This is my contribution to the KakaSaku Halloween antifanfic contest for the KakaSaku fanclub on the Narutofan forums. (Lots of compoundish words there.) Sorry mine was posted later than the others; I hadn't been aware of a change in plans. Sakura's nature is supposed to be ambiguous, so please use your imaginations!
It was mid-afternoon on a cool autumn day in October, and Sakura was hidden in a tree. She peered through the leaves, squinting as she scanned the park. She noticed a man walking a dog, and her vision clouded as a burn started climbing up her throat. Biting back tears, she forced the craving down where it could smolder in her chest. No, not this one. Shaking her head a little, she refocused her eyes on her search.
A few more people passed by; most of them were couples, which made her bear her teeth and growl quietly. Suddenly, a bright flash of orange caught her eye. Her gaze darted to a tall, strange-looking man with alarming silver hair, his nose buried in a book with a remarkably neon color. Immediately, the burn returned, only this time it was pleasurable and her interest was sparked.
She watched hungrily as the man neared the tree in which she was perched, licking her lips softly in anticipation of seeing his face when he looked up. As he passed beneath her tree, she purposely rustled the branches. Startled, he looked up; his eyes caught hers for a brief second, and Sakura was surprised to see that most of his face was covered by a thick scarf. All she could see were his eyes, and disturbingly, they did not match— one was a dark, unremarkable brown color and the other was a brilliant shade of green.
Although this troubled her a bit, the eye contact had been made and so she whispered underneath her breath to once again become invisible. The flames had returned now and were lapping against her teeth, teasing her but refusing to spill forth and engulf the mysterious stranger. As he spared an elongated glance for the tree, Sakura frowned; usually, this was the best part of hunting— she allowed the man to make eye contact with her and then watched as her image flooded into his brain, causing him to briskly change direction and head for the secluded glade and await her arrival. This man, however, shrugged and walked away.
Sakura watched his back until he rounded a corner and disappeared from sight. She had to hold back a mournful cry; never had her prey escaped her. Is it because I didn't see his entire face? she wondered. Or is it because of those eyes…?
Just as she began to fear what strange sort of supernatural defense could be keeping this man from her, she felt something tugging at the edge of her mind. Curious, she tapped into this foreign sensation and was met with a sudden overflowing sense of knowledge. Unfamiliar memories spread through her mind, familiarizing her with their every sensory detail and emotional nuance.
She nearly fell off her branch in surprise; dazed, still processing all of this new information, she felt her power draining and hurriedly transformed into a bird, ruffling her feathers and erupting from the tree. She rushed home, fighting to fly steadily despite the onslaught of information.
She landed in a secluded clearing and assumed human form, falling back against the great black tree and clutching at her chest. Her breathing slowed as her energy started coming back to her, and as she clung to the tree for strength the images in her head started to make sense. She realized with a jolt that these were the thoughts of the man with the silver hair.
Excited, she tried to dig through the man's memories, but now that the rush had stopped, she found that she was only subconsciously aware of them and could not bring forth any of them at will. She frowned, concentrating as she probed her mind. She felt a little pulse of thought independent from her own; curiously she tapped into it (but not without caution this time) to find a steady feed of thought.
Lewd descriptions started running through her head, narrated by a man, and her frown deepened. It took her a moment to realize that these were probably the words of the book the man was reading. She smiled, albeit with slight confusion; somehow, the usual effect of her eye contact had been… reversed— but then, it wasn't quite that, either, because he didn't seem to be controlling her thoughts in any way.
She slid down the trunk of the tree to sit cross-legged at its roots; having returned home, she had energy now to explore this uncommon phenomenon. Closing her eyes, she could visualize it now; his thoughts were like a silver stream, trickling steadily into her consciousness. She tugged at one train of thought, pulling it aside and isolating it from the others. Fascinated, she watched it evolve, constantly changing shape in accordance with any alteration in the man's surroundings. She could not see the man himself, but his thoughts told her exactly what he was doing and what he planned to do.
As she analyzed these thoughts and their processes over time, she began to notice patterns, which she mentally identified by colors; she could begin to tell the different types of thought, from basic actions to underlying worries. Soon, she was so good at this that she could look up the stream and identify a thought's nature (and even get a rudimentary idea of its specific contents) long before the thought actually entered her mind. She wondered if perhaps these thoughts she was guessing at before she saw them in their entireties were actually little visions of the future. Was there simply a lag, or was she seeing his thoughts several seconds in advance?
Almost without thinking, she reached out to try and touch one, and to her astonishment, she diverted its path. The thought changed course and all of a sudden she was informed that he had stopped walking and felt his pain as someone bumped into him.
"What the hell? Watch it."
