I do not own Naruto.
Ino Yamanaka, eight years old and chained to a chair in the depths of T&I, sucks in a harsh breath to attempt to dispel the penetrating sense of loss permeating her body. She would like nothing more than to curl into a ball and cry for a while, but Hokage-sama is still staring at her like she's gonna explode.
Ino doesn't even wanna look at the old man right now though. Daddy will have a fit when he finds out about it, calling it disrespectful or something, but Ino blames Hokage-sama for Lien's departure. It's his fault she feels so empty right now, so infinitely tiny and hollow. Lien was so much more, a dream, a consciousness that didn't need a body. She was a self sustaining mind that forwent physical form, a construct of pure chakra that traversed everything, even time itself.
Ino lets out a whine, her nose filling with snot. She wants to hide her face in her knees, but the shackles binding her to the chair won't let her.
"Tears will get you nowhere," The Sandaime informs her harshly, and Ino knows. She knows that the Hokage can't be sure that Lien is really gone, even if the chakra cloak has disappeared, and she knows that the Hokage is just trying to do his job. She knows about stress responses, and past influences affecting current psychological states. Ino is more aware than ever of the influences of the mind, because Lien showed her. Lien built on years of clan training, and provided names for things nobody even knew existed here.
Ino knows so much now.
"This isn't a dream," Hokage-sama asserts again, and Ino cannot help but sniffle at that, moisture seeping down her cheeks. Of course it's not a dream. She's here in her own physical world, tied to a chair, being interrogated by the leader of the village who just convinced an extra dimensional construct that everything is fake.
"I know it's not a dream," Ino sobs out, her voice thick. She feels mucus in the back of her throat, and knows she looks ugly. She wants to go home, to figure out what she is now that Lien and her have done what they have done. Is she still eight, mentally? Is she even human, mentally? There's so much information in there now, so many memories and ideas. Years and years and years, enough to make it feel like her brain is swelling inside her skull.
There is a pause then. A silence where Ino can only hear her own sad sounds echoing around the chamber.
"Ino or Lien?" The Hokage demands of her. He sounds stern, angry, but Ino is a Yamanaka. She can hear the confusion in there as well. She was trained to.
"Ino," the girl answers, opening her eyes and looking up at the village leader forlornly. Her vision is all blurry now, and no amount of blinking will clear it.
"If you are really Ino, then you will hopefully understand that the restraints are not for you, but for the dangerous entity that is inhabiting your skin," Sandaime says almost gently. Like he is trying to assure the little girl that was, before all this began.
That little girl isn't there anymore, though. The Ino here now isn't the Ino that started this.
"Her name is Lien,and you made her leave," Ino chokes at him, frustrated and sad. Lien might not be like them, but she exists. She's a person. She has a name, deserves to be called it.
Hokage-sama casts her a pitying glance, and Ino is so frustrated she wants to shout. He doesn't get it. He doesn't know what happened, doesn't understand how much everything is going to change.
"I cannot know that, not for sure."
"Then get daddy," Ino says, knowing perfectly well what a brat she is being. It's beyond rude, almost punishable, disrespectful, to give the Hokage himself orders.
"Unfortunately, Inoichi is compromised when it comes to his family. Especially his daughter. He knows this well," Hokage-sama informs her, and it makes sense, but it also hurts. He's her dad, and he's supposed to be here. He's supposed to protect her, keep her safe, not leave her chained up in an interrogation cell.
But it's for the good of the village, Ino knows. More than that, she understands, and can comprehend concepts that seemed alien and strange. Empty words that have no meaning in this language flitter through her mind, things like 'nationalism', 'national security', and something about the good of the colony, queen, and hive.
"We will have another verify your identity soon enough, but you said that you and Lien shared, Ino," Hokage-sama continues. The way he says her name drips with doubt. He's letting her hear it, letting her know he does not trust her. "You said she dreams this."
"It's not though," Ino sniffles. "It's not a dream, it isn't all a dream."
"Can you clarify, Ino? Can you tell me how Lien does what she does?"
"She's like me," Ino manages to work out, trying to get the Sandaime to understand. "Like a Yamanaka, but she doesn't know. Her mind isn't trapped in one form, and she never grounded herself, so she lost track of her body, and the world it was in. When she sleeps, it breaks free. "
"So she has a body?" The Hokage asks, fishing for something he can hold on to. Something he can protect himself from. Then his eyes flicker to the side, as if considering her words. "Losing her body...I thought Yamanaka are tethered to their body no matter what."
