Disclaimer: The entire Naruto franchise belongs to Kishimoto Masashi. Some of the dialogue was lifted straight from Viz Media's sub of the series, specifically episode 43.

A/N: You've probably not noticed unless you've been re-reading obsessively, but I have been working on my stories. It's simply been in a more editorial mode, as I am a compulsive re-writer. I'd made it through the first chapter of this fic and three of Curlew before prodding reviews and one really fantastic piece of fanart made me feel guilty enough to write this, because I've known how this fight would proceed before I wrote the first part. brokenmaelstrom deserves the thanks for that.

The First Flower of Spring

-Chapter Twelve-

Of Men and Dogs (Part II)

Sasuke seethed as he took his place in the arena. Naruto was an idiot and Kakashi was enabling said idiot, so that made him equally as guilty in his humiliating prank. His ears burned and he could hear the high-pitched whispers of kunoichi.

It was an enormous loss of face, both personally and to the Uchiha. And that was intolerable. Unacceptable. His lips twitched upward faintly as Tsuchi Kin marched down the stairs, her ridiculous and impractical hair following the stiff movement of her hips. Everything about her spoke of confidence, but though she'd leered at him earlier, she wore her sensuality oddly. She was different from his former classmates or the single kunoichi jounin-sensei. Clad in a flak jacket and wearing camo fatigues in a desert or urban pattern at odds with the forested environment they'd just exited, she seemed a kunoichi only nominally, as if her gender was a matter of chance and not something she'd embraced.

But that hair revealed the pretense for what it was. Slick, glossy hair almost to the floor. Unless it was a kekkei genkai, it was nothing more than a vanity. Tsuchi Kin was deeply conceited. She was also either extremely talented at taijutsu, which was unlikely, or she preferred distance combat.

"Let's get this over with," Sasuke growled.

Tsuchi grew more serious then, lips pressing into a thin line. Her hands went to her hips. His mother would have scolded her for the way she hunched her shoulders forward and slouched, which made her look sloppy rather than intimidating. "If you think it'll be that easy, I'll this quickly," she promised.

Sasuke ignored the proctor as he gave them the go-ahead. Closing the distance between them quickly, he decided to test her taijutsu, to see if it was as poor as he anticipated. She ducked beneath his sweeping high kick, but he was easily able to avoid her counterstrike, landing slightly behind her and transitioning to a kidney jab that she sidestepped partially, his fist catching her in the side, most of the force lost.

He recovered more quickly than she was able to and his confidence grew. As he'd thought from the stiff way she held her hips when she walked, Tsuchi had limited flexibility for a kunoichi without the strength of a shinobi to make up for it. Neither was she quick, though her technique was sound enough.

She ducked beneath his next strike, attempting to sweep his feet from beneath him, but Sasuke turned the technique on her and caught her just behind the knee with his foot, sending her sprawling when her wrists proved too weak to accommodate the extra momentum. But she skittered backward like a spider as he attempted to close the distance again, using a back handspring to rise to her feet. Now she looked angry, sweeping a stray strand of hair behind her shoulder impatiently. "That you're all that, huh?" she challenged. "But taijutsu? From an Uchiha? That's a little bit disappointing."

Sasuke's eyes narrowed. "For you, anything more would be overkill."

She snorted, then tossed a handful of senbon at him. Tiny jingling noises, like bells, roused his suspicion as he dodged them. The addition of bells could be nothing but a distraction, intended to disguise other senbon, for bells altered the flight pattern of the lightweight weapons, drastically reducing their range as the bells pulled the tips down. He used a similar technique, though his shuriken had to be thrown almost instantaneously in order to disguise them, while the naked eye had difficulty tracking senbon in flight.

If I had Sharingan-, he thought with frustration, tossing the thought aside as he flashed outside the broad array of a second barrage.

Why senbon? Why bells? A tinkling noise from behind distracted him for a moment, but he blocked the senbon he was too late to dodge with his forearm. It hurt, certainly, but this would turn into a war of attrition if she intended to defeat him two senbon at a time. There had to be a further strategy, one he wasn't seeing, or she was simply monumentally stupid.

Because in a war of attrition, the army with the greater resources inevitably won. And he had speed, strength, and technique on his side.

The bells jingled again, but he ignored them. Even without Sharingan I-

His world tilted and swayed, nausea roiling in his stomach as he stumbled, collapsing onto his knees. He struggled to rise, but a complete lack of balance threatened to topple him.

