fic pimp!

Okay cindelius, OMG THANK YOU. Would you like your babies fresh or baked into a pie?

So the fic of the day is... *dun dun dun* a Kakashi/Sakura.

*watches people fall over in shock*

Duty Before Honor, by SilverShine. ♥

So Sakura is seventeen and a jounin, and she gets one of them zomg Kunoichi missions, ohnoes. Kakashi is assigned as her partner/backup.

Simply put. It's awesome.

It doesn't:

-make Sakura a Sue (she's so in character it hurts)
---make Sakura too strong and awesome and perfect (sometimes she freezes when she's faced with things outside her experience, and when she's unsure she can't help but instinctively wish for Kakashi's help -- force of habit? XD -- even though in the end she often ends up saving herself)
---make Sakura too weak and scared and wahh protect me all the time. (she can kick serious ass when she gets into it. XD)

The balance between Sakura the Jounin, student to the Hokage, and Sakura, the girl who was the weakest of Kakashi's Genins and has never had a kunoichi mission before, IMHO, is very well handled.

-Make Kakashi a smooth perfect mysterious man. He's also horribly, horribly IC, funny sometimes and lazy and confusing, incredibly caring but forbidding himself to show it because he thinks he has no right, and so riddled with issues and yet still highly functionning and mmm.

-make me barf because it's borderline child abuse -- Sakura is seventeen and Kakashi hasn't been her teacher for years, so there's no huge icky ethics issue, and what's left of it isn't ignored.

-forget everything about Sasuke, Naruto, Ino, Tsunade, her family and everyone -- even though the action quickly takes Kakashi and Sakura away from them, we get a clear sense of a whole village (and IC too!) around Sakura -- they're not living in a vacuum of lurve where no one else exists beyond the two of them and a handful of carton cutouts.

-The few bad guy OCs are handled well enough for their purposes, and they're also consistent with their own characterization (even though we don't see much of them XD). For example, the really badass villain does not drop the whole matter easily, and is not defeated by Sakura suddenly overpowering him because she's just that awesome.

-Sakura's feelings for Sasuke haven't been excused as a "aha, I was young and silly, I think he sucks now" thing.

-Sakura's feelings for Kakashi aren't immediately ZOMG I'M IN LURVE. She's confused, a little weirded out by the "but he was my teacher" thing, and quite baffled at her developing crush.

-oh oh oh! no spoiler details, but: no "zomg homosexuality so never happens that I don't even need to mention it in certain situations where it would be utterly logical to have at least a quick reference to it." ♥ Instant ten points just for those moments.


Also, Sakura's feelings and reactions -- over being forced into non-consensual stuff for the sake of the mission, over Kakashi, over her teammates and Ino -- are delightfully complex and IC (to me at least. She's a lot more IC than Teamwork!Sakura at any rate XD), and usually avoid the usual cliches and shortcuts.


Oh, it's not perfect, there are some cliche situations, (and I don't really agree with how little Sakura knew about the male body), but the writing is so engaging that I forgot the slight snags easily enough. (and for the context of the story, her ignorance works well enough :p) Some of the cliches themselves are handled in a way that made me think "oh hey, maybe that's why they became cliches. They're really quite likely." and the author doesn't actually take the several cheap ways to smut she gave herself, prefering instead to let the characters do what they're actually more likely to do in those situations.


In short, upon thinking about it afterwards, there might be some small "huh" moments; but when I was reading? Totally didn't bother me. I snickered when the characters said or did funny stuff, grinned in places, was very uncomfortable along with Sakura during the mission, almost bounced in my seat during the actionny bits, and went "aww" quite a few times. Well-balanced, angsty-with-some-funny action/romance fic, with neither the romance nor the mission taking over -- rather, they feed off each other; there's no feeling of two separate plots that happen to happen at the same time.

Of course it's incomplete, but it doesn't matter. For chapters that good and that long, I can wait. ^___^

(I really want to see Naruto and Sasuke actually in the story, though, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't matter. The few flashbacks are funny and they haven't been entirely forgotten, that's all that matters.)



and yes, yes, I will reply to everyone in my previous post, gimme a minute. *lazy* XD