XXX

Story: [A Scarecrow's Worst Friends]

Summary: Kakashi-senpai has become a jounin-sensei, and Sakura is maybe a little bit bored with ANBU. Age-bent Sakura and Fem!Sai

Genre: Humor

XXX

Sakura didn't exactly dislike ANBU, but it wasn't really the same without Kakashi-senpai.

Sure, Tenzo was still there, and now that he'd finally gotten around to creating a functional non-ANBU identity, she could mess with him even when they weren't wearing masks. She'd even introduced him to Tsume, though she really could've done without the woman's 'subtle' hints about Sakura having weird tastes in men.

Sakura didn't have any taste in men, which Tsume should've damn well known by now. Sakura had excellent taste in women however, even if her luck with them was awful.

Really, she'd basically given up hope entirely after Kurenai had laughed off an honest proposition for sex from Anko. Sakura probably wouldn't have agreed either, but she would've very consciously made that choice, rather than assume that it was some kind of joke because Anko was being friendly and weirdly sexual about a lot of things.

Kurenai was quite possibly denser than fucking lead. So, for all that Sakura's taste in women was excellent, she was pretty much doomed.

Then again, Sakura hadn't ever really gotten around to talking about her sexuality with Tsume, so she might just have assumed that Sakura had a thing for long hair or something. Which... would explain why Tenzo had been seriously considering getting a haircut after that last visit. At least until Sakura had decked him for trying to copy her.

The only person who got to cut their hair in order to 'be more professional' around here was Sakura. Anyone else could suck it.

Ignoring Sakura's pseudo-aunt and her attempts to get Sakura laid, Sakura still wasn't sure about how to deal with the ANBU-situation.

It was good work, and she really had no regrets about accepting her mask, but she was more support than she was tracking. It kind of came with the territory of being a medic-nin. And without Kakashi's nose and his pack, she was basically bouncing between Inuzuka-ANBU.

Inuzuka generally stuck around in ANBU for a couple of months. They were loud and brash, and Sakura loved them all dearly as the pseudo-cousins that they'd decided that they were, but they weren't terribly suited for ANBU.

The Aburame were better about remaining in ANBU, but Sakura was more used to dogs than she was bugs, so she didn't really have a lot of missions with them. Though, admittedly, that might be because she was considered a 'corrupting influence' on them, after that one time she'd convinced an Aburame to prank Tenzo with termites.

Regardless, without Kakashi-senpai and his pack, Sakura didn't really have a permanent squad, and it was kind of uncomfortable.

Tenzo adjusted better, but that was mainly because his skill-set was more towards infiltration and stealth than actual tracking, and that there were plenty of those missions to go around. Sakura preferred tracking-missions though, and without Kakashi-senpai or a super-nose of her own, that meant that she kept being forced into the role of experienced second-in-command of the squads that kept breaking up.

Sakura wasn't becoming an ANBU-captain even if it killed her. Unless Tenzo accepted a promotion first.

Half the reason why she'd even decided to bother with aiming for the jounin-promotion was to annoy Tenzo with how he technically hadn't done it himself, meaning that she outranked him. Obviously, in order to shut her up, he'd needed to become a jounin as well, which meant that he'd finally been forced to create a non-ANBU identity.

Sakura wouldn't put it past Tenzo to grab a promotion to captain for a similar reason, and she wouldn't let it stand if he did, but she doubted it would happen. Tenzo was wholly devoted to Kakashi-senpai, to the point that Sakura really couldn't imagine him trying to 'live up' to Kakashi's legacy by becoming a captain himself. Sakura also wouldn't be surprised to find some kind of weird shrine in a corner of Tenzo's room.

Not that she was planning on looking. Much like trying to look for stashes of porn in any friend's home, looking for their stalker-shrines was kind of bad manners.

The point was that Sakura didn't really feel like there was anything keeping her in ANBU except for the habit of her being a part of ANBU. She didn't really feel anything pushing her away from being in ANBU, excepting maybe Tsume's grumpy worries about her mental health.

Sakura was perfectly healthy, and wasn't at all running from the idea of being part of a non-ANBU team again because of the memories of waiting and waiting for her genin-teammates to return and properly congratulate her for her promotion. It'd been nearly three months after their scheduled check-in-time that confirmation of their deaths had finally been given.

And then the ANBU-option had started to look mightily tempting. They'd been very happy to have her too, what with their issues with manpower back then. Danzo had really done a number on them with his 'perfectly conditioned' ninja. Even nowadays – nearly a decade after his execution for treason – there were traces of that mess left behind.

But that was that and this was this. Sakura might've joined ANBU because she hadn't wanted to see old classmates and have them glance away in pity, and because she really didn't want to deal with another team of 'comrades in arms', but she'd gotten over that within the first couple of years.

