to find the ninken piled around her. That and a shower where she'd scrubbed herself until she was almost raw had given her enough courage to make the journey to Grandmother Nightmare's. She didn't knock on the door this time, because Gozen-san had given her permission on the third day to come inside without waiting for permission.
The old woman was baking cookies when she opened the door; the whole house smelt like warm chocolate. And Sakura was sick to her stomach as she met Gozen-san's eyes. "That wasn't the worst story, was it?" she asked her quietly.
There was nothing soft in Gozen Reiji's eyes when she responded to her question. "The worst stories are not the ones we hear as words. They're the ones we feel in our hearts. For me, the worst story...," she paused thoughtfully, and Sakura's hand slid to grasp her upper arm as she realized what it might mean, that Gozen-san had so many bad stories it took this long to choose a worst.
"The worst story," Gozen-san said at last, "is of a selfish man and a willful woman for whom many sons and daughters died, just so they could have a son of their own blood. He knew—and she knew even better—exactly the stress it would put on the seal, but they did it anyway, because they were so strong and proud and clever that they thought that it was their chance to take. But it wasn't, not in the end. So many dead, all because they didn't have the sense to adopt and raise a child of the heart, rather than of the flesh. And he died for it, but did anyone think he'd gotten exactly what he'd deserved?"
Sakura was so still she wasn't certain she was even breathing, but Gozen-san's gaze was fixed somewhere in the past. "No," she said softly, voice sharper than one of Sakura's knives. "No. They whitewashed him and what he'd done and made him a hero," she sneered. "And that is why it's the worst story. If there was anything redeeming about that terrible night, it was that at least they didn't manage to make a martyr out of other."
"Who was it?" Sakura breathed.
"That," Gozen-san said, "is classified."
Sakura blinked at her, feeling strangely betrayed.
"Don't give me that look, child," she said. "I am an angry, bitter old woman, but I will be a good shinobi until the day I die. And that means even bad orders are carried out. Now," she said, "the weather's nice, so I'd like you to start by airing out the futons."
[Kill Your Heroes]
Sakura had a fully grown deathstalker scorpion in a glass sealed with wax paper and a rubberband at the top in one hand, her other hand swollen and not nearly numb enough beneath layers of ice, washcloth, and masking tape when Naruto bounded back into her life.
"Hey, hey, Sakura-chan!" she heard someone call from behind her as she explained her problem to the receiving nurse.
She turned to look and found her teammate waving at her from the entrance, closely shadowed by a well-endowed blonde woman who followed him when he bolted forward.
"Sakura-chan! You'll never guess what I—," then he checked himself, brows furrowed. "Wait, are you okay? Or just here to visit Sasuke?"
Sakura stared blankly at him. "Sasuke's here?"
It was his turn to stare. "You don't...?"
"What's that in the glass there?" the woman, who was accompanied by a slighter, darker woman she hadn't noticed earlier, said as she approached.
Sakura frowned down at the aggressive scorpion, who was still trying to strike her hand through the glass. "An object lesson," she muttered beneath her breath, "about being misled by experience." When the woman raised a brow, Sakura flushed. "A scorpion stung me while hanging up laundry on the line, ma'am."
Now both brows soared, because Konoha didn't have any native species of scorpions, but then the nurse called Sakura's attention back to treatment of her throbbing hand.
And that was the first time Sakura saw Senju Tsunade, the third member of the Sannin. Konohagakure's legendary three, who might only have one among them openly called a traitor, but all of them had left the village. That was Gozen-san's first remark when Sakura brought her the news that Tsunade had returned to become the Godaime, after she'd been released from the hospital and had very grumpily returned Gozen-san's scorpion to her.
Of course, by that point Sakura was convinced that the only people that Gozen-san respected and liked were the others who had survived careers as ANBU lifers. And those were a very, very few, most of them living nearby and many of whom Sakura had met as what Gemna-sensei had intended to be a D-class mission or two overran her life. But as Sakura listened to the murmur of the village, shamelessly eavesdropping on conversations as she ran errands, Gozen-san wasn't the only one who was less than forgiving about the formidable healing skills that Tsunade had deprived the village of when she'd left. There was a lot of talk centered on how many might have been saved in the wake of the invasion if she'd been there.
