I do not own Naruto.
Sarutobi Hiruzen walks the corridors of Konoha's T&I division with a quiet solemnity, and if his feet made sound against the ground instead of ghosting across it, he knows the noise would echo around the earthen halls like a temple bell. He imagines it would reverberate through the entire village, clamoring a message to the world at large.
A sound of triumph, perhaps. Or one of warning.
He does not know when all of this began for the world. Perhaps they had been coming since creation itself. Perhaps they started when the Sage did, or when the first bit of Chakra leaked into the world. Sarutobi can only say for sure when he first really took notice, years ago, when in between breaths something took control of his body.
It named itself Franky, and no amount of fighting or struggle would cause it to budge.
It tore from him many secrets before he could stop it, information no man but he should know. It cared not for proprietary, or safety, and seemed unaffected by wordly affairs. Instead it searched him with a single minded intensity for an item it had lost, one that his Anbu teams had brought back to him after a mission that was distinctly strange.
(And he should have looked harder into this mystery back then. He should not have let it become a cold case like so many before it, put down to foreign jutsu, or domestic strife. There was evidence, strange and otherworldly machinery, and powers unheard of. But it was too strange, and he had been distraught by the loss of his successor and wife at the time.)
Since then, he and Danzo have been playing catch up with these beings, using the young boy that experienced the same to search them out and hunt their stories down when T&I could find no substance. There is so many things to be learned about them, and so little substance to be found.
Most of what there is is naught but rumor and hearsay. Fables of village founders meeting three fates, and tales of the Sage once conversing with a maiden, a mother, and a crone. There are whispers of Madara's madness being inspired by them, and the Bijuu knowing them on sight. Some say that the First Daimyo of Suna found them in the shape of a scorpion, a gale, and a spring, and they helped him found a village. Others yet proclaim that they spirit away the wondering, and the lost.
Now one has come back, a harbinger of some strange fate. It invades the body of the heiress of one of Konoha's Clans, and appears totally at ease, despite being bound to a chair inside a cell.
Outside the room, the young head of interrogation paces, unable or unwilling to disguise his anxiousness. When he senses Hiruzen's presence, he looks up sharply, his eyes like glaciers on his face.
"Hokage-sama," he says, and Hiruzen cannot tell if it is an admonishment or a plea.
"Inoichi-san," the older man returns, his voice forced into steadiness. "Be at peace."
The man's face spasms, and for a moment, Hiruzen can see the terrified father lashing out. It is a break in composure so unlike this man that Hiruzen is taken aback, remembering the twelve year old boy that he once was.
"I cannot be at peace when my daughter is being held hostage inside her own body," he states ferociously.
"Inoichi," the old man says in a level tone.
The reprimand is enough interrogator, and he mostly composes himself, but the fear is still evident in his eyes, as well as the anger. He does not understand the situation, and only knows that he was tasked with searching out years ago. Three names, and an obscure ability much like his families own.
Now he knows why, but he wishes he didn't.
"The entity is exuding substantial amounts of chakra. It's more than Ino's body can produce, and I worried about her dying at first, but it's not her producing it. Whatever is inside, this Lien, it's expending a lot of energy for no known purpose," Inoichi reports. He breathes in for a moment, and there are words straining behind his teeth. More than anything, he just wants the entity gone.
"Does it seem to be directed? A preparation for attack, or just a showing of power?"
"I don't think it's either. When they looked at it, they seemed surprised to see it, and have been treating it as an oddity since then. As ordered, the subject has been in isolation for thirty six hours, though it seems generally unaffected by this, and hasn't asked to eat or drink once. I'm not sure how the bodily functions are working, actually," Inoichi admits. If they could get a med nin in there- but no. Orders are orders, even with his daughter. "There has been no signs of strain or stress."
The Hokage nods, having been updated on the situation. He had hope that maybe, he could visibly soften it's will with the usual methods, but it was a leap. The thing is not human. How could he expect it to be concerned with human needs?
"I suppose the only thing left to do is the actual interrogation," Hiruzen says finally, and Inoichi nods stiffly. Hopefully, this nightmare of a situation will end. He prays that the Hokage will find what he's looking for quickly, because if he deems physical persuasion necessary-
"Sir," he says softly. "Please, be mindful of your actions, and their weight. We know little and nothing of this creature, and I know that my daughter is still inside."
For a long moment, Hiruzen looks upon him with serious eyes. He remembers how it was for him, and if young Ino is still inside, experiencing this, he prays she will forget. It is a heavy burden for one so young.
'What is this?'
Inwardly, Lien sighs. The soul inside her head woke up some time ago, after searching out the new boundaries of herself within the confines of their shared headspace. She's...different now. Still young, and yet not. She seems to have accepted the changes to her with all the grace of a child finding out a new fact, but adultlike in her articulation of ideas.
'A classroom,' Lien answers quietly, no more than a thought being shared.
'Doesn't look like a class,' the child declares, living out a stolen memory. It's an old one, a classroom lecture on cells, and the way the body breaks down food to gain basic nutrients and energy. Personally, Lien thinks it's a bit lackluster, but the self dubbed 'Ino-chan' seems to find it all endlessly entertaining, like a magic show of some sort.
