Nascence

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X: Twined Round the Columns

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Tired.

That word had become TenTen's whole world.

The brunette opened the door to the room she shared with Sakura with the kind of relief only someone as exhausted as she could experience and sighed a sigh of pure bliss. The futon was right next to her, warm and comfortable and smelling of freshly-washed linen… Sakura probably wouldn't be back from her 'talk' with Neji for another couple hours… and she had with her the bottle of wine Lee had given her as a 'just because' gift only thirty minutes earlier, because she was, quote unquote, 'looking so down… my beauteous flower should never feel such despair!'

Well, all of Lee's romantic, poetic talk aside, the gift was superbly apropos.

TenTen quickly changed into a simple sleeping yukata, something she hadn't worn in over a week, and let loose her chestnut hair from its tight rolls, relishing in the feel of the soft hair curling at her back. She lit a candle with a quick and weak fire jutsu, grabbed her newest mystery novel from her pack, and poured herself a glass of red wine from the bottle.

The weapons mistress took a slow sip and relaxed against the soft, downy pillows, drinking in both wine and word as her eyes flickered over her reading. She was just in the thick of the climax, right when a knife was pointed at the hero's throat and a trickle of blood was running down his neck, Sakura stumbled through the door.

She's back earlier than I expected. I hope nothing went wrong. But, on the contrary, Sakura looked satisfied. Not really happy, and certainly not jumping for joy; but on the other hand, a great deal better than she'd looked that morning.

Sakura caught a glimpse of her friend and smiled ever-so-slightly. "Comfy, are we?"

TenTen raised her slim eyebrows and cocked her head towards the bottle on the counter. Sakura obviously didn't want to talk about Neji. What this girl needed was some serious unwinding. "Help yourself. You look like you could use a little relaxation. There are glasses in the cabinet."

Sakura nodded her thanks and shrugged off her vest, dress, and shorts, wrapping a robe similar to TenTen's over her body. "Where'd you get that? Isn't it against ANBU rules to drink on the job?"

TenTen scowled in response. "Are you kidding? If anybody in the world needs alcohol, it's ANBU. Three-quarters of every team are puke-drunk after a mission, guaranteed. Why not start it off early?"

"True," the pink-haired woman replied with a little chuckle, pouring herself a bit of the burgundy liquid. "And what's a better time to have it than at the end of your life? Cheers."

"Cheers." TenTen raised her glass. "Did you figure anything out?"

Sakura sipped. "This is good. On the killer? No, not really-- I got a lock on his chakra signature, but that doesn't do us much good. It's too much… well, raw energy, really-- to recognize fully. It's just irritatingly familiar, that's all. I'm going back later tonight to work on it some more."

"Well, it's a start. You can find out tons of things from a chakra signature, can't you?" For the first time, TenTen felt a knot of real worry at the pit of her stomach. She was hardly paying attention to he words as the cold fear of death pressed upon her, making the insides warm from the wine chill immediately. "Do you think this guy's serious? I mean… about the whole 'kill your team' thing?"

Sakura moved her glass in circles, making the wine skim the edges. "I don't want to believe him," she answered after a moment, and her voice was quiet, "but I do. There's too much at stake for me not to believe him."

"And tomorrow's our last day."

Sakura nodded mutely.

TenTen looked at her novel for a moment before throwing it contemptuously to the floor. Damn it, why was she reading that trash, anyway? When she herself was about to taste the sharp end of a blade at sunset tomorrow?

"I'm sorry you're involved in this, Ten," her friend said softly, her voice heavily laced with something suspiciously akin to regret. "I didn't think… I don't know. I didn't think it would be this serious."

"Things are always serious when you're a shinobi, Sakura" TenTen snapped, but there was no real sting in it; there was more fear to it than anything. She drained her glass, reached for the bottle to refill it, and thought better, setting the empty thing on the side table instead. "If it makes you feel any better, Sakura," she added after a few seconds, "and I know it probably won't… but I want you to know I would be handling this a lot worse if I were in your place. It… I just… I don't know. The concept of dying hasn't ever hit me as hard as it has these past two weeks. You know?"

