A/N: More fanart! No, really, more fanart. Check out the great 'Kill your heroes' by alumis over on deviant and, while you're there, take a look at the wonderfully creepy 'Sakura Cat Marsk Kyh' by Happinessandchoc. Now, onward to what is turning out to a xianxia novel. Kidding. Sort of. I did at least Google what the Japanese equivalent of the dantian was. And did not once describe Itachi as having "bewitching phoenix eyes." Applaud my restraint. It had nothing at all to do with my indecision about whether his eyes counted or not, due to the Kishimoto's illustration style. If you've never heard of "phoenix eyes" before, just know that every male character worth looking at in a Chinese web novel (or at least the ones with a female protag) has them, along with long, flowing hair and a great wardrobe. Consult the Google for real-life examples. I don't know if it's used as a descriptor in Japanese fiction so much (or at all), but just go with it.

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Fifty-

Philia (Part III)

"I don't know if you know this, Naruto, but I'm not your mother or your girlfriend. You sulking in public only annoys me, especially when you're supposed to be sending us off," Sakura said to the blond who sat across from her, her tone sharp in order to cut through the noise of the crowded diner without raising her voice.

Naruto was treating and had therefore chosen the venue, which had actually come as a mostly pleasant surprise. She could do with dialing down the noise level a decibel or three, but the reason it was so crowded during the breakfast crush was that the only thing better than the food was the service. All of the waiters, waitresses, and even the cooks cheerfully calling out to them to come fetch orders remained pleasant despite the sheer volume of customers and each moved with a quick efficiency that kept food and people flowing.

Despite treating vegetables that hadn't found their way into ramen broth with an almost hilarious suspicion, Naruto's choice in restaurants was surprisingly reliable.

Unfortunately, his emotional range seemed to have expanded while he was away as well. As much as she'd once found the can't-keep-me-down, over-eager puppy persona annoying, she wasn't precisely pleased with the Naruto capable of glowering darkly at his plate. Growing up was all about learning to suppress the self—whatever you were really feeling, there was less and less tolerance for expressing those things which were troublesome to others except in increasingly limited, socially acceptable times.

Your last breakfast before parting ways for kami knows how long was not one of those times.

Yes, she cared that Naruto was upset and generally she was willing to talk about whatever might be wrong in his life, but she hadn't woken up this morning feeling generous. This morning she'd woken up feeling like the sky was threatening to fall in on her like a half-rotted roof. The threat of war, the coming conversation with Itachi, and the choices she'd have to make about her body all pressed down on her until she'd felt like screaming. Which she hadn't, of course, as that would alarm the neighbors. Instead she'd taken a punishing morning walk with the ninken, pushing herself as hard as they'd once pushed her in those first awful weeks after Wave.

By the end of her run, she hadn't exactly been touched by divine inspiration, but she'd accepted that flailing around wasn't helping things and shoved her worries into some semblance of order. War was something outside her control, so she would stop treating it like something that could be held off by losing sleep over it. She was already doing everything in her power to maximize her chances of living through any given battle, so whether that battle was a one-off for a mission or part of an extended conflict shouldn't matter to her because she was as prepared as she could reasonably be.

She hadn't received Itachi's response yet, so that also gave way to her concerns about her body.

A training trip like this one—while it put her out of easy reach of a hospital if things went wrong—was probably her best chance to implement many of the changes that would make her more efficient. Better suited to her purpose. Improve her combat performance. She'd tried out several ways of thinking about it in her head, found all of them creepy, and given it up for the more fruitful task of deciding which, what, and how much.

Compared to that, she didn't think whatever Naruto was concerned about could be all that bad, though a tiny corner of her brain acknowledged that was a selfish and bitchy way to be.

"Sorry," Naruto mumbled as he jabbed at an already mangled bit of egg.

She eyed him until he scowled back at her, letting his chopsticks drop carelessly to the table. "I talked with Tsunade-baa-chan about going out again to find Sasuke."

"I take it the answer was a no?"

