Disclaimer: If I actually owned this franchise, I might actually have to decide on a single storyline. As I do not, I will continue to revel in the many ways the characters can be set loose in alternate stories.

A/N:…The OCs are multiplying. Which makes sense, because I want the Haruno clan to be convincing as a clan and not simply as a plot device, but really. I blame Shiki. But this should also be the last of the Haruno clan OCs, so there you have it. I promise he really does serve a purpose.

The First Flower of Spring

-Chapter Seven-

Vision in Red

Three figures had watched the encounter with the Demon Brothers with keen interest, two keeping their chakra cloaked and the third who could have put on an entire kabuki play without most of the other group noticing.

"So that's the jou-chan, eh?" one figure inquired after the group of ninja had continued on their mission.

"Indeed," Shiki replied evenly, cold green eyes still trained in the direction Sakura had disappeared. "It would be remiss of the Haruno clan to have not provided its heir with a retainer, when under village law she can now be prosecuted as an adult."

"And so you called for me," the newcomer said with barely-veiled amusement. Kagami glanced down at him nervously, wondering if this time Shiki truly had gone mad. Or what kind of monster he hoped to make Sakura-chan, if this was the dog he was giving her for a pet. Haruno Jun was a monster even among the Haruno, who were by definition just a little bit soulless.

He was a main house member who had been exiled permanently from his home village at the age of fifteen. That became more remarkable when the village in question was Mizu, which drenched itself in the blood of its own ninja as part of its tradition. He'd been exiled because he had a careless kind of loyalty—if he'd decided in the middle of a mission that he was working for the wrong side, he was as likely to bare his teeth to his teammates as to finish the mission.

But what scared Kagami was not that. Haruno Jun was the only member of the main house to have accomplished what was supposed to be impossible. He had killed the spirit of the branch house member that had inhabited his signature weapon, tekko-kagi, long-clawed gauntlets. Jun had never told anyone how it was accomplished, just smiled that eerie, disconcerting smile of his with eyes blazing in the Thousand Generation Flower.

Shiki had let him live, which had appalled several members of the clan, but the oyakata-sama's word was absolute. A new branch clan member had been assigned to him. Haruno Ai, whose body had become a single bone-white senbon, was presently nestled in the man's long hair.

And was it ever long, longer than even Kagami's own, braided down his back with generous bangs in the front. It was the color of purest, brightest flame, a red-blonde that lied about how much blood the man had shed, just as his pleasant countenance was nothing more than a trap for the unwary.

You're going to send this man to Sakura-chan? Kagami thought desperately as she glanced over at Shiki, who was as always unreadable. Pleasantly unreadable. With a shudder she couldn't quite mask, she realized how similar the two might seem, but there were subtle differences. Jun's pleasure seemed warmer, like blood was warm and flowing, while Shiki's smile was the edge of a knife.

Although, as she tried to look at this in her usual humorous light for her own sake, she thought that if Shiki sent Jun to Sakura, it was going to make him look like a fleshmonger. Because Sakura was a growing girl and Jun was attractive, like all Haruno men were (and Haruno women, she thought smugly). He also went about half-dressed.

Besides billowy, samurai-esque hakama in a somber shade of black and wooden sandals, she had never seen Jun wear another to cover up his admittedly second-, third-, and fourth-glance worthy physique. But on his back, carved into his very skin, was a twisted tree. Perhaps that was the only part of him that was honest, because for all his soft voice and gentle actions, he was a man who refused to use shuriken or senbon not because he was unskilled with them, but because the kill was not close or intimate enough.

But Kagami kept her silence. Because, in her heart of hearts, she feared Haruno Jun, more than she loved Sakura-chan, for all her brightness and smothered monstrosity. But she still feared Shiki more. What in hell is that man thinking?

"You will shadow Sakura. If you find yourself in a position to make yourself useful to her, observe only. Your primary responsibility will to be to ensure she does not accidentally kill one of her teammates. It is desirable, for the moment, that she remains in Konoha."

"Hai, oyakata-sama," Jun replied cheerfully. "Should I introduce myself to jou-chan, or would you prefer I remain anonymous to her?"

"Present yourself to her. From now on, your life rests at her pleasure. Remember that."

-X-X-X-

Where you kill one, two more will show up for his funeral. Sakura thought that was what the country folk said about flies, but Kagami-sama had once told her that about shinobi.

Like fuckin' vultures, had been her other bit of wisdom. Especially when it comes down to two things. Money and loyalty. If enough of either is involved, watch your back, your front, and the earth beneath your feet, because as soon as you think you've got them beat, they'll come at you.

