A/N: I forgot to mention last time that this fanfiction has acquired it's very own tvtropes page—applause for negativecelsius!
And Mordacious Marotium has had some new fanart done—it's even Christmas themed: (/) 0aeh8e8b0gq
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Fifty-One-
Atelophobia
Itachi's head thumped against the wall only a moment after his back impacted the unyielding surface and he allowed himself to slide to the floor, his legs tucked up tight against his chest.
He knew that he'd sabotaged all his careful efforts to build a measure of trust between himself and this one very essential ally, but for now at least he was finding it hard to regret what he'd said.
Whatever Sakura might think, it wasn't so much that she had tested Sasuke and found him wanting, though that had been…difficult. If that had been the extent of it, Itachi thought that perhaps he could have been kinder in his choice of words. He had expected this outcome from the moment Sakura had insisted that he needed to see the young man Sasuke had become.
He had worked with Orochimaru; he was aware of just what the old snake was capable of.
Orochimaru was many things, but strangely enough a liar was not one of them. Which only made him more dangerous. If he had offered power to Sasuke, he would deliver it in full measure, but he wouldn't take just the seeming of compliance in return. He would need to be convinced that Sasuke was fully invested in his bargain. And Sasuke would need to be convincing even in the moments when he thought he had privacy, minute after minute, day after day, year after year, until it took more deliberate effort to cast off the mask than it did to wear it.
Even if they hadn't confronted him with Orochimaru looking on, Itachi didn't doubt that Sasuke's response would have been the same. It wasn't just that deception began with your allies and ended with your enemies. His little brother wasn't the kind to change his mind once he'd set on a course of action. Unlike Itachi himself, Sasuke was not calculating by nature and did not hold himself back emotionally; as a child it had been an endearing trait, but he'd known it would be nurtured into something darker by the company he'd been keeping as well as the path Itachi himself had set him on.
There had been anger for the teammates who would not accept his decision, and outside the tidy, structured world of the villages, use of violence was an extremely common way to settle disagreements. Even though Orochimaru's followers were numerous, they weren't a village—Orochimaru did not implement and enforce laws in the same way that villages did because he was not interested in protecting the weak or the vulnerable. Orchimaru didn't have much use for victims, at least not those who fell prey to someone other than himself.
This wasn't the path he'd wanted for him, no, but he'd been reassured by the bright, honest anger that he'd seen in Sasuke. Orochimaru had made him ruthless, but not cruel; disabling the Kyūbi as he had might have been painful in the present for Naruto, but not so painful as if he'd come back to himself to find he'd killed all his teammates in a rage and was presently at the pleasure of Orochimaru.
Sakura had been cruel.
Sasuke's reaction to the sight of their mother impaled on his sword had been instant, reactive anger even before Sakura had made that uncanny illusion open her mouth and taunt him in the voice that had once read them bedtime stories and sang them lullabies.
Itachi wasn't so dissimilar from his brother in that regard.
His mother had always been a special kind of existence to Itachi. He had loved her more than he had loved even Sasuke, but unlike Sasuke, she'd been a grown woman who'd chosen to stand beside her husband and her clan against her village for the sake of ambition. Even if the nine familial exterminations hadn't been decided upon as the punishment, she was deeply involved in the Uchiha clan's treason. There would have been no escape. There had been no argument that could made for sparing her that wouldn't depend entirely on his ability to make it sound like his mother was a woman without the capacity to make decisions of her own.
Like she was an object, not a person.
Itachi had respected her too much for that, even if that hadn't been an option precluded by the directive, so her life had ended on the end of his sword.
Death was nothing new to him. It wasn't a friend or an eagerly anticipated guest, like it was for some shinobi, but he was an old, old acquaintance.
Itachi had been killing before most children graduated from the Academy. There was nothing astonishing or surprising about watching someone die; all children had some chore they hated to do and this was his, watching the soul seep out of someone's spent shell like so much blood spilling out onto the floor.
