Chapter Text
The first thing Sasuke’s aware of is the apple from the market lying on the dusty street, bright green with a bite taken out of it, collecting dirt. The second is the pain.
There’s someone over her, in her—a shadowy shape in the moonlight, grunting and wheezing, with a hand across her mouth to stop her from screaming. She thinks, Itachi, help. Then she remembers Itachi isn’t here to help anymore. React, she tells herself instead, but she can’t muster up the action. She’s limp, barely present. She’s been disappearing inside her head more often than not lately. It’s Itachi’s fault. It’s the Tsukuyomi he pushed into her, and burned into the back of her mind.
Somehow, the man manages to be more painful.
Blood, she realizes. She has has blood slicking at her legs, and spilling at the back of the dress her grandmother made her for her seventh birthday. It’s hand-stitched with delicate fabric. Mom helped her button up the back for school the day of the massacre. Now it’s ruined, torn and stained. Like this, the present slides back into place.
The third thing Sasuke’s aware of is a clearness to the world that wasn’t there before. In her panic, everything looks red, but she notices, then, the calluses and scars on the figure’s—on the man’s—hand fitting a shinobi, and a pouch near her left knee at his thigh. His hair’s brown, scruffy, and his skin tan, a patch of acne across his face. He’s young. She’s younger. It doesn’t matter. All she wants is him gone.
She turns her head, his grip of her loose enough to slid beneath his hand, and he swears, jerking back. This isn’t adrenaline or panic changing her vision, but the Sharingan, because she can see his chakra signature, exactly as Itachi described it. Without thinking, she knees him below the ribs, and bites into his hand hard enough to draw blood. He releases her in pain, and maybe fear, and she moves when he moves, twisting to get away. Before she can, his hands are on her again, dragging her back, one slotted over her mouth. When she jabs her elbow back, it’s ineffective, and then he has a kunai to her throat.
In the same moment, her fingers brush against the weapons’ pouch at his thigh. Though he says something, she doesn’t hear it, and catches her index finger on the circular hilt of another kunai, dragging it out. The Sharingan can’t see behind her, but she does have some awareness of where his chakra’s focused, coiling around major arteries and organs. By the time he notices his femoral artery’s been cut, the blood is already flowing down his leg, and against her side.
As he falls back, cursing and shouting, his kunai nicks against her collarbone. If he keeps this up, then the noise will attract others, and he’ll tell everyone this was her fault. She looks down at the weapon in her hand, slick with blood, and to the man putting pressure against his wound. It’s less of an informed decision and more an instinctive one when she throws it, hand shaking but precise enough, and the tip disappears into his neck. He quiets, twitches twice, and then stops moving.
That’s when her awareness of the pain returns, and she collapses to the ground as her Sharingan fades. His eyes, blue and dead and staring, watch the night sky, heavy with clouds. Some muted, faraway part of her remembers Itachi killed his first man at nine, too. Itachi, who—
I want Itachi, she thinks. I want, I want, I want my brother, I—
It starts to rain, pit-pat against her body. Drops slid into her eyes, more benign than tears. From the distance, a woman’s voice, light and airy, says, “I think it came from over here.”
Sasuke doesn’t have a family to help her, but she was the daughter of the police head, once, when she was safe; she knows what happens to people who kill others in dark alleys on Saturday nights. With this rain, her first stroke of good luck in years, her tracks and the blood won’t leave a trace. Ignoring the pain, she pulls herself to her feet, and makes a run for the chain-linked fence. A dog barks, near or far, and she shuts down her thoughts as she pulls herself over, rolling rather than landing on her feet when she reaches the other side. She’s close to home taking a shortcut largely avoided. As she runs, she stays to the shadow of the building wall, glad for her dark hair, and by the time she hears the shouts of surprise, she reaches the river.
Even if they track her this far, they can’t find her in the water, and the river goes three ways. Swimming isn’t her strongest skill, but she drives in, and goes with the current towards home.
By some miracle, no one finds her. It helps that the search isn’t wide, or long. People like him, even ones with families, aren’t particularly cared about.
In the weeks that follow, Sasuke finds the news that she won’t be caught doesn’t allow her to breathe easier.
Her scores drop in written, participation, and cooperation, even as they improve in ninjutsu and taijutsu. After years of being the best of her class, and wanting to be the best, she should care. She doesn’t. More often than not, she falls asleep during her lessons. She’s taken to sleeping with the light on at home, but it doesn’t make a difference. It’s a stupid reaction to something she ultimately came out on top of, but in the Academy, no one’s going to leave her alone or hurt her. At home, she’s on her own. Sometimes she wakes in the middle of night, feeling a hand over her mouth and over her ribs, and the movement of someone inside her, and activates the Sharingan instinctively.
