"I want to put in a request to be promoted." Sakura said stubbornly.
The Hokage, sat at her desk, placed her fingers in a steeple and peered at her apprentice. Her head was bent slightly so she was bathed in sunlight that poured through the window. Her eyes were hazel and shrewd, filled with the knowledge she had accumulated over the years, yet sparkling with feigned youth.
Her expression was unreadable.
"You want to be made jounin at sixteen years old?" Tsunade said, her head tilting slightly. Her fingers were covered in rings that sparkled in the sunlight. She looked regal.
"Hyuuga Neji was," Sakura pointed out, "And I'm fairly certain you became a jounin even younger than that."
Tsunade smirked, "Exceptional cases. Do you think yourself exceptional?"
"I'd say I have been taught in a wide range of areas by skilled ninja. Kurenai-sensei has told me she thinks I will one day surpass her. With respect, Tsunade-sama, I believe I could be a jounin. I've fought a few ninja that many would have run from. I wouldn't say I've lived these past four years," Sakura looked down at the floor, her eyes shadowed, "I'd say I survived. I think I proved my loyalty to this village and I want nothing more than to help defend it."
"A pretty speech," Tsunade observed, "With a hidden layer of resentment, I think. Being a jounin isn't just about being able to defend the village, though that is important. I think you just want to be able to walk around the village as proof that you are not a traitor."
Sakura bit her lip to stop her mouth twisting into a grimace, "Is that so terrible? If I'm appointed a jounin, like Anko, then the village will see you trust me."
"Anko worked for that trust," Tsunade extended a hand and gestured for Sakura to come closer, "Come here," Sakura obediently stood next to Tsunade, "Do you really want proof of your loyalty to Konoha?" Sakura nodded fervently. Tsunade smiled and poked Sakura's hitae-ate, right above the Konoha insignia etched in the metal, "There's your proof. If I thought you were a threat or a traitor, there is no way I would let you wear that. Anyone with half a brain knows that. So stop worrying."
Sakura sank beneath her disappointment. She had so hoped… she did consider herself exceptional! She was a genjutsu specialist at only sixteen, just like Kurenai had been, and with all the other things she had learned, she had just hoped…
She wanted to be a jounin so badly. The rest of the chuunin weren't like her. They were cheerful, inexperienced… content. Sakura burned with the need to prove herself. To prove her loyalty.
"Oh, and work on your chakra so more." Tsunade added with a cheeky wink, "You'll need huge reserves to support your specialties."
"Does that mean you'll teach me the Yin Seal?" Sakura said hopefully, pointing to the purple diamond on the Hokage's forehead, where she constantly gathered chakra.
"Not unless you want an early death." Tsunade grumbled, "And, Sakura…" She called as Sakura went to leave the room, "You need to stop thinking of yourself as different or as an outsider. You are no more special or less special than any other chuunin of your age."
Sakura gaped at the Hokage, astonished at the mild criticism, "Are you calling me big-headed?"
"Well, seeing as you just came into my office and demanded to be made a jounin aged sixteen, having completed only seven A-rank missions and no S-rank, I can only assume your ego is slightly inflated." Tsunade gave a careless shrug, her casual tone lessening the impact of her harsh words.
Sakura looked away from the soft gaze of her sensei, crossing her arms defensively. Her ego was not inflated! She only wanted recognition for the skills she had worked hard for.
"To tell the truth, Sakura, you have managed to keep a low profile as a chuunin so far… I looked through all of your mission reports, and whilst you reported no casualties amongst allies, you also never contributed to enemy deaths. Ever. In four years. You've got by in life by the skin of your teeth, using your genjutsu skills to trap enemies, but never finishing them off. What's going on here, Sakura? I'm being presented with a very mixed up girl here. On the one hand she appears proud and haughty, slightly cold and serious for her age and on the other hand, I have a ninja who has never killed." Tsunade said insightfully, her eyes suddenly piercing through Sakura like knives.
Sakura swallowed and rubbed her wrist nervously, "I have killed," She argued, "and the only reason I have a very low kill count is because that's not my job. I stand back and trap the enemies in genjutsu, and my own allies finish them off."
"Rubbish," Tsunade dismissed her weak argument immediately, "Kurenai traps her victims in illusions and then kills them. If what you are saying to me here is that all you do when I send you off on missions is stand back and leave it to your allies to fight, then we have a much bigger problem than your career level not satisfying your ego."
"I do not have an ego problem!" Sakura spat. Tsunade simply raised her eyebrows. Sakura realised her mistake and flushed, "I'm sorry, Tsunade-sama. I just… If my not killing ever jeopardises a mission or even costs an ally their life, then I could see why it would be a problem. If not then… please allow me to continue doing my job in the only way I can do it." Sakura gave a deep bow, hoping the Hokage would be kind enough to accept her request.
