sunshineverse | [July 14th, open]

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[July 14th, open]

Who: Uchiha Sasuke
When: July 14th
Where: The most remote training field he can find
What: Sasuke is between missions and has been kicked out of Hinata's recuperating room as gently as possible. Time to break some bones; it's equal parts penance and practical, he swears.

Things had actually seemed to be going well this time. Hinata had been careful not to show her feelings about which way the talks had gone while in the village, and the trip there had been so uneventful that the return seemed destined for the same.

Except it hadn't, and Hinata had gotten hurt because of it.

Sasuke strapped his shoe back onto his foot with vengeful yanks, glaring down the training log in front of him. He was stubborn -- he knew his own faults -- but he didn't entirely ignore advice received, either. The last time a teammate had been injured under his watch, Obito had told him to get stronger as a shinobi, get better as a med-in.

He would. And today, that just happened to mean breaking bones.

Taking stance, he carefully judged the angle he'd need to strike the log at in order to smash some of the finer bones of his right foot. It would force him to counter training ignrained into muscle memory for a long time, something that was likely to prove useful in itself, but for now: for now there was only the crack of flesh impacting wood in all the wrong ways, and Sasuke's stifled grunt of pain as he let the Sharingan flood his vision, watching his own chakra respond to the green glow of medical ninjutsu he applied to the injury, healing it.

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Spending his afternoon effectively training someone else on their anatomy -- not how Sasuke had envisioned the day going. Only clan-trained politeness kept the thought from surfacing, and he was already hunting for a way to turn down her offer without making the upcoming mission awkward when she offered her second suggestion.

It prompted him to raise his eyebrow a second time, though this time it was accompanied with a scrutinizing once-over, trying to decide if Sakura was the kind of person who tolerated pain well. Hard to tell just from looking, though he could make assumptions based on the kinds of expressions she generally turned to the world. It wasn't a terrible idea, but ultimately ...

"The policy for medical ninjutsu is to not train on humans," he said, albeit somewhat reluctantly. "Other humans, at least. Genjutsu training would help only as practice in maintaining chakra control."

Which wasn't in itself a bad idea, if he thought about it. Genjutsu could mimic the usual distraction-rich field of combat.

He vastly underestimated her grip of the human anatomy: at least when it came to manipulating a genjutsu and using the other person's knowledge of anatomy against themselves. If she knew his feelings on the matter, she might even insist she prove her abilities on the matter, as a matter of pride.

"If it's the policy to train it on yourself, shouldn't you be in the hospital, in a place they reserve for that sort of medical nin training?" If it were a sanctioned and expected training method for medic nin, she strongly doubted that Konoha would expect budding medic nin to endanger themselves without supervision any more than it did its genin and chuunin.

She didn't feel the need to voice that thought any more than she already had, though. Instead she tilted her head slightly. "Genjutsu would allow you to attempt to heal under circumstances conventional training wouldn't. Such as healing someone else instead of yourself while coping with a severe injury you might get on a battlefield. Right?"

It was technically true that medic-nin normally practiced healing humans in the controlled environment of the hospital. Technically. But Sasuke technically wasn't a medic-nin, which meant that he didn't need to wait for an instructor to be around before attempting human healing.

That, and he'd decided to take his cue from Tsunade's first response to his statement that he wasn't about to leave front-line combat, no matter how much medical training he ended up going through. If she could casually break his arm in the middle of an empty training field and tell him to heal it, he could definitely do it to himself. Whether that explanation would fly with anyone at the hospital wasn't relevant as long as no one at the hospital found out.

It was partially for that reason and partially out of genuine interest that Sasuke latched onto her suggestion instead of answering her first question, folding his arms with a faint habitual frown.

"You're saying that you'll replicate battlefield conditions in order for me to test my focus and chakra control?" Was genjutsu her specialty or something? There was no reason for her to offer something like that otherwise. "Very well. I won't use the Sharingan, so you can build whatever illusion you want."

She's pretty sure, if the fact that he wasn't technically a medic-nin came up, that he should be under supervision with that kind of training even more. Students who haven't become genin weren't given more freedom in their training than genin, after all. She'd doubt a little how much he knew about what proper training was if he was still in the training phase.

...As for the actions of the sannin, she'd always found the sannin to be pretty mysterious, so. There wasn't anything she could say on that matter. The legendary trio were all strange and missing from Konoha last she'd seen, so they were maybe not the best people to take examples from. As loyal and stationary Konoha nin.

