Sakura crouches alone inside her mind. She skitters across the starry, undulating expanse before her, her tentacles and talons and spines knowing exactly which points of gleaming nothingness are solid and which of the planets are just tricks of the light. The world shifts with every stes, twisting sometimes subtly and sometimes more drastically, and she's walking on the ocean, on the clouds, on asteroids, and then on planets once more. One last step trillion-limbed step, and Sakura stops, crouches all of her every-changing number of limbs over a rock so massive it compresses her universe-consuming mass down into a human size, if not a human shape.
Sakura looks down upon Ino's water lily—untouched, unharmed, her chakra coils healthy and unpoisoned. Sakura's mind may be vast and ever-changing—but this is one of its fixed points.
Around Sakura, the universe twists and inverts and breaks and comes together again and the flower beneath her and the rock beneath it change not at all.
The rock is, of course, Sakura's love for Ino. Just like how that star she can see out of the corner of her eye—the one whose light is wibbly and wobbly and not good for anything—is her well, something, for Jiraiya, and the binary star above her is her overwhelming and mind-numbing terror.
The stars rip themselves apart at the reminder of their existence, exploding in a wash of light that blows the whole world away.
You see.
Sakura's dying.
She's finally free—the veneer of lies that made up Outer Sakura finally gone, releasing her truly to her body for the first time.
And she's dying.
She knows it like she knows that she currently has five hundred eighty-three million, five hundred eighty-one thousand, three hundred sixty-six limbs. It's her mind, after all.
It always has been.
That knoll was Outer's mind, but Sakura—her mind has always looked like this. This is where she's been trapped for the last ten years, under the weight of Outer's knowing lies and unintentional falsehoods.
When Sakura declared her own name, burning out all of Orochimaru's poisonous chakra and memories out of her, she didn't just burn Orochimaru's chakra out of her—she also burned Gamami and Tsunade and Jiraiya's chakra out with it.
She couldn't not, and even if she wanted, she wouldn't have wanted to keep it.
It was wrong.
It wasn't hers.
Less than a percent of her chakra had been her own. The only chakra that had been left was the chakra that had been tucked into the little imperfections of her coils, so deep and hidden where not even she (not Outer, her, Sakura) had been able to rip it free in her scramble to fight Orochimaru on that day in South Fire.
It is not enough to run her body, so her body is shutting down.
Here, in her mind, every instant is an eternity, but she can still feel it. She can feel her cells starting to die. They exist here, too, after all.
This whole universe, it's all her and it's all dying.
She knows exactly where all of her chakra is, scattered across the too-full emptiness all around her, and she knows how to coax it out of the emptiness that is her brain and the emptiness that are her lungs, and the emptiness that is her heart. She knows how to direct it along the invisible leylines that are her chakra pathways to the little blackholes that are her tenketsu. She knows which tenketsu need chakra most desperately, and she could feed them all exactly as much chakra as they needed to stop screaming, to stop the stars above her from dimming.
She could do it until she ran out, and this whole world winked out of existence all at once.
She's scared.
The empty space the explosion leaves in its place undulates with it. Her talons shake with it. Her teeth shine with it.
She's so scared.
Sakura looks down at Ino's flower, Ino's frozen chakra coils. Here, tucked inside of her own mind, so far from the slowly dying universe around her, time doesn't mean much of anything.
If she talked to Ino now, Ino could never understand her.
If she wanted, she could spin her clock fast enough Ino could hear her and understand her.
But if she did, she wouldn't live long enough to say a single word.
She could spread herself through the infinity around her, take her sometimes infinite and sometimes finite limbs and thread them through her everything—through a maze of infinite size and infinite complexity, always changing and shifting, blinking across her mind randomly and without pattern (a maze she knows instinctively, because it is her)— taking her body under her control, for the first time, but if she did, she would be dead before she opened her eyes.
Sakura turns a couple of the talons she sees out of towards a white dwarf half a universe away, too far to have been blown away by her explosion of terror. It is a white dwarf which should be a brilliant star.
It is her reservoir. Bone dry, but dripping with too-much natural energy—the seal Orochimaru placed on her dumping so much of it into her she can see it gather, even as out of time as she is. The white dwarf that is her reservoir is literally dripping with it, the whole of the dwarf beading with it until it's not a white dwarf but the moon on the mobile she can just barely remember in her first memories, spinning above her. Her universe shifts, and now it is not a universe but a room, which she remembered seeing out of Outer's eyes (but that Outer had long since forgotten), as being so big and terrifying and dark and too-full of monsters in the dark. Here, those monsters are both real in a way they hadn't been and also her, and she is staring back at herself through every one of their eyes. She is still on Ino's rock, now sitting in a massive cradle the size of the whole of Konoha, the bedding a mountain range like one she's never seen, peaks and valleys and more besides.
The mobile spins above her, the earth and the moon and the sun, and then venus kind of hastily attached to one end because she had really liked venus, or so her parents told her. (Told Outer.)
