Title: Seeking Rin
Chapter: 17 - Niente
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4,522
Summary: When Sakura, newly in a relationship with Kakashi, finds out about Rin, she makes a choice that's hard on them both. Even worse, there's a mysterious illness cropping up in Konoha that even Tsunade can't heal. And what does Ino have to do with it? Kakashi x Rin, KakaSaku.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 17 of ? Unbeta'd.
Sakura wakes up abruptly-dizzy and nauseous and all alone-just like Tsunade-shishou had said. She'd be scared, except that this… this, she agreed to do.
Except fear comes flooding back a few moments after that thought as she gets a good look around the room. It isn't the room she'd been in with Tsunade-shishou. It's not the room she's already woken up in once already post agreeing to become Ran.
Where am I? she wonders, more discomfited than she would like to admit. (Even to herself.)
The emptiness of the room: just a few metal chairs and a table with the same cold sheen, leaves her frozen inside. She thinks of running, except that there are more important things to do. Too much for her to get bored or allow fear to freeze her, Sakura knows, as she pulls herself to her feet, stretching the aches and stiffness away.
She remembers waking up. She remembers running diagnostics. She remembers getting results (but, worryingly, she doesn't remember what those results were) and she remembers the doors of the room.
She doesn't remember anything else.
"What happened?" she asks but, of course, no one answers her. Sakura doesn't like this one bit.
Before she does anything else, Sakura checks the door. It's unlocked so she locks it. Doing so won't keep anyone out if they're really determined but it will give her a smidgen of time to brace herself.
(And if this repeats again well… maybe she'll remember a little more the next time around.)
That done, Sakura does a quick search of the room. There's really not much to it. The desk, the chairs, the walls, the floors, the ceiling, the harsh, glaring over-head light, and the door. She doesn't like any of it—which feels completely irrational—and yet she can't find anything untoward.
Which leaves just… her.
Any medical ninja knows many diagnostics. As Tsunade-shishou's apprentice, Sakura is not just 'any' medical ninja. She knows more.
She's done this already. (She doesn't remember.)
So she makes herself go through it all again. It takes time, and keeps her occupied, as she runs through all the ways she knows, the ones that are reliable to use on herself, and reflects on the results.
When she's done, Sakura sits on the floor, ignoring the cold chairs with a disdainful look, and bites her lip. She's not reading as herself. She still looks like herself, as far as she can tell, but she's not scanning the way she should.
It's like she's someone else.
That sounds and feels right, like she knew this already, but her mind feels fuzzy and heavy and things don't quite make sense no matter how she studies the results.
Sakura eyes the door of her cage contemplatively. It's locked but she still feels unsafe. She knows she can use her chakra which means that chakra dampeners aren't active.
The fact that she can get out of the room is comforting. The fact that, for now, she controls who can enter the room is also comforting. The knowledge of these things is the reason why she doesn't bust out of the room right away, now that she's done her tests.
She's hungry and thirsty and needs to use the bathroom but those are all secondary to the fact that she needs time to think and the room that she's stuck in seems designed to amply provide for that.
If she's Miyagi Ran, what does that mean for her? Tsunade-shishou had mentioned that there was a decision that was going to have to be made, something that has to be fixed.
Sakura wishes that she'd thought to ask more and knows that Tsunade-shishou wouldn't have told her.
She wouldn't have wanted to contaminate the experiment.
It makes her blood boil at being an experiment. Sakura shoves those feelings down and stomps on them. She can't afford to rage uncontrollably. Or cry. Or sit and shake, numb with shock and horror. She can't afford any of that.
Kakashi and Ino are going to need her help.
She flips through the journal again, relieved that it was still tucked into her clothes and that no one had taken it from her. Sakura takes her time re-reading bits and pieces of entries, looking for some clue about Ino that she's missed. She finds nothing. Resting her head on her knees, Sakura reminds herself that just because she's found nothing doesn't mean there is nothing.
Sakura's a prodigy at medicine and she can pound in faces with the best of them.
Ino can plot circles around her without even trying.
Tucking the journal away, Sakura gets to her feet. She'll keep the journal, because she suspects Ino would want her to, that there's more to it than has happened already, but she's not going to wait for someone to give her instructions.
Besides, she needs to pee.
Sidling up to the door, Sakura leans against the wall beside it and sweeps her chakra out in a wave that reverberates through empty hallways and rooms and finds nothing living. Somehow, Sakura doesn't find that comforting.
