[Naruto] Late Night Gambles
Title: Late Night Gambles
Author: runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Summary: a collection of glimpses involving multiple characters, and gambles made in the middle of the night. Thirteen ways a title could go. Gen.
Notes: lita_of_jupiter left the title as a prompt for my 'give me the title of a fic I've never written and I'll give you details about it' waaaaaaay back. I'm posting it mostly because I want to stop fiddling with it, because I have no idea where it comes from and where it's going. (Aka: what am I writing.)
1.
"I should never have introduced the two of you," Jiraiya grumbled.
In front of him, his student only laughed.
"I didn't need you to introduce me, sensei. Everyone knows Tsunade-san!"
Jiraiya didn't answer, only scowled and handed over the bra the grinning blond had just won. He gazed mournfully as his prize disappeared in his student's pocket with a casual flourish (who else could make such a gesture not only possible, but also normal? It wasn't natural, just like the brat's damn luck wasn't natural, not at all).
"I won it from her fair and square, too," he resentfully muttered. Knowing he acted like a child but unable to refrain himself. And, in spite of his disappointing loss, enjoying himself.
Again, the brat chuckled.
2.
The scalpel was cutting into skin with faint noises, squelching and metallic clicks, following the definition of the muscles to avoid puncturing too many blood vessels. Removing the glands didn't require as much concentration as it had in the beginning, since he had got the knack, but it was still a long, meticulous task.
While he worked, his hands unemotionally severing the tissues, he listened for foreign noises.
Ideally he would soon find a medic to carry out the practical parts of his research; his hand hovered above the still-pulsing yellowish sphere, finally cleared of its encasement of valueless flesh. The slightest slip could rupture the precious organ, and all of his work would be soiled. It was a necessary, but nevertheless time-consuming process, and there was only a limited stock of this precise resource. (Such tended to be the case with bloodline limits, he allowed.)
He took a moment to deplore Anko's uselessness in that respect, and his own failure to anticipate that his interference into her chakra would be likely to render her inoperative as a medic-nin.
Carefully sliding the gland onto a sterilised tray, Orochimaru wondered whether tonight would be the night where his sensei would give in to his advisors' suspicions, and break into his laboratories.
3.
It was always darkest before dawn; Lee remembered the expression when he decided to undergo the operation that had fifty percent chances of killing him.
Odds were too strong against him to actually come to pass.
4.
Sometimes Kisame looks at Itachi over the fire and he doesn't miss the way the flames flicker on the fixed blood-red of his partner's Sharingan.
He privately makes a bet with himself over how long it is until Itachi makes his use of the Mangekyou permanent, or if Itachi even could, now.
5.
Sometimes Suigetsu looks at Sasuke over the fire and he doesn't miss the way Sasuke's black eyes seem focused on something beyond the flames.
If he thought about it, he would suppose it's his brother Sasuke thinks about, but it's a whole lot of time to spend thinking about someone you want to kill (that's what Suigetsu would think if he thought about it), especially with such a blank air. Suigetsu wouldn't think even Sasuke, with all his amazing skills for looking like a blank statue of blankness, would be able to pull that one off. After all, he wants to kill the man.
But instead of nosing, even mentally, into Sasuke's emotional life or lack thereof (Sasuke may be too innocent to be real - even worse off than Juugo on some accounts, since Juugo is aware and wary of dangers Sasuke ignores as if they didn't exist, or as if he thought they couldn't have something to do with him, perhaps - but he certainly doesn't broadcast said hypothetical emotions), Suigetsu makes bets with himself over how long it is before Sasuke shuffles an inch away from Karin, who is leaningleaningleaning against him.
He could recruit Juugo into his bets, he thinks, and then he calls out loudly to Karin himself.
6.
Teetering on the verge of a precipice, Haku watched Zabuza sleeping and wondered if he dared slip into the other man's bed, and rest his head on Zabuza's chest.
Zabuza's lips made as if to mumble a sound, and Haku waited, breathless. If his name…
7.
Three medic-nins are busying themselves over and around the prone body of an unconscious ninja. The machines of the hospital are persistently beeping among their breezing.
The youngest of the three is sponging up the blood streaming from the man's abdomen, where the oldest is reconstructing his intestines seemingly from scratch or worse than scratch, while the last one is preparing endless and endless rows of bowls of chakra-enhanced waters.
