A/N: If you're coming to this story from the site called Amino or are reading it over on Amino (I think there are only something like four chapters up and it's calle over there), I am not actually the one posting it. Though to be fair, whomever is taking the time out of their life to type out each chapter—or who has discovered how to copy/paste from this site—does link it back to my profile here. It's not so much that I'm upset—I don't profit from this story, after all, and I am sort of being credited, I'm just taking precautions in case the author's notes or profiles over there contain something inflammatory at some point. I can do inflammatory on my own just fine, thank you. And I don't listen to Linkin Park.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Fifty-Seven-
Sugkunegousin (Part III)
"You don't have to stay," Shino said softly as the others swept up into the sky and Sakura heard an ominous roaring that heralded rain on a distant ridge. As he spoke, beetles were crawling from beneath his coat, but even she could see they were more sluggish than usual. Heavy rain would further limit them—who knew how much they'd be able to reduce the blast radius?
"Don't be stupid," Sakura said curtly as she sheathed the knife in her good hand, carefully prying the knife from the deathgrip of her other hand, which set to trembling as soon as she did so. She ignored both the pain and the blood dripping steadily to the ground through the ease of practice—meditation wasn't just good for increasing one's chakra reserves. "There's sacrifices that have to be made for the sake of the mission and then there's just being an asshole."
Maybe there would come a day when she had to leave someone behind in order to complete her objective and the current her would probably do it, though it made her sick to her stomach to think of it; what she'd never do was leave someone behind to avoid personal risk.
Sakura cast out her senses to retrieve the anchor that she'd used before. Whether they were exterminating Akatsuki for the good of the world or not, they were still violating a treaty with a grudging ally. Luckily, it hadn't been subsumed by the still-swelling mass of Deidara's body and the last of the beetles were still taking flight from Shino's coat by the time she returned to his side.
If they had more time or even a definite deadline, she knew Soudai might have been able to track down whatever remained of Sai's leg; as it was the last of her eagles peeled away from her skin and she and Shino mounted it in time to be drenched by what was almost a literal curtain of water.
Visibility was instantly brought to almost zero and only the faint sense of her anchor in the distance allowed Sakura to navigate—she supposed that the others were making heavy use of the Byakugan to make any headway. She could only hear the rain hammering down and the sound of her own breathing, creating a sense of isolation, as if time and space had suspended itself. That was until a great blazing streak of lightning struck only a handful of yards away and the sky roared like it was going to eat them.
Her nerves were so on edge that when Shino's hand pressed softly against her back, she instinctively shifted as if she were going to use it to fling him off the bird. She caught herself in time to turn the movement into merely half-turning to face him. Even though her combat glasses were coated to prevent them from fogging and were probably the only thing keeping her from being blinded by the rain, she felt like she was looking at a world underwater.
"This is my limit," he said. Or rather he all but shouted, judging by his body language.
Sakura nodded sharply, concentrating on holding them steady as the wind began to pick up—it wasn't really a bird and therefore could hover, but it was almost harder to stay in one place and be buffeted by stormwinds than it would have been to ride through them. She was too anxious to enter the kind of deep meditative state that would have allowed her to maybe shape the wind and water—monsoon-strength gales weren't something she'd tested herself against.
So she could only stick grimly to the eagle's back, attempting to ignore what felt like a small stream trickling down her spine and into uncomfortable places. Circulating chakra kept her body temperature from dropping, but her hand was soon all but useless, curled tightly into itself and feeling like a second throbbing heartbeat. Her dexterity with that hand was going to be non-existent, which was going to make forming the handsigns for Hiraishin slow and painful and she could only regret not having mastered it to the point where handsigns had become unnecessary. But Hiraishin wasn't just any jutsu—she could do complex shapings without any kind of crutch, but something that folded space was dangerous to more than just her enemies.
Much like senpai's Black Gates, except that if she lost of control of the technique it would only leave neatly divided bits of Sakura along her path instead of whatever happened when you lost control of the holes you'd torn in reality.
Between the rain limiting her field of vision and the physical discomfort, it was an act of will to keep her awareness stretched out when all it wanted to do was huddle inward.
Perhaps it was that to blame, perhaps it was that Shino's shrouding clothes made reading the nuances of body language impossible when at best he was a blurry shape, perhaps it was a combination of these things.
Wherever the blame lay, Shino had almost slipped from the back of the eagle before she noticed and Sakura lunged toward him, only catching at his collar and hauling him towards her before they were slammed by a wall of water, which wrenched both of them from the construct.