Sometimes she wakes, and smells blood. She thought that was a fear she shook a year ago.
The only consolation she has is that no one at the Academy notices. Ino and Sakura, the friends she avoided after the massacre, look over with concern occasionally, but that’s the extent. They don’t try anything. Neither do the instructors.
On a Tuesday in March, the day they have their quarterly scores returned, her instructor calls her over after class. Now that Sasuke doesn’t have parents, instructors can do this. “You’re sixth in your year, Sasuke,” the woman says. “I know you were hoping to jump a year now they’re all going co-ed in August, but if you don’t get back to your top spot, then it’s out of my hands. I’m sorry.”
Sasuke started to feel like maybe she wasn’t so weak, and that maybe she could grow stronger. Instead she was just reminded of her own uselessness. In a few months, she’ll be ten, the same age that Itachi became a chuunin. This never would’ve happened to him.
“Okay,” she says, looking from the scores to her instructor. The woman’s bangs are in her face, brownish yellow like old hay. “I’ll do better next time.”
Though she’s waiting for a proper address, Sasuke doesn’t offer one. Pretending to care about a class where she hasn’t learned anything all year is boring. With a smile that clashes with her eyes—black, but smoldering, like the end of a burning incense stick—her instructor says, “I hope you do. You really deserve the position.”
No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t deserve anything, because she hasn’t earned it. A better word would be owed. At the realization, she almost laughs. They think they owe it to her, like being orphaned gives her some sort of privilege. All the man in the alley did was prove her the degree of her own worth, and how little it is. She’s not owed anything. If she gains anything, she’s going to earn it first.
Somehow, she manages to smiles back. “I’ll be fine,” she says. “Thank you for your consideration.”
With everyone else gone and turned to ash, she’s the heir to one of Konoha’s founding clans, and doesn’t feel as strongly about that as she should.
By the end of the year, Sasuke feels as though she’s half in a trance more days than not. Only two weeks into the merge of boys’ and girls’ class, she has a pamphlet on her desk with a number for a children’s therapist. Early signs of depression is circled.
The moment she’s home, she tears the pamphlet she shreds, and throws the pieces into a fire. It catches, and the spine burns last.
In late October, the combined classes have co-ed spars with their opponents pulled from a hat. Before Sasuke’s fight with Uzumaki Naruto, Iruka-sensei pulls her aside. “I know you’ve developed the Sharingan,” he says, “and that you’ve must’ve practiced it quite a bit to do so many high level jutsu at your age. I don’t want to see it once during this, do you understand?”
Though Academy classes teach just the basics, shinobi on the streets casually use D-and-C-ranking jutsu more than is probably legal. Teaching herself is just a safety precaution. “I understand,” she says, and he nods. There’re dark smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, and his tiredness only makes the scar across his nose and cheeks more prominent. Lately, she’s been sleeping so much she must look well rested in comparison.
Naruto calls out, asking what’s taking so long. After going through the motions of showing each other respect, they prepare for a fight. This is going be easy, Sasuke assumes. She forgets about the accidentally skipped breakfast and dinner, and that she’s half his size. Like a stupid little girl, she forgets that in the only fight she’s ever had, she aimed to kill, and that isn’t allowed.
For a while, she has the upper hand. He’s too slow to land a hit on her, and she’s fast enough to connect punches and kicks several times. Then she misjudges a step, and he gets lucky. His foot tangles around her ankle, his hand latches to her shoulder, and as she falls, he smiles. It doesn’t matter he’s falling with her as long as he’s on top.
He’s over her, pinning her to the ground, with his eyes the same color as the sky. The scream she never had the chance to release before builds in her throat, and as his mouth begins to form words, it comes out. It’s messy, and panicked, and she loses awareness of anything but his eyes, and the weight over her. She struggles, and he gets off himself as someone else comes in, arms under hers, dragging her upward and away.
“Breathe,” a voice is saying, trapping her place. “Sasuke, breathe. Everyone else, clear out. Back to the classroom.”
The screaming had already stopped, but she falls back into the world at the mention of the classroom. She’s ten now, and an Academy student. All she was doing was sparring. There was an audience. Iruka-sensei’s the one holding her. Naruto was her opponent. Any semblance of normalcy she had was just dashed to pieces.
“I’m fine,” she says after a moment, calming. The panic’s fading to the same muted way she feels most things. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
Slowly, Iruka-sensei releases her, but holds out his arm before she can stand. They’re in the dirt of the sparring circle. “You’re a smart girl, Sasuke,” he says. “Honestly, you’re the smartest in the year—the surrounding few, even. I don’t like to pressure my students, but it is worrying you’ve dropped your scores. Now there’s this. Is there anything you want to talk about?”
