A/N: You were all fantastic in your reviewing last time, so much so that this author is going to mass reply to some of them. (I would do shout-outs to specific reviewers, since some of you gave me very long and detailed commentary this time, but I live in horror of missing someone, so just know that you're extra-awesome.) Kakashi's eyesight has been fixed—if you'll recall, it's not the emotions, per se, that unlock the next stage of the Sharingan, but by a specific chemical trigger. With medical chakra and drugs and some very morally grey experimentation, Sakura was able to recreate the effect without using genjutsu.
As for her concern with the opinions of others, reflect on the fact that canon Sakura basically belonged to the "in" crowd when we first meet her. But she's not the trendsetter or the one that accrues followers—that was Ino. Sakura made a lot of effort to make herself acceptable to that crowd after being bullied for her physical appearance, putting a lot of effort in how she looked, what she wore, and being "in love" with the most popular guy in school.
(Keep in mind that the culture of Naruto is patterned on Japanese culture, which has less emphasis on individualism than you might be used to and is a "masculine" culture in the sense that there is a greater disparity in the behaviors expected from each gender and this would have been reinforced all of her life in ways both subtle and not.) While Wave was a wake-up call for her, none of this is going to magically evaporate. She's still sensitive to societal norms and pressures—she is aware when she breaks taboos and deviates from the usual role expected of kunoichi. It doesn't stop her, but remember that Sakura is focused mainly on accruing the skills necessary to survive in the field, not intentionally breaking the trail for others to follow.
As for making weak excuses for not having sex—that's true. But it's something she'd really rather not do and because she doesn't have good excuses for not doing it (there's nothing wrong with Zen and she knows that), any excuse will do and they've just multiplied as she justifies it to herself. There's nothing wrong with not having sex at seventeen (or not having sex at any age), but the Sakura of the moment doesn't have enough self-confidence to just say no and leave it at that, without scrambling for justification.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Fifty-Three-
Eosophobia (Part I)
It didn't take Sakura long to dress, but she took her time undoing the hasty braid that had kept her waist-length hair in check while Sai worked. She wasn't plotting or planning, just putting off the master-level test to her professionalism that was suddenly looming large in her future. It shouldn't have felt like a surprise, because she'd known for more than a year that this was coming, but enough time had elapsed that she'd tucked her anxiety away.
Not dealt with it, like a kunoichi should, but ignored it until it couldn't be avoided any longer, like an inmate awaiting execution.
Sakura had retreated to the small bathroom in order to have the benefit of the mirror and her hands splayed on either side of the reflective surface. Petal-pink hair tumbled down in front of her shoulders, framing a face that no longer had the roundness of childhood, but had finally recovered from the gauntness of her "growth spurt."
When barefoot she now stood just an inch shorter than Kakashi-senpai, which still sometimes felt weird. It also put her well above the average height for a woman, which served as a good excuse not to wear heels when masquerading as a civilian, but made her more noticeable as well.
The reach, though, was well worth the trade-off.
"You can do this. You will do this," she snarled at the girl in the mirror. "You're not twelve anymore. Suck it up and be a grown-up." If she thought she could slam her palm against the wall for emphasis without having it shatter the drywall, she would've done that too, but as it was she settled for sneering at herself as she twisted her waist-length hair up into a slightly more elegant arrangement than her usual style. Date night with destiny, she thought to herself, the words steeped in dark, bitter humor.
When she'd finished, she exited the bathroom to find Michi preening herself on the back of a chair. "Are you going to read the letter?" she croaked.
Once, the irony of Uchiha Itachi writing love letters had made it amusing to read the coded messages, once she'd gotten over the embarrassment of his assumed persona. But irony was eroded with overuse; now it was only annoying to wade through the paragraphs to glean the pertinent information from them. Practice had made her quick at it and it was only a matter of minutes before she had everything useful memorized.
