A/N: Sakura's theme song for this next arc: Three Day's Grace—The Mountain. The track for her relationship with Kakashi? Zak Brown—It Goes On. Also, congratulations to all the readers who've made it this far. In terms of word count, you've read James Joyce's Ulysses.
Kill Your Heroes has also picked up a German translation, which is being done by Mayumi Uchiha. Applause for undertaking such an ambitious project!
Ah, and for you kind reviewers worried that I had been put off writing by a troll, fear not. I am both older than most of the writers on this site—and therefore have much more experience in taking criticism—and in possession of a degree that says an accredited university acknowledges that I do have a working knowledge of how English ought to be written. I am comfortable with the bending and occasional breaking of the current rules for stylistic reasons; I also acknowledge that I could produce much cleaner copy if I brought on a beta.
I haven't been posting as often because I am largely a reactionary writer when it comes to fanfiction and I'm at my most productive when I have very strong feelings, good or bad, about an original work. My dissatisfaction with certain elements of Naruto produced several hundred thousand words of fanwork, but I'm not as immersed in it as I once was. Hence less impulse to write.
And, as I told a kind soul who PM'd me, I'd hit a dangerous and tricky period in the story. I want to do the coming war justice and without losing the spirit in which the rest of KYH was written, despite Sakura having become much more powerful than in those opening chapters. This means sitting down and really thinking about what kind of tactics you'd use if you were waging war with shinobi. What it means in their context to have an "ethical" war without Geneva convention guidelines. Which of their leaders would actually be concerned with ethics. How complicit they'd judge the civilian population of their enemy and whether or not they worry about causing mass civilian casualties. The role of daimyo and samurai in containing or even condemning conflicts between shinobi powers, which are more like little city-states than they are government armies and governments maintain their power by having a monopoly on authorized violence.
That said, please enjoy.
Kill Your Heroes
-Chapter Sixty-Two-
Hojarasca
Kakashi-senpai and she parted ways with the others upon arrival in the village, as Itachi would be debriefed and Sasuke and his team interrogated and Tsunade-sama had a war to plan.
The housing situation had changed, if not improved, and for the first time in her life Sakura found herself in barracks-style accommodations. Konohagakure's shinobi were not an army in the usual sense—they were military contractors, offering specialized services like surveillance, protection, or any number of other things that their employers did not have the personnel or training to provide for themselves. They were usually in the field or hosted on-site; when a mission ended, they returned to their own private homes.
Now she and the other single jounin without clan exemptions shared rooms with their partners in designated apartments; another housed those with families. Chūnin and genin were racked in with their squads in other buildings, which delighted absolutely no one, especially those jounin-sensei in charge of underage teams—making certain they did things like laundry and didn't live like animals was somewhat outside their normal responsibility when at home.
Sakura did not mind living with Kakashi-senpai, which she'd never quite had the courage to bring up on her own, though they'd been all but doing it before. Sometimes she thought about how Itachi might feel if everyone survived the coming conflict and she and Soudai and all the ninken and Kakashi-senpai kept living in a bustling, warm space like this. Where almost immediately there were pet hairs on every surface, bed was a place where the ninken let you sleep if they were feeling generous, and midnight trips to the bathroom were treacherous obstacle courses.
Of course, if he intended to bring Sasuke under the same roof, his opinion on Kakashi-senpai's presence would be considered null and void. This was only if she and he were still a they by the time the war had finished.
It was easier to think about her own small matters than what would happen if the village was unable to meet their obligations to their clients and began defaulting on contracts, the fact that it wasn't simply resource conservation but also suicide prevention that meant no one lived alone, and what sort of black tactics might be used to level the playing field in a war against Akatsuki.
More immediately, what concerned her now was a strange, almost thready sensation in her chakra, like she was tied to something and it was tugging at her. She'd only noticed it as they drew close to the village, which made it more curious—it would have been alarming wherever she'd noticed it.
Slipping from her futon, Sakura sought the one thing in short supply with so many in a small apartment: privacy. She dashed off a quick note for Kakashi-senpai before she slipped out the window, knowing that he would respect her escape but not a disappearance, and into the still-too-quiet, still-too-dark night.
The training fields had escaped the worst of the Crush and so it was atop the red bridge that had once served as Team Seven's meeting point that Sakura settled into a meditation posture and tried to reach for the right state of mind to explore her inner landscape. It was easy to control her breathing—that was almost muscle memory by this point—but it was much harder to find the kind of peace she needed. There was too much fear in her and she'd trained herself to react to fear by confronting it with violence.
