June 5, 2004

2 years, 5 months, 18 days prior to Incident

Sakura silently slipped into the dark hall. All was quiet. Her target, it seemed, was sleeping soundly.

Good. It would make her job that much easier.

Sakura easily traced the only chakra signature in the apartment to one of the closed doors and slipped into the room. Standing over the bed, she slid out a knife, leaned in close -

a flurry of movement -

eyes snapped open -

BANG.

"Guh..."

Sakura stared at the dead body on the bed, and then at the slowly leaking hole in her abdomen. She glanced at the droplets of blood on the ground and behind her.

... What?

How had he known she was there in the first place?

And how had he known where she was standing?

The first question was easily answered. This had to be a setup. The man knew she was coming and had tried to prepare himself.

But more urgently, how had he known her location? She had a genjutsu up! He wasn't a shinobi. He was a perfectly normal human on all accounts, so there was no way he had seen her, or heard her, or smelled her. It couldn't have been a lucky shot, he'd looked too sure of himself.

She didn't understand how this was possible.

Unless...

Sakura grabbed her deceased target's head and tilted it to the left. Nothing. Then she tilted it to the right.

A tiny black ear bud.

She took in a sharp breath.

This was definitely a setup. Not only that, it was obvious that someone knew how to bypass genjutsu and was using that against her.

Shit, shit, shit, shit!

She was being filmed! Who was it? The camera, where was the camera?!

If she was being watched, she couldn't heal herself properly, either, since she wanted to limit knowledge of her abilities. And besides, what if she was forced to heal someone in public? (What if Miku or Kaito got into a fatal car accident, or something?) She didn't want Fuyuno Sakura to be traced to the Shi no Kage.

Sakura looked around frantically, and spotted the trails of blood on the beige carpet.

"Fuck!"

She had to get rid of the blood. Even the slightest trace of it would be dangerous to her. Stupid civilians and their stupidly advanced technology.

But she couldn't exactly erase it all out. Even bleach wouldn't be enough, it was too much of a risk.

Fire would work. A small, localized katon would take care of this. But she was being watched (where was that fucking camera?!) and it wouldn't be wise to show any more Jutsu than absolutely necessary.

This guy had to have a lighter, right? Hopefully he was a smoker. Sakura pressed a hand against her wound and hissed at the pain as she began searching through the bedside cabinet.

Dammit, there was nothing.

She searched through the entire apartment, tracking blood as she went.

Nothing.

How could this guy not have a single match?!

She was lucky that no one else had been sent (or perhaps the person or people watching her already knew that would be rather useless), but her luck wouldn't last forever, and she was feeling rather dizzy.

Sakura glanced at the stove and grit her teeth. Only one way then.

L stared at the dark figure on the screen.

What was the Kage trying to accomplish? She was clearly searching for something. He wouldn't presume to think that his opponent was careless enough to leave obvious DNA evidence everywhere, but that was exactly what she was doing.

Unless, of course, she wasn't human. Besides the obvious assumptions, he'd also considered the possibility that she wouldn't care about having her blood found and analyzed, as well as the possibility that she could use unknown powers to erase all traces of it from the crime scene. The first was looking more and more likely, though it didn't explain why she was running around the apartment so haphazardly. The Kage knew she was being watched. He'd seen her discover the criminal's earpiece - as expected - and recoil, so it likely wasn't that she didn't care.

Perhaps she had come to the conclusion that no one would be sent? He knew about her strange abilities, perhaps she thought he would think it would be pointless to try to risk attacking her.

Well, she was right. To an extent.

He wouldn't send anyone to stop her because it was pointless. But not because he didn't want to risk having an agent die. L was 98.3% certain the Kage wouldn't kill someone she wasn't paid to kill, so no one he sent would be in any sort of peril.

The purpose of this experiment wasn't to try to capture her; one wouldn't catch water with a net, after all. L had already acknowledged that such efforts would be futile until he had a proper grasp on the assassin's character and her unexpected abilities.

Except for the single expletive that had escaped from her, she hadn't tried to communicate with him, the surveillant, at all, which further cemented the impression of cautiousness he'd drawn from her previous actions. She was a quiet kind of individual, opposed to taking risks, only focused on doing what she was paid to do.