Sakura nodded, taking another slow sip. "I know." The possibility that she wouldn't know was slim to absolutely none. The woman she looked to as a mother had just been murdered, and that's something that shakes you and doesn't stop shaking till the hurting stops.

"But you can't just run away from it. It's inevitable-- especially as, well… one of us."

One of us.

Kunoichi.

Shinobi.

Sakura paused for a moment, and then smiled a real smile and finished off her share of wine, putting her glass next to TenTen's. "But you can't forget, TenTen: most of the time, we have the power to postpone it." She savored the rush of pride that coursed through her veins for a moment before turning her face to her teammate. "I'll try not to wake you when I leave. 'Night." And she leaned over to blow out the candle.

The last thing she saw before the candle's single lick of flame disappeared was her brown-haired friend's face: incredulous, worried, and bizarrely proud.

We have the power to postpone death.

That was her job, her mission… her current Way of the Ninja, if you will. Her ninpou.

To postpone, if possible, the death of the people she loved.

And as she fell back on the pillows and heard the strangled little noise sob/laugh that TenTen let out before falling back on her own, Sakura smiled.

Because she knew she could do just that.

---

Sakura woke up at three-thirty A.M. on the dot and rose from the futon silently, slipping quickly back into her day clothing. She wasn't tired at all; on the contrary, even though she'd slept deeply, she was now completely awake.

The Haruno kunoichi pulled on her gloves and shot a glance at the bed opposite her own; TenTen was still asleep, snoring lightly with her head making a cavern in the pillows. Smiling slightly, Sakura exited the room, closing the door shut without a sound.

The journey from her bedroom to the conference room Neji and Sakura had met before was a rather unexciting one; just hallways and windowless doors and a few staircases. But Sakura's imagination provided her with gruesome and frightening possibilities: the killer was lurking behind that door; the Sasuke bunshin was going to spring from behind her at any moment; she would open the briefing room's door only to see Neji dead at her feet; she was in a genjutsu, wandering unknowingly towards the edge of a very steep and very fatal cliff.

She had actually gone so far as to consider using the Release technique when she arrived at the doors of the conference room. Steadying herself, Sakura firmly pushed all thoughts of gory deaths and raging murderers aside and let herself in.

Neji was not dead, and the room was not spattered with his blood. He was working diligently, scribbling something on a piece of paper and checking it with a scroll. There were piles and piles of the things on the table, some half-unrolled, some tightly sealed, others cast away onto the floor in a way that the Konoha archive's official librarian would have keeled over if she'd seen it. There were sheaves of paper littering the ground, some crumpled up into tiny balls and one seriously dented, with holes in it-- Sakura reasoned that Neji had lost his temper and closed some imaginary tenketsu points on the poor material. The photographs they'd gotten were spread right in front of him, in clear view, and every other piece of evidence surrounded him as he wrote. He had obviously not gone back to his room as he'd advised Sakura to; he had been working all night long, by his lonesome.

"Why didn't you take a rest?" Sakura demanded once she realized this, shutting the door and stalking over to him.

Neji glanced up. "I wasn't tired."

"Bullshit." The pink-haired woman sat down next to him, clearing a space for herself with a simple and powerful shove. "What have you been working on?"

"A psychoanalysis of the killer's personality."

Sakura frowned. "How? We've never even met him. Only the bunshin."

Neji waved the forged letter from Gaara in her face. "This reveals some of his personality, and so does" -here he held up the letter the killer had written to Sakura- "this. They're completely different in context and tone. It's like this person has two personalities."

"What d'you mean?"