Bringing it close in a mockery of a kiss, Sakura exhaled instead, whispering out a nascent flame that licked at the eloquent words and burned quick and hot as the paper caught. Releasing it rather than allowing it to singe her fingers, she watched with satisfaction as Itachi's handwriting was distorted and destroyed, the flame dying out to glowing edges that soon cooled—and with them, her little fit of temper.
Michi cocked her head, looking meaningfully from Sakura to the curled and blackened remnants of the letter. "You're not going to make someone else clean that up, are you?"
"No," Sakura sighed.
When she'd finished disposing of the ashes, Sakura sought out Kakashi-senpai to tell him she was leaving. They hadn't gone far—they'd overnighted in a small town, which made it fairly easy to get out of the range of civilian senses. Out of politeness, they'd chosen a fallow field to spar in and Sakura plopped herself down on one of the wide fenceposts that flanked the gate.
Her eyes were on Kakashi-senpai as the two shinobi exchanged blows. She was beyond the point of the fruitless wishing to confide in him concerning this mission; now she'd prefer that senpai never know what she had done to aid Uchiha Itachi's plans. He would understand, she knew—he had once been ANBU, but even with the new openness between them, he had only ever once talked about his time with the organization. And that had only been to warn her about Danzō, back when she'd asked if he minded Sai traveling with them for a little while.
They were traveling not-quite-incognito at the moment, which meant that they weren't selling a cover, but neither were they advertising that they were shinobi. Which meant that senpai was without his flak jacket. If her new height was sometimes weird, seeing Kakashi-senpai in daylight without his armored shell was always bizarre. It had been a part of him, an integral piece of his silhouette, for so long that when he wore something that exposed the lean, well-built lines of his torso it took her an extra half-second to pick him out of a crowd.
And right now, it wasn't just the clothing that made him unlike the Kakashi that had imprinted himself so deeply in her memory.
He'd recently lost a bet with her and the ninken and there'd been a quick but furious debate whether they were going to take him to a groomer or a stylist to have something done to his hair. Sakura didn't have a lot of room in her life for the vanities that had consumed so much of her time before she'd been shown what being a shinobi meant, but she still kept her nails clean and tidy, had her hair trimmed on a regular basis, and moisturized regularly. She reserved the right to be judgmental about Kakashi-senpai's hair, especially when he was almost religious about the ninken's grooming and his philosophy for his own hair involved roughly trimming it—on his own, with kitchen shears, which went a long way toward explaining the asymmetry—whenever it grew long enough to demand regular brushing.
And it was really a pity, because he had such thick, fantastically soft hair, like the heavy undercoat of a mountain dog.
In the end, they'd taken him to a stylist—chosen by Pakkun—who'd taken off much of the length and trimmed it in such a way that it no longer had its gravity-defying properties (which mostly involved going to bed with his hair wet and sleeping on it). His bangs had been left long enough to cover his eye, though that was habit rather than necessity since both his eyes were so similar in color it would have been difficult to guess which was which if it weren't for the scar that bisected his brow.
It managed to make him look much less eccentric, which was deceptive—he might not be a cuddle-virgin any longer, but senpai would always and forever be very much a person who lived at his own pace. And his pace was weird.
As she thought that, Kakashi-senpai glanced over at her, which Sai took as an invitation to strike. He really should have known better, Sakura thought ruefully even as senpai side-stepped the blow, catching Sai's forearm and using his own momentum against him. Normally, loss of an eye marked the end of a career for a shinobi, much as loss of a limb would. Only someone like Kakashi-senpai, who could compensate for the sudden lack of depth perception with incredible chakra-sensing skills, would be able to stay in the field without resorting to the Sharingan at every turn.
As Sai was picking himself back up, Kakashi-senpai ambled over to Sakura, who hopped down from her perch.
"You're making that 'I'm-leaving-you-for-another-man' face again," Kakashi-senpai sighed. "If you keep doing this, I'll start to believe you don't love me anymore."
"Now, you know that's not true. Those other men, they don't mean anything. You're the one I come back to in the end. Besides, you can't blame me when you never tell me you love me."
