I swivelled my head around. The Kakashi-cosplayer– No. Kakashi of the Sharingan. Kakashi. My sensei. I was Sakura. Kakashi was in my hospital room. Naruto is real. I am, literally, Sakura. I am–

"Maa, it's nice to see my cute student feeling better." He smiled, or at least one of his eyes seemed to indicate so, what with two-thirds of his face being covered. He snapped a book closed and walked over to ruffle my hair.

I stared at him. "Kakashi-san," I began. Closed my mouth. Somehow, using -san here felt impolite. I tried again, "Kakashi-sensei, you're… you're early. For that to be true, I mean."

There was a silence; a thrum of surprise.

"Oh, and she remembers me first! And my wonderful habits!" He pressed a hand to his cheek, as though to conceal a blush. Through like a million layers of fabric.

Inoichi sighed. "Kakashi, this truly isn't–"

Kakashi sat in the chair opposite the bed, looking for all the world like he had just been invited to do so. "You wouldn't want my poor genin to hear bad news without the one person she remembers nearby?" he drawled. "She would be traumatised. And how would her poor sensei know how to help her with her training if he's not informed?"

"Please let him stay." The words tumbled out of my mouth. During his monologue, I'd had a horrible recollection. "I have parents, right? I don't remember my parents. If I'm going to have an adult figure around, he's genuinely the least frightening person I can imagine in that place." And wasn't that a scary thought.

Inoichi seemed to deflate. "Very well."

Something else occurred to me. "Actually… I signed a consent form myself. Am I considered an adult? In charge of my own medical decisions?"

He nodded. "Yes. You've graduated as a full-fledged ninja, and have been accepted into a ninja squad under your jounin-sensei. Under the eyes of the law, you are an emancipated adult with full rights. In the case of any medical emergency in which you are unable to make your own decisions, that is when your next of kin would be consulted."

"Uh, can I make him in charge of that instead?" I asked, jerking a thumb toward Kakashi. Even he looked surprised by this.

"May I ask why?"

"I may not remember everything, but I do know he's trustworthy." It was one of the very few things I knew about this place at all.

"No." To my surprise, it wasn't Inoichi who'd spoken, but Kakashi.

I put my chin on my knees. "Why not? I'm an adult, right?"

Inoichi shook his head slowly. "You are an emancipated adult with severe, possibly unrecoverable amnesia." He said it gently, but firmly. "It's one thing for him to hear your medical information and be available for your recovery, but it would be unthinkable to give your sensei a family's rights. You've only known him for one day."

I almost said, 'I'm an adult, not an adult who makes reasonable personal decisions', but fortunately ignored the urge. It probably wouldn't help me out much, here.

"Okay, I get it. But what other problems am I looking at? If I can't recover? Will I stay a ninja? You said I could still train."

"Well, your sensei did say he would train you; if he continues to agree, you can remain a ninja this way. If he should decide you are unable to operate in your team, you will still have options: you can return to the academy for remedial education, or apply for a civil position within Konoha." He smiled. "However, I agree it would be a good idea to try to keep your life as close as possible to the one you have forgotten. Even if you have no conscious memories, you may still hold unconscious memories. For example, you can still form chakra, and said you can speak a language you don't recall knowing. You may have other similar memories as well, such as for throwing kunai."

"Or hand-seals. Try to make a Tiger hand-seal!" Kakashi-sensei cut in.

Inoichi looked annoyed, but I found myself twisting my hands together.

I stared at my hands and the position I had formed them into. The shape was certainly familiar. Well, that's embarrassing. "Uh, probably not, then." Sailor Mars? Really? That's the first thing I could think of?

"Ah, no. That is the correct seal. Please demonstrate an Ox hand-seal."

"Oh!" And so I found myself demonstrating various weird, twisty hand-seals. It was shocking how easily they came as soon as I heard the word; it felt almost like Sign Language. How on earth do I know this?

Kakashi crossed his arms and nodded. "Perfect. So why don't you tell us about her chakra, now?"

I turned to look at Inoichi. That certainly didn't sound good. If chakra worked anything like what they thought it did in my world, except observable, then having a problem with it was probably a physical medical problem. "My chakra?"

He put his head in his hands. "Kakashi, she's already had to hear so much today."

I raised my eyebrows. "Please tell me absolutely everything. I don't want to be any more in the dark than I already am."

He folded his hands and sighed. "We've noticed some disturbances in your chakra coils. For unknown reasons, they are attempting to develop to a level too large for a twelve-year-old of your height and weight."

"Well, I mean that makes sense. After all, I'm–"

Oh.

My.

God?