Sakura realized with excitement what this meant— while unable to directly order him around as she could usually do, she was able to manipulate his thoughts at the edges. Contemplating the possibilities this would yield, she narrowed her eyes and a dark smile danced across her face. She felt her insides groaning with hunger, but she fought it down. This one will take longer, but it will taste so much better in the end.
(…)
Kakashi walked down the hall of his apartment building slowly, tired from the day's work. Being a barber wasn't the most difficult thing in the world, but it was often very taxing on his nerves. Working with sharp scissors also had its downsides, as the tiny scars on his hands clearly showed.
He sighed as he reached his door, rummaging around for his keys in his pocket. He pulled them out, peering at them briefly before slipping one into the lock. To his surprise, it would not fit properly. Confused, he shook it around a little before pulling it out to inspect it. His brow furrowed as he noticed that it was the wrong key. It struck him as a little odd that this was the first time he had ever put the wrong key in, but he shrugged it off; first time for everything.
He entered his apartment wearily, kicking the door shut behind him and heading towards the bathroom. All of a sudden, pain coursed through his entire body— he cried out, backing up and clutching at his head. He squinted through watering eyes and saw that he had just walked into the bathroom door. What the hell? He exhaled a great deal of breath and rubbed at his forehead, turning the knob and entering the bathroom.
Sakura grinned to herself as she let her concentration loosen and congratulated herself on the success of the tests. Not only was she able to get him to make a different decision about the keys, he didn't even consciously register the change— it just happened, as far as he and his mind were concerned, quite naturally. Also, while she couldn't see as much use in this, it also seemed that she could stop a thought dead; when the stream had indicated that he wanted to reach for and turn the brass doorknob, she had taken hold of the thought and instantaneously stamped it out. This proved that if he started showing signs of dangerous thinking, she would have the ability to crush any errant thoughts or patterns too large or complex or contradictory to subtly change the course of. Granted, this was something he was more likely to notice, as with the doorknob test, but perhaps if the diminished thought did not have a direct physical result, he wouldn't register that anything unnatural would have transpired.
She mulled over her control over him as he carried out his business, showering and eating a light meal while a game show flashed its exaggerated colors at him. She noticed that he wasn't even really processing the television program— she could only discern small parts of it, as most of his attention was straying to various topics of a vaguely random nature, his mind jumping lazily from thought to thought. She grew a little bored, waiting with decreasing patience as his consciousness waned. Finally, his chin fell to his chest and his breaths became deep and regular. With mild interest she noted that his ears were still working at deciphering the television's sound waves, but this muse lost its importance as the stream of thoughts began to shift form. The trickle transformed into more of a river, with tributaries branching off and mingling with one another. As a result of this, his subconscious thoughts went off on tangents barely traceable to their origins, the different thoughts crossing with each other and forming new images that did not follow the man's regular pattern of thinking at all.
She realized that these must be his dreams. The fanciful images flowing through his brain had stemmed from waking thoughts and were being given new shapes depending on simple whims of his mind. Coming to her senses, she shook these thoughts from her head and called on her analytical skills, looking for ways to take advantage of this vulnerable state of mind. She found that she could change the paths of these impressionable and volatile thoughts with much more ease than she could when he was aware of himself, a large part of which may have been that she did not have to be worried about him recognizing the manipulation. It also became apparent that she had a much broader access to his memories now. While she still could not peruse them at will, his subconscious was churning out so many different signals that she had more than enough material to work with.
Having fully appreciated the new parameters within which she could now work and the resources available, she now focused her energies on the ultimate goal of ensnaring him. She started by gently bringing up the encounter of earlier— not even an encounter, really, at least not to him, but more of a random incident that could (and did) mean so much more. She expanded upon the brief and inconsequential memory, manipulating his imagination to create images from her own. She showed him a scene where he remained at the tree to see what had caused the minor disturbance in the branches and watched in awe as the leaves parted to reveal a woman, pink hair falling to her shoulders and green eyes boring into his own, beckoning him towards her. Image in place, she relaxed her grip on him a little now without completely relinquishing her control over things and watched what he did with what he had been given.
To her mild disgust, the imaginary man began to undress her, the gentle caress of his fingers eliciting exaggerated moans out of the apparently helpless woman in front of him. She fought back the urge to roll her eyes as the two characters in the dream began to act out passages from the erotic novel the man had been reading earlier. She understood the physical sensations humans were capable of giving each other, but she considered it petty and rather two-dimensional compared to the pleasure and enormous satisfaction she experienced whenever she consumed a human soul. Humans, she thought, could never fully be part of one another as her kind could, and she considered their attempts at "love making", when they were not made with the intention of procreation, were imitations that were doomed to be incomplete.
