Sakura was standing in the freezing water of the cave, the slug still perched on her shoulder. She shivered involuntarily – the sinister energy of the cave was undeniable, and the promise of ancient forces and spirits swirled around her head.
"This will be painful." the slug said quietly and unhelpfully. "Chakra purification is as unpleasant an experience as your species can stand. Fortunately, you only have to live through it once, and your mind will be occupied with other things."
"Fortunately?" Sakura choked.
"Indeed. You will have to confront a great many truths about yourself. To rid yourself of your malignancies, you have to meet the demons that live inside of you, and you must then tame them so they have no hope of controlling you."
"I don't have demons."
"We all have demons." The slug says gently. "Even now, the cave is drawing them out of you. I can feel it. We should make a start before they break free and destroy us both."
Sakura shifted uncomfortably, rocking back and forth on her heels. It was undeniable that something was happening to her – she had the horrible feeling that something was crawling under her skin. She rubbed her arms, trying to warm herself, but the cold was coming from within. Her shivering had become uncontrollable, and she was becoming lightheaded.
"Shall I explain the process to you?"
"Please."
"For purification, the cave will first draw all of your chakra out of your body. Normally, this would be a death sentence, having all of your chakra drained, but it will be immediately replaced with natural energy, which you will circulate through your tenketsu, the way you have just learned. By doing this, your tenketsu will be purified, and you will then be able to create purified chakra as well as manipulate natural energy."
"The natural energy won't turn me into a slug?" Sakura asked apprehensively – she remembered that Naruto had very nearly spent the rest of his life as a toad thanks to the effects of uncontrolled natural chakra.
"No. As I said, becoming a sage in Shikkotsu is very different to becoming a sage in Myoboku. The nature is different here, and the nature of the energy is different as well. Do you remember the most important part of your medic training?"
"Don't get killed."
"No. Well, yes, but no. The most important part is that you remain calm. If you are not calm, you cannot control your chakra well enough to direct it for healing. With natural energy, it is even more important that you can provide a calm environment, or it will incinerate you. And that is where the search for self-acceptance comes in."
"Stay calm or be incinerated. Got it."
"No, no. You are not understanding. While your tenketsu are undergoing the conversion, you will be inside the planes of your own mind, seeking inner peace. While you are doing this, I will be sitting right here on your shoulder, controlling the natural energy so that it does not kill you. The hope is that when you awaken, you will have gained the serenity to control it yourself."
What have I gotten myself into? Sakura thought, not for the first time since arriving in the forest. She was unconvinced that this was a survivable undertaking. The slug seemed to understand her trepidation.
"Have more faith in yourself, child. No time like the present."
"No time like the present." Sakura repeated, trying to convince herself. "Let's start, then."
"Good. Sit in the water. Don't look at me like that," the slug warned. "Go ahead, sit. Criss cross applesauce, as you humans like to say! I said don't look at me like that. Good girl. The cold will pass. Can you swim, by the way?"
"When I'm conscious," Sakura muttered, clenching her teeth. The cold did not pass. It wracked her body in convulsions, pulsing ice through her veins. She was submerged up to her navel now, and her toes were numb.
"Good, good. The last one nearly drowned. Now, elbows back. Pull your navel toward your spine…. My god, you call that posture? Palms facing up on your thighs, please. Feel all the points of your body that are connected to the earth. These are your anchors."
"I feel them." The rocky floor of the cave pressed into her thighs uncomfortably. She worried about hypothermia and blood circulation, the medic in her unwilling to rest.
"On my signal, you will begin to cycle your chakra, the way you just learned. It will hurt, but you will not feel anything at all after a few moments. Your soul will fall into the hands of the spirits, and your chakra will be pulled out of your body and into the water."
"Am I going to die?" Sakura whispered, and her voice was afraid. She could no longer feel her limbs, the cold giving way to the numbness of deadened nerves.