She'd remained in ANBU mostly due to it being comfortable. She wasn't really a front-line fighter, and had never enjoyed guard-duty. Tracking people down and murdering them in their sleep was much easier to deal with. Certainly, there were some missions that were distasteful, and she wasn't overly thrilled about their orders some of the time, but that was the life of a shinobi, and she was content.

Also, she might've gotten overly attached to Kakashi-senpai and Tenzo somewhere along the way, and the idea of entirely abandoning Tenzo to ANBU was a bit uncomfortable. Sure, he didn't have any issues with it, and without Kakashi they didn't really work together all that much anyway, but Sakura didn't want to.

Kakashi getting out of ANBU was good. He wasn't-... He was a very good captain, and she was happy to have served under him, but ANBU wasn't a good place for him. She was pretty sure that he just cared too much. All the blood and the ruthlessness was wearing him down, slowly but surely, and Sakura was in fact relieved to hear him finally retiring.

Sakura and Tenzo were pretty content with ANBU though, so there wasn't much point in either of them retiring, unless they actually had somewhere they wanted to go afterwards. And that was why Sakura smiled and laughed and generally tuned out any of Tsume's worried badgering.

XXX

"They passed."

It was spoken with the silently panicking despair of a man who wanted to protect people, and kept on stumbling across their corpses every step of the way.

Give Kakashi a unit of well-trained shinobi, and he'd make any mission into a brilliant example of why Konoha was so often referred to as the 'strongest Village'. Give Kakashi something that he had a high chance of growing emotionally attached to, and he'd fret himself to death before they ever made it out into the field.

Sakura had seen it in action enough times to know the signs. She'd been pretty young when she'd joined ANBU, about the same age as Kakashi had been when he'd done the same, actually, but very much an inexperienced chunin in comparison to Kakashi's 'traumatized war-promoted jounin' at the same age. Why, Sakura hadn't been horribly traumatized by anything at all, she'd just waited in safety for the return of her genin-teammates and the jounin-teacher she'd silently considered an older sister – or maybe an aunt, not that she would've ever said so where the age-sensitive woman could've heard her, on pain of death.

A return that never happened, and which left her slipping deeper and deeper into despair over being unable to do anything about it except continue waiting. And then, finally, receiving the message of their deaths.

She'd been pretty messed up emotionally, and very much in mourning. But there was a very big difference between having horrible nightmares for barely a year, and having to remember watching the people she loved die in front of her eyes.

So no, Sakura had been practically completely untouched by the horrors of their profession, by the time she showed up in ANBU. Which understandably put her in the unenviable position of being the closest thing to 'normal' that Tenzo and Kakashi knew of.

Sakura was pretty sure she wasn't actually 'normal' anymore, because she had a vague memory of thinking that drowning people in their own vomit was nasty, and yet she still giggled sometimes when she remembered that one time in River Country.

"Ah, well. Look on the bright side, senpai." Sakura smiled at Kakashi as he sent a skeptical kind of despairing look her way. "At least you won't have to worry about their parents being noisy about what you're teaching them."

Kakashi stared at her for a long moment. "The last Uchiha, the jinchuuriki, and-..." He paused, clearly thinking about it. "She was pretty quiet, but I think she might be a psychopath?"

Sakura made a thoughtful sound. "You caught her in a genjutsu where everyone died?" Kakashi nodded. "Could be that she noticed it catching, that always throws me off. Or she just blanked?"

"Don't think she noticed, and pretty sure she would've reacted afterwards if she blanked on the spot." Kakashi sighed. "Still better than-..."

Sakura nodded, accepting the point, even if Kakashi trailed off rather than say it out loud.

Itachi snapping under the pressure of his clan, and murdering them all in one hell of a bloodbath, before legging it out of the Village? That'd come as a surprise to everyone. In hindsight, perhaps it shouldn't have, but then everyone were more used to half-crazed prodigies ending up like Kakashi instead.

Traumatized, suicidal, dead, stand-offish, and competent. Nowhere on that list was whatever the hell Itachi had been there at the end. The only thing the investigation into it all had uncovered was that perhaps the death of Itachi's 'closest friend' might've been more than the suicide that it'd been written off as.

Perhaps Uchiha Shisui had noticed the cracks in his friend and tried to address them? Perhaps Itachi had revealed his plan and been rebuffed? Nobody knew, really. In the end, unless someone managed to corner an S-Class missing-nin and interrogate him about a moment in time where he'd likely been at his most unhinged, it was a mystery that Itachi would be taking with him to his grave.

And from the sound of it, Itachi had had plenty of uninterrupted genjutsu-time with his little brother before he finally legged it out of the Village. So yes, in comparison, a potential psychopath wasn't so bad. At least they tended to be pretty solid about compartmentalization, instead of becoming walking messes of neuroses.

"But hey, at least foxes are kind of similar to dogs, right?" Sakura grinned at him.

Kakashi's eye turned sharp. "Don't call him a fox."

