Chapter 11
Four days later, the orders came to stop.
That meant that they were done destroying the bodies of those dead that they had missed on that first, desperate day that had faded into a moonless, hopeless night. By the time the sun rose the next morning, they had stopped recovering survivors. And yet the work continued, because there were still bodies to burn, secret techniques and bloodlines to bury away forever with the ashes that were scattered to the wind.
Guruko’s comforting presence had become her lifeline as they spent day and night overrun with the horror of it all.
Sakura had been so exhausted by the time they had stumbled back to the fort some time the next afternoon that she barely remembered how they had gotten to sleep. The barracks that had once lay abandoned were overflowing with soldiers, and as the lucky few uninjured, previous inhabitants of the fort found themselves kicked out of the bunks they had claimed and sleeping in cramped positions on the floors of various rooms. Sasuke had even taken to sleeping outside, though based on the angry glares he was constantly shooting all around him, she felt that it was more out of his general misanthropy than reasons of space.
Kakashi joined them before they went on their next outing. He was obviously distracted, but summoned his dogs for their company, freeing them from the necessity of working under Hana. Sasuke took the lead again as always, but Sakura was proud to find that she was the one best equipped to follow the dogs’ noses and instructions. Sasuke’s eyes, always better than hers or Naruto’s, were equally useless in the perpetually foggy borderlands that surrounded the rain-wall, as they had taken to calling it. Sakura still thought it seemed more like a veil, shrouding a kingdom of death beyond.
Only Naruto could pass through it, but when she had reported his actions to Kakashi the man had been unusually furious, and whatever he had told the boy, Naruto had been suitably cowed by the next time she saw him. He had been angry at her, too, but the resentful looks had faded away within a day as their awful task forced his childishness away from him (what, did he think she wouldn’t report it?)
But when they were on the hunt together, it was Sakura they looked to for interpretation of the dogs’ barks, Sakura who’s burning nose could sniff through the overpowering chakra infusing the air around them to detect the traces of blood, piss, and sweat underneath that the dogs had honed in on, Sakura who would point the way. By the third day it had become as easy as breathing, and when back at the base, far away from that horrible, corrosive rain, and too tired to think as she tried to find where she had last left her sleeping roll, she found herself subconsciously navigating to her familiar scent, eyes half-closed, without having to think about her chakra pathways at all.
It was good that at least something could come easily to her. The other part of their duties didn’t. The callous way the Uchiha woman had executed her relative that first day replayed itself against her closed eyelids again and again. It had been such a shock she didn’t even register it at first, and then she saw the scene repeated, again and again, as the shake of a medic’s head became a death sentence.
But tracking through the misty forest with the dog by her side – now that at least gave her something good to daydream about. She could imagine herself as a wolf princess, like Hana, maybe, but prettier, hunting down a dangerous missing nin. Or maybe following an enemy’s trail by nose, on the way to rescue Sasuke, who had been kidnapped because of his bloodline. She liked the thought of that. She, clanless and therefore overlooked during the attack, finding him on account of her own abilities, the way he would look up with those big, dark eyes as she appeared from above like an avenging goddess, decapitating the enemy in one stroke of her blade…
The awful stench of the decaying body in her arms was a constant distraction from her attempts to fantasize. She had noticed the Akimichi crest on a piece of his clothes, which meant the stomach was particularly important to destroy first, something about the digestion process.
And then after –– the awful stench of burning flesh, the creak of bones breaking down, the way a Nara might stop besides a body for a second too long to ensure that the hands were completely destroyed before returning the body to its place in the line waiting for their turn to roast on the bonfire.
There were too many secrets in a ninja’s body to allow them to slowly rot into the earth. When the orders came to stop, it meant there was no one left, at least no one on this side of the wall. She wondered what had become of those who lay beyond. She knew it was a question that was torturing some – one of Sasuke’s kinsmen was unaccounted for, and she had seen the awful face he’d made when he had heard that news.
Somehow, she thought that genetic theft really wasn’t the aim of the operation. Whoever could make a jutsu like that wouldn’t need his cousin’s eyes. But it wasn’t really a comforting thought, so she thought better than to share it. Under that kind of downpour, she doubted there was anything left of the eyes after the first few hours, anyway. But that also wasn’t the type of thought you’d share (Naruto had said something of the sort and Sasuke decked him for it, which wasn’t a particular surprise. Sakura would’ve been more polite, anyway).
With the stop order, Sakura found herself with too much free time. After finally allowing herself a good fourteen hours of sleep on the floor, Guruko sprawled across her like a blanket, long whiskers tickling against her skin, she thought about writing a letter to her mom. She didn’t know what to say. She had written to her father the second morning, even though a lieutenant from the second army had promised her that the third army wasn’t involved in the invasion force as she scraped the infected skin from his arm and he puked into the grass besides her. Even though he was a long-distance formation fighter and wouldn’t have been in one of the assault waves in the front. She just had to be sure.