Maybe there were some shinobi that could sink into themselves in the action of the moment, but Sakura needed stillness. Quiet.
Usually if she couldn't find them on her own she listened to the reliable and comforting sound of Kakashi-senpai breathing, but now she listened to the water flowing by until her awareness sank quietly into her own familiar flows.
Except that they weren't so familiar any longer. Like after a hundred-year flood, her interior landscape was no longer as she remembered it. The pool of chakra at her core was deeper and stranger than she'd ever seen it, her tanden housing what looked like a slowly rotating something at her core that almost seemed to glow—she was sharply reminded of the luminous pearls that were always clutched in the talons of dragons in paintings and statues. When her consciousness brushed against it, she discovered that it wasn't a pearl, it was a tightly wound skein of natural chakra that threatened to rouse at her attention.
Pulling back from it like she'd been burned, she traveled along the ebbs and flows until she came to where something foreign tangled with her own chakra.
Exploring this aberration even more cautiously than she normally would, after the strangeness in her tanden, her eyes fluttered open when she recognized the chakra. "Sai?"
Her hand fluttered instinctively toward the seal they'd both thought a failure. The ink had once been invisible beneath her skin, much like the seal they'd been applying on her back, but after she'd been pulled back from the reikai both had slowly re-emerged. She'd thought it was some sort of strangely colored bruising at first, but then the glossy, red-sheened black had defined itself into a tangle of complex lines and characters.
While still in talismanic script, the handwriting wasn't Sai's any longer. Neither was the pattern of the seal. She was still panicking, very quietly, about that.
Like an insect caught in a web might feeling the spider plucking at the strands, Sai must have felt her exploration of their chakra bond. Now that she was aware where the trail led, she could sense him vaguely, something that refined itself as he approached.
She didn't think you were supposed to be able to feel other people like she could feel Sai as he drew closer—not without your hands on them, alight with medical chakra. She could feel the beat of his heart and the slow work of his lungs and where the mixture of ink and chakra ran down from his knee to make his prosthetic work with all the dexterity of his remaining limb. She could see the prosthetic as well, for while he had his kit, he hadn't bothered with proper pants, just his sleep-shorts—he'd taken artistic liberties and now had clawed toes like some sort of daeva.
He blinked at her, deceptively sleepy-eyed, hair tousled. "I feel like saying 'I can feel you moving inside me' isn't the first thing you ought to say when you haven't seen someone for weeks and who managed to die in the meantime, but it's so distracting I think it's worth mentioning."
Sakura choked on helpless laughter. "That's terrible, Sai."
He tilted his head slyly to one side. "How about, 'I felt you coming'?"
Sakura only shook her head and thought about shoving him playfully and then thought better of it. She wasn't certain how well-recovered his balance was and wouldn't that be a terrible way to say hello after not seeing him for weeks.
"Well, now that we've addressed the incredible strangeness of this," she waggled her hand between them, "with bad sex jokes, now might be a good time to discover if the seal is functional or well, it obviously has a function, but I don't know…. It doesn't—well, you can probably guess that's something changed, because it didn't work before, but it wasn't something a change I made to the seal. It mutated, somehow. Both of them."
"Strange. Almost as strange as mysterious mass resurrections," Sai said dryly. "And probably not at all connected. I want to see that thing I've been painting on your back first. Anything that went wrong—or right, I guess—probably started there."
She saw or rather felt his first hesitation in the use of the prosthetic after they'd moved somewhere less exposed than the bridge. When Sai knelt behind her, what should have been an easy, almost thoughtless, movement had become something he had to think about. But it had only been weeks. A civilian in the same set of circumstances might still be learning to walk over uneven ground, though she didn't have much frame of reference for the recovery rate of civilians who didn't have the money to pay for medic-nin.
Sakura might not have needed light any longer, but Sai did. Sakura squinted at even the weak beam of his flashlight, but willingly sat still for his inspection, her knees drawn up to her chest and pinioning the fabric of her top against her breasts.
"Does it work?" he asked after long, silent minutes.
"Well, probably," she replied.
"Probably?"
"I haven't made the attempt to channel natural chakra since the Crush."
"…and why not?"