She opens the door anyway.
Then she tumbles into the hallway, alert and ready for anything as her chakra sweeps the halls again, just in case, because it's better to be safe than sorry. (She hates being sorry. She's so tired of being sorry.)
No one is around.
Sakura straightens, and breathes a little easier now that her eyes have confirmed what her chakra was telling her, before looking down the hall, both ends appearing the same, and picking the left at random. If there's no toilet down this way, she promises herself she'll check the other half too.
Luck is with her and she finds the bathroom after only ten minutes of looking. It's just as industrially bland and functional as the rest of the rooms she's seen. The light is unflattering, the paper is rough, and the water is cool no matter how she tries the hot water tap.
She does her business and, while washing her hands, tries to decide where to go next.
She's not Ran—not yet.
Her scans say she's well on her way to becoming her but… Sakura still feels mostly like herself. Discombobulated and annoyed and frightened in about equal measures but they're all her feelings and familiar.
Sakura thinks that Ran would know exactly where to go. Drying her hands on a bit of scratchy paper towel, she leans against the cool metal sink and studies her reflection critically. She looks like herself… mostly. Her hair and eyes are the right colours, but her hair has picked up some curl that it doesn't have naturally, and her eyes are narrower, with sharper eyebrows. Her jawline is more delicate.
She studies the girl in the mirror that she's becoming and wonders how far the changes will go.
Will there come a time when she doesn't recognize herself in the mirror? Or will she always recognize herself—will it just be a matter of the self she recognizes being different?
Will it be Ran who stares out and studies the body and wonder where the pink and green colouring has come from before it disappears entirely?
Shaking her head, Sakura leaves the bathroom quickly.
"That's enough," she murmurs, making sure to say the words out loud to make her resolve seem more real. "I'll think about that later."
And does it even matter if she thinks about it later? She's already made her choice.
Sakura mentally stomps on the thoughts that linger a few times more, lingering just outside the bathroom for a hesitant second, searching for Ino's chakra and not finding it. Then she picks left, since she's had good luck with left already.
(She needs all the good luck she can find; it's too bad Ino's usually the lucky one, of the two of them.)
I'm coming, Ino.
It's funny, but as she scouts the area, Sakura keeps thinking about Ino, rather than Kakashi. She supposes it's because while Kakashi's been driven mad… Ino is dying. One of them, there must be a cure for—now that she knows Kakashi's madness was induced, not natural, that means a cure must be possible even if she doesn't have the slightest clue where to begin with curing that—but dying, well, there's only one cure for that.
And Sakura doesn't want to entertain it what that means for Ino even though she's the one who, less than half a day ago, Sakura hit in public.
(But that had just been a clone. Not even the real Ino.)
She loves Kakashi fiercely, entirely, even though she broke up with him.
But if it is ever a question of who she'd save first, it's always going to be Ino. In a world like this, she wonders if that means she doesn't love Kakashi enough (but who decides what enough is?) and knows that there's no point in thinking about it now, not as she checks room after room that turn out to be empty and sterile, looking for Ino.
Later, she promises herself. She'll think about it later.
(After Ino is safe.)
And after the ramifications of what Sakura has done to save her have become apparent. The decisions she's made, they've left her free-falling, and she doesn't care.
I've got you, she thinks, hoping against hope that Ino will hear her. I'm coming. We're going to make it. Both of us.
She just has to make sure she isn't too slow to act. Sakura abandons yet another empty room, new steel in her spine, and sweeps the floor again, futilely, for other chakra signatures. There's so many dampers and wards up that the deeper she goes into this lab (was there ever a time when all of this space was used?) she can barely feel her own chakra, let alone others.
But she keeps looking because Ino's signature is as familiar to her as her own. If there's even the faintest, slightest, wildest chance that she can find Ino, can stumble across Ino's signature, she'll recognize it in a heartbeat.
The floor is empty, though she finds another bathroom, and a stash of lip balm in one of the lockers. The lip balm doesn't read as poisonous, just cherry-flavoured, so Sakura pockets it. (Alright, she'd pocket it even if it were poisonous-but for a different use.)
She finds twelve clipboards, twenty-three pens, and four abandoned lab coats. She leaves them where they lay. She has clothes enough and her and Ino's shared journal and the bright pink pen that goes with it.
