"I see. So that's what happened. You're telling me that Kakashi and Yamato allowed this girl, that for some reason has the power of the nine tailed demon, to get away with the three tailed demon?" Danzo asked. He and the council demanded to get the report on what happened at the isolated lake straight from Tsunade herself.
"What were they to do? They were out numbered and out powered. Did you really expect that two Jonins and six Chunins to fight and win against a girl with the power of nine tails and more control of that power then Naruto has ever shown? A girl that, on her own, sent two Akatsuki members flying like they flies buzzing around her head and defeated the three tailed demon in one hit," Tsunade asked in return.
"Also, according to the report, it seems that Jiraiya entered the area, took this girl's partner, but he has not arrived back here in Konoha yet. Why is that? Is there something more to this report that you are not telling us?" Koharu asked, curious as to why Tsunade's teammate would do something like this.
"It's rather simple. The reason behind that is: do we really want someone with the power of the nine tails under their control coming to Konoha as our enemy? We all are well aware of what happened when the Kyuubi came sixteen years ago, as it night that can be easily forget by anyone that lived through it" the Fifth Hokage said.
"What about the report that your missing apprentice and the demon being spotted in the area?" Danzo asked, somehow knowing of Team Ten and Yamato's own mission in addition to serving as back for Kakashi and Team Eight.
"The reports are right there for you to see. It was only a false alarm. It was that girl using her power that had been spotted and not Naruto and Sakura. Also, I just got a report from Naruto telling me that he was in the middle of tracking Sasuke with Sakura and remaining hidden to do so. If Orochimaru, Sasuke, or any other Sound nin learned of his location, tracking them would have been all that much harder since they will know where he coming from," the blond Hokage informed them.
'She is hiding something. I know it!' Danzo thought. She left the room. The demon and pink hair brat were variables that he wanted out of the picture if he wanted to re-make Konoha to his vision of it.
The last time he made the mistake of leaving his rival's student alone thinking they would not get in the way of his plan, the plan backfired when the Third died, and rather then offering him the title of Hokage, they gave that chance to Jiraiya who later suggested Tsunade. He thought that it was fool's errand since at the time he was sure that there was no way Tsunade would accept either and that he would be the mostly likely person to choose next because he had a reputation in the village that rivaled the Sanin and the last two Hokage in addition to be the Third's rival for the position. Somehow, Tsunade had accepted the title. Not only that, but she returned just as he was about to take the title for himself.
This was not the first time that Jiraiya had tried to get Tsunade to come back, so what was so different that he not only got her to come back, but become Hokage as well? Then it struck him. It was the demon brat that made the difference. Tsunade then took on his useless teammate as her apprentice and he thought not of her at first since she below above average in everything but chakra control and book smarts compared to the rest of her graduating class. Yet to his shock, she turned into second Tsunade in only two and half years, thus becoming a threat to his plan as history was seemly repeating itself. It was most likely that the demon brat or his no longer useless teammate would be offered the title of Hokage over him.
Thus when they both were out the village, it was reasonable that he wanted them declared missing nin as a way of knocking out any opposition to his chances of being the Sixth Hokage. He probably would not live or be in any condition to be the Seventh Hokage.
As for Tsunade, she collapsed in the chair inside her office and thought back to the true version of what happened in the Land of Water as well what happened to the two people she thought of as her family.
'Naruto, I know you will find a way to turn Sakura back to normal. You are not Konoha's Number One Ninja at Surprising People for nothing,' Tsunade thought and she also smiled at the fitting punishment that Sasori had received for what he did to Sakura.
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"Okay, are you sure that this seal is going to work, Naruto-sensei?" Ryo asked.
"Of course it will work! The three of us worked on this for weeks, you know, and have carefully thought out every bit of this seal," Naruto said.
While Jiraiya who was watching the two of them felt a sense of pride that Naruto was taking things he had taught him and applying them to Ryo training in learning to control his own powers rather then let them control him, something that Naruto began doing whenever the three of them were not working on the seal for Sakura.
