Being with Naruto again was heaven. Cheery, hyperactive goofball just had no idea how special he could be.
Still, two weeks after Sasuke returned to the Ninja Academy was all she could take. Seeing the broody bastard who'd turned traitor and destroyed Konoha, then the entire ninja world, sitting there just like he'd been the very day he'd turned traitor had been too much.
Akatsuki had only attempted to destroy their world. But Naruto had stopped them. Then Sasuke had killed Naruto and brought about the end of the Elemental Nations in a search for "Vengeance".
Vengeance against what she didn't know, as no one in the world had caused more harm to more people, destroyed more lives or caused more destruction, than the broody bastard. So what he thought he was avenging when no one was more guilty than he, she didn't know.
Itachi didn't have one percent of the blood on his hands Sasuke did.
After two weeks of seeing him there, the exact same person at heart, with the same callous attitudes, disregard for others and focus on his own pain, as the one who had led their continent down the fiery path of total destruction - and having everyone in town love him for it, was just more than Sakura could take.
That was when she realized he had to go.
Hearing his steps approach, Sakura carefully reached for the kunai hidden under the fish on the counter she worked behind.
It had taken her a month to lay down enough seals so that she could attempt the jutsu again without drawing every half-competent ninja in Konoha down on her with the resulting chakra flare as the jutsu built up. Thirty-six hours just to perform the handseals was NOT a quick jutsu by any means. She didn't dare use the same Wood techniques she had to form the diagram before for exactly the same reason as she needed the concealment seals, in the wake of the Uchiha massacre everyone was on high alert for anything weird happening. She'd even had to genjutsu her mother into not noticing anything wrong as her daughter stayed cooped up all that while, skipping class and barely coming down to eat, but in the end it got done.
Then she'd been forced to lure Naruto to her house on guise of playing, and take out his ANBU guards in a way so nobody knew they'd been taken out, just so she could put the boy under a forced-sleep Jutsu to provide the massive amount of chakra she'd need.
If she hadn't been a Kage-level ninja there was no way it was all getting done without going all belly-up, but she was, and it had gone off as smoothly as anything like that could have. Even so, it had only moved her back two months, and her control of Naruto's chakra was severely strained just getting that much.
Back two weeks before the Uchiha Massacre was enough.
On the fortunate side, she'd arrived on a day when it was easy to just run into Naruto at the park, befriend him, apologize for having snubbed him at her mother's request, and get all teary and guilty-eyed so it would be believable that the two were now inseparable. She and he were even playing together now, though it was getting late and she'd had to sneak another genjutsu on her mother to let the poor orphan pariah into the house.
But she'd had to, for the sole reason that the ANBU who watched over Naruto were now providing her with the alibi she needed, with a good, solid two weeks of history behind it, so there was nothing for an investigation team to look for.
Nothing like having, oh, say, created a wood clone of herself in the bathroom of a food stall before meeting Naruto that day, a clone that had then used the boy's own modified Henge to shapeshift into other people, creating false trails, until it would up here, a copy of the counter person at a fish seller's booth along Sasuke's route home, replacing the real counter person who was now under another forced-sleep illusion, tied up in ropes under the same counter she worked. A little clumsy, but would help convince later investigation squads the girl was not to blame.
After the Massacre, the Last Uchiha would have more hidden guards watching over him than the Hokage. Today, the day of the massacre, he did not have that protection.
The boy who had killed every third person in the Elemental Countries didn't even know he was in danger until the clone had leaped out and rammed the kunai through his heart.
The explosive tag on it detonating a moment later was just gravy.
"Hey, Sakura-chan! What's the ninja book say? I wanna see something new!"
The real Sakura smiled at the blond-haired boy bouncing around her in excitement and reached for a dog-eared manual her mother had bought for her second hand. As far as such books go, it wasn't much, but it had Naruto excited and was an excuse to do two things: teach him the chakra control exercises he so desperately needed, and by having him 'help' her and showing him the symbols as she laboriously worked them over herself, teach him how to read.
The only thing Naruto had lacked in life to be the ninja he'd always believed he could be, was a teacher. And, under guise of learning alongside him, that was exactly what Sakura intended to be.
Sakura matched the hyperactive ball of energy grin for grin as she opened the battered textbook. For six year olds, leaf floating was the coolest thing, and seeing all of the ways he screwed it up, then made a game out of blasting it off, scorching it, or all of the other hideous things they did with those poor leaves together, made it all worth it.
And, better still, by learning how to repeat those results, blowing it up only when he wanted to, or trying to aim at targets they'd chosen (a stone, a wastebasket, a bird, or that awful woman who threw fish at them when she saw Naruto) when blasting it off, he had made the simple exercise teach her things she hadn't known about how to do tricks with chakra!
Somebody had probably invented water walking that way.
Sakura made a show of looking up with Naruto when they heard a distant explosion, then like him shrugged it off and went back to the known rewards of that wonderful ninja book, and made an expert play of not noticing one of their ANBU guards signaling to another to go check the sound out, as it had originated from near the center of town, not any training grounds.
Pretending not to notice the unprofessionalism as one of the bodyguards left his duty post to go inquiring after the sound, when that kind of distraction can and had cost the lives of clients by peeling away their protectors, Sakura instead cuddled closer to Naruto while they opened the wonderful training book.
"It says the next one is called tree climbing."
"Cool!" six-year-old Naruto breathed with unbridled enthusiasm.
Itachi frowned when his brother failed to arrive on schedule. That frown deepened when an explosion came from within the village, not far from the Uchiha compound gates.
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(Posted Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:03)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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