So Sakura kept her eyes open, her ears sharp, and that strange sixth sense that had been built through years of combat aware of her surroundings. It looked as if Naruto-san was doing much the same thing, except, rather than combat training, he'd borrowed his techniques from a B-rate spy movie, shadowing his eyes with his hands and darting suspicious looks into the bushes that lined the road.

If Sasuke-san was at all concerned about another encounter, he was doing his best to conceal it, but there was a certain edge to his movements that was only relaxed fractionally as Naruto-san kept reacting to squirrels rustling the brush. Only Kakashi-sensei seemed unconcerned, but that was his right, she supposed.

Shiki-dono had hardly been upset when his house had risen in rebellion. How could she respect a sensei who reacted badly to a few unplanned attacks?

Shiho-nii was silent at her side. Which made Sakura want to fidget. It didn't seem right not to talk to him just because there were others who couldn't see him, but Shiki-dono had made it very clear she was not to do it and Shiho-nii had told her himself it was for the best. To her mind it just seemed unfair, but because of the forces that had shaped that mind, she did not think it was unfair because of the clan system but rather that it was unfair that the others did not have Haruno blood.

All other blood is inferior.

It was only when Naruto threw a kunai at the next rustle that she was distracted, because he burst through the shrubs after his weapon like he expected to pounce on an enemy then and there. And immediately started wailing when it turned out to be only a rabbit.

"Rabbits only have white fur in the winter, or if they're domesticated," Shiho-nii murmured. "And we're too far from any village for that. It didn't run away when it heard us approach, either."

Jutsu. The answer was obviously to Sakura and she curled her hand more steadily around Shiho-nii's scroll. She didn't want to summon him yet, in order to use surprise most effectively. Sakura had never once regretted the form Shiho-nii had taken, but she had learned to work around its weaknesses, one of which was that it was regrettably hard to surprise an enemy with a strike from a weapon taller than you were.

Not impossible. Just hard.

As she discovered when a sword, shorter than Shiho-nii but much broader, just about severed her teammates' heads from their necks. As soon as Sakura had detected the tiny spike in killing intent that had proceeded the attack, she'd leapt into the trees for a better look, trusting Kakashi-sensei to protect the client, as that was the central imperative of the mission.

With the gennin out of the way, he would be more capable of doing just that, because unless they were attacking in force, unskilled allies were simply another thing to get in the way.

And though Sakura knew few chunnin were as skilled as she was, her first instinct was not to aid in protecting their charge, as might another Konoha ninja, but to eliminate the threat as swiftly as possible.

But she was also skilled enough to immediately understand that this was one battle she might not be able to win easily or at all. Zabuza Mamochi had made the bingo books for years and she'd known he'd gone rogue a few years ago, but never would she have expected her first mission for Konoha to put her up against someone who'd regularly earned a "Kill on Sight" tag from neighboring villages.

Zabuza chuckled down below as Sakura did her best to become one with the branch she was perched on, like those little brown stick bugs Tsubasa-sensei had once forced her to watch for hours upon hours. Just a really big Phobaeticus chain, she pretended, slowly her breathing and changing her movement so she wouldn't be the only rigid object on a tree that swayed and moved with the breeze, not daring to use a jutsu to camouflage her distinctive coloring. "Looks like one of your followers has already broke and run," the foreign-nin challenged her sensei.

Sakura internally bristled but kept up her self-appointed task. Missing-nin traveled alone, sure, but more often than not they traveled in pairs. Everyone had to sleep sometime and it was a key vulnerable point that inconvenient hunter-nin liked to strike during. Hence, partners.

Shiho-nii had moved away from her, his form phasing cloudlike through the dense foliage of the canopy. His range was somewhat limited, anchored as he was to his physical body, but it was more than enough for him to survey the forest rimming the lake. It was said, jokingly, that the range of a branch clan member was exactly, within so many centimeters, the distance from one end of the clan compound to the other.

Sakura watched the farce of a fight that went on below with a dispassion that alerted her to the fact that her kekkei genkai was already in the budding stage and was dangerously close to erupting in the first flower.

Shiho-nii coalesced at her side. "Two watchers. One dressed like a hunter-nin from Mizu, but don't trust it. A real hunter-nin from that kami-forsaken village would have already interfered. He or she wouldn't take the chance of Konoha-nin learning anything valuable from a high-level rogue like Zabuzi. The other is from the Haruno. He waved hello." His voice was stiff at the last words and Sakura looked over at him in question.

