Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Forty-Two-

Aphenphosmphobia (Part II)

"What?" the word tripped flatly off her tongue before her mind managed to rein in her mouth and she realized she'd just been incredulous to Uchiha Itachi. "Sorry," she apologized automatically, "just...give me a moment to parse all that."

There'd been two salient points within that jaw-dropping pronouncement. Uchiha Itachi was dying. And that was, well, not okay, because if he was dying-dying and going blind and still ranked as an S-class ninja, then she was almost afraid to guess what he might be capable of in good health. Still, he was all but a stranger, a name and a face and knowledge of a terrible event that she knew more of from microfiche than personal memory.

Sasuke, however, was someone she'd watched for years. She'd paid more attention to his career than her own, had followed rumors of his tastes and preferences like they were the dogma of a religion. Sakura hadn't needed other hobbies or interests, because she'd had him.

Now that she knew the truth of the massacre and that information on his younger brother was the currency by which Itachi was paid, it didn't take genius to guess that Sasuke had been the one person that Itachi couldn't bear to kill. It hadn't been innocence—they're been children hardly crawling who'd never seen another sunrise—but affection that had kept Sasuke alive.

Kept him alive and turned him into that stranger he'd been at the end, the one who'd sold himself to an infamous criminal because he was blind to everything but revenge.

Sakura took a deep, unsteady breath and then rose. "You said you're dying."

"Yes," Itachi confirmed. "My lungs. I haven't seen a medical professional for my condition in some time, but they were quite certain in their prognosis."

Trying not to eye him like he was a large carnivore that she suspected of being rabid, Sakura padded over to his side of the table and knelt behind him. He didn't stiffen or otherwise react to someone he didn't know well being so close; she didn't think she could have done the same if their positions were reversed.

Itachi just sat there, even as her hands flared with the distinctive green tint of medical chakra. She laid her hands on his back very gently and discovered that he was unexpectedly warm, his heat soaking into her palms across the thin barrier of his shirt. "Tell me about your symptoms and their diagnosis," she asked him.

Her training was geared toward injuries that would be incurred in the field, not diseases. This was not a gash or a puncture or a break, though she could help in terms of inflammation or infection. She'd expected something terrible that she could hardly diagnose, let alone treat. Cancer, perhaps, maybe some cellular disorder she'd never heard of.

It was terrible. She wasn't mistaken on that point. The damage was extensive, severely impacting the functionality of his lungs. It was also bacterial, which was something she had a little experience with after her nasty little bout of illness in the humid subtropics.

And had been very, very treatable.

Her hands shook slightly as she took shifted back a little and she curled them into her lap. "This was treatable."

"Yes," Itachi acknowledged evenly.

And he'd chosen not to.

That fact seeped into her veins, made her chest tight with something she couldn't name. She'd had time to acclimate to the idea that perhaps the Uchiha massacre hadn't been all that it seemed. Sakura hadn't, however, thought about what that would mean in terms of how Itachi viewed the event and his role in it. That first time she'd met him in person, he seemed so distant, so calculating, so inhuman she hadn't for a second considered this one inescapable fact.

Uchiha Itachi hated himself.

This awful thing he was allowing to happen to his body, it was a very deliberate thing. They weren't in the world of a century ago, where there weren't the drugs or the knowledge to treat his condition, nor was he a very poor man living in an area without access to proper medics. This was a choice to make every breath hurt, to make his body ache, to end his life coughing up blood and slowly suffocating as his lungs failed. Perhaps it might spread, if he lived that long, to his spine, his joints, his kidneys. He wasn't a fool. He probably knew all of those things, had chosen this for himself regardless.

This was a penance.

And Sasuke? Sasuke was his means of suicide, of bringing everything to an end.

Perhaps it would have also been his final apology, to a brother he'd wronged for the sake of something bigger than their family.

Perhaps he thought his death would appease Sasuke, when nothing else would.

It was reckless and desperate and mostly stupid.

Sasuke might have been satisfied with that for an hour, a month, a year, but what then? Did he just self-destruct, his purpose accomplished? What happened if he ever discovered the truth about what had happened that night? Granted, that information was unlikely to ever make its way to Sasuke's ears, but if it did, the consequences were dire enough it deserved some consideration. She had no real idea how strong he was now, but if he turned on Konohagakure, really, truly turned on the village, she knew who'd be sent out to put him down. And she didn't want that for Kakashi-senpai.