Tsuchi's smug voice penetrated the haze. "That happens to anyone who hears my bells. The sound vibration of this special bell reaches the brain directly from the ear drum. First, disorientation and a loss of balance. Then it will make you hallucinate."

Grimacing, Sasuke bit down on his lip until he drew blood, but it failed to break the genjutsu. Auditory genjutsu was rare, enough so that no immediate counter-strategy emerged in his mind. Though he knew it was probably futile, as if by reflex his hands rose to his ears, but deadening the sound did not deaden the effects.

"You can't avoid the sound of my bell by doing that," Tsuchi informed him, the last word splintered and reverberating as she seemed to multiply before his eyes. "You can't do anything, can you?" she gloated. "Well, I'll cook you slowly." She held up a handful of senbon to emphasize her point.

Senbon again? Sasuke glowered at his opponent, who seemed to shift even as he watched, so he could form no guess as to how many false Tsuchi cloaked the real one. Kunai would finish the battle more quickly. But if she was a sadist, it was to his advantage. The longer she prolonged the battle without finishing him decisively, the more time he had to discover a way to defeat her.

Pressing his eyes closed, he didn't flinch as two senbon sunk deep in his shoulder. When he opened them, he found he was staring into the stands. His eyes met indifferent jade, waiting patiently for the battle to end in either his victory or defeat, multiplied by Tsuchi's hallucinatory genjutsu until it seemed as if he was entirely surrounded by those apathetic eyes.

It was eerie, but also strangely calming. Empty of expectation, they didn't see him as the last of the Uchiha, upon whom all the hopes of the clan rested. They didn't see one of the prodigies of their generation. Nor did they see the younger, less gifted brother of Itachi Uchiha. Sakura expected very little of him. And that set him free.

With a grunt, he absorbed the impact of another pair of senbon.

"Are you just going to sit there like an idiot?" Tsuchi said, punctuating the statement with an oddly girly giggle. "So much for the Uchiha."

Bitch. Calling to mind her explanation of the jutsu, Sasuke suddenly smirked.

"Something funny?"

"Not yet," he said, concentrating his chakra and calling it up from his belly, into his throat, then spewing it out of his mouth as fire, as sustained and as intense a flame as he could manage, pouring most of his chakra into the jutsu.

Sweeping around, still on his knees, he razed the arena, the surface of the concrete blackening. Tsuchi had leapt well out of the way, her threads intact. She tugged on them, bells jingling merrily. "That almost singed my hair," she complained as she returned to the floor, striding very near to him. "Just for that, I'll end this quickly."

Sasuke looked directly into her eyes. "Oh?" He flung a wide barrage of kunai, one passing so near her face that she had to lean slightly to the side, her attention momentarily distracted as her eyes tracked it. When her attention returned to him, she found him gone. Tsuchi stiffened as she felt the cold touch of metal at her throat, Sasuke's other hand twisted in her hair near to her skull so she couldn't draw backwards. "Thanks for explaining your trick," he told her.

"Why?" she hissed, head tilted uncomfortably back as far as his grip would allow to avoid his blade.

"They're special bells," he said. "Any imperfection or change in the metal will change the tone, breaking the genjutsu. I can't produce a fire hot enough to melt metal, but I can distort it. Call it," he ordered the proctor.

He coughed into his hand. "Winner! Uchiha Sasuke."

Naruto had his hands laced behind his head as he returned to the balcony. "Boring!" he declared.

"Congratulations, Sasuke-san," Sakura told him politely, glancing at him briefly before returned her attention to the match board.

"Hn," he hummed in reply, rubbing at the places where the medic-nin had extracted the senbon before letting him return to the audience. "All of us are in the finals," he commented.

"Yes," Sakura agreed. Her eyes strayed across the arena to the red-headed boy from Suna.

Glancing out of the corner of his eye for Kakashi, who seemed to have been called away, Sasuke moved closer to her. "Something wrong?" he asked in a low voice.

She looked over at him. Whatever had upset her about her match seemed forgotten for the moment. "Gaara-san will be the real threat in the finals," she reported.

A brow rose as Sasuke considered the certainty with which she'd delivered that statement.

"Watcha mean?" Naruto inquired from her other side.

"Why him?" Sasuke asked, pretending that Naruto hadn't spoken. He earned a sulky glare from the blonde, but he intended to continue ignoring his existence until he apologized.

"Everyone on this balcony kills for a reason. For the mission, the village, for pay, for glory-those are all 'acceptable' reasons. Gaara-san's the kind of shinobi who kills because he likes the color of blood."

