A/N: Welcome to the time-skip era! These chapters will be a little different than the rest of the story, closer to a series of vignettes. They will be in chronological order, but time does pass between them. Thanks to everyone who's come along for the ride thus far.

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Thirty-Two-

Toward Better Days (Part I)

[storgē]

With Sasuke...gone and Naruto now absent on his training journey, Sakura lived in a perpetual state of nervous anticipation for all that she'd acted blasé in front of Naruto. The missions were a certainty; her relationship with Kakashi-sensei was far more uncertain.

It wasn't unheard of for jounin to take on individual apprentices, but there was a special process for that. Sakura didn't have any illusions of being so specially gifted as to merit the complete attentions of a jounin as storied as Kakashi-sensei even under normal circumstances, nor was she skilled enough to not be a serious liability on the kind of missions he'd need to take on now that Konohagakure needed the kind of income A-rank missions brought.

And she was, after all, chūnin. Technically speaking, she was a working ninja now—what she learned would be from her seniors, not from a teacher. It was entirely possible that they'd only place her with a more experienced team and that would be the end of it. Team Seven would become nothing more than a memory of failure.

She hardly ever slept in her bed anymore—the western-style piece of furniture was too much "sacrifice on altar" for the abused limits of her imagination—but it was still her favorite place to think, especially when there was sunlight spilling in through her window, warm as an embrace. Her knees were pulled tight to her chest, back supported by the wall, and her forehead pressed to one of her knees.

Even though the time she'd haunted Kakashi-sensei's apartment had been very brief, she missed it terribly. With eight dogs, there was always someone begging attention, or food, or just proving remarkably tolerant of intermittent petting. Not like here, where the emptiness of the house below seemed almost to echo, her thoughts too loud and too uninterrupted to prevent the slow encroach of a miserable depression. Kakashi's couch might have been a nightmare, likely older than she was and with an almost magnetic property where dog hair was concerned, but she'd trade that perch in an instant with her tidy bed and all her sunlight.

She hadn't seen any of them, sensei or ninken, since he'd left on his last mission.

Sakura tightened her grip, pressing her head harder against her knees. She needed to stop this and she knew it, but she wasn't any more able to stop the first trickle of tears than she would have been able to hold back the tide.

It was worse than not having teammates, worse than being just the one left behind. One of them was a traitor. She was still struggling with the idea, but others didn't have the same conflicted feelings. Today, a woman on the street—a perfect stranger, cheeks flushed with rage, eyes full of unshed tears—had come to a dead stop right in front of her and hissed, "I hope that your former teammate gets everything he deserves. My brother died when that snake came and then that boy," the word was so full of rancor it could have been a curse," just hands Orochimaru the most valuable bloodline this village has."

It was only the opening salvo of a stream of potent vitriol and Sakura had been powerless to do anything but stand there, pale-faced and trembling, as she closed her eyes and wished she could just flee. But some part of her brain had recognized that since Sasuke's defection wasn't a secret any longer, this was just the first of these conversations.

Somehow Gaara—who wasn't only a jinchūriki, but also the son of the previous Kazekage—had gotten embroiled in the whole thing, and the genin who'd been sent in Sasuke's retrieval had belonged to large and prominent clans. Their families had been more than a little curious about what had hospitalized so many young prodigies, especially as they hadn't been informed that they were about to be sent out on a mission. With that many people involved, and enough shinobi more than capable of noticing when Uchiha Sasuke never showed his face on the streets again, the news spreading was only a matter of time. Tsunade-sama had taken preemptive action and announced it very gravely herself.

Once she'd been so, so proud to be part of Sasuke's team. She'd gloated about it to Ino. Now she almost wished she'd been assigned to some other squad, that she'd only ever watched him at a distance—and had her heart broken at a distance too.

Eventually, someone had taken pity on the young genin, gently steering the now-shouting woman away.

Sakura had fled at the speed of shunshin.

She was so busy trying to stop the tears, she almost didn't notice the shift of the mattress. But almost was not the same as not, and she glanced up sharply to find that it was Kakashi-sensei perched on the edge of her bed.