Even if he never discovered what had really happened, what did Itachi expect Sasuke to do when all was said and done? Sasuke had already ruined his career in Konohagakure with his own choices. He wasn't like Itachi, who'd been in deep cover for the better part of the decade. Uchiha Sasuke really was a traitor to the village. And in the shinobi world, betrayal came with consequences. He'd only been a genin when he left, so there was that in his favor. It wasn't like he'd taken a scroll or a weapon or intelligence. Just himself and one of the most valuable bloodlines in the village. If Orochimaru didn't take that from him, maybe he could buy himself back into the service of the village.

It would be hard, though. Konohagakure remembered Orochimaru. Knew what he was capable of, treated Mitarashi-san—his former student—as suspect even after years of faithful service.

One day, if he wanted, Sasuke might stand in the ranks of Konoha shinobi again. But trust would come much harder and much slower, if it ever came at all. He would never serve in ANBU, would probably have trouble being promoted to jounin. If and when that promotion came, he'd likely work only for outside clients, never for the village, never be entrusted with sensitive information.

If he didn't come back to Konohagakure, another village might take him in. Take him and his eyes, start another war, begin a new cycle of destruction and competition between the villages. For now Otogakure wasn't encroaching on the business of the major villages and was protected from reprisal for their attempted invasion by Orochimaru's reputation. If he left Oto? Gave himself to Iwa or Kiri or another major village? Then they'd see how long the peace lasted.

Setting even that aside, what kind of emotional fall-out would there be from killing the man who'd murdered his family? When that single purpose was all he'd pared himself down to? Sasuke hadn't been a bastion of emotional stability in those last days even before he'd spent years with Orochimaru.

It wasn't until his knee tapped hers that Sakura realized Itachi had shifted. "Sakura-san?"

She frowned unhappily at him, shuffling on her knees until she was facing him again. "May I examine your eyes?" she asked, retreating to more comfortable ground, which was more a measure of how much she wanted to avoid the Sasuke question than it was an indicator of trust.

But Itachi only studied her expression briefly before dipping his head in assent.

It was like—it was like kissing Tatsuo that first time, only this time the nervous energy boiling beneath her skin didn't have a pleasant source. He didn't close his eyes, even when she framed them with her hands, her thumbs brushing against fragile skin.

He'd admitted to blindness. He hadn't said a word about pain. Intense neuropathic eye pain, at least when he channeled chakra in the patterns she'd observed when Kakashi-senpai pushed it into the Mangekyo state. Even now, with the Sharingan in an activated but essentially passive state, he had to be experiencing some pain. Everywhere his chakra channels touched, the nerves displayed the same kind of damage she'd expect to see in a burn. Something to do with the Uchiha clan's fire-dominant chakra? Something else entirely?

Some of it was clearly chakra overflow, the kind of damage she'd dealt herself when she'd first started mastering Shunshin, but while she understood the base structure of the Sharingan due to her treatment of senpai's eye, she'd have to correct what she could and observe any developing problems, because there were subtle variations from the way she'd integrated senpai's implant. And on a cellular level, subtle variation was everything.

At last, Sakura lowered her hands back into her lap. "I'm not a proper medic-nin," she told him seriously. "I didn't do a residency at the hospital or anything like that."

"But you were talented enough to you to be recommended to Jiriaya regardless of that."

"Yes, well, we're going to put you on antibiotics strong enough to be toxic to your liver and we're going to do it without proper medical supervision," Sakura told him frankly. "I can probably repair the cellular damage in your lungs and hopefully the nerve damage in your eyes. I can restore your vision, but I won't know if I can stop the problem from recurring without more invasive study."

Itachi arched one brow, dipping his head slightly to one side. "That prognosis doesn't sound quite as dire as your expression would indicate."

Sakura smoothed out her expression with the ease of considerable practice. "Sasuke—I don't think it's a good idea. To include him in all this," she clarified.

"Is this a tactical protest or an emotional one?" was the response drawn from Itachi. There was a fractional drop in the warmth of his tone, a certain hardness in the set of his eyes. Subtle things, but they were enough to remake him into the public face of Uchiha Itachi, clan-killer and Akatsuki member.

