There had been no time. Kakashi tried, in that last second, to prevent what was coming. A blink, a deactivation of his sharingan, but it was too late. The machinations had already taken over, distorting the air to the point that there was only a fraction of a breath left before the shift between dimensions occurred, and that nanosecond wasn't long enough.
A clap of silence, and his student, Haruno Sakura, was gone.
He didn't even have the time to let that fact sink in before he was immersed once more in the battle for the shinobi nations -- one he was fairly certain he had fought before.
Shit.
---
Sakura felt herself hit the trunk of a tree with enough force to drive the air out of her lungs. Her arms, which had been crossed in front of her to absorb the force of her opponent's impact, now came forward to catch herself before she impacted with the ground. She had no time to spare catching her breath; she never did in battle.
She was up and on the offensive, several meters to her right, when what her senses were informing her of caught up with her mind. Every chakra signature that had been inundating her senses had gone abruptly silent, leaving her with a silence she'd never felt before. Straightening, an odd thought came to mind.
She was completely, unexpectedly alone.
The forest around her looked the same as it had a moment before. The trees were as solid, the air... no, the air was different. More still; not quite stagnant, but not quite fresh. She could see the foliage move in a breeze she should also be feeling, but it was the merest whisper against her skin.
Cursing her own distractedness, Sakura directed a jolt of chakra to her brain, seeking to disrupt her pattern and break out of whatever genjutsu she must have fallen into. Surprising, to realize it must be of Sasuke's design; gratifying to know her training had paid off.
Only nothing changed. The same half-dead feeling hung over the area, permeating everything, and Sakura was left, having dispelled something which had never existed in the first place.
"Oh come on," she said, once again going through the motions of extricating herself from the web of someone else's illusion. When it didn't work yet again, she forced herself to think.
"Alright," she said, under her breath. "I was fighting. Which was about time, given how badly everyone else was doing." Medic nin or not, she hadn't trained in order to hang back and watch her closest friends lose, even if it was to another of her closest friends. "I'd been fighting the orange haired man when the silver haired one had swung with his sword, which I avoided, though it left me with no choice but to absorb the impact of the first one's kick."
Frankly, that had annoyed her. Not the time to think about this, however.
"And then I hit a tree. And I was here."
A here which looked exactly the same as the there she'd been in previously. "What the hell happened between that kick and the tree?"
Death didn't seem to be the correct answer, even if it was one she entertained for a moment. She trained too hard to die without having the decency to remember her own death. Hell, she shouldn't have been hit in the first place. What could have made the difference?
Scanning her memory, the adrenaline high young woman could arrive at few sensible answers. One which tended toward the more dramatic side of the spectrum gave her pause.
"Right before impact, there was... something. A distortion." She stopped, turning to internal monologues as her tongue simply failed to keep up. The chakra signature around that was familiar, and it wasn't just me. The air around me felt like it was collapsing in on itself. Almost like...
She stiffened, eyes going wide as implications and possibilities ran through her mind, and then wound down to an answer she didn't know how to handle.
Almost like Kakashi, when he displaced that explosion tracking down Gaara, months ago. The explosion which had been sent, as Kakashi had said before collapsing under his own strain, to another dimension.
There was no way. First off, her former teacher would never make the kind of mistake which would have left her in this predicament. Even in battle, he wouldn't use a technique he didn't have full control over, especially not when it had that sort of impact on his system. Two uses of his eye jutsu had kept him in the hospital for weeks. Kakashi was not a careless man, and therefore, Sakura would not presume carelessness on his behalf.
Dismissing that possibility, however, left her in a conundrum. The silence that had been deafening her slowly began to break into normalcy. Birds called from far away, chirps and songs that made up the background noise to her life jolted Sakura. They'd been so conspicuously absent the minutes before. She closed her eyes, seeking to find resolution as she reached out with her senses, looking for the sign of life energies every living creature inevitable produced. She touched on nothing, at first, and frowned, concentrating harder. If everything were simply out of range she could understand; she was sensitive due to her career, not to an inimical talent of her own.
The fact even the trees weren't registering struck her as odd. Not even just odd; impossibly frightening.
"Kakashi," she found herself saying, voice pitched at barely above a whisper, "Just what the hell is this?"
Her mentor was no where around to respond. Sakura was slowly coming to dread that wasn't her biggest problem. If the impossible had happened -- if carelessness hadn't been the culprit, but chance and bad luck -- then she was in another dimension. One which possibly held nothing she could recognize, possibly even held nothing alive outside of herself.
