All of a sudden, the questions stop. Are stopped. Active effect; direct command.
The Third Hokage is a man with aching bones and a tired smile he only vaguely remembers how to wear. Skin like old worn paper, pinched and fraying like old worn twine. Bare scalp of liver spots and the dead wisps of hair. A creaking, teetering ramshackle of ancient muscle and bone.
At his word, the questions stop.
There is a shuffle; a reassignment; new rearrangements made. She will be a genin now; a 'proper' genin who ventures beyond Konoha's (protection) walls, and the questions will stop. The treatment of Haruno Sakura, the medical observation of Haruno Sakura, is now to be the responsibility of the Yamanaka Clan, alone. To pursue further investigation is forbidden. To plumb the depths of the runes she brings is forbidden. Her lessons with the sword will continue.
It's for the best, Inoichi whispers quietly.
She wonders what happened to the village elder that taught her Sealing.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
As it turns out, she has been pulled as a replacement.
Hasegawa Ami is not a… familiar name, but it rings with a faint notion of recognition. If she ever wants to remember it properly, it can be found written and engraved on a convenient slab of stone; left in the training grounds with perfect pride of place. Another victim to the world outside, it seems.
She arrives to a team in pieces. Sasuke, Uzumaki and the Jounin Hatake. Any evidence of unity is gone from them; the jounin has given up on his leadership, Sasuke has given up on his team and Uzumaki, continuing to play the fool, has seemingly never had hope at all. She wonders if he was responsible.
There's a look in each of their eyes that day, when she makes her reintroductions in the training field. Sasuke; familiarity, a weary acceptance, a grim refusal to hope. Uzumaki; hurt and confusion, something in the wound still raw, a lack of recognition despite their shared space for all those years. And Jounin Hatake, whose face is so tied up he can make barely any expressions at all, the smile of his one visible eye like a painted on mask.
It's expressed in different ways, but the 'I wonder how long this one will last' is plain to read.
In their minds, 'Haruno Sakura' and 'Hasegawa Ami' overlap.
In their minds, Haruno Sakura is already dead.
With the way her dreams always go, the notion is almost laughable.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
Unfortunately, there still remain questions.
They are of a changed nature, true, but their propensity to split and divide, split and divide and then endlessly repeat themselves has only intensified. No delays caused by the dream cycles, no respite, not much improvement at all.
How is she feeling what is she feeling what are her thoughts and opinions and dreams with the lowercase 'd'. An unexpected inquisition, made all the more alarming for how half her answers are apparently wrong.
So they just keep asking, expecting her to somehow divine the correct responses, yet deviations are to be noted and reprimanded. In the past, what they wanted to know was clear; Sakura might not have had the answers, but she knew where she needed to look. Here there is no such guidance and Inoichi's advice, as usual, fails to clarify. If she is 'not meant to think in terms of right and wrong answers' then what is the point in asking.
One of her younger doctors even apologises for it. Smiles helplessly, pushes up his glasses beneath his mop of grey hair, offers to just discuss the theories like they used to do. It's bizarrely a relief. He's surprisingly insightful about it, too; clever inferences, smart deductions, clearly read in on a lot of the old topics. Her old private room with the maps and models are sealed now, but he has pens and plenty of graphing paper, so the efforts restart anew. Starting from scratch is… daunting and frustrating, but at least she knows the right answers.
Talking about it to Ino gets her pity, but that doesn't meant they know what do about it.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
Determining her new role is… awkward. Determining the team's role is somehow even harder.
She does not know personally how a Konoha genin team is expected to operate, just snippets and tidbits and flashes of Ino complaining. She is, however, quite reasonably sure it isn't this:
Sasuke, willing to train as always, but never bothering to consider the others.
Jounin Hatake, more willing to stare at a name-engraved stone than his own living charges, who will raise his eyes to Uzumaki or the Uchiha but never at all to her.
Uzumaki, a permanent state of restlessness, his words and 'pranks' distinctly barbed; mistrust recognising mistrust. He aggravates Sasuke out of misplaced pride, but her? It seems 'replacement' is a highly objectionable existence. When grief and denial combine, they paint an ugly picture.