"We are," Ino mutters. "We can always find our way back, because our body makes our chakra, and that's what we transfer. There's connection back to the world."
There's a choking noise from the corner of the room, and Ino makes a horrible sound of surprise in reaction to the Anbu's exclamation of epiphany. She'd forgotten he was there, honestly.
For a moment, the Sandaime looks both amused and pitying at the startled expression on her tear stained, probably snot covered face, but it's gone so quick she can't be sure. Either way, she resolves to look perfect in the future, so nobody will ever look at her like that again.
"Cat," The Hokage calls, and the operative fidgets. Ino's sight is still blurry from tears, and she's not positive, but the man seems to be unnaturally still. Like he's gone into shock.
"Hokage-sama," The agent returns, sounding somewhat breathless.
"Is there intel I missed in her statement?" He drawls, sounding both reprimanding and serious in his question.
"I believe the implications are that the entity becomes a self sustaining chakra construct," he says hoarsely.
"It has to have a body," The Hokage states adamantly.
"The statement was that the entity is not 'trapped in one form'. Likely, it has more than one."
Ino sniffs, glad to have someone understand her. She tries to crane her neck far enough to wipe her face on her shoulder, but it only kinda works.
"Lien has a stable body in one world, but I don't think it's the right one. That's why she's coming to this one, because her real body is somewhere, still making chakra, and she needs to find it again. She jumps here, taking on other forms that keep her at a fixed point for a time, but they don't actually stabilize her," Ino says, knowing that no eight year old should know this. That no child should understand what she said. But Lien had bits and pieces, wrapped as they were, and she shared them before leaving Ino empty, only half understanding the world around her.
The Hokage stills, so that not even his robes move. His eyes have gone hard as he begins to acknowledge the statements.
"You are saying somewhere in this world, there is something generating vast amounts of chakra, and its consciousness vacated it for an unknown reason to travel to another world, and it returns in an instinctive attempt to find it's real physical form, and every other form it takes is transient, so any harm done to the impermanent, assumed physical form is null," The Hokage demands cooly.
There is a pause, like the Anbu is hesitant to say more.
"It's also not subject to time. So long as the physical form exists, the consciousness will be dragged back sporadically, and it would be a nonlinear experience," the unknown agent eventually continues. "Such an experience would seem like a hallucination or dream, especially if time passes differently there, and the body in the other world is stable enough to only allow the consciousness to slip during sleep."
The Sandaime only just stops himself from groaning. Ino watches the sound travel up his wrinkled throat and get caught just below his jawline.
"A time travelling consciousness, looking for it's lost physical form, which is capable of generating massive amounts of chakra. One that has no idea it is any of those things, and now believes both worlds are a dream," he corrects roughly.
Silences reigns in the cell, and Ino feels like screaming. They don't get it, they don't understand. She's not a thing, she's a person. She has a mind, emotions, memories, thoughts, and ideas. She's seen so much, known so much, and she just wants-
She wants to be.
"Her name is Lien," Ino asserts, because if nothing else, Ino can do this. If she can't get them to recognize that Lien is a person, then she will remember that fact. She may only be eight, and way out of her depth, but Ino can at least give Lien some sort of grounding here. She won't let her friend float endlessly in the abyss without a tether to guide her back.
It's not that hard really. All she has to do is remember that it all exists, that it's all real. Above all else, she just has to remember that though she might only sometime be human, Lien is a person. She can believe in that.
The Hokage turns back to look at her, his gaze piercing and stern. Ino knows that she's being strange. The Sandaime is worried about the existence of all these things, and anxious about what they could mean. He wants to know the implications of it all.
The Anbu, however, tilts his head in the slightest of nods. If Ino hadn't been trained to read body language since infancy, she would have missed it.
"Lien," he repeats, and the old man lets him, assuming it to be nothing more than a pacifying gesture, but Ino knows better.
Despite the situation, and her own tiredness, she smiles.
It's only a tiny string, a miniscule root in the ground, but it's something. After all, a tapestry cannot be woven without thread, and trees cannot grow without a root.
Fusang.