"This the combination of all our skills in regards to seals and Kugutsu. This is going to work," Naruto said confidently. On paper, everything seemed to make sense, but this was something that had never been attempted before.
Beyond the three gathered around the table where seal blueprint lying on a table was Sakura the one that would be getting this seal. During the last couple of weeks, they did various test to try and get feel of what Sasori's hybrid form of Kugutsu did to Sakura exactly without causing her any damage if possible.
After another two days of talking and making various adjustments to the seal and the jutsu that be used, it was finally time to get down to business.
Sakura's jacket and sport bra had been removed because the seal was going to be carved right where her heart used to be. Ink was a first option, but it was also possible that it could be washed off or smeared. The way they were doing it by carving the seal into her would make it become a part of her like the seal on her forearm and hands. During a test they held after learning of Sakura's ability to repair herself with her own chakra as conversion of sort of her own medical ninjutsu, they then tested a theory that she could also repair seals carved on her forearms and damaged them, only to watch in amazement as she repaired the area and back to its original condition that included the seal on her arm as well. Yet this only seemed to work for the four seals she had craved on her arms and forearms as other seals that were painted on vanished when she repaired the area they were in.
There was a painstaking hour and half where Naruto carefully and slowly carved the seal on the area where Sakura's heart once was with a Shadow Clone wiping the sweat from his brow and another one going over the jutsu that would be used are the seal was done as last minute prep.
Naruto let out a sigh of relief. He was finished craved the seal with one of his claw cover in his charka as he found his hand to shaking to use any tools.
'Now for the test to see if the seal will stay,' Naruto thought. He had Sakura sit for awhile and attempted to repair the area over her heart, when nothing happened and the seal remained. Naruto sent the shadow clone that helped him keep his sweat from dropping onto Sakura to get the other that doing the last minute prep with the jutsu. A minute later, Naruto had obtained the knowledge of his two Shadow Clones after they dispelled. This was something that learned from Jiraiya who told him one of the previous unknown benefits of the Kage Bunshin to him.
Taking a deep breath a few times to calm his mind, Naruto then went about going through the hand sign of the jutsu to go along with Sakura's seal and then once he had gone through them all, his hand glowed with red and blue. Naruto then pressed them against the seal that was carved into Sakura's chest as if he was about to give her CPR, yet simply kept his hand there, pushing his charka into the seal for about ten minutes nonstop. Once he was nearing the end of the ten minutes, his head was feeling light and he passed out on top of her.
When Naruto woke up again, the first thing he saw was the puppet girl staring at him. At first he had thought he had failed. He knew he passed out and fell on the Sakura puppet after finishing the jutsu.
'It did not work,' Naruto said to himself.
He was sure that he had failed because if it worked the way he wanted, Sakura would not just be staring at him same vacant expression that he had seen he found her being used as nothing more then a thing by Sasori.
As Naruto was dwelling over the failure of the jutsu and thinking about how to do it right next time, Naruto then noticed that she blinked and realized that he was lying on her.
"What's going on here and why are you lying on top of me, Naruto?" Sakura asked as she spoke her first sentence let alone words in almost a year.
Naruto jumped off her started babbling a bunch nonsense that was lost on Sakura.
Sakura sat up on the table and noticed that she was topless, yet did not realize she was not human because the anger that clouded her mind over Naruto laying on her while she did not have a top on.
"Naaaaarrrrruuuttttto!!!" Sakura growled. She did not know what was going on but she did not like it.
"I…" Naruto started to say before Sakura punched him in the face with one of her charka and Iron Sand enhanced punches.
"Sensei, I-umph!" Ryo said as he was coming to check on his sensei as he heard a voice that did not belong to Naruto. As he opened the door, he was struck by the flying Naruto who continued to fly off out the door and through another door (that Jiraiya had opened after hear Sakura's angry in saying Naruto's name) into the distance.