In some ways, it almost feels like she and Sasuke are the team's only members, being the only ones actively willing to work together in their mutual sparring practises. She can't quite put a finger on why but some part of that sentence still rings distinctly cruel.
Inoichi's advice still doesn't help, but he does promise to look into it. In the mean time, she and the Uchiha spar and spar and spar and spar.
There are no missions.
There are no team meetings or sessions or laughter or agreement.
Her breath will not be held.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
Someone somewhere – likely in the Hokage building – evidently ran out of patience.
Mission assignment, C-Rank, Land of Tea, three weeks estimate. Escorting a caravan from one place she's never heard to some other, different place. Dotted lines on maps. Uzumaki makes an aggressively loud haw about it being better than D-Ranks, and it belatedly occurs to Sakura she's never actually participated in any.
...She knows what they involve – Ino complains – but. Never participated in any. A hollow absence of experience she'd never noticed she was missing. Her old assignments back when they cared about the Dream Worlds were never organised as such. Nor, in hindsight, paid.
Ino grins and gives terrible advice. Her parents wish her well. Inoichi seems to… stiffen slightly, but pats her on the shoulder nonetheless; eyes stormy but none of it directed at her. Maria can only blankly tilt her head; clearly unsure what advise she can give from too-many worlds' distance.
She has to apologise to her new grey-haired friend, but his smile is understanding.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
Back in the day, there'd always been one point of curiosity they'd never been able to test for.
What affect did location have upon the Dreaming? Sleeping within Konoha or outside Konoha, did it make any difference?
As she slumbers in a sleeping bag beneath a moonlit sky, awakening before an ephemeral clockface, she suspects the answer may prove disappointing. No matter. She has a far more exciting development in mind.
She wakes Maria with an almost giddy smile, her mentor visibly caught off guard as she rushes about to and fro, gathering paper, gathering inks. They're somewhat… short for pigments around here, but she's learned to improvise. That old sealing brush from twine and cuts of her own hair has been iterated on multiple times by now, canvases and makeshift stands beginning to crowd Maria's echoing chamber.
A fresh pot, a fresh paper, and Maria sits and watches as she paints and draws and sketches and describes. The flick and curl of grass in charcoal monochrome. The bunching and petals of unfamiliar wildflowers in reds, quicksilver and strangely pearlescent oils. The sight of a village – an actual, civilian village; first she'd ever seen in this life – with all its people and buildings and clothing and stalls, scratched out in pencil and ink. Murakasa-san, their client, old and grey with few teeth left in his smile. Kei-chan, a short little thing with too much energy constantly bursting from her short frame. Carts and pack animals. Rabbits and nesting birds.
There's something sonorous; a gentle, sibilant sound. Maria has a hand before her mouth, shoulders shaking, soft chuckles fading into the chamber walls, too faint to echo. Her other hand raises, hesitates, fingers stopping a bare inch from brushing across the bare canvas, before being reluctantly retracted. Mindful of the still-drying inks, Sakura imagines.
Slowly, with uncharacteristic hesitance, Maria moves. A blank canvas, and a blank stand. At her request, Sakura hands her a brush and a bottle of ink.
Maria is born no artist either, but from that night, she learns.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
The mission is… slow and boring in some ways – the expected ways, as she vaguely understands it – but honestly, Sakura couldn't be happier. Fresh greenery, fresh sights, fresh air upon the breeze, and she doesn't even have to sleep to see it! The civilian kids on the wagon train are a right pack of chatterboxes, and Sakura listens and asks and lets it wash on over like a cleansing stream. A civilian's life and a civilian's work are, strangely, foreign territory. Fascinating to look upon.
She keeps talk away from her shinobi life, partly from shinobi training, partly from a gut instinct she can quite identify; warns her to withhold the details, warns they would not be welcomed. Was this is what Maria felt like, way back when? Intuition says 'yes' but can't say why. It's a strange, unfamiliar feeling.
Conversation thus remains merrily and pleasantly simple; their wants and worries and hopes and lives. Things they value and things they choose to miss. She learns the sheer difficulty and effort of basic textile production, the tricks and wiles of money-men and coin mints, the precision and mysticism of planting and growing seasons, the longing and fear of falling rain. Someone actually takes the time to explain what a 'goat' is.