Sakura prefers her own tools, in this case.
Standing in the stairwell, Sakura tilts her head up, peering through the railings to the floors above, just to see how far up the stairs go. It's hard to tell. The stairs go up at least another two floors, but beyond that she's hesitant to make any solid assumptions. A genjutsu has been twined around the stairs so thickly that it makes her teeth ache to pry at it-no simple kai will cancel this one-and to her eyes, there is a dizzying view of stairs reaching up forever.
Stepping back, she closes her eyes, centers herself, and then takes that step forward again. This time, she looks down. Immediately vertigo washes over her and Sakura clutches at the railing to keep herself from stumbling into it.
If going up has a genjutsu on it to stretch reality out, then going down has a pit that never ends. She swallows hard, bites her lip, and forces her eyes closed while she counts to ten, then to a hundred. Once she feels less like she's going to pitch right over the rail, Sakura steps back, eyes still closed, and reaches out with her chakra.
It's an easy decision.
Far more effort has been put into trying to keep her from going down than up. Sakura cracks one eye open, careful not to let her gaze stray downwards, and grimaces.
She's got to go down.
After taking a moment to study her surroundings again, Sakura closes her eyes tightly and, clutching the railing, begins to make her way down the stairs step by careful step. If someone were to attack her right now… she hates to think about it.
Her chakra will, hopefully, warn her in time to react, but fighting blind has never been one of Sakura's specialties, nor has it ever needed to be. Turning on the landing, she gropes for the railing, and makes her way down to the next floor.
She finds the door by feel, and pushes it open. Stepping out into the hallway, Sakura allows the door to shut behind her and carefully opens her eyes.
It's fine. Everything is fine. Turning to look at the door, Sakura staggers, going down to her knees as revulsion washes over her.
The genjutsu!
With a wrench, Sakura flings herself away from the door, landing heavily, awkwardly, on the cool linoleum. There, she lays panting, as the jutsu-originated nausea takes its sweet time to subside. She closes her eyes, reaching out with chakra, and still finding nothing.
"Okay," she says. "Okay. Let's not do that again."
Except she will.
She'll examine this floor to see if there's anything useful on it and then… then she'll go back to the stairwell and try going down another flight.
"But that's a battle for another Sakura," she mutters, pushing herself up off the floor, taking care to keep her back to the door she came from as she got a good look at the long, long hallway she was in. "This Sakura isn't going to borrow trouble."
She's got enough of it already.
The linoleum floor is out-dated (she's pretty sure it was outdated before it was put down and wishes Ino was here to agree with her) and a pale off-yellow that looks dirty even though the hallway smells sharply of hospital-grade cleaners.
Sakura is pretty sure the floor is cleaner than she is right now.
The walls are still the same white and the lights in the ceiling haven't changed either. The doors that dot the hallway at regular intervals, however, have changed. They're uniformly brown now, like the doors at the Academy, and they look just as old. Gone are the sturdy, intimidating doors from the floor above.
Getting to her feet, Sakura doesn't look behind her (she doesn't want to be flattened by the genjutsu on the stairwell again) but makes her way over to the nearest Academy-esque door. The handle is battered brass and turns easily under her hand. There's no window in the door.
That's the only thing she liked better from the old doors.
With a sweep of her chakra (which tells her, again, that she's the only living thing that's able to be sensed) she pushes the door open and…
She walks into a classroom.
Bemused, Sakura grabs a chair and uses it to prop the door open, should she need to make a quick escape, and then she gives everything a good, long look.
It's like she's been transported back in time. The chalkboard is empty—waiting for a sensei to fill it with the day's lesson—and Sakura takes a moment to locate a piece of chalk and doodle on it, a silly little flower with a smiling face. She'd never had the courage back when she'd actually been in the Academy to do so.
Doing it now feels like a victory for the tiny Sakura of the past.
She flips through the books, smiling as memories flood back. There's no need to read the shinobi rules these days, they're engraved in her mind and soul and she doesn't think she could forget them even if she tired, but there's something warm and comforting about reading them again.
Nostalgic.
The desks are so small though she remembers them being large.
Other than memories, Sakura doesn't find anything of use to her in the classroom. She checks all the books, every piece of paper. She checks the bottoms of the desks and chairs, then checks their legs too, and the insides of each desk, feeling carefully with both chakra and her fingers for anything that feels out of place.