The scowl deepened. "She told me that I couldn't keep having it both ways. And when I asked her what that meant, she told me she could either treat me like the favorite nephew that she'd never had or treat me like someone who could be her successor. And then she went and said that whichever I chose, I wasn't getting permission to go after Sasuke again. Said if she wanted to deliver the damned fox to a psychopath with a bow on it, she'd have done it already, so I shouldn't get any ideas about going out on my own unless I wanted to be suspended and placed under observation."

Sakura squashed the mental applause that had threated to manifest as an At last! kind of grin.

Good children were good at least in part because it brought them attention and praise, so it rankled when adults "rewarded" misbehaving children with more time and special focus; as adults the only thing that changed about this were the rewards and titles of those doing the awarding. Beyond her personal good-child irritation, Sakura was also canny enough to understand that no interaction between two people was ever just an interaction between two people. Not in public, at least, and maybe not in private either.

It wasn't so much about Naruto's personality or what he had to say, so much as where he usually chose to say it. His impatience and his inability (or maybe it was more correct to say his unwillingness) to moderate his emotional responses meant that he would never request a private audience with Tsunade-sama to share his concerns; usually he caught Tsunade-sama in public and used something that almost qualified as an inside voice.

It wasn't just about Naruto and Tsunade-sama then. It was also about a shinobi and his commanding officer, and also about a jinchuriki and a kage who needed to present at least the illusion of being able to control the vessel that housed the chakra-construct that had wrecked so much misery in the village. Naruto seemed to operate under the assumption that once you were appointed Hokage, everyone—even the people who'd hated you before you'd donned the hat—would fall into line and never go out of their way to stir up trouble.

It probably had something to do with growing up under the Sandaime, who'd been Kage long enough to have a very secure grasp on both his position and his opposition, and who'd been in charge of the village during the longest stretch of peace it had ever experienced. Tsunade-sama, on the other hand—well, it didn't exactly take deductive reasoning skills to know that a lot of people hadn't been happy with accepting a Kage who'd been absent from the village for over a decade. Everywhere Sakura had gone during those days leading up to Tsunade-sama's official appointment, there'd been gossip about whether someone so out of touch with the current issues and factions in the village would be able to take over the village without becoming little more than a puppet who happened to have the right kind of bloodline.

So, for obvious reasons, whatever Tsunade-sama felt for and about Naruto, she couldn't necessarily afford to have him openly criticizing her in public. It was bad enough that people still sneeringly called Tsunade-sama "Princess"—she didn't need to add to the impression that her house wasn't in order.

With all these thoughts crowding her head, it was difficult to pick out something to say, but with Naruto now staring at her, she couldn't just not answer. Although that was pretty tempting.

"Um, you do get that those are all really good points, right?" was her eventual response. "And that it would be really, tremendously stupid to take her response as a challenge. All joking aside, if you pull a stunt like that, not only do not become Hokage, you are the one ANBU is going to be bringing back. It will go on your permanent record and you'll be lucky if you ever make chūnin, let alone jounin. Sasuke ruined his own life, Naruto. Don't let him ruin yours too."

"Growing up sucks," Naruto muttered and Sakura couldn't disagree. "I thought Kakashi-sensei was supposed to show up for this?"

"Since you're treating, I don't doubt he'll show up, but you know senpai. He'll be late to his own funeral."

A familiar hand came down atop her head even as the words escaped her mouth and Sakura swatted at Kakashi-senpai before he could muss her hair too badly. "Senpai, please stop that."

Kakashi-senpai hummed mock-thoughtfully and then said simply, "No," as he dropped down into the booth beside Sakura.

"Senpai," Sakura sighed, "could you at least just pat my head, instead of making it look like I've been caught out in a windstorm?"

"That's hurtful, you know. Asking me to temper my spontaneous displays of affection is the same as rejecting my affection."

"Uh-huh," was Sakura's skeptical retort. "I'd threaten to return the favor, but I don't you'd be able to tell. Maybe you should consider getting a haircut. Either that or try growing it out. Gravity has to win at some point."