Considering they’re in the middle of a lesson, this isn’t the time. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Maybe I’m just not as smart as you think I am.”
“There are people you can talk to,” he says, “if you’re not comfortable talking to me. At least think about it.”
As she stands anyway, she repeats, “It’s nothing. I promise.”
Though he doesn’t hide how little he believes her, he lets the subject lie for now. She’s relieved, because she the last thing she wants to deal with is this.
Sasuke becomes the object of teasing after her display in the yard, and it isn’t as terrible as she thought. Even if it’s annoying, it’s not so bad that she can’t pretend it isn’t happening.
Unfortunately, she’s not too immune to the humiliation of apologies. “I’m really, really sorry,” Uzumaki Naruto says a few days later when he catches her alone after another talk with Iruka-sensei after class. The dull hallway lights wash him out so his skin looks pasty and his hair bleached. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Honest.”
Winning is winning, and no one should ever apologize for doing so. It’s a lesson her father taught her years ago. “I know,” she says, adjusting her posture to stand straighter. He slouches, shoulders dropped. “Go away.”
“Can I, like, buy you ramen or something?” he says, sounding even more awkward than she would. “I sort of—”
She turns abruptly, narrowing her eyes. “Go away,” she says, more forcefully this time. “I don’t want anything to do with you, understand?”
When he doesn’t answer, she turns again, and heads for home, taking the long, busy route the whole way.
Suddenly, Sasuke is twelve, and a month from graduating. Her class has a guest speakers on risks they need to be aware of as they enter the field for the first time, and she barely makes it to the washroom down the hall before throwing up. It’s been years, she tells herself. She shouldn’t care anymore. Then she thinks, I want Itachi.
It’s a thought that invades her sometimes, burrows inside all her safe, normal ones like a parasite and waits for her to find a way to burn it out. He killed their—her—family, but brothers are supposed to protect their little sisters. She wants to regress, go back and back, until she’s waking in tears, pinned only by her comforter, and Itachi’s there to hug it all better. Always Itachi, not Mom. Never Dad. Go back before her brother changed, back before the massacre, back before—
She spent a long time trying not to put a word in the alley, but she has it now, unavoidable. One in five kunoichi are raped in the duration of their career, the guest speaker said. Sasuke’s a statistic. Uchiha women aren’t meant to be statistics. They’re meant to stand out, distinguished. Mom and Dad were so ashamed of their daughter already. She doesn’t want to imagine what they would think of her now.
The door opens, and Uzumaki Naruto comes in, his orange shirt loud against the drab off white background of the tiled walls. “This is the girl’s room,” she says, and stands. The space is small. “Or did you just forget how to read?”
He’s quiet for a moment before saying, “Iruka-sensei sent me.”
“You? Seriously?”
“It’s just to see if you’re okay.”
For some reason, Naruto tries to talk to her a lot. It’s something she could do without. “I’m fine,” she says. “Just sick. You know.”
“No parent permission slip?” She nods. He hesitates. In the girl’s room, there’s no window, and the tension hangs around them, suspended. “Want me to bring you to the medic? She can sign you out.”
Even when she was younger, she never missed a day of school. “Yeah,” she says. “Now get out and give me a minute.”
She washes out her mouth once he’s gone. Though she’s never missed a day of school, she’s willing to do so now if it means she doesn’t need to sit through the rest of that lecture.
It’s a Thursday after school, two weeks before graduation, when Sasuke realizes she’s started to outgrow her clothes. Most of the allowance Konoha gives her just went to updating her weaponry, her own dulled after years of waking in the middle of the night and practicing shurikenjutsu until the sun rises, so she doesn’t have money to buy anything. Instead she finds the sewing kit her mother never used, and searches out something to wear.
Mom only owned dresses, something Sasuke’s avoided over the past few years, and even if she hadn’t, the thought of wearing a dead person’s clothes leaves her feeling dirtier than usual. Even if it isn’t the much better option, she goes instead to Itachi’s room, because he wasn’t much bigger than she is now when he was thirteen.
Unsurprisingly, everything’s dusted over, and creased to stiffness. This is the room she skips over while cleaning. It’s messy. It’s dusty. It’s the dust that makes her eyes water. She’s not going to analyze an emotional need to cry. Emotional isn’t something she can be considered these days. There has to be some secret to it, flicking on and off your ability to feel anything. If there is, she hasn’t learned it, but she wants to. She wants to burn the indifference out of her, and scatter the ashes in the river so the current takes it away. Reverse, up the stream like a salmon. Away from Konoha, and home.