"In the letter faked from Gaara, he's cold, almost impersonal; probably good to impersonate the Kazekage, but not good enough on a second glance. It's almost threatening. 'I don't want any more fatalities'… the way he wrote it sounds like he's almost warning the Hokage not to let anything else happen. This is most obviously someone who's been in control… or, worse, someone who believes he is always in control."

Sakura nodded. "I get it. In the letter addressed to me, he's almost friendly. Scary, but not directly threatening. He sounds almost amused."

"Exactly." Neji shuffled his papers and held up a new one. "Everything else I did was organization. What we know, what we don't know, what we need to learn."

"A KWL chart."

"Sort of, yes."

Sakura took the paper from him and examined the 'don't know' section. The red photograph, the chakra signature, the killer's identity, how to stop the reality manipulation. Those were only the beginning. A bit frustrated already, Sakura chose one at random. "I'm going to work on how to stop the reality manipulation. There should be something in one of these scrolls about it somewhere. Or maybe I can pick up something from the hints in the letter."

Neji nodded his approval. "I'll work on the chakra signature. Byakugan might reveal something about its workings, something I might remember from the past."

After that, there was no real conversation; each person was thoroughly working. The only sound was the flickering of paper, the dry unrolling of scrolls, and the scraping of a pencil or pen as the two shinobi made notes. We could be studying for an exam, Sakura thought absently as she browsed an old scroll, and smiled slightly at the thought. Only the difference here is greater than pass or fail.

Sighing, she rolled the dusty scroll back up and put it in a pile along with the others that hadn't revealed anything, choosing another at random from the pile in front of her. But for some reason, she couldn't focus. I remember studying before the first Chuunin Exam, she thought rather ruefully. I was such an idiot. All those books I read have hardly helped me at all. She knew she was only beating herself down; the byproduct of being a bookworm at the Academy was having a great knowledge of jutsu and counter-jutsu and technique in general that several ANBU she knew had no idea of.

Fiercely, Sakura fixed her eyes on the scroll, reading carefully so she wouldn't go off track again. 'These kind of genjutsu stop the flow of chakra so that the opponent cannot move; can only cry out in pain until the attacker decides to finish them off or an ally stands to protect them…' Sakura blinked. Like what Orochimaru did to Sasuke with the curse seal. That was creepy… Sasuke unlocked his Sharingan for the first time and did battle with Orochimaru… and I just stood there, worried, until Orochimaru bit him.

She mentally shook herself again. '…this attack may, however, cause permanent brain damage… may, in fact make your opponent go mad. It is not recommended for…'

Sasuke went mad when he woke up. She remembered it well. That fearsome ring of purple fire traveling from the ground up; a spiraling, deadly thing that moved with him, coaxing him on. The body, so bruised and broken, was covered in inky black signs like the strangest of tattoos, and he had turned his head towards her and whispered her name roughly: 'Sakura… who did this to you?' She remembered it like it was yesterday. Those red, glimmering eyes, like shining rubies, or… or shimmering pools of blood…

There was a sharp bang, and Sakura jerked her head from where it had been resting on the table. Neji had closed a book hard and was now searching for another one. "Must've fallen asleep," she mumbled to herself. She stretched a bit and eased her sore neck muscles with her hands as she leaned over, preparing to commence reading once more.

But something stopped her.

Her blood chilled; her extremities seemed to go numb. Sakura gaped at her hands, the palms pink and fleshy, the backs scarred, a gaping cut by her left thumb from holding the bunshin's sword, a wound she hadn't had the time or energy to heal.

Shimmering pools of blood.

Shimmering pools of red blood.

Red.

Shimmering red.

Her head turned, almost against her will, to the row of pictures in front of Neji.

Shimmering, bloody, Sharingan red.

The mysterious photo.

She immediately grabbed it, holding it up to the bright fluorescent lights of the room. It was the same color she'd seen every day at age twelve, the same color she saw about every week nowadays, whenever Kakashi came in for a check-up or a treatment.

Sharingan red.

The color of blood.

You have been in close contact with this kind of reality manipulation before…

The Mangekyou Sharingan.