Inside, Lien can feel her energetic mind chewing away, coming up with more and more questions. She's fascinated and curious in turns, demanding what such advance technology like projectors and genjutsu are doing inside of a classroom, and why none of the teachers are wearing a headband.
'And you just come here when you fall asleep? Then mind-body switch with your host?'
If she could, Lien would make a face, because she'd never even heard of the Shintenshin technique until Ino woke up hours ago -or the day before? Or the week? How long has it been?- and tried to cancel said technique out.
'It's not the same thing you do,' Lien reminds her yet again. 'I'm not a tree walker.'
Ino snorts. Apparently, Lien is bad with names.
'Ninja,' she corrects yet again. 'They're ninja.'
'Where I'm from, people don't have your abilities, and ninja's are guerrilla fighters that sprang up in one small section of the world, not the base of every known military force. Nor are they the root of the postal, and protection industry,' Lien points out.
Ino does the mental equivalent of blinking, and then begins rooting around the inside of their shared mind for the definition of the large majority of the terms she just used. And that's strange, this once little girl running through memories and experiences with more skill than Lien could ever manage. But, at least his activity allows Lien to run over the information she has learned as well.
This place, this Dream World, she has always known it to be more vivid and elaborate than any dream she's been in before. She's spent her whole life in and out of it, learning the intricacies and nonsensical wonders of it, but before now, she's never had the context she does.
Running into Ino, and mingling their souls together, has given Lien a solid eight years worth of experiences and memories of another life. She always ruled that this place was the non-reality because it fundamentally made no sense, but she was missing something, and element unnamed.
Chakra. A toss away term she had both heard, and used, before. It was synonymous with magic, a hocus-pocus thing that used to defy definition.
But Ino's memories show her differently. Chakra is about the same as energy is in her world. Both are defined as the strength and vitality required for mental and physical processes, and both are power derived from the utilization of physical or chemical resources. Chakra is ATP, and Chakra is electricity. Chakra is fire and water and wind, the same way atoms are everything.
Only, according to Ino's early memories, evolution was vastly different in their two worlds.
Lien can't tell if their world has had more time, or less, than Lien's home. It's easy to look out at the rural, sometimes backwards methods, and assume that they are living out a time period that Lien's world has passed. However, there is also technology and philosophy far beyond what this time period implies. Their culture only has a few hundred years of recorded history, according to Ino's mind. All of which comes after a huge period of intense, incredible warfare that is vaguely defined. One that is shrouded in mystery.
A post-apocalyptic society, perhaps? A civilization that took root after a war between humans with several hundred thousand more years to evolve than those back home? Or a young one, where evolution branched out due to this strange almost-radiation that allows people to consciously manipulate matter and energy with training?
And the timeline... Ino comes after the death of the Fourth Hokage, in a fragile time of peace. Lien is distantly aware that she's been jumping in and out of time in this world, but she thought that maybe it was all that inconsistent. Actually, she doesn't know what she thought. The Dream World was supposed to be fluid and sporadic. It was never supposed to have the grounding that Ino's memories give it.
With this new information, the line between Waking World and Dreaming World grows thin, and Lien is having a hard time establishing which is the real one. Of course, hers makes the most sense to her, but then again, if she listens to Ino's memories, the Dream World begins to make sense too.
And if she questions, if she presses too hard on either, they both begin to break down.
All society, all culture, is a construct of the biological beings, attempting to impress will and structure onto things that span beyond comprehension, built from thousands of years of development. Logic, reasoning conducted or assessed with strict principles of validity, is entirely dependant on perspective. Language is a media attempting to convey a four dimensional concept into sound in order to transfer ideas and information, and it's inherently flawed, with variables like tone, context, and structure changing entire meanings. Mathematics purposely isolates numbers from their environments, boiling them down into equations, and irregularities crop up all the time. They come in the form of unsolvable math problems like Beal's conjecture, the Skolem problem, Hilbert's fifteenth and Sixteenth problem, The Stark Conjecture, Kobon Triangle problem, and so many more. And science, her love, her hope, is the child of these three, and thus inherently flawed from the start.
Maybe it's her not understanding things. Maybe it is her own limited comprehension, but the line is so blurry now. What makes sense breaks down, and she can confirm nothing.
Lien is sure of nothing.
(What is real?)
'I don't get it,' is what Ino interrupts, surfacing from her searches to find Lien drifting in her own incomprehension.
'I don't understand it either,' Lien admits. Feelings of doubt and insecurity nag at her, because nothing is real, and she's crazy. She's mad, ugly, useless, and gross inside worlds that don't exist, bound by made up rules she's afraid are breaking down.
'We should get up now,' Ino says after a pause. 'Daddy will be worried.'
'Okay,' Lien answers simply. She can feel something stirring, an idea on the tip of her mind. It's starting to raise up, just inside her grasp. 'Okay.'
They open their eyes.
It's still dark, and still damp. They are still chained to a chair, and nothing outwardly seems to have changed, even though they both have undergone huge revelations inside. The Shadow...the ninja still stands in the corner, mostly unseen.