So what she was doing right now was out of character.

L watched her reach for the large bottle of cooking oil with narrowed eyes.

"Watari. Send three firetrucks to that address. Quickly."

The firetrucks wouldn't get there in time. L furiously worked on hacking into the apartment's computer driven control panel. Luckily, the apartment was a very developed one, and had an addressable fire detection system.

On screen, a flash of black was rapidly spreading the oil all over the apartment, particularly on the areas of carpet where blood had been spilled. It then returned to the kitchen and found a roll of aluminum foil, sticking a fist full of it in the microwave and programming it to an hour. The Kage tore a wooden table leg off and headed over to the gas stove.

L sat back as the fire sprinklers in the apartment began to rain water all over the small abode. He was too late. His lips tilted slightly in displeasure when he saw that the microwave had already exploded onto the wooden kitchen cabinets and the Kage had spread fire on all of the pools of oil.

The black figure speedily bound her wound and escaped through the window. Several seconds later, the sprinklers were disabled, presumably because the Kage had closed the building's water supply valve.

She had gotten away from him, again.

Nonetheless, L felt satisfied. The Kage was irrefutably human (until now, he had allowed himself to doubt this) and, as apparent from the way she went to the trouble of setting the entire place on fire, she could easily be found using DNA profiling. He wasn't dealing with a supernatural being, he was dealing with a human, a citizen of Japan. The Kage could most definitely be brought to justice. He also now had a vocal sample to analyze; though it was muffled and relatively unreliable, he could still use it to narrow the killer down to a certain demographic.

Besides that, L had gotten her to panic, and he counted that as a personal win for him.

Sakura felt faint, and not just because of blood loss.

What was that?

Who was that?

The police? Was it the police?

No, she doubted it. Sakura was almost certain that the NPA still thought she was a Jack-the-Ripper-esque psychopath. Last time she checked, no public announcement had been made about any sort of breakthrough on the Shi no Kage 'murders'. Yes, it was possible that they had figured out that she was a mercenary and had refrained from releasing the news, but she doubted it. This society was incredibly open about such things, sometimes to the point of incompetency, not to mention the way large organizations tended to leak information. Not to toot her own horn, but something this big would have made headlines.

And merely figuring out her motives wouldn't make setting a trap any easier. They wouldn't have any idea how to contact her - only her clients knew, and she'd made sure they wouldn't be able to reveal much.

Anyone who entered one of her stations and wrote on a scroll was tagged with the tiniest bit of her chakra, which would then slither its way into their cerebral cortex. The chakra was completely harmless and would lie dormant... until the person started revealing information about her. Or more specially, about the Shi no Kage. 78 seconds after the decision to talk registered in their brains, the traitor would be forced into a deep coma. The only way to wake them up would be by taking the sliver of chakra back out, and the only person who could do that in this world was her.

So the affected person would have virtually no chance of recovering, and not only because she felt negatively towards them. That bit of energy was entirely detached from her. Even if someone fell into the aforementioned coma, she would have no notice of it. One the one hand, this saved her from sensory overload - being directly bombarded by information from a foreign source was not fun - but on the other, she had no way to track if information was being leaked about her, or how much was being said in those 78 seconds. She couldn't shorten that time either, though she'd definitely tried.

Her current opponent was either a client who'd decided to betray her, or a very efficient interrogator. A private detective or agency, probably. This was much too close for comfort.

How many times had she been filmed before now? No job in particular stood out, so maybe this was the first, which was a relief.

But then...

Who had she killed today?

Had she murdered a civilian just doing his job?

Fucking hell.

The steel girder under her foot broke in half as she jumped off of it.

Fuyuno Sakura - age 14, 1st year high school

L - age 21, education unknown

AN

Sakura is careless (should have checked if he was sleeping!) and L is immature. The dude on the bed was another death row criminal, not an agent, so rest assured everyone!

Welp, now Sakura is becoming vaguely aware that someone is honing in on her.

Last chapter was a bit cracky, and rather disjointed, haha. It really could have been better - I still kind of dislike most of it. I feel like I fell under your expectations. Sorry for the suck, guys! I promise that if a DRR character ever appears again in a normal chapter, it will be better. Probably. (I make no promises for omakes.)