Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 2 - Once Bitten
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 3152
Summary: AU. Sakura gives up on Kakashi as a teacher after Team 7 falls apart. Too bad fate, enemy ninja, and sheer bad luck have other plans.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 2 of ? Unbeta'd.
"Kill me," Sakura says, breezing into the flower shop and ignoring the startled looks the civilians give her at that. "I mean it," she says, "the quicker the better."
Ino blinks at her, looking up from where she's wrapping flowers for another woman. "Don't worry about her," Ino tells the woman blithely, "it's a ninja thing. Here's your flowers, Nakamura-san. Thanks for stopping by!"
Nakamura-san gives Sakura a long, dubious look while thanking Ino, and Sakura watches her leave with raised eyebrows. "It's a ninja thing?" she asks archly.
Her best friend scans the shop quickly for anyone who looks like they might need her help—Ino always takes her responsibilities seriously, even if she complains sometimes—before kicking at Sakura's ankle, where the customers wouldn't see it. "Shut it," she says. "Nakamura-san's a sweetie but she's ancient and thinks ninja are from a different world or something. If she doesn't get that, then there's no way she's going to get over-dramatic teenager drama."
"Nice to see you've got my problem pegged before I tell you want it is," Sakura mutters, leaning over to rub her ankle. "Pig."
"Forehead." Ino leans against the counter, looking more like a shop girl than a ninja right then and there. "So why do you want me to kill you? I've got to charge you extra if you wind up bleeding on the begonias." Ino ponders that. "Though our meat-eating varieties would probably appreciate it."
Despite herself, Sakura laughs. She's still in a horrible mood but it's easier to ignore it when Ino is with her and being ridiculous. "You don't have meat-eating begonias," Sakura says and at Ino's look of 'are you sure about that?' laughs again. "No, seriously, you don't."
Ino just shrugs innocently.
"Yamanaka-san?"
"Sorry, Forehead," Ino says, "gotta work. I get off in two hours—meet me then? Unless you want to work…?"
"Sure," Sakura says impulsively. It'll give her something to do. It's worth it, too, for the surprised expression on Ino's face. Ino knows she hates shop work with a passion, having helped out before.
That doesn't stop Ino from directing Sakura over to the till, where they kept spare aprons underneath before Ino drifted off to go and chatter with a customer.
The division of work suits her mood perfectly. Ino is like a butterfly, no customer gets very far into the store without Ino saying a quick hello and a tell me if you need my help and no poisonous plants are not sold to civilians and anything lethal in under thirty seconds requires your ninja ID and thirty-six hours before the order can be released no arguing and if you argue you can take it up with the owner.
It never fails to amuse Sakura that Ino can say all of that with a bright smile without laughing. She knows she can't do it—she's tried. It's hard to say something that's a warning and threat and an offer to help all in one without losing composure.
The two hours pass in a whirlwind of brightly coloured and scented flowers, some that Sakura recognizes and others she doesn't though Ino finds the time to give her an impromptu lesson to two ones she doesn't, and the customers don't blink an eye at finding two girls instead of one minding the shop.
Of the customers, the ninja recognize them both as Genin—the only reason that they're even allowed to sell anything deadly—and the civilians know Ino as the daughter of the owners and Sakura as her friend.
Sakura finds it soothing, though by the time she's done her unplanned for shift, she's also tired. It's only eleven in the morning; Ino had been working the morning shift.
"There," Ino says with satisfaction as her dad comes in and shoos them out. She grins at Sakura as they wander down the street. "Wasn't that a change? And you're not ready to spit nails."
"No," Sakura replies, "it's a miracle."
"It might be," Ino laughs.
They walk in comfortable silence for a few moments before Sakura sighs. This, Ino takes as permission to pry. (Which, to be fair, Sakura admits, it kinda is.)
"So," Ino says, "what's got you unhappy-like? Your sensei? Or is this a new and untried unhappy thing?"