Sakura clenched her fists to keep them from shaking, but her voice trembled without restraint as she spoke up. "Neji."

Her companion glanced up at her, took a look at her contorted face, and immediately slammed his book shut. "Sakura? What's wrong with you?"

"It's…" Her mouth was dry; she was finding it extremely difficult to talk. She licked her lips, coughed, and tried again. "It's the Sharingan." She was quiet, too quiet to be heard.

"The…" Neji frowned at her, leaning a bit closer. "The what?"

"The Sharingan."

Neji's pearl-hued eyes opened wide in shock and realization and his mouth hung open in an uncharacteristically emotional manner. "The Sharingan?"

"The Mangekyou Sharingan," she repeated, staring at her hands. "It's so damned obvious. The glimmering red picture is simply an enlarged part of the Sharingan eye-- you can see a little black shade in the corner that might be one of those comma-shaped things." She shook her head, as if trying to convince herself that she was lying, that it wasn't real, wasn't true. "The Sasuke bunshin, the intensity of the chakra… that hint he gave me. 'You've been in close contact with this reality manipulation'."

Neji seemed at a loss for words as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place neatly in his brain. But there was one missing. He glared in her general direction, though not at her… something was off. "So who is it?"

Sakura looked up, confused, and then realization dawned on her… there were only three people on the Earth she knew of that had the Sharingan.

Kakashi, Itachi, and Sasuke.

"It's not Kakashi-sensei," Sakura said hoarsely, "and Uchiha Itachi is dead. So that leaves…"

Neji looked at her. "But that's impossible. No one's heard about him in a long time, but the Uchiha…"

He didn't finish. He knew very well that Sasuke just might have.

All of a sudden, Sakura felt sick to her stomach. She looked at Neji wildly, green eyes aflame in shock. "If it's Sasuke, that means he's dead! He has to be dead to cast this kind of thing over so many people, for so long. The scroll told us that."

The Hyuuga branch family member across from her ran a hand through his dark mahogany sweep of hair. "There's no way," he murmured. "He's too strong to die in any kind of battle."

Sakura shook her head. "But he must be…" She put her fingers to her eyes in case tears pricked, but none did. Instead, she felt oddly lightweight, as a feather, as if she just wanted the ability to float above all this and let the wind take her somewhere else.

"The scroll might be wrong," Neji soothed, "but either way, we have to find a way to get out of this."

The two looked at each other over the table, and Sakura took her hands from her face and stood up. "We need to tell everyone."

"We don't have time," Neji argued. "We have approximately nineteen hours until midnight. We need all that time to figure this out."

"Neji, they have to know. They're part of the team."

Her glare was steely, and the way her chin was set showed Neji that the woman he'd come to love was not going to give up on this one.

He nodded his consent. "Fine."

Sakura nodded as he had done, in appreciation, and tied her mask round her head with a sense of absolute purpose. "I'll go wake up the team."

"And I'll get the Kazekage. We'll meet in his office and work on getting this straight." Neji also tied his mask on, tightening it at the back a little harder than was necessary. He watched her go to the door and wrench it open, watched her run a hand through her hair as he had done before. "Sakura."

She glanced back at him, and he felt a sudden, foolish urge to unmask her, to see what she really felt when he said her name-- whether it was nothing or everything, he just felt a need to know. And to be found so utterly wanting cut him to the core.

But she was saying nothing and revealing nothing, and he had to content himself with the way her hand had jerked towards the lip of her mask, as if to pull it up and look at him.

He cleared his throat and walked towards her, taking her hand in his in a gesture of uncharacteristic gentleness. "Good work."

Sakura was a bit taken aback, but recovered quickly and nodded. "Arigatou."

The two parted, running separate ways, and Sakura longed for the day when they could speak openly to each other.

All the obscurity of the past two weeks was driving her insane.