"Certainly not." The slug assured her. "I am right here, and I won't leave you. I will be keeping you alive myself. This is hardly my first cave cleansing. On the count of three."
She nodded, her throat aching too much for words. Something inside of her wanted out, something violent and sick with murderous intentions.
"One."
Sakura squeezed her eyes shut.
"Two."
She clenched her hands into fists.
"Three."
She began circulating her chakra, pushing the energy through her tenketsu. At the same moment, she felt the wriggling under her skin strengthen, like a million white-hot maggots had forced their way into her veins. She gasped, gulping stale air into her lungs, and forced the current of her chakra to continue its flow. The water around her legs began to glow faintly, the pale green effervescence that she had seen thousands of times before, and she felt herself growing weak.
The glow grew stronger as she grew fainter, and she felt the slug begin to pour its own foreign chakra into her. She grasped at it but it wasn't hers and she couldn't hold it, only feel it as it began to circulate through her tenketsu in place of her own chakra that was trickling into the water. Her shoulders began to droop.
A dull scream began to ring in her ears, intensifying with every moment. She thought it might be her own, but soon realized it couldn't be – it was made up of hundreds of voices, beckoning her beyond the pale, coaxing her towards the abyss.
Do not resist, Sakura could vaguely hear the slug whisper. With one final gasping breath of reality, she closed her eyes and allowed the voices to pull her under the black water.
Suddenly, she could no longer feel the cold swirling around her navel, or the rocks pressing into her skin. She could not feel her life force draining out of her. She felt comfortable, warm, like she was underneath a soft blanket.
She opened her eyes, and was greeted with the sight of absolutely nothing, as if she had opened her eyes to the darkest night. She could still feel her body, run her hands down her arms, draw air into her lungs, and she could tell she wasn't blind – there was just nothing to see.
"Haruno Sakura, who are you?" A voice asked, startling her. It was a multi-hued sound with the timbre and tone of many different voices coming together in perfect harmony.
Sakura, confused, had no answer. The voice very clearly knew her name – so why ask who she was? "Um. I'm Haruno Sakura. Like you just said, kind of."
"You are a lost child." The voice corrected her. While it did not sound unkind, Sakura could not mistake it for friendly. At best, it was indifferent, and it sent shivers down her spine. "You will have a better answer for me soon, I hope. You are not the first to come looking for me. Many have come here seeking exactly what you seek. But if you succeed, you will be only the second."
She swallowed. She was hardly the type of girl to succeed where others could not.
"If you have come to me to learn who you are, so that you may make peace with it, then you have quite the journey lying ahead of you. There are many contradictions that live inside of your soul, little girl."
"Who are you?" Sakura asked, afraid. Ancient forces, she remembered. A thing not to be trifled with.
The room rumbled, low and powerful – was the voice laughing at her? "I can see you, Haruno Sakura. You can hide as long and as far as you wish, but I will always see you, now that you have come to me. There are legions within you – as many are perverse and corrupt as are saccharine and delightful. And they are waiting to eat you alive."
Sakura swallowed. She regretted asking. She did not feel as though she contained legions. But as she thought so, she began to feel a rattling inside the hollow space her bones that began to burn and expand.
"Are you going to let them out, Sakura? Are you going to give them what they want?" The voice taunted, and she could almost hear greasy lips pulling taut over fangs as tall as a man, smiling sickly down at her. "Or are you going to give into me, and just let me consume you now? You could save yourself a lot of heartache, you know – it will happen either way. Just come to me, and I can make you safe."
Sakura shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, sinking to her knees. She knew the voice was lying – whatever lay in its claws, it was not safety – but it tempted her in a way she had never been tempted before. The way a fish can't resist the shiny flash of a baited hook, she wanted to flick her little fins in its direction, to find out what it was like to be truly consumed.