"Kakashi-sensei," Sakura says moodily, "and a new and untried thing."
Ino pauses, clearly trying to work that out. Sakura watches the rapid-fire expression on her friend's face and tries to guess what she'll come up with. It won't be reality, Sakura mourns, but it'll be interesting.
"Don't tell me they're giving him another team?" Ino asks, sounding appalled. "After the disaster of what happened to you guys?"
Sakura winces. That would hurt, even though she's spent the better part of a month ignoring him. "No," she says quickly, as Ino's face turns stormy. She wouldn't put it past Ino to go raging up to Kakashi-sensei to give him a piece of her mind.
It's funny how much that comforts her even as she tells Ino that, no, that's not it.
"What is it then?" Ino asks. "It can't be worse?"
"Let's get a smoothie," Sakura says, dragging Ino down the street.
Half an hour later, smoothies in hand, they're in the park where they first met, sitting on the swings.
Ino fiddles with her straw and then fixes Sakura with a look. "Okay," she says, "now talk."
"I've got a mission," Sakura says moodily. "And it's looking after Kakashi-sensei."
"What?"
"I don't know," she says. "Tsunade-shishou was pretty apologetic about it but she's putting me back with Kakashi-sensei because, apparently, he doesn't remember me."
Ino, mid-way through a slurp of her smoothie chokes as she splutters. "What?" This time, instead of confusion, she has a good bit of outrage in her voice.
"Some jutsu nailed him on a mission." She doesn't look at Ino, who is still muttering vile things under her breath. "It erased his last few years of memory or something. They're still trying to figure it out."
"Well isn't that just convenient!" Ino rages. "He gets to mess with your life, destroy your team, and then some enemy nin gives him a get out of it all card for free?"
Sakura looks down. Toys with her smoothie straw. "Yeah," she says quietly. "That about sums it up."
It doesn't cover the fact that some part of her is upset that he's hurt but it does cover what she feels is the raging injustice of it all quite nicely. Sakura simmers with resentment over it, really, because if one of them had to forget, why couldn't it be her? She's the one that got left behind. He's just the one that screwed it all up.
"I'm going to kill him." Ino kicks up a cloud of dust with one foot. "Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but one day I'm going to kill him. And they're saddling you with him because maybe you'll trigger something?"
"How did you-?"
"Hello," Ino says dryly, "my family specializes in mind-jutsu. That's a pretty basic attempt for triggering memories."
Hope, weird and painful and ugly, blossoms in her chest. "Do you think it'll work?"
Ino looks uncomfortable.
Her hope crumples like a used tissue. "You don't."
"Well," Ino says, like she really wishes she didn't have to, "Sakura, he couldn't be assed to remember you when he had his memories. Why would he remember you without them?"
Kakashi squints at the dossier. There's no real need to, of course, because he's read it twice already and has it memorized, but it gives him something solid to focus on. He stares at the pictures of the Genin who were… apparently… his team.
He cannot imagine what possessed him to pass a team.
He never wanted a team.
But apparently he had one. The future, he decides, is a bizarre place. Assuming this isn't just a genjutsu.
He tells himself that it could still be a genjutsu but as time ticks on by he finds his belief in that assumption challenged more and more. He doesn't believe it now, but it's just tempting to lie to himself. There's limits to what genjutsu can do, especially if they're not backed by a bloodline limit, and by his estimation, they crossed over the limit of reasonable doubt quite a while back.
Which doesn't stop him from wishing a genjutsu was the trouble. It would be infinitely easier to just assume that and then spend his time figuring out how to break it.
If he's really in the future-which so far, seems to be Tsunade's leading theory, though they haven't ruled out him having lost several years of his memories, which definitely doesn't sound right to him because he recognizes himself in a mirror and he hasn't gained any scars and he highly doubts he's become a good enough ninja to avoid all scarring for somewhere in the guess of at least five years, maybe as much as seven…-then he's got a problem.