All three look pale and deadly concentrated.
Sakura sweats more than her counterparts, and when she pushes up a lock from her sticky forehead with her wrist, in a moment of inattention, she leaves a streak of blood. She's never wished more desperately that she was just a blank malleable slate, but she's been taught that there are different types of chakra and that while it doesn't make a difference for healing, to infuse someone with chakra to make up for that which they lost, the chakra must be the same. Shizune's is the same as their patient's. Sakura's isn't.
Next to her, Tsunade growls before pushing her hand deeper into the mass of half-unformed wet flesh. The Sannin's brow is furrowed and her lips pursed into a thin line.
We're losing him, Sakura thinks.
It doesn't matter if the man is destined for Ibiki's care and not what Sakura, before she became a medic-nin, always thought medic-nins were supposed to preserve.
We're losing him, Sakura knows because it isn't the first time she helps her master patch up an enemy ninja whom his village believes to be dead for Intelligence and Interrogation purposes.
It doesn't matter that Konoha is ultimately going to kill him (probably; he might be used for an exchange, but doing so would require admitting to having something to do with his disappearance), Tsunade is fighting to save his life. Sakura isn't sure whether the energy she is putting in it is due to her being a medic-nin or her being the Hokage.
We're losing him, but the three will not stop until the man is dead.
Tsunade's most important lesson to Sakura is that a medic-nin always loses but never gives up. It's something Tsunade should know: even out of the hospital, she loses every of her bets.
It may be Tsunade's most important lesson, but it's one Sakura already knew, and one that doesn't erase the sagging faint lines of resignation and pain around Tsunade's eyes, and Sakura also noticed this.
The only way to make the lesson an effective one, Sakura decided, is to ignore it.
"Here, Shishou, go take some rest; I can keep his heart working for the next hour."
At the table, Shizune looks up and nods, hope blooming on her face.
Tsunade's eyes narrow thoughtfully. Sakura doesn't falter, because she is confident in her skill and confident that she is not making a meaningless offer.
After a moment Tsunade inclines her head.
The only way the lesson can work is to forget it.
8.
"Watch me," Ino sneers at a smirking Kiba, and, with a decisive torsion of the hips, walks up to the white-haired Sannin who is currently mumbling over the several stacks of papers and scrolls he has spread on the restaurant's table until some of them rolled onto the ground, a pen in his hand, which he is alternatively munching on or running with vengeful determination over the paper, crossing big parts of the handwritten text, and who is blissfully unaware of anything else going on.
"Jiraiya-sama!" she says in a simpering yet imperious voice.
Immediately, the Sannin startles and slams his arms down on his writing/reading material, an almost hounded expression on his face. He relaxes when he sees the slip of a girl. His eyes barely flicker down before settling back on her face, and he smiles widely.
"Hello, Yamanaka!"
Impressive, Ino judges. She hasn't ever talked to him, and he hasn't shown even one moment of hesitation. She understands she's one of the ninja in Konoha whose identity requires the less fumbling to guess correctly, but she prides herself on being an expert on self-confidence, and damn if that wasn't it.
"I see you are alone," she answers with a dazzling smile of her own. She's careful to keep her voice loud. "Would you mind me joining you?"
Back at the table, Kiba's jaw has hit the table, and Shikamaru remarks, "I told you Ino never backs down from a challenge. Especially after a mission."
9.
A fool was hardly the worst thing he'd been called, and he flickered through the night, his precious bundle (sleeping, sleeping, still sleeping blissfully with the fatigue that came from being born) in his arms, faster to leave the word behind and faster toward the roaring beast, blazing stronger with each life it put out.
It was a fool's gamble.
But then, he had a fool's luck.
10.
Hinata isn't going home until the log breaks. The moon is already high in the sky, but she's not going to.
It will take a while, since the Jyuuken isn't worth a damn against things without chakra, but it is an efficient way of measuring the time she spends training; thus, her training is never too short. The thought is comforting; she drops into a roll to the ground and twists up to strike at the log from behind.
She just has to break the wood before the bones in her hands break. She can do it.
11.
On the night before her son killed his closest friend, Mikoto called for a family meeting between her husband and his son.
She wanted to clear things up between the two of them. A father proud, concerned, and strict, and a teenager who was growing apart from his parents and the life they had planned out for him; and everything else.