No. She felt the fire crawling its way up her throat, looking to escape through her lips. She shook her head, pressing her hands against her mouth to keep it shut. The rattling in her bones had expanded into convulsions that jarred her thoughts. Flashes of red and yellow began to flicker in her periphery. Don't give in. Somehow she knew that if she let it escape, it might never fit back in. Sakura cradled her head in her hands, her skull threatening to split in two, her eyes squeezed shut. She could hear her bones cracking and her blood seeping out from underneath her fingernails, burning hot against her face.
"Let them out, girl!" the voice roared, its taunting edge gone, its indifference replaced with a pure anger that could rip a world apart.
She could not hold it in any longer – her skin was swelling, bones splintering, brain melting, eyes disintegrating from their sockets. She knew that she could end the pain if she would just open her mouth, and let them out. But a different kind of pain was waiting on the other side, she knew. Could it be worse than this?
Yes.
Sakura screamed. As her mouth opened, everything that had been lacerating her insides poured out into the blackness, and her skin shrunk back around her muscles, her bones straightened, her eyes healed, the smell of blood disappeared.
The voice cackled. "You've done it now, girl. You'd better go find them before they find you."
The darkness consumed her consciousness.
..
..
..
When she woke, she was lying flat on her back and staring at a dusky purple sky. It was streaked with sunset pinks and blue clouds and the bright twinkle of early stars. Her palms were grasping handfuls of cool, damp grass and tall trees dotted the periphery of her vision.
"Ahem."
When she turned her head, there were no ancient forces, but a tiny girl no older than twelve, with messy, scraggly blush-pink hair covering her bright green eyes, wearing a familiar red dress and staring right at her. Sakura sat up so fast that black spots converged on her vision. She blinked once, twice, and shook her head.
The girl mirrored her, sitting up and crossing her arms. "Are you just gonna lie there or what?"
"Why am I – who are you?" Sakura frowned. "And why are you me? Where are we? What happened to the – the voice?"
"I don't know about any voices, but… You don't remember me?"
"Is that a trick question?"
"I'm you."
"No. I'm me. You're… you're something that damn forest conjured up to mess with my head, as if that horrid voice wasn't bad enough. So go away. I'm trying to do something here."
"What're you trying to do?"
"Make inner peace." Sakura grumbled, getting to her feet and dusting bits of grass off of her pants. "Face my demons, or something like that. I think I just threw them up a few minutes ago and now I have to go find them, so if you'll excuse me, I don't have time to babysit hallucinations."
The girl also stood, and immediately planted her fists on her hips in a pose Sakura found embarrassingly familiar. "How d'you know I'm not one of those demons? And excuse me, did you just say you threw up?"
Sakura looked around. She had somehow woken up in the middle of a quiet meadow surrounded by trees – trees she knew. She knew exactly where she was. This was the third training ground, where she and her teammates had tried and failed to take a set of bells from Kakashi.
Sakura started walking west, where she knew Konoha was waiting for her.
"Uh, hello?" the girl grabbed Sakura's hand. "Is this how you greet your old friend? Wow. I grew up to be a total bitch, didn't I?"
"What'd you just say?" Sakura frowned, shaking her hand out of the child's grip. "You're awfully rude."
"You appreciated my rudeness when I kicked that pig Ino out of our head during the chunin exams." The child said haughtily, flipping her short pink hair over her shoulder.
Sakura stopped walking and turned to stare at the girl, squinting. "No."
"Yep." The girl beamed. "It's me. Inner Sakura."
"Oh no." Sakura groaned, smacking her forehead. "That's even worse. I thought I got rid of you years ago."
"Nope. You just started ignoring me, which was totally bitchy. Like, really totally. Anyway, since you're my responsibility, and you ended up here, you're stuck with me."
"Where is here, exactly? This can't really be Konoha." Sakura gestured at the trees surrounding them.
"Let's you and I walk." The girl reached up and took Sakura's hand, pulling her through the forest. As Sakura expected, the trees eventually parted into a pathway with the village gates at the end. The girl chattered the entire way – annoying, Sakura thought with an almost-smile.