Regardless of her personal feelings towards the matter, though, it was undeniable that sexual appeal was an invaluable tool in her arsenal, and so she intended to take full advantage of whatever sort of allure she could hold for this man, be it emotional or physical. After a certain point, however, she had to make her own image fade. It would be unwise to give the man too much time with her, for he needed to develop a craving. So, right before the man's climax, she yanked herself out of his fantasy with a little more force than was strictly necessary, leaving him naked and alone.
She watched with satisfaction as, with the help of her meddling, his dream descended to hyperbolic darkness. For the rest of the night she let him sleep without any interference on her part, save to stop her pink-haired likeness from cropping up again.
(…)
The jingling of the bell as he pushed open the door; the squeak of his shoes on the clean floor; the snipping of scissors; even the whisper of hair falling to the floor— all of these sounds, even the most gentle, served only to aggravate his head, and by extension, him.
"You're late," his boss grunted from behind the counter. Holding back an easily misinterpreted wince at the jarring sound of his boss's voice, Kakashi acknowledged the man with a wave in his direction and hurried to begin his work.
The rest of his day proceeded much the same; every noise set his teeth on edge, and he was messing up things he'd been doing smoothly for years. Sakura guided him through this "bad day", as he continually referred to it; she hoped that in the evening when he was ready to call the day a failure, she'd coax her own image out of his mind and give it to him, creating a sense that this woman was an escape from the life he led. She thought the headache was a nice touch and must be a side effect of the dream manipulation— but soon her help wouldn't even be needed in the dreams, so no suspicious pattern should come to his attention.
So as he left work, slamming the door behind him and regretting it immediately, and he deliberated which way to take home, she moved him in the direction of the park with the reasoning that it would be quieter there. True as that may be, there were still enough sounds there to gnaw painfully at his head, and he was put into an even worse mood until by chance (Sakura knew better) he glanced at a tree in the park.
He stopped, staring at it quizzically. It took him a moment to remember— last night, he had dreamed of a beautiful woman emerging from that same tree. He suppressed a shiver as the murky details started to return to him with more clarity, smiling hazily at some of the more graphic images.
A dog barked somewhere and he was brought back to earth; he noticed that he was developing an uncomfortable stiffness in his pants. He started walking home with a heightened pace, eager to return to the comfort of his own apartment. By the time he was at the door he could not hold it any longer; he wrenched open the door and before it had even swung shut behind him he had already retreated to the privacy of the bathroom.
Sakura sighed. Whatever it takes, I suppose.
(…)
For the next week, Kakashi could hardly stop thinking about the pink-haired woman. Sakura delighted at how quickly the seed had spread, although she had her work cut out for her trying to put a lid on the rebellious thoughts. So often his rational side wanted to ponder this bizarre notion of a woman coming out of a tree, where in the world it came from, and why he was becoming so fixated on it. Sometimes, Sakura's judgment slipped, and these traitorous thoughts found a way through, threatening to sabotage the entire operation with their simple innocence. At times like these, Sakura perhaps put too much force into overriding them with passion— after all, passion was something she usually directed in dizzying quantities, and many of these nuances were beyond her. So she channeled her own mounting hunger for him into his lust, which were desires of two different colors but a rose is a rose is a rose. She was even used to the self-pleasuring by now, choosing to interpret it as his way, as a flawed and ignorant human, to try and bring himself closer to her. If she squinted the right way, it could even come off as endearing.
About a week and a half after the first night, Sakura noticed that his interest had already seemed to meet its peak. He couldn't go anywhere from where he was right now, a state of constant desire, but down, and she began to fear that if she did not act she would lose her sway over him. After all, he could pick a woman in the street to fantasize about next, and that would actually give him a known chance of fulfilling his desire with a real person. Right now, the beautiful woman of his dreams was nothing more than that. In response to this, she decided that tonight, she would add a new element to the recurring dream.
When he sank into unconsciousness (something she always helped along, but tonight with added eagerness) she quashed threats of other dreams and summoned the usual image of the tree in the park. She could feel his excitement as the leaves parted, but this time there were only bare branches.
Sensing his dream self's disappointment and confusion, she directed his attention to a forest, dark and dense. Invisible, she led him through the trees, pushing aside brambles and branches effortlessly, until he came to a clearing. Looming above him was the largest tree he had ever seen, casting an imposing shadow that swamped his seemingly insignificant form in its cloak of darkness. And underneath the tree amidst its roots was the pink-haired woman, standing naked with her arms outstretched in welcome.
He moved toward her with a cry of delight, but as he neared her she put up a hand to stop him. He halted, thrown off by the interruption of his momentum, and watched curiously as she pointed silently to the tree. Sakura made sure he got a good look at it before letting it fade into darkness.