"I'll tell you about him later. For now, you need to decide what action to take about the watcher."

Sakura's eyes narrowed and she could feel the first petals begin to form in her eyes, little points protruding from the shrinking black of her iris that expanded, filling with green. There were only three, one at the top and one to either side of the bottom, splitting the space into three equal sections, but she knew even these petals were three too many.

There was just so much bloodlust and killing intent radiating upward towards her perch. Sakura didn't yet have the control not to respond to it.

"Control it, Sakura," Shiho-nii urged her and she detected a hint of panic in his voice. But she didn't react to it, because the First Flower dulled the emotional connection. But it did not break it, which is what it had done for those people down in the clearing. They might have been less than strangers or not there at all for all the concern Sakura had. They were only names she knew—Kakashi in her head bore no more weight than Zabuza.

Slowly, carefully, moving only when the wind blew and the ninja below clashed, Sakura closed in on her opponent in a curved pattern that brought her up behind the enemy's position. The androgynous figure was male to her eyes, but young. Skilled, though, if the development of his chakra coils was anything to go by.

But it wouldn't matter. Silently unfurling Shiho-nii's scroll, Sakura slammed her chakra through the paper, making the enormous guan dao materialize even as she was leaping forward, still as silent as a whisper. The other shinobi verified her estimation of his skill as he twisted out of the way, catching the blade of her weapon in his shoulder instead of in his heart.

Bearing down on Shiho-nii, she drove the weapon in even more deeply, sending them both tumbling out of the tree. Mid-air, the boy managed to writhe free of her blade and landed lightly on his feet, flipping backwards to put more space between them. Sakura landed almost fully crouched, Shiho-nii held parallel to the ground.

"Sakura-chan!" Naruto shouted in surprise.

"There was someone watching in the trees, Kakashi-sensei," Sakura told her recently freed instructor as she watched the other ninja's movements with predatory fascination. "I think he belongs to Zabuza-san."

"Well, let's hope he does," the silver-haired nin said wryly. "Because otherwise you've stabbed a Mizu hunter-nin and started an inter-village incident."

Sakura didn't even blink. "If he is a Mizu-nin, he is after Zabuza-san. If he dies, the blame will be laid at his feet. His death will not matter either way," she said, her voice smooth with dispassion.

It shocked a rough chuckle from Zabuza. "Seems I was wrong Kakashi. Looks like there's still a monster or two to be found in Konoha after all. Oi, Haku, don't just stand there and bleed. Take care of the girl."

Her opponent answered readily, "Hai, Zabuza-sama," but there was no accompanying surge of killing intent to tell her he was serious.

She could almost hear Kakashi-sensei's displeasure from here. "Sasuke, Naruto, protect the bridge builder," he commanded.

Sasuke's answer was a grunt of displeasure, but Naruto was more vocal. "What about Sakura-chan?"

Zabuza didn't give their instructor time to answer, instead drawing the fight back out onto the lake.

Sakura faced her opponent squarely. "I'm sorry," her opponent apologized as he drew a handful of senbon with his good hand.

She tilted her head to the side as she studied the movement and analyzed his choice of weapon. "I'm not."

And then they clashed, but Haku moved quickly outside the range of her weapon, throwing his senbon with pinpoint accuracy, but she spun Shiho-nii in front of her body, knocking the weapons easily off course.

Without irritation and still with no killing intent to speak of, the ninja in front of her made a series of one-handed handsigns.

"What?!" Shiho-nii gasped from above her. "Watch out," he warned her, "it has to be a kekkei genkai!"

It was. Smooth icy mirrors condensed out of the air, forming a domelike shell around her. Trapping her inside, yes, but so was her opponent. Whose gaze was like a fly, irritating but not deadly. It was unfocused, somehow, timid. And she knew then he didn't really want to kill her.

But Sakura had no such reservations about him. She defended herself adroitly as she studied this icy cage, but even she could not prevent the stray senbon or two that made it past her highly trained senses. If he had been using kunai or shuriken, it would have been more of a concern, because he could have cut her to ribbons and left her to bleed to death.

Senbon, however, were not deadly unless aimed in key areas—a person's heart, for example, but not veins or arteries, unless the poor fool pulled them out—or when they were poisoned.

Haku was both fast and accurate enough to kill her with his senbon if she gave him an opening, but Sakura had grown up with people trying much harder to kill her than his half-hearted little attacks. In fact, she would say he was mostly preventing her from joining the other fight going on in and on the lake between the two jounin.