She nodded slightly, rather than give any verbal confirmation of his question. It went without saying, in her opinion, that she could replicate any number of battlefield conditions, both ones he'd likely run into, and extreme conditions he wasn't ever likely to. (or couldn't, but would push his control and focus to an extreme, hopefully).

Her first inclination was to reject his offer to turn off his Sharingan, as she would if he were Shisui, but...that would lead only to questions and logical conclusions that she were training with a Sharingan (rather than being wary of or avoiding Sharingan interference when building a genjutsu like an independent genjutsu user should) and that would compromise her training with Shisui. So, she simply gave a slight lift of her shoulder. "If you think that will help, that's fine. But you should sit down first."

Since it was generally best, when using immersive genjutsu like what she preferred. His legs could stop supporting him and he wouldn't realize it, after all.

Though he kept his expression cool on the outside, Sasuke had to breathe a sigh of relief internally. Maybe he was too used to people who liked to pry and doggedly clung to a topic until it was beaten into the ground -- he'd halfway expected Sakura to insist on pursuing a line of inquiry into his medical training, something which would have inevitably ended in unwanted consequences.

Instead, he apparently had an afternoon of genjutsu to look forward to. Even with a genjutsu genius for a brother (then again, what wasn't Itachi a genius in), Sasuke had never particularly pursued genjutsu as a favoured tactic. It was probably past time he spent more time on it.

Sitting down wasn't something he expected, though he complied after shooting her a perplexed look.

"Alright," he said once he was seated in a habitual seiza. Taking stock of his chakra, he deliberately relaxed his guard and nodded to her. "Go ahead."

He was looking at the wrong person if he expected someone to pry into his matters. She didn't know him well enough for that to be her business. Sakura rarely had the energy or the interest to pry where she wasn't wanted at any rate.

Genjutsu was a fairly new thing for her, too. She'd only discovered she could be any good at it the year before after she became a Chuunin. She'd just latched onto it and worked hard since then, so...given that he was an Uchiha, if he tried at all he'd probably be able to easily surpass her skill in a far shorter amount of time.

She ignored his perplexed look, however. Why he would be confused with something like that, she didn't know.

She gave a small nod, and after a moment of calculation, lifted her hands to engage her chosen genjutsu. It was a bit of a shame she couldn't just activate it with a look like the Uchiha could, but she was working on ways to make it less obvious (and give less time to react to it) that she was using genjutsu anyway.

Strictly speaking, she didn't have a genjutsu go-to for what he wanted. So even when he wasn't trying to break out of it, it would be an exercise for her: ensnare him in a simple sensory deprivation genjutsu, and then re-add the sights, sounds, and smells she wanted him to have by manipulating his chakra and perception with her own.

Crafting genjutsu was always a curious thing, like painting a picture by standing behind the easel and reaching around it. She couldn't see anything she did, but she knew what she was manipulating well enough to know what she was making the other person see. At least as far as her creation went. What details his mind added automatically to make it 'real' once it was convinced what it was experiencing she could only guess at.

Well. That's how it worked with this sort of creative genjutsu, anyway. Ones that relied entirely on the other person's mind, like the certain one she was still developing, that was like handing them the brush and strapping their wrist to the easel. She had no idea what it was at all except by judging their reaction.

In this case, she knew she'd created a hectic battlefield, and a faceless ninja with a various array of life-threatening injuries (taken mostly from what she'd been taught to inflict), and indistinct shouts from other injuried shinobi in the distance. It seemed simple enough while being what he wanted, and starting out simple was much easier than complicated. Even if he wasn't fighting to escape it, if he instinctively found it 'wrong' because it was too sudden and intense then it served no purpose. Right?

The downside of handling genjutsu from a non-Uchiha was needing to extend the usual courtesy of not using the Sharingan. He was accustomed to Itachi's illusion-work, used to being immersed in a genjutsu in the span of a breath, so actually watching Sakura form seals was an interesting experience. It made restricting the Sharingan more of a pain, the instinct to watch the chakra shape rising until he quashed it and let his control on the rest of his chakra ease.

It was subtle: he would give her that. Details faded in smoothly, as if they had always been part of the environment, birdsong giving way to distant shouts and then closer screeches of metal on metal, a battlefield as busy as an outright war -- nothing Sasuke had experienced personally, but certainly distracting -- and when he looked down to see a wounded man in front of him, it seemed to follow naturally as a matter of course.