"And lose my distinctive look? Never. Also," and he turned to Naruto as he said this, "you should never give into a woman's nagging. What you don't realize is that it isn't a battle, it's a campaign and if you've let her win one victory, you've just let her build momentum. Next thing you know, you'll own a house and have taken up something quiet and out of her way when you're allowed to come home at all."

Sakura scoffed and rolled her eyes. "If you take his advice on women," she countered, "you'll find yourself alone but for a whole bunch of dogs. Or frogs, in your case."

"Ignore her," Kakashi-senpai advised, "as she's a cat lady in training."

Naruto eyed them both skeptically. "Yeah, I think I'll stick to taking my own advice when it comes to relationships. Anyhow, Kakashi-sensei, about what Tsunade-baa-chan told me about Sasuke…"

[Kill Your Heroes]

"So, should we formally put money on whether or not Naruto does something rash while we're gone?" Sakura asked Kakashi-senpai once they were well outside the village.

Kakashi-senpai glanced over at her and spared her a slight smile. "You don't have to worry. Yamato will keep an eye on him—he knows what his personality is like. Besides, maybe this time Naruto will surprise us both. He's grown up a little in the last three years, so maybe all he needs is a little time to think over our last encounter with Sasuke."

Sakura thought Naruto wouldn't be Naruto if he gave up that easily, but she hoped he was right. Not just for the sake of Naruto's emotional well-being, although being unable to let go of self-destructive bonds wasn't good for anyone, but because she had the feeling that Itachi wouldn't mind that someone else in the world cared for the well-being of his brother against all reason and good sense. Which was all well and good, except she knew now exactly how far Itachi would go to protect Sasuke.

Manipulating Naruto? That probably wouldn't even register on whatever passed for Uchiha Itachi's moral scale.

As if thinking of him had conjured the crows, Michi and Yoko swept towards them from out of the dense canopy that provided the tree-road, which they'd been eschewing in favor of endurance running on the ground. Sakura had thought long and hard about keeping her newest companions a secret, but had decided that secrets only made her look suspicious. Itachi was hardly the only shinobi in the world who'd partnered with crows, just the most infamous.

Sakura held out her arm and Michi alighted on it easily, Yoko's landing on her shoulder less smooth because she hesitated at the last moment before settling into place. Both were large enough that their talons had no problems clamping down on either perch.

With her free hand, Sakura loosed the note tied to Michi's leg and the crow obligingly fluttered up to her other shoulder so that she could read it more easily. She really had to applaud Itachi—if this note had been intercepted, there was nothing about it that even whispered, Conspiring with an S-class missing-nin!

Once she finished her applause, though, she'd need to strangle him. She could picture with perfect clarity his subtle smile and laughing eyes, which had likely been present in full force while he was penning this note.

Because Uchiha Itachi—for all that this was the easy, logical way to conceal the true nature of their association—seemed to be having altogether too much fun with this whole "relationship" thing.

My tigress, it began, which was both sort of adorable and bizarre, because her mind kept trying to supply the image of Itachi calling her that to her face and contemplating just what he meant by that—it was far less condescending than something like "kitten", but there were so many negative connotations that could be implied in calling a woman a tigress and it was stupid to even think about either of these things, because he wasn't actually calling that, had just needed an opening to this letter—and then it got worse from there. There was a location and a time for a meet-up, but this was no terse, two-line message. It was a full page of his neat handwriting, without any of the awkwardness or self-consciousness she'd have seen in a sender her own age. Sincerely, Yours, the letter concluded.

This reads almost like something out of one of Jiraiya-sama's novels, was Sakura's bemused thought, but she supposed that writing love letters wasn't a skill Uchiha Itachi was much practiced at. Of all the writing styles of all the smutty novels in the world, he had to choose those?

"You're blushing. Now I'm curious," Kakashi-senpai said, hands shoved casually into his pockets as he observed her reactions to reading the letter.