When he was very young, much of his emotional response to this had been patterned upon that of the adults around him. Children raised by farmers did not flinch at slaughtering a chicken or butchering a cow; a child raised by shinobi, at least among the traditional clans, was encouraged to view human life as something that could be bought and sold. But he was observant—he noticed that they never brought other children out on the same missions that he was tasked with. The wary, uncertain looks of adults who didn't know he was watching. The angry or grief-stricken reactions of those who'd briefly survived their teammate, family, lover.
That pervasive sense of wrongness eventually coalesced into something that his father had found inconvenient. A morality system that said that killing human beings shouldn't be like killing a cow or a sheep or a chicken. That it should have weight, and meaning, and not be the first option.
But he had never thought of it as evil, not until that night.
That…necessary evil.
All these years later and he still didn't know what his clan had been thinking. They'd resented that they were resented, but Itachi could see merit in both sides of the argument. In the eyes of the Uchiha clan, they'd faithfully served the village and were now several generations removed from Uchiha Madara, but had been rewarded by distrust, prejudice, and an unwillingness to let them serve in highly influential positions. The rest of the village saw only thieves with outsized ambitions.
Things had reached a crisis point when the military police had become a bastion of power for the Uchiha clan; within the clan, it had whetted their appetites for an Uchiha kage, but outside the clan resentment had grown to a point where there had been enthusiastic conspiracies about an Uchiha plot even before there had been such a thing.
The plan had been to pressure Sarutobi-sama into abdicating and naming an Uchiha successor, which wasn't in itself treasonous. Many, many factions had been clamoring for the elderly Hokage to prepare for the day when he would no longer be there to lead them instead of being to all appearances content to let the pieces fall where they would. That reluctance to make clear his wishes concerning the next leader of the village had been the fertile soil in which the Uchiha clan's ambition had found root and sprouted into a bloody tree.
Itachi still resented that failing on the part of the Third; he didn't discount the part of his family in their downfall, but they would not have chosen to do anything more than grumble and work hard for the sake of future generations if they hadn't been presented such a temptation. With the political situation as it had been, all it had taken was someone with charisma, standing, and a grudge to bring their discontent to a pitch that couldn't be ignored. Not every member of the clan had gone eagerly into rebellion; many of them had felt that they were trapped by the suspicion of the villagers, trapped by their loyalty to the clan, and trapped this one opportunity that might not come again within their lifetime.
So the plan had begun with an earnest petition—and when that failed, it had become something that involved forgery, an assassination, and a scapegoat. Which had been very nearly what had happened, only turned on its head and without any forgery.
Konohagakure had neither the ability nor the resources to imprison so many Sharingan users; when it had come to deciding upon the punishment it had been mostly a matter of planning how to minimize non-Uchiha casualties.
Even if he hadn't found that his loyalty lay with his village instead of with his family—if the blood of the covenant hadn't been stronger than the water of the womb—there would have been blood. Some of the other clans would have upheld Uchiha rule, especially if they believed they were following the will of Sarutobi-sama, but not all of them. And the more that the Uchiha would have tried to suppress them, the more convinced they would have become that their only choice was to solve the problem with more violence, which would have been returned in kind.
Perhaps the village wouldn't have survived such a civil war; if it had, it almost certainly would no longer have been one of the five great villages.
Itachi understood all of this intellectually, which was why he'd agreed to carry out the nine familial exterminations, but it hadn't made it any easier when the time had come to kill his mother. That had felt like killing his own heart. And having Sasuke walk in on it, that had been…
That had never been the plan, but in those brief seconds he'd decided that it would be better if Sasuke never questioned why his older brother would do such a thing. The same genjutsu net that had kept the rest of the world ignorant of the slaughter inside the compound should have also turned Sasuke aside if he had someone slipped the person who'd been ordered to intercept him before he made it past the white-washed walls of the Uchiha quarter. There had not been time to investigate that failure; he suspected it had something to do with his "assistant" that night. Not Danzō, but the other.