"Sakura?"

"I'm..." What? Excuse me, what? "How old am I?"

Inoichi blinked, and then understanding dawned on him. "You're twelve. The internal age the genjutsu put you under was inaccurate by some number of years."

No.

"I understand this may be very jarring, but..." his voice faded into the distance.

You've got to be kidding me.

It just wasn't fair. Everything about this was completely unreal; like I was having some sort of complete mental breakdown, or stuck in some weird-ass dream that wouldn't quit, but this? Seriously? What if it's real? It felt real, and this, THIS, was just too awful to even be considered.

My voice came out small and weak. "I'm going to have to go through puberty again?"

As it turned out, the amount of sympathy I received for this horrifying realisation was precisely zero. The two men instead wanted to focus on the strange growth in my chakra coils and the repercussions it may have on my brain and body.

"After all, when you told me you had amnesia and I sensed your new fluctuations in chakra, I thought you were an imposter and took you straight to the Torture and Interrogation office~!" Kakashi chirped, proving immediately that it was perfectly rational to trust him above all others in this new life.

Thanks, honourable Shishou.

What this meant for me in the meantime was apparently as many body-and-brain scans as the hospital had available, along with some blood and DNA tests. I'd had some memory of MRIs in my past-life (fake-life?), and wow was I not excited.

"Can you like, knock me out again for this?"

Inoichi frowned. "I assure you the scans will not be painful, and the scans we have scheduled shouldn't take above five or six hours at the most."

"You're not selling me on this at all. That sounds incredibly boring. I honestly don't want to be awake to be stuck in loud tubes for six hours. Plus, knocking people out seems simple for you guys. Compared to what I thought was real life, anyway."

"Absolutely not," Inoichi said.

And sensei slapped another piece of paper on my forehead, knocking me out immediately.

What an absolute legend.

The Good News: I was asleep for six hours of super-boring tests.

The Bad News: Inoichi and the other doctors were incredibly unimpressed with Kakashi-sensei and he was kicked out until further notice.

The Worse News: I was an idiot and did not realise that due to all the sleep I'd had during the day, I'd be wide awake in my hospital room all night long. With nothing but my thoughts for company.

The Worst News: As a consequence, I had time to digest everything that had happened to me over the last 24 hours.

This more or less boiled down to repeating the same question to myself over and over again: What is real?

I've remembered my dreams around the same amount as any other person, and this did not feel like a dream at all. I even tried some of the tricks I could remember about how to tell if you're in a dream, and none of them did anything. Pinching my arm, looking at my hands, trying to read, trying to read a clock, holding my breath. Nothing.

And if this was all real, did that mean they were right? Was I Sakura Haruno, the victim of some sort of weird magic spell? Was my entire life up until this point a lie? Or did I just wake up teleported into another world, where Naruto was a real thing? Hell, a real person. With a whole world of ninja and magic and violence. A world I was expected to be a part of.

When I was a child, I would dream about this sort of thing, constantly. But I was too realistic. I knew that if I, say, woke up as a Hogwarts student, I wouldn't be anybody except myself. I wouldn't be able to study hundreds of books and become the best witch ever. I wouldn't train hard every day to become a star Quidditch player. If I woke up and Gandalf was at my front door, I wouldn't want to go on a long and perilous journey. It was too hard to dream; not when I was limited to dreaming about being me.

So why?

I felt a lump rising in my throat; my eyes started to sting.

Why do I feel like I can do this? Why aren't I frightened? Where is this determination coming from?

Why did I truly, really believe that I would train hard, study hard, and try my hardest to become an excellent ninja? In one of the fantasy-realms I knew the least about, why did I feel so confident? Like, yes, I'll wake up tomorrow and ask the first person I see if I can get started right away. Why did I want to jump out of this hospital bed right now to work on it?

When I thought about it that way, the answer was obvious. It was one of the very first things I'd noticed upon waking up here.

I don't hurt.

I'd been plagued my whole life with fatigue that just never seemed to lift; with an attention span that could never focus on what it wanted to, with aching anxiety that plagued my every thought, and with a depression that told me nothing mattered.

Was it because I woke up with someone else's body? Someone else's mind? If it was, then how could I be thinking the thoughts I was having right now? How could I remember a different life with someone else's mind?

Or had everything really been a spell– a jutsu– and they gave me a life where I felt so hopeless, they hoped it would stick when I woke up?

I rolled over on my side and tucked my legs up toward my chest. Regardless of the why of it, I was here now, and this was how I felt. It hurt, a little, to know that my determination might not be my own, but…

"Let's see if this new brain knows how to sleep," I mumbled.

It did.