The embarrassment had been genuine, but not for the usual sort of reason one had when reading a love letter. No, this was a reaction to being caught reading bad smut, the kind of barely tolerable stuff you even looked down on yourself for reading. She was quick to put the letter away, because Kakashi-senpai might well suspect something was amiss if he caught sight of the contents—there was going to have to be a discussion with Itachi about what a boyfriend she might plausibly have in real life would sound like in his letters.

Whatever that was, this wasn't it.

"Um, right," she mumbled, ducking her head. "About that, Kakashi-senpai. I might have…met someone," she confessed. "A boy. We, ah, hit it off pretty well and he wants to see me again. So, is it alright if I detour a bit? Meet up with you afterward?"

"You know, while I joke about bringing boys home, I really think that fifteen is too young to date," Kakashi-sensei replied soberly. "Especially dates of the unsupervised, overnight somewhere else kind."

When Sakura scrambled to come up with an appropriate rebuttal for this, he suddenly grinned, his eyes creasing into upturned crescents. "Joking, Sakura, joking. If you're responsible enough to make jounin and spend weeks at a time in the field, you're plenty old enough to set your own boundaries about things like dating. Providing you're not breaking any laws or regulations or moral imperatives. Go, have fun," he said, shooing her away with his hand.

"Really?"

"Really," Kakashi-senpai replied dryly. "I have full confidence that if any boy happened to be struck by a case of wandering hands, you wouldn't have any problem breaking them."

"Please," Sakura said with cheerful disdain, "If he can't respect that no means absolutely not, he'll be wishing that I only did something like breaking his hands. He'll be the one going home crying. It's very difficult to prosecute for psychological damage done by genjutsu."

Sakura was absolutely certain that Uchiha Itachi would never suffer from a case of wandering hands; she was also absolutely certain that her life would be much simpler if making good decisions about boys was the most stressful thing in it.

[Kill Your Heroes]

"Come in, Sakura-san. Dinner is almost ready," Itachi told her as he opened the door. Judging by the rich smells that billowed out to tempt her appetite, his culinary skills hadn't mysteriously evaporated after their last rendezvous.

"Should I immediately suspect an imposter if you don't attempt to feed me? Just for future reference," Sakura asked as she eased inside and slipped off her shoes. She slanted a glance at Itachi as she did so, assessing his skin color, weight, and muscle tone for improvement.

Sakura was reassured by what she could see. His skin had lost that awful, translucent whiteness that had made it possible to clearly see the blue rivers of his veins were the skin was thinnest; now it was recovering a healthier honey tone. None of his clothes had been form-fitting, probably to hide the extent of his weight loss and that hadn't changed, but the deep, shadowed hollows beneath his eyes were vanishing.

He'd been on the antibiotics for long enough that any regular hospital would have had him in for blood work and a session with a medic-nin two or three times already. Before they talked about Sasuke, which was a conversation she was hoping would end in a reasonable decision on his part and not violence, she wanted to do a session and make certain that the antibiotics weren't damaging his internal organs. She could do some cellular repair while she was at it and bolster his immune system, which had been pretty laughable the last time she'd had her chakra in his body.

"Usually it's considered good manners to at least get through the meal before you start undressing me with your eyes," Itachi commented, which made Sakura flush so deeply that the tips of her ears burned. There was something about his expression just then which reminded her deeply of a playful cat—if he'd been Soudai his tail would have been twitching in anticipation of her reaction. Even though she knew his real personality was like this, she still had trouble reconciling this teasing, kind Itachi with the impassive, deadly one that had been deeply impressed on her imagination long before she'd ever met him.

Between that and the fact that his tone hardly ever sounded like he was teasing, as a normal person's might, he'd managed to discombobulate her almost every time his mood turned like this.

Sakura rallied. "Unfortunately, my interest in your body is limited to the progress of your recovery," she told him, tamping down on her embarrassment and trying to match the disaffected steadiness of his voice. Unlike the easy back-and-forth she enjoyed with senpai, she still wasn't comfortable enough to let this escalate. Well, too much. "Which means that I don't have to undress you with my eyes. I know that I'll have the real thing after we finish eating."