Oddly enough, it's Sasuke who gives her the strange looks for all this, and Uzumaki who shares the interest. Not an attempt at camaraderie or anything, just- an interest. Shared.
What foreign existences they must seem like to him, she dares not safely speculate.
The Jounin Hatake, for his part, is just the Jounin. Stoic, stiff, eye on every underbush; he tries to mask it with an air of lazy nonchalance but it's apparent just in his stances, the way he prioritises his lines of sight. His only words to her are orders. This is actually an improvement.
They reach the destination and the cargo gets off-lifted and then all of a sudden, they're going home. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened: Uzumaki seems to breathe out a breath of air he'd been holding in the entire mission, Sasuke seems to twitch and constantly scan the treelines, Jounin Hatake subtly tenses like a silently taut bowstring, hovering and looming constantly at their back. She has the very distinct impression she's missing something, urgent.
Absolutely nothing happens on the way back either, even as they pass Konoha's towering gates. She never quite relaxes her sword arm until she reaches the Yamanaka estate, and never quite gets an understanding why.
...Ino finds it all hilarious, of course.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
Gliding lines across a canvas, gradients of colour mixed and intertwined. Texture laid out in the grit of charcoal, the dapple of a coarsebrush or the whirling curves of ink. Shapes and shadows and lines and arcs.
Upon these structural foundations, images are built.
Cainhurst, a castle locked in snow, a grim opulence wrought in solid stone, draped and adorned in ice. Maria sometimes has to mention that the monochrome of her charcoal drawings is actually accurate, and not some concession of style. Images of knights, of pale-skinned women matching Maria's austere features, of foreign-faced men with well-dressed facial hair and strange looks in their eyes. Old friends, old family. Left behind, she says. Her statement bears an odd tone of finality.
Byrgenwerth, a sky-viewing dome and austere halls, neat little lawns surrounded by tame forest and a tranquil lake. Eager students in simple robes, surrounded by musty tomes and books, star-charts and diagrams, freshly unearthed artefacts and sketched-out tunnel maps. An old man in a rocking chair, watching as a moon in a lake reflects the moon in the night sky. Great circular halls, rising steps like the classrooms of the Academy; passionate teachers, fascinated students. Learning, exploration, curiosity, awe. There's a fondness in her eyes and a fondness in her voice, choking in the back of her throat; turning bitterer the longer she talks.
Yharnam. Great spires of architecture, cobbled streets clutching tight together, piling on top of each other, climbing higher and higher into the sky with almost desperate grasp. Vast buildings – 'churches', Maria explains – with grand, ornate windows and looming, towering buttresses. Statues and fountains and carriages and horses. A great city Sakura can actually recognise; the one by the bloody river, now buried and consumed in the coral. A once proud place, as Maria tells it. The seat of the Healing Church.
The Healing Church.
The Chapel Ward.
The Choir the Cathedrals the Astral Clocktower the-
Maria's last few works are hushed, scrawled things. Things forced to be drawn, compelled to be dragged forth and laid to paper. She draws them perfunctory. She describes them perfunctory. The Healing Church healed. It founded Yharnam. Healed the sick.
...It sounded like a noble goal.
Maria never says anything to that.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
Revelations spark an interest, there in her grey-haired friend. And why should it not? He is a medic after all, to understand methods of healing – however foreign – is well within his purview. A route of inquiry she is happy to indulge, happy to discuss and theorise. Even the Yamanaka doctors let her investigate, if begrudgingly, once it is clear they are stepping wide of the runes. Who indeed can turn aside the power of healing?
In exchange, her grey-haired friend tells her stories. The First Hokage, the previous Shinobi Wars, the Sannin; Konoha's three great Sages. Jiraya of the Toad Seers, Orochimaru of the Great Snakes, and Tsunade of the Phantasmal Slugs. Her in particular her friend choses to highlight, a budding curiosity in his voice: a great healer so praised for her medical insights, he muses, should have held great interest in the Healing Church and its methods, yet she'd possessed a noteworthy fear of blood. He hadn't thought much of it in the past, he sheepishly admits, but now…
A fascinating curiosity indeed.