Sakura had contradictory feelings about what she'd heard, read, and seen, but what concerned her more than the new Hokage was the first proper meeting of Team Seven since the invasion, which hadn't yet happened. Sasuke hadn't been released from the hospital yet, though she was going to go see him today.
It felt, somehow, like she was going to that first meeting again, back when they'd only been genin-candidates. It wasn't only that there were more dead men and scars between her and them again, though that was part of it. The time she'd spent learning not to flinch when whole passels of illusionary spiders rained down on her while changing a light bulb, Sasuke had spent in the hospital for a reason no one would tell her.
While she'd listened to Gozen-san explain that insects were effective in genjutsu because people readily believed they were real and most found them disturbing en masse, while more fantastic illusions invited the brain to realize it was trapped in an illusion, Naruto had been off on some adventure with the Toad Sage. Even Kakashi-sensei. When she'd been breaking plates while washing dishes, slicing open veins and learning that the fears that really spoke to people, the ones hardest to shake off, were the ones rooted deeply in reality, he'd had medic-nin coming by to make certain his IV was feeding correctly.
But first, she had an audience with their new Hokage. She shifted restlessly, Kakashi-sensei occupying the time as they waited with his novel, which was somehow both irritating and reassuringly familiar. She was surprised to see Shikamaru and Asuma exit the Hokage's office, Shikamaru looking deeply unsatisfied with the chūnin vest tucked under one arm.
His scowl disappeared briefly as he said, "Hey, Sakura," as they passed them.
She managed to muster a smile in return, but then Kakashi-sensei was peeling himself from the wall and she followed him into the office. She knew the slighter, dark-haired woman as Shizune now, Tsunade-sama's apprentice, but she was a little bemused by the pygmy pig that came to snuffle at her foot. The blonde-haired woman waved them impatiently further in until they stood before her desk.
"So, Kakashi," she said, "it seems you have a whole passel of extraordinary students." Hazel eyes fixed on Sakura, who struggled not to squirm. "Haruno Sakura?"
"Yes, ma'am?" Sakura responded, and it was only because of time spent with Gozen-san that she didn't squeak. If her voice was a little higher than normal, it was because the part of her brain that would forever live in the Academy regarded the office of the Hokage with more than a little awe.
"Despite the interruption of the exams, upon review of their performances, two of your yearmates received promotions today," Tsunade informed her, settling her chin on interlaced fingers. "You, however, were eliminated during the preliminaries after the second section."
"Yes, ma'am," Sakura replied, swallowing down the memory of that match.
"Normally, that would be the end of it. However, I received a recommendation for your promotion from a jounin."
Sakura's eyes automatically swept over to Kakashi-sensei, who raised a brow. "A field promotion?" he asked Tsunade-sama. Sakura couldn't quite work out the complexities of his tone.
"Yes," she replied. "The jounin was not the only one who came to me with something to say. A handful of chūnin came to me and were very insistent that it would be very embarrassing for them go on mistaking a genin for a chūnin. After that, I pulled your files." Those hazel eyes narrowed. "I was more than a little surprised by what I found. It's a record that almost seems like it shouldn't belong to a genin brought up in peacetime, but it is what it is. As of this moment, you have the highest kill count of anyone in your graduating class, but that alone isn't enough to make chūnin."
She raised her head off her hands, lips compressed into a thin, unhappy line. "Personally, I dislike field promotions. We only see them regularly in wartime and that was something I wanted to leave far behind. But neither can I ignore the needs of my village, which will be asking a lot from its shinobi for months, likely years as we rebuild our military strength. I'd like to give you at least another year of field experience, but circumstances being what they are, I'm going to reward you for your sacrifices in the past by asking more of you tomorrow. As of today, Haruno Sakura, you are a chūnin of Konohagakure. Congratulations."