That's what Lien's Papa called it, when he told her the stories he was told as a boy. Her mother knew it as the Bohdi tree, which shaded Buddha as he attained enlightenment, and it has never had just one name.
The Norse called it Yggdrasil, a great yew whose branches bore the weight of the nine realms, on which the fates carved the destinies of men. In Hinduism it is known as the Akshaya Vata, an eternal banyan tree that exists despite the cyclical creation and destruction around it, grounded by roots that stretch to worlds beyond. In Mesoamerica, the Maya know it to be a ceiba tree, and it is an axis mundi that connects the heavens, the earth, and the underworld too. Islam knows it as the Tree of Immortality; Judaism the Tree of Life; Christianity, The Tree of Good and Evil.
Lien stares at its remains, the diameter of the stump left behind large enough to build a city on, and she feels a sense of … something.
She wanted so much for the boy from the hive, that Ne child, to immediately believe in both worlds, for him to help make the world a little bit more real on the spot. She selfishly wished for his shift in perception to happen right away.
And she wants it to happen fast. An individual perception is the basis of one's understanding of reality, yet an individual can change perceptions, both theirs and others, and therefore can change reality. He could have made it more than a dream right then.
But he didn't. He chose another path.
The sky above her whirls like a movie stuck in fast forward, silver stars speeding into blurs around the stationary moon, making shadows dance across the corpse of the divine tree. The forest, wild and alive, continues growing as she muses.
"That's the fatal flaw, isn't it?" she asks to the empty glade.
The moonlight slides over her skin, like a mother's reassuring touch. It seems to be the only one to acknowledge how much Lien is striving, to acknowledge how much she is attempting to ground herself.
"It's not just dependent on me," Lien informs the waist high grass, and the brambles to her right.
No, it's dependent on a group. A mass of people, big enough to bring the probability of the situation away from 10^(-30), and closer to one. But she can't even convince one person when she's actually trying. How is she going to convince the amount needed?
True, Theresa believes, and she's beginning explore the possibilities. Franky believed from the second journey onward, and Ino knows as well. There's many people who believe in the multiverse theory in her world, and that has to count to some extent, though it may not extend to this particular experience. But that's only one dream world. The other dream world doesn't think about the subject much at all.
She looks back to the splintered remains of the divine tree, remembering how right it felt to be it. How snug it felt around her. She knows it for some reason, a familiarity that sits solidly in her mind.
Creating reality would somehow work out in that form, she thinks, without really understanding how or why.
...But it is broken. Its trunk is shattered, strewn across the landscape, and its branches are twisted and splintered. The foliage it had is falling from it, and though it fell just a short while ago, for some reason it seems emaciated.
Her toes wiggle in the bloody soil, and she contemplates the divine tree for a long time.
The conclusion she arrives on is the same she had before. She doesn't have an answer. Doesn't know if there is one.
"Aiyah," she sighs softly, glancing to the moon.
She supposes that asking the Norns is the next step, but to do so, she needs to gather them all in one place. Which will take some figuring out.
-Wait, was she even basing them off the Norns, or was she sticking to the Greek term, and calling them the Moirai? Hindu, with the Devi Shakti?
For the life of her, she can't remember. There's too many similarities, a startling number of common themes in myths and religions. She has difficulty sorting them, which probably explains her own Taoist and Buddhist beliefs.
Perhaps she should stick to science, but then which science? Physics is the most logical choice for discussing reality, but which doctrine? Galilean, Newtonian? Relativity? Then again, those seem to have been unified under the new Quantum, and generally most fields interact together harmoniously. It's just comprehending everything on that level is absurdly difficult.
Sorta like understanding how all these myths have such similar themes, and yet differ so greatly. There's probably a path to unification somewhere, but not only would that be blasphemous, it would be improbable to do with how societies treat them.
(And what about a merger of the two? Is that...is that philosophy? No, that can't be right. Maybe she's trying to put too many things together in one system. But all those things exist together in a system together in the dream/reality, so uniting them shouldn't be so difficult inside her head.)
She's probably making this harder than it needs to be. She may have even made it more complicated than it ever actually was.
"The others may know," she tries.
The celestial body remains silent, as if it is amused.
AN: Big shout out to Siartha on tumblr for helping me out with this chapter. If it looks cleaner, it's because they went over it.