His brow quirked in a question, but Sakura only ducked her head, trying to wipe away the evidence of her fit of tears. So she had no forewarning, only recognized the press of warm fur as Bull's weight was significant enough to tip her forward into the wave of dogs who leaped up onto the bed and were competing for space to press cool noses against her bare skin. There was no speaking, just a rather embarrassing bit of strangled snuffling on her part, but soon they'd teased her out of the worst of her misery, especially when Shiba started "assisting" by lapping at the tear tracks down her cheeks.

"Thanks, everyone," she murmured, answered immediately by a unanimous tail-wagging.

"No problem, Sakura," Pakkun reassured her. "It's the obligation of leading men to show up at times like these."

She blinked at him, then turned a questioning look to Kakashi-sensei, who told her, "In this case, Pakkun is your leading man. I was going to at least take a shower first."

Pakkun scoffed, but only grumbled something about the smell of sweat, steel, and knife oil that she couldn't quite make out.

Sakura ran thumb and forefinger over Pakkun's velvety soft ears. "It was an honor to learn from you, Kakashi-sensei. I—I wish it could have lasted longer."

She hadn't thought to say it after she'd first made chūnin, too busy trying to wrap her head around the idea that she'd made chūnin at all, but the sentiment would have been just as earnest then. Kakashi-sensei might never have been there when she felt like she'd needed him most, but he was always there to pick up the pieces and help her glue them back together into something stronger.

"Just for that comment, you should expect an extra twenty minutes on tomorrow's walk," was Kakashi-sensei's immediate reply.

Sakura blinked at him. "But without Sasuke and Naruto—without the team—chūnin and jounin hardly ever work together."

"Lots of people manage friendships without being on the same team," Kakashi-sensei pointed out dryly. "And jounin work in pairs."

[cleithrophobia]

"If you have to go to the bathroom, go, otherwise quit squirming and ask," was Gozen-san's exasperated comment as Sakura scrubbed at the planks of the porch. Konohagakure might not have vicious extremes in weather, but mold was a yearlong problem. The plan was to scrub the porch free of mold and re-seal the boards, which was straightforward, but less straightforward was her reaction to Gozen-san's silence on Sasuke.

Sakura bit her lip and pressed harder on her brush, using her body weight to drive the bristles deep in the worn boards. "Could you use genjutsu to brainwash someone?" she asked. "Or a seal?"

""Brainwashing," you say. That would be a technique and a half," Gozen-san said with a chuckle. "And if it existed, it would be a kekkei genkai, and the family would be slaughtered as soon as could be managed. The rest of us make do well enough without something like that. With time and the right resources, you don't need genjutsu to change someone's mind. There wouldn't be spies in the world if it wasn't possible to turn people into assets. It's an art, almost like a really good massage. Once you know the stress points, it's just a matter of applying enough pressure. Still, you can't exploit what isn't there. There is a good deal of skill involved in picking your target; of knowing who will bend, who will break, and who will simply take you, if you are not careful. The best never even bother to lie—you just have to show them a different kind of truth. I assume this is related to your Uchiha brat; you've never showed an interest in coercion techniques before."

"I actually thought you'd say something," Sakura admitted.

"I have said something. Not to you, no, because I believe that when you speak, it should do something useful. In my capacity as a former ANBU captain, I submitted a recommendation to the Hokage that the Uchiha be eliminated before he grows up to be more than a nuisance."

Sakura took a long moment to gape at Gozen-san, whose expression looked as if she'd done no more than recommend a particular recipe or something equally mundane, not just admitted she thought that outright killing Sasuke was the best solution. Some part of her mind finally ventured, This is her mundane.

Another, far more melancholy part recognized, This is my mundane, one day.

But not today, she thought fiercely. Today, she was allowed to be a little bit horrified at the comfortable finality of Gozen-san's assessment.