A massive drop of natural energy, the size of Konoha, drops down from her mobile.
As it falls, it dwindles down, from all of Konoha to the civilian district, to the Hokage tower. Sakura reaches up, and catches it with the flat side of a tentacle which is momentarily a talon. She expects it to burn her, twist her, tell her she must have more and more of it until she is perfect and complete and a stone statue, but in her mind she is all that she is and exactly as she is. It loves her for it, slips under her chitin and then under her skin and then further still, all through her, and then once it tires of her it slips back out, slides slowly off of a spine, then down down into the bedding beneath her—a spot of the bedding which is actually a single strand of her hair.
It turns bright blue for a moment, and then the natural energy vanishes back into the outside world.
She catches the next drop with a tongue, and it doesn't hurt her, doesn't twist her, doesn't sing to her of how she will only be complete once she is filled with it and nothing but it. All through her, back again to another of her tongues, peeking out the end of a talon, and like a single drop of water, she lets it slide down her tongue, down down down into the bedding that is her left pinkie. It hardens into stone for a fraction of an instant, then vanishes.
Again and again she does this, looking down at Ino and wondering and waiting and what—
What is she going to do?
The drop of natural energy falls down, down into a massive cavern in the bedding, a crevice which goes down and down into the end of the universe, down into another universe, where the stars shine black, and empty space is white—
The walls are the left and right ventricles of her heart, and it drops past them at the exact moment some of the last of her chakra flows through her left ventricle.
The natural energy flashes, bright enough to light the whole room, all of the monsters and not-things in the dark burned away by its light.
When Sakura can see again, it is chakra, and not natural energy. It falls down and and down and down into a black star that is some of the cells of the palm of her hand. For that moment, that star gets brighter (blacker), instead of dimmer (lighter).
Sakura stares.
She remembers watching from Sakura's close eyelids as Orochimaru moved their body, remembers hearing his thoughts through Sakura's plugged ears, broadcast across the horrible and false expanse of his mind, about the nature of natural energy, and how it wants to be chakra.
She catches another drip of natural energy on a spine, lets it buzz through her, and then drops it down down down into another crevice which is her right and left lungs. She misses, hitting one of the walls instead, and the bedding twists and hardens into just a little bit of stone.
Five tries, and she succeeds in dropping a single drop of natural energy past a bit of the bedding at the moment her chakra passes through it.
Once again, it blazes brighter than the whole world. She catches her chakra on a talon, reaches up, up, impossibly up, and drops it into her too-dry reservoir and in that moment, her chakra reserves go up, instead of down.
Sakura leaves only five talons, two mouths, and three tentacles (one bladed, two unbladed) crouched over Ino's water lily, and wraps the rest around the frame of the mobile, heaving herself up and hanging down from it, just below the little plastic moon that is suddenly a whole pink star, its surface a roiling pink ocean of heat and light.
The natural energy responds to her presence, surging up, the surface of the star rising, and she gathers some of her chakra from her lungs, her brain, her heart, brings them into her mind with her, coursing along her limbs, and holds them beside the natural energy as it leaps up in massive solar flares.
The world erupts in light as natural energy explodes into chakra, coerced by the chakra running along her currently-infinite limbs. Her reservoir shifts in phase, turning one and a half times and therefore rotating into the point at infinity, and Sakura follows it, tucking all of herself around it, pushing her chakra closer to the natural energy still boiling up over its surface.
It comes faster and faster, but faster still when she moves, so she spins all of herself around it, and the natural energy comes faster still, spilling into her mind, blazing into chakra before dripping down onto a waiting talon and coursing through her currently-million-and-two limbs. Her body begins to scream from lack of chakra, and she feeds her new chakra back into her reservoir, under the ocean of pink, and her reservoir dutifully passes it along the leylines that are her chakra pathways to the tiny little black holes that are her tenketsu.
They quiet, and when her reservoir rotates this time, it rotates her with them, shattering her into two hundred pieces as her reservoir comes to a rest beside Ino's rock, now floating in a black ocean filled millions of little animals, all hunting and killing each other, turning the surface to a bloody froth. Sakura has already formed half of herself around it, more natural energy begetting more chakra, which she feeds back into her reservoir as her body screams for chakra once again.
It occurs to her only then, as she spins herself silly around her reservoir, into the black ocean that is sometimes more blood than water, that her reserves already spin. She is supposed to have her chakra in her reservoir, and be spinning it there. She transfers her chakra to her reservoir, and spins it…
It's slow.
She can't spin it fast enough.
The natural energy flow slows, drips more erratically, drips down into her mind still.
Sakura takes her chakra back, leaving only enough to feed her body. She forms her limbs into a chaotic ring, the more chaotic the better, and natural energy pours out from the little pink bath toy that is her reservoir.
It is faster now, but still slow.
Too slow.
She is still losing chakra. Her body is waking up, screaming for the chakra it has been denied, and she cannot feed it no matter how quickly she spins her limbs.