"So, where is here?" The girl asked Sakura as the training grounds began to melt into the outskirts of the village. "You tell me."
"This is Konoha. This is where I… where we grew up." Sakura amended, looking around her, savoring the familiar warm breeze rustling the tiny leaves on the trees, swirling them around the air. "This is home."
"And we love being home, don't we? But you haven't been home in a while."
"No," Sakura agreed. "I haven't. Where are you taking me?"
"I have something to show you." The girl said, pulling Sakura along through the familiar streets of Konoha. Strings of paper lanterns hung between buildings, and a warm glow emanated from every window, shop or home. But there were no people. Sakura peered into the windows of shops and restaurants – there was food on the tables, but no one to eat it. A ghost town? She shuddered. Lazy music twisted through the streets, and she felt like she had known the tune in a past life, maybe. It's familiarity was a melancholy one.
The pair continued on, passing the old ramen restaurant that Naruto had dragged her to hundreds of times over the years, and she found herself staring up at faces that were carved into the cliffside. She recited each of their names in her head out of habit – Hashirama, Tobirama, Sarutobi, Minato, Tsunade, Kakashi.
"Crazy that they let Kakashi-sensei up there." The younger girl sniffed. "After how badly he ignored us, I can't believe they put him in charge of everything."
Surprised, Sakura glanced at her younger self. She had forgotten the anger and resentment that she used to harbor for her old teacher. "He did his best, you know. He was battling his own demons."
"Still. We could have been something great, couldn't we? Maybe if he had given us the time of day instead of giving all of his attention to Naruto and Sasuke, none of this would have ever happened. We could have stopped Sasuke from leaving."
"Nothing was going to stop Sasuke from leaving." It was a truth that Sakura had been forced to admit to herself over and over, but that didn't make it sting any less.
The girl shrugged. "We'll never know now, I guess. Anyway, we're here."
Sakura averted her gaze from the carved faces to the building in front of her, and she gasped. She recognized the tiny house and its red painted shutters and small garden. The paint on the front door was peeling, and the gold doorknob was brassy from years of young and old hands turning it, returning from the academy or missions or jobs. Her mother was always after her father to repaint it, but he thought it added character. This was her childhood home.
"Go inside." The little girl nudged. "No need to knock. This is your house, isn't it?"
"I, uh…" Sakura said hesitantly, resting her hand on the old doorknob. "What's inside?"
"I don't know. Go find out." And with that, Sakura was pushed inside, the door slamming shut behind her.
"Sakura, honey, is that you?" She heard her mother's voice call from the kitchen. "How was training?"
As she opened her mouth to answer, a voice behind her beat her to it. "It was good, Mom. What's for dinner?"
Sakura turned to see that her younger self had followed her into the house. The young girl winked at her older self, and then pushed past her into the foyer. Sakura trailed behind her.
Her mother was sitting at the counter, considerably younger than Sakura knew her to be; fewer wrinkles lined her face, and there was no gray in her hair. Mebuki glanced at her young daughter and smiled, paying no attention to the older Sakura behind her. "What did you learn at training today?"
"Who cares? Sasuke is never gonna like me back." The young Sakura grouched, and collapsed dramatically into a chair beside her mother. "He won't even pay attention to me at all."
"Maybe because he's busy paying attention to the lessons," her mother chided gently. "Maybe you should try that, and let your smarts speak for itself."
"Sasuke's a good enough ninja for the both of us." Sakura grumbled. "It's not ladylike to fight. Plus, boys like to rescue girls."
Sakura watched as her younger self continued to complain about the uselessness of learning how to throw kunai properly and how difficult it was to get closer to Sasuke when Naruto was always tagging along, being loud and competing for attention. Her mother nodded along patiently, not really listening.
Sakura wanted to shake the young girl. She wanted to scream. Be better than that! Listen to what Kakashi is trying to teach you. Don't be more interested in Sasuke than your own life. Be nicer to Naruto. Be something, but don't be this useless!