Kakashi-senpai glanced back over his shoulder at Sai before his eyes lit on her, glimmering with the kind of mischief that usually preceded a puppy doing something it had been explicitly told was bad. He moved closer, which prompted her to take a wary step back, the fencepost suddenly a solid barrier at her back. Senpai leaned forward slightly, which put him at a level with her ear, so close she could feel his body heat—so close that when he pulled down his mask, she felt his lips brush against the fine hairs on her cheek. "I love you, Haruno Sakura," he murmured in a low, husky voice—right before he licked her, his tongue warm and wet as it swept up her jaw and along the edge of her ear.
An ungainly little shriek of surprise and outrage escaped her lips as she shoved him away, swiping at the wet trail up her face. She saw his grin for only a moment before his mask was back in place, the fabric obscuring all but the contours of his expression. "That's just gross," she protested.
"I was raised by dogs—wet, sloppy kisses are an expression of true love."
"Then I feel like I should bop you on the nose," Sakura said, emphasizing her point by pointing a finger demonstratively like she would with a real dog. "No boy, down, down, bad dog!"
"This is me with my tail tucked between my legs, but you'll have to keep waiting if you're looking for sad-puppy eyes," Kakashi-senpai's eyes were creased into the familiar crescents by the force of his humor.
"Seriously, senpai, I feel like I should go scrub my face now," she muttered and then shook her head. "Anyhow, I don't know how long I'll be gone, so…"
"This time, you don't need to send the crows," Kakashi-senpai told her. "It's time we checked in at the village—how long has it been since you've seen your parents?"
Sakura's reply was an uncomfortable shrug, because she hadn't been keeping track.
It made her feel guilty, how much more like family Kakashi-senpai and the ninken and Soudai and Michi and Yoko felt than her own parents. It was with them that she felt that promised bond of second family, though if she was in the mood for brutal honesty they'd usurped her blood family as her first family. This was the bond she'd been promised with her genin team and never found, but now that she knew it, she knew why shinobi would struggle and survive and die to protect it.
It wasn't like she didn't love her parents, because she did, but this was the family she ate with, slept with, and shared danger with. She'd spent more time with Kakashi-senpai in the last year than she'd spent with her parents in all her years at the Academy—whatever they might say about absence making the heart grow fonder, proximity tended to feed and maintain a relationship in ways that distance just couldn't manage.
The everyday annoyances might loom larger in her relationship with Kakashi-senpai and the others, lacking the rosy-tinted nostalgia and longing that characterized her bond with her parents, but Sakura knew that was just time wearing any sharp edges from her memories and the very human impulse to desire what she didn't presently have. At least with senpai, though, she was aware of his foibles and habits, annoying or not; after she'd entered the Academy she'd never spent long enough with her parents to know whether living with them would be difficult or not.
But part of her did want to know—and part of her missed her house, her room, her bed. No matter how many things could be neatly packed into scrolls, they couldn't recreate the sense of being a sanctuary that her room could and did. And she'd probably need that, coming back from this mission.
So she nodded and turned to leave, but was stopped by Kakashi-senpai's voice. "Before you scamper off…"
Sakura turned back to him expectantly and watched curiously as he drew something out of his pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it easily and turned inquiring eyes to what turned out to be a bracelet—it wasn't anything particularly fancy, just a length of braided cord with a single bead set in the center. She'd seen similar "evil eye" decorations in Suna, where they were believed to ward off evil, but rather than the striking blue that characterized those talismans, this one was bright red.
And there was something off about the way it looked besides simply the color—it wasn't colored glass or enamel; it was only when she shifted it for a closer look that she noticed that there was an air bubble that moved as the bead tilted. "Is that…is that blood?" Sakura queried.
"Mm-hm,' Kakashi-senpai hummed an affirmative. "Just in case mauling becomes an attractive option—since I haven't been able to talk you into taking the ninken with you, I thought I'd pick Sai's brain while we have him with us. If you crush the bead, my blood is going to spill onto the paper folded in the center, which will activate the summoning."
