A/N: Just as a fun fact, "herbivore" or "grass-eater" is an actual term in use in Japan, though obviously translated into English. The original is sōshoku-kei danshi, if your heart desires to Google.

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Forty-Two-

Aphenphosmphobia (Part III)

They passed an uncomfortable night together, she and Itachi.

Though he slept in the outer room, the walls weren't sufficient barrier against the sound of his coughing. Whatever he was using to manage during the day wasn't enough to prevent the ragged, wet sounds that occasionally escaped him and jolted Sakura awake. She'd padded over to the door after one such episode and discovered he'd not even attempted to lie down, just slumped against the wall with the thin pillow behind his head, the covers pulled up over his shoulders and the thickness of the futon beneath him.

His eyes fluttered open, his awareness of his surroundings apparently fully intact despite his body's suffering and she met his undemanding gaze only briefly before she made a silent retreat back to her own futon.

Sakura woke at dawn out of habit despite sleeping poorly and stumbled to the bathroom, going through her morning routine as quietly as she could. She was sans ninken and the energy needed for a proper "morning walk", but she did slip outside when she'd finished. For the next hour, she did slow, controlled sets that returned limberness to muscles gone slightly stiff with disuse and helped her sweep fresh chakra through her body.

She'd expected Itachi to be up by the time she'd finished; she'd half-expected him to be watching, evaluating the person with whom he'd be first entrusting his eyesight and then his life. But he was asleep when she slunk back inside and though he relocated to the bedroom while she made herself tea, he didn't reappear until almost ten o'clock.

While "well-rested" wasn't the adjective she'd have chosen to describe him now that she knew to look beyond the initial impression, he was neatly put together and apparently ready to initiate the next phase of their plan. Or at least that was what she assumed, given that his hair now appeared to be a warm brown, worn much shorter but in a flattering cut, and he was wearing glasses, his eyes dark with the absence of the Sharingan. He wore civilian clothes badly in the sense that he would have attracted less attention if he was a little more rumpled and unkempt, but he seemed intent on minimizing the changes he'd need to maintain while they were out.

Part of her mind, the section that collected life-size posters of actors and desperately counted days until the release of the next novel in the Tsunami series, approved. Vehemently. The kunoichi part of her brain noted that he was attractive enough to be memorable and that wasn't a necessarily a good thing.

She took her cue from him, though she was more than slightly skeptical of her ability to create a convincing cover that looked as if she belonged walking around with that. Her kit always had basic infiltration gear, but basic was the key word and while she wasn't homely or anything and henge would fix it if she was, it was the how he presented himself that worried her. Even without an introduction, even without family resemblance, it was easy to tell clanborn from the old families if you knew what you were looking for. Lessons from the cradle up shaped them, made them something distinctive that couldn't be aped by just putting on the right clothes. In this case, Sakura didn't think she wanted to mimic the effortless posture or the complete self-assurance and made a mental note to suggest that Itachi do something less...Itachi with himself. Not that she doubted his skills, but the gender-bias of kunoichi classes cut both ways. Most boys emerged from the Academy with only nominal infiltration skills and there was nothing in what she knew of Itachi to suggest it was something included in his skillset.

A petal-pink blouse with long, loose sleeves hid the muscle tone in her shoulders and arms, while her knee-length shorts drew attention to the lean lines of her legs, distracting from the very thin, flat blades hidden beneath the denim. Even if someone did notice, she wasn't worried. Any onlookers could mistake them for off-duty ninja—goodness knew the civilian population of Fire was used to that and eager to have the well-paid shinobi spent their coin at their establishments—so long as they did not identify them as Uchiha Itachi and Haruno Sakura.

Her wonderfully broken-in boots were exchanged for sandals that would not survive a marathon, but would blend in seamlessly in a civilian crowd. She scraped her hair back into a spiky ponytail before illusion shifted its distinctive color to a less noticeable brown, and she slightly altered the shape of her face while she was at it. Minor changes like these were easier to maintain and less noticeable than full transformation.

Exterior alterations complete, she focused her attention on the more subtle things that would actually sell this persona, because no amount of chakra could disguise habits, foibles, or mannerisms.