She almost didn't notice the heat at first, radiating up from the porch planks, because her eyes were on Gozen-san. Who was seated in that single rocking chair, moved to the far side of the porch, her hands busily crocheting. But when she glanced down, little tongues of fire were licking off glowing, charred wood. Sakura made a strangled sound in her throat, but the little inhalation was full of dry, dry air and smoke, which had her choking.

"During the Second War, there was a year in which we had a very nasty drought here in Konoha. Usually we have more than sufficient rain and even if we don't, there are plenty of rivers. Not so that year. And what rivers didn't dry up, they diverted in places as far from the village as they could manage. A clever man in Iwa had decided that our forest could become our pyre—we lost thousands of acres to that blaze and came closer than most people know to losing thousands of human lives.

"It had already crowned when we arrived. They had wind-natured shinobi both enhancing the blaze and dispersing the smoke, so it was almost too late by the time a watchtower noticed. As it was, it was like walking into hell on earth," Gozen-san said thoughtfully. "Humans are fascinated by fire, but when it becomes a beast so wildly out of your control, there is a deep, primitive part of the brain that can only react with fear." And on her last word, Sakura's world blazed.

[oikophobia]

It wasn't just that Kakashi-sensei appeared whenever he liked to continue her training, though he insisted on being treated to a meal afterwards and he was much more expensive than Naruto, but she was almost certain that he was using his influence to put her with specific teams. Unlike her first mission, the last two she'd been on had seen her appended to established teams and she'd had just a single day of downtime between them.

She had her suspicions as to his motives. Sakura didn't have a noncombat specialization, which meant that she was going to be the "muscle" on any purpose-built team. And her muscle wasn't that impressive just yet, though she thought she'd done well with Shino. With a proper team, it would have mattered less. Without one, she needed both strength and utility, otherwise she'd find herself at the mercy of Konoha's needs.

On the mission she'd just returned from, she'd been part of a five-man squad who clearly didn't really need her, though she'd been of an age with the person they'd been hired to escort. Very putatively, she'd been the girl's body double for a few dicey stretches of road. It was their field medic who'd approached her, taken her under his wing temporarily, making conversation about the medical specialization just as the head of the force recon unit she'd taken the other mission with had explained about acquiring and collating data and coupling that with their resources for effective action.

Sakura would readily admit that medical jutsu seemed tremendously handy. She had every intention of expanding her required reading and maybe asking Honda-san for guidance if she couldn't manage with books and animal "volunteers".

But when she'd come to the cold realization that Tsunade-sama's medic program required her to stay out of the thick of combat even when it wasn't a matter of protecting the client, she'd known she couldn't become a field medic. Not only did it take a special breed of cold rationality to watch your teammates take the brunt of the damage without putting all Kakashi-sensei's lectures on teamwork to good use, but she just wasn't that brave.

It was strange and counterintuitive, but for her standing still, fighting only defensively, was balancing on the edge of a dangerous precipice. One little misstep would lead to the kind of retreat that had nothing to do with regrouping and everything to do with running away. Every mission was first a battle with herself. And taking that step forward, exposing herself to pain, to injury, to possible death, that was winning the battle. If she just stood, if she just watched, safe and insulated in her role, she knew there would come a point where she wouldn't be able to take field missions at all. The fear would win, complacence having eroded the fear of shame, the pride and the patriotism that let her move forward despite it all.

When you only watched the backs of others, she thought it would be very easy to think, No one would notice. It might start small. Less eager to rush in, slower to take chances. Until it became no one would notice if I didn't come at all. She was coming to know herself uncomfortably well. It wasn't a stretch anymore to imagine herself rationalizing herself right into a role far from the field.

And despite how much she did not want to be there sometimes, that felt like a betrayal. Of who, she couldn't say, but it was anchored as firmly in her head and her heart as the fear. She liked to think it was more than just pride, that she'd deeply internalized the teamwork component of Konoha, but the pride was there, the inescapable weight of other people's opinions propping it up whenever it flinched.