Several of them.
The most pressing one is that he has no idea how to get back. They killed the ninja that did this to him. He distinctly remembers snapping his neck.
Of course, he thinks wryly, picking up a picture of a blond kid making an atrocious face for the camera, his memories might not be reliable at this point. Who is to say that one is?
He's conflicted on if he even wants that particular one to be reliable. On one hand, the fact he killed the person who might have been able to reverse this is thoroughly distressing. On the other… the fact he killed the person who did this to him is entirely satisfying.
Setting down the picture of the blond kid, whose name makes him wonder what sick joke this is, giving him his sensei's child to look after, he picks up the photo of the other boy. Dark hair, dark eyes, clearly an Uchiha through and through. He's baffled at the thought. Why would anyone put him on a team with an Uchiha after what happened to Obito? The Uchiha Clan had been quite adamant in their disapproval of him having one of Obito's eyes and informed the village the he wasn't to be sent on missions with any of their Clan.
When had that changed?
The third picture is that of a pink-haired girl. She's smiling at the camera, making it look more like a school photo than a picture meant for a ninja's ID. He doesn't recognize her as being from any existing clan but that's not entirely a negative. It means she's got less training to fall back on but it also means she doesn't have any familial bad habits trained into her.
Setting her picture down, he wonders at the scarcity of information in the dossier. There are the basic stats of each Genin along with their mission records and a few notes, only a few words long for each of them, in what look suspiciously like his own hand, about each of their abilities.
If this is all the information that Tsunade-sama gives him, it makes him wonder what is missing. He can see that they've all been ninja for about a year. There should be more.
There isn't.
Kakashi tilts his chair back, balancing precariously on the back legs, and considers that with no little amount of dread. Tsunade-sama has already told him that he's being assigned to Haruno, the pink-haired girl, until they can determine what's wrong with his memories. He suspects there's going to be a Yamanaka involved in that and isn't looking forward to it.
More worrisome is the fact that while he's being assigned to look after Haruno, Tsunade-sama made no mentions of Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke being assigned to him as well. What can they do with only half the team?
And why isn't he being placed with all three of the Genin he's supposedly sensei for?
He glances at the clock and knows he'll start getting answers in about an hour.
It's going to be a long hour.
He never was that patient.
"I don't want to go and meet him," Sakura says, her smoothie gone and her face stony. "It's going to be horrible."
Ino, her rage shelved because Sakura is upset, swings her legs idly. "You've got a few more minutes before you've got to leave," she says comfortingly.
"If I'm late, Tsunade-shishou is going to murder me." Sakura lifts her head. "I am giving serious consideration to that option."
"I'd miss you," Ino tells her. "Don't."
Sakura smiles slightly. "I won't, I guess," she says sighing. "But only because you don't want me to."
"Look on the bright side," Ino tells her. "Which is, I know, ridiculously hard but there is one!"
Tilting her head in thought, Sakura tries to figure out what could possibly be a bright side of Kakashi-sensei not remembering anything that he did to ruin his team. Of the fact that he won't, doesn't, remember the fact that Sasuke left because he chose vengeance over their team, or that Naruto bailed in order to follow a better teacher, or that she did the same, only her teacher couldn't leave Konoha and so, neither could she.
Put that way, she thinks, she envies him for that. Life would be way easier if she could just turn time back enough for none of it to have ever happened.
"I don't know," she says dubiously. "Are you sure there's a bright side?"
"Yes," Ino tells her earnestly. "You're going to go and meet him, right? They're going to hope you trigger his memories, right?"
She nods, still not seeing where Ino is going with… Her eyes widen. "Ino!" she says, shocked.
Ino looks pleased with herself. "I thought it was a good idea."
"It's evil," Sakura tells her.
That earns her a raised eyebrow.
"But good," Sakura concedes. "You think I can get away with that?"