He was impressed.

And then he was scrambling forward to react when the man coughed and blood gurgled out of his mouth; most likely a punctured lung, Sasuke automatically catalogued, and drew a kunai to slice the faceless victim's uniform apart and expose the injuries. A handful of scattered cuts -- definitely sword-work -- and the deeper stab wound that was most likely causing the hacking of blood.

Green chakra buzzed to the surface of his hands, Sasuke brushing over the other cuts just enough to ascertain nothing else crucial had been hit before focusing on the stab, probing chakra through it to determine whether there was significant flooding of the lungs yet.

It wasn't an unconvincing injury.

Yes, well. No amount of training would actually give her a dojutsu, unfortunately. Even if her genjutsu skills one day surpassed that of a sharingan (in a particularly wild fantasy world), she would still be forced to use handsigns to perform it. Simply looking was a privilege reserved for a clan she had no blood from.

It was difficult to say whether he was taken by the genjutsu completely, or if he was simply activating his chakra to heal the person because that was the plan. She assumed it was the latter however, and channeled more of her own chakra into the connection to strengthen the genjutsu. Although she was sure he'd still get practice performing the jutsu if he was aware it was a genjutsu...it would be much easier to ignore distractions and remain calm if he was still aware he wasn't in reality.

So. She focused on manipulating his chakra to convince his mind into believing what he was seeing (whatever it was--some of the details of the injuries were from his own memories and knowledge about the human body, not hers) and slowly dialed up the interference around him into much nearer battle. Battle that could potentially harm the victim or himself, if a jutsu or weapon missed the intended target.

Using his own memories and knowledge of the injuries ought to make the injury convincing (whether she could on her own wasn't important, when he had his own knowledge she could use against him)...and hopefully combining a subconscious signal that it was his information, and therefore right would translate into 'real', and infect the rest of his perception with the belief that he was in reality and not genjutsu.

Perhaps it was a cheap trick, but she couldn't hold back her cheap tricks when dealing with an Uchiha.

It was beyond weird to be willingly submerged in a genjutsu, and for a while the injury under Sasuke's hands was only given only perfunctory attention while he glanced around to examine more of the details. The relaxation of his chakra made a difference, though; when the surge of sound that came with a battle drawing nearer arrived, it was unexpected enough that he shifted into a defensive half-crouch, instinctively responding to a closer threat.

Instinct helped immerse him more deeply, in the end -- a mis-aimed kunai clipped past Sasuke's ear close enough that he forgot it wasn't real and flinched out of its path, attention focusing back onto the buzz of chakra between his palms and the stranger. Stranger, but someone wearing a Konoha forehead protector, so an ally who was injured and needed healing.

Not so injured as to be written off. He'd seen this type of wound before, and the first step was to force his natural chakra habits into submission and drain what blood had already flooded the tissue of the lungs; engrossed in drawing it out, it was easy to forget what was and wasn't real.

The world narrowed to just enough awareness to note any attack rushing in his direction and the blood sucking out of the wound, fizzling where it hit the core of chakra and drying into an ugly mess -- but at least a mess that wasn't internal.

She wouldn't know why he found it so strange; willingly submerging oneself into genjutsu and then breaking out was a basic part of genjutsu training. Dealing with Uchiha, it seemed, was the same from Uchiha to Uchiha, though. Even without the sharingan they were more difficult to completely seize control of their chakra.

It was a little tricky in this case though, just because she needed him to be able to manipulate some of his chakra freely, but not so much that he could break the illusion around him in the process. It meant his chakra network had to be an organized chaos, mixed up and unusable everywhere but where he needed to access it for healing the imaginary person. And she needed to ensure it was spent without actually being actively used the way he wanted it to be (in case that could cause damage or interfere in some way, since he wasn't actually healing anyone).

It was a challenge, but that was the point.

She noted with some satisfaction when she watched his muted chakra finally succumb into the pattern she usually noted in those firmly ensnared in her genjutsu (that was, easily manipulated by hers). It was hard to tell if he was completely submerged, due to his atypical arrangement of chakra in the genjutsu, but it seemed safe enough for her to begin to ramp up on the distractions and require them to be less sensical without fear of breaking the illusion. Deep enough, much like a dream, logic and cause-effect wasn't as necessary. Or at all, eventually.