Though it wasn't that cold out, even without a shirt, as compared to the country she'd just left, Sakura shivered. "It hurt. A lot," she said flatly. "Channeling it through the incomplete seal…"
"It always hurt when you integrated a new section of the seal or tested it," Sai pointed out. "And you were always willing to do it then."
Sakura clenched her teeth tight, because she knew that to say that she hadn't died because of it back then meant that Kakashi-senpai should never push himself beyond his limits for the sake of others or any of the shinobi of Konohagakure stand against an opponent that outmatched them. She stared at the bony protrusion of her wristbone and the scales there that scattered light in a different way than the paleness of her skin.
"Have you ever wondered," she asked softly, "if we came from the spirit world and go back to it, what you were there? Who your friends were and how you lived? How long you stayed before reincarnating?"
Given how quickly he answered, she didn't think that Sai even had to mull over his reply. "I've always had enough problems in the here-and-now without needing to consider things that happened in a lifetime I have no memory of. Root promoted self-examination, but not self-reflection."
Sakura hummed thoughtfully, then hissed a sigh through her teeth. "How likely do you think it is that it'll do something bizarre to you if I try this while the other seal is active?"
"Danzo-sama likes you. He'll forgive you if you accidentally kill me, but expect him to use it as leverage."
Sakura twisted around to stare at Sai, who offered her a beatific smile. "Sometimes you really make me want to punch you."
"That's because you're a violent hag, which is not my fault."
Sakura was braced for fire licking at her insides again, so she almost didn't notice at first the sensation like sinking into warm bathwater. It wasn't at all like before. That had been power like riding lighting, trading immense power for overwhelming pain. This was just the power.
Not without price, though, or risk. Sakura might not have conventional medic-nin training, but it didn't require more than observation skills to watch the scales slowly creep up her arms, emerge on her collarbones like freckles in the sun, the strange but not uncomfortable pressure of antlers beginning to emerge.
"I thought that the seal was supposed to prevent side-effects," Sai said as he curiously prodded one of the antler nubs.
Sakura swatted his hand away. "Clearly not," she ground out, spooling the natural chakra back into its tsunami-like rotation in her core. It drew in the remaining foreign chakra in her body and the physical changes receded, which loosed some of the tension that had settled into her bones.
"Well, it doesn't kill you and there's no sign of it turning you to stone. Or a toad. So I suppose we can pronounce it functional, Dragon King."
It had been Sai, far better at reading talismanic script, who had puzzled out what the King seal now said. Originally a larger seal formed around a triadic core using King, Ox, and Horse characters—presumably referring to King Yama, Ox-Head, and Horse-Face knowing the somewhat grim humor of ANBU Team 9—they'd failed to adapt it so that it worked with only two people. Now it seemed to work all too well between her Dragon King and his komainu seal.
Since she'd plucked the string that tied them, she hadn't lost her unnatural awareness of him. While they'd been tracking the slow creep of her transformation, they'd discovered that Sakura could lend her own chakra—not natural chakra, though probably that as well, but they were attempting some measure of responsible experimentation even if they were doing it crouched in the wooded dark with Sakura half-dressed—and manipulate Sai's chakra, as well as receive it.
In short, except for the awareness, which had never been mentioned in Araki-san's journal and given that it had been Gozen-san who'd been King of that array he might never have known of it, it functioned as intended.
Sakura didn't trust it. Good things did not spontaneously happen in her shinobi life—good things were ground out with painstaking research and sweat and blood and usually fear. She and Sai had made their attempt at the seal and set the project aside until they found someone else to bring in to stabilize it—and giving someone access to your chakra through an array recovered from the journal of a mentally unstable ANBU member was not a selling point—and though she was no expert at resurrection, it shouldn't have caused either seal to complete itself.
Sai hadn't even died and his seal had been affected.
Sakura was caught off-guard by a yawn, though she shouldn't have been. They'd been at this for hours, the sky beginning to grey with the promise of dawn.
"See you in daylight?" Sai offered, looking rather worn himself.
"Daylight," Sakura agreed.
[Kill Your Heroes]
Sometime a little after dawn, Sakura received a summons that had her following an ANBU down into the rebuilt levels beneath the Hokage tower.
She had never really been in the rooms and corridors below the public levels of the tower; aside from the now-devastated document storage, it was also where the Hokage or someone from the mission office handled S-class briefings or anything assigned to an ANBU team. There had been other things here once, resources for jounin-rank shinobi, but what remained of them was a restoration project being handled by the village elders.