The fright crept in further, then was pushed back by her overwhelming logic. Even if that is the case, she temporized, it's only a blessing.
Beyond that, she didn't want to say anything more. Brief thoughts on how to handle hunger, the sudden solitude, the fear fell before the absolute need to return and protect the Five Kage's. Even if Danzou was one of them; it was her duty, and her necessity. Especially when Sasuke was part of the offensive. Especially when Naruto's future was on the line.
Where-ever she was, if it was indeed not merely an elaborate genjutsu by her former teammate, she needed to get back. Now.
---
Unfortunately, whatever god was on task to take note of people's personal declarations was on permanent hiatus. Seven hours had passed, and Sakura had made no noticeable progress in getting out. Exploration of the area had proved insightful; the geography was almost identical. She couldn't say exactly. In a way, it was as if the world had been tilted just enough to the side to make a notable difference, but she couldn't exactly say how.
For example, some of the trees weren't quite the right size, or in the right place. Their long shadows held a promise of a correct answer, if she could just see through them. And she tried. Looking underneath the underneath, and finding only earth and shrubbery. If Kakashi's advice was going to hold true, she needed a better indicator of her progress.
Her stomach twisted, a hollow feeling she'd been trying to pass off as unease with her situation. Hunger wasn't alien to Sakura. In her line of work, sometimes hunger was the least of the pains you endured. The shinobi nations and scientists had invented means of getting around the fact of hunger, for up to two weeks at a time. Dehydration had never been as adequately handled, though those out of Suna were better prepared when it came to conservation.
Neither of these facts did much for Sakura as she came to rest in tree branches overhanging a small creek. If she needed to accept that she was indeed in another dimension, and in particular one reached through Kakashi, then she also needed to come to terms with the fact she didn't know how to get back. She would need time, and the means to survive until that time she was able to return.
Most immediately, this meant finding food and shelter.
She wiped sweat off her forehead, feeling that aching silence all around her. The birds hadn't quieted. In fact, they startled every so often as she moved around the forest, the changing landscape showing she was heading toward what should have been home. Yet she'd never so much as glimpsed one. The same went for other animals; things had moved through the underbrush, but no amount of observation had lead to a discovery of life.
Everything was there; only her senses must be lying. It led her back to her original assumption, where she was captive to Sasuke's sharingan-created realm. If that was the case, she'd have to endure for three more days. Even Itachi, from what she'd read, hadn't held people in an illusion of his own creation for longer than three days.
Sakura didn't let herself believe this possibility for long. She found if she did, the chance of being wrong was enough to depress her. At least with her theory involving Kakashi, she wouldn't hold false hopes on being saved.
Being saved. She looked down at the water, hoping to see signs of life there, when it had failed elsewhere. I thought I was done with being saved.
A conviction as quiet as the chakras of the world around Sakura filled her as she stood there. She was done with being saved. She'd decided that years ago, and in spite of the fact the men in her world still strove to keep her insulated on the battlefield, none of those men had been there when it had come down to her spirit and Chiyo's wisdom. Sakura had a heart. In some cases, a bleeding heart -- and she'd clung to the belief that men would listen.
Sasori and Chiyo had shaken that belief. "You think men stop long enough o listen to a woman?" Chiyo had been right. In the weeks and months following, that truth had made itself a part of Sakura's life. Out of no ill will, she saw as she was navigated around, babied or belittled when any male would have been expected to step up or pay the price. Excuses due to her specialization failed when Naruto stopped talking to her, so focused on his efforts that the gap they'd been mending since his return earlier that year had widened yet again. A common purpose pulled them both together, but his respect for her strength ended at her fists.
He was a strange mix of mature and immature, though perhaps no more so than herself.
A flash of silver drew her out of her thoughts. Fish? There it was again. She watched the water's deceptively still surface, judging the refractory angle. "Please be real," she said to herself, inching a kunai out of her side holster. She might only have the one chance.
A plick, and she looked down in satisfaction at the kunai that had buried in the head of one of her chosen targets. She dropped down to the embankment, pulling her gloves off as she walked out on the water and knelt down to retrieve her weapon. The rest of the fish had fled underneath rocks both up and downstream.
She held her catch in hand, feeling distinctly superior to her thirteen year old self even as it registered the fish was no more than six inches long. She sighed, and shrugged.
At least it was real. Between this and the surrounding edible plant life, she wouldn't starve.
---
Three weeks of similar fare left Sakura stockpiling herbs meant for more than just healing poultices. She'd never been a particularly inspired cook. At the best of times, she was too busy to care, and at the worst of times, too hungry to bother. Classes she'd excelled in during school were becoming useful four years later, to her chagrin.
The hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn't as novel as it had been at the start, an extended survival campaign like the sorts she'd once imagined shinobi did to prove their own mastery of the elements and their skills. As it turned out, it was like an extended survival campaign, after supplies had run out and you were on the run from enemy shinobi without anything more than the clothes on your back, basic weaponry, and your own wits to rely on. The enemy for her was time, or on other days, weather. The omnipresent gray she felt as if it were a tangible creature registered at the back of her mind constantly. She recognized the psychological warfare it was causing her to wage against herself.
She'd taken to speaking out loud to herself to drive it off.
"Another sunny day," she mused, peering out of the shallow cavern she'd staked out the night before. "Not a cloud in the sky."
The chirping of the unseen birds accompanied her out to the creek. She ignored their chatter, picking up her pace so she was making progress in a lazy jog, feeling blood start moving through her sore muscles and beyond. Last night had not been kind to her back, but she wasn't near any natural hotsprings to start working out the kinks. Self provided therapy only went so far.
She slowed to a walk, starting her arm stretches as she cataloged what she would do for the day. "It would help if any of the scrolls or books had still been in Konoha," she grumbled. She'd made it to Konoha two weeks ago, only to be confronted with a veritable ghost town. The final possibility of being entrapped by Sasuke had cleared when the three day marker had passed. She was, for all intents and purposes, in another dimension, one which lacked most the physical, moving elements of her own.
Where the hell is this was a question she often found herself wanting answered in terms of how to leave where-ever it was. Unfortunately, Kakashi had never explained how his eye jutsu worked; she had a feeling in another setting, it would have been more straightforward. He'd literally sent an explosion to this realm, if the location was unchanging. He'd intended to send Deidara himself, if she recalled correctly.
Her hope lay in being able to return without the benefit of the sharingan. A technique was, at it's heart, a technique. Lacking the particular abilities of a native born sharingan user, Kakashi must have had to rely on his own knowledge and experience gained over the years. Sakura didn't want to say she had all the time in the world to try and find a way back, but without any apparent immediate threat, she did.
Finding Konoha had driven that home. The village wasn't like any version of the town she remembered leaving before the historic meeting. It felt antiquated to her eyes, as if it was a Konoha of her grandparent's years, even if it had the same size and general layout of where she'd grown up. It was just a feeling, the kind she'd been having since her arrival here. Nothing to substantiate it beyond the fact she wasn't used to complete solitude, or the kind of chakra silence so astoundingly complete.
Sakura began stretching her legs, holding herself still for the thirty to sixty counts. "Must have slept wrong. More stiff on my left than I'd expect." She continued her stretches, straightening as she gave herself a critical sniff. "I need a bath." Not the most pleasant realization, though the morning was shaping up warm and she probably wouldn't be hypothermic.
Probably.
Feeling in better form than she had on waking, Sakura gave in to the inevitability as she stripped down, leaving her shin guards and shoes propped up on a rock while she took her clothing into the creek. The water ran about waist deep here, ten feet long at most, but the rocks and sand were soft to walk on and she figured there was a chance this was warmer than some of the deeper, shadier pools.
What she wouldn't give for a proper shampoo right about now. Sand and a few plants had been serving fairly well, when the oil build-up got to the point Sakura couldn't stand herself anymore. At least sand was plentiful everywhere. She could always get the worst of the dirt out, with enough scrubbing and the sand.
Clothing was turning out to be the bane of her existence. She didn't have a change on hand when she'd been rather unexpectedly -- and unprecedentedly -- shunted into another dimension, nor had anything been shunted over since that would serve. How inconsiderate of fate and circumstances to make her living situation so difficult.
Shaking her head at her own silliness, she popped her foot up on a rock just below the surface. The least of her worries was how long her clothing would last. She knew some basic tanning skills, and she could weave plant matter into containers. If no animal outside of the fish presented itself after an extended stay here, she could always weave herself a barrel to wear.
Her laughter rang out across the water, silencing the sounds of unseen life. "I need to get out of here. I'm going to go insane."
As she switched her attention to her other leg, Sakura found herself focusing on the chakra readings of the area. Nothing new, that she could tell. Scrubbing down her calf, she allowed herself to sigh.
The sudden, alien spike of chakra caused her to startle, head whipping up and looking to the east. Had she invented that? It was possible. She was so desperate for some change in the pattern of these last few weeks, she could have fooled herself into feeling something which wasn't real.