Itachi's lips quirked slightly before he turned and led her further inside the house. She was beginning to sense a trend in his choice of accommodations. Both had been furnished, traditional-style houses on the nicer end of the spectrum. Was it a coming-from-a-clan thing, or was it just an Itachi thing?

Once again she found she was refused admittance to the kitchen, instead being urged to take a seat at the low table as Itachi vanished inside, reemerging with a tea service. "I have not done this for a long time," he murmured to her as he settled gracefully to her left, "but since you're a medic-nin, I think the risk should be minimal."

To her astonishment, because in her mind all fire jutsu were at best barely leashed explosions, Itachi's heavily lashed eyes narrowed into slits of concentration before he exhaled,slowly rotating the pot in the palm of his hand. She could see the heat distortion in air, but only the tiniest flickers of flame, and he continued this until he was satisfied with the temperature and proceeded with the rest of the business. "It's a black tea," he said as he rose, "so give it time to steep properly. I should be back with the food by then."

Sakura was still staring at the teapot as he left. She wasn't worried about contracting his illness. He'd been receiving treatment for over two weeks and was showing a clear response to it and she was, as he'd said, enough of a medic-nin that burning out a minor infection in her own lungs wasn't something beyond her. Even if it was, she wasn't worried. There were very effective treatment options readily available even at a civilian level. Only the very, very poor or those in extremely isolated rural communities still died of his particular disease in Fire.

She'd looked up the statistics after their last meeting, viciously curious as to how easy it would have been for Itachi to have received treatment years ago.

She wanted to ask about his astonishing level of control when he first returned, but let herself be distracted by his cooking. When she'd reached the point where further compliments should give way to substantial conversation, however, she pounced on the topic. "That heat—where'd you learn to do that? If you don't mind me asking?"

"I don't," Itachi said. "It is an offshoot of an exercise intended to help develop control of the temperature and quantity of the fire one unleashes in their techniques. Anyone with a fire-natured constitution can learn to conjure fire using their breath and their chakra. It was a rite of passage in the Uchiha clan. It was another to learn to shape it into something more complicated than a simple stream. Spheres are the easiest and therefore the first anyone learns. Given how most of them choose to wield it, it is almost always the last thing they learn as well."

Sakura nodded, because the fire-jutsu she'd seen didn't utilize much in the way of chakra-shaping, relying instead on the brute destructive force of the element.

"After that, refining the techniques requires more control, which is something usually developed by meditation. Judging by your skill as a medic-nin, I expect you've had some experience?"

There was an awkward pause there, but Sakura eventually came to the conclusion that there was no graceful way to admit to this. "No. I've been considering meditation as a way to increase my chakra reserves, but, um, my chakra control has just always…been sufficient for whatever I wanted to do with it?"

Itachi blinked at her slowly, then, "Interesting. I once practiced two main styles of meditation. When I said that I had not warmed a teapot for a long time, it wasn't simply risk of contagion stopping me. As my condition degraded, I lost most of my fine control and with it, much of my power and versatility. Something like warming a teapot might seem mundane, but if you acquire one made of very thin china, warming it gradually without causing it to crack is an excellent test of control."

"Was that usual? Something your family taught you to do?" Sakura asked curiously.

"The control was something taught by the elders, yes, though my meditation styles were learned elsewhere. My father's generation believed that you didn't require that much control for military utility," there was a certain snap to the words that suggested that they'd been said to him many, many times. "They were only interested in raw power and didn't seem to realize it was the same thing. I can show you," he offered. "Now that less of my focus is demanded by…functionality."

"Please?" Sakura said eagerly. "I mean," she backpedaled, "we can finish eating first, of course."

Once they'd both finished—and Itachi's appetite had improved noticeably—they cleared the things away and then Itachi led them out into the walled-in back yard that made some attempt at rock garden.

Her sandals crunched against the pea gravel and she made herself comfortable on a weathered rock as Itachi settled himself on the gravel, legs crossed and his hands folded into a familiar handsign of concentration with two fingers extended. This time he shut his eyes completely and some of that rigid posture seeped from his body. It wasn't that he was slumping, precisely, but more like his focus had turned deeper inward and some of the iron control over his body that had let him pretend to be a healthy, functional human being when his lungs were basically so much wet slop had to be diverted into his internal landscape.