The filters of her mask might have protected her from dust and particulates, but they wouldn't do a thing to keep her from drowning and as Sakura spluttered, trying to breathe water in a world whose only directional certainty was that gravity would win out, she tried keep hold of an unresponsive Shino. She managed to awkwardly loop her arm through his, pinioning it against her body as she fumbled through the handsigns.
There was a long moment between where the disorientation was almost total and Sakura clung desperately to the distant anchor that was in Kakashi-senpai's possession.
Then they were spilling out of folded-space and a strong hand was against her back and other hands were taking Shino. Clawing at her mask, Sakura managed to dislodge it, coughing so violently that she ended up vomiting, her senses still so disoriented that it felt like the room was spinning. Her thoughts were fractured and running wildly, her breathing erratic, and her heartbeat like thunder in her ears, like they'd never made it out of the storm.
The well-trained core of self that remained unshaken by her physical misery recognized that this was only due in part to breaking a wall of water with her face. The rest was a Hiraishin that had almost gone awry, her chakra rampaging and interacting strangely with her near-finished seal. She coaxed it back into steady flows in the more usual channels, her breathing slowing and her heartrate following suit.
"Did I get all of Shino through?" she rasped at last. "That was awful."
Finally feeling equal to glancing up, she found the area illuminated only by a few glow-rods shoved into the dirt. The earth had been folded up to create a kind of earthworks cave, which made her look to Kakashi-senpai, as he was the only one capable of earth manipulation on that scale. He gave her a tired kind of smile. "Welcome back," he said, subtly shifting the earth again, the sour smell of her sick disappearing. "Hyūga, what's Aburame's status?"
"All present, but I think he's going into shock," was Neji's grim reply. "He's nonresponsive."
Sakura painfully shuffled over to where he was crouched over Shino. Neji'd gotten his mask off and laid him on his side, but his near-plummet had spared him from the force-driven water. The rain had only felt chilly in comparison to her combat-heated body; monsoon season with its ferocious thunderstorms and driving rain was a summer phenomenon. So it alone couldn't be responsible for the alarmingly low body temperature that presented itself when she worked with Neji to open Shino's complicated layers.
While it was pointless to ask that the Hyūga refrain from using their doujutsu when in the presence of another clan, unlike their offshoot the Uchiha, they kept whatever they perceived to themselves and made no efforts to replicate them. As Sakura glanced up at Neji, she wondered whether he would keep strictly to clan law or help her treat Shino. She would respect his decision if he kept quiet, even if whatever adaptations the Aburame had developed proved too strange to treat; she had the freedom of being clanless, but respected that it meant something to those that did belong.
The normally subtle glow of chakra that coated her hands was as bright as the glow-rods in the dark, casting sickly shadows over Shino's sallow skin. "Maybe it's a physiological response to the loss of his swarm," Sakura muttered to herself as she took in the slowly-blooming bruises that were an external testament to internal damage.
Just as he'd warned when they'd made the attempt with Sai's ink, Shino's body proved reluctant to accept the intrusion of the foreign chakra, even without the threat of his beetles swarming. She was so intent on attempting to infiltrate without doing harm that she almost flinched when Neji leaned forward until they were all but cheek-to-cheek, his voice to low she almost couldn't hear it. "Kikaichū are poisonous when crushed, right? He has a lot of dead beetles in his abdominal cavity—my guess is he got caught in a blast. If he has any internal bleeding and the toxin has entered his bloodstream…," he trailed off, setting back on his heels.
Sakura grimaced as she considered what needed done and what could be done. She wasn't plying any false modesty when she claimed she wasn't a medic-nin—a real medic-nin would have had supervised experience in treating a wide variety of patients and a consistent and thorough education.
What she had was specialized experimental knowledge of her own body, of the Sharingan, and of the nervous and by extension the endocrine system due to her specialization in genjutsu. A natural toxin like crushed kikaichū would fall under her interest in poisons; should someone without extreme body adaptations like senpai be the one suffering, she was almost certain she could treat the poison.
With Shino—well, she'd do her best, but she didn't think that his injury ended with poison. Whatever metaphysical bond existed between the Aburame and the beetles that parasitized him, that must have suffered when they stopped existing. They might make her skin crawl, but to Shino…
Lips pressed together, Sakura eased a formless genjutsu of peace and rest over Shino. Unlike his body, his mind didn't resist her. When she felt it settle and latch—there weren't any ghosts to see with this kind of genjutsu, except for a faint haloing effect—she turned her attention to his exposed abdomen. Beneath his layers, he was built solidly, with a wide ribcage that didn't fashionably taper into a narrow waist. Instead he was all straights lines from armpit to hips, probably to maximize the space available inside his abdominal cavity for his swarms. Like a fish's gills, there were curved slits that followed the angle of his ribs, their edges slick and pink like scars with enough excess skin that they overlapped.