Tsunade closed her eyes.
"I'm sending you for counselling to overcome this fear of killing." She said finally after a long minute or two, "I don't know if it's your morals or something else, but I know what it's like to have difficulty in some areas of fighting." She smiled ruefully, looking at her own wrists and the faint scars from battle that covered them, "My fear of blood nearly stopped me fighting for good. If your no-killing policy is something you are willing to compromise on, then I see no reason why I should stop you from doing your job."
Sakura felt herself break out into a genuine smile for the first time in ages. Tsunade looked surprised.
"Thank you, Tsunade-sama." Sakura said fervently, bowing once more.
"Now that the pleasantries are all finished, onto the real business," Tsunade said, her demeanour suddenly shifting from kindly Hokage to steely businesswoman in seconds, a gambler's greed twinkling in her eyes, "I've a fairly safe bet that I need you to take care of for me."
"…Tsunade-sama, I'm not going to count cards for you." Sakura said firmly.
"No! Of course not!" Tsunade laughed a little too loudly, "A businessman I know lives in near Suna. I promised him I could make his daughter look pretty for her Miai. I need your genjutsu skills to make her look stunning for when she meets her future husband."
"And how much has he bet you can't do this?" Sakura asked suspiciously.
"Enough to refurnish my office," Tsunade said, deadpan.
"I'm not going to cast a prettiness illusion on some girl," Sakura said, slightly outraged at the idea of utilising her skills for cosmetic use, "I can make her turn into his worst nightmare, if you like. Hellfire and everything."
"Sakura, this guy is pretty rich," Tsunade said soberly, "If this bet pays off, we'll do very well from it."
"So this is how the great shinobi village Konoha makes its fortune," Sakura said heavily, "By ripping off husbands-to-be."
"If he chooses to marry her because she's pretty than he deserves to be suckered into a marriage with her." Tsunade said pitilessly.
Sakura sighed dejectedly, "Fine, when should I leave?"
Tsunade looked innocently naïve, toying with a pen on her desk. "…Today?" She suggested finally.
Sakura groaned.
xxxxxxxx
The mission had been a piece of cake. Sakura had simply used a weak illusion that was easy to sustain for a long time to enhance the girl's already rather pretty features, making her eyes brighter, her hair shinier, her teeth whiter, etc. Luckily the girl revealed a rather wicked sense of humour that her husband-to-be appeared to share, so they hit it off and Sakura hoped the girl's fiancé would write off her suddenly much plainer features as love at first sight at work.
After running the whole way there, Sakura wanted to keep her strength up and decided to walk back instead of sprinting, since the sun was still up and Konoha was only a few miles away on foot. She was carrying a significant amount of money on her person, and she looked like a lone female – which many idiots would think screamed 'Easy prey!' – so she used genjutsu to make herself look like a carriage and a fair few guards on foot as a deterrent to any criminals lurking out there.
Unfortunately when she was only a mile away from Konoha she sensed about twenty men with weak chakra signatures hiding in the undergrowth around her.
They were either bird-watching en masse or they were hoping they could ambush her. Or, rather, ambush the carriage and guards she was disguised as.
Idiots.
But when Sakura was about to turn the carriage-illusion into a fire-breathing demon to chase away the fools, a rather strong chakra signature appeared as a heavily-built man dropped down from the trees in front of her.
"You morons, this isn't a carriage and a coupla guards, it's a girl." The man said angrily to the bushes, which quivered in response.
Hmm, a bandit who could see through illusions. A weak illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. Fun.
The man held up a hand wordlessly and his fellow bandits crawled out from the undergrowth, some of them staring suspiciously at what appeared to be a carriage to them.
"Now why don't you drop the little genjutsu so we can all see your pretty face?" The bandit leader said, smirking. A few of the bandits tried to grin to share the joke, but most looked worried their leader had gone mad and was hitting on a carriage.
Sakura released the genjutsu without a word or a movement.
The men actually jumped back in shock. She figured that the only ninja amongst them was the leader, and was hugely thankful for that. Twenty ninja might have delayed her at least fifteen minutes.
"Here's how this is gonna go, little girl, we paid a lotta money to keep this nice stretch o' land ours. A lot of money, if you catch my drift. I'm thinking a girl like you who goes to the trouble of putting genjutsu over herself when she takes a walk has got something of worth on her. We would like to take that off your hands." The leader pulled out an axe that had been strapped to his back.
Some of the bandits chuckled.
"Hmmm…" Sakura pretended to contemplate this with a thoughtful look at the man's weapon. Rusty and old. No bloodstains. Barely used. Interesting. He wasn't holding it right, either, all she had to do was get him off balance and he'd decapitate himself for her, "I don't know… The only things I've got on me are these…"
She pulled out four metal balls from her bag. The bandits looked confused.