She didn't actually know what his phobias were, other than vague guesses. In the end, she worked on increasing pressure (accessing deeper, more dangerous injuries, and dropping more shinobi around him, more injuries and the need to move faster). And...more distractions. Fire was her first go-to...but after that she brought natural disasters and insects, just because--as an Uchiha--it was always possible he didn't care about fire.

Pneumothorax was a pain to heal, but more of a pain to experience, which meant that by the time Sasuke was done with the Konoha-nin under his hands, the man had passed out cold. Glancing up, he spotted another pair of shinobi stumbling for cover and another that was too badly injured to move off the field -- a mess that left him deflecting a pair of kunai and forced him to knock out a rather generic-looking Mist-nin before dragging his ward to the same patch of bushes that the two injured were using for cover.

Neither were critical, which meant that priority went to the ninja still lying prone in the field. The field that, when Sasuke looked out again, was now apparently changing hands between a proficient Katon user and a swarm of bugs. Not Aburame bugs, or at least Sasuke assumed not Aburame bugs because they were attacking Konoha-nin instead of assisting.

He'd rather fire than bugs any day, he thought with irritation, blasting a shield of it in front of him to incinerate the cloud of buzzing pests that had descended on his would-be patient. Badly wrenched bone here, enough that the victim hadn't been able to move but not so much that it needed immediate on-location attention.

He was in the middle of pulling the nin with the broken bone to shelter when he saw it -- a flash of dark hair and pale palms, Jyuuken snapping through a huddle of enemy-nin, and a half-smirk curled his mouth at the familiar chakra technique so close by.

It vanished immediately when the crack of shattered bone sounded clearly through the recitation of each step. He was too far to tell which Hyuuga it was, but something about the chakra had been --

Med-nin priorities are what's in front of them and whatever supports the mission objective -- funny that he couldn't recall the exact objective right now, but he definitely had bone jutting out of flesh in front of him. There were other Konoha-nin on the field, he was sure of it -- med-nin priorities --

"Damn it," he growled out loud, and pushed the ninja he was healing deeper into the covering brush. Green medical chakra buzzed as quickly as he could make it move, working with him to grab the splintered bone back together and start pushing it back under skin. For all the delicacy of the technique, at least part of his attention was directed toward where he'd seen the Hyuuga chakra.

He wasn't alone out here, that made sense, which meant his team ... but priorities -- "Damn it!"

She could see--sense, rather, given she didn't have any dojutsu techniques that allowed her to physically see his chakra network--the disturbances in his chakra network as he struggled with the genjutsu. Unfortunately, she could only monitor his level of emotions and stress, and how deeply he was entrenched in the genjutsu, with her connection to him.

She couldn't tell exactly how he was doing in there, or how well he was dealing with the genjutsu fears thrown at him. He wasn't trying to resist her genjutsu in any way that indicated an attempted escape to her, and the part of his chakra she allowed him to keep access to wasn't completely disturbed with panic or distraction, though. There was no reason she couldn't leave him at this level, but since she didn't know how well he was distracted, and his current state suggested he wasn't at his limit, she didn't.

There wasn't a point to a training that didn't push you to some limit or another, right?

For this, she dipped into more specific shinobi fears: worse wounds, more injuries that made it harder to keep up with as one medic (pressure was a good idea to push him with, she thought), and...endangering his teammates specifically.

She had to rely on a thin representation of them that his mind would fill out, though, because she didn't know them well enough to take a direct hand in manipulating them. After a moment or two of contemplation, she decided to make up for that by making certain to cross the feeds of 'hostile threat' and 'loved one'. The inherent confusion involved in turning an ally or loved one against him would help cover up for other weaknesses in the genjutsu.

It wasn't that she didn't want to work on those weaknesses, mind, it was that some weaknesses couldn't be avoided when dealing with enemies: she was never really likely to know their loved ones well enough to back them up with her own knowledge of them. Better to practice the distraction and smoke-screen techniques around those weaknesses.

There was something off about all this, but he couldn't put his finger on it. It made him want to let the Sharingan bleed into his eyes, but there was a reason he couldn't -- even if the reason wasn't clear right now, he was certain of it, it had probably been in mission parametres to stay low-key and avoid letting the enemy know there were Uchiha on the field right now. That wasn't impossible, even if there were Hyuuga using their bloodline-limit techniques on the field. It wasn't as if Hyuuga eyes could be disguised.