But the Sages are gone from Konoha's walls, so alas. Her friend can only shrug. Nothing to be done there. Tsunade left Konoha well before Sakura's birth, besides.
Instead, they try to focus. The blood, and what can be done with it. Chakra is a union of energies; the physical and the spiritual, this they know. The quirk to her coils ensures all her physical energies are tied into her bloodstream, hence the limitations on her ninjutsu, but in the Dream?
It's not as if she cannot bleed in the Dream, yet there's no chakra there to speak of.
A quick hypothesis and a few simple tests overnight confirm a few things, and from there, it's off into the realm of yin releases and nature transformations. Her Dreaming self, as her grey friend quickly proves, is a construct entirely of spiritual yin, even right down to the blood; not a speck of the physical to be found. It's a serious challenge, a unique challenge, the sort that brings a gleam to one's eye; even the yin releases and transformations known to Konoha have some component of chakra to them, either in the ignition process or as part of the energy transformations. Pure physical yang techniques are not unheard of either – every person in the world has at least a physical body – but completely pure yin, with no yang to work at all? An unfamiliar territory that not even the Konoha Medics or Yamanaka Clan can boast to explore.
Even he, Kabuto confesses with an almost dazed awe, cannot achieve that level of refined technique.
She has some things easier; while they're focusing entirely on yin techniques, her Dreaming self doesn't have to worry about control, filtering or having any yang trickling in to pollute things, might even let her explore some purely theoretical areas with nothing but pure, isolated yin to manage. But there are old books and dusty scrolls and quite some ways to go yet.
For once, these questions are all entirely hers.
~ ~~ ~~~^~~^~^V^~^~~^~~~ ~~ ~
In the human physiology, as recorded both by Konoha and in the Dream, it can be said there actually two brains. The first, of course, is the obvious; the one housed inside the skull. It handles the complexities of things; sight, sound, movement, empathy. It makes plans and draws conclusions, comprehends speech and writing. Predicts the future and remembers the past. This is the brain that thinks.
The second is the stomach. Woven into the lining; from the throat to the intestines; enough nerves to wire a cat.
Before life could think it still had to eat. The bestial prime brain, elder and more primitive than even the first outgrowths from the base of the spinal chord, it holds a subtle but inescapable sway upon behaviour, as certain as gravity. Hunger doesn't change a man; it just changes which half is presently in control.
In a way, you could say that the thinking mind is its natural evolution and superior. A quite literal elevation of thought.
In another way, you could call that very same process just a clever means to keep a beast well sated.
In all honesty, Sakura would have expected this to come up in the Dream, but-
The bandit swings, the bandit misses and her sword cleaves through thinned skinned and weakened muscle. Carving right through a starving gut. The body crumbles, just skin and bone, so absurdly easy it's actively jarring.
It's a similar story elsewhere, the rest of team making their own clean-up, the merchant caravan quite unmolested. She's only dimly aware of why these men were starving and the sturgid merchant isn't, but just by the fading looks in their eye she can tell they weren't being guided by rational thought.
Her blade flicks, the blood flinging off into the undergrowth, sheathing it a well-ingrained motion. Across, Sasuke stands, facing another body slump limply to the floor, his back to her still tense with expectation. Leftwards, on the opposite side of the caravan, Uzumaki is blinking twitchily, staring at his hands and one gory kunai; something in his eyes wide and confused. She hopes he doesn't start trying to eat anything.
The rest have died already, the bodies vanishing in puffs and flickers. The efficiency of a Jounin for you.
"He- he had a thing around his neck." Uzumaki blurts suddenly, waggling a hand about his throat in a circular motion. In his other hand: the blood-soaked kunai remains in a blood-soaked grip. "A charm. F-From Wave."
The name means nothing to her, but by the way Sasuke tenses-
"The road ahead is clear." The Jounin announces, a little too loud to just be addressing their client. "We should move on, Sanada-san."
"Y-Yes," the merchant stutters hesitantly, reaching for his reins, "let's..."
There is given no explanation.