"Senpai…," Sakura sighed as she closed her hand around his gift, "It's not that I don't appreciate that you're worried for me, but I can promise that the only way he'd hurt me is emotionally and I don't think that really calls for a mauling."
"Humor me," Kakashi-senpai insisted as he leaned forward and plucked the bracelet from her unresisting hand, tying it into place on her wrist. "There," he said with satisfaction. "For when you need a little help from your friends."
[Kill Your Heroes]
"You bring me the best presents," Sakura said flatly as she took in the man restrained on the narrow bed. He shared Itachi's general build and coloring and had been drugged into unresisting placidity.
Itachi did not respond from where he stood silently in the doorway, but Sakura had not expected him to. She understood by this time that Itachi tended to eschew pointless conflict and though she couldn't quash her do-not-want-to-be-here temper, she knew that it wasn't serving any real purpose. It wasn't even making her feel better about the sensation of being trapped by her orders, which were counter to her own judgment.
"Have you infused the ink with your chakra yet? If you haven't, you should, while I prep him," she told him when he didn't immediately retreat. When he still didn't move, she only shrugged and tugged the unresisting body of her subject to the edge of the bed, her knife making swift work of the barrier of his clothes. She didn't ask Itachi his name, his age, his occupation—that would make him more like a person and while Sakura had practice in ignoring the sick, nagging feelings that pooled in the bottom of her belly, she didn't feel any particular need to make this more difficult.
Where are the lines in your life? the tiny disapproving voice in her head hissed at her as she tugged the remnants of his clothes free of the man's body and ignored the distant curiosity that was the only expression in his eyes. She made a mental note to ask Itachi whether it was genjutsu or drugs keeping their guest compliant, in case of an undesirable interaction.
She noted Itachi's retreat as she used a combination of poison and chakra to purge the man's chakra, leaving him something of a hollowed-out shell in terms of metaphysical energy. When she'd finished, Itachi had returned, carrying with him the solid stick of ink. It quietly thrummed with his chakra even as he shoved the battered nightstand into a position where it would be more convenient for her to reach the suzuri as he ground out the ink.
They worked together in silence, this time less because of her temper and more because all of Sakura's attention was required for her task. She had just enough space to think, Sai would be really useful right now. It took them almost two hours before she felt the jutsu catch, for lack of a better word, Itachi's chakra locking into a cage which would bind the body to his will when it was activated, the seals slipping beneath the skin to become invisible puppet strings. She hadn't quite figured out how Sasori had managed to do this without suppressing the host's chakra or how he'd been able to activate it after releasing his victims back into the wild, so to speak, but as Itachi's plans had them putting this body into use tomorrow, she supposed it didn't matter.
[Kill Your Heroes]
"Even after the founding of the village, the Uchiha didn't abandon their old hidden strongholds," Itachi told her as he showed her how to access this particular one. The terraced forests above them were full of crows, ominously silent and watchful. "We kept them supplied even after generations of peace and even now, some of them are still guarded by the spirits they contracted to the task. The Uchiha found it very hard to let go of the habits of war, even after they had become part of the village. When a child came of age, we were taught or shown their locations and how to open them."
"I wouldn't exactly call this one hidden. How in the world did this not end up as a stronghold for bandits or missing-nin after the massacre?" she asked as she resettled the weight of her passenger on her shoulder, but she was more interested in studying Itachi from behind the safety of the mask. Her hair had been temporarily dyed a rust-brown as a precaution, though being seen at all would be a failure on her part. Itachi had been briefly startled when she'd emerged and she realized that it was the first time he'd seen her in full kit.
The moment she'd decided she'd reached her optimal height, Sakura had commissioned new body armor to replace her old and all the money made from bounty hunting had been freely poured into the new gear, which had far better fit and function than village standard issue.