"Metal ain't worth nothing to nobody, honey, you got anything flashy in that bag o' yours?" The bandit leader said, raising his eyebrows and letting his grip on the axe slip.
"Flashy?" Sakura looked at the traps in her hand and primed them all with a decisive twist, "Yes, I might have something flashy."
She placed them on the ground, very, very gently.
"Now," She said, looking around at them all, "Believe it or not, these traps could kill you all in seconds and since I'm a nice person, I don't want to do that. So here's how this is going to go. You are going to run away. I will continue on my walk. You get all that or do you need me to repeat it?"
The bandits burst out laughing, but the leader was looking at the traps warily.
"Gimme one good reason not to slice through that pretty neck of yours." The bandit leader said, growing annoyed, pointing the axe at her.
"OK," Sakura said obediently, taking another trap out of the bag and priming it. She threw it away, hard, so that it hit a tree.
It exploded into hundreds of metal spikes with a flash of light so bright that even Sakura cursed and had to look away.
"There's your reason." Sakura said, her mouth shaping into something that wasn't nearly nice enough to qualify as a smile.
The bandits all looked down at the four metal balls lying innocently in the grass between them and Sakura.
Sakura drew four kunai with a smile, holding them between her fingers. She made as if to throw them at the traps, and the bandits all leapt back, even the leader.
"Y-You wouldn't," The leader said hesitantly, "They'd get you too."
Sakura's smile grew, "You want to test that theory out?"
The leader scowled and shot off, sprinting away without a backwards glance.
The bandits seemed both put out and terrified at being abandoned and ran after their leader.
Sakura bent down and pressed the button that would deactivate the traps on each of them carefully.
She gave a self-deprecating chuckle. Any other ninja would have just killed them all without a second thought, even the ever lazy Shikamaru or the too kind Hinata, not set up a complicated little farce routine to save their lives.
Where are your priorities? Sakura thought to herself, hating the weak side of her that interfered with her career so much. Those bandits would go on and rob someone else, maybe even kill them, and it would be her fault.
Tsunade had known she hadn't killed in four years.
She hadn't killed anyone since her first kill, Dosu had lost his life beneath her shaking hands.
Her pacifistic nature might not have impeded her so much had she not been trying to make a career out of killing. God, she was an idiot.
She hated that weak, idiotic side of her so much because she knew exactly where it had come from.
Him.
The man who'd always anxiously asked her if she'd killed anyone since he last saw her. The man who described in great detail the horrors of war and how ninja had to kill children who'd been given kunai and shoved into battle. The man who'd sadly remarked on her violent nature the last time they'd met, ignoring the fact that his own little brother lay broken and bleeding on the floor by his own violence.
He obviously had been lying about being a pacifist. It must have been a lie to make her weak, so she'd get herself killed in a fight.
Sometimes she lay awake at night and burned with the knowledge that she had been so very stupid. She'd thought herself a genius, the smartest girl in her year; she hadn't needed to cheat on the written test in the chunnin, she could recite the list of rules shinobi had to follow backwards and yet she'd been stupid enough to break so many rules it was a miracle she hadn't been declared a missing-nin and executed on the spot for treason.
She had actually climbed out of her window and gone to see a strange man who refused to tell her his name. She had met up with this man for many years and trained with him. She hadn't thought to report his appearance, or the fact that there was an unknown ninja on Konoha territory.
She wasn't smart at all.
The sky was darkening now. Sakura gathered up the traps and set off for Konoha, her feet feeling slightly sore from the long walk and the previous sprinting she had done to get to her mission.
She was pleased that Tsunade had trusted her enough to allow her to transport large quantities of Tsunade's money from near Suna to Konoha, but the heavy bag was really starting to annoy her.
She reached the village's gates as it turned dark, the sun slipping from the horizon.
The guards let her in without a second glance. Before, when she'd come back from missions with Team 7, they would chat with her and Kakashi – as Naruto would have already rushed off to the ramen restaurant and Sasuke was too cool to talk to mere mortals – and ask about her mission, but since her apparent betrayal they'd been rather cold to her.
She didn't let it bother her. She let their dislike roll off her like water off a duck's back, just like Anko had advised. Don't show it upsets you, act unaffected and eventually they'll see they can't get to you with whispered insults and accidental shoves. When she was twelve, she had cried upon having a jounin push her to the ground by 'mistake,' and had only been consoled when Kakashi had held a kunai to the man's groin until he apologised.
Nowadays it was her with the kunai and the apologies just flooded in.
She dropped off the money for Tsunade – reminding her that she was a bad person for gleefully pouncing upon her ill-gotten gains – and headed home.