It was very quiet in this section of the yard, as there weren't flowers or trees to attract insects and birds. So she clearly heard the subtle change in Itachi's breathing, which immediately explained why he would have had to give this form of meditation up. For a while that was all she could observe externally, this slightly altered cadence to his breathing. Then he exhaled, long and slow, and a spindly flame burst into existence on the tips of his extended fingers, which were positioned in the air in a direct line with his tanden.

But this was not the orange-hearted fire she'd seen others use in battle. This fire burned a wicked, dazzling blue and her brain numbly informed her that fire of that particular shade started at 2,600 degrees.

Uchiha Itachi wasn't just powerful. He was insanely powerful and Sakura felt a shiver skitter up her spine and crest on her scalp as he shifted the flame—still licking eagerly at the tips of his fingers like they were candle wicks—to a position just above his head. It continued to burn evenly as he returned to what seemed to be a centered, resting state and only flickered slightly when he exhaled another flame.

He kept up this exercise until there was almost a full circle of licking blue flames, like he was some sort of kitsune. But she could see where he was losing control—these were no longer well-behaved little tongues of fire, instead flickering wildly, their edges flaring purple as the temperature fluctuated.

Itachi's eyes opened in the same moment that all the flames winked out. His lips briefly pinched themselves into an unhappy line before the expression vanished as quickly as the fire had. "While that was not the best demonstration, the exercise itself is simple enough. It is an exercise in fine control, both of your breathing and of the fire. First comes control of the internal landscape. Second, the hottest flame you can shape without scorching yourself."

"How does that even work?" Sakura asked with equal parts eager curiosity and bemusement. Her nigh unnatural level of chakra control meant that she wasn't held back by things like elemental affinity, but her early experiences with fire—and her time with Gozen-san—meant that she'd never understood the appeal of cultivating a style of ninjutsu that took more chakra than any other. It helped that she'd been doing the equivalent of an advanced medical degree before she turned fifteen and no amount of extra time gained by the sleep deprivation caused by her other major field of study could give her enough hours in the day to learn everything.

Though when you were preparing to walk into a war against the largest collective of rogue S-class nin that had ever bothered to collaborate, she sometimes felt she should at least try.

"The same way you can walk through hot coals. Stimulation of your chakra and blood flow, which allows the heat to dissipate without burning the skin. Only a very, very few would be able to put themselves in the correct mindset quickly enough for it to be useful in combat, but it is a very useful…incentive, to keep yourself performing the exercise correctly. Third is to maintain the flame without physical contact. All chakra shaping is difficult, not only in manipulating the energy once it is outside the familiar landscape of your body, but also because once it is no longer part of the smaller world that is you, its natural inclination is to return to oneness with the greater world. But fire is even more demanding, because it also transforms—consumes—chakra, so it has to be maintained in that way as well. You begin with maintaining one flame, then you learn to split your concentration to maintain many."

"It was very, very impressive," Sakura complimented him, but he only shifted his head in a slight negation.

"The woman who taught me the technique no longer had to use her own chakra for the exercise—she could sift fire-natured chakra from the environment and light a hundred such flames," Itachi told her. "That would be very, very impressive. As it is, it was perhaps adequate, if that. I am not what I will need to be, for what is coming."

There was something unfair about issuing such flat-toned, dire pronouncements like that and then falling silent, but that old idiom about life being unfair was something she'd learned to embrace long ago. This wasn't a favor and whatever they had developing between them wasn't soul-baring friendship; this was a mission and she was well aware of their respective roles. So she said instead, "I've never even heard of a kunoichi capable of that. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone capable of that."