She didn't turn on the lights when they sat, wanting to remind them that the Sharingan could see through the darkness, and that she was as much of an Uchiha as they were. Before she resigned when she was pregnant with her first child, she had been a jounin.
It was no secret among the clan that her Sharingan outclassed by far that of many. Her husband never had much aptitude for genjutsu. Not like Itachi and her; and not, according to every probability, like Sasuke. Their children were more hers than his.
Fugaku read too much in it, trying to reassure himself over things that should never have been questioned. But Mikoto never called him on it because Fugaku never accused her outright.
The Sharingan could see through darkness, but Mikoto doubted either of her sons saw through the part left unsaid in as I expected, you are my child.
She knew they would need time for their discussion; and that she was putting all of her remaining chances at salvaging a semblance of inner peace in her family on a late-night conversation between two men she knew to be equally stubborn.
She had prepared herself for it.
She hadn't counted on Sasuke waking up.
12.
Temari's smile as she closed the door was a tense, small affair. Kankuro wasn't paying too much attention to it, because he was faced with two jugs of sake and wondering whether they shouldn't have taken more. A whole lot more. There was possibly not enough sake in Suna for the upcoming night.
On the other hand, like Temari sensibly said when Kankuro commented upon it, getting drunk out of their mind would ruin the purpose. They were supposed to keep their wits to them.
Kankuro had refrained from pointing out that no amount of soberness would keep them alive if it turned out Gaara still shouldn't sleep, and that all in all he'd have preferred to spend his last remaining hours on earth roaringly drunk, since the option of feminine company was out. It wasn't, for once, the perspective of Temari snickering at him that stopped him.
Temari knew this as well as he did.
If they were there - sitting in front of Gaara's room, their backs to the wall, on a mat they had carried for this specific purpose - it was because they were the persons closest to Gaara in Suna. No-one was more aware of the extent of Gaara's powers than they, and no-one had more of a right to be there.
Possibly because no-one was crazy enough to do it, Kankuro reflected, but as a jounin - even a Suna jounin - and someone who had met a number of Leaf-nins, including but not limited to the pretty-boy jailbait Temari was boning (it was illegal in Suna; Kankuro had looked it up in case the kid ever came for a visit, but the Leaf didn't have such provision because Suna and Konoha were nominal allies), he was okay with it. Too bad Uzumaki Naruto had had to leave, otherwise they would've been three waiting for the world to melt down into a swirl of hungry howling sand. Gaara would have liked that.
Their being here was on the whole useless.
They couldn't hope to stop Gaara if somehow turned out that his sleep had retained demonic qualities (Kankuro knew he could ask for an immigration warrant to Konoha because 'the demonic qualities of someone's sleep' was a reality that made sense to him). Temari might be able to summon one of her weasels and send him away as a messenger of doom, except that there was no authority to be warned in the middle of the night.
And if Gaara, in fact, would sleep off his fifteen years of forced insomnia without a noxious side-effect, then Temari and Kankuro were getting worked up over-Kankuro couldn't find in himself to think nothing.
It wouldn't be nothing. It would be their kid brother first full night of sleep. Or handful of days, because Kankuro imagined Gaara' body would be pretty insistent on catching up on fifteen years of missed sleep, or something, but still.
Fateful moment.
He was suddenly hit by the awful, mind-numbing, bottom-of-stomach-dropping thought that it might be how a parent would feel over their kids' first tooth, or something, and he violently shuddered.
"He must've fallen asleep by now," Temari muttered, her head resting against the wall and her jaw clenched. "His eyes were closing on their own when I left, and he doesn't have a coffee machine inside."
Wordlessly, he pushed one of the jugs of sake toward her. She looked at it for a moment, then snorted.
"If we start drinking now we'll be snoring before half the night is through," she said derisively.
He grunted in agreement. "Later."
Temari nodded, her body relaxing but her nails drumming on the fan resting next to her. It was only when Kankuro saw her do it that he realised his own fingers were running on the three scrolls that contained his puppets.
"We need to be ready for when the assassins come," Temari needlessly added.
Yeah. The rest was unsure, but this they could do. Kankuro hoped they'd be able to get rid of a few council members after that.
13.
Naruto doesn't wait to see whether the star falls behind the waterfall or not. Either way the waterfall is still there. Either way Sasuke is waiting.