The sky was dark blue and cloudy, so Konoha's lamps were lit and she had to pick her way through the streets by lamplight.
Sakura shivered in the cold, wishing she'd brought a coat and cursing the streets for being so poorly lit.
She was just turning into her own street where her house was when the crow cawed.
Her blood ran cold. She recognised that caw, she had heard it so many times, she had known that bird since she was six years old and newly acquainted with a murderer…
She turned around wildly, eyes searching through the gloom of the night, spinning around in the street to get a better look at each tree.
Her breath came out in clouds as her eyes erratically jumped from tree to tree, examining the dark sky as best as she could in the pitch black night.
The only sound was her panicked, ragged breathing.
Raban.
It had to be him. It had to be.
Raban never flew far from that man, which meant he was –
"Here, oh God," Sakura said almost hysterically, turning to face her house.
What if – what if he'd… her family…
She was running towards her home before she knew it, instinct making her fly towards the threat to her family, not knowing if she was scared or angry, just knowing some strong emotion was pumping adrenaline through her body and making her heart beat irregularly.
She wrenched open the front door after unlocking it – remembering as always to look behind her before she got the key out, having never quite forgotten the shock of having that man appear behind her suddenly – and rushed into the hallway.
"Mum?" She shouted, one hand in her hair, almost tearing it out in her awful fear of helplessness, of not wanting to be proved right, not wanting to push open the front door and find…
The living room was silent and empty.
Not knowing if that was good or bad, Sakura quickly checked the kitchen. No one.
She ran upstairs, fear propelling her upwards quickly.
Her mother's bedroom was empty. So was her grandmother's.
Sakura turned to her own bedroom, and saw that the door was hanging open though she never left it unlocked – she had too many traps in there she was afraid her mother would set off.
Traps she had carefully and methodically placed in order to stop that man coming in and to help her sleep easy at night.
Sakura stepped into her room.
Empty.
She was sweating.
"Mum?" She called out, quieter now, confused and frightened.
There was a creaking noise coming from her mother's bedroom.
Sakura nearly jumped and forced herself to remain calm. She walked back into her mother's room, hoping she wouldn't see the last person in the world she wanted to see.
Her mother was pulling back the blankets covering her, putting a foot out of her bed and standing up.
"Mum?" Sakura repeated again, not sure if the woman was real or that man had trapped her in an illusion, "But, I thought no one was in here…"
"You woke me up," Her mother said testily, rubbing her eyes, "I was in bed."
Didn't she check the bed? Sakura wondered. She thought she had…
"Was there anything wrong?" Her mother asked, yawning.
Sakura hesitated. She would love to confide in her mother, but if this really was her, any mention of the possibility that that man was in their house would just freak her out. If he wasn't there, which it looked like it wasn't, she didn't want to upset her mother for no reason. Still, she wanted to keep her safe…
"Nothing," Sakura smiled reassuringly, "Go back to sleep."
Sakura had casually suggested that she would just check that her mother's bedroom window was locked, and had subtly placed a trap that would shriek an alarm should anyone touch it on the windowsill.
Then she had persuaded her mother to go back to sleep.
Sakura closed her mother's bedroom door behind her, and slid down to sit on the floor outside her room. Apparently her grandmother had gone to visit a friend who lived nearby, and was stopping the night, which was why her bedroom was empty, to Sakura's relief.
Sakura's head rested against the bedroom door and she played with a kunai in one hand, eyes fixed on the stairs, assuming that that man would have the audacity to enter the house through the front door. He'd always been an overconfident bastard, with good reason, of course.
Lack of sleep and slight chakra deprivation was pulling her towards an involuntary power nap, despite her desire to protect her mother.
She was asleep before she could register the red eyes staring into her own, the tomoes spinning soporifically.
Did anyone else notice that Tsunade twisted the subject of conversation so she wouldn't have to answer why she wouldn't promote her? Remember one of the punishments Konoha decided to use for Sakura? Yep, the Hokage might have forgotten to mention that Sakura will never legally obtain a rank above chuunin…
Also, Sakura's first real fight after the timeskip and she doesn't even scratch anyone. Lame.
Short chapter is short, I know.
Good God, I am SO TIRED I SHOULD REALLY BE IN BED RIGHT NOW. BUT HERE I AM. FINISHING THIS CHAPTER. OUT OF LOOOOOVE, FOR YOU ~~~
:)
Also, prettifying is apparently a word. Go figure.
Quick poll take: Should blood be spilled in the next chapter?
A) HELL YEAH!
B) Hm, sure, I don't see why not.
C) Blood? I'm up for that!
D) Yes. Let there be blood.
Lol, trick question poll is tricky. Can you tell I'm running out of ideas for these?
Much love.