Danzō had agreed to spare Sasuke and was a man of his word, however terrible; he was like Orichimaru in that while neither were good men, they both operated within the bounds of their own unique code of ethics.
Danzō was willing to ignore both conventional ethics and laws if he believed it served the greater good of the village, but in this case the good of the village had clearly aligned with keeping his word to Itachi.
Aside from that understanding, Danzō's Root program was in its third phase by that time, which meant that he knew how and when to break someone to make them a useful tool. He would never use hatred—that was too powerful and unpredictable when his goal was to make shinobi who never felt at all.
Whatever the world saw when it looked at Uchiha Itachi, whatever he made the world see when they looked at Uchiha Itachi, he wasn't that shinobi.
To see it that scene again, to have it play out in such vivid, awful detail, that had felt like…
To say it felt like a betrayal would be a foolish and irrational response to what hadn't been a calculated blow against him. But he kept recalling the eager, self-satisfied glimmer in Sakura's eyes when she'd shown him the reconstructed memory of the event.
"She was my mother too," Itachi murmured, letting his eyes drift shut. One last time, he let himself remember the sound of his mother's voice, then he tamped the memory down.
What Sakura didn't know and couldn't guess was that this wasn't only about Sasuke. This was about a man who called himself Uchiha Madara and a war that would draw in the whole world.
One last time, he thought to himself. One last mission. And then everything can end.
[Kill Your Heroes]
Her arms were bare and slick with sweat, her breath rasping in her throat. With a cry that was anger and frustration and release all tangled together, Sakura surrendered to her exhaustion, allowing her knees to crumple and impact the unforgiving earth. An errant stone managed to stab into her knee, sending pain licking up her thigh and deep into the joint, but she didn't shift.
Sakura instead glowered up at an impassive Itachi, who surveyed her with those damned eyes. She thought that she was probably the only living person who'd seen the pattern of Itachi's Eternal Mangekyo and they were like the rest of him, equal parts awful and exquisite.
The sight of him made her want to rage and scream and do careless things that would break her, break him, break the world, if only she had the strength and the chakra to do it.
A breeze swept by, rustling Itachi's long hair and Sakura let him go, his form dissolving into black feathers that were caught up by the wind and vanished somewhere in the distant sky. Other people had to make do with shadow-boxing and their imagination, but Sakura had found she wasn't above using genjutsu to try and spend some of this annoyance before she met up with Kakashi-senpai and faced any awkward questions.
For the sake of the mission, she'd have to meet with Itachi again, so if she came back to Kakashi-senpai with a little bit of constructive violence on her mind—and right now she was almost certain that she wouldn't be able to hide her desire to shake Itachi until his brain started processing reality again—it would only make things awkward later. Though some dark, ironic part of her really, really wanted to explain to senpai that this new boyfriend of hers had helped her discover herself as a sadist and discovering new and interesting things about yourself was what adolescent relationships were all about, ne, senpai?
It would even be sort of true, because while Sakura was mostly reactionary in her violence, she was certain that she'd really, really enjoy beating some sense—alright, that was a lie, she'd just as soon settle for senseless—into either or preferably both of the brothers.
One for being an asshole who thought that someone doing something terrible to him justified whatever he did in retribution for that—and since the Uchiha clan had been guilty of treason, which had always been a capital crime even when it didn't involve the rebellion of an entire clan, and the nine familiar exterminations had been carried out by an ANBU member whose actions were upheld by the Hokage, so it was in fact no different than Sasuke taking revenge for criminals convicted and punished by the government and she did not care that Sasuke knew none of this—and one for being an enabler and an apologist for his younger brother.
At this point she was probably angrier at Itachi than Sasuke; she'd thought of Sasuke as a lost cause for a long time, but there was something so damn tragic about Uchiha Itachi.
You've let yourself be manipulated, Sakura told herself darkly. Of course he's going to display behaviors that make you want to help him, that make you feel sorry for him, make you feel like it's a shame that he's so determined to die. You've only met him twice. You have no idea what he's actually like. He's a genjutsu-type too and you shouldn't forget it! Her fingers dug furrows in the loose-packed loam as she clenched her hands into fists. Bitter laughter escaped her at the thought.