---

She knocked her black-gloved knuckles on the doors her teammates were behind, kicking Sai's just because it was his. "Wake up," she called into the thick wood. "We have a breakthrough."

Shikamaru, surprisingly, was the first one out, yawning widely and rubbing the side of his head. "Yare, yare, Sakura… what's the big deal?"

"The 'big deal', Mr. Troublesome, is that we know who's doing this to us," Sakura retorted, poking him hard in the chest.

Shikamaru's deer-brown eyes widened, and he suddenly seemed all the more awake. "You're not joking?"

"Not joking," Sakura answered as the rest of the team spilled from their rooms fully-clothed, tying their masks round their heads. "You'll get a briefing in the Kazekage's office, so I suggest we hurry. Neji's probably already explaining to him."

With hope mounted on pedestals in their hearts, the team ran through the hallways, wrenching open the door to the Kazekage's office and falling through with solemn, masked faces.

The Kazekage's hair was ruffled, and it was plain that he thought little of being woken before dawn. But his face was serious, and he was sitting at his desk with a mixture of rage, relief, and exhaustion radiating from his person.

Neji stood at the front of the room with Gaara as their Captain, waiting till they were all inside the room before starting to speak. "After research, Sakura found that what is being used on us is not a genjutsu, so to speak, but something called 'reality manipulation'. This is used in the Mangekyou Sharingan… a smaller version, anyway. The enormity of this jutsu has one tax on the caster: it kills them." He paused. "Uchiha Itachi is, as you all know, dead. Killed by his brother, Uchiha Sasuke, who is the last remaining shinobi in possession of the Sharingan besides Hatake Kakashi-sensei. All evidence points to the Uchiha as our man."

"But that would mean that Sasuke-san is dead," Lee remarked, his voice strangely serious. "His flame of youth doused… I can't imagine."

"How he died is not the issue," Neji said quickly. "Finding out how to stop us from all doing the same is."

Sai frowned beneath his mask and spoke up quietly. "But why would the traitor target us? We haven't heard anything about him in months. What's this for? What are his motives?"

There was an uneasy silence, broken only by Sakura shifting uncomfortably by the doorway. Unfortunately, this did not go unnoticed by Neji. "Sakura?"

She looked up, then away, almost instantly. "The bunshin said he was testing me." She paused and sighed. "If he was close to death, maybe he wanted the reality manipulation to be his last act. Acknowledging me."

She remembered that once upon a time, that had been her greatest wish: for Sasuke to notice her, to look upon her as someone worth challenging.

Shikamaru turned slowly in his seat to face her. "Why would he do that? Wouldn't he have more important things to focus on before he died?"

Sakura shook her head. "To Sasuke, family was almost the most important thing, even if he didn't have one. I always thought that towards the end, whenever it would come, he would want to gather what he had left to make one."

"And killing you is a good way to do that?" TenTen remarked skeptically.

Shikamaru frowned at her. "The Uchiha's mind worked in strange ways, TenTen, don't forget. He went through incredible trauma, and his idea of a family is probably very distorted compared to ours. I was always surprised he didn't just go mad."

Gaara interrupted the soon-to-be debate with a cough. "Whatever the case," he said in his deep, rumbling voice, "you have about eighteen point five hours until the reality manipulation halts with you in it and you're all killed. I'd suggest getting a move on."

Neji nodded. "Hai. Sai, patrol the city for the bunshin in case he comes to create any more trouble. Shikamaru, I want you with Sakura, figuring out whatever you can about the weaknesses of this kind of reality manipulation. Lee and TenTen, you'll work with the Kazekage's genjutsu users to find out anything you can… anything the books didn't elaborate on."

He was silent for a very long time, as if trying to think of words that would encourage them. And "hurry up or you'll die" didn't seem quite right.

"We all want to get home," he said instead, and cast a long, almost tangible look towards Sakura. "We all want the chance to toughen up, to see our friends, face old hurts." He spoke deliberately.

