Sakura in Wonderland
Chapter 3: The Hookah, 'Shrooms, and something a bit Furry
Outside of the back door of Kakashi's house was a large garden; or rather what I had originally assumed to be a garden had turned out to be a large forest of unidentifiable plants and flowers. It took awhile for me to realize that I wasn't my normal size but rather only the height of the grass. Without someone to guide me further-
Sasori had rushed off after I saved him! Is that how you save your rescuer? By hurrying off like you can't stay in the same room as them…Dammit! There I go again being all-selfish again! He said he needed to find his brother, it's not right for me to expect something in return…just what kind of doctor am I?
I decided to wander along the thinner path of grass that seemed to have a well trodden path through it until I came across another person who might be able to tell me where to go next.
Up ahead was a rather large mushroom with a figure sitting atop it; stunned, I walked around it and realized it was as big as me.
So which is it? Am I as big as a mushroom or is the mushroom as big as me? I guess it really isn't important what size I am here. But I can't help but wonder…Earlier I had drank the potion and shrunk so am I normal size adjusted to a much larger world or only a few inches tall in a normal sized world?
A face peeked over the edge of the mushroom. I had forgotten there was a person on top of the mushroom before and he had startled me.
He had dazzling, long, white hair. His hair parting was zigzagged as if he had done it without intent or purpose and long piece hung in his face held there by small gray ring-like clasps. He had either discolored rings around his eyes or he wore makeup. It made his eyes look sunken and eerie. He held a smoking stick, which I later noticed, was actually a hookah.
"Who are you?" He asked.
"You know, it is rather rude to ask for someone's name and not introduce yourself first. So I should be asking who are you?"
"Aren't you simply contradicting what you've just said? Again, who are you?" He insisted without much change in his tone.
I realized he was right, and slowly started to become irritated with the man. He seemed so much like the druggies that would occasionally come into our hospitals. They were always so rude and he seemed to remind me quite easily of them. Hell, the both of them even smoked in people's faces, I realized as he exhaled without turning away.
I glared at him and seeing he was not going to budge or back down, probably too high off whatever he was smoking to really care, I surrendered in hopes of receiving help.
"Okay, I give in. My name is Sakura Haruno, how are you?" My question was met with a heavy silence as he continued to stare at my face. I continued on without faltering at his weighty stare. "Okay, it seems you don't feel like giving your name away, that fine by me. You are entitled to your privacy, but I'd like to ask you whether you know the way out of here."
"Does it matter which way you go to find the exit? There isn't one at the moment…if there isn't an exit there isn't any point in trying to find one."
"What do you mean there isn't an exit? If there's an entrance there has to be an exit! I just came in through a hole and Kakashi got out somehow!"
"Just because you assume there is an entrance and exit doesn't mean there will be one."
"What the hell do you mean? There has to be an exit! If Kakashi got out of this hellhole, just to get dango for your King then I'd like to assume I could get out too."
"Kakashi had permission, you don't." He answered while continuing to exhale colored smoke into my face without a care.
He's not really answering the question…Gah! What is that he's smoking? It's burning my eyes!
"Well then how do I get permission to leave?" I asked while gritting my teeth against the horrid smell of the exhaled smoke.
"You'd have to go to the castle." Again with the incomplete answers and second hand smoke.
"Damnit! Just give me an actual thorough answer already! And I've had it with you freaking smoking into my face!" I yelled as I snatched the pipe from his hand and smothered the fire in the hookah with a small damp handkerchief that I had kept in my pocket from earlier today. It was still damp from my swim in my own tears.
I noticed what I had done and quickly collected myself, I had had a stressful day. I had gone from the hospital to my house, then this place. Had I been in the hospital, this would've have been the patient that everyone would pity and as my colleagues had once commented on, previously I was wound up from stress and fatigue and didn't notice I had intimidated a patient, who had provoked me by being particularly defiant about clarifying his medical history, into cowering in the corner. And that patient had had dealings with the Mob. So I needed to remember to calm down, yelling at someone isn't going to help them or you.
I looked up again; he was still staring down at me with seemingly unaffected eyes that seemed to have softened or maybe that was just what I wanted to see.
"Okay, now I realize I shouldn't be yelling at you. You don't have any part in this and you probably don't deserve to have your head bitten off. But could you please help me? I don't even know how I've gotten myself into this mess, one moment I'm running across my property chasing down someone I assumed to be a trespasser, and now that I think about it I'm not even sure why I chased him down. I mean what's the harm in trespassing? He wasn't breaking into my house, or stealing anything. Why did I have to chase him anyway? But I did, I'm normally not that kind of impulsive, yes, I'm moody but not physically impulsive. I just did it."