She clenched her jaw against the impulse to swallow her protest. He was her lead for this mission and it was his mission, but they weren't on a battlefield. She could discuss her concerns. She felt her own expression begin to reflect some of Itachi's hardness. "Why did you change the plan?" she challenged him. "Why not just let Sasuke kill you outright? Has he fallen short of your expectations or is there something else? Someone else?"

In the face of his silence, she continued, "When I worked with him, Sasuke was psychologically vulnerable and I can't imagine that Orochimaru wouldn't have exploited that. How long since you've seen him, face-to-face? Are you trying to break him?"

That drew a sigh from Itachi, the deadly intent seeping from him to leave him merely frightening rather than terrifying. "Not since before he left the village," he admitted, those deep stress lines beneath his eyes more prominent than ever. She resisted the urge to flinch back as his expression grew briefly assessing. "You mentioned antibiotics. How long before I would feel an improvement?"

She allowed the change in topic, but she wasn't finished with that particular discussion.

"If you were civilian without access to a medic-nin? Nine months. If you were in Konoha General under Tsunade-sama's supervision? Four months. That's for complete eradication of the bacteria. Normally, you'd see improvement before that, but your case is so advanced that a civilian doctor wouldn't be able to do more than advise you to make your last arrangements," Sakura told him frankly. "I don't know how long we'll need to keep you on antibiotics. I guess it'll depend on how often you want to meet for a chakra-healing session. Since I can't discuss which antibiotics would be best for you with someone who has actual clinical experience, I'll need a little time to research. Then there's the small matter of getting the drugs. I could start on your eyes immediately, but I'm not really up for an extended surgery. Your eyes are bad enough without someone making stupid mistakes because she's overreaching."

"How long before you're recovered?"

"A day, maybe two." She'd likely still feel miserable, but more confident in her ability to make it through a prolonged surgery.

"I won't be expected for another four days. You will stay here with me until then," Itachi suggested in such a way that it became an order. "We will rarely have the opportunity to meet. The ritual to contain the bijū is extremely taxing and though we belong to the same organization, no member of Akatsuki trusts the others enough to show weakness in front of them. So it is expected that we will slink off and disappear after we take a jinchuriki, but at no other time will a face-to-face meeting be without risks that I would rather avoid if at all possible." That harshness was back in his face as he said, "Given the number of free jinchuriki remaining, our opportunities will be severely curtailed.

"I will explain as much as I can about Akatsuki, both its goals and its members. I will also provide a way to communicate with me, when we cannot actually meet. But for now, we should finish lunch."

[Kill Your Heroes]

Itachi was careful, systematic, and thorough. Or at least that was her impression of him as he produced a tarp so she wouldn't spoil the floor when she unsealed the body that had previously worn his face and wordlessly produced a surgeon's kit. He described the members of Akatsuki to her in uncompromising detail to her as she worked: skillsets, psychological profiles, career histories. Details she could pass on to Jiriaya, far more information than could be included in coded letters that masqueraded as complaints about the impact of Jiriaya's novels on the morality of the populace or about his depictions of women.

She listened intently to him while she searched her subject's clothes, examined his skin, slit him open and cracked his sternum to spread him wide, opened up his skull and peered into the wrinkled, grey-tinged folds of his brain.

Her impression that Sasori was a mad, twisted kind of genius intensified as she found kanji on the inside of his skin, like some terrible reverse tattoo. Once she'd found the first by accident—his scalp slipping loose from his skull—she began the delicate and labor-intensive task of skinning him. It wasn't the first time that she'd skinned something, as survival exercises at the Academy had made her proficient at it. Squirrels and rabbits were easy; with a few preliminary cuts and a partner to hold their feet, their skin could be pulled away with no more effort than taking off a slightly sticky sock. Deer were more awkward only when you didn't have the opportunity to hang them.

Not so a human being, whose skin was thinner and more delicate. A younger Sakura would never have made it past the first incision without bolting, but present-day Sakura was not only a veteran of the battlefield but also of Gozen-san. It helped that her audience was Itachi, who managed to seamlessly marry clinical distance with respect for the fact that this body had once been a person. Gozen-san wouldn't have cared; Naruto would have covered his unease with terrible jokes and maybe prodded an eyeball to convince himself that this didn't freak him out.