Sakura blinked, then shook her head. "Sorry. Not my point though." She made a motion with her hands. "You still have that spray-bottle, right?"

Kakashi leaned forward, reluctantly intrigued. "Go on."

And hey, it worked for the Inuzuka, just look at tiny little Kiba and how he didn't try to steal snacks anymore.

XXX

"If you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all." Sai explained simply.

Sakura stared at the girl for a long moment, not entirely sure how to respond to that.

She'd decided to ambush Kakashi's cute little genin-team during one of their practices to see what they were actually like, and it was great. It was like locking Gai and Anko in the same room for a couple of hours. Oil and water, except that they were both volatile in their own version of madness, so odds were good that you'd open the door back up to some kind of horrific scene of gruesome murder.

Not that Sakura had ever actually tried that. No sir. Absolutely not. She would never.

Even if it would've been perfect revenge for Anko stealing all of her clothes and and locking her and Kurenai in a closet for three hours.

She could see a certain degree of Anko trying to be helpful from that event. It'd been mortifying, and it hadn't worked at fucking all, but Sakura could sort of admit that Anko could be interpreted as having done it with good intentions. Or, at least, as good of intentions as could ever be expected from that woman.

Doing something similar to Anko and Gai would've been purely an act of petty cruelty, and Sakura was a better person than that. She might've desperately wished she wasn't a better person a few times since the idea had originally occurred to her, but it was what it was.

Naruto and Sasuke were equally hilarious to imagine locking in a closet for a couple of hours. Though, considering how they were barely entering puberty, and how blatantly focused they were on each other, the results might be kind of a different shade of hilarity than she'd be comfortable exposing herself to upon opening the closet back up.

In comparison to the boys being loud – Naruto – or bitterly cutting – Sasuke – Sai remained a perfect calm in the eye of the storm, which was impressive considering how even Kakashi tended to be forced into the chaos. If only because he was easily noticeable and Naruto had some clear issues with focusing on one thing at a time.

Regardless, Sakura had finally asked the girl why she was so quiet, and that was the response she'd been given.

"That's-... Sai, that's for interacting with clients, potential clients, and people you actually care about." Sakura grinned, already imagining Kakashi's face once he figured out that Sakura had managed to corrupt one of his brats. "And if those people you care about are actually worth caring about, then a certain degree of friendly meanness is expected."

Sai tilted her head. "I didn't know that meanness was friendly?"

"It depends on a lot of circumstances and gets really complicated really quickly." Sakura nodded. "But when it works, it's a thing of glory." Then she cleared her throat, and raised her voice to be clearly audible to all of the kids. "Senpai! Mi-chan is the evil missing-nin!"

Kakashi looked up, then blinked at her stupidly for a moment, before his face began to pale, and he looked back down at his book. "No-... I hadn't even-... Mi-chan-...?"

Sai glanced between them, looking confused.

"That's the sound of his heart breaking." Sakura explained to Sai, grin on her face. "Treasure it."

XXX

"I hate you."

Sakura looked up from her book on medicine. "Fair enough. Any particular reason?"

"She's like a mini-Anko." Kakashi shuddered slightly. "A smaller, less-sexualized, and not quite as gleefully violent Anko. And it's your fault."

"I just gave her the opportunity to express herself, so that she doesn't murder someone out of repressed annoyance someday down the line." Sakura pointed out reasonably.

She was only halfway on purpose referencing Itachi's psychotic break, mostly she was covering up that she'd pointed Sai in this particular direction of stress-relief because it was hilarious.

"They even smile the same. It's creepy." Kakashi continued, deciding to ignore her, likely because he knew that she had a point but still managed to see straight through her. Kakashi-senpai was good at that kind of stuff.

"Huh." Sakura tilted her head. Now that Kakashi mentioned it, Anko sometimes wore a Sai-like expression when she was trying to be polite around civilians. Sai was better at the falsely innocent smiles though, Anko was more a smirking kind of lady.

Kakashi made a vaguely horrified noise deep in his throat. "I knew it. I knew that it wasn't just my imagination." He slumped down next to her, clearly in despair. "I thought Anko was supposed to be like-..." He made a vague motion with his hand, the other one too busy cradling his likely-aching head. "She's supposed to be one-of-a-kind, you know?"

Sakura hesitated, then slowly reached out to pat Kakashi on the shoulder.

Whilst she didn't regret telling Sai to be mean – because it was still hilarious – she could appreciate that there were some things that should be too horrible to force anyone to contemplate. Such as the idea that there were more than one Anko. Or that Anko was a human being and therefore capable of reproducing, rather than a weird inhuman sexy banshee that simply appeared out of the aether one day and made everyone's lives hell.

Sakura was pretty sure that Anko wasn't the kind of woman to bother with having kids, but that didn't mean that the image wasn't vaguely horrifying.

XXX