They blink.
'Do you want control of the body?' Ino asks, as if it is a shared toy to be passed between them.
'It's your body,' Lien answers distractedly, just the barest of whispers in Ino's mind now. The little girl can feel the thing inside her shifting, consumed by something from the heart of all things.
Ino shrugs, this time outwardly manifesting said action. For a moment, she seems surprised at this, but then remembers she's not on a mental plane anymore, and that it happens all the time.
The ninja in the corner is watching them closely now, but Ino isn't particularly bothered by it. She wants to get out of the chains that are chafing her wrists, and she jiggles her hands around, trying to squeeze them beneath the links. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't work.
The eight year old is just about to open her mouth and ask for her father when the door opens, and another person steps through.
The sight of the honorable third Hokage makes Ino instinctively stiffen and sit up in her chair, attempting to look presentable for the head of their village. It's no easy feat, considering her shorts are rumpled, and her hair is half hanging in her face, but she tries, because that's what daddy would have wanted.
He comes right up, and at first Ino thinks that he's going to help undo her chains, but then he just stands there and looks at her. Not doing anything.
"Uh...Hokage-sama?" Ino asks after a second.
The Hokage looks down, and seems to peer very hard at her eyes.
"Is it Ino speaking, I wonder, or is it someone else?" he asks her.
Ino scrunches up her face, confused.
"It's Ino," she says.
"But before, it was Lien," he tells her, and then Ino is less confused. Of course it would seem weird that they changed around, but that was before. It was an emergency situation.
"I was busy, so Lien took over," she explains breezily, as if extradimensional beings take over her body everyday, after accidently blending souls. "But now I'm me again, so I'm here."
Then she thinks of all the new memories, and pieces of herself. She recalls that she isn't, technically, who she was, and thinks that she should probably inform the hokage that.
"-But not the me from before. I've got new stuff, and I gave some stuff to Lien. We shared," she amends.
The Hokage simply looks at her. It's the same looks that Ino gets from her dad when she says something he needs explained.
But...but it's hard to put into words, Ino discovers. How can she tell the Hokage about the heart of all things, and the wonder of the stars? How can she describe her new friend, Lien, who is both twenty five, and old enough to have seen times before history?
"What did you share?" the Hokage asks her.
Ino roots around her head for the right word. Kindly enough, Lien picks out a few for her to choose from.
"Memories. Ideas, " Ino says, not sounding at all like the eight year old girl that she was just two days ago. "Lien has lots of them. I only had a little, but I have more now. "
"Memories? "
Ino hums, nodding her head and looking into the distance. Lien has so many memories, and thoughts. At first, it was hard to even remember that Ino wasn't Lien, because there was so many. That's why Ino had to find herself again, because the boundaries got so blurred.
"Lien remembers lots of stuff," she says to him. "Like how it feels to fly in a bird's body, or how last night she dreamed of Franky taking over you."
The Hokage inhales sharply. There are many, many things wrong with this situation. First and foremost, how strange the girl is acting. Secondly, the way she is speaking so familiarly, and fondly, of the invasive entity. Then the sharing of memories, and ideas; the way she refered to such the life changing incident as if it happened last night, instead of years ago. And-
"Dreams?" He leads on, unsettled.
Ino nods, unperturbed.
"That's what Lien calls them. She dreams of us a lot," Ino clarifies, only muddling the situation further.
"This is not a dream," he says solemnly.
This time, Ino doesn't answer. Her eyes slide to the side, and her face twists through emotions as a myriad of thoughts flood her minds.
(And Lien stumbles into comprehension, as clumsy as a baby taking it's first steps. The idea that eluded her before fits firmly inside her mind at his words. This is not a dream, he says, and it echoes.
This is not a dream, she repeats, and Ino, so young and new, tries to grasp on to Lien's soul as it grows beyond her grasp.)
She refocuses her gaze on the old man in front of her, and it's the same eyes, in the same face, but a different force looking out of them. Hiruzen doubted Ino's identity before, but he doesn't doubt now. This isn't that little girl. This is something else.
The chakra around the child's body flutters, like a flame in the wind, despite the lack of breeze, and the nature of chakra. The long shadows cast over the room dance, taking on a fey nature, and the light of the room begins to bend oddly. A smell lingers on the air, unnamable and otherworldly, and the temperature warms from cold into entirely temperate.
"It's all a dream. Everything is."
Like a light bulb shattering, or a bubble surfacing, Lien Wakes, and loses reality.
AN: Alright, I hope this gives more context. If not, than let me explain fully. Time isn't linear in this story, although for a few chapters it's been following a line. Lien has been jumping in and out of the timeline for all her life, and has accumulated centuries worth of memories in her dreams. She thought the real world was real because it made sense, but with Ino's soul joining hers, she has to accept that the Dream World is just as real...or that hers is just as fake.
Lien is mirroring the concept of not only the cycle of Samsara (Living out many lives in many bodies in an endless cycle) but also The Ascending Master. Both are concepts I have taken liberties with, and hopefully, portrayed respectfully.
Feel Free to ask more questions though. If they aren't directly tied to spoilers, I'll do my best to answer.