She takes a moment in which some of the animals in the froth around her die without being killed, and then she thinks—
Well…
Why does she need to use Orochimaru's stupid (gross) natural energy seal?
Natural energy has always been more than willing to come to her before.
At the thought, natural energy pours into her. From every animal in the ocean, the little guppies that are her hair, and the whales that are her eyes and the sea tigers that are her skin. The two points of infinity, at the bottom of the sea that are her lungs, a stretch of five feet tucked into a two foot rock that is her heart and on and on.
The natural energy loves her mind, calming and fizzing and pleasant, but her body is not so lucky. Wherever it touches her body, her body warps, horns and scales and skin turned to stone. Sakura scrambles to put her mind-limbs in the way. It moves, constantly, and it drips down onto her and she does not need to spin herself because she has more than enough natural energy, too much, all she needs is to scoop it all up, let it run through her, run chakra past it in other limbs—
As she dances and squirms her massive body and her currently-billion-and-two-hundred-million-and-three limbs through her infinite expanse, her mind lights up like the high noon, the black liquid of the ocean burned white.
Chakra blazes through her, half of her reserves, three quarters. She does not keep it inside of her, tucking it back into her reservoir and the natural energy keeps coming, faster now. Faster and faster and faster and she can take it all, burn it into chakra and then—
And then she has her entire reservers either in her reservoir or in her body.
The natural stops turning into chakra.
But it doesn't stop coming. More and more and more and overflowing her mind-body, dripping out into the black ocean around her, infusing itself into the fish and otters and kelp that are her physical body. She twists and contorts herself to catch natural energy when it drips away from her, tries to stop it from hitting her body, but she misses more than she catches, and still it comes, twisting and warping and there is more and more and more—it loves her feels her chakra wants to be made into more chakra even though it can't anymore—please, Sakura, it cries out to her—
STOP, Sakura bellows from thirty-three thousands mouths.
The natural energy stops. Even the trickle from Orochimaru's seal goes silent.
The natural energy that had already been within her doesn't go away. Still dripping off of her body, trying to slip out of her chitin, out to her body, to warp it, destroy it. Sakura, ever-twisting, tries to keep the natural energy from falling. She lays herself down across her tenketsu, fitting her tentacles through the conspicuously empty spaces.
She pours as much natural energy as her body can handle out of her tenketsu. They try to break down, burn up, but she doesn't let them, brushing away the debris that tries to close the empty spaces. When she is empty, she slips back to Ino's flower, and takes a moment.
She pours the rest of her chakra into her reservers until her body is empty of both natural energy and chakra, once more.
She smiles a grotesque smile of a million mouths.
Finally she can take what has always been hers.
But, there's something (someone) she wants more than that.
She spins her clock faster to match the outside world, and speaks.
Hi, Ino. Orochimaru took me over but I kicked him out. I'm okay, I don't know where I am. I need your help. Danzou is—
She pushes her chakra senses outward, and—
In a tornado of limbs, Sakura pushes herself through her chakra pathways for the first, estles herself in and around her tenketsu through the tiny crevices that are her chakra capillaries, wraps her last tentacles around her chakra reservoir, and surges back up into herself, taking control of her body for the first time. She does not have time to enjoy it, forced to duck under a slash from a wind blade that almost cleaves her in half. Her body feels wrong, too few limbs, in too euclidean a space, but Outer's muscle memory moves her just fine. Within her, her chakra is moving in perfect synchrony, along her billion limbs that are tucked into her chakra pathways, arching to the trillion more than are tucked into her tenketsu and the quadrillion more that lead to her every chakra capillary and it is easy, it is her. She knows every pathway they could take because they are all her limbs, and her body.
The Closed Loop may have been hard for Outer, but it was always trivially easy for Sakura.
She diverts chakra from her coils to her feet, spreads it evenly, and rockets backwards, away from Danzou's punch. In her senses, she can feel twenty-two other chakra signatures, all of them empty, hollow, like who she remembers Outer calling Fuu and Torune (it's dirty, poisoned knowledge, rooted in Orochimaru's memories, which are gone but her memories of Outer using them are not). Their chakra begins to shift, focus on her—
She poofs into a flower cloud as lightning tears through where she just was.
Sakura! Ino says, voice giddy, Tsunade is working on getting there. She says… she says she has a way to get to you. She says—
Wood explodes from Danzou's right arm, hitting every one of her flower petals, and she turns back into herself, ground shattering under legs as she runs and runs but she isn't fast enough.
It catches her, slams her into the wall. She slips her chakra out through the cracks in the suppression, transforms into a petal, and then swaps with a pebble by Danzou's right leg. He stomps, and she flees down the hallway, pebble for pebble for pebble, until the hallway turns over as the air fills with flames.
Nowhere to go, Sakura conjures chakra on her skin, tinges it with water chakra, and huddles behind her arms. It burns and hurts and her skin peels but she doesn't die.