He seemed to wait for me to continue, as if he knew I needed to vent to someone capable of hearing what I had to say before I could listen to what he would say.
"But now I'm here, being led this way and that, in a place I've never heard of before, nor did I ever know it actually existed. You talk of permission to get out, but I've never been here, I don't know how to obtain permission and all you have to say is "to go to the castle." Won't you please specify where the castle is, or where to go and who to speak to? It's almost as if I'm being forced on a big treasure hunt across a foreign land I've never heard of but it has existed in my backyard for who-knows-how-long?"
I looked up again at him to indicate I was finished, but found he was now leaning down; his eyes now level with mine. Something twitched near my eye and I found it to be one of the pair of fuzzy antennae he had on his head.
"If this is such a hellhole," he began, not in an insulted tone but rather one associated with the statement of a fact. "-Wouldn't you consider the fact that we all might want to get out, but we can't because we all have our roles here, that we can't just leave. There are rules that we are forced to live by, rules that are only to be known to the inhabitants of this land, and you are in fact correct about your impulsiveness. It's associated with the madness you'll quite often encounter here."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"As I said, rules that are meant only to be known by the inhabitants of this land, we have our roles here and now so do you. You'll need to head for the castle," he paused to smile at this, "which is in that direction." He gestured to a point behind him and his mushroom.
I was about to move to leave but he gently grasped my shoulder as I turned to head in that general direction.
"But first you'll need to get to normal size again, and that would require a bit of my help." He pointed to the mushroom he was sitting on. "Eating one side will make you bigger, the other side will make you smaller."
With that last bit of advice he slid off the mushroom with a grace I had never seen in a caterpillar, wait, he was a caterpillar, right? When I had first seen him I hadn't paid attention to his legs, but I was rather sure they hadn't been human legs before. As I took one last look at him, I realized he had already disappeared into the forest without a trace.
"Um…what was that?" I wondered out loud to myself.
"And my name is Kimimaro…" He replied peeking out of the forest one last time.
"What?"
"My name, you asked for it earlier, is Kimimaro." With that he disappeared back into the forest.
"So which side of this mushroom is what I'm looking for?" I asked out loud again, silently hoping that Kimimaro would answer me.
My question was met with utter stillness.
I sighed as I decided just to wing it, since it didn't seem as if I was going to get out of here anytime soon.
Something rang in the back of my head,
Some words of advice I couldn't remember who had said,
But the message was clear,
As an idea whispered in my ear,
"A little of this side, and a little of that side where it dwells,
And some experimentation should do you well."
"Now where had that come from…" I muttered to my self. I looked around for a source to the suggestion that had seemed to come from the blue. It didn't seem likely I would find a source other than some odd reason for spontaneous rhyming thoughts, and even those I wasn't sure what could have been the cause of those.
"But who am I to go against the voices in my head?" I muttered sarcastically, while nibbling on a little piece of either side of the mushroom that I had broken off earlier while the rhyme had echoed through my head.
The voice I was referring to was a…phenomenon… I had met/created in elementary school…Inner-Me, the brash and impulsive personality that I had created as what I could assume to be a comfort mechanism to the lack of friends I had had during elementary school. She had been the one I had talked to while I was bored and she continued to be there for me through high school, often saying irritatingly lewd things about the upperclassmen in the advanced classes I had taken. She had disappeared a few years ago sometime in college; maybe I hadn't the psychological need for her anymore? Maybe I had simply grown up?
I noticed I had grown back to normal size (or at least normal in comparison to the height of the trees) and I had started to walk down a previously unnoticed path without really realizing where I was going. I could only hope I had wandered in the right direction, because I was almost about to run into a tree in the middle of a fork.
"Why was I even thinking that hard about something that was practically a figment of my imagination? Am I mad?"
"Everyone's mad here, ugly. Even I am." Replied a voice that seemed to come from nowhere.
I looked around and saw no one until the voice replied to my active search for its source.
"Up here, ugly."
My eyes followed the sound up the tree I had just previously almost run into. There laid a pale-faced male wearing a rather odd outfit, it was unusually revealing for something worn by a male. The ends of his shirt reached the end of his ribcage, it was loose fitting and was obviously just cut that way instead of being ridiculously small. Speaking of the cut, everything on his person seemed cut oddly. One sleeve was a ¾ length while the other was normal, and his pants sat low enough to reveal more than the average amount of male pelvis.
"It's impolite to stare, you know that ugly?"