Sasuke was silent a moment. "And why do you kill, Sakura?"

She gave him an unreadable look. "You were distracted during your match," she observed.

"Hn."

Sakura fell silent as the next match was announced and though Naruto was as animated as ever, Sakura seemed pensive. Sakura was talkative only when nervous, but this was more than her usual reserve.

"Why were you crying after your match?" he asked in a low voice, the question almost lost in the noise of the crowd. "Was it because he was a Konohagakure shinobi?"

Sakura glanced at him. "No," she said after a moment. "In battle, the identity of your opponent is irrelevant." A long silence led him to believe he would have no further answer, but then she said, "I had already won. There was no need to-," she trailed off, a brief look of frustration crossing her features. "I did something unnecessary. And because of that, I felt I had disappointed someone whom I care for very much. That was why I was crying."

Another long silence. "Were you surprised I won?" he asked at last. He was surprised by the question, more surprised by the vulnerability he felt asking Sakura her opinion of his match. Since the massacre, he had been mostly indifferent to the praise of his sensei, knowing that they had spoken the same words in relation to that man, knowing that some of them saw him as only a pale shadow of him.

Sakura sighed. "Not really, Sasuke-san." And she was silent.

-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-

Shiho-nii had softened to her with her admission to Sasuke-san, but she could still he was still upset. And here, with all these people surrounding her, she could not apologize to him directly. Shame kept her from meeting his eyes, but Shiho-nii was no longer bound by physical limitations.

He manifested before her, wide sleeves blooming as he seemed to settle from some higher place. "Sakura," he said softly. "Sakura, look at me. Please."

Biting her lip, Sakura did as Shiho-nii asked.

"Don't ever forget this feeling," he told her, his insistent tone at odds with his expression. He wore a terribly sad smile, almost as if he was the one who wanted to cry. "Guilt makes us human. Shame makes capable of functioning in society. Regret keeps us thoughtful. When you can no longer feel those things, you become like Shiki-dono. An existence that approaches the boundary between ningen and youkai, between man and monster. It will be a long and difficult road for us, Sakura," he told her, "because neither of us can help our natures. After this, you will become chūnin, then jounin. The battles will get harder. Bloodier. And in a few years, your body will come into its own. That is when the Flower flourishes. That is all the future holds for us."

Tears gathered in the corner of Sakura's eyes, but she blinked them away.

"But I will never, ever abandon you, Sakura," Shiho-nii promised. "I will never leave you. That is the one gift of the Haruno, even when the rest of our existence seems like a curse."

"Thank you, Shiho-nii," she mouthed and his smile grew less sad, but she could not say it was happy, either.

"Shiki-dono would think nothing of your actions today. Nor would my mother. And, to me, what was alarming wasn't really what you did to that ninja, though it was part of it. A Haruno must treat their words as binding contracts, for when you are lost to the First Flower or deeper, there will be no emotions to guide your actions. You implied that you would accept his surrender, so you must give him the opportunity to do so. But that is really secondary, Sakura."

Sakura gazed at him uncomprehendingly, for she could imagine no other reason for his disappointment.

Shiho-nii took a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You're unexpectedly adept at wielding killing intent, Sakura. You weren't even properly bloomed and you managed to stop his heart. Amplification because he absorbed your chakra or not, a child of the main line shouldn't have that kind of control yet."

Not even the heir, was the unsaid implication, but then Shiho-nii glanced down at the matches taking place below them. Sakura followed his gaze.

"Hyuuga clan," Shiho-nii remarked. He evaporated for a moment, but then he was by her side again, so real she almost imagined that she could touch him and feel flesh. But even though she couldn't physically reach him, she was nonetheless put at ease. Shiho-nii was such a soul of remarkable goodness she couldn't imagine anything other than an evil caprice of fate had led to his being born into the Haruno clan. But though it had done nothing but ill for him, she could not imagine what her life might have been like without him in it. And that made her feel guilty. It was a guilt that only increased whenever Shiho-nii was unfailingly kind, when he promised her support, when he did everything but blame her and the main house, the Haruno bloodline, for what it had done to him.

"The one with his forehead covered is probably from their branch clan," Shiho-nii informed her and Sakura turned her attention to the combatants taking their places. "All houses have secrets, Sakura. And most of them are ugly."

Sakura didn't recognize the long-haired boy, but she watched as Hinata Hyuuga trembled beneath the weight of his glare.