You don't want to get hurt like you were before.

"So let's work on getting our lives back, eh? I'm tired of being in somebody else's mind."

The team nodded and stood, almost as one, and vanished, leaving Sakura, Neji, and Gaara in the same room. Sakura's masked face didn't move away from Neji's for a very long time, but then she turned her head and vanished, too, a puff of opaque smoke replacing her body.

Was it Neji's imagination, or had there been a curve of a smile from behind that mask?

---

"How the hell does someone have that much power?"

Shikamaru glanced up from his text at Sakura's face, which was currently conveying mild shock. Their masks were thrown carelessly to the side, and they were both poring over their respective tomes, things on the Sharingan and the Uchiha clan and dispelling techniques. "What?"

"I was just thinking, Shikamaru, I'm sorry," she said hastily, reaching for her book again. She hesitated, then dropped her hand. "These things are about as useful as gasoline for dousing a fire."

"True." Shikamaru slammed his book shut. "I work better by thinking without the aid of words."

Sakura closed her own and stared at him as he leaned back in his chair, tugging at the end of his spiky ponytail. "Penny for your thoughts."

"This reality manipulation is basically the Mangekyou Sharingan times a thousand."

Sakura nodded. "If you want to put it like that, yes. It's the same basic principle."

"And how does one stop the Mangekyou Sharingan?"

Sakura felt like a child in the Academy, and she resented it. "Well, it's a regular genjutsu, isn't it? So you'd either stop the chakra flow to your brain or have someone else force their chakra into you." Shikamaru nodded sagely, and Sakura sighed in irritation. "But Shikamaru, this isn't a normal genjutsu. It creates a different reality… not just something inside the group's respective brains, but a completely different world. And you can't just walk up to it and force chakra into it to break it."

"So outside chakra won't work. What about inside chakra?"

"What about it? I've canceled the chakra flow to my brain thousands of times since I found that scroll, and I'm still here, aren't I?"

"You are, indeed." Shikamaru was silent for a long time, as if waiting for her to continue, and Sakura's annoyance grew.

"Shikamaru, where exactly are you going with this?" she snapped. "Not all of us have IQs of 3000."

"Apparently."

"Shika-"

He cut off the threat he knew was coming with a loud sigh. "Listen. I have a theory. And it's just a theory, but there just might be something to it." He paused, and Sakura waved at him to continue. Shikamaru rubbed his temples. "This kind of jutsu would take up a huge amount of chakra."

"Duh."

Shikamaru gave her a withering glare and continued loudly. "Technically, for the jutsu to work fully, the person would have to concentrate all the chakra in their body-- and I mean all of it-- to pull it off perfectly."

Sakura was clearly ready to say 'duh' again, and so he rushed on.

"That means that it wouldn't work if they were doing it while having a heart attack, because they'd be asleep and unable to do anything; it wouldn't work during a battle, either, because they would have used up some chakra, even a minimum, to fight at all. So the only way it would work perfectly is if they were planning it and planning to commit suicide."

Sakura frowned slightly, but then nodded. "So Sasuke… killed himself?" She nearly choked, and she felt her throat ache. Not Sasuke. He couldn't have.

"No, I don't believe he did," said Shikamaru, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together in his usual thinking position. "Uchiha is-- was… too proud to kill himself. Too full of himself, too egotistical in every sense of the word."

Sakura felt a little pang. "So…?"

Shikamaru turned his head a bit to the side, glancing at her through the corners of his eyes. "I think that the real world and his fake one merge a couple times."

Sakura's level of understanding, on a scale from one to ten, went from eight to about negative thirty in half a second. "What?"

Shikamaru sighed once more, grabbing a piece of paper. He drew two circles, their perimeters dashed instead of solid, and labeled them 'real world' and 'manipulated reality'. "He didn't have all his chakra when he made this one for us to live in," Shikamaru explained, pointing to the 'manipulated reality' bubble. "And so it's unstable. It melts into the real world at times, and then comes back out. I think it has to do with when we're all together, or whether we're separate."