Before class, she washes everything, and by the time she returns, most are finished drying from the strength of the Land of Fire’s August sun. She cuts away the high collars on the shirts first, because that style’s reserved for the men of her family. Then she folds the fabric down, and sews a new hem. She shakes her hand out when she pricks her finger, and gives up after the third try. By the second shirt, she’ll be better.
Her hands are both a bloody mess when she finishes, bandaged so she doesn’t bleed on the clothes, but the shirts are to a reasonable length with the collars removed, and the pants fall to her ankles or knees with the waist cinched in to fit. It’s far from perfect, but it’s good enough. No one will notice if they don’t look too closely. This works well, because few people look twice at her.
That works well, too, because the less attention she catches the better.
Sakura runs over as the day ends, the night day before the exam. “Me and Ino are setting up a study group with a bunch of people,” she says with a smile. “You should come, Sasuke-chan.”
Before the massacre, Sasuke occasionally spent time with Sakura and Ino when Itachi wasn’t around. After, Sasuke closed off from everyone. They haven’t spoken more than a few words to each other since. “Thanks,” she says, adjusting her hold on her school books, “but I study better on my own.”
“Are you,” Sakura starts, but cuts off when Iruka calls Sasuke over. “Oh. I guess I should let you go. But, if you change your mind, it’s at the picnic table area of the park. We’ll have snacks.”
“Right.”
As she walks away, Sakura’s face falls, and though Sasuke feels guilty, it’s not enough to go. “Yes, Iruka-sensei?”
He smiles at her. People have a tendency to do that. “You forgot your notebook,” he says, holding it out to her. Inside’s nearly blank. “Make sure to study hard tonight. But get enough sleep, too.”
Regardless of what her scores show, she finds written tests easy. There’s nothing in the Academy she’s been taught that she didn’t already know. It’s just that she doesn’t have the patience to go into the detail necessary for the opened ended questions.
Besides, no one will care about her year ranking once she’s a genin.
“I will,” she says as she accepts the notebook. “Thank you, Iruka-sensei.”
When she leaves, Sakura’s nowhere to be seen, or anyone else. Sasuke’s walk home passes in silence.
Sasuke didn’t study, and passed with the highest scores in the class. Two days later, she and Sakura are on the same team, and if the other girl is jealous, she’s good enough not to show it.
The name Hatake Kakashi is one Sasuke recognizes distantly from her childhood, the sort spoken behind closed doors. You worked with my brother, she thinks as he introduces himself. Back then, she wasn’t aware of much if it didn’t involve Itachi. She wonders what her sensei will think of her, if she’s right. She wonders if she cares about his opinion at all.
No, she decides. She really doesn’t.
Since Sakura and Naruto made an effort to sit next to her, Sasuke sits in the middle, looking up at their masked sensei. Naruto smiles brightly when Kakashi-sensei tells him to introduce himself. She half pays attention, expecting his ramble on ramen, but is forced back into focus when he says, “I’m going to become the Hokage one day and make everyone acknowledge me!”
The thought of Naruto becoming Hokage is laughable, but Sasuke’s saved from having to react when Kakashi-sensei turns to her. “I’m Uchiha Sasuke,” she says, straightening her posture. “I like…” Words fail her. It’s been awhile since she’s thought about her likes or dislikes, or dreams for the future. “I like tomatoes,” she says, settling with it, because if Naruto can get away with food, then so can she. “I don’t like, I don’t know. I walk a lot, I guess.”
After a short silence, Kakashi-sensei says, “And?”
“I don’t have an immediate goals for the future.”
“Really?” He raises an eyebrow. She frowns.
Five years ago, Itachi told her to gain the Mangekyo Sharingan herself and to avenge their clan. She’s woken up with her Sharingan activated calling his name too many times to know she could never do it. Weak little girls can’t fight someone like him.
The second silence grows stale from waiting. “Yeah,” she says. “Really.”
Though Kakashi-sensei’s gaze lingers on her a moment too long, he turns the attention to Sakura. Her likes are trivia books and friends, and her goal is a blush and flustered non-answered. According to a graduating Academy student’s handbook, teams are picked based on skill and personality compatibility. Even when she tries, Sasuke doesn’t see the connection in Team Seven.
Maybe it’s better that way. Just because she’ll need to learn to work with them doesn’t mean they need to be friends.
Within the first ten minutes of the bell test, both Sakura and Naruto corner Sasuke to work together. Her confusion lasts as long as it takes to see Sakura glare at Naruto, and realize this is pity. The last time either of them saw Sasuke fight she had a panic attack in the middle of class. They think she’s fragile. Iruka-sensei did, too.