Just to test her theory, Sakura knocked another batch of senbon from the sky, then smashed the butt of Shiho-nii's shaft through one of his ice-mirrors, shattering it. It reformed quickly, but before it was perfect, she used the flat of the blade like an extra-long baseball bat, cracking the ones to either side. Moving quickly, she kept breaking the mirrors and dodging senbon, forcing her opponent to expend his energy until his movement slowed enough she thought she might be able to match it.

Having gone into the fight with the First Flower in bloom, her eyes had been keen enough to perceive his movements. Not perfectly. She wouldn't have been able to use something as accuracy dependant as senbon on him, for certain, but she could have managed to hack off an arm or a leg or a head, if her body had been fast enough.

But with this kekkei genkai, his speed far exceeded her capacity to match his at full strength. However, now—"Shiho Specialty: Typhoon"—and every one of his pretty mirrors shattered. Except for one. The one she'd caught the flicker of movement at. And she was waiting when he emerged, flaring her killing intent dark and bright. The tip of Shiho-nii's blade hesitated only briefly at Haku's sternum, despite the fact that the guan dao was not designed as a stabbing weapon. It was meant to cut and cut it did as she forced it through until she encountered resistance again at his spine.

If they had not been gracefully balance in midair, like two birds of prey caught on camera, the leverage she applied next might have split open his belly like an overripe fruit. As it was, the movement threw Haku to the ground with a dull thump, all the animation gone and reducing him to what humans were in reality—just so much meat, flopping around because of electrical signals.

As the mirrors she'd shattered continued to fall to the ground, her eyes were trained on the single whole mirror in the array as it too cracked and slowly disintegrated.

The noise must have attracted the attention of the others, because she heard the disbelief in Zabuza's voice as he murmured, "Haku…"

But now that her own battle was finished, Sakura was otherwise occupied. Shiho-nii's ministrations drowned out the background chatter. Gathering her into arms that didn't exist, he covered her eyes with hands that she could see through, if she tried.

"Hush now," Shiho-nii murmured. "The battle's over," he soothed. "Come back from the edge, Sakura. Come back to me. I'm right there, in your hands. Just…feel me there."

And she did. Shiho-nii was smooth and warm, hard and firm. An unbreakable anchor to this world. She could almost feel his emotion, as if someone was telling her firmly that she was loved, that she would never be abandoned, would never be alone. To hurt or be frightened was all right, in front of this one person. This precious person.

She could not leave Shiho-nii and she could not disappoint Shiki-dono. With that in mind, she pulled back from that craggy darkness in her mind, that metaphorical ledge she'd plunged off as the petals began to unfurl.

To find that her teammates were watching her shakily, Naruto looking a little ill, and that Zabuza was no longer there.

"Are you alright, Sakura-chan?" Naruto asked.

"Of course, Naruto-san," she replied politely. "He was using senbon. I don't think he was really trying to kill me," she said thoughtfully and glanced back at the body. Which, of course, drew their gazes to it.

"Heh-heh, but I guess you got him, Sakura-chan!" Naruto tried for a good display of bravado, but the way his voice faltered made it clear just how shaken he was by the death of her opponent.

Striding over to her fallen opponent, Sakura laid Shiho-nii carefully on the ground, then removed Haku's mask. The face beneath was just as prettily androgynous as the rest of his body, the dark brunette hair now splayed over the ground and the red flecking his lips looking bright against pale lips.

And, for the first time, Sakura felt a strange warmth low in her abdomen, looking at those blood-flecked lips and those clear, clear eyes. As the heat flowed through her, she thought she might be blushing, so she turned her face so her teammates couldn't see.

If Shiho-nii saw, he didn't say anything. Sakura regulated her breathing and waited until she was certain the blush had faded before she looked at the dead body again, this time ghosting her hand over her face so she could close his eyes. His eyelashes were soft and fine against the firm flesh of her hand. She bit the inside of her mouth to keep from shivering.

Sakura was not touched and did not touch in anything but violence, not for many years now. And even though violence had brought Haku beneath her hand, it was not violence that now motivated this action. Which made it strange and unusual to her. Novel.

What might it be like to touch like that all the time? she thought wistfully as she reached over and picked up Shiho-nii, moving to seal him back in his scroll. That done, she looked over at her teammates again.