Either way he wins.
Author: runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Summary: a collection of glimpses involving multiple characters, and gambles made in the middle of the night. Thirteen ways a title could go. Gen.
Notes: lita_of_jupiter left the title as a prompt for my 'give me the title of a fic I've never written and I'll give you details about it' waaaaaaay back. I'm posting it mostly because I want to stop fiddling with it, because I have no idea where it comes from and where it's going. (Aka: what am I writing.)
1.
"I should never have introduced the two of you," Jiraiya grumbled.
In front of him, his student only laughed.
"I didn't need you to introduce me, sensei. Everyone knows Tsunade-san!"
Jiraiya didn't answer, only scowled and handed over the bra the grinning blond had just won. He gazed mournfully as his prize disappeared in his student's pocket with a casual flourish (who else could make such a gesture not only possible, but also normal? It wasn't natural, just like the brat's damn luck wasn't natural, not at all).
"I won it from her fair and square, too," he resentfully muttered. Knowing he acted like a child but unable to refrain himself. And, in spite of his disappointing loss, enjoying himself.
Again, the brat chuckled.
2.
The scalpel was cutting into skin with faint noises, squelching and metallic clicks, following the definition of the muscles to avoid puncturing too many blood vessels. Removing the glands didn't require as much concentration as it had in the beginning, since he had got the knack, but it was still a long, meticulous task.
While he worked, his hands unemotionally severing the tissues, he listened for foreign noises.
Ideally he would soon find a medic to carry out the practical parts of his research; his hand hovered above the still-pulsing yellowish sphere, finally cleared of its encasement of valueless flesh. The slightest slip could rupture the precious organ, and all of his work would be soiled. It was a necessary, but nevertheless time-consuming process, and there was only a limited stock of this precise resource. (Such tended to be the case with bloodline limits, he allowed.)
He took a moment to deplore Anko's uselessness in that respect, and his own failure to anticipate that his interference into her chakra would be likely to render her inoperative as a medic-nin.
Carefully sliding the gland onto a sterilised tray, Orochimaru wondered whether tonight would be the night where his sensei would give in to his advisors' suspicions, and break into his laboratories.
3.
It was always darkest before dawn; Lee remembered the expression when he decided to undergo the operation that had fifty percent chances of killing him.
Odds were too strong against him to actually come to pass.
4.
Sometimes Kisame looks at Itachi over the fire and he doesn't miss the way the flames flicker on the fixed blood-red of his partner's Sharingan.
He privately makes a bet with himself over how long it is until Itachi makes his use of the Mangekyou permanent, or if Itachi even could, now.
5.
Sometimes Suigetsu looks at Sasuke over the fire and he doesn't miss the way Sasuke's black eyes seem focused on something beyond the flames.
If he thought about it, he would suppose it's his brother Sasuke thinks about, but it's a whole lot of time to spend thinking about someone you want to kill (that's what Suigetsu would think if he thought about it), especially with such a blank air. Suigetsu wouldn't think even Sasuke, with all his amazing skills for looking like a blank statue of blankness, would be able to pull that one off. After all, he wants to kill the man.
But instead of nosing, even mentally, into Sasuke's emotional life or lack thereof (Sasuke may be too innocent to be real - even worse off than Juugo on some accounts, since Juugo is aware and wary of dangers Sasuke ignores as if they didn't exist, or as if he thought they couldn't have something to do with him, perhaps - but he certainly doesn't broadcast said hypothetical emotions), Suigetsu makes bets with himself over how long it is before Sasuke shuffles an inch away from Karin, who is leaningleaningleaning against him.
He could recruit Juugo into his bets, he thinks, and then he calls out loudly to Karin himself.
6.
Teetering on the verge of a precipice, Haku watched Zabuza sleeping and wondered if he dared slip into the other man's bed, and rest his head on Zabuza's chest.
Zabuza's lips made as if to mumble a sound, and Haku waited, breathless. If his name…
7.
Three medic-nins are busying themselves over and around the prone body of an unconscious ninja. The machines of the hospital are persistently beeping among their breezing.
The youngest of the three is sponging up the blood streaming from the man's abdomen, where the oldest is reconstructing his intestines seemingly from scratch or worse than scratch, while the last one is preparing endless and endless rows of bowls of chakra-enhanced waters.