Uchiha Itachi is not your problem, she told herself firmly. The mission is. And when the mission ends, cleaning up afterward. It's not enough anymore to just not die. I have to become someone who can stand toe-to-toe with an S-class nin and expect to win.
The Sakura who'd expected others to step in and save the day was long ago and far away and never coming back.
[Kill Your Heroes]
"Did you miss me desperately?" Sakura queried as she dropped into a seat beside Kakashi-senpai, her brows rising as she took in the way he was not so much sitting at the table as he was transforming a corner of the restaurant into his own home. He even had his feet propped up on a chair, novel open in one hand as he caused food to vanish in his own special parallel to eating.
"Absolutely," Kakashi-senpai drawled without looking up from his novel. "I've been counting the seconds."
"I might have believed you if you told me you were counting the pages," was Sakura's retort as a cowed-looking waitress scuttled up to their table. "Now, what have I told you about staying off the furniture? Sorry," she apologized with a sheepish smile, "we're still working on his training. It's all about consistency."
"And you wonder why I don't miss you," Kakashi-senpai commented.
"Lies," Sakura quipped, feeling her world right itself.
When the waitress had left again, Sakura settled herself more comfortably, tucking her fisted hands under her jaw as she braced her elbows on the tabletop. "So, after this, is this where you drag me up a mountain and cue a training montage?"
Kakashi-senpai chuckled as he marked his page and tucked his novel away, taking his feet off other people's furniture as he did so. "Funny, I remember shaving this morning. Unless I've sprouted a waist-length beard and some impressive eyebrows since the last time I looked in the mirror, the only thing you're going to get good at if we hunker down on a mountain is fighting me. The Hatake family style isn't ruthless enough for you, after all—it's part of the reason I've never offered to train you in it."
"Hey," she retorted.
"I'm not judging. I'm just pointing out when you practice a martial art that focuses on ending any battle as quickly—and sometimes as permanently—as possible, it doesn't leave a lot of room for friendly sparring."
Sakura shrugged, unapologetic for the style that had supplanted the basic forms taught at the Academy. When she'd still been under Aihara-taichou, the woman had taken her aside and advised her that she not depend so much on her knifework that those skills were all she had to fall back on if someone managed to disarm her. The Academy style was more conditioning system than it was anything else, besides being a way to teach them cooperative action. It had never been meant to be an end to itself, just a stepping stone as each shinobi found a style that suited their weight, height, strength, and personality.
Most families and lesser clans allied themselves with clans who had their own martial art; in return for political and sometimes monetary support, the greater clans either taught or allowed the use of their own systems. The Haruno family usually had just enough members to produce a new generation, let alone have anything to offer a larger clan, so it had come down to Sakura's own initiative to find someone willing to instruct her.
"So, if there's no mountain retreat in my future, what exactly will we be doing?"
"Oh, a little of this, a little of that. I promise you won't be bored."
[Kill Your Heroes]
Kakashi sometimes forgot what it had been like to have been Hatake Kakashi, a jounin on his own merits, instead of being "Sharingan" Kakashi or "Copycat" Kakashi, a jounin whose career was overshadowed by the eye that had been Obito's last gift to him.
He'd first been arrogant, because he'd never had to work hard for his skills to overshadow those of his agemates, then complacent, because the Sharingan had jarringly unbalanced the scales of combat even as it had eaten away at his chakra. Even then, only S-class nin like Zabuza had posed a real threat and those were few and far between.
Somewhere between his teens and his twenties, he'd lost all his drive and his dedication; it was only now, watching Sakura, free from the worst of the parasitic aspects of his transplanted eye, that he was rediscovering it.
When they'd first met, she'd been the student he'd expected to take care of herself, in the sense that he'd felt she'd only stay a kunoichi for as long as it took for her to snag a shinobi and make a smooth transition out of fieldwork and into housework. Maybe deskwork too, if she developed more ambition than she'd displayed in those first weeks.