She curiously stared at Kakashi's Sharingan eye. It was one thing to see it in pictures, but in real life, the red was uncanny. But there was a certain glazed look to both his eyes. "Well, Sakura-chan…" he began, but his legs gaze way and the famed Copy-nin toppled to the ground.

"Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto yelled and even Sasuke flinched forward, looking like he wanted to run to him. Sakura nodded to him and Sasuke advanced forward, checking his pulse.

"He's alive. It must be chakra exhaustion," the young Uchiha pronounced. "He used the Sharingan, but he's not an Uchiha. It probably was an extreme strain on his body."

Sakura nodded, filing the information away for further use. "So, we need to deliver Tazuna-san safely to his house and get Kakashi-sensei there without disturbing him…" she muttered, then glared in the direction of the trees. Tazuna-san was also standing in that direction and he flinched.

"You," she barked in the direction of the trees, "who are you?"

With a rustle, a man dropped out of the tree, landing with his hand on Tazuna's shoulder. The older man abruptly screamed, a high-pitched girlish shriek of terror and surprise. Naruto and Sasuke spun to face this new threat.

The new shinobi held up his empty hands with a smile. "No need to sic your teammates on me, jou-chan."

Sakura wondered how to phrase her question without giving away too much. Shiki had commanded that she keep parts of her Haruno heritage a secret, but here was a clan member. How did she interpret this?

The shinobi who smiled so kindly made no move to aid her in her decision. "You were sent by him?" she asked at last.

Her two teammates leaned forward, eager for the information.

"Oh, yes, he sent me. Offers his greetings and all that." The man moved closer, but saying that didn't really describe how his body seemed to roil forward, lean muscles moving beneath skin, until he towered over her. He was tall, a little broader across the shoulder than Shiho-nii, with long hair. He had the Haruno eyes, green, but there was something strange about the pupil, as if his kekkei genkai's petals never truly retracted fully. He swiftly crouched in front of her until his eyes were on a perfect level with hers. Sakura tensed when he moved forward, but it was only to whisper in her ear. "I'm Jun, jou-chan. Shiki-sama says I'm to tell you I belong to you now."

Sakura's eyes widened. She knew who Haruno Jun was. There was no one in the clan who didn't. At her side, Shiho-nii's expression mirrored her. "Shiki-sama…," Shiho-nii growled.

Jun drew back, his smile gentler than ever. "Now, you needed me for something, jou-chan? Or were you just calling me out?"

Shiki-dono had likely forbidden him to interfere in combat situations. As heir, she lived and died alone in battle. That was the way of things, the only way to prove to the clan she was strong enough to lead them. Sakura did not mind, because she always had Shiho-nii by her side, but it would be useful having another adult with Kakashi-sensei unconscious. "Can you carry Kakashi-sensei back to Tazuna-san's dwelling?" she asked bluntly.

"Sakura, do you know this man?" Sasuke asked sharply.

"I know of this man," she told him honestly, her eyes never leaving Jun.

"And do you trust him?" he pressed. While she'd been occupied, he'd managed to put himself between the Haruno and Kakashi's body.

"To carry Kakashi-sensei's body for us while we protect our client? Yes."

It wasn't really an answer and she only discovered how thrown Sasuke had been by this turn of events when he caved without complaint.

Sakura turned to their client and gave him a very proper bow. "I'm terribly sorry you had to see this scene. If you would guide us to your house now?"

Tazuna glanced at the body of the young boy. She could almost read his thoughts. Haku couldn't have been much older than them and he'd thought of them as children too, when he first saw them.

"I will take his body," Sakura told him softly. "Is there a crematorium in your village where I can make arrangements?"

Tazuna nodded, for once serious and very sober. "Can't have burials on an island like this without one. Dead bodies pop up out of the ground in flood season and we can't spare the space for mausoleums."

Riffling through her pack, which she'd discarded as soon as the fight began, Sakura pulled out a spare groundsheet and wrapped Haku carefully in it, then gathered him carefully in her arms like a new bride. She nodded to Sasuke, who stepped out of the way, so Jun could throw Kakashi-sensei over one shoulder.

Instinctively, the two gennin with free hands moved to flank their charge. Then, moving as a single unit once again, they made their slow way to the house of the bridge builder.

A/N: Shiho Specialty: Typhoon is a weapons-based jutsu. Concentrating solely on speed, depending on the weight of the weapon for destructive power, Sakura moves so fast she creates the illusion of striking out in a stabbing movement in all directions at once.

Next chapter, you'll get to see the reactions of Naruto and Sasuke to the fight.