In the end, it's just a perfect replica of a classroom. One that's timeless because Sakura can't find anything to date it at a specific time.
All the materials are things that haven't changed. The shinobi rules aren't amended very often. The work sheets are all ones she remembers doing—but calculating how to throw a kunai to cut a rope fifteen feet above you isn't a math problem that changes with the flow of time—and even things like the chalk and the erasers are ones she's seen Ino's dad use, she's used, and are the same as the Academy students these days use.
Despite looking for something, anything, out of sorts about this classroom, Sakura eventually is forced to concede defeat.
The strangest thing about it seems to be the very fact of its existence in the middle of a secret laboratory.
"Was this ever even used as a classroom?"
But no one answers and, on reflection, it's probably better that way.
When she leaves, she shuts the door gently behind her, wistful for simpler times, back when everything had made sense and the things that hadn't were things that she didn't have to think about.
Sakura sighs and sets off down the hallway to the next door.
It doesn't really surprise her when the next few doors are yet more classrooms. She finds an indoor weapons range.
(Sakura steals every single kunai, senbon, shuriken and length of wire from the range. Being fully armed makes her feel a bit better.)
She finds a music room, which is interesting mostly because she'd dreaded the lessons on the koto and shamisen with Suzume-sensei with every fiber of her being back when she'd been in the Academy.
"But good kunoichi have to be well-rounded," she says, smiling slightly.
She can hear Suzume-sensei saying just that like it was yesterday.
When she finds a sewing room next, Sakura isn't surprised. The dress forms are still eerie, being just bodies without heads or arms or legs, but they don't do anything and she's got worse nightmares these days.
Nothing gets found there either though, this time, Sakura is willing to concede she might have missed something.
She's got worse nightmares these days but the metal bars of some of the dress forms still make her skin crawl. Her search is quick and barely thorough and then she flees.
(No one needs to know.)
The kitchen, now, she wanders through that much more eagerly. Sakura always had liked the cooking lessons and, in the moment, she's hungry.
There's a complete dearth of ingredients to make anything with but she does find some field ration bars tucked behind some of the mixing bowls in the bottom cupboards. She hauls them all out and inspects them carefully, using a few medical jutsu to check if they're poisoned or expired.
They're neither, still good to eat, though they taste like berry-flavoured cardboard.
It's a risk, of course, in eating them, but Tsunade-shishou doesn't want her dead. The whole point of the experiment isn't to kill her which helps mitigate some of the risk from eating food from an unknown source.
Sakura hangs out on one of the metal kitchen stools, eating a few ration bars, then gets a drink of water and heads off to the next rooms.
Which turn out to be more classrooms.
"Was this a school at one point?" she wonders. It wouldn't take much to make it a functional school, even now, and it occurs to Sakura that maybe this was something from the great wars. Sakura doesn't remember ever learning about the village being so imperiled that the Academy was moved underground but it's been a long time since she studied history.
And this might not be covered in the Academy's history lessons.
Classroom, classroom, classroom, and then—
"The library," she says, brightening as she enters the room. Sakura doesn't expect there to be much of use to her here but she's always found books to be comforting. She does a walk-through of the place—it's bigger than she's expected it to be—and it's not until she's on her way back towards the door that she realizes there's someone sitting in one of the chairs.
Pushing her chakra out, it comes out reading that no one is sitting there.
"Hello?" Sakura says carefully, wondering if she ought to switch the 'someone' in her thoughts to 'something' instead.
Taking the long away around the room, Sakura circles until she can approach the person (thing?) in the chair from the front.
"A… doll?"
It looks like life-size doll of a little girl, maybe three, still toddler-pudgy, with thin brown hair, black eyelashes, and empty, hollow eyes.
Sakura shivers. Creepy. Well-made but creepy.
She makes no move to go closer to it, instead draping herself over the back of a chair a good distance away from it and just studies it. The doll is one of the best constructed that she's ever seen. It looks almost real, except for the emptiness in the eyes.
"None of this makes sense," she mutters. "Fine, a secret lab I get. I'm willing to bet there's more than one in Konoha. But why is there a secret school with a doll in the library?"
The doll doesn't answer her.
On reflection, Sakura is grateful for that.