Placing one hand on either side of the bathroom mirror, Sakura took a deep breath, held it for a heartbeat, then exhaled very softly until her muscles were taut. Gather 'self' up, breathe 'self' out, she repeated to herself in the familiar mantra they'd been taught in the Academy. Consider what made "you" and discard those things unnecessary in order to become the person you needed to be to achieve your objective.

In reflection, it was also an accurate summary of her strategy for dating Sasuke.

Meeting her own eyes in the mirror, like her early genjutsu exercises with the tree, Sakura shifted her posture and expression, modulating her voice until she was satisfied that in the unlikely event someone she knew just happened to be in the area, nothing about her would make them ask, "Hey, wasn't that Sakura? And who was that guy she was with?"

Itachi's brows rose only fractionally when she addressed him as she came out of the bedroom, lowering the formality of her speech in a way that would have made her uncomfortable if the whole situation hadn't already had her ill at ease. Not in a rude, 'oi, you' way à la Sasuke—she wasn't dressed to pull off that kind of act—but far more warmly familiar than their brief acquaintance merited. "So, how far are you going to make me walk in these shoes?" she teased. "And are those glasses actually anywhere close to the prescription you need?"

While Itachi might not be an infiltration specialist, he was adept at reading situations. And apparently shameless. "Does it matter how far, so long as they look cute?" he asked amiably, his body language shifting to something far less reserved. "And no. But they do transform the world from abstract watercolor to film in soft focus, so they are sufficient for their purpose."

That amiability persisted throughout the first part of the day, though Itachi didn't feel the need to fill the silence between them with chatter. The tree-road saw them to the closest mid-sized city, which they'd decided was the likeliest to have a full hospital, not just the clinics that serviced the rural communities. Unlike Konoha General, which had a modicum of security due to their shinobi patients—just as they occasionally assigned chūnin to suicide watch, they also had round-the-clock surveillance for critically injured jounin—this hospital wasn't difficult to infiltrate.

An ebb and flow of patients and visitors kept them from being noticed in the halls; genjutsu kept them from being noticed as schedules were perused and they slipped into the empty office of one of the doctors who had a day off on the rotation. Itachi riffled through the papers on the desk until he discovered the signature they'd need to forge a prescription, memorizing both it and the handwriting of the doctor with the Sharingan active; another minute saw several pages from a prescription pad liberated from a locked drawer.

While he was acquiring that, Sakura paged through the reference tomes weighing down a shelf on the far wall until she located both the disease she was looking for and recommended treatment options. She silently pointed out the drugs she wanted, leaning close to whisper further instructions as to dosage, and Itachi silently scribed her requests.

The cardboard backer on the desktop calendar provided the password she needed to access the system and while her mock-up case file was a little sketchy on the details—she'd essentially cloned the file of another patient with the same condition, but far less advanced, changing what personal details she could-she wasn't too worried. It wouldn't hold up to intense scrutiny, but they weren't going to give anyone a reason to do more than glance at it— few minutes lurking in the pharmacy had told her that the doctors within the hospital were using the intranet to send memos rather than phoning downstairs.

They could have outright stolen what they'd needed, but she didn't want to get anyone fired. She didn't expect anyone to double-check in any case; some of the drugs were expensive, but there weren't any opiates among them.

They could have gone to another pharmacy rather than the one at the hospital, but the odds of them carrying some of the drugs on a day-to-day basis were extremely low and, in this case, a slightly hassled and very busy pharmacist was an asset. With so many people passing through during the day, they were less likely to be remembered.

The visit to the pharmacy that followed on the heels of their B&E was both fruitful and uneventful, but Sakura was grateful as they left the grounds of the hospital, the smell of sun-warmed asphalt and the fried food of street vendors replacing the subtle stench antiseptic and anxiety.

"So, mission accomplished," Sakura ventured. "Or at least phase one of a currently indeterminate number of stages."

"Yes," Itachi agreed absently. Sakura thought they would turn back then and she would have to endure another day of awkward isolation, but he said instead, "Do you like taiyaki?"