More distracting than the vague sense that there wasn't quite as much information for him to work with here as there should have been, though, was the fact that the ninja under his hands was stirring and kicking up a fuss. It was bad enough to be guiding bone back into flesh without the owner of it starting to struggle in woozy alarm, and after a few fruitless moments Sasuke simply reached over and pinched a nerve in the man's neck, knocking him out.

A few moments was too many moments to lose in a battlefield like this, though. Sasuke snapped out bandages taut around the wound with a glare at his surroundings. There still wasn't anything clearly --

And then there was a strange tug, something that felt like his chakra had been disturbed, but not directly. Like a side-door had been opened, the flow of everything unsettled, which ... but it was just Naruto, after all, stumbling into the clearing looking battered but no worse for wear. Sasuke cast a critical, if somewhat jaundiced, eye over his teammate's wounds, about to snap at him to get in line if he wasn't losing internal organs, when branches snapped and the blur of Hyuuga movement that he'd spotted suddenly reappeared.

Hinata. Hinata, spinning in a graceful movement to drive her chakra-buzzing palm directly into Naruto's spine with a sickening crack.

"Wh --" Sasuke started, staring blankly. "What --"

Outside the genjutsu, his chakra flared in a sudden blast, an instinctive push that would have disturbed a weaker or more unwilling illusion.

A part of her actually expected and wanted him to use his sharingan, because that was the sort of training she was used to...but it was best that he didn't. Using her techniques against the sharingan would raise suspicions about why someone like her might have any experience with the sharingan at all, and potentially implicate Shisui as her teacher. So, that he continued not to use it was a good thing. She could practice her technique of cutting off his access to the sharingan while in genjutsu when she next had the chance to train with Shisui.

Still, she remained alert, ready for the inevitable reaction to her newest technique. Theoretically, he could leave the genjutsu at any time he chose to since this was only training. But he'd have to try much harder than that for her to determine he'd remembered his situation and wanted out. For one, she'd expect him to activate his sharingan, and for another she expected an actual fight for control when he wanted his freedom, considering the genjutsu skill Uchiha were known for, and how it was with her usual training.

This chakra flare she was prepared for, and rather than completely stand firm and risk slipping her grip or alerting him subconsciously to the resistance, she reacted much like she might to waves on a ship, shifting and adjusting the rest of his chakra network along with his flare of activity and then settling it back down when it passed. Within, presuming she got the timing and shape right (and she liked to think she did) the illusion should remain undisturbed.

Whatever was happening inside his mind, clearly the choice to combine threat and friend was the correct one.

Self-suggestion would only last so long when the Sharingan had been so deeply ingrained into his every technique for so many years, but for now Sasuke could only distantly piece together that he couldn't use it. And it was easy to be distracted, because Naruto had crumpled to the ground without a sound and Hinata was poised over him, arm curved back in a finishing strike.

Controlled, she had to be -- some kind of jutsu that took the body away from the mind, because Hinata would never -- there was something terribly wrong about the way Naruto was bent. His eyes were registering it but the brain wasn't, the unnatural angle of spine, the perfect stillness of the body.

"Stop," he started, too quiet, and then louder: "Stop!"

The chakra he'd released had disappeared into the environment, undirected as it was: he focused it more, now, slamming his hands together to flicker: never a technique he'd made much use of, his training relying so heavily on natural speed as it was, but he needed to move and move fast. He reappeared closer to his teammates, hands outstretched to knock Hinata out of commission and keep her from doing any further damage, and then someone appeared before he could.

Someone with a sharp blade and no hesitation in killing grace. The sound of metal slicing through cloth and flesh hit the air before blood did, Sasuke's hands still reaching until they were splattered with it.

"Brother ..." It was a whisper, shocked, and now there was the beginning of the Sharingan stirring, an unavoidable instinct even with the insistent sense that he shouldn't use it. Chakra flooded again, a conscious attempt at dispelling genjutsu this time: because this had to be fake. It couldn't be real, Itachi standing over him holding a sword wet with Hinata's blood, red eyes cold. It couldn't be real, and he focused this time, seeking the edges of his own chakra, looking for where it had to be entangled with a lie.