All three look pale and deadly concentrated.
Sakura sweats more than her counterparts, and when she pushes up a lock from her sticky forehead with her wrist, in a moment of inattention, she leaves a streak of blood. She's never wished more desperately that she was just a blank malleable slate, but she's been taught that there are different types of chakra and that while it doesn't make a difference for healing, to infuse someone with chakra to make up for that which they lost, the chakra must be the same. Shizune's is the same as their patient's. Sakura's isn't.
Next to her, Tsunade growls before pushing her hand deeper into the mass of half-unformed wet flesh. The Sannin's brow is furrowed and her lips pursed into a thin line.
We're losing him, Sakura thinks.
It doesn't matter if the man is destined for Ibiki's care and not what Sakura, before she became a medic-nin, always thought medic-nins were supposed to preserve.
We're losing him, Sakura knows because it isn't the first time she helps her master patch up an enemy ninja whom his village believes to be dead for Intelligence and Interrogation purposes.
It doesn't matter that Konoha is ultimately going to kill him (probably; he might be used for an exchange, but doing so would require admitting to having something to do with his disappearance), Tsunade is fighting to save his life. Sakura isn't sure whether the energy she is putting in it is due to her being a medic-nin or her being the Hokage.
We're losing him, but the three will not stop until the man is dead.
Tsunade's most important lesson to Sakura is that a medic-nin always loses but never gives up. It's something Tsunade should know: even out of the hospital, she loses every of her bets.
It may be Tsunade's most important lesson, but it's one Sakura already knew, and one that doesn't erase the sagging faint lines of resignation and pain around Tsunade's eyes, and Sakura also noticed this.
The only way to make the lesson an effective one, Sakura decided, is to ignore it.
"Here, Shishou, go take some rest; I can keep his heart working for the next hour."
At the table, Shizune looks up and nods, hope blooming on her face.
Tsunade's eyes narrow thoughtfully. Sakura doesn't falter, because she is confident in her skill and confident that she is not making a meaningless offer.
After a moment Tsunade inclines her head.
The only way the lesson can work is to forget it.
8.
"Watch me," Ino sneers at a smirking Kiba, and, with a decisive torsion of the hips, walks up to the white-haired Sannin who is currently mumbling over the several stacks of papers and scrolls he has spread on the restaurant's table until some of them rolled onto the ground, a pen in his hand, which he is alternatively munching on or running with vengeful determination over the paper, crossing big parts of the handwritten text, and who is blissfully unaware of anything else going on.
"Jiraiya-sama!" she says in a simpering yet imperious voice.
Immediately, the Sannin startles and slams his arms down on his writing/reading material, an almost hounded expression on his face. He relaxes when he sees the slip of a girl. His eyes barely flicker down before settling back on her face, and he smiles widely.
"Hello, Yamanaka!"
Impressive, Ino judges. She hasn't ever talked to him, and he hasn't shown even one moment of hesitation. She understands she's one of the ninja in Konoha whose identity requires the less fumbling to guess correctly, but she prides herself on being an expert on self-confidence, and damn if that wasn't it.
"I see you are alone," she answers with a dazzling smile of her own. She's careful to keep her voice loud. "Would you mind me joining you?"
Back at the table, Kiba's jaw has hit the table, and Shikamaru remarks, "I told you Ino never backs down from a challenge. Especially after a mission."
9.
A fool was hardly the worst thing he'd been called, and he flickered through the night, his precious bundle (sleeping, sleeping, still sleeping blissfully with the fatigue that came from being born) in his arms, faster to leave the word behind and faster toward the roaring beast, blazing stronger with each life it put out.
It was a fool's gamble.
But then, he had a fool's luck.
10.
Hinata isn't going home until the log breaks. The moon is already high in the sky, but she's not going to.
It will take a while, since the Jyuuken isn't worth a damn against things without chakra, but it is an efficient way of measuring the time she spends training; thus, her training is never too short. The thought is comforting; she drops into a roll to the ground and twists up to strike at the log from behind.
She just has to break the wood before the bones in her hands break. She can do it.
11.
On the night before her son killed his closest friend, Mikoto called for a family meeting between her husband and his son.
She wanted to clear things up between the two of them. A father proud, concerned, and strict, and a teenager who was growing apart from his parents and the life they had planned out for him; and everything else.