Suddenly spurred to action I replied with the not-so-smooth-"Why do you keep on calling me ugly?"
"You have presumably dyed your hair pink, you have green eyes, and you seem to wear red when you know it will clash with your hair and sometimes with your skin while you blush like that." He replied with a twitch of his tail, a feature I hadn't noticed while rudely critiquing the cut of his clothing.
Do I usually ignore the animalistic features of the men I meet? Kakashi had rabbit ears, Sasori had mouse ears, Kimimaro had antennae…well at least I though he had had antennae they might have disappeared with the maybe-never-there lower half of a caterpillar that may or may have not been there…
"And are you usually this empty headed?"
"No." I ground out before continuing, "My hair color is natural, too. And the red colors I wear are part of my family's crest."
"I didn't realize people still lived by family crests. I don't even understand why people would want to identify themselves by a color to know you were related to someone."
"I wear it as a reminder…of my family." I replied, expecting another rude comment to come from the male casually sitting up in the tree, so much like the cat that he resembled.
"Then I wouldn't know I've never had a family." He answered in a less empty tone…in fact it sounded a little…envious?
My head snapped back up to look at him, a curious look probably plastered across my face, but this curiosity was based in logic not unlike the factual approach taken by any number of scientists I've known.
"What do you mean you've never had a family?" He could obviously mean that he had never met his parents or relatives, but I had only recently realized that in this place, there didn't seem to be any true families, not with parents or adults to take care of children.
"As in, I have never had a family, I thought I was being rather clear on that, ugly, you seemed to be the intelligent sort."
"And I mean as in, you certainly couldn't have just popped out of nowhere. Into existence from nothing, you know."
"I practically did. That's how the world works here. Role holders and the faceless nobodies that wander the streets of this world, the faceless nobodies are the ones who have families but are easily replaced when something happens to them. But the role holders aren't so different, we're just going to be replaced with another nobody who will be forced to take on our role should we disappear."
"What do you mean, "disappear"?" I was curious as to what he meant by faceless nobodies and role holders, apparently it was some sort of hierarchy here, peasants and nobles. But peasants didn't just come out of nowhere, and they often didn't become nobles out of nowhere either.
"I seriously don't know. One minute I had been living in what I assume to be my house, and the next it was announced to me that I was the Cheshire Cat. I have never been allowed to return to my former position and it leaves me to wonder what had happened to the previous person to be placed in this position. It leaves me to believe he found a way to die."
"You can't die here? And what's stopping you from leaving?"
"Not in the sense I've heard Kakashi speak of in our little chats. Your people leave this world forever, never coming back. We are only reborn again, a different person, no memories, blissfully unaware of the empty life we lived before until it is pressed upon us again, sometimes as a different role, sometimes the same, but we ourselves never know. And there isn't much we can do about leaving, we always end up in the same place we tried to leave from."
"So you're alone?" I asked gently, not really expecting an answer this time.
"Yes."
"You could come with me. Earlier Kimimaro left his mushroom, and I assume that's where he's always been. I had stayed there for a little while and he didn't come back. I'm quite certain whatever is keeping you isn't as strict as you make it out to be if Kimimaro just got up and left."
The cat seemed to lazily but truly consider it for a moment before jumping down from the tree and landing on his feet just like a cat would.
"It's not like I have anything better to do, ugly." He replied before adding, "So where are you headed?"
"The castle. Though I'm not sure whether or not I've been heading in the right direction though…" I answered, unsure of myself.
"Then we'll be going this way." He said pointing a finger towards our right.
"Okay, but what's your name? Mine's Sakura." I said before he could say anything about it being rude about asking for a name from someone without saying your name first. I really didn't want to go through that conversation again, and it seemed this cat was just the type to do that, all the while throwing in casual insults.
"Sakura, hmm? Very unoriginal for someone with pink hair, wouldn't you think ugly? Mine's Sai."
I quietly gritted my teeth and took a deep breath to push down the urge to punch him in the face now that he was within range. I had a feeling that, just like his insults, the urge to punch him wouldn't be leaving soon either.
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Okay third chapter done. "Sakura's Inheritance's" chapter has been almost done for a while now so once I cap off the last since it should come up soon too.
Please review! Seriously review! It can just be a "Sai's out of character, you suck at writing!" Though I seriously don't want that, but if you do, then please tell me what's wrong with his character before writing/typing that "you suck at writing" part. Even though I haven't received one of those yet…it's still possible.
To Vesper-chan, if she still reads this: I do apologize if this story does not meet your standards of quality, but I'm trying and that's all that matters to me. ;-)