Retrieving a penlight from her kit, as well as her canteen, Sakura held the light clenched between her teeth as she teased open one of the vents and emptied the contents of her canteen into his body cavity. Her good hand followed with considerably more care and she tried to ignore the ick that was warm organs and unexpected pointy bits courtesy of dead bugs. There was really no question of being able to purge all the toxin in his bloodstream, not with the Aburame constitution serving at this moment not to serve as a stable environment for the beetles to propagate in, but as a stumbling block to a Sakura who already battered and exhausted.
So instead she'd flush out the beetle carcasses and sear shut any veins that had been damaged. At the same time, she'd be killing any immature larvae that hadn't been ready to emerge, but she couldn't help that. Perhaps there would be unhatched eggs that would survive without tending. Now that the barrier of his skin wasn't providing a primary defense, she could vaguely sense them tucked within the coils of his intestines, clinging like frog's eggs.
Ick, her brain reiterated even as Sakura sent healing chakra coursing through the medium of the water. She wished that there had been an actual medic-nin assigned to their pursuit team, but there were only so many medic-nin judged qualified to take part in Operation Headhunter.
She managed to convince his veins to clot, then swept all the mess out onto the dirt like some awful afterbirth, all blood and beetles and pale wriggling things. It was like something Gozen-san would have dreamt of and it was that experience that allowed her to keep her composure; Neji flinched before he visibly gritted his teeth and helped her strip Shino out of his wet clothes and wrap him in an emergency blanket that senpai produced.
By the time they'd finished, Sakura was clutching her damaged hand close to her body and senpai was looking haggard and grey from the effort of keeping their shelter intact in the face of the storm raging overhead.
"How's Sai?" she asked Kama, whose eyes opened in response to her question.
The other kunoichi's voice was impassive as she answered, "Alive. For what that's worth." And without waiting for a response, her eyes slid closed again as she rested her cheek against her knees and her breathing evened quickly back into a steady rhythm.
Sakura was reminded of what Gozen-san had told her before she'd left. He was trying to make perfect soldiers, she'd said of Danzō, but all he managed was to make weapons, sharp and brittle and unthinking. You can't be forged into what we are; it is something you must choose every day and every minute to be. Once you break the spirit, all the body is good for is following orders. That doesn't make you a perfect soldier; it doesn't even make you a good one.
By this point, the pain in her hand was making her sick to her stomach as her body metabolized the adrenaline that had dulled the sharp, stabbing edges, but she still did a more careful sealing of Sai's severed limb once she'd trimmed the flap of muscle and skin where it hadn't been cut cleanly. Unlike Shino, his body responded easily to her chakra, pink skin creeping over what had been little more than cauterized muscle and veins. Also unlike Shino, she had no fear of pain-killers having an odd reaction, so she liberated some from her supply and administered them liberally.
No one needed to wake up in a hostile country and find themselves with one less limb than they'd had before they lost consciousness.
Then, at last, she could do something about her hand.
[Kill Your Heroes]
The storm broke, eventually, and Sakura piggybacked Sai for the duration of the grim trek back to Hi no Kuni and the nearest outpost. Neji took charge of Shino, whose body temperature rose alarmingly, but never woke.
There were some tense moments as they avoided the border patrols, but otherwise it was just a matter of slogging through country she'd be glad to never see again. They handed off their injured squadmates to the medic-nin upon arrival, but found themselves checked in for observation as well.
News trickled in. The team that had been assigned to Tobi had disappeared entirely. The squad that had been assigned to Kakuzu had made contact and had died in the attempt, though the squad who'd taken his partner had been more successful despite suffering casualties. There had been no sign of Zetsu; Kisame Hoshigaki had been loitering in populated areas and the team assigned to him had decided not to engage. No attempts had been made enter their stronghold of Amegakure.
The seismic event of Deidara's detonation had been significant enough to trigger a mudslide that swept away a village that had been perched on a nearby slope as well as flattening trees for miles. They hadn't been able to glean numbers of the lost, but Kaminari no Kuni was already squalling with outrage and looking to assign blame.
In the real world, there never was such a thing as a clean victory, Gozen-san's voice echoed in her head.