"I'd heard the heiress was unreliable," Shiho-nii murmured. "Normally the outcome of this fight would be a foregone conclusion."

It was a foregone conclusion, as it turned out, except that it was not the conclusion that had been expected. Sakura had been startled to see the depths of a vitriolic hate that was obviously festering inside Hyuuga Neji. He was as different from her in skill as night from day. And ruthlessly, mercilessly, he revealed to her the disparity between them.

"This is why twins are ill luck," Shiho-nii remarked. "Only a few moments separated the birth of their fathers. When the birth order is that close and one child so much more gifted than the other, it's no wonder he resents her."

Did Shiho-nii also carry such a resentment as a secret in his heart? Sakura wondered.

Shiho-nii glanced over at her and interpreted her expression correctly. "The Hyuuga are different from us, Sakura," he told her gently. "Birth order is what separates them. The separation between their main and branch clans isn't something physical, like the Haruno. For us, that runs bone deep. But for them, it is only the main branch's monopoly on their jutsu that creates the schism."

With dawning understanding, Sakura looked down on the uneven battle. For us, she thought, choice is only an illusion. Without the branch houses, we main house members are little more than progressive sociopaths. And without us, the branch house members can only look forward to an early grave. The trade is uneven, but a trade it remains. What does their main house offer to their branch houses?

Nothing, apparently, that could stem the vengeful actions of Hyuuga Neji. Sakura watched silently, emotions swirling dizzily in her heart. The part of her that was Haruno heir sneered at the flinching and ultimately ineffective Hyuuga Hinata. She seemed to draw from a previously hidden well of confidence at Naruto's encouragement, but she had already lost what respect Sakura would have given to her.

Stand alone, Shiki-dono's lesson reverberated through her, or die alone.

"How weak."

She didn't realize she'd said it aloud until Naruto rounded on her. "Hinata isn't weak!" he snarled.

Sakura blinked. "Yes," she asserted calmly. "She is. And compared to Neji-san, she's clumsy and slow as well. Prolonging this battle might seem like protecting her pride, but all she's doing on that floor is shaming the main house. And if Neji-san has his way," there was a wet retching sound from below, "she won't leave with her body intact." Sakura glanced over the railing to see as Hinata vomited more blood, the medic-nin rushing forward and the proctor hastily declaring the match finished.

Don't be cruel, Sakura, Shiho-nii chided her. She tried her best.

But Sakura was staring steadily at Naruto, who was glaring at her in turn. "If you hadn't encouraged her, she might have surrendered, Naruto-san," Sakura told him evenly. "This is what happens when you encourage people to fight hopeless battles. Not everyone is like you. If she dies, how will you feel? Proud that she stood up to someone who had a clear advantage? Guilty for your part in it? Retreat isn't always defeat," Sakura parroted one of Tsubasa-sensei's old lessons. "Reflect on your reckless encouragement in the future," she ordered Naruto.

The blonde looked as if she'd struck him. "But I didn't mean-"

"Your intentions were good, yes, but what you meant has little bearing on the effect of your words. If you want to be the Hokage in the future, what you say to your shinobi could be the difference between life and death on the battlefield. Unless you're ready to sacrifice them, don't give them the kind of encouragement they can't escape."

Chastened, Naruto retreated a few steps, settling sulkily against the railing.

Sasuke was watching her, slightly wide-eyed. "You're merciless," he remarked with forced casualness, his hands hidden in his pockets.

"No, I'm not," Sakura said softly. "Someone truly merciless would have let him go on without correcting him, to learn his own lessons in the future." Someone like Shiki-dono.

-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-[-]-

Sakura remembered with eerie clarity the last match. She had not thought it possible that there was someone in the world as terrible as Shiki-dono, but Gaara-san's bloodlust was so strong it burned. It was not the intensity, however, that bothered her. Shiki-dono could all but kill through will alone and Gaara-san was far from being that fearsome, but his intent was unfocused and all-consuming.

Shiki-dono was wholly amoral, but rarely actively malicious.

Shiho-nii echoed her thoughts. "That Suna child-there's something off about him."

Sakura shuddered. Sasuke-san had looked enthusiastic at the prospect of facing him, but Sakura had known from the moment Gaara and Lee-san's match began that if she ever faced the redhead in battle, he would undoubtedly push her beyond the First Flower. And that was not somewhere she was prepared to venture, for she had no desire to Dance, to leave behind 'good' and 'evil'.