Then had come Wave and the days and years that had followed.
Nowadays, he still expected her to take care of herself, but he no longer wanted her to feel like he couldn't be relied on. And that was a very strange feeling, one he didn't know how to articulate to Sakura without saying it outright, which…well, he supposed he could just do that, but all things considered he'd rather not.
That would involve an open admission concerning the strange state of his emotions—really, who wanted to be depended on more?—and Kakashi hadn't had relationships that involved actually talking about feelings in any kind of reciprocal way since before his mother died. He'd come closest to breaking that record in their senpai-and-Sakura moments, but those were usually designed to address Sakura's feelings, not his own.
As he contemplated what he might actually say in this entirely theoretical conversation, he kept an eye on Sakura over the top of his novel.
He knew just enough about growth spurts in children to know that girls were usually tapering off as they approached sixteen, not going through another major growth period. Yet Sakura kept gaining inches as the months crept by until she was starting to resemble a gazelle, all long legs and deceptive fragility since her weight wasn't quite keeping pace with her growth. Then she would move and prove herself more cheetah than prey animal; whatever she lacked in muscle mass she more than made up for in speed and her chakra-enhanced strength.
It was as if she had some mental checklist where she was slowly eliminating any and every advantage an opponent could have over her. She had already held the advantage of strength over the average shinobi and she'd redoubled her efforts to refine her speed until her reaction time was becoming something uncanny. He was half-suspicious that her sudden lack of difficulty with the matter of reach had been solved by chakra; he was absolutely certain of it in the case of her reflexes and certain improvements to her stamina.
He'd caught her once or twice with her chakra where it didn't belong in his own body as she'd taken the initiative to heal things that would have healed on their own. "Remember, consent is sexy," he'd drawled when he'd realized she wasn't just repairing aches and sprains.
Something complicated and dark had crossed her face before she'd quashed the expression. "Women should be informed and willing," was her retort, "while men are best bound and uncertain. Embrace my double standard."
She was presently occupying the empty space between their beds, legs crossed, hands held loosely in her lap, her eyes closed, but her expression was serious and intent. Though her meditation did not look in the least peaceful, whatever it was she was doing was undoubtedly effective. Her chakra reserves had always been shallow to the point where if she hadn't been such an exceptional talent at controlling and manipulating her less-than-ample supply, she would have spent her entire career as a chunin; nowadays she was much closer to an average jounin. Considering that they'd been on this little trip for less than four months, that was…
Well, because he was fond of Sakura, that was astonishing and something he really should think about praising her for in the future. But if they had been strangers, that would fall solidly on the side of alarming.
The only thing he found alarming, though, was how little she'd done anything else these past months. She'd teased less and frowned more and spent hours meditating when she wasn't reading, researching, or exercising. He hadn't seen her pick up a novel the entire time, even though Tsunami to Tsundere-kun had released a new volume that had been available in a special edition to commemorate the release of both a manga adaptation and a figurine line. Thanks to some clever use of shadow clones and transformation techniques, he'd managed to acquire a full set for a birthday gift; at least her new tunnel vision had made it easy to pick out a present.
The room was narrow enough he was able to reach out and prod her shoulder with his foot, prompting her to give him a narrow-eyed glare. "Do you interrupt surgeons when they're in the middle of a delicate surgery?"
"Not normally, no, but I apparently now stage interventions. Please do something that isn't directly related to your new and overwhelming ambition to become the next God of Shinobi."
Sakura rolled her eyes. "I'm not aiming for that. I'm just…tired of almost dying," she said between clenched teeth, her hands curling into fists in her lap. "That's not exactly something I can take my time in correcting. It's not like there's some sort of posted schedule to all this—oh, look, I won't encounter another S-class nin for eight months, so I can take the week off, no problem."
"So, you're going to keep this up until when?"