Eventually she had the skin off and spread before her like a map. She studied the characters, probing for residual chakra while Itachi retrieved pen and paper and laid down a diagram of their placement. They discussed method of application, exchanged theories on why one character would have been chosen over another, and drew conclusions about the chakra network that would be created when the jutsu was activated. The subject's—or victim's—own chakra withdrew deep into the internal organs, helping to maintain automatic functions, while the outside source of chakra—Itachi had first-hand experience with that part of the technique, which would make the transference much easier to recreate—flooded the normal chakra network and essentially remade one person into another.

She was unwillingly impressed, a little horrified, and very certain she'd made the right decision to end the fight against Sasori when she had.

When she'd learned all she could from the body and the sunlight was well on its way to fading from the sky, Itachi disposed of their subject while she showered and pointedly tried not to consider where their own "volunteer" would be coming from. There were a lot of people that the world was better off without, but Sakura was uncomfortable with the way her moral lines seemed to be made of sand. Press her too hard and she'd redraw them somewhere a little closer to the person she didn't want to become.

Itachi showered when he came back inside, then insisted on making dinner, which relegated her to feeling awkward at the table while he produced more evidence that some Homemaker's Association somewhere was missing their role model. His hair was loose and still damp when he joined her, spilling over his shoulders in a dark, sleek waterfall. The table was small enough that she could smell the sharp, clean scent of the soap he'd used, overlaid by a strong herbal scent that Sakura suspected was due to the copious amounts of tea she'd seen him sipping throughout the day—due to the ingredients she'd been able to recognize, she was almost certain it was helping him to manage the cough that should, by all rights, be plaguing him at this stage.

It was only then, in that moment of strange intimacy, that her brain managed to process something that should have occurred her much earlier, when Itachi had insisted she would spend the next several days with him. Alone. In this isolated, cozy getaway cabin.

Uchiha Itachi was as unreal to her as the actors on television, but Itachi was a man.

She wasn't delusional enough to think he'd be attracted to her and she wasn't worried that he'd make advances. She certainly wasn't worried that she'd inexplicably fall deeply in lust with him like in one of Jiriaya's trashy novels. But that wasn't the point.

The point was that everything was about context. Kunoichi worked with mixed-gender teams that heavily favored the male side of the equation. The Academy hadn't been interested in producing soldiers that viewed each other as gender-neutral equals; there'd been too much emphasis on the differences between kunoichi and shinobi for that to happen, making them all painfully aware of the boy/girl divide. She'd shared cramped tents with her genin team and shared accommodations with senpai as a jounin and she'd shared space with Tatsuo too, but all those things shared factors in common. All those people had been familiar to her, people she'd grown up with, and there had been clearly established boundaries laid between them, reinforced by the protocols taught in the Academy.

Collaborating with Itachi made the rules strangely fluid; he walked a strange line between partner and contractor and with all of the other things making him what he was, it was impossible to put him into a neatly labeled box and treat him with unabridged professionalism. He made her too uneasy for that and this assignment was so far outside anything she'd ever done—there would be support, no post-mission debriefing, she'd never break it down and analyze it with her squad—that it demanded a certain kind of flexibility, a change in the rules that governed every mission.

And because of all those things, because she was a teenage girl who read smutty novels in her spare time, because he was one of the most beautiful and tragic men she'd ever seen, Sakura experienced a few very uncomfortable moments of recognition of Itachi the man before she tucked it away and looked on him as simply Itachi.

"You're an excellent cook," she told him, which drew a faint smile.

"My mother was excellent. If I am passable, it's all to her credit," was his response. When Sakura visibly hesitated, his expression softened until he was that warm, affable creature that had greeted her with lunch, as if she'd never challenged him on Sasuke. "You are allowed to talk about them. To ask questions. You don't have to pretend that the massacre did not happen for my sake. It will be...not pleasant, necessarily, but welcome to speak about my family to someone who knows that I did not kill them simply because I could. I have been pretending to be that monster for so long it is almost more real to me than the truth."

Sakura nodded slowly, taking in that admittance, said in the same even tones with which he'd announced he was dying. She'd already learned that all his emotional displays were subtle, but this crossed the line into impossible to read "So, your mother taught you to cook?" she prompted. "That's unusual, isn't it? In clans, I mean. Though it's fairly unusual in general, too."