Whatever it was, if these were Kakashi-sensei's hints about where her possible talents might lie, she was more than half-convinced she was crazy for favoring force recon. In wartime, not only were they expected to perform limited recon functions deep in enemy territory, they were expected to carry out limited scale operations without support, then vanish like shadows in sunlight. In peacetime, their specializations were extraction, hostage recovery, and kidnapping. Missions that required them to move fast, silently, and improvise.

It sounded like every nightmare mission she'd ever participated in, so she hoped that time would bring other missions. Other options.

Sakura was so involved in mulling over a future in which she voluntarily placed herself in that position that she was entirely surprised by the presence of someone else in the house. Treading lightly over the floorboards, she padded toward the kitchen and the soft sounds of something that she didn't actually think was a home invasion. It was more than likely just Kakashi-sensei pillaging snacks that weren't out of date at this time last year.

So she wasn't prepared for the sight that greeted her. "Mom?" she gasped, remembering only belatedly that she'd known she was coming. Somewhere upstairs, there was a calendar on which the date had neatly written down and then circled a time or twenty for good measure.

Haruno Mebuki turned and her eyes widened at the sight of her daughter. Sakura was suddenly, fiercely glad that her appointment with the specialist had gone well, her face once again unscarred. She didn't even think she looked particularly bad, but of course her mother hadn't seen her for some time. And Sakura doubted it was the few poor inches she'd gained since graduation that held her attention. She realized one hand had gone to clutch at the opposite arm, the other dropping to rest comfortably atop one of her knives.

It was a defensive posture and she tried to force herself to relax it, to throw herself into her mother's arms, but it was like her feet had sprouted roots while she wasn't looking. So it was her mother who closed the distance between them, folding Sakura into her arms. The gesture brought back her childhood, carried on her mother's scent and in the safety she'd always found there. One of her mother's hands came up to cradle the back of her head, navigating her sweaty, tangled hair with ease.

"Oh, Sakura," her mother breathed.

"Mom," Sakura mumbled into her mother's shoulder, almost choking on all the things that needed said. But for the moment she just clung to the one woman left in the world who could make things better by just being there. Her Baba could have done the same, maybe even better, but she was long gone. Gone, gone, gone—like her mother and father had been for most of her life, like Sasuke, like Naruto.

Everyone always left her behind.

She hadn't cried, not really, since she'd heard the news. But suddenly she was sobbing and couldn't bring herself to stop.

[vestiphilia]

Sakura hissed as she dabbed the rubbing alcohol towelette against the wide, ragged scrapes that decorated one of her legs, deep enough that she was dribbling blood. It looked like she'd been severely underestimating the abrasiveness of tree bark all this time, but she was now thoroughly schooled in the fact that not all of Konoha's forest was as forgiving as their smooth-barked Fire beeches.

Mariko only watched, hands resting comfortably in the pockets of her sleeveless hoodie and looking cheerfully unrepentant. "This is why sane people wear pants," she told Sakura, voice rough with laughter. "I'm actually a little surprised that your legs don't look as if you live with a rabid housecat."

Sakura took a moment from her task to scowl at the older chūnin, who'd been the one to bodycheck her into a tree.

That only made her grin widen, Rie's tail beating out an eager tempo against loam. "I'm just suggesting you don't ruin your best feature before you have a chance to make use of them."

"Best feature?" Sakura repeated dumbly.

"Sure. A cute face gets you noticed in the Academy, but once you've hit puberty? Eyes tend to trend elsewhere. You've already got great calves—how much do you run, seriously?—but I bet you're going to have fantastic legs once you've got some height. I've met your mother, remember, so I wouldn't hold out much hope on the chest angle. Genes, y'know, can't win against them. Unless you're going the path of Tsunade-sama. There is no way those things are natural, not unless she's got some children stashed away somewhere. Body fat just does not do that."

"Why are we talking about this?"Sakura asked.

"Girl talk," Mariko said. "Very important part of life. Right, Sakuya?"

Sakuya and his teammate Chiasa—who was an unfair combination of fantastically pretty, genuinely nice underneath some tsundere speech patterns, and really skilled, none of which was lost on Sakuya—had been pretending deafness from the moment Mariko had mentioned puberty.