Itachi himself was without the cloak that was indicative of his status as an Akatsuki member—even the ring was on the man slumped across her shoulder—and he'd traded in the outfit he'd formerly worn beneath it for something a little less like a jinbei and a little more like something you'd want to wear on a battlefield.
He looked back over his shoulder at her as he led her through a long narrow hall that led down into the heart of the artificial mountain. "It has been in the past. Bandits and missing-nin both. Occasionally I come here to clear out the vermin. There is a sense of…theatre, here. I always intended to end things in this place." And Sakura saw exactly what he meant as the hallway led into a vast, cavernous room that had a throne atop a dais.
Sakura's eyes narrowed as she read the calligraphy on the tapestry centered behind that throne. "Kitsune?" she asked sharply. "I thought your family was affiliated with cat spirits."
"The Uchiha? Yes." Itachi's eyes fixed on the tapestry and he didn't turn back to her as he replied. "But that's a story for another day."
Sakura frowned at him from behind the barrier of her mask, then asked, "So, remind me what you hope to achieve here?"
"If I am right about Sasuke, then I hope to exorcise all his demons."
"By dying on his sword? Besides salving your conscience, even if by some strange stroke of fate it actually works, what's it going to do? Sasuke's been declared a missing-nin. This is an irrefutable fact that won't change no matter how he feels about it. He can't come back to Konohagakure unless he wants to hand himself over to T&I and whatever they'll do to him when they're finished asking him nicely what Orochimaru was up to. If he hadn't slaughtered the leader of the village he'd defected to, maybe somewhere like Kiri or Iwa would have taken him in, if for no other reason than to try to breed him. As it is, his only real choice is to keep being a missing-nin. And missing-nin only survive by doing things that legitimate villages refuse to do."
"Normally, you'd be right. But there is a war coming and war provides…unusual opportunities."
"For?"
"Storytelling," was Itachi's succinct reply. "And the story of the prodigal son is a favorite."
"And if you're wrong?" she challenged him.
"Which would make you right?" was Itachi's dry reply. "In order to be convincing, I won't be able to let Sasuke have an easy victory. I don't think he'll be in any state for doing anything particularly stupid on his own in the immediate aftermath, but there have always been certain parties lurking in the dark. Waiting for their moment. That's why I've asked you to watch over the battle, even though you aren't there to interfere. I think that we might very well have a guest who will attempt to take advantage of Sasuke's emotional vulnerability when the battle is finished."
"And you don't want me to swoop in and save him?" Sakura pressed, thrown by the direction that their conversation had taken.
"Unfortunately, you can't," Itachi said with a strange, sad smile. "After all, redemption must be bought and paid for with his own strength. I can only open the path. He'll have to walk it on his own. Your part is to observe the person who'll come to collect him. If your cat companion is much good as a tracker, you should ask him to memorize the chakra signature. He's been too careful to make the mistake of keeping Sasuke with him for long."
"And this person will be?"
"He should be the one behind the Akatsuki. The one man whose will is strong enough to bind together the disparate wills of Kage-class missing-nin and keep them bound. The man responsible for this coming war, who has been skilled enough to evade all my attempts to locate him since the night of the massacre. If he doesn't come himself, it will be someone connected to that man, which will be a more substantial lead than I've had in years. He's been patient for a long time, but I don't think he'll be able to resist when all the pieces are falling into their final places."
Sakura stared. "You…you're also using Sasuke as bait?"
He glanced over at her from where his gaze had been focused on the tapestry. There was a hard, resigned sort of dignity in his expression, as if he couldn't quite bring himself to be proud of the fact that even in this he hadn't let his judgment as a shinobi be compromised by his emotional involvement. "Did you really think that I would fail to account for something like outside interference? My little brother's habit of striking out when he's angry and confused? That I would pass on the burden of eliminating a threat I've been aware of for longer than you've been out of the Academy onto a brother who I intend to emotionally destroy in the belief that something better will rise out of the ashes? You should know better," he said softly.
Without giving her a chance to reply, he began walking again. "The vault is this way."