She didn't turn on the lights when they sat, wanting to remind them that the Sharingan could see through the darkness, and that she was as much of an Uchiha as they were. Before she resigned when she was pregnant with her first child, she had been a jounin.
It was no secret among the clan that her Sharingan outclassed by far that of many. Her husband never had much aptitude for genjutsu. Not like Itachi and her; and not, according to every probability, like Sasuke. Their children were more hers than his.
Fugaku read too much in it, trying to reassure himself over things that should never have been questioned. But Mikoto never called him on it because Fugaku never accused her outright.
The Sharingan could see through darkness, but Mikoto doubted either of her sons saw through the part left unsaid in as I expected, you are my child.
She knew they would need time for their discussion; and that she was putting all of her remaining chances at salvaging a semblance of inner peace in her family on a late-night conversation between two men she knew to be equally stubborn.
She had prepared herself for it.
She hadn't counted on Sasuke waking up.
12.
Temari's smile as she closed the door was a tense, small affair. Kankuro wasn't paying too much attention to it, because he was faced with two jugs of sake and wondering whether they shouldn't have taken more. A whole lot more. There was possibly not enough sake in Suna for the upcoming night.
On the other hand, like Temari sensibly said when Kankuro commented upon it, getting drunk out of their mind would ruin the purpose. They were supposed to keep their wits to them.
Kankuro had refrained from pointing out that no amount of soberness would keep them alive if it turned out Gaara still shouldn't sleep, and that all in all he'd have preferred to spend his last remaining hours on earth roaringly drunk, since the option of feminine company was out. It wasn't, for once, the perspective of Temari snickering at him that stopped him.
Temari knew this as well as he did.
If they were there - sitting in front of Gaara's room, their backs to the wall, on a mat they had carried for this specific purpose - it was because they were the persons closest to Gaara in Suna. No-one was more aware of the extent of Gaara's powers than they, and no-one had more of a right to be there.
Possibly because no-one was crazy enough to do it, Kankuro reflected, but as a jounin - even a Suna jounin - and someone who had met a number of Leaf-nins, including but not limited to the pretty-boy jailbait Temari was boning (it was illegal in Suna; Kankuro had looked it up in case the kid ever came for a visit, but the Leaf didn't have such provision because Suna and Konoha were nominal allies), he was okay with it. Too bad Uzumaki Naruto had had to leave, otherwise they would've been three waiting for the world to melt down into a swirl of hungry howling sand. Gaara would have liked that.
Their being here was on the whole useless.
They couldn't hope to stop Gaara if somehow turned out that his sleep had retained demonic qualities (Kankuro knew he could ask for an immigration warrant to Konoha because 'the demonic qualities of someone's sleep' was a reality that made sense to him). Temari might be able to summon one of her weasels and send him away as a messenger of doom, except that there was no authority to be warned in the middle of the night.
And if Gaara, in fact, would sleep off his fifteen years of forced insomnia without a noxious side-effect, then Temari and Kankuro were getting worked up over-Kankuro couldn't find in himself to think nothing.
It wouldn't be nothing. It would be their kid brother first full night of sleep. Or handful of days, because Kankuro imagined Gaara' body would be pretty insistent on catching up on fifteen years of missed sleep, or something, but still.
Fateful moment.
He was suddenly hit by the awful, mind-numbing, bottom-of-stomach-dropping thought that it might be how a parent would feel over their kids' first tooth, or something, and he violently shuddered.
"He must've fallen asleep by now," Temari muttered, her head resting against the wall and her jaw clenched. "His eyes were closing on their own when I left, and he doesn't have a coffee machine inside."
Wordlessly, he pushed one of the jugs of sake toward her. She looked at it for a moment, then snorted.
"If we start drinking now we'll be snoring before half the night is through," she said derisively.
He grunted in agreement. "Later."
Temari nodded, her body relaxing but her nails drumming on the fan resting next to her. It was only when Kankuro saw her do it that he realised his own fingers were running on the three scrolls that contained his puppets.
"We need to be ready for when the assassins come," Temari needlessly added.
Yeah. The rest was unsure, but this they could do. Kankuro hoped they'd be able to get rid of a few council members after that.
13.
Naruto doesn't wait to see whether the star falls behind the waterfall or not. Either way the waterfall is still there. Either way Sasuke is waiting.
Either way he wins.