Sakura had thought Kiba was crude in school, but it turned out to be a clan-wide frankness that very probably had something to do with their canine companions. With that frankness amped up into a late-teens chūnin, there had been some very uncomfortable conversational lines crossed.

One of Mariko's teammates had resigned, while the other had found a noncombat specialty, leaving Mariko to head a team of chūnin whose teams had been similarly dissolved. That made her a fantastic resource, someone willing to talk about practical choices and who hadn't taken the prodigy route through her career. She was also an eager sparring partner who wasn't above explaining the best ways to counter her own attacks. Best of all, unlike Kakashi-sensei, Sakura also didn't have the sensation she was allowing Sakura to have the upper hand whenever she managed to take it.

But, god, sometimes she was embarrassing. The last time their little coterie—Mariko, Rie, Sakuya's whole team, and others who'd been in the stands during the invasion—had made it out to dinner, Sakura had thought she'd have to invent a jutsu that let her melt into her chair. Ranking the, ah, 'posterior assets' of men wasn't a conversation she thought she could survive more than once. Sure, Sakura and Ino had giggled together over boys, but it had been more of a general thing. He's cute, he's not, maybe noticing his eyes or his hair, not a breakdown of someone's body so complete as to be a rubric for attractiveness. It had only gotten worse when she'd attempted to wrangle Sakuya and the other boys into the conversation, proving either confident enough or flexible enough in her sexuality to turn her sights on women.

The other chūnin trended four to five years older than her; sometimes hanging out with them made her feel special and much closer to adulthood, but sometimes she only felt tremendously awkward and out of place.

"As flattered as I am to be included in this 'girl talk'," Sakuya said after a long pause, white brows rising incrementally, though his voice was as smooth as ever, "I think I'll choose the "staying silent" option."

It was Mariko's turn to raise her brows. "Does that mean you're coming with us when we take Sakura shopping?"

"Hey," Sakura protested sharply, "I think you skipped the step where you asked Sakura if she wanted to go shopping."

"One word. Pants."

[bibliophilia]

Sakura balked when she saw the store, but Kakashi-sensei's hand clamped down on her shoulder. "Ma, ma, Sakura-chan," he drawled, "Is something wrong?"

She tried to splutter an answer, but before she could, she found herself inside, the door closing behind them with a decidedly ominous sound. Sakura made a small, hunted eep and Kakashi-sensei's hand closed tighter.

It was a lot more crowded than she'd imagined, but it only stood to reason. These people were here for the same reason that Kakashi-sensei was, after all—today was the release of the first press of the Icha Icha Paradise movie. Or at least that was what she assumed from the promotional signing. Only Kakashi-sensei's hand was serving to keep her from bolting for the door.

"Why don't you look around," he suggested in a voice that suggested it wasn't a suggestion at all. "While you're waiting. I'm going to get in line."

And with a firm pat on her shoulder, he abandoned her. Her eyes darted for the door, but she obeyed, skulking closer to the shelves so she wouldn't seem so out of place. She was very purposefully not looking at anything when a voice asked, "Can I help you find something?"

Sakura nearly leapt out of her skin as she stammered, "No, no, I'm not looking for anything!"

She turned to see an almost disappointingly normal clerk regarding her with faint amusement. An almost disappointingly normal female clerk, with pretty, tea-colored hair and kind brown eyes. "You're a girl," Sakura said without thinking. It almost came out as an accusation.

The amusement deepened. "Strangely enough, women enjoy smut too," she said. "Though we usually demand a little more in the way of plot. We only carry a limited video line and as books are almost the only escape from the male gaze, most of our customers are actually female when there isn't a new Icha Icha release. Is this your first time here?"

"I'm not here," Sakura responded immediately. She pointed to Kakashi-sensei. "I'm here with him."

The clerk, whose tag read 'Akemi', followed the line of her finger until she encountered Kakashi-sensei, who noticed them and waved. Cheekily. Akemi chuckled. "Ah. Hatake-san. If he's here for the release, you'll be awhile. We won't be giving out copies for another three hours."