This isn’t the way she wanted to start her career as a genin.
“There’re only two bells,” she says quietly, and then thinks of every team she’d ever seen. If genin teams are designed to have three members, there has to be a reason. Most of her childhood life was spent around jounin; she knows how easily they can say one thing, and mean another. “Fine,” she continues, the word settling heavily at the roof her mouth. Cooperation was always her lowest score. “Naruto, I saw your clones. Attack him head on. You need to be a distraction. Sakura, come from behind. I’ll use Naruto’s distraction to come from the front and do the rest.”
For the duration of their Academy career, she’s never seen her teammates so much as glance at each other, but they do now. “That, uh,” Naruto says, “sounds kind of dangerous.”
She presses her lips in a line. “What?” she says. “You’re scared?”
“No,” Sakura says, too quick to jump to a kid she doesn’t like’s defense. “You can’t make clones like he can. Isn’t attacking a jounin from the front a bad idea?”
“Just get the bells,” Sasuke says, because it takes too long to explain the Sharingan. With no one to practice against, she doesn’t know if she’s skilled with it or not, but the sight of it might shock Kakashi-sensei, at least. “Ready?”
Though neither of them seem happy, they agree. All unsmiling, they leap from the bushes, a dozen Naruto’s, and one Sakura in the blind spot of Kakashi-sensei’s covered eye. He destroys the clones quick enough, kicking Naruto back, but before he can go after Sakura, Sasuke jumps, kunai at the ready, letting the Sharingan bleed into her eyes. In a single moment, she sees Naruto struggling to stand, two visible chakra signatures swirling in reverse directions, and Sakura’s pink hair now saturated with red. Kakashi-sensei’s visible eye widens, and he’s reaching out, swinging him other hand backward to stop Sakura by knocking her on the forehead with his book. She rocks back, and crumbles, bells jingling from the fleeting contact with her fingertips.
In the same second, Sasuke learns she can’t change position well midair; he reaches past her face until his hand wraps around her upper arm. With a single tug, he brings her hard back to feet, rattling her bones, and twists one arm around her as he grabs the other, pressing her own kunai to her throat.
Something she hasn’t felt in years breaks inside her, and it’s like a recall of an old emotion, of feeling helpless from the last time she was in the position. Her heartbeat is fast, her chakra and blood sparking, her chest burning. Objectively, she knows what’s going on—it’s just Kakashi-sensei, and she’s twelve-years-old, taking the genin the test, ready to become an adult—but everything around her slows anyway. She tenses, the movement causing the corner of the kunai to cut into her neck, and he abruptly lets go.
No one moves, and between the embarrassment, and leftover panic, and realization that she just ruined everyone’s chances, she doesn’t know what she’s feeling other than it’s something more than usual.
Then, though the alarm hasn’t gone off, Kakashi-sensei says, “We’re done for today. Sasuke, your eyes.”
She deactivates the Sharingan, and confusion joins the rest. Sakura, to his side, stares at Sasuke with wide green eyes. Crazy Uchiha Sasuke, with her mind split so cleanly open it might as well have been sororicide. After the massacre, the medical-nin thought she wasn’t going to wake, and she shocked them all. Her classmates never found out. That’s what she feels like now. Split clean.
“Getting the bells wasn’t the purpose of the exercise,” he says, drawing their attention away from her. “It was to see if you understood the value of teamwork. Being skilled individually, that’s good, but what makes a team great is their ability to work together. Sasuke created the plan, but the moment you saw she was caught, the two of you tried to help. That’s what you need—people who leave their teammates behind are the worst kind. I’ve never had a team before. Welcome to Team Seven.”
When she was little, extended family used to comment on how young Itachi was when he graduated, and then ask her how old she was as if they didn’t know. A passive-aggressive reminder she wasn’t good enough.
Itachi graduated at seven. He was a chuunin by ten. Now she’s twelve. Even as Naruto and Sakura cheer, Sasuke can’t find the pride she should feel. Suddenly, she reverts, and just feels tired.
“Do you need help with your neck, Sasuke?” Kakashi-sensei, close to indifferent but not unkindly. She wonders if her old Academy instructors told him anything about her. She wonders what there was to tell.
Pressing her hand to the shallow wound, she says, “I can handle it. I’ll see you in the morning, Kakashi-sensei.”
The goodbye is half hearted, but he lets her go. As if the world wants to remind her even the minor of accomplishments are meaningless, the clear sky covers itself with clouds. Then comes the rain, thick and heavy and warm. Aggravated, she kicks a rock, knocking it against a wooden fence, because it’s easier than screaming.