He hadn’t responded.
Mail could take a long time to and from the border regions, so she wasn’t overly concerned. At least, that’s what she told herself.
She had spent much of the previous day technically in a sector under Koji’s supervision, but the older ninja had seemed determined to ignore her presence as much as he had once ignored Naruto’s. He gave them no commands and accepted indifferently the bodies they added to his sector’s pile, barely looking up from the intensive notes he was taking on casualties and conditions of the dead.
She had thought about apologizing, though she wasn’t exactly sure for what. For Kakashi-sensei? That would be absurd. Maybe just for the awkward situation. When he met her questioning look with a cool snap of “don’t you have work to do?” she thought better of it.
It didn’t seem so important now, anyhow.
A masked group of black ops soldiers had arrived unnoticed in the night and would often appear to collect such notes before disappearing back into the tower, where everyone knew they had set up something of a temporary headquarters.
Sakura found herself sharing Sasuke’s overly obvious bitterness at their presence – it was well and good that they were taking notes now, but where was the intelligence beforehand? Everyone had been talking about the Rain offensive for months, wouldn’t a chakra monster made of rain be something important to know?
The God of Pain… Furtive rumors had spread about the pamphlets from that first day, but they had been ordered destroyed immediately, and Sakura found that those who had been in the rain would only discuss it amongst one another. She didn’t understand enough about the local religions to guess at what it could mean. She understood the message well enough, in any case. “Out, foul invaders” seemed pretty clear.
On the fifth day, the day after the final stop order, they held the official funeral.
The pyre was still raging, but the pile of bodies still lying in wait for destruction had shrunken significantly, and the fort suddenly felt as empty as it had been that first evening so long ago. The thought struck Sakura as amusing when she remembered how unnerving she had felt the place was back then. She felt like she’d been there for years rather than a few months.
They bent their heads and prayed for the safe passage of their comrades into the pure lands beyond, rededicated themselves to the Will of Fire in the names of their comrades’ passing, and one by one, etched the names of the fallen onto a wooden memorial plaque to stay in the fort. The list would also be passed on to the memorial stone in Konoha proper, of course, but they needed a place to light incense here as well.
The Uchiha had their funeral separately, later in the day: one pair of Uchiha eyes for each invasion squad – almost all dead. She saw them standing by their own, smaller block of wood. There were only four of them, including Sasuke, the women from the first day, and the man they had found not far from the rain-wall on that first day. The fourth she didn’t recognize, but he shared their dark features and wore the Uchiha fan bright on his back.
She watched from a distance near the barracks as they bent their heads in prayer, and noticed Kakashi doing the same from the entrance of the tower. He was slouching deeply, hands deep in his pockets, but his whole body was angled to give his full attention to the little group. She thought he must be studying Sasuke too.
.
.
.
Then it was over.
In a slow trickle that turned overnight into a flood, by the time a week had passed, the remains of the ravaged second army slunk away – on to new assignments, their original posts, maybe back to Konoha. The injured were probably evacuated, for good, right?
She couldn’t be sure. Their presence had lent a new pale of suspicion to the camp – if we didn’t know about that then what do we know? – and she had found that the last thing they wanted was to entertain her questions. “Operational security” had seemed to gain a new meaning, when it had always seemed more like one of those things that the grownups just loved to go on about before.
They were alone again in their base with Renji’s team. Honestly, Sakura was shocked that Kakashi had stayed. He had been practically impossible to find, constantly holed up in the tower where the black-ops forces were, and she assumed that things were serious enough that he would go with them, or maybe with the army, and do something, but it seemed that babysitting them took priority for now.
She wondered if he resented it. If he did, he certainly had his ways of getting back at them, because the first day they woke up after a night of sleep in their old bunks, once more available for use, he spent the day beating them brutally into the ground.
Naruto and Sasuke seemed to thrive on days like that, turning their frustration and powerlessness into ever more desperate attacks on Kakashi, but it just made Sakura want to go home.
Every time he pushed her face into the cakey dirt of the training area they had made for themselves slightly south of the fort, where none of the infected had been placed, she remembered the way that chuunin’s nose had sizzled and then melted away upon contact with the grass, the way Yuji had writhed against the ground like an animal.
Her legs still hurt from that first run back from Sand.
She couldn’t even cry herself to sleep, because when she tried Sasuke told her to be quiet. That got Naruto to her defense, but hearing their swearing slowly turn into a tired fistfight didn’t actually make her feel any better.
Her father wrote back.
She hadn’t mentioned anything, really, in the letter, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that he didn’t mention anything, really, in his. But it still made her angry. What, was that “operational security” too? Sure, forget about it for your invasion, but if you can mildly inconvenience Haruno Sakura, then knock yourself out.
Kakashi spent another day beating them, and she tried her best to daydream about punching him in the face.