But if Sasuke-san lost, as there was the very great possibility if he could not somehow learn to breach Gaara-san's defensive sand, it became a probability that they would eventually face each other. However, Sakura had already developed a plan if that was the case. In order to qualify for chūnin, the review board would be looking for the ability to lead a squad into battle.

And, as she had said to Naruto, a very important aspect of that ability was knowing when to retreat. If she faced Gaara-san, she would test his defenses and then cede the match. Sakura had never been brought up to place much faith in the village ranking systems, nor did the increase in pay hold much allure. Sakura had changed little of Shiho-nii's room since she moved in, replacing only those things that wore out with near-identical copies, and she intended to continue to do so.

No matter how Shiho-nii encouraged her to personalize the space, she would not gnaw away the reminders she'd been left of him as a living, breathing person.

Sakura crept into the house and hearing the sounds of Ran-oba-san conducting business in the bakery in the front, she padded silently upstairs. She paused on the landing, sensing a chakra signature that was foreign to this house, though it was not strange to her.

Sliding open the door to Shiho-nii's room, her eyes tracked a liberal trail of blood over the balcony, across the room, and onto the bed. There, Haruno Jun lay sprawled, one arm thrown across his eyes.

"Welcome home, jou-chan," he said, his voice alight with something that made her uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she crossed the room, until she was near enough to look down on him. He shifted his arm slightly so she could make out part of one eye. Petals bloomed there, and a deeply unsettling, strangely beautiful madness. He grinned fiercely, a dog's baring of teeth. "I invited your snake to play, but seems he doesn't like the sight of his own blood."

There was a wound, as if from an enormous snake's fang, in his left shoulder and other gashes from a blade, but Jun chuckled deeply. Blood seeped from his wounds from the movement and the comforter was already soaked through, but it didn't seem to matter to him.

Satisfaction fairly radiated from him. "You ought to have seen his eyes," Jun said, stretching and then half-rising. He'd lost the tie to his hair and it stuck to the tacky blood, coming out of the long braid he wore it in. The senbon that was the physical manifestation of his partner was missing.

Shiho-nii noticed before she did. "Where's Ai?" he demanded.

Jun glanced around the room carelessly. "Hiding. She's a clever girl. I eat ghosts, you see. Why don't you go to sleep for a while? I want to greet my master without dead people looking on." There was a strange pulse of chakra and an expression of shock crossed Shiho-nii's features, but his body was already evaporating. In just moments he had disappeared completely, though she could sense that he was only dormant rather than destroyed.

Sakura glanced at the man bleeding on Shiho-nii's bed. "Do something like that again," she said pleasantly, "and I will teach you regret. Shiho-nii is more precious to me than anyone."

"So for him you would do things you would never to for anyone else?" Jun chuckled again. "Pretty sentiment, jou-chan. But I don't like chains. And don't let them lie to you. All chains were made to be broken."

Sakura frowned at him, but his face was suddenly uncomfortably close to hers and he idly brushed her bangs aside. "It's a pity you're so young, jou-chan. Compliments and plenty of treats are how you teach a dog to obey your commands."

He stunk of sweat and blood, the flush of fever was on his brow, and the tang of poison was on his breath. Sakura held very still as his bloodied arms encircled her, his tongue tracing a wet path from the collar of Shiho-nii's shirt to her ear. "These eyes of ours clear away the blindness of living in the world. Jou-chan, don't ever let them tell you victory isn't the sweetest fruit."

There was something beguiling about his smile and she could feel her own kekkei genkai begin to bloom, but as the petals emerged, his pull on her lessened. Jun was consumed by his own power, whereas she had been born with absolute control over her chakra. Sakura was her own master. And through their shared blood, she was his as well.

He sighed with disappointment as she made the petals in his eyes furl back into the darkness, sagging slightly against her as his pain multiplied. "Cruel, jou-chan," he murmured. "Very cruel."

Sakura pressed against his bare chest and he flopped back onto the bed, his smile never wavering. His long hair was being stained redder by his own blood, his life slowly seeping onto the bed.

She could let him die. Haruno Jun was a monster, even by the standards of the Haruno. He had broken their one sacred trust, had killed members of his own village upon a whim, and had gleefully traded his humanity for the cold freedom of the Thousand Generation Flower.

But he was also hers.

Without another word, she turned her back on him and descended the stairs. And when Ran-oba-san stepped inside the living quarters of her home, Sakura made her first request of the older woman as the heir of the Haruno. The insane dog would live, in order that he could obey.