Witch and Hound had been mission office favorites for how quickly they cleared their assignments, which was at least in part because they didn't return to the village between them, so she had the field experience but not much confidence in navigating the areas her rank had opened up to her.
Though Sakura was fairly certain rank alone wouldn't have been sufficient to get her through the door the ANBU took her to; she couldn't help but feel a sharp stab of anxiety when she was left alone in a room that contained both Shimura Danzo and Tsunade-sama. The blade twisted when she realized she was alone in the room with them.
Tsunade-sama, in the few instances she'd met her in person, had never bothered to use body language to intimidate—today she was slouched deep into her chair, eyes lidded as she supported her head on one fisted hand. Danzo-sama, by contrast, had his back to her as she entered, one hand clasped around the opposite wrist. Without the bandages, which had at least offered the comfortable illusion of physical weakness, she found him deeply unsettling. She was confident he had the welfare of the village first and foremost in his mind; she just didn't trust that the Konohagakure she loved and killed for would still be herself if she employed his ways and means.
She did not particularly like what his presence implied for her personally, either.
"Haruno Sakura," Tsunade-sama said without raising her head from where it rested on her hand. Sakura was not annoyed by this, because even with the benefit of genjutsu the older woman looked exhausted. Sometimes it was difficult to recall her true age, between the illusion of youth and her inexhaustible energy. Today was not one of those days. Today Tsunade-sama looked old.
Danzō, though a generation her senior, just looked hard. Ready. Like war was something he fed on and was energized by.
"Yes, ma'am," was Sakura's automatic reply.
"The Witch of the Woods."
"Ma'am?"
"I've read your files. Talked to my legacy ANBU. While you're not an heir to her technique in the traditional sense—and I can't imagine what a mentorship with Grandmother Nightmare must have been like—I understand that you're the closest thing we've got. ANBU Team Nine was infamous for their ability to control a battlefield with fear. Could you do the same, not just to a battlefield, but to a village?"
"A village?" Sakura repeated weakly.
"Amegakure," Danzō confirmed. "We've had reports that the skies above it have been clear since the Crush, but the first clouds were sighted yesterday. We don't have conclusive proof that it's linked to the recovery of Amegakure's leader—who was responsible for the Crush and presumably the resurrection—but according to Uchiha Itachi a large part of this Pain's "god" status is linked to his ability to sense what occurs within his village. Jiraiya suspects he could be a particularly adept Sage with a water elemental affiliation and has been using that to amplify his abilities."
He turned back to the large map posted on the wall, before he continued. "The rain is clearly important. Amegakure—and the country it is located in, obviously—has always had warm, wet summers and brief dry winters, but its current weather is clearly unnatural. It's turned the whole area into a swamp, whereas before it was rivers and plains. Destabilized house foundations and destroyed the local ecology. Nothing grows there any longer and if it weren't for the irrigation channels that take the run-off into the surrounding area, it would be a swamp in the middle of a desert wasteland."
"That didn't inspire civilian resentment? Or the daimyo's? I wouldn't think he'd allow anything that would risk the harvest or destabilize the economy."
"Hanzō the Salamander ended his life as a paranoid despot, but he was first a genius," Tsunade-sama said flatly. "Strangely enough, the former didn't entirely negate the latter. We Sannin earned our fame by surviving him. The people of Amegakure survived him for years. The daimyo didn't.
"I'm certain they were at first very grateful for their liberation—we don't have an exact date for Hanzō's death, but it's plausible to assume that there was likely a chaotic transition period. Various factions, free of Hanzō, were probably scrabbling for power at the expense of a population who didn't have the power to fight back, even if the will hadn't been stomped out of them. Enter Pain, god and savior."
"As far as we can tell," Danzō said, taking over the narrative, "it was Pain himself that created the current irrigation system, so it wasn't quite as if they directly exchanged one dictator for another. We're actually not certain why he felt the need to monitor his own village so closely, at least once he'd established himself, but his little surveillance storm provides a useful indicator for us. If we can take him while he's weak, good, and if it's a trap, well, there's nothing going to change soon for us that would put us in a stronger position. Naruto has finished his Sage training and come out of seclusion. He will be under Jiraiya's command, on a team assigned to deal with Pain and any other S-class threats. The Kazekage and several other select shinobi will be joining them."
Sakura thought she probably looked a little hunted by this point, her mouth dry and the muscles across her back tight. "And if I could do it—if I could bring terror to an entire village," she said, stumbling over the words as her breath hitched, "what would my place in this be?"