"Yes?" Sakura responded bemusedly, then realized that her intonation had turned her answer into a question. "Yes," she repeated.

Itachi nodded and steered them toward a nearby store, where Sakura discovered that he shared her predilection for the custard-filled ones. Itachi asked the woman manning the counter for directions to the nearest park as he accepted the bag, thanking the woman pleasantly when she suggested that he and his girlfriend might enjoy one that was a little further away but had been less designed to cater to mothers with small children. Sakura would have been content to trail behind him, staring quizzically at the back of his head, but he seemed intent on having her walk beside him and after the second time she almost ran into his shoulder as he paused and glanced back at her, she complied.

"I've already agreed to heal your eyes, cure your disease, and stage your death. Exactly what sort of favor are you about to ask that requires taiyaki?" she murmured to him, the words spoken softly enough to be swallowed up by the noise of the city.

Itachi looked over at her, one brow quirking upwards as a faint smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. "Perhaps I should point out that a boyfriend buying you food shouldn't be acknowledged as bribery but...I'd like to talk about Sasuke. So, some sweet, to go with the bitter."

Tension knotted the muscles in her back and neck, but Sakura resisted the urge to frown. "Oh?" she asked with manufactured lightness. "Reconsidering your position?"

"No. However, the information the Jiraiya provided me, while thorough, was...clinical. Evaluations by teachers, psychologists...grief counselors. I'd like to hear about Sasuke from someone who was more invested in him as a person, rather than as a shinobi."

"...I don't know that I ever really knew Sasuke as well as I thought," Sakura admitted, not meeting his eyes, instead fixing her gaze on the first flush of greenery heralding their destination. "But I'll tell you about the one I thought I knew."

[Kill Your Heroes]

Kakashi had a niggling feeling that this phenomenon he was experiencing was best called "separation anxiety," which put him on par with dogs in empty apartments and helicopter parents. He was neither, but he reasonably attached to his partner and Sakura had an established habit of almost dying on him when he wasn't watching. He'd been told, of course, that she was taking a few days medical leave and was resting in the comfort of civilian accommodations elsewhere, but he'd feel reassured when she was in front of him and not before.

[Kill Your Heroes]

There were situations that were unequivocally intimate, regardless of where or with whom they happened. Sex was the one that was probably leapt to the forefront of anyone's mind, but Sakura thought she could make a solid argument that surgery outside the well-lit operating theatre of a hospital required more trust than sex would have. After all, unless someone brought syphilis to the party, sex didn't usually come with the risk of permanent blindness.

If she screwed up here, it wouldn't be as simple as handing the case off to another medic and wishing Itachi better luck next time. At best it would be a benign cellular mutation—at worst? A highly aggressive cancer.

Rather than her kneeling for hours on end—Hinata might have been able to manage that without excruciating pain, but Sakura was less practiced at seiza—Itachi's head was pillowed on a thin cushion on her lap, her legs partially drawn up to either side and her back supported against the wall.

She'd carefully partitioned off the part of her brain that was admiring the aesthetics of all that long, ink-black hair spilling across the pillow, the heartbreaking transience written in the pale, pale skin and deeply shadowed eyes. It wasn't sexual, really. Not romantic, but Romantic. Itachi belonged to some sweeping epic tale of love and betrayal and murder, while she—she belonged in the workaday world, to the armies to fought and lost and won and died without leaving their names behind to live on after them.

His skin was smooth and too-warm beneath her fingers as she settled them into place—his lashes felt like butterflies walking across the palm of her hand when his eyes opened. "Something wrong?" she queried.

"Nothing," Itachi murmured, closing his eyes again. She waited, to see if he would say anything else, but when he kept his silence she closed her own eyes and drove her chakra down into his flesh.

The damage was still awful enough to make her want to cringe in sympathy, but that was shoved aside in favor of impartial analysis. Chakra surgery was much less painful that the regular kind and now that she didn't have to work to ignore a gaping wound in her abdomen, she'd have enough control to mute the pain to nothing more than moderate discomfort. Her work on senpai's transplanted eye had given her some idea how she'd like to proceed, but the way she'd chosen to "wire" the transplant back into Kakashi-senpai's native system wasn't identical to the chakra network that already existed to support Itachi's Mangekyo Sharingan. Her improvised system wasn't perfect, not if senpai was still experiencing loss of sight, but this nerve-damaged mess...