She says you have to say 'Blood of my blood, Flesh of my flesh, I permit you'.
Wow, does that sound like a nasty blood oath Sakura does not want to say.
The fire clears and there is a wood shackle locked around one of her feet, Danzou before her, and she scrambles to get her chakra out of the cracks in the suppression field. She ducks his first wind blade—"Blood of my blood"—she takes a punch to the face which she returns two hundred fold into a wall of wood—"Flesh of my Flesh"—more wood lances out from the cuff she still has not broken, pinning her into the wall behind her as fire gathers in Danzou's open mouth—"I permit you."
A wall of force blasts away from Sakura's skin, blowing the wood shackles and the fire in Danzou's mouth away. He is immediately coming back towards her, but in that empty space, a single drop of blood bursts from Sakura's chest, and then balloons out into organs and a skeleton and skin and a mass of blonde hair, and then Tsunade is there, dodging Danzou's attack and driving her fist into his chest. She's naked, but only for an instant before a transformation jutsu washes over her and covers her in her standard pants and haori.
"Good job surviving this long," she says. She turns and belches a water wall into an oncoming fireball.
"She's clearly been possessed, Tsunade—do you still doubt me?"
"Absolutely."
Tsunade closes the distance to Danzou in the blink of an eye, the concrete floor shattering in her wake and, with a smirk, he opens his left wrist with a kunai, spraying blood in every direction. That smirk falls when Tsunade plunges through the spray, and drives her fist into his chest again. A hasty replacement technique leaves Tsunade shattering a stone wall instead of Danzou's chest. He's gone, halfway down the hallway, the hallway explodes under Tsunade's feet once more as she crosses half the distance between them, and he ducks into a room Sakura can feel is massive, where…
All of the chakra signatures in the complex are waiting.
Oh no.
Sakura, Ino says, voice tense.
I'm okay, I'm okay, Sakura says (trying to keep the giddiness of finally being the one talking to Ino out of her voice), giving chase. Tsunade saved me.
She's pretty sure it's now time for her to return the favor.
She gives chase, arrives in time to see Tsunade leaping off the ground as it drops away into a pit, arching in mid air around a water dragon, raising a water wall to block a fire attack, and—
Doing nothing but raise her arms to block Danzou's massive wind blade.
It digs deep into them and tosses her back into a wall that comes alive behind her. She breaks free, the diamond on her forehead expanding into a flower across her face, and then exploding across her entire body. Her arms heal.
Sakura lets out a cloud of cherry blossom petals that are immediately incinerated, switches with a kunai, and is then forced to switch back when two water dragons crash down upon her. She can see it all happen before it happens but there is too much, and she can't avoid it all.
Meanwhile, Tsunade ducks a bolt of lightning, catches three shuriken, closes half of the gap to one of the Root ninja before being forced to leap over a summoned tiger. She comes down on it, throwing it into the ground with a bloody crack, but the air around her comes alive, and her skin opens in long gashes that close in an instant.
"You might have been able to beat me alone, Tsunade, but you always were too headstrong," Danzou says, opposite the room from them, twenty two jounin in between them, "never looking before you jump."
Tsunade cracks her knuckles and falls back to Sakura's side.
Tsunade sets a hand on Sakura's shoulder, and Sakura feels Tsunade's chakra wash briefly through her for a moment—confirming she truly is Sakura, and not Orochimaru in disguise.
"What sort of Hokage would I be if I stood by and watched as you killed one of my people?" she says.
(A what?)
(Sakura sets it aside.)
Despite Tsunade's words, Sakura can feel the uncertainty in her chakra. The fear.
Tsunade throws Sakura back as she dashes forward to dodge a fireball, leaps a moment before a pit opens below her, catches a ninja with a water whip and uses it to heave herself out of the way of three different sets of kunai.
Sakura tries runs forward with her, but the moment she steps forward, a fireball and five kunai arch towards her. She vanishes into a petal cloud, but then there is wind, slicing all of her petals in two, and she only barely manages to replace herself with a kunai to get herself out of the way.
She's back at the entrance, and all the ninja's attention turn back to Tsunade.
She's—
She's not even a threat to them.
Sakura grinds her teeth in frustration. Inside of herself, all of her mouths grind in fury.
What can she do.
What can she do.
She—
She remembers Kakashi, crouched over the ground, chakra sparking around his hand as he carved a fang into the universe.
He'd never meant to show her. Never sat Outer down in front of him in his room that was too-quiet and too-empty where she couldn't feel anything from the rest of the world, and showed her, let Outer tell him again over and over and over again, but…
She remembers.
Outer wouldn't, her mind too malleable, but Sakura does. She remembers watching through Outer's eyes, she remembers feeling his chakra, remembers exactly how his chakra spun itself to burn those fangs into existence.
Sakura sets her hand against the floor, forms her chakra to match Kakashi's, and… upon completion of her jutsu, there is an answering wave from the universe, and then… nothing.