"She wasn't a kunoichi," Itachi replied softly. "I don't think she'd ever raised her hand in violence. She worked at a shrine and she'd spent almost fifty years tending fires that were never allowed to go out and never fed mundane wood. The fires there had become things unto themselves. We'd gone to the shrine for my fifth birthday. She was celebrating her kanreki and as part of it, she walked through a bonfire clad all in red. It was the first time I truly understood that there was—no," he said, some of the unexpected animation fading from his features as he seemed to recollect himself. "I'm sorry for boring you with personal memories. I thought that this might be a good way of demonstrating my progress, short of initiating a round of sparring."

Sakura grimaced. "As that would last about twelve seconds before my crushing defeat, that was probably a good call."

Itachi blinked once at her. "That wasn't what I meant to imply."

Sakura shrugged it off. "Do you want to back inside for a healing session? You haven't experienced any problems with your eyes, have you?"

It took two hours for Sakura to be satisfied with her progress, Itachi patiently answering her rapid-fire questions as she prodded and investigated the state of his rehabilitation, and she quit only because she didn't know she'd have enough chakra to show him the encounter with Sasuke if she didn't.

That was thoughtless of her, because some wary animal corner of her brain felt deeply, deeply uncomfortable at the knowledge that she would be even more helpless than usual in front of an S-class nin who'd know in a few moments exactly what she'd done to extract proof of his brother's character. She didn't regret her methods, precisely, but her mind was bracing itself in the same way that it would have if she was anticipating a physical blow. Nervous anticipation soured her stomach, but conviction and a sense of satisfaction—she'd been right and Uchiha Itachi was wrong—steeled her for his denial and perhaps his anger.

But he upset her expectations once more, because while there was a certain tightness to his expression, his response was only, "I see."

"That's it?!" Sakura demanded. "Just, 'I see'?!" They'd been kneeling opposite each other in respectable seiza style, but the force of her emotions sent Sakura toppling forward onto her hands, almost snarling in Itachi's face. Showing Itachi had been like living through that battle again, snaring her in the emotional turmoil of the memory, and there was nothing in her that was ready to blandly accept this lukewarm pronouncement.

"I see that you are a very dangerous, very talented ninja, with a distinct insight into Sasuke's particular weaknesses," was Itachi's measured reply. "However, your past with Sasuke—and your bias against him—means that this wasn't so much a test as it was a trial in which you'd already made your judgment long before you ever encountered him."

He leaned in slightly, as if to reinforce his words, which in another state of mind would have put them uncomfortably close, but Sakura was only tempted to headbutt him. "And what does that mean?" she said with only the barest veneer of civility.

"It means that with Orochimaru watching over his shoulder, Sasuke's behavior was constrained. Whatever he felt about you, he could not reasonably be expected to show either mercy or hesitation. It does not serve his purpose to leave Orochimaru just yet, so he would not give his master cause to doubt his loyalty. He is hot-headed, but he is not a fool. He won't act until he has the advantage. Even if he wantedto escape, the scenario you just showed me wasn't one where acting would have been in anyone's interest. Orochimaru long ago stopped being something you could kill like a human," Itachi told her darkly. "And those who follow closest to him share that very annoying quality. When you consider that Orochimaru is capable of sabotaging the Kyūbi's seals, if the battle hadn't progressed in his favor, you shouldn't be surprised that this was his reaction."

"But—," Itachi's hand made an impatient gesture and Sakura bit back the words struggling to spill out her lips.

"You killed his—our—mother right in front of him—made him kill her and then compared him to me—and survived doing so. The curse seal that he now bears is not merely cosmetic and it is unlikely that you took him so much by surprise that he forgot its existence. Strong emotion should, in fact, make it more difficult for him to control. Do you think your battle would have ended in a stalemate then?"

"It didn't end in a stalemate. We were interrupted," Sakura forced out through gritted teeth. "What makes you think he wouldn't have activated the seal if the battle had continued?"

Itachi's lips twisted into a hard, mocking line. It was strange, startling, uncharacteristic, and for the first time Sakura saw how deep the family resemblance between him and Sasuke ran. "My little brother, like most Uchiha, is over-dependent on his Sharingan. If he was going to use the seal, he would have used it to metabolize whatever paralytic you used and then killed you. Since he didn't, my judgment stands. We will proceed as planned."