[Kill Your Heroes]
[Author's Note]
I saw a trend of people wondering why it was so difficult to deal with Deidara this time 'round, when Sasuke was able to kill him by himself in canon. This is because I'm probably a lot more convinced that explosives being used in combat is Bad News than Kishimoto-sensei—not only are you going to have injuries from shrapnel (which isn't predictable like the flight path of a kunai), you have the force of the explosion itself to contend with, which opens up the prospect of such things as internal bleeding and severe burns. Hence, the squad has to be very cautious when attempting close combat, but also keeping Deidara busy enough he can't turn this into aerial combat (in which his exploding clay creatures would make a pretty good stand-in for missiles with sophisticated tracking capabilities—also Bad if you happen to be our protagonists).
Also, on Kurenai—yes, Sakura is being judgmental. Canon-Sakura is super-judgmental, including for things you can't help, like being an orphan. KYH-Sakura isn't as quick to make assumptions, but she's not totally free of the time and place in which she lives—it isn't all about being a weapon for the village, though that factors in.
In the modern world, we have two conflicting messages that we pass on: have good judgment and don't judge others. I sometimes think that we overemphasize the latter, because a large part of having good judgment is predicated on our ability to do just that. Sakura lives in a world where childcare and eldercare is provided, not by paid professionals, but by one's clan or family or, in extreme circumstances, family friends. Paid maternity leave isn't yet dreamt of and there aren't government programs to help subsidize the cost of medical care or childcare items. A jounin's income would be dependent on specialization and missions undertaken; Kurenai's spent most of her time after promotion as a sensei. There's no existing infrastructure to make being a single parent easier, even overlooking the fact that social pressures are much more real and present influences in a culture that puts more emphasis on your role within society as opposed to an individualized one.
Konohagakure might look like a city, but in many ways it functions like a small town—your neighbors have opinions about your business and you'd have been raised to care about these opinions.
Marriage is something one does for love, but there's a much higher awareness of whether a partner is "suitable" and represents a union not just between two people, but also their extended families. It wouldn't be unusual to live at home until marriage; it wouldn't be unusual after marriage for one's parents to move in to help with a new child—it also wouldn't be unusual to have your parents introduce you to your future spouse, who is probably the child of someone they know and have good opinions about.
greywarden wanted to know why Kurenai couldn't be having the child to further her own clan and why having it for the Sarutobi clan would have made it more acceptable—it wasn't so much that it would have been for the Sarutobi; if Asuma had married in, rather than Kurenai marrying out, it would have been just as acceptable, though her parents—unless she was their only child—would (probably) be more likely to take her feelings and personal readiness to have a child more into consideration than her in-laws. It was the lack of marriage that was the real problem. If Asuma fails to acknowledge their relationship in a public way, with the permission of both families (i.e. marrying her), Kurenai will probably face ostracism from her clan in the worst-case scenario; in the best case scenario they'll never let her forget that she bore a child out of wedlock.
Kunoichi aren't expected to be virgins on their wedding night, though it is considered lucky if they are—and luck is taken far more seriously than in any western equivalent, as the wedding itself would be held on an auspicious date and include many, many elements meant to ensure the future happiness of the match—but they would be considered "damaged goods" if they'd had a child without the benefit of a husband. This is at least in part because everyone will be silently asking themselves what Kurenai's damning flaw was, that Asuma wouldn't marry her. (And yes, fault will be presumed to be on the woman's part.) Sakura is judging Kurenai for making the conscious decision to expose herself to this—this isn't taking antibiotics and your birth control failing or forgetting a condom in the heat of the moment, this is a making an appointment with your doctor sort of thing—and also in choosing a lover who'd let her expose herself to this. And because a sensei teaches you more than just footwork, their actions also implicate their students, who might have passed on these lax morals to say, the Hyūga heiress (who will probably not be allowed to associate with her former teacher going forward).
Sakura is both sensitive to society's judgments and a product of a two-parent household that still managed to leave her mostly in the care of her grandmother—it would be stranger if she wasn't judgmental about it. As a woman who's learned to take responsibility for her own decisions and who still regrets Sasuke, she assigns most of the blame on Kurenai for not extricating herself from a relationship that her partner won't admit to.
(Much of this is not the work of my imagination, but were the realities of life in various periods of Japanese and Chinese society—and not very long ago, western society wouldn't have been any kinder to a woman who had far less control of her body's reproductive abilities than Kurenai. And I did not mean to turn this into a women's studies essay. I should write a blog.)
