Title: womb under water
Chapter: 6 – Year 5 to 6
Author: Killaurey
Rating: M
Word Count: 1,750
Summary: AU. Once upon a time, nine children were kidnapped, bought, and freely given into the care of a stranger who would become their parent. They were broken down then reforged, reformed and redeveloped into man-made gods in furtherance of a grand, mad plan. The nine rebelled against their parent, as all children eventually do, and tried to save the world.
They failed.
Six scattered to the winds. One died. Two were left behind.
It will be six years before they are all in the same place again. This is the six years of the two left behind.
(Sanity is a sliding scale.)
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 6 of 6.
Notes: The sequel to this will start going up on the 16th and is called watercolours in the rain.
In retrospect, the slide is easy to spot: the way things shift and change, the precarious tightrope, an altered angle as she walks across it.
But in the present, she doesn't notice.
Oh, she notices the way that time fades in and out, that hours go missing like so much scattered birdseed, but she doesn't notice anything wrong. Ino is fine. Her own numbers, in the tests, are fine.
It's just Inner being odd; her time in pieces. A shattered hourglass.
(Really, in retrospect, she should have just admitted it was wrong then.
She wasn't capable of it. But she should have. The deceptive calm, peaceful times were the darkness knocking on her door.)
That the oddness is spreading beyond her, in her isolation, the perfect breeding ground for patient zero, comes in drips and drabs.
Kiba's letters grow surlier (he is always surly, writing her) and his handwriting changes, each letter more jagged. Hinata chatters on in her missives, saying even less than usual. Shino stops writing her entirely and she's forced to ask Kiba to confirm that Shino is alright because it's one thing for Him to never respond to her, she'd fall over if he did, but Shino's manners are exquisite; he'd never forget.
Shino's letters resume.
But they're all wrong and empty. Like he's been hollowed out. He ignores any questions from her about his state of being, if he's okay, how he's getting on with… everything. Kiba tells her, "for the love of fucking god, just drop it, Sakura," and then answers none of her letters or calls for three months.
She doesn't ask Hinata what's going on, learning her lesson there, and just scours Hinata's chatty snapshots of fluffy brilliance, letters so bright that their illumination seems a fever dream, for the grit that must be underneath.
Ino, too, is changing.
There's agitation in the breadth of her shoulders. A mutinous tilt to her head. The riotous, unsettling tableau Ino has created, her room of nightmares and daydreams, is in rebellion.
Then, one day:
Good morning, Ino's voice says, an echo in her head.
Erosion, Ino realizes, is going to be the way they lose this war.
It's why Mother remains content to play their endless rounds of games, win some and lose some, a winsome facsimile of placidity painted on her pale face. Ino drapes herself over the back of a blood-red fainting couch, in ducky pajamas and her hair in pigtails, and eats a few strawberries, dipping them in warm, melted chocolate as she thinks about that.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Mother says.
"What currency are we talking about?" Ino wonders.
Mother shrugs, a vision in a formal Japanese kimono, silver koi dancing across deep blue moons, replete with embroidery that glitters and shimmers. A folded fan rests across her lap. Ino knows there's a blade hidden therein.
Eventually, Ino asks, "If I gave up, what would happen?"
Mother lays out cards and invites her over. "Black Jack?"
Licking her fingers, Ino shrugs a little. That's an answer in and over itself.
"Sure," she says, then asks: "Is the slow seepage better or worse for—everyone?"
"I suppose that depends," Mother says thoughtfully. "Do you prefer to rip a Band-Aid off?"
"Or let it fall off on its own?"
Mother's approval is quiet, found in the lines of her smile, the crinkles of her eyes. Ino turns her attention to the game, sharpening, focusing, unwilling to be made the jester—
And sliding to where Sakura hums as she bathes Ino's body. Ino studies Sakura thoughtfully, earning a brilliant, beaming smile when Sakura realizes she's there, watching.
"Is the water the right temperature?"
Ino honestly doesn't know. She's managed to reconnect parts of her consciousness to her body but not that, not now. It's never seemed very important.
Making her eyes smile isn't easy, but it's easier than making her lips move and it satisfies Sakura.
"Just wait until you've seen the dress I found for you," Sakura says, but Ino isn't listening, looking instead at the personality divide.
Not too tumultuous today. Maybe-
Things are falling apart. The seal is going to fail. Soon. Sakura, can you hear me?
But she doesn't.
Ino doesn't speak often and, when she does, it takes time, the ellipses of heartbeats audible between each rise and fall of her chest. It draws her like a moth to flame, a siren snaring a sailor. Sakura could drown herself in the bliss of it, euphoria drenched right through as she holds Ino's hand and listens and listens and there's a response.
Sometimes she wakes, Inner leaving her freewheeling without a frame of reference, to find herself on the floor, her head resting against Ino's knee, and it's terrifying, horrifying, she hates that, that shattering of the rigid lines she paints herself into, but Ino's fingers in her hair shift and smooth, and it doesn't fix anything, it doesn't stop the hate—
But it's… it's better.