"I think," Ino says, "that they're going to have to give you room enough to see what Kakashi might remember anyway. You might as well take advantage of that."
She squirms a bit. "I want to," Sakura confesses, "but won't he be able to tell I'm lying?"
Ino just shrugs. "What's he going to do?" she asks. "Tell on you? If he's going to be jerk enough to forget everything that happened, then I think you're perfectly justified in taking advantage of it to do a little… creative rewriting of history."
"Naruto and Sasuke are still gone," Sakura points out as she stands and dusts her dress off. "I can't rewrite the story so that changes."
"You don't need to," Ino says, smiling slightly. "In fact, it's better if you don't. Lies always go better if you mix a bit of truth with them, you know? But there's nothing to say you can't change how things went with you, right?"
Sakura frowns as they toss their cups in the trash and start heading for the hospital, where she is supposed to meet Kakashi. "I don't know if I like that," she says. "It just makes things easier for him, doesn't it? If he thinks I was a student he cared about? Then he'll think he wasn't a total failure when he finds out that Naruto and Sasuke both… left."
"Don't think about what's good for him," Ino advises, sounding a lot like her mother for a moment. "Think about what's good for you, Sakura. Would you benefit from rewriting your relationship with him?"
"I'll think about it," Sakura promises. "But I'm not saying I will. It might serve him better if I just drop the whole, ugly, truth on him."
Which was incredibly tempting to her. He could have it and he'd have no idea how to deal with it because she had no idea why Kakashi-sensei had made the decisions he had and suspected that this Kakashi-sensei, with years of memories taken away, might be similarly handicapped in this matter.
"Hokage-sama might not like that," Ino observes.
Sakura deflates. "No," she admits, "she wouldn't. She's already given me the 'go easy on him' lecture. I don't see why I should."
"Me neither," Ino says, "but then, I'm not the leader of a bunch of deadly ninja either. She's got her reasons and I'm sure they make sense to her but, Sakura, he still owes you. Even if he doesn't remember, he still hurt you. I'm not going to say what you should do but-just, seriously, don't let him off the hook too easily."
"That," Sakura says, "I definitely won't do." They stop at the street just before the hospital and look at one another. "Are you going to come with me?"
Ino looks dreadfully tempted before she shakes her head. "No," Ino sighs, "I shouldn't. I'll let you decide what you're doing first and then we can talk about how I'm supposed to react later, okay?"
"How you're supposed to react?"
"Well, yeah, if you're suddenly his favourite student, clearly I can't be going around hating him," Ino points out. "And if you're dropping the harsh truth on him, I can't be friendly, right? Let me know what you decide and I'll tailor my responses to that."
"You'll support me no matter what I pick?" Sakura bites her lip the moment the words are out and wishes that she hadn't sounded quite so pathetic there. Ino doesn't seem to notice, which she's thankful for, because noticing would just make it more embarrassing.
Instead, Ino just takes it seriously, and gives her a look like 'who do you think you're talking to' as she rolls her eyes. "Oh, come on," Ino says, "of course I'll support you. I've never done anything but."
She's running out of time before she's due at the hospital and knows it but Sakura can't resist the urge to criticize that comment. It's so blatantly untrue that it leaves her feeling a little like she's been struck. "That's not true," she objects, "you and I, we weren't friends for years. I dropped you."
Ino just smiles at her, not a bright smile that the customers of her parents' store get, but a smile that's harder, that glitters around the edges with emotion that Sakura doesn't understand. "I didn't drop you," Ino says. "But we'll talk about that later, if you insist."
"You make no sense," Sakura accuses.
"Sure I do." Ino laughs. "To myself. That's the most important person to make sense for, I think." Ino reaches out and gives her a shove. It's not a very gentle shove. "Go, Sakura," Ino says. "You're going to be late.
"We're talking later," Sakura says, half a threat and half a promise.
Ino just waves her off with a roll of her eyes and a grin and Sakura is left to hurry to the hospital.