Chapter Text
Haruno Sakura is not the idealist her teammate is.
Oh, how she wishes she were; she wants to believe in Sasuke, wants to believe so badly it hurts, but he has never had a kind word for her and even his rivalry with Naruto can barely be called that, always more bite than bark.
She has never been worthy of Uchiha Sasuke’s notice, she realises.
And that, his utter disregard for anyone he believes lesser than himself, is what lets her drive a kunai between his third and fourth vertebrae as a thousand birds chirp between his fingers.
“Sakura?” Naruto manages, voice thin, as the point of the kunai exits the front of Sasuke’s throat.
“I’m sorry that this isn’t what you wanted, Naruto,” she says, tears a cold trail on her face but her voice the most level it’s ever been, “but I’m not sorry I did it.”
---
There is no trial, though at the time of his death Uchiha Sasuke is still a shinobi of Konoha. There are hundreds of words she could throw in Tsunade’s face, about letting Naruto’s sentimentality cloud her judgement as Hokage, but she keeps them behind her teeth and endures the lecture and the heavy gazes of the Clan Council. Still, they can’t complain overmuch - she did preserve his body in a storage scroll and return it to the village, so it’s not as though they can’t restore the Uchiha clan that way.
Naruto’s refusal to spend any longer in her presence than absolutely necessary stings, though.
Team Seven fractures under the pressure, and three weeks after their return from the Valley of the End, Kakashi files for its official dissolution.
He delivers the notice personally, and of all things that is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. She takes the scroll and stares down at it, mind blank, and then bursts into tears, noisy and messy, and Kakashi takes a step back. She snorts a watery laugh, then, because of course her jounin-sensei finds weepy thirteen-year-old girls scarier than missing-nin.
And that’s the thing: She’s a thirteen-year-old girl who three and a half weeks ago killed a boy she’d once planned to marry. Kunoichi of the year or not, no academy lesson could have prepared her for that.
When she quiets down, curls up on the couch and props her chin on her knee, still sniffling, Kakashi takes a step closer and puts a hand on her shoulder very, very gently.
“It’s probably not what you want to hear right now, but I’m proud of you,” he says awkwardly, and perches on the edge of the couch beside her. “Uh, can I help?”
She shakes her head, trying to think of something he could actually do, and then mumbles into her knees, “I could really use a hug.”
A warm arm drapes itself across her shoulders a moment later, and then there’s a puff of smoke and about a dozen dogs, all wearing Konoha hitai-ite and henohenomoheji on them somewhere.
Sakura’s mother arrives home in the early hours to find her daughter curled up on the couch with Hatake Kakashi and a dozen ninken, and thinks it’s the least troubled sleep Sakura has had in weeks.
---
“Sensei--”
“You know, Sakura, I’m not actually your sensei anymore.”
“I was thinking,” she bulls on, “that you could take me as your apprentice.”
“Um,” says Kakashi, one visible eyebrow making a bid for his hairline.
“When you have free time, of course.”
“You’re not being put on another team?”
“I formally requested a solo posting. I’ll be village-bound until I make chuunin.”
“I may not be available all that often,” he says, and she smiles politely and says nothing about the dog-masked ANBU who stands guard at her home so often, whose posture is nothing like Kakashi’s but whose presence is unmistakable.
Kakashi isn’t available to train her often, it’s true, but she’s happy to be passed around amongst the other jounin-sensei of her generation. Kurenai’s gentle hand sculpts her genjutsu skill until she can cloak herself with barely a thought. Gai’s bright, effusive tutelage breaks down the poor taijutsu practitioner in her and rebuilds it from the foundations up, until she feels as though she could walk around the walls of the village on her hands a hundred times. Asuma makes her play shogi until she wants to stab him in the eye with her king, and then sets her against Shikamaru, too.
But Kakashi is the one who makes her tie all these disparate practices together, who sends her trawling through training grounds looking for him, sets traps and makes her fend for herself. It is Kakashi who presents her with a scroll on basic fuinjutsu for her fourteenth birthday, with an entirely false wide-eyed exclamation that he’d had no idea that it was her birthday, and that was just an old rag, anyway, but he supposed she could keep it if she wanted.
Naruto hasn’t talked to her for eleven weeks, and she’s not even sure it still hurts.