The things Ino says are long and distant, like Pythia, Apollo's Oracle, she brings tidings of things that all of Sakura's tests can't measure, stories that Sakura can't find the pages to.
It dampens her joy, mutes and discolours it, a brooding mien that leeches ecstasy until she's on a more even keel.
Not that she stays there.
Her time is no longer her own, Inner taking more and more and more until some days Sakura wonders if she's become the voice in the back of Inner's head not the other way around.
It sends her into screaming rages and tumultuous tantrums, her carefully wrought controls and failsafes failing her one by one.
Everything is slippery, sliding, she has pages and pages of letters, hundreds of days detailed down, and the proof is there: something is wrong and Ino is right.
It's hard to remember when someone else is turning the pages.
It's impossible to forget, watching the news one night, seeing the Naruto's flame tails exploding through a cityscape, terrifyingly hot, blisteringly fatal, and out of control. She watches, immobile, the breaking stories, the deaths, and how no one knows what caused it.
Some confabulation of human incompetence, nature's brutality? A terrorist attack?
Sasuke calls her, hours later. "We're coming home," he says, no question.
There's no redemption here, she doesn't say.
It's screaming that draws her back to reality, thin and ephemeral though her grasp on it is these days, and Ino slides into her own mind, her own eyes, and takes in Naruto clutching at his head, claws drawing blood from his scalp.
A shadow—for a moment, her heart skips, but it resolves itself into Sasuke, who has gone past ashy and waxen into something phantasmal—and she is deeply, bitterly disappointed even though Sakura had told her that they were coming.
Something about Naruto having lost control.
She'd been shown newspapers but they hadn't mattered. This matters now, this broken shambles of someone who is used to shining, and it doesn't take her tangled mind to know that being here, seeing her and her madhouse, her gilded cage, has flung him into a trauma response, a flashback, a collapse.
Ino doesn't reach out for his mind. She doesn't dare, not when flames are crawling from the air around him, flames with red eyes, slitted like a fox, demon eyes.
But her other brother's mind is there, barely stable in and of itself, but lacking any horrors, lacking any balustrades or stanchions joined by velvet ropes, no signs labeled 'DO NOT PASS'.
Sasuke, Ino thinks, her voice sliding through layers easily, relief flooding her because she'd been worried that her difficulties with reaching Sakura were universal but they're not, they're not. Get him out of here.
Sasuke jerks back, an awkward revulsion, before his eyes widen, locking on her. "Ino," he breathes, and she realizes that he hadn't understood that she was there, more than a shell, greater than the pips of her.
Come back later? she says.
"We will," he promises. It takes blood spilt, flesh burnt, from both of them before she's alone again.
Inner mops up the gore, acid green eyes burning with fervent hatred, mutterings under her breath, and it is days before Sasuke and Naruto return, bandaged and reeking of Sakura's verdant energy, cling-wrapped.
"Hey, Ino!" Naruto says. "Sorry about last time!"
The seal is failing, Ino says to Sasuke. Get Sakura to call.
Inner puts her fist through Naruto's sternum three days after he and Sasuke arrive, bloodied, filthy, and smelling like other peoples' corpses. Naruto's laughter is too loud, Sasuke's is too quiet, their balance is an outside, unwelcome reminder of her own lack of moderation, her rollercoaster of personality shifts.
Sasuke yells at Inner, who yells right back at him, and between the eyeblinks of rage, Sakura can see the moment he realizes it's not her, that it's Inner, he's dealing with. It's in the swirls of his eyes, the brace for a fight.
Naruto stops them from killing each other the first time. And the next.
Battered and ragged, control a fine-spun thread, each meal is acknowledged as a truce. The seat next to her screams so loud.
But having them helps. She has more time as her. They don't hold grudges for perforated organs, broken bones, just as she doesn't for burns, punctures, and how there's always someone to heal. Repetitious.
Ino watches as they fall apart and Ino nags. And nags.
It will get worse, Ino insists, in her slow, drawling echo, the underwater rippling reflection of how Ino used to sound.
(Naruto and Sasuke do not mention how off she sounds; Sakura wonders if Ino talks only to her and hugs that possibility to her chest greedily.)
You need to bring everyone back. All of them.
"But we can't," Sakura says. "Chouji's dead."
He will come, Ino insists. Call them. The seal will break and soon. An overflowing dam.
"What will happen to you?" Sakura asks.
Ino's silence then is a hateful, lingering ghost. A shiver that sends Sakura's poorly balanced scales rattling.
What do you think? Ino says, finally. Call everyone back, Sakura. Otherwise everything's going to be worse.
Inner blinks the world apart.
Ino stares and stares until Inner capitulates, giving Sakura her freedom to do this for Ino.
Hours later, in town, Sakura's fingers tremble as she dials each number, a litany on the line of: "Don't hang up. It's about the seal."
Except for Him, who is told: "Don't hang up. It's about Ino."