It was here that Sakura realized what was going on and wondered just what was going on. How did she get here? She looked at her hands and remembered what had happened. She had lost to Sasori and was trapped in cage and then Sasori forced her to walk towards him by controlling her like a puppet.
Sakura then looked to see that kid and Jiraiya just outside the room she was in, but before she could even begin to question them, she just collapsed to the ground.
"Hey, Ryo, go over there and check to see if she is okay," the Frog Sanin said.
"Me? why me?!" Ryo yelled as he rubbed his chin which Naruto slammed into before he continued going.
"I am human and you are a demon, thus I am pretty sure that you could heal from whatever she does better then me. The last time I pissed off someone like that, they beat me within an inch of my life and that same person is the one that Sakura calls sensei," Jiraiya told him.
"She'd better have good explanation for this!" Ryo said as he poked at Sakura, yet she did not move in the slightest and then managed to roll her on to her back to see that the seal that was red while she was moving was now black.
"Quickly roll her back over to her stomach. That's why if she gets up before Naruto get back, she might not get mad at us," Jiraiya told the three tailed demon.
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Later….
Jiraiya was keeping his distance from Sakura and was telling Ryo to do the same. According to what he was told by Tsunade after he told that he was going to find Naruto in order to find out what happened to the seal, Sakura had become sort of a queen of knee-jerk reactions during the time that Naruto and him were on their training journey. She started expressing what she was actually feeling more often by that also meant she got more violent as well since most her knee-jerk like reactions dealt with hitting something or someone. From what he was told, this at first caused quite a bit of problems as she would hit who people that insulted Naruto or Sasuke in her presence and with her control of her strength she gained not yet being second instinct yet, she put quite a few people in hospital. It took training with Rock Lee and Tsunade's guidance that she managed to get her most of her violence knee-jerk reactions under control, but those dealing with Naruto and him were too deeply rooted in her psyche and personality so they could not remove them.
When Sakura's body began to move, Jiraiya made sure that he and Ryo were nowhere near the area. He did not know what her new range of attack was and he was not taking any chances that either one of them would get caught in her sights. He saw what she did to Naruto, who he was sure would have need a hospital from the sheer force of her punch if he was not Kyuubi at the moment.
'What happened?' Sakura thought as she began to pull herself up off the floor and noticed that this looked like the floor to someone's house, not her own bed after going to sleep once having got some ramen with Naruto and Kakashi-sensei like her last memories were….but wait! Those were not her last memories. She could vaguely remember others all of them dealing with Naruto and trying to be of use to him.
'Why can't I remember them clearly?' she thought. They were all fuzzy and vague but she knew they happened and couldn't place any of them.
Then the only clear memory she had of Naruto came rushing back to her and she was confused by what he doing when she had come to the last time.
'Naruto, what were you…huh?' Sakura continued to think until she notice that Naruto's jacket, the black and orange one, she saw him wearing ever since he came back from his training trip with Jiraiya, was lying on her back.
She brought the jacket into her arms and hugged it as for some reason she felt really possessive of this jacket but it was not her, so why did she feel like it was when it really was Naruto's?
It was then that she realized that she did not have a top on as she held out the jacket, trying to remember why she felt it belong to her. She noticed her undress state and immediately threw on the jacket to cover up as best she could.
"Wait a minute! Are these really my hands?" Sakura asked herself out loud as she looked to see that her hand were segmented and wooden just like puppet or marionette.
The pink hair chunin then noticed a reflective surface. She stood up and wobbly made her way over there, feeling strange and light headed, but that seemed to fade with every pasting moment for some reason.
Holding the object reflecting her image back at her with one hand, she then brought her other hand up to her face and touched it, only to feel nothing at all. She tried pinched herself but that was no good. She knocked on her cheek and heard it made the sound of someone knocking on wood.
She then looked down at her bare chest where the only thing she had covering her upper half of her body was her/Naruto's jacket. She repeated the same process as with her face with her stomach only to get the same results.
Sakura's mind was racing over the possibility of what this meant had happened to her in the gap in her memory between being captive of the bastard Sasori and being with Naruto.