"Explain."

"Alright." He set his pencil down. "When we went to Konoha for the Godaime's funeral, how did everyone else see us and recognize us?"

Sakura frowned. "Maybe they were a part of the reality manipulation."

"Can't be. Sasuke is targeting our group only. And what about Gaara? Is he targeted, too?"

"No…"

"But he's every bit as involved as we are," Shikamaru insisted. "He's right in the thick of it because he's close to us. It's only when our squadron is together that the manipulated reality is perfect. Think about it. When you're on your own, or with someone that isn't a victim of this jutsu, has anything happened to you?"

No.

No!

He was right, she realized, completely right. She had been tricked by the genjutsu with TenTen; had been with the injured chuunin with Neji; had been with the whole team for the rogues and the studying and finding the note and such… and whenever she walked alone in the streets, Gaara never took notice of her; when she had been talking with Shizune, the woman had acted slightly confused about the Hokage's death, even though she was one of the Godaime's closest confidantes; when she was at home when Naruto was brooding, she'd noticed her house looked exactly the same, even though she'd slept in it the night before. Why hadn't these things occurred to her earlier? Why hadn't she seen?

"But Tsunade-shishou's funeral was real," Sakura whispered. "She was dead."

"That's what I mean, Sakura, that the two worlds merge," Shikamaru murmured, his voice quieter at her sorrow. "They merged just then, and the whole of Konoha was affected."

"What about Naruto? Is he still in it?"

Shikamaru shrugged a shoulder. "It's impossible to tell because the two worlds are so close. It's like a quilt halfway sewed: the two ends are touching, but they're not completely connected."

"And if the two halves aren't sewn together, there's still a chance the second half pulls away."

"Metaphorically speaking."

Sakura grinned slightly at him. "So… in other words, if we find a way to break the weak connection between the real world and the manipulated reality, we can win. We can get out."

"Exactly."

Sakura's smile brightened, then dimmed again. "But that leaves us right back where we started. How are supposed to break that connection?"

Shikamaru steepled his fingers, and his dark eyes flashed a bit. "I think," he said slowly, "the bunshin is the key."

"The bunshin?" she repeated. "How?"

"It traveled back and forth between worlds even when they weren't really merging," Shikamaru said, weighing each word for substance. "The bunshin killed Tsunade. The bunshin fought you. And the bunshin wrote those letters. It is, literally, a clone of Sasuke-- a representation of the Uchiha in both worlds… one he created, and one he's lost to."

Sakura shook her head. "How the hell do you think of this stuff, Shikamaru?" she asked hoarsely.

"Practice," he answered simply, toying with a kunai. "And the IQ of 3000 doesn't hurt, either."

Sakura chuckled. "So how do we go about defeating this bunshin? I threw all of my best attacks at him the other night."

"Did you, really? Everything you had?"

She hesitated. "Well… no, not really. It just looked so much like Sasuke."

Shikamaru gave her a small glare. "Sakura, emotional attachments wil not help you here at all."

She sighed, frustrated, and blew a strand of rosy hair from her eyes. "I know, Shikamaru, I know. But when you see a teammate you considered lost to you for three years all of a sudden standing right in front of you, your brain doesn't really function like that. In that kind of situation, it's 'logic be damned'."

He rolled his eyes. "There was a difference then," he said.

"What?"

He smirked at her, a typically lazy smirk that made her want to both punch him and ruffle his pineapple-head at the same time.

"You were fighting alone."

---

Author's Note: Sorry for the long wait, guys, but this took an extraordinarily long time to write. We're coming oh-so-near to a conclusion here, so hold onto your hats… this is going to be a big battle.

And props to cowtippr, who correctly identified what seems to be the killer. But I've got some more stuff up my sleeve, so don't you guys worry.

See you next time, and I hope you enjoyed the latest chapter!