"You'd strike the first blow and burst them open like a rotten melon as the officer in charge of Operation Cloudburst," Tsunade-sama said. "I know that Team Nine worked in concert. I understand that it might be difficult to find people with whom you can cooperate well enough to perform a complex genjutsu with, especially when I tell you that you can't have either of the Uchiha and all of the clan heirs are off-limits. None of the heirs will be allowed to enter Amegakure and the Uchiha will be making themselves useful elsewhere. Hatake will be working with you, of course. You'll also have Chiyo-sama and the most skilled members of the Puppet Corps under your command. You'll be assisting them in infiltrating the village, before you cast your genjutsu."
Rising from her slumped position, Tsunade opened a folder that had been pinned beneath her elbow. "Sit," she commanded, which Sakura did, even as she understood that seeing anything in that folder was probably as good as agreeing to complete the task.
Tsunade slid a large, folded piece of paper over to her and Sakura unfolded it several times over to discover a hand drawn map of what she assumed was the city Amegakure—the one on the wall was of the surrounding country.
"You and your team will retrieve vessels from these areas," she said, pointing out sections that had been flagged on the map. "I don't need to tell you to choose those who won't be missed. Chiyo-sama has forbidden passing on the technique for corpse-puppets, but she has agreed to make them herself for the Corps members who will be entering Amegakure in native flesh, so to speak. They're there to give teeth to your terror. Puppetmasters can do a lot of damage in very little time when they don't have to worry about friendly fire. Once the fear starts, they'll do their work in the resulting chaos. What your team does after that depends on whether you have to remain static to keep the jutsu in place or if you can anchor it."
Sakura's hands curled around the edges of her map. She thought about how embarrassing it might be to hyperventilate on the table in front of Tsunade-sama and Danzō. She was not quite certain she cared, the way her insides were trembling. She told herself that she would have Kakashi-senpai, whether it was her in charge of the mission or not. "I'll need Sai."
"Done," Danzō said immediately.
Kakashi-senpai hadn't wanted the seal when they were first experimenting with it, but he'd agree now, if she asked for this, even if she explained how strange it was. Three of them would make a stable array and was all that was required for the most basic version, but she didn't know if they could take in all of Rain without her being washed away by the dragon.
She considered genjutsu-experts first, out of habit, even though the seal meant that what they'd need most was power and control rather than expertise.
Konohagakure didn't exactly have an excess of genjutsu-experts to be had, though, and she wasn't certain she liked the idea of sharing the seal with near-strangers. She had the king seal and the balance of power was on her side, but it would be an awkward kind of intimacy. Most were jounin she'd met only in passing or knew only by reputation.
"It's not just a matter of cooperation," she confessed. "There's a seal. Sai already has it, but—well, it's not the kind of seal that most people would be comfortable with. We've explored it to a certain extent," she deliberately omitted that the testing had finished only hours before, "but we've never field-tested it."
Tsunade-sama and Danzō exchanged a look. "Mitarashi Anko was supposed to be sent on another mission, but we'll transfer her to your squad," Tsunade-sama decided. "Mitarashi-san has…experience, with seals."
Sakura remembered the dumpling-coveting sadist that had taken such glee in terrorizing exam candidates. She didn't know how much of it had been a ploy and how much an act, but it had been effective. Even though she'd met the older kunoichi since then, it was that image that defined her in Sakura's mind. Bold, fearless, ruthless. Also either shamelessly comfortable in her own skin or so uncomfortable in it she compensated by putting all of it on display.
"It would be useful to have a Hyūga to monitor the situation inside the village," Sakura hesitantly put forward when it became clear that they were waiting for suggestions rather than putting their own candidates forward. "Even if he or she isn't willing to take the seal."
Tsunade-sama thoughtfully tapped her fingers against the table. "You're probably most familiar with Hyūga Neji. His cousin has much better range, but even if she wasn't heiress, I don't think she'd be a good fit for your team. Her personality makes her better suited for defending, which isn't a bad thing to have in the head of a clan. I don't have a problem assigning him to you, but it would be up to you to convince him to take the seal. We're putting most of the qualified Hyūga on Operation Watchtower, monitoring battlefield conditions in real-time for my commanders, but I can spare someone."
"Neji-san will be fine," Sakura said uncomfortably, the consideration a reminder that she wasn't just a little gear in this engine of war. Her team was the key that would turn the whole thing over.