Mumbling, he awoke; Sakura watched with interest as he groaned and sat up, scratching his neck. Images from the dream came to him as his consciousness asserted itself, helped along by Sakura's touch. She found that she had to do very little from that point to get his mind working in the right direction— she was elated when, without her help, he wondered if the dream had been some sort of answer to thoughts concerning this woman's authenticity he hadn't even realized he'd been harboring. He stared at the wall opposite him thoughtfully, summoning the image of the forest. Have I seen a forest like it before? It was very hard to tell— in the dream the forest was dark, and his focus was on moving ever forward, following instinct towards the woman awaiting him. The tree in the clearing was much more distinctive, but he couldn't recall ever seeing such a tree anywhere, let alone near his home.
Although the place was unfamiliar, he felt powerfully drawn towards it; he was sure it was this elusive pink-haired seductress, leading him to the place where she would be waiting for him. He couldn't restrain the lusty smile that passed across his face; oh, how sweet it would be to finally feel the warmth of her flesh against his and their bodies becoming one.
Sakura echoed his thought with a quiet grin. Oh, how sweet it will be.
(…)
At a carefully measured pace, Sakura revealed steps to Kakashi. They were in reverse order to prevent him from running off to the forest and falling prey to someone else. She started slowly, teasing him with a new direction, a new turn on the hidden path. She wanted to make sure that she maintained a certain balance so as to forge an appropriate, mounting suspense without threatening to let him lose interest. On the nights when she did not illuminate a further part of the labyrinthine path to her home, she allowed him to fantasize about her. A part of him seemed to be determined to keep his mind revolving around her without her help, and as she watched this natural process with a pleased grin she wondered if perhaps her talents actually appealed to the darkest side of men, so that they bent towards her will of their own accord.
So far, she was encouraging Kakashi's idea of waiting until he had all of the pieces to seek her out. For once, she found herself fighting down his instincts and dredging up his rational side— albeit in fragments warped to suit her purposes. Finally, after a fortnight of calculated taunts, she decided to reveal the last clue.
She could barely contain her hunger for him now; she decided to let him fall asleep naturally so she could better savor the anticipation. It was torturous, waiting like that, but it served to build up her ache for him to vertiginous proportions, sending the burn through her entire form, scorching her through to the dark pit where her heart should have been. As soon as his light snores began, however, she could not contain herself— she unleashed her power, sending an image of what she had denied him for so long— the path from his home to the forest.
With a cry he awoke; the shock of Sakura's outburst was so powerful that it had jarred him out of sleep. His heart pounding, he scrambled out of bed and into yesterday's clothes. He hurried out the door, ignoring the horrendous throbbing in his head, and although he could not hear her she screamed, urging him to rush towards her.
But in all of her passion, her unbearable lust for his soul, she was not paying attention to the workings of his mind. Most of this thoughts were in tune with hers, a maniacal drive for release, but a small, beaten crumb of his will was battling its way upwards. The emotion dictating him now was so grossly inhuman that warning bells had been set off, and Sakura was shrieking so loudly that she did not hear them. Kakashi, however, was not equipped to handle what she was putting his mind through, and so he welcomed the familiarity of his own thoughts in the midst of all of this foreign emotion, clinging to them and giving them power that they had not had in weeks.
He skidded to an abrupt stop. He put his hands to his head, gripping at the roots of his silvery bangs. Look! his mind screamed at him. Can you see that this is not normal?
It was hard to see through the cloud of passion tugging at all parts of his body, threatening to drag him into the forest and down the winding path, but he struggled and was able to throw his head back and release a primal scream.
Shrieks of terror from neighbors echoed his own, but he paid them no heed. Panting, he lowered his hands and stared at them, his mismatched eyes blurring with tears. Sakura was confused; his resistance had become so distracting that she was forced to rip her attention from her appetite to her prey's mind, and she realized with horror that her control had began to slip.
The indignant shock that followed cost her precious seconds as Kakashi started dragging his feet backwards in an effort to retreat. He noticed the immense exertion involved in this simple action with a surge of fear, and his fright cemented in his mind the danger.
Sakura grasped at his thoughts as they fell through her fingers, but his fear had gripped and grounded him, leaving her to claw at him in vain. With a whimper, he was gone.
Kakashi issued a loud gasp; his head was suddenly clearer than it had been in weeks. He was still incredibly frightened, however, and so he acted upon his most basic survival instinct and ran. Sakura watched him was the agony ripped at her chest, her hunger for the first time denied.
Careless.
—
—
—
Forever shaken, Kakashi quit his job and moved south where there would be no trees to haunt him. Still, it was hard to put it all behind him, so he sought professional help and eventually managed to forget.
But Sakura did not have the gift of time and could never forget. She was left broken, too distraught at her folly to muster the energy to pursue more men to quench her now insatiable thirst. Rather, she allowed herself to waste away, retreating into the safety of her tree and fading as her hunger consumed her.