There were strong arguments for letting Sasuke go given he was attempting to break free of the genjutsu now, and so clearly whatever he was seeing was unacceptable. However, as an Uchiha, he should be more than capable of breaking free no matter how hard she tried to keep him there. Even if she were to exploit sharingan specific weaknesses to keep him under -- and she wouldn't, because she valued her freedom -- someone without one would always be at a disadvantage when facing an Uchiha that did have one. Uchiha were born with genjutsu ingrained in their chakra networks, she'd only learned to manipulate genjutsu.

Thus, she felt no guilt in fighting back against his attempts to break it. This was, after all, also genjutsu training. She reacted immediately to the concentrated burst, bending and adjusting her chakra to ride out his flare of chakra. For the moment, she also bent the rules on not using sharingan specific disguises. Hiding her chakra threads by merging with his and using his as camouflage wasn't exactly going to compromise Shisui...She could simply be innately talented.

...But just to be certain he was too distracted to notice, once his initial attempt to break free passed, she countered by over-stimulating his fear center. It carried the risk of making the genjutsu more disjointed and nightmarish than a cohesive scenario, but like a nightmare it would hopefully confuse and scatter his thoughts badly enough that he wouldn't think about that.

She could ease it back to a real world level genjutsu once his focus was broken. An Uchiha was much too well trained for that to work as a subliminal command not to try to escape again, but it should do well to keep him from asking how she'd hidden (or noticing where she failed) her chakra amongst his.

There was a disruption, but more than that there was blood dripping off his brother's blade and Hinata's body stilling, the shock of pain stiffening muscles until the brain dies first, stops sending the signal to the heart to beat, the eyes stop seeing, the body releases. The wet impact of her body (corpse) against Naruto's (corpse), entangled as they'd never been in life, and the red, red, red eyes of --

Itachi, stepping forward and raising his sword again, and Sasuke lost the edge of his chakra control for just a moment in sheer disbelief. The moment was all it took before the sense that he'd found something wrong was gone, but before he could think about it he was staring into an unfamiliar pair of eyes, Itachi's Sharingan mutated somehow. Darker, an unnatural warped shape to it, and in a blink the world around him had shifted into a smear reds and blacks. Primal fear, bloodline fear, that the eyes were lying, that they were no longer useful.

There was a jutsu he could use, here, because the only reason Itachi would -- the only reason Itachi would --

"You're a disappointment, little brother," Itachi's voice cut through his frantic gathering of chakra, and Sasuke gasped for air as a foot suddenly landed on the back of his head, digging into the base of his neck. His brother stood in front of him, so that had to mean --

"You're a disappointment of a son," Fugaku's voice arose, not so much the image of him as the sense of him bleeding into the blood-moon world, and the echo ringed around him: you're a disappointment, you're unfit for the name you bear, you're a disappointment. His mother, hands folded in front of her, eyes cool, standing behind Itachi's shoulder. Aunts, uncles, Shisui too, he thought in a blank breathless panic, and the ranks parting for --

Obito --

But sensei said, unfinished half-protest, knees sinking somehow where he was still bent beneath the pressure of his father's weight and Obito's voice at its coldest professional hue: "You have proved unworthy as my student and as a shinobi of this village, Sasuke."

Echoing again through the crowd, a ripple of noise that limned the crimson haze of light, the black pools of Uchiha eyes and Uchiha voices and: unworthy, a rising hiss of noise. His body still sinking into something viscous, something coating his hands, and in his hands were -- when had he picked up kunai? When had he --

Itachi stepped forward and over Naruto and Hinata's bodies, faces slack, laid out on their backs as if on a funeral pyre. Their throats were slit, blood draining to -- and that was what Sasuke was sinking in, against the murmuring crescendo (a failure, worthless) until suddenly his chin was forced up so his gaze locked onto his brother's warped Sharingan.

"I never wanted you for a brother," Itachi hissed, low and menacing and bloodless, as if all the warmth Sasuke knew in him had drained into the blood he was sinking in as well -- submerged to the waist, Sasuke reached out with one hand only to have it slapped away, something unwanted and annoying. A nuisance, a -- "Waste, that's what you were. A waste of my time. As if you'd ever be good enough to match me, let alone protect me. Your have no value to this village, to this clan, or to me. Your only future is to live a low life, to crawl and run and hide like the insect you are."