Sakura's shoulders slumped. She'd thought Pakkun's reprisals for failing training goals were bad. Now she knew better.

"Are you sure I can't help you find anything?" Akemi asked. "You're free to browse, but that can be a little dangerous if you're...sensitive," she settled on after a significant pause.

Sakura just stared blankly at her for a long moment, before raw curiosity triumphed over social conditioning. She had certain expectations about stores like these and the books and things in them, but this clerk defied them. So she wanted to know. "What about...something with a strong kunoichi?"

"Ah," Akemi said thoughtfully. "That's your taste, then? I think I can recommend something."

Sakura followed her obediently, but with growing trepidation. Akemi finally came to what she was looking for, pulling from the shelf one of novels. She expected one of those damning, blandly colored slipcovers, but she was surprised to find it much like the light novels she'd borrowed from the library before Kakashi-sensei's reading assignments had taken over her life. Sakura still accepted it like she might a live snake and tried to not look too closely at the cover. Tentatively flipping it over to the title page, she was instantly transfixed by the first illustration.

A kunoichi—tall, slender, elegant, but wearing the uniform of an ANBU without any salacious alterations—had a shinobi caught up easily by his collar, his feet clear of the floor, her body pressing his aggressively against the wall. She was smirking, and his face was turned aside, but a blush dusted the ridges of his cheeks. He was sleekly good-looking, all artfully tousled dark hair and pretty eyes. Though it was just the first plate, Sakura suddenly felt a wash of respect for the illustrator.

The title was Tsunami to Tsundere-kun.

"It's the first in the series. It was meant to be a stand-alone novel, but it was so popular they serialized it," Akemi said. "The female lead's just been promoted into ANBU and she clashes with her teammates, because for this overly convoluted reason, their squad isn't formed with a captain declared outright and they only have a short window of opportunity to decide who gets the captaincy. You'll figure out pretty quick that Tsunami's abilities are based on Tsunade-sama's and there are some great scenes where she uses that monstrous strength to flip the usual gender-roles. You know, the ones where the man pins the women in place to finish a conversation, that sort of thing. Neko-kun there is the focus of the first one, but all the members of her team have at least one novel that focuses on their development. And the later ones that feature Ookami-kun, who's her main rival, are really good too. And it's pretty vanilla throughout the series so it's good for a..first-timer." The last word was said with a hint of laughter and Sakura flushed.

"So long as you stay out of The Cherry Pit, you'll be fine. Pure love's pretty popular with kunoichi, so they're separated out by citrus content. Then, for our customer's convenience, they're sorted by relationship type—see the little placards on the shelf? If you're in a yuri mood and don't want to wade through the heteronormative sea or if you can't stand yoai, you'll find it much quicker and won't be in for any unpleasant surprises in the last twenty pages. Then they're sorted by author's last name, of course."

She led Sakura back to the end of the shelf, which was papered with a light green gingham and featured an anthropomorphized lime grinning at them. Others shelves kept to the cute gingham prints and big-eyed fruit, which explained why the store was called Lemon&Lime—the enormous ones over the registers had the byline 'It's doki-doki time!' The Cherry Pit she'd referred to was a walled-off section where a staff member stood sentry. It had not one but two anthropomorphized fruit—the Bitter Cherry section was apparently to the left, the dark burgundy fruit equipped with smoldering gaze, while Sweet Cherry was on the right, far more playful looking. It was apparently the home of the entire Icha Icha series.

Her first instinct was to thrust the book back on the shelf and pretend she'd never seen it. But...

"Hatake-san has an account here," Akemi said with a grin. "I'd say he owes you one. And we have a little reading café, just beyond the registers there. I recommend the Orange Dreamsicle float."

Sakura's first instinct was a no thanks, but somehow she found herself in ownership of the novel. And by the time Kakashi-sensei had emerged, she had every intention of owning all of them.

And in this way, a new fan was born.