Though before her mind could thinking to long on that possibility, her attention was caught by the three people talking just outside where she was currently, wherever here was.
"Hey, sensei, you are back! Man, did that violent gorilla-like girl punch you far away! Are you sure that the two of friends after what she just did to you?" Sakura heard the voice of what seem to be a young kid said.
"Actually, that's remnants of the Tsunade's thousand meter punch. She hit me with it one time while we were coming back from a mission," a voice she recognized as Jiraiya said.
"Wait, you were punched a thousand meter, lived, and still consider this person to be your friend after all that?" the kid asked in a shocked tone.
"It was a good thing she did that to me. Because of that punch, I managed to find Myouboku Mountain and train with the frogs there," Jiraiya told him.
"Yeah well, Sakura's version was twice the distance and I landed in river with strong current that quickly sweep me downstream before I could wake up again," Naruto sighed.
"And you still consider this girl your friend?" the kid asked and Naruto replied positively in response.
'Sakura…just Sakura, but what happened to Sakura-chan?' she thought as for some reason, this was very upsetting for her.
She then felt someone lightly shaking her and placed her hand on theirs to get them to stop only then noticing that it was Naruto doing it.
"Naruto, what's going on? Where are we? Why do I look like this, and who is that kid?" Sakura asked, looking scared and confused
"You do not remember what happened, Sakura?" Naruto asked confused as were Jiraiya and Ryo who were sure that Sakura had an idea of what happened before she collapsed at least.
"If I could remember then I would not be asking now! Would I, Naruto? The last thing I remember is us beating Kakashi-sensei, then all of us have some ramen, and finally going to sleep. Then I wake up looking like this!" Sakura told him motioning to her puppet body.
'Huh? What's the matter with Sakura's memories? She completely does not recall us being sent to Suna on that mission where I screwed up big time,' Naruto thought.
"Hey, Naruto…Naruto….answer me, damn it! What the hell happened to my body? Who did this to me?" Sakura yelled. She was shaking him and was about to slap him when her arm was caught and held firmly by the green hair boy that with Jiraiya and him.
"You sure are acting grateful after what Sensei did just to make so you could move again," he said sarcastically.
"Who are you?" the pink hair girl asked since she had never since this kid before and did he just refer to Naruto as Sensei?
"I am Ryo, and the fact that you're even able to move like this again is thanks to me, Sensei, and Ero-Sanin over there. Though if what I saw and heard earlier is how you always treat him, then I do not even know why bother to even help you," Ryo snorted.
While Jiraiya slumped his shoulder a little as he even got the kid (at in appearance and age compare the other tailed demons) calling him by that name.
"Hey, Sakura's not that bad of person even if she does hit me a lot," Naruto said in her defense, snapped out of his thoughts by Ryo's words
'There it is again, just Sakura and not Sakura-chan,' she thought, wondering how things could change so much from just one night (from her perspective at least).
"Naruto, what's happening? Is this really your doing?" she asked as she looked down at her chest under the jacket to see that there was a seal carved right where her heart was.
Naruto explained everything that happened between him, Sasori, and while she was just one of his normal human puppet, minus the rubbing her breast in his face and posing naked parts; then just the important fact of the search for Ryo, minus the part of her getting captured by Guren or running in their friends; then about time spend here making the jutsu and seal with Jiraiya and Roy in order to animate her like this.
Sakura just nodded as she listened to what had happened. Though nothing about going to Suna or the guy named Sasori rung any bells yet, she was positive that Naruto would never lie to her but something in his story got her angry again.
"You saw me half naked and carved this seal on me with your finger?!" She yelled as she was about beat the hell out her teammate for looking at her naked body while she was unable to do anything.
"It had to be done. I had to carve the seal on you and I couldn't use any tools because my hands were shaking too much to do it properly," he said. This caused her to stop as that was something she had expected Naruto would have done something that and he did give her his jacket and seem have made a makeshift dress from his clothes plus it was this seal that was allowing to move on her own again.