As if she could hear her, the young girl turned to look at Sakura with a smile on her face. "It's so frustrating that you can't change the past, isn't it?"
The walls around her began to melt, and the young girl and her mother disappeared. Sakura found herself staring at her own reflection through a gold-framed mirror.
She hardly recognized herself. Her green eyes were dull, her cheeks were hollow, her arms thin and pale and roped with muscle. Her blush-pink hair was straggly, uncombed, cut unevenly with a kunai. The simple black uniform she wore seemed to swallow her alive. Her sallow face looked like it hadn't smiled in months, like it hadn't spoken a word in weeks. She looked… unhealthy, sick, lost.
Is this what I look like now? Sakura hadn't seen her reflection in so long - she had purposefully avoided it, relying on genjutsu when she needed to change her appearanceShe raised her fingers to the mirror to touch her reflection. As soon as her fingertips touched the cold surface, the mirror shattered out of the frame.
Behind the mirror was a window, held in place by the same gold frame; through it, she could still see herself. But a different version, in a different place – this one looked healthy, happy, with rosy cheeks and a bounce in her step, wearing long white coat and standing in front of the Konoha hospital. And it wasn't a reflection – this healthy, smiling Sakura waved at her gaunt counterpart through the window, and flounced away to start her shift.
The mirage did not end there. Images continued to flash in front of her, images of happiness and optimism and achievement of a different Sakura.
She was faced with what she knew could have been the future; what could have been, what was likely to have been. A career, a wedding, a family; a simple death in her old age surrounded by loved ones. But then, the scenery changed, and she was shown the alternative. A lonely, blood-spattered existence ending the way it was lived - desolate, bitter, forsaken. And when that life ended, it would switch back to Konoha, where she watch herself live other fulfilled and enjoyed lives, and then back to the icy wilderness where she spent her days on the run. There were as many hard endings as soft, as many slit throats and crushed skulls as quiet passings. She lived each of these lives inside of her old childhood home or in the snowy cabin in the mountains, watched herself go through so many different versions, steeped in contentment or rent with hardship.
They all ended in death – oftentimes gruesome and bloody. She watched these without flinching. It was what came after that hurt her the most.
Her friends lives went on without her; they had children and grandchildren and not one of them knew about her. Her grave sat in silence year after year. Fake as it was, Sakura found herself hurt that not one person visited her. When she finally died, Kakashi only heard about it months after the fact, pulled out her file, stamped it, and put it away; it was never taken out again.
Then, when Kakashi had put the file away for the last time, the gold frame and mirror disappeared. She found herself back inside the tiny living room of her old home, standing alone except for Inner Sakura, who was sitting on the old ratty couch, reading a book about understanding young men. She looked up at her older self and smiled. "Well, what'd you think?"
Sakura said nothing as tears began to stream from her eyes and she sank to her knees. She was exhausted – she had watched for what felt like years, each life different from the last, either happy and loved at home or wretched and dying alone in varying and horrible degrees of injury. For a long time, she cried as hard as she could. And then for a long time, she was quiet. She thought of everything that she had seen, the good and the bad, the long life in Konoha and the short one in the snowy cabin in the mountains.
"Were those my only options?" She said quietly, staring up at the ceiling. "Since I can't go back home, am I bound to the alternative?"
"Well, no." The young Sakura said, sitting on her hands. "It's not like I was telling the future or anything. I just took your own thoughts and showed you what they look like in real life."
"What?" Sakura wiped the remaining tears from her eyes and glanced at the little girl.
"You're not really doomed to anything, are you? Even if you can never come home, why does that mean that you have to resign yourself to hopelessness? There's no telling the future, Sakura. Nothing is set in stone."
"Because I… How am I supposed to be happy, with everything I had to leave behind? When everyone thinks I'm dead, when nothing I do means anything?"