When Sasuke was younger, her understanding of friends was limited. She liked Ino and Sakura, and a few other girls that didn’t pass the secondary test to officially graduate, well enough, but the friendship was more obligatory. To make kunoichi lessons more bearable, she needed conversation. It also allowed for a good excuse to be away from the house when Itachi wasn’t home. Once he was, she didn’t want anything to do with anyone else.
After the massacre, she cut everyone out completely, too focused on the idea of killing her brother. Then she lost track of that, too, and there hasn’t been room for anyone in the blankness of her day to day.
This is makes the first few weeks of genin D-ranking missions hard. Being in the Academy was one thing, when she was surrounded but rarely had to interact; now she’s forcibly, actively engaging with a boy who fought for her attention for two years, and a girl who was once her friend. It doesn’t help that Kakashi-sensei watches her closer than her teammates. That’s all right, though. Iruka-sensei did the same thing for years, and never brought his concern to anyone. As long as the fact that she killed someone already stays secret, she doesn’t care what they think.
D-ranking missions really are boring, and by the end of the third time catching the Daimyo’s wife’s cat, Sasuke’s genuinely debating writing out a complaint form. “I want to write a complaint,” Sakura says, unknowingly agreeing, and frowns. “No, scratch that. I want to figure out if there’s a way to get an investigation of animal abuse. There’s no way that cat’s running away from the woman so many times without reason.”
Sasuke looks down at the scratches on her hand. They aren’t bad, but still an angry red, standing out in stark contrast against her pale skin. It makes her feel delicate, made of rice paper easy to break, not yellowed, but bleached by too many hours in the sun. One gust of wind, and she’ll fall right over.
Lately, she hasn’t felt steady.
“I don’t know,” she says, glancing back to Sakura. Naruto walks to her side, a little apart but like he wants to be closer, testing his boundaries. “She’s requested us personally twice. Maybe she has a thing for Kakashi-sensei.”
“How?” Naruto says. “He hides most of his face.”
Laughing, giggling, inching towards friends, Sakura says, “It makes him mysterious.” Turning to Sasuke, she adds, “My mom asked me to go food shopping, and I know you probably do too. Want to come? It’ll be less boring.”
Now that Sasuke’s a genin, she doesn’t get the allowance from the village. Her family’s finances are frozen until she’s a chuunin, or sixteen. Food’s secondary; the first thing she needs is an updated wardrobe. “There’s something else I have to do,” she says. “Maybe next time. Naruto probably has to, though.”
Unsurprisingly, he does. Surprisingly, Sakura lets him come. Sasuke doesn’t understand friends, but as she watches them walk away, she thinks maybe she wants to.
The last time Sasuke was out of Konoha’s walls, it was her sixth birthday. Dad couldn’t come, but Mom and Shisui were there, and Sasuke spent most of the walk home on Itachi’s back. Now the trees are still big, but seem smaller. Somehow, the colors seem duller, too, as though last time she viewed the world through the Sharingan. The brightest thing now is Sakura’s hair, rocking behind her as she walks. Sasuke’s comes to her shoulders, and she never understood how the girls in her class could stand to wear theirs long.
Naruto’s running up and down the road, excited and not hiding it, as Sakura tries her hardest to rein him in. Kakashi-sensei barely casts them a glance, and focuses on Tazuna-san instead. With nothing else to do, Sasuke looks around, and observes. Observation’s what she’s good at in the past year or so; she stopped disappearing into her head so often, and with no one to talk to, it was just something to do. The Sharingan made it easier. There’s no better way to learn than to find a stranger doing something, and copy it. The learning pace at the Academy was boring. This was just quicker.
It’s also the reason she notices the puddle. Nowhere else shows evidence of recent rainfall, and this is close enough to Konoha that if it rained here, it would’ve rained at home, too. Then again, this is the time of year that it can rain for five minutes in one area, and be entirely dry with blue skies five miles away. Late September and early October is a messy few weeks for the Land of Fire. She could be overreacting. That isn’t uncommon.
Just to be safe, though, she walks to Kakashi-sensei, and tugs on his sleeve. He doesn’t pause in conversation, but still glances at her, and raises his eyebrow. She raises one of hers. A mutual agreement, then. They’ve both noticed.
When the puddle explodes a moment after, the droplets of water transforming into two men, Kakashi-sensei’s hand falls flat to her stomach, and pushes, throwing her backwards. The chains miss her by an inch, but wrap around him, and she activates her Sharingan in just enough time to see he isn’t really the one getting ripped apart. Unfortunately for Sakura and Naruto, they don’t have the advantage of eyes that can see chakra signatures, and she doesn’t have the means to tell them without alerting the enemy-nin. Kakashi-sensei better have a good reason for this, because faked or not, Sasuke’s not good at watching people die.