"Three of you, kill the girl."
"I'll fucking kill you."
"You clearly cannot."
Sakura jumps back as three ninja close in on her, trying to think of a way to thread herself through the attacks of three jounin at once. Before she fails, Tsunade vanishes into a mist of flesh, reappearing before Sakura, punching one of the ninja approaching her in the stomach, before kicking the second in the shoulder that cracks a wall just from the air-pressure. The third ducks away before Tsunade can follow up.
Tsunade is left standing before Sakura, chest heaving, fury twisting her face.
"You sicken me," she snarls.
The chakra in the diamond in her forehead is half gone.
For a moment, no one moves. Sakura can feel Tsunade performing a jutsu in the still silence.
"Do you think I would have implanted your clan's cells in me if I did not know how to counter your blood jutsu?" Danzou says, seals on his chest lighting up bright enough to be visible through his cloak.
Tsunade's lip twists. Chakra gathers in her feet, and Sakura puts a hand on her shoulder before she can throw them both into the invisible field that has been behind the from the moment they entered the room.
"Fuck."
"Congratulations on the shortest kage-ship in history," Danzou sneers, his remaining twenty ninja arrayed around him.
"They'll never accept you again."
"Oh, you forget how short the memory of ninjas is. The Uchiha and Hyuuga have to go, but the rest—what cares do they have that I steal their flesh? They can be convinced. And the civilians—well, a little money goes a long way. Install the right Hokage, and—"
Danzou smiles.
It is not a pleasant smile.
Sakura retreats back into herself, pulling her quintillion limbs out of her chakra system, and tries to drag time to a crawl, to give her time to think.
But something is different, something is still anchoring her to the pull of time, and she can't slow down the world at all.
She takes precious seconds being frustrated, wondering why before putting it out of her mind.
She knows that she did Kakashi's jutsu exactly right, exactly as he had done it. Her memory is perfect, unlike Outer's, so… what did she do wrong?
She remembers the feedback, when she used it, like it hit something, and was bounced back.
Through the rock that is her left eye and the enormous tree which is her right, she sees Tsunade move. Sakura gathers all of herself on Tsunade's terapede as it tears its way through a tree, tries not to think about what will happen to it if Tsunade dies.
That thing Tsunade did, she could use it to get out, Sakura's pretty sure. But she won't leave. Not without Sakura.
Sakura crawls through her mind-forest, finds the waterfall that is a memory of the five second stretch of her looking through Outer's eyes during one of her and Kakahi's spars, in which he leaned down, chakra blazed out of his hand, and he seared a fang into the universe.
Watching it again, she can feel the universe echo back to him, the backlash she felt when she performed it, and then there is second flare of chakra from him, small enough she didn't notice at the time. Tiny, subtle, a seal in the form of a whisper of chakra.
Sakura… Sakura doesn't know if she can do that.
Sakura didn't know Kakashi could do that!
She thought the one thing she had over Kakashi was her chakra control.
How did he do that?
She watches it again.
Again.
Again.
Before it whispers out of his fingers, she feels something else.
His back. A whisper of chakra pulsing from the two hundred and eightieth tenketsu, distorted through a seal hidden under his skin. It echoes out, speeds along his arm, meets the chakra from his hand, and then together they sear his fang into the earth.
She doesn't have that seal.
She'll have to form the chakra herself.
She doesn't—
She doesn't know if she can do that.
In the outside world, Tsunade is reattaching an arm while taking a bite to the leg, and—
Sakura'll never know if she doesn't try.
She surges back up into herself.
She's still being ignored. Tsunade's hand is gone for a moment before it remakes itself in a gross little surge of nastiness and another ten percent of the chakra vanishes from Tsunade's seal. Two more ninja are down, but it's not enough.
Danzou is untouched.
Sakura dashes towards the closest ninja, tries to make them focus on her and not Tsunade as she tries to blaze Kakashi's fang into her dress. She answers the backlash with her best approximation of his seal as she ducks under a kunai, over an earth jutsu, but… nothing happens.
She is forced back by the addition of three other ninja that are no longer attacking Tsunade.
She tries to make the fang again, fails again.
She leaps up, over a water jutse and puts her fist through a rock before vanishing into a petal to slip through the electric net behind it as across from her Tsunade takes a kunai to chest, rips it out, and throws it at Danzou. He blocks it easily, cleaves the room in half with a wind blade she does not quite dodge.
Sakura fails to make the fang for the fourth time.
On the ground, the closest ninja is a little too close, so she leaves her fifth failed fang attempt on his wrist as she closes her hand over it and breaks it, but the earth is about to open up under her as fire erupts to her right and she has to retreat—
(Six failures)
The room is filled with wood that explodes under Tsunade's punches, and then six, seven, eight blades of wind explode out from Danzou's mouth, and Tsunade falls in two pieces to the ground.
No.