A bitter smile curled the edges of her lips. "I might have some natural talent, but it's not the type where I don't have to work hard to stand on the same level you do. I just don't have that kind of chakra—I don't come from the right kind of family, the right kind of bloodline—but what I do have is the ability to cultivate it. But it takes time. And time is the resource in shortest supply for human beings. I can't afford to waste it. I'm not weak. I know that. But I am afraid. And I am tired of being afraid. So I'm going to stop."
"You are part of a team." That was close enough to telling her that she had someone she could trust to have her back, wasn't it?
He should have known better.
"Teams are only as strong as their individual parts. If you aren't strong enough to stand on the battlefield alone, you're going to die on it." Something dark flitted through her eyes and she added, "Sometimes, even that won't be enough."
Apparently finished in her defense of her actions, Sakura's eyes slid closed again. This action only served to emphasize the bruising under her eyes from lack of sleep; her cheeks were edging toward gaunt because she hadn't inherited a teenage boy's appetite alongside their ability to grow like weeds and that just made it worse.
Moving his novel to the nightstand wedged between the beds, Kakashi threw back his covers as he went to flip off the overhead light. Their room, besides being roughly the size of closet, had only a single window, but the moonlight filtering in through the blind would have been enough to avoid tripping over Sakura if that had been his aim.
But it wasn't.
Sakura made a strange noise when he scooped her up and dumped her on his bed, sliding onto the edge of the mattress next to her and using one hand on her shoulder to keep her from struggling upright.
"Senpai?" she asked sharply.
"I'm giving you my first time, so quit flailing."
"Your first time doing what?"
"Cuddling. Actually sleeping with a woman," he said dryly. "Think of this like an extended horizontal hug, except with less effort on my part and with the lights off."
Sakura stiffened and then sagged back against the mattress. "I don't need a hug," she sighed. "I need to train. Please. Senpai, I know—."
"What you need isn't only a hug, but we'll start there."
Kakashi flopped onto the mattress, nabbing the covers as he did so and flipping them up into place as this run-down hotel had substandard heating as well as tiny rooms. But it was scrupulously clean, which was more than could be said for the rooms their target was staying in.
Just as he'd told Sakura, while there was plenty of time for study and practice without the distractions offered by the village, they hadn't retreated somewhere and trained in isolation. They'd been bounty hunting, which for him was a chance to exercise a skillset that had once been his specialty before the Sharingan had changed everything. For Sakura, it had been an opportunity to gain combat experience in a semi-controlled environment—they could pick their targets, their moment, and their battlefield, which was more than you could expect on every mission.
Or, rather, he could pick their moment—Sakura's style tended so much toward ambush and guerilla tactics that if he let her have her way all the time, actual combat would be extremely limited. Which defeated the purpose of the training exercise, but he couldn't argue that her methods made her a very effective shinobi.
While he was self-aware enough to know that he didn't have much room for criticism when it came to coping methods, he was afraid that this one—this dedicated, sustained effort to become a shinobi so effective and efficient that no one could ever hurt her again—wouldn't leave her enough space to be a person too.
Maybe it was Gozen's fault that she'd grown up like this. Maybe it was no one's.
But maybe, just maybe, it was his—because almost every time she'd nearly died, it had been on a mission he'd led or ordered her to undertake. They hadn't been bad orders, in and of themselves. Most were combinations of bad luck and inevitability, but the circumstances didn't change the fact that he had set the tone of her experiences in the field. Even her very first mission outside the village had been all about pain and fear, faced alone.
Intent on his own thoughts, he lost the initiative and missed the moment when Sakura decided that perhaps this wasn't a terrible idea, but he certainly didn't miss the moment when her chilly hand slipped behind his neck.
"Your hands—and feet are freezing," Kakashi observed with a barely stifled noise of surprise, even as her other hand slipped between his arm and side and yanked him closer, her forehead impacting painfully with his collarbones. "With less violence, please. Senpai is old and fragile."
Sakura chuckled into his chest, but didn't relax her grip. Which made it difficult to return her embrace, but he managed.