Well, she wouldn't have declared it a "successful, stable mutation of the Byakugan."

She closed the pathways, temporarily rendering his Sharingan nonfunctional, so that she could assess the cellular damage without being distracted by the mangled channels or the strange chakra residue that coated some of the nerves that were responsible for his chronic neuropathic eye pain. This part, at least, she had some confidence in correcting. She didn't do quite what she'd done to her own eyes, which might have created chakra channels that had the possibility of destabilizing his doujutsu, but his normal sight was restored without mishap.

Sakura responded to this early success by a slow, thorough evaluation of the tangled nest of chakra channels that fed between different regions of the brain and his eyes, using trace amounts of her own chakra to "illuminate" the channels. If Gozen-san hadn't taught her to be so painstakingly meticulous or if she hadn't severed his channels to begin with, she'd have probably missed them entirely. "Itachi? The Sharingan doesn't have a third form, does it?"

He went very still beneath her. "Itachi?" she prompted.

"What would make you say that?" he asked.

"There are channels here that, well, I guess I'd describe them as collapsed veins. They're there, but your chakra hasn't been travelling through them. No nerve damage and they seem to..."

"Seem to what?" he asked her with marked patience when her voice trailed off.

"Seem to fix some of the major issues caused by the Sharingan. Most of them, I think. Maybe all of them. They're smaller than the first set of channels. Capillaries, almost. But more complex." So complex it would be almost impossible to duplicate to fix Kakashi-senpai's problem, but now that she had an idea what the system was supposed to look like, she had some ideas as to how that could be corrected.

"If you can, you should make use of them," came Itachi's response, which neatly sidestepped her original question. But if the Mangekyo wasn't quite public knowledge in the way that the Sharingan was, it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility that there was a third form, even more secret than the second.

Before she attempted to divert his chakra into the new channels, she first began to repair the damage caused by and to his other channels. But the more damage that she healed, the more difficult it became to keep track of the other set of channels, almost like they were shrinking away from the healthy channels. "What do you have to do to activate this one?" she muttered to herself as she struggled. "Cause irreversible catastrophic damage to your own eyes?"

Itachi made no answer and she gave up the attempt at healing the damaged channels, instead focusing on attempting to open the newly discovered ones.

It was less than fruitful. "Your doujutsu is very, very annoying," Sakura told Itachi as she wracked her brain for a solution. "How is the second phase activated? Senpai's just sort of was when I integrated the eye, but that can't be how it always works."

Itachi was quiet for so long she thought he wouldn't answer. And when he did, she almost wished he hadn't. Especially when, after another gaping, bleeding silence in which she marveled at just how awful the Sharingan was, he told her the usual manner in which one obtained an Eternal Sharingan.

"I really think the Byakugan is really the better choice here," she quipped weakly as her fingers trembled against his skin. She felt herself becoming frazzled, losing control of the precision demanded by medical chakra, and choked down her horror. She needed to think with her head, not her heart. She mulled it over, examining that extremely specific condition for triggering a mutation that resulted in the Mangekyo, comparing it to what she knew of the development of the first phase of the Sharingan.

"It's chemical," she concluded aloud, the tremor from her fingers having transferred to her voice. "It's not about the situation itself. It's about the body's responses to the situation. Certain regions of the brain are stimulated, which in turn produces a cascade of chemicals and hormones being released..." Sakura trailed off, her eyes snapping open on the revelation, her head dipping down so she could fix her gaze on Itachi.

Kanashibari. That was her answer. "Please don't fight me," she whispered to Itachi, closing her eyes even as she opened his mind to an image of Sasuke as she'd seen him in the Forest, roiling with corrupt chakra and wide-eyed with hate.