She's also starting to feel a bit silly just eyeing a doll like it's a trap about to spring at her. Sakura huffs a sigh (at herself, for her nerves, as if they aren't perfectly reasonable given everything) and before she can think better of it, strides around and over to the doll and plucks it up.
It's heavy, far heavier than any real toddler would be.
It flops in her hands, boneless and empty.
"Okay," Sakura says, relieved as nothing happens. "Okay."
Now that she's got the doll, she makes sure to search through its clothes for anything important (there's not even lint in the pockets) before she puts it back, having found nothing except that her fear was foundless.
(Which means, really, she found the most important thing.)
After that, Sakura loses track of time in the library. Each book might have answers so she has to check all of them and checking all of them means that there's always going to be a paragraph, a page, a chapter that genuinely fascinate her.
(She's always been a nerd.)
It's not until her bladder demands, firmly, that she has to go and go now that Sakura peels herself out of the library. She checks on the doll on her way out and a cold chill dances down her spine—the doll has moved and points now at the door.
Sakura goes out the door only because it's the only way too go and she glowers at the doll on her way out.
The bathroom is where she thought it would be—across from another door into the stairwell that makes her head ache even just passing by it—and when she catches sight of her reflection in the mirror, Sakura swears.
A lot.
Her cotton-candy pink hair is fully curled now and streaks of—green? Blue? Some shade in-between?—are spilling through the strands like a child has kicked over a bucket of paint. Her eyes have darkened. Still green but not her green.
Shaken, Sakura leaves the bathroom quickly.
Before she can think better of it, Sakura closes her eyes and just keeps going across the hall, reaching the door handle by feel, pushing it open, and finding the stairs by touch, refusing to look.
Stair by stair she goes down again, her breathing tight and uneven.
She's losing herself. (How much time had she lost in the library? Sakura isn't sure what day it is. Had she slept? She doesn't remember.)
She needs to find Ino before she's too much Ran and too little Sakura.
After all, there's no way that Ran will love Ino the way that Sakura does. Ino is dying.
When Sakura disappears will Ran even know that there used to be another girl in the body she walks in? Will anyone ever know what happened to her or will Ran just step into her life, like an evil twin in a late-night movie?
(Will she even be evil?)
Sakura stumbles down the stairs, her head reeling despite her eyes being closed, and it's almost with relief that she slams into the next door. Scrambling at it, Sakura finds the knob, yanks it open, and flings herself through. Her feet sink into carpet.
The door slams shut behind her. There's a click of it locking.
Slowly, Sakura opens her eyes.
"Ah, Ran-chan!" A woman bustles up to her looking suspiciously like Shizune, though Shizune's smile has never been so carefree. "I was looking for you! We've got to go over last mission's reports, don't you remember?"
"Sorry," Sakura hears her mouth speaking. "I forgot. Forgive me, Yoshiko-san?"
But I didn't forget anything! Sakura protests. Her mouth doesn't move. Horror floods her. I don't know you! I'm not Ran!
"Well, I guess so," Yoshiko-san says, laughing. "After all, you're here now. Come on, I'll make you tea and you can tell me what's got you so distracted!"
"I thought we were doing mission reports?" Ran says, her voice low and amused.
Sakura is not the slightest bit pleased. At all. In fact, she's incredibly close to screaming inside her heart and, she thinks, if she starts then she won't ever stop.
"We'll do that too," Yoshiko-san says. "But you know how it is, Ran-chan. Gossip before work is my way!"
"You should maybe not say that too loud," Ran says. "You never know who could use that against you."
"Psh. I'd like to see anyone try."
Sakura is quiet (she has no choice but to be) as Ran, in her body, and Yoshiko, walk through the carpeted halls of the lab. Down here are other people, all of them Konoha ninja, going from the hitai-ate they wear, but Sakura doesn't recognize any of them.
Some look familiar only to stop being familiar as they get closer.
Ran is greeted as they walk through the halls.
If anyone knows Sakura is there too, they don't say anything. They don't mention how Ran's hair is mostly several shades of pink (Sakura can still see the pink curls out of the corner of her eye) or how she's wearing clothing that belongs to another woman.
I want out of this!
The very worst part is that Sakura agreed to this. She's willingly chosen to become Ran.
I didn't think it would be like this!
But that didn't make a difference as Yoshiko-san and Ran took a seat in a small office.
"So," Yoshiko-san says, putting a kettle on to eat. "Start talking, Ran-chan."
Ran laughs.