"Just because no one knows what you're doing, it has to be nothing? What happened to us, Sakura? You used to listen to me. You used to listen to yourself. You used to trust that you knew the way. Is this all it takes to break you? Making you start over?"
Sakura was silent, not knowing how to respond. Of course it had broken her – leaving home, leaving everything and everyone that she had loved and that had loved her. Seeing what could have been, and how ardently she longed for it – so much that her lungs hurt, that the pain in her gut could kill her, that her heart might as well stop beating - what was left for her, if not that lonely death that nobody even knew happened?
"Then maybe you're as weak as you think you are." The young girl said quietly. "You made this sacrifice yourself. You know you'll never have any of it back. Things won't be like we hoped they would be. But it doesn't have to be bad. There can still be meaning, can't there?"
Sakura stared at the young girl. She didn't look so young anymore – in fact, she had grown significantly older without Sakura noticing. No longer a twelve year old, the person sitting in front of her was the same age as Sakura herself, green eyes bright and healthy.
"Couldn't you listen to me?" She said softly, taking Sakura's hand in her own. "Couldn't we learn to trust each other? And couldn't we still make something good out of this lifetime? Everything you saw – you can avoid that. But you have to want to do it. Go be the new slug sage, kick some ass. Find other things to do to help Konoha, even. And don't ignore me anymore."
"Maybe that wouldn't be so bad." Sakura squeezed the hand offered to her, and she could feel herself almost smiling. She hadn't smiled in – how long now? She hadn't been counting.
"So can you accept that the past is the past? But the future – the future is yours, and you should still do your best. Find meaning some other way."
Her lips broke into an actual smile then. "Yeah. I think I can do that."
Sakura let herself be pulled to her feet by the mirror image of herself, who was smiling softly. "Then there's only one more thing for you to make peace with."
"What?"
The reflection of herself dropped Sakura's hand and gestured to the front door of their old home. "He's waiting for you out there."
"He?" Sakura asked, confused. The door opened of its own accord, and Sakura walked toward it uncertainly.
"Go." Inner Sakura encouraged her. "It's not the last you'll see of me. Not by a long shot. Go make your peace."
Sakura slowly walked to the front door and turned the doorknob; she found herself standing outside of the house, on the front steps, staring out into the garden her mother had so diligently cared for, and the walkway that led away from her home.
She found herself standing outside of the house, on the front steps, staring out into the garden her mother had so diligently cared for, and the walkway that led away from her home.
On that walkway stood Sasuke, wearing simple black clothing and a frown on his face as he looked around at his surroundings.
Sakura quickly shut the door and turned back to face Inner Sakura. "What's he doing here? He's not... he's not really here, is he? Like, he's just like you, he's coming from inside of my head, right?"
"No, he's really here," the girl said sweetly. "His body is not, but his spirit is. How else are you going to get any answers? Go. Ask your questions. Be honest; he won't remember a thing when he wakes up. It will be replaced with a dream of his childhood, or perhaps of nothing at all."
Sakura huffed, conflicted and confused - he was here, somehow, and she knew she wouldn't be able to leave this dream state until she had talked to him and settled whatever hold he still had on her. She would have to trust that he would forget - strange magic lives in this forest, the slug had said. Strange magic indeed.
She turned back towards the door and placed a hand on the knob, turning it slowly. When she glanced back, her younger self had disappeared, and she was alone once more.
With a deep breath, she opened the door.
"Sasuke?"
First off, sorry that I didn't update when I promised. I actually got off my butt and hiked the High Sierra Trail, which was an exhausting but very rewarding trip of isolation that provided me with much inspiration, and then my job title and responsibilities increased tenfold (I work in medicine), But I love this story, and I love you guys, and I love reading your reviews. I spend so much time perfecting what I write that it just tickles me pink when y'all take the time out of your days to write me something back, and I re-read your comments often. Hope you're all taking care of yourselves out there. See you next time!
P.S. Expect the next chapter to be very SasuSaku heavy ;)