There’re two enemy-nin, and she, as the smallest, quickly becomes the next target. To her left, Naruto stands immobile, and Sakura, the perfect student, jumps in front of their client. Sasuke has just a moment, or less than that, to analyze the situation—the chain is attached to a metal device on his arm, aimed for her right, the other one is trying to come at her from the side, and the Sharingan allows her to differentiate colors, so she can see the difference between the liquid on his claw, and the actual metal. Poison. Though the chain is long distance, they’re relying on taijutsu. They reduced themselves to a puddle. She might not know what that’s called, but it sounds like the sort of thing a Kiri-nin would do. Fire, logically, is weak against water.
She reacts in her last opportunity, pulling a kunai from her pouch, and catching the chain on the tip rather than throwing it. Though her size means her strength isn’t the greatest, the enemy-nin’s momentum’s perfect, and he’s still midair. She pulls hard, and throws a shuriken to lodge at his knee with enough force to break the cap. Then she releases the kunai, letting it bounce uselessly off the trunk of a tree, but he collides solidly with his partner, whose poisoned claws slash his side.
Instead of that being the end of it, the partner leaves the first one injured on the ground, and darts for Sakura and Tazuna-san. As Sasuke goes to pursue, a hand closes around her ankle. She’s done with being pulled to the ground, though, and turns abruptly, kicking the enemy-nin in the throat. He gags, doesn’t let go, but makes eye contact.
He doesn’t stand a chance.
The scream’s hoarse, almost unheard, and she doesn’t know what she did, but it’s enough to get him to release his grip. By the time she turns around, Kakashi-sensei’s back, holding up the second by the waist, unconscious. “I’m sorry, Naruto, I didn’t expect you to freeze,” he says, as he gets about tying the first one up. “Sakura, good reaction time. Sasuke, that was quick thinking.” When Naruto, face tomato red, runs over to help her pick up the first to carry him over, Kakashi-sensei adds, “You can leave him, you two. These claws are poisoned. He took a direct hit.”
Again, Naruto pauses, and then glances at her, before turning his attention to Kakashi-sensei. “So he’s going to die?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Sasuke says, looking around at all of her team and Tazuna-san. “I really didn’t.”
She’d known, though, and she did it anyway. She’d killed a person before. Kunoichi kill. That’s reality.
From the look Kakashi-sensei gives her, she thinks he’s perfectly aware of her apathy, and doesn’t know if that’s good or bad.
Though Kakashi-sensei’s rendered useless from chakra burn out, he’s still able to move around enough to give a lesson. Sasuke copied how to walk up solid surfaces and over water off of some jounin years ago, because the walk home’s easier when she can cut across the river.
As Sakura’s told to guard Tazuna-san, since she got it on the first try, while Naruto practices, Sasuke expects to be, too. She isn’t. Kakashi-sensei said he wants to talk to her instead, which is never a pleasant way to start her day, and she can’t think of a good excuse to get out of following him for the ten minutes it takes to get to the deserted beach. No one’s around. Now that summer’s over by two months, all the adults are working, while students’re back at school. For civilians, school continues until they’re sixteen.
Wincing, he sits on the wooden steps of a snack bar with a sign on the door reading Closed Until May. “Sit,” he says, and warily, she joins him. The wood’s rough beneath her hands. “We’re probably going to have another fight in a few days,” he says, as though she hadn’t heard him at dinner. “The three of you did a good job against Zabuza, but you weren’t in control during the bell test, or the fight on the road. Will you be able to handle this one?”
The embarrassment from the bell test returns, because Naruto froze during the fight on the road, but she’s the one getting the talk. “I’m fine,” she says, the words meaningless and hollow after so many reuses. Itachi was an ANBU by this age; the least she can do is take care of a couple of missing-nin with her team. “I can handle it.”
“A behavioral assessment comes with each team, Sasuke,” he says. “Iruka noticed more than you think.”
She looks down at her knees, at the raised scar on her right from age six, when she tripped on a stone running after her brother. “It’s nothing,” she says, and doesn’t understand why she bothers to resist at all. Secrets never stay secrets for long, and it’s been three years. “I’ll be fine.”
“With the way you’re going now, you won’t be,” he says, more blunt than Iruka ever was. “You can’t fight as a kunoichi if you’re afraid of physical contact, and you didn’t have the reaction of a first kill. So what did cause you to kill someone before?”
Lie, she thinks, because it’s reflexive now, but when she goes to tell him she’s just desensitized, she says instead, “I just reacted. I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Before she’s even aware she’s doing so, the story comes out in a patchy mess of what she can remember, spoken aloud for the first time, punctured by shock and tears. In the end, she dissolves, the back of her hands against her knees and eyes pressed to her palms as her shoulders shake.