Desperately, Sakura tries to make the fang for the eight time, but it's even worse than the seven time before
Calm.
Calm.
(It's hard, Outer was always better at being calm.)
She tries for the ninth and tenth times, but still nothing.
Is she even closer?
There's no feedback at all—jutsu will always tell you if you're anywhere close but this is different.
"Get her!"
A kunoichi is too close, so Sakura breaks her right femur, swaps with a kunai coming towards her (leaving behind her thirteenth failed fang attempt).
Tsunade's guts stay inexplicably right where they are, and she heaves her bottom half back to her, taking kunai and water whips as the line between her torso and legs close, and she lands, whole on the ground.
The seal on her forehead is empty.
She rips kunai from her left arm, but the wound doesn't heal.
No.
No.
As Sakura fails to make Kakashi's fang for the eighteenth time, a shinobi near her turns to Tsunade, not appropriately recognizing the danger Sakura poses to him, and Sakura drives her fist into his neck with a crack.
(Don't think about it.)
She makes her twenty-second attempt on his back before she dodges under a fire jutsu that hasn't started yet. She replaces herself with a kunai to get past a wind jutsu and blocks an attack for Tsunade's back, replace back to the middle of the room when the wall explodes.
Desperately, she tries her thirtieth attempt in the wall beside her, to no avail. Still no feedback, no nothing.
Sakura tries to ignore the rising despair as Tsunade ducks, leaps, shatters a wall for long enough to close on another ninja, and snap their neck.
But it was a trap. From behind her, Danzou rises up, chakra suppressed, and—
"Tsunade, behind you!" Sakura bellows as she tries one last time (for the thirty-seventh time) to burn a fang into the ground, rushing towards Tsunade as soon as the chakra has left her fingers.
There is an eternal instant as Tsunade turns and the chakra she left behind her works its way into the ground.
Finally, behind her, her jutsu catches, and a fang blooms into existence.
Before her, Tsunade has turned herself, but so high in the air, she has no maneuvrability to speak of, and Danzou is opening his mouth.
Sakura tries to replace herself with Tsunade's left sandal, but there is a chakra wall in the way, breaking her chakra strings. The ground explodes under her feet but ten ninja move into position between her and Tsunade, and she can't think of a way to get through them in one piece.
Kakashi, please, she finds herself thinking as Tsunade takes one hit, two.
Sakura gets through two ninjas, but she won't be in time, she won't—
The room, for an instant, burns white.
Another moment and Kakashi is three step past her, and then twenty, the air screaming behind him, the chidori carving a searing white path in his wake through the eight ninja before her who haven't yet realized he has arrived.
Two ninja fall with kunai in their necks, and then Kakashi is in the air behind Danzou, plunging his chidori forward on a crash course for Danzou's heart.
Danzou twists, and is forced to fire some of his wind blades at Kakashi to force him to teleport back down to one of the six kunai Kakashi sprayed into the ground around him on his dash across the room.
Tsunade hits the ground in one piece.
"Take the others," she commands, and Kakashi vanishes once more.
"You really think—"
Sakura dashes towards the ninja closest to her, ducks under his fireball, and then leaps over the katana slash that she sees coming before he starts moving. She moves into his guard, and punches his stomach when he guards his face. He falls to the ground, coughing blood, and the ninja that tried to take advantage of Sakura's distraction takes a lightning-wreathed hand to the chest.
Across from them, Danzou has been interrupted by Tsunade, who, now with only two ninjas to heckle her, is easily capable of closing the distance to him, dodging and blocking his wind blades and wood like they're nothing.
His bones break when he blocks, and the air pressure of her punches blows him off balance when he dodges. One of the ninja trying to protect Danzou gets too close, and gets thirteen broken ribs for that mistake.
Sakura kicks the ninja before her out of commission, replaces herself with a kunai that one of the Root ninja has sent at Tsunade's back, ducks under the follow up, and catches them in the stomach when they dodge right into her punch.
Behind her there is the crunch of wood shattering, and in the distance there is the wet schlick of the last of the Root ninja tumbling from Kakashi's hand.
Sakura turns just in time to see Tsunade dig her fingers into Danzou's right shoulder. "I believe," she says, "this is my grandfather's." Sakura closes her eyes against the sight of it, but cannot block the sound. She opens her eyes again to the sight of Danzou's mangled right arm falling to the ground.
Danzou backs up to the wall, wild hate in his gaze as he looks out at the three of them arrayed before him.
He rips open his robe, revealing a seal written across his chest, but whatever it is, Tsunade's plunges her hand through its center (and by extension, through Danzou's chest) before it can activate.
"No," she says.
The seal misfires, missing its central point, and Danzou coughs blood onto Tsunade's face.
"You die a traitor, Danzou."
"If you kill me," he says, "you will never know how deep—"
His neck snaps, and he tumbles, lifeless, to Tsunade's feet.