"Yes," Itachi responded, picking up the thread of the conversation. "But I was very fond of my mother and the kitchen was a place that my father rarely entered. Both of those contributed to my desire to learn. It was something that she and I could do together—once I was in the Academy, there were very few of those things left that were considered appropriate for the heir of the clan."

"If your father avoiding the kitchen was a good reason to be in it, I guess you didn't get along?"

"It was not my father, precisely, that I was avoiding. Only his expectations. In those moments when he forgot he was the head of the Uchiha clan, he was a good father. Those instances happened less and less as I grew older, though, and tensions with the village worsened. He was...very proud of being an Uchiha," Itachi said after a moment's consideration. "So much that I think it came to define him. Every insult dealt our clan became a personal one and he reacted in the only way that he knew how. With anger, resentment, and eventually, violent action."

"Your mother, did she...?" Sakura asked tentatively, but found herself unable to complete the question.

Itachi, however, apparently didn't require her to say anything aloud. "You want to know if my mother died for the sins of her husband?"

"It's just...not everyone in your clan who died that night would have been directly involved in the plan to rebel. I understand, sort of, why they issued a blanket order. But if your mother wasn't responsible for anything more than being an Uchiha, I think that must have been very hard."

"In many ways, my mother was a traditional clan wife. She deferred to my father in public, so I suppose to an outsider it might have seemed as if she allowed all her opinions to be led by his. But she was her own person, responsible for her own decisions. She was also an integral part of the plans for rebellion. As the wife of the leader of the clan, she took on most of the social responsibilities that my father was too busy for. There was no need for my father to arrange clandestine meetings when my mother could visit anyone in the compound at any time without arousing suspicion. My mother might have been both kinder and softer in her manners than my father, but she was not a victim."

Because Sakura didn't know whether that made it better or worse, she only prodded at her tamagoyaki. "How well do you know this area?" she asked him before the silence could grow awkward.

"Reasonably well," was his answer, which Sakure interpreted to mean that he was probably aware of every residence within fifty miles if he held true to pattern. "What do you require?"

"Access to pharmaceutical catalogs and case studies," she replied. "And then access to a pharmacy."

She did manage to convince him to at least let her do the dishes while they discussed the logistics of acquiring what she would need to begin treating Itachi's condition. By the time they were both satisfied exhaustion had sunk deep into her bones and she was seriously considering just pillowing her head on her arms and sleeping at the table.

Itachi rose from his seat across from her and slipped into the bedroom, though that was something of a misnomer.

In keeping with the design of the house, the bedding was stored during the day in a large closet, leaving the second room empty and useful for other functions beyond just being a bedroom. She heard the sound of one of the closets being opened and Itachi reappeared in the doorway with a thick, comfortable-looking futon that smelt ever-so-slightly like cedar and sunshine even from where she was sitting.

Her mind wasn't quite groggy enough with the need to sleep not to react at all when he asked her, "Shall we go to bed?"

It took very little time for the rational voice in her head to firmly assert that he was only trying to keep her from drooling on the table, not propositioning her, but people like Uchiha Itachi were the reason that people believed that the Sharingan could read minds rather than just allow them to interpret microexpressions. Her only comfort was that it appeared alarm had trumped anything else that she might have felt, which meant that while the tips of her ears warmed with embarrassment she didn't feel the need to let her head drop to the table with a hearty thunk.

An undercurrent of amusement warmed his dark eyes. "You have nothing to worry about. What's the term?" He paused thoughtfully for a moment. "Ah. I am a herbivore."

Due to the speaker, it took Sakura's brain a moment to process the term. Herbivore. A man for whom sex came very low on the hierarchy of needs, if it appeared at all. There were other associations as well, but Sakura was fairly certain that was the one meant to reassure her. It usually wasn't a compliment, but she'd grown up with boys who thought 'You fight like a girl' made a fine insult.

She outranked most of those boys and had a higher kill count than anyone in her graduating class. In Itachi, "herbivore" didn't carry warm and fuzzy overtones—except perhaps in those moments when he was putting her own mother's cooking to shame—but translated to a highly cerebral being.

"Also," Itachi continued in a distinctly wry tone, "I suspect you would not enjoy sharing a room with me with me at the moment, let alone a bed. Night sweats and coughing fits are, I imagine, less romantic in person than what classical literature would lead you to believe."