“Sasuke,” Kakashi says when she’s done, quiet and soft rather than accusing and angry like she expects, “have you ever told this to anyone else?” She shakes her head, not moving her position, and he shifts next to her. When she peeks, he’s kneeling in front of her, crutch discarded. “You wouldn’t have gotten in trouble for defending yourself. What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“It feels like it is.”
“You were raped,” he says, and though she means not to, she flinches at the word. It’s the first she’s ever heard that, too. “That’s never going to be your fault.”
She turns her eyes back to her lap so she doesn’t have to look at him. “Are you going to tell anyone?” she asks, because this isn’t something she wants spread.
Kakashi hesitates before saying, “You went to the Academy well check-ups every year, right?” She nods. “All right. They would’ve figured out if there was anything wrong. No, I won’t. Not unless I have to. But, look, being a jounin sensei means more than just training you. Find me whenever you need me.”
When she suddenly leans forward and wraps her arms around his neck, she surprises herself, too. She hasn’t seeked out physical contact in years. He hugs back a moment later, and neither says anything.
It’s better this way.
Four days later, Zabuza attacks again with the boy at his side, and Sasuke, still embarrassed from her talk, feels as though she has something to prove. She doesn’t wait to activate her Sharingan when the boy attacks, and this is where he goes wrong.
Though he’s fast, she’s faster and has him on the defensive quickly as they clash kunai to needle. As he lifts his hand to perform a single sided seal, she twists, using her smaller size to her advantage, and kicks into his wrist. It’s with force enough to stop the hand seals, but he recovers almost instantaneously, grabbing at her ankle. She doesn’t give him the opportunity to throw her away; in the same moment, she reaches forward and up with the hand not occupied with her kunai, and punches him in the jaw.
He falls, but so does she, and they land sprawled together on the ground. The needle digs just into the inside of her elbow at the forearm, but she ignores the pain, and focuses instead on him. Blood spills from his hair, and across the stone bridge as he loses the grip on her ankle. Before he can recover again, she rips off his mask, revealing a face that doesn’t fit with his voice, and more importantly, wide open eyes. As he tries to move her off, she ruins his ability to finish whatever jutsu he was trying to create the only way she can think of, breaking two fingers on his left hand, and allows the Sharingan to do the rest. Or, at least, she tries.
She stops abruptly when Naruto appears in a puff of smoke, losing the concentration she needs to create a deep enough genjutsu. “Sasuke!” Sakura says, louder than Naruto, but Sasuke’s already several feet away on her side, bleeding from her shoulder and elbow and knee with a second needle stuck between her ribs.
“Get back!” she shouts as Naruto moves as though to help, because the boy’s forming the seals again with the opposite hand. She throws two shuriken as she gets to her feet, and though he dodges those two, he misses the third hidden in the shadow of the first.
A point stabs into his hand as he lifts two fingers from his palm, stuck into the skin. It’s still too late, and that must’ve been the final seal, because then there’re mirrors erupting around her. “You’re very good,” he says from the mirror to her left, “but in here, your speed is no match for mine.”
When the first volley of needles comes, she ducks, evading all five. In the mirrors his speed might be better, but he’s still no match for her eyes. Outside, Sakura yells for Naruto not to try and enter. Inside, Sasuke evades and tracks for a pattern, and after she finds one, takes aim with another shuriken. It connects with the boy’s knee, causing him to fall. The enclosing’s small, making it easy to cross as he stands and moves to fade back into the mirror. He’s only half in when she grips at the back of his yukata, and she’s not very strong, but she’s good enough to pull him back, away, and onto the ground.
He tries to stand again, and since she doesn’t know if being held in a genjutsu state can release her from this and she doesn’t want to kill anyone else on this mission, she parodies his own technique. Aiming for pressure points is more Hyuuga than Uchiha, and she can’t affect chakra, but it’s still effective for incapacitating an opponent. With two fingers, she hits at all the points he targets with his needles on his left side, and brings him to his knees.
“My eyes can do a lot more than track your movement,” she says, holding a kunai to his neck, forcing him to look at her. “Release us right now, or I swear, by the time I’m done with you, you won’t remember who you are.”
She doesn’t know if it’s a threat she can deliver on, but it’s the best she has. “If I release us both, I’ll simply help Zabuza-san against your sensei,” the boy says blankly, “and you’ll go after us both. Are you willing to die for your team, kunoichi?”
This is all the warning she gets before, from behind her, there’s a crack of ice breaking. “I’m supposed to be,” she answers, and the ceiling collapses over head.