They fell back into a lazy training routine, but the atmosphere seemed difference, tense, like they were waiting for something. It seemed to her like their obligations in the fort should only have increased, but they seemed to stop leaving it. Koji no longer sought her out for casual conversation, so one day over dinner she brought it up to Hana instead.
“Well, it’s October already,” the older girl shrugged. “The harvest here is earlier, it’s basically over already. Being here in the fall is always pretty boring, normally we’d just head over to some villages to remind the civvies we’re here everyone once in a while. But I don’t think they need that right now. Of course, there’s normally more people here, too.”
Seemingly despite himself, Koji injected himself into the conversation. He always had to be the local expert, he couldn’t help it. “There’s not a point, we mess with ‘em to remind ‘em not to cheat us,” he gave a dangerous looking smile.
“This year, though…” He trailed off. “Well, the civvies probably won’t have much to offer.”
That was true. Sakura wondered how they were dealing with the poisoned air and water. She knew it had sunk into the soil in some areas, and they hadn’t used the well within the fort until it had gone through a week of medical purification. She thought that maybe some of the medics would stay to carry out similar processes in the nearby villages, but she supposed the injured nin they left with took priority.
It was still a bitter thought; she had no doubt that the civilians near the border were paying the price for Konoha’s failed attack. It felt wrong to think that there were victims within the Land of Fire – that was the whole point of Konoha, wasn’t it? She knew that they had failed them, and knew that they truly didn’t have the resources to help.
Maybe that was why they didn’t leave the fort. There would be something shameful in showing themselves before those people they had failed so badly.
And at the same time, the thought of returning to that endless work of burning bodies made nausea creep up her throat. No, Sakura wouldn’t volunteer herself there, thank you very much. She didn’t think she liked medical jutsu all that much.
“They’d have a lot more if you’d help ‘em,” Naruto offered, tone-deaf as always.
“Uh-huh,” Koji responded. Then he smiled wide, nose crinkling. She’d forgotten how cute he looked when he did that. One hand made an abortive motion, and Sakura thought if it hadn’t been Naruto, he might have even reached out to ruffle the boy’s hair. “You were never a bad kid, y’know.”
.
.
.
She found herself returning to the same thoughts that always came with the beginning of October. For some, this new tragedy would outshine the first, perhaps. She doubted it. Sasuke had surely taken it badly, but it wasn’t really a fair comparison.
The point was – Koji wasn’t always wrong, and Naruto had been out of it recently too. They all were, in a way. Kakashi seemed to have lost all interest in teaching them, the only thing he did was appear to run drills, commanding them semi-distractedly before disappearing again, and occasionally beat them into the ground. He used to at least pretend to let them catch him off guard for a hit or two, and she could feel the frustration welling up inside of her, waiting for an outlet to explode.
Sasuke had taken to slipping away in the mornings to visit the small plot of land where the Uchiha grave-marker stood fairly frequently.
When Kakashi finally seemed to remember their existence with a dramatic appearance at breakfast – meaning, appearing in their room in the barracks with a loud bang, holding half a loaf of bread and announcing “Breakfast time, kiddies!” – she wasn’t surprised to find Sasuke missing when she startled awake.
Kakashi seemed disappointed, however, giving Sasuke’s empty bed a significant look. It was early, or late, she wasn’t sure, the sun not yet risen.
“Well, I was going to let you all fight to the death for the only food you’re allowed to eat today,” he gestured lazily at the bread and she realized the missing top portion had been bitten off. “But I guess someone has better things to do. Sakura, go get him. Then meet in the mess. We have new orders.”
Naruto squawked with excitement and they all heard a loud groan in response from the next room.
“Seriously? Shut the hell up….” Sakura recognized Nobu’s sleepy voice.
Kakashi snorted, and, winking exaggeratedly in their direction with his only visible eye, he disappeared in the loudest sounding body flicker Sakura had ever heard.
She hurriedly slid on her uniform and fled out of the window to avoid the flurry of cursing in the next room.
Sure enough, when she went to check, Sasuke was standing before the grave-marker, head bowed. The red of the sharingan spun in his eyes as he glared at the ground, fists clenched tight, knuckles white.
Sakura hadn’t known he’d awakened it.
Curious, she moved forward, allowing her feet to slip to make full contact with the ground, politely announcing her presence with the noise.
Sasuke spun around to look at her, his eyes immediately turning black. He looked angry, she realized, and she felt the sudden urge to apologize, as though for intruding.
She was forestalled by a quieter arrival, sudden enough that neither she nor Sasuke noticed him before he spoke.
“I knew I would find you here.”
Uchiha Itachi melted into existence out of a flock of crows. He knelt and placed his hand on the grave-marker, eyes dark and far away as he examined it for a long moment.
Then he stood, half-turning to look at Sasuke, whole face melting into a soft smile.
“It's been too long, little brother.”