"Brother," choked out, audible outside the genjutsu, and then Itachi's hand was on the back of his head and pushing -- shoving his face into the mingled muck of his teammates' blood. It filled his lungs in one stunned gasp and finally, finally his Sharingan flared, a pure adrenaline rush rising with it to shred the genjutsu with a wave of chakra that gusted through the clearing, first chakra-nature telling as it heated the air for a moment.

Sasuke stayed where he was, doubled over, and tried desperately to bring his breathing back under control.

Edited 2014-10-26 04:40 (UTC)

She had to release her own chakra quickly just to avoid too much recoil from that spike of chakra. She expected him to break free eventually, but the violence of his life scape was unexpected. Had the genjutsu been too intense...? Surely the Uchiha had worse things in store for their training. Shisui was always able to match her efforts after all.

She held one arm up in a defensive posture, in case the heat for his chakra might not be the only way he lashed out in a post-genjutsu confusion, and stared across the way at him in a mixture of concern and surprise. Not wariness, because despite his abrupt reaction he did nothing aggressive, but concern all the same.

Should she say something? It was only genjutsu, he wouldn't need a medic, and he obviously was neither completely alright nor mentally disturbed enough to need restorative action...

"...Brother?"

No, that probably wasn't what she should say.

The Sharingan was still spinning in his eyes, the comfort of its grey-tinted clarity serving to remind him of the difference between reality and illusion. The earliest training a Sharingan-user got was that difference, when vision could be trusted and when it could lie, but he'd willingly subsumed himself in the illusion -- he'd forgotten how quickly genjutsu could take hold of the senses.

And that one had done more. There was something about it that he couldn't put his finger on, mind still whirring through images and deconstructing them now with Sharingan-memory; the little things that had been wrong with the way Hinata had moved, the lack of focus in Naruto's expression.

The cruel disappointment in Itachi's voice.

Those things should have tipped him off in a regular genjutsu, but it had escalated so quickly, and something about it had used -- something more than his own entering reminder that he couldn't break the genjutsu --

But the single word from Sakura brought his head up with a jerk, the motion a full-body flinch. It was a question. Had she not --

"Did you see it?" He asked, voice hoarse.

She tried not to look at him with curiosity that was...too obvious. An Uchiha, one who knew from the start that he was under genjutsu, shouldn't be reacting so poorly. She'd done her worst to Shisui (at his behest) and never returned anything but approval or perhaps his being briefly winded.

Could it be that the technique she was testing was effective after all? It was mostly just a hunch, so she hadn't been sure the genjutsu wouldn't just completely unravel when she attempted it, or that the lack of fine control from her end wouldn't make it lose shape and believability.

She frowned silently for a few moments. His movement, expression, and his voice told her to be concerned for him. He was obviously under distress or recovering from a great amount of distress beyond that of what a genjutsu itself would exert on a body and chakra circuits.

But...this was Sasuke Uchiha. Someone like her couldn't really do any significant harm to him, probably not even if she tried, unless she were to kill him.

"...What was it?" She didn't. Obviously she hadn't seen it, if there was a way to witness a genjutsu cast on someone else (apparently there was), she didn't know how. As she'd allowed his own mind to conjure up most of the genjutsu--if that had indeed worked--she didn't even have any idea what it would be, other than that it had to be influenced by deep rooted fears and anxiety.

But if he chose to interpret her words to mean something different from that, she wouldn't necessarily change his mind of that either.

She didn't know. Sasuke's expression grew incredulous, first, because as deliberately cruel as the illusion had been it must have been calculated -- but then his breath finally caught pace with his heart, the rhythm of both steadying. Sakura didn't know him as anything more than an Academy schoolmate, and certainly not well enough to conjure up anything as detailed as what had been on that battlefield. The errors had been too minute, not accidents so much as ... deliberate, almost.

But he certainly hadn't created the images from nothing and cast a genjutsu on himself. This was something he'd never encountered before, something almost more sense-feel than chakra-feel lingering over skin, and --

Relief. The content of it had been -- nothing a near-stranger needed to see, and certainly nothing a near-stranger deserved to see.

"A battlefield," he answered shortly, drawing himself up and straightening his spine with a careful focus, finding the breath to steady his voice. His eyes still didn't quite meet hers, but he occupied his hands with dusting himself off -- "It was immersive. An excellent use of chakra."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[July 14th, open]

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tl;dr incoming

Giving u an easy one liner tag.

gives one back

responds with a one word ta -- wait what the heck is life scape. wow, autocorrect

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