She rebuilt him meticulously, from the scent of his soap to the faint overlay of smoke, his hair shifting as he whirled to face them, his face twisted not into the coldly furious lines that he'd worn in reality, but that just-on-the-edge-of-control look he'd worn when he'd confronted Naruto on that roof all those years ago. When it came to the people that mattered, Sasuke lost all that cool poise that he liked to pretend went bone deep.

She felt Itachi tense, but he didn't begin to dismantle her genjutsu. Not even when Sasuke snarled at him with a voice like a wounded animal, demanding, "Why?!"

There it is, Sakura thought with mingled guilt and satisfaction as those shadow channels gained definition. As she spun Itachi's feelings toward Sasuke and her memories into one finely honed tool, the guilt faded away until she was intent only on the result, on opening the path even if she had to pave it with pain.

And she did.

The conversation between Sasuke and Itachi turned, twisted, the coin spinning and landing to reveal the source of that deep, roaring hate. She let his mind feed Sasuke the words to express his betrayal and his anger. And it was Itachi's hope, his deep-seated belief in his brother's strength that lanced the boil of all that festering emotion, though it was Sakura who made Sasuke say, "Then see it through. Save me," and take a knife to his own eyes, freeing them from their sockets and offering them as bloody favors.

You couldn't really reach out and pluck eyes like grapes, but the skin there was thin, delicate. In reality, she didn't know if someone would have enough control to cut out their own eyes without damaging them, even if they couldn't feel pain. But a genjutsu could be a world of probable lies, of things that might be, and reality mattered less than belief.

The channels were open, distinct, but no chakra flowed into them, and Sakura knew that there wouldn't be another chance like this one. Even if Itachi volunteered for further emotional torture, he was too much a genjutsu-type himself for him to let some illusion impact him like this a second time. So what the hell? she demanded of herself. It was at least partially a response to emotional distress; she'd proven that part of the theory.

If the Mangekyo was an endangered animal, the Eternal Mangekyo was a legendary beast. Itachi had only been able to cite a single known, proven instance, which any idiot knew didn't make a data pattern but was plenty of basis for a legend to take root on. It was unlikely that the family had conducted experiments in the Orochimaru-searching-for-the-limits-of-possibility sense of the term, so they only had that one success to go on. Which may have led to some erroneous beliefs. For example, the "close blood relative" clause—why include it? The Sharingan was a young doujutsu—anyone who had an active form of it was a close blood relative. There'd been a great deal of cousin-marriage taking place, to increase chances of passing on the Sharingan.

So, in theory, any Sharingan would do, so long as it wasn't the pair you were born with. But why? Maybe... she thought, it's not so much the new eyes, so much as the chakra? I can't duplicate the residual memory of the unique abilities or anything, but he's already come this far half-blind and dying. I can't imagine what he'd be like if he wasn't trying to destroy himself.

Chakra was as distinctive as fingerprints, but if she could smudge that fingerprint somehow...

If she was a criminal mastermind, she might have a better idea of how that might be done; if the Academy had a graduate course in chakra theory and she'd completed it, she might have more confidence that badness wouldn't ensue. What she had instead was the knowledge that any jinchuriki's chakra could be tainted or influenced by their bijū and there was no reason that what worked on a macro scale wouldn't be as effective on a micro scale.

It needs to be just different enough, Sakura thought, biting down hard on her lower lip as she shifted a fractional amount of her chakra back into its natural state—as opposed to the tightly controlled chakra used for medical jutsu—inside Itachi's eyes. She felt his breath hitch slightly at the discomfort of someone else's raw chakra inside his body and she sensed him automatically begin to disperse the genjutsu. "Itachi," she said sharply, before the shadow channels could begin to fade, "activate your Sharingan."

He obeyed and chakra flooded into the previously unused channels. Opening her eyes to the real world, Sakura glanced down at him, removing her hands from where they'd rested against his face. His eyelids parted and those hell-red eyes met hers.

"I doubt they're as powerful as the real thing," Sakura told him softly, "but since the only person with the real thing that you know of is dead and buried, I think the fact that you won't go blind through use of your doujutsu makes a good consolation prize."

Itachi blinked, the red giving way to black, and he stared up at her with an inscrutable expression. "Indeed."