"You are altogether too dangerous to leave alive," she says to his corpse, shaking the blood from her arm. "May the pure world reject you, and curse you to inhabit your decaying corpse for all eternity."
She watches the body for a long moment, waiting for, well… Sakura's not sure. When she's confident that it will not rise up to attack her or explode, she turns back to Sakura and Kakashi.
It's okay, Sakura says to Ino, who she can feel waiting over her water lily. We're alive, Danzou's dead.
Sakura feels a strangled cry of relief from the other side of the lily and maybe a couple muffled tears.
Thank the Sage, Ino whispers, and Sakura wants to gather all of herself up around her lily, talk to Ino forever but—
Tsunade is talking.
"Excellent job, you two," she says.
Sakura can't help but smile a little, the adrenaline leaving her a little giddy. (Not to mention, y'know, having a body, moving. This is great.)
Kakashi, however, just inclines his head respectfully.
Which is… wrong?
Sakura looks to Kakashi in surprise.
His eye twitches faintly in a smug smirk.
Sakura's vision is briefly red, and she has the very unfamiliar experience of having to push down her anger, but she does it anyways because that's the reaction she knows he wants.
"How many Root ninja are left alive?"
"Thirteen, with four seriously injured, and one in critical condition, Hokage-sama," Kakashi responds.
Sakura's mouth falls open, and there's Kakashi's smirk again! Because he's the worst!
She pushes the fury down, a little better this time.
"Take me to them."
Kakashi vanishes in a flash of white light and re-appears over a Root ninja with a hole in his chest.
Tsunade follows him, only the barest of instants slower, and crouches down over the roots unmoving body.
"Well, shit," she says.
"Sakura, tie up the rest of them."
"I, um—" Kakashi tosses her some rope, and she sets to it.
"Kakashi, ink."
Kakashi produces ink.
"Do you know where we are?" she asks Kakashi, as Sakura ties up the two of the Root ninja she knocked unconscious, and then one who took a knife to the leg, but is just faking unconsciousness.
"I have a couple ideas."
"Figure it out, tell Jiraiya."
"Please don't kill me," says a Root ninja who's not quite as blank as all the others.
Sakura punches her head hard enough to knock her out, and then ties her up.
Sakura finishes, and returns to Tsunade's side just as Kakashi is vanishing into a white flash, ten nindogs dashing out of the room in his wake.
"Hold an even chakra flow here," Tsunade says, pointing at an activation point of a seal she has drawn around the hole in the Root ninja's now-bare chest. It's tiny, barely large enough to fit the tip of her fingers, so she touches it just with the tip of one and gives it a sliver of her chakra.
Tsunade lifts her hand from the ninja and then there is suddenly a seal drawn across Sakura's chest, its lines glowing a bright blue. There is a light pressure on her neck, and she looks down to find Tsunade's hand around her throat.
(She hadn't even seen Tsunade move.)
Sakura recognizes the seal from the scrolls she and Outer found in the Yamanaka library after they found the Triggered Implanted Memory technique. It's a seal for detecting possession.
Red means possession.
Green means no possession.
There was nothing in the scroll on what blue might mean, although Sakura has some ideas.
Sakura holds very still, and raises her gaze to meet Tsunade's eyes.
Tsunade takes a deep breath and then sighs, releasing Sakura's neck and patting the side of deck briefly in what almost feels like apology.
"Good enough for me," she says, as she draws the ink from Sakura's dress with a gesture. "A little more," she continues, and it takes Sakura a second to realize she's talking about the chakra Sakura's putting into the seal. "Yeah, just like that," Tsunade says after a moment.
She pulls back, and inks a larger seal array across the Root ninja's chest, and then out onto the floor. She lifts the earth under Sakura up into a weird little stone shelf so that she can ink underneath her. When she's complete, she sets her hands on two much larger activation points.
"You can stop now."
Sakura releases it, and Tsunade's chakra flows through the seal.
Kakashi appears beside Sakura on the weight little stone shelf, one hand finding its way obnoxiously to the top of her head, grinding the hard metal of her forehead protector into her skull.
This time, she fails to restrain herself, and elbows him with a little killing intent, and he dodges her easily.
"Get off of that before it breaks and screws up this seal," Tsunade orders them.
They dutifully move off of the ledge, and crumbles away into dust in their wake. "Jiraiya, Shikaku, and a small team of trusted jounin are on their way," Kakashi says.
"Good. I have this kid stabilized, but I can't heal this here. I'll need Jiraiya to lift and freeze this seal so we can move him."
Sakura looks at the Root ninja properly for the first time. His blank mask is cracked, revealing half of his face. Pale, with short black hair. Pretty, in an unassuming sort of way.
He can't be older than her by much, if at all.
She still remembers the stillness of his chakra, moving only when ordered to.
She shivers.
"Well, while we're waiting," Tsunade says, not moving, still leaned down over the seal array. "Sakura, what happened?"