Still, if there was a chance she wasn't hallucinating... Sakura held still, focusing even more intently on chakra signatures.
Minutes passed, and a thrill of nervous excitement shot through her stomach as she felt that chakra spike again. Pushing off the bottom, she reached for her undershirt and skin-tight shorts. Pulling her shorts on, she held her shirt with her teeth and hurriedly secured her kunai holder to her leg, taking off before she was fully decent. The chakra she'd detected hadn't moved. If anything, it was weaker than the first time she felt it.
Not worth taking chances, she decided, shrugging at last into her shirt and clamping down on her own chakra. And not worth hesitating over. This might bring her closer to home.
For a third time, she observed that spike in foreign chakra, knowing her movements had almost brought her on top of it's origin point. Sakura slowed, scanning her surroundings. She could detect nothing, or so she thought at first. She realized as she concentrated the chakra she'd been tracking had a far more subtle presence between spikes.
Sakura edged forward, stalking silently forward.
I'm close to whatever it is. She swallowed, and found herself hoping this didn't end up being her desperate stalking of a squirrel. The thought was half formed as she scanned a vaguely familiar clearing, eyes nearly passing over the one out of place object to be found. A flash of tan, partly buried in the heavy foliage. She might have ignored it completely if it hadn't made the slightest movement -- and in a flash, Sakura was by it, kunai out and senses on high alert.
She didn't quite understand what she was looking at, at least not at first. When it finally struck Sakura that she'd found the source of her strange chakra spikes, she couldn't stop herself from laughing out loud. "Oh hell," she said, sitting back on her haunches. "It's an arm." And only one arm, someone's right arm.
She reached out with her kunai, poking at the knuckles. Not like the rest of this world made sense, but how was she getting live readings off a limb? It just seemed impossible --
Sakura flew back with a muffled shriek as the arm pushed off the ground, swatting half-heartedly at where the kunai had been a moment before. The movement was accompanied by another sharp spike, stronger than the ones prior. Sakura watched in open-mouthed silence from her perch on the side of a tree, having retreated beyond the floating appendage's immediate range.
What the hell? What the hell? She bit off a curse, suppressing her own chakra as she noticed the arm orient itself on her position. What the hell was going on?
The analytical portion of Sakura's brain took over in the face of horror and sheer xenophobia. The arm was truly floating now, though it's level didn't fluctuate. If anything, Sakura was inclined to say it was at about the appropriate level for a person roughly a hundred sixty, a hundred seventy centimeters tall. Granted, she was presuming based on average shoulder level, and the fact most heads were within a certain range, and furthermore she was presuming logic had a place in her observations, but illogical assumptions wouldn't be terribly helpful.
The young woman did have to find herself bemused that the first chakra signal she'd picked up on belonged to a disembodied arm. If she were inclined to believing in ghost stories, she'd presume this was the first sign of a later possession, or perhaps a more mundane supernatural murder.
As it stood, she was mutely watching the arm move around the clearing. She squinted, catching sight of a sort of shimmering haze, a darker smudge across her vision near the arm. It took a while before what she was seeing made sense.
A silhouette. Furthermore, of a person. The limb was the natural extension of the shadow-figure's right arm, but no matter how she tried to dispel potential genjutsu, let alone detect a signal beyond the one from earlier, she could get no better read on the shadow than her eyes.
The arm -- the shadow-person and arm -- paused. She could feel the chakra presence grow more sedate, as if it was being siphoned off as the limb attempted movement. It didn't make any sense. Sakura forced herself to think, pondering over what could explain this phantom's limb.
I'm here because of Kakashi. Maybe not intentionally, but because of him none-the-less. Is there any chance... her thoughts trailed off as she struck on a realization. This might not be as hard to explain as she thought, if she recalled the only other times she'd seen Kakashi use this particular technique. Hadn't he used it twice that day, when he'd sent the exploding clone to this dimension? The mission report, as garbled as it had been between Kakashi's tendency to stick to only pertinent facts, and Naruto's tendency to tangent, had made mention of her former teacher utilizing a new technique against their Akatsuki target twice.
And if she remembered correctly, which she must have, she must have, the first time Kakashi had partly missed his target. Attempting to send the entirety of the target to this dimension, he'd ultimately... Only been able to send the target's right arm.
Akatsuki. Not even that general. She knew the target's name, even if she hadn't directly fought him. Sasori's partner, the missing shinobi of Iwagakure. "Deidara."
Any doubts to the disembodied limb's identity were dissolved as it reacted to Sakura's voice, as it turned toward her and brought it's palm up... and smiled.