"I'm sorry," Sakura mumbled.
"For what? The violence in bed? Well, I knew about that before I invited you in, so that's my bad."
"Not that. The rest of it. Making you worry. Snapping at you for worrying. I'm not sorry for training, though. Though my training more should make you worry less, not the other way around," she said pointedly.
Kakashi hummed thoughtfully. "When I was your age and in your place, I wouldn't have appreciated someone intervening either. Luckily, I didn't have anyone too much invested in my continued safety and wellbeing. You, on the other hand, are in the unfortunate circumstance of having a partner who's discovered that old dogs really can learn new tricks, with the right motivation. I'm not going to just watch as you make your life so much about surviving it that you don't even enjoy it anymore. You should—" he began sternly, when the words caught in his throat and he realized he was about to have the conversation he'd thought would never happen only minutes ago. Like a civilian bracing for oncoming impact, he closed his eyes and finally said, "You should depend on me more."
"Senpai…"
Kakashi opened his eyes again, but though the moonlight had been sufficient to keep him from tripping over Sakura, his own body was casting shadows and making it impossible to read her expression. But the tone of her voice said that though she wanted to believe, she couldn't make herself invest in something that she'd learned would end in disappointment.
"I'm not making promises I won't be able to keep. So I'm not saying you won't ever find yourself alone on the field of battle or that there won't be missions in the future that we'll undertake separately. But you don't have to train or fight as if you're always going to be alone. That's not a good way to live," he said softly.
"…maybe that logic works better when I don't feel like there's a storm coming and the only way I'll survive it is to be the kind of house that doesn't shudder in the face of wind and rain and lightning. I can't just…close my eyes and hope it passes me by or holds off until I'm ready. I wasn't born under a lucky sky; if things can go bad, they will."
Kakashi sighed and clutched Sakura tighter, knowing that she wasn't wrong but also thinking that it was a pity that she was so aware of the fragility of her own life. He'd first had an unshakeable confidence to protect him from the reality of war; afterwards apathy had been a powerful drug that made everything and anything bearable.
Sakura had once possessed an arrogance that had made her completely insensitive to the risks of the shinobi lifestyle, but that had been crushed. Thoroughly. And in the interim, because Sakura had developing a habit of keeping everything to herself and dealing with things on her own, he'd failed to notice that someone like Gozen was shaping her into someone who saw peace as only a temporary state or a shallow illusion.
It was fine to work hard; it wasn't fine to work so hard that she destroyed herself before she'd turned twenty. It happened quite often in ANBU and among the medic-nin, who tended to both be the most driven individuals and those exposed to the most high-stress situations. Whether it was chronic exhaustion leading to a critical error in judgment or the extremely high suicide rate, it wasn't only enemy-nin that stood in the way of long careers.
Sakura's outlook wasn't something that could be changed by just a few words; it would take time and patience and putting all his good intentions into consistent practice before she might begin to believe that there might be someone there to catch her when she stumbled.
But that was fine. Kakashi hadn't allowed himself to grow attached to a human being for a long, long time, but whether it was dogs or novels or his partner, once he'd found something he liked, he wouldn't let it go so easily.
A heavy silence fell between them, until Kakashi broke it.
"There's something I've been meaning to show you. A new technique."
"Honestly, ever since your chakra started to recover, I'm no longer surprised by the range, variety, or sheer ridiculousness of your ninjutsu."
"Aya, that's not a very cute reaction. You should always you observe your senpai with wide-eyed wonder. Don't you read novels? What if I wanted to teach you a new technique?"
"…"
"The disdain of a genjutsu-user. And here I thought since you'd been working so hard on improving your chakra, I'd teach you the Hiraishin no Jutsu."
"Well, it sounds impressive," Sakura contributed doubtfully. "Also like it was named by a man."
"Well, that was the rumor about Senju Tobirama," Kakashi agreed. "And it is an impressive technique. Extremely chakra-intensive, though, which is why I haven't given it to you before. I figure I owe you at least one technique from my not-so-much-a-sensei period. But that's not actually the one I wanted to show you."