"Um." Sakura swallows. "One second." She bites into her thumb, and summons Gamami, gathering her up in her arms. Gamami grabs the front of her dress in both of her tiny frog hands, relief radiating off of her in waves. You're alive you're still you you're alive you're still you you're alive her chakra says murmurs in tiny little waves.
Sakura smiles despite herself, and something in her chakra must be different, because Gamami looks up, and Sakura can see recognition in her eyes. Sakura never talked directly with Gamami, never had the control over their chakra to do it, but the look in Gamami's eyes says that she remember her. Not Outer, but her.
You did it, she says, and Sakura can't help but smile at the simple acceptance in that single phrase.
Tsunade clears her throat, and Sakura finds herself blushing.
This is stupid.
Outer blushes.
Sakura doesn't blush.
What the hell is this?
Tsunade raises an eyebrow, and Sakura coughs, feeling even more heat in her cheeks, and then reaches back into her memories, staring out through Outer's eyes.
She starts telling them the story of her capture, but is almost immediately stopped on mention of Kabuto.
"The doctor who originally saw you was Inuzuka Hiji," Kakashi says, and a slick, cold feeling slips down Sakura spine.
She… she never saw Kabuto with someone else. Not until he showed up behind her parents.
She'd never even thought to suspect him.
She'd love to blame Outer, but she never doubted it, either.
Why was she so—
Kakashi grinds her forehead protector into the top of her head.
"It's not your fault. Yakushi Kabuto?"
Sakura nods.
Tsunade and Kakashi trade glances.
"He's a genin, no medical training," Kakashi says to Tsunade. He glances down at the boy being kept alive by Tsunade's chakra. "But this kid is also registered as a genin."
"You think he's Root?"
Kakashi shrugs. "I'd love it if we only had one horrible conspiracy lurking underneath of the surface of our most beloved village."
Tsunade snorts, and then turns her gaze back to Sakura. "What happened with Kabuto?"
"He was in Orochimaru's memories—he was one of Orochimaru's minions—and I recognized him, but it was too late. He overpowered me, and he um, he broke my seal."
Silence.
Gamami's grip on Sakura dress tightens, and Sakura can feel the fury and relief and panic and worry in her chakra.
All gazes turn to Sakura's stomach, which she knows is now bare of the three different seals it has had applied to it in the last month.
"How the hell are you alive, kid?" Tsunade says from the ground. "Sage's ballsack."
Sakura shrugs. "The Closed Loop technique kept me alive."
Tsunade snorts, but she doesn't say anything, so Sakura continues.
"Kabuto swallowed the Orochimaru snake, and but unlike me, I think he beat it? He told me he had wanted Orochimaru to possess him, so he could, um? Eat him?"
Tsunade and Kakashi trade uncomfortable glances.
"Then Danzou and Aburame Torune and Yamanaka Fuu—" she tries not to think about the fact Orochimaru killed one of Ino's cousins with her body. (She doesn't—she really doesn't want to tell Ino about that.)
"They came and took me out of the hospital in… a body bag," she swallows at the memory, "and then we were in this sealed room. Danzou left, and Fuu started going through my memories—or, Orochimaru's memories? I managed to rebuild my chakra pathways, and then I passed out."
Tsunade nods.
"Then… then the bit of Orochimaru he left behind took me over. He left some of his chakra in my coils before getting eaten by Kabuto."
Kaksahi's and Tsunade's gazes bore into her.
"And you broke his control?"
Sakura can't hesitate so she doesn't. "I woke up when I felt him thinking about possessing Ino," she lies, and it makes her skin crawl, but she doesn't want to admit that the Sakura they knew is gone, that Sakura kind of… ate her. "I tried to fight back. I was able to suck up his chakra, and I broke one seal he tried to put on me, but he made one out of… someone's soul? And then—" Sakura swallows heavily, remembering being locked behind Outer's eyes, staring out at those bars, watching, unable to do anything.
"He was going to kill Ino," Sakura says. "Her Mind Anchor was still inside of my mind after he took it from me, and he was going to poison her, just—" Sakura hesitation she does not have to fake "—just because he could." She coughs out the tightness in her chest, and does not cry, once again thrown back to what it felt like to be trapped inside of Outer's skin inside that cage, able to do nothing but watch as poison dripped down from his finger.
It had made her so, so mad—madder than she'd ever been.
Let me out, she had said. (Or really, LET ME OUT.)
I can take him. (I CAN TAKE HIM.)
And, for the first time, Outer did. She let her veneer of lies and weakness fall away, and let Sakura finally take control of the mind that was rightfully hers.
It was irreversible process, and they both knew it.
Outer Sakura is gone. She was never really real, anyways. Just a figment of Sakura's mind.
(For what purpose, though, Sakura cannot imagine.)
The more she tells the story, with its half truths, she can feel a bit of the truth in it, because there have never really been two Sakuras. She has Outer's memories, and they're starting to feel less like Outer's memories, and more just… hers.
Sakura's.
The one, the only.
"Something changed in