He didn't need light this time to know she was peering at him suspiciously. Sakura had relaxed her grip so that he felt less like she was trying to anchor herself so she wouldn't fly off into the darkness. She wriggled upward until they were sharing the pillow and the atmosphere slowly lightened until he could almost forget the tone of their previous discussion. He wondered now if that was intentional—and how long Sakura had been deceiving him with similar tactics to keep him from prying too closely.
How long his habit of non-involvement had allowed him to go without noticing this.
"I dunno, senpai—after being promised a technique from Tobirama-sama, I don't know how you plan to impress me more. If you always lead with the climax, it's no wonder you can't get women to spend the whole night."
Sakura yelped as Kakashi prodded her ribs in retaliation.
"Then you're going to have to take responsibility for me," he intoned seriously, sitting up and shifting so that the light hit him in such a way that he knew she had a clear view of his next action. Very slowly, very deliberately, he brought his hand up to his face and hooked two fingers behind his mask, then pulled it down.
He'd worn many fewer clothes in front of Sakura before, but this clearly felt like the closest he'd come to being naked. It made him feel more than slightly uncomfortable, but if he expected her to admit her vulnerabilities and insecurities—to take off her mask—then he was willing, needed,to take off his own.
He might have age and experience, but this was, after all, an equal partnership.
Kakashi no longer wore his forehead protector to conceal his eye in private now that he could make the bloodline trait go dormant, but now he forced it into the Sharingan state.
"The first stage of a Sharingan is stable—it presents near identically among anyone who develops it. Its abilities are well-known, even outside Konohagakura. The Mangekyo state, though, it's mostly rumor even inside the village. Everyone knows it exists, because of Uchiha Madara, but there aren't any good records of what it does."
He felt the slight burn of the transition from the first state to the Mangekyo and then shifted so that he was almost leaning over top Sakura, all his weight braced on one elbow. He was close—very close and her eyes were wide and wary and easy to make out with the aid of the Sharingan—and told her in a low, sober voice, "I've figured out what mine does. Between your Kanashibari to keep them still and my ability to rip holes in the fabric of the world, there won't be any prey too big for our jaws."
[Kill Your Heroes]
A/N: Interesting historical tidbits you really don't need to know, but I mention because I can: zhū lián jiǔ zú—basically what happened to the Uchiha clan—was an actual punishment in ancient China, though it also made an appearance in Chinese-influenced regions. It was the most serious punishment for a capital offense, of which treason was one.
It was regarded as cruel and inhumane, but wasn't officially repealed as a punishment until 1905. Usually children under a certain age were spared, but as the resemblance is quite marked—though I don't know if it was intentional—I'm going to be treating it like many people in the US treat capital punishment. It's thought of as archaic and barbaric, but it is still a punishment that can be legitimately carried out by the government.
I'm not setting out to make an argument that it was the right way to handle the situation, but I'm trying to flesh out my version of the Narutoverse for all of you out there. While the world has a lot of modern trappings—indoor plumbing, modern clothing, color television—that makes it feel familiar to us and encourages us to make use of our own values system when judging it, it still operates in many ways as a feudal society.
Since large mercenary companies like the shinobi villages exist and aren't incorporated into the function of a state proper (i.e. directly employed a government that has a monopoly on violence like modern mercenary companies are—the US used them heavily in Afghanistan, such as the very controversial Blackwater), I have to assume that private warfare is still a right enjoyed and abused on occasion by the wealthy and the powerful and the villages themselves. Hence, feudal. And in feudal societies, human rights don't have quite the same role as they do in modern ones.
Hence, the massacre was concealed as a private individual's action not because it was something that couldn't have been carried out openly on the Hokage's order—though Sarutobi's personality would have made this unlikely—but to protect Konohagakure's "face". They can't be seen with their most powerful clan in open rebellion, so it's better to suffer an unfortunate loss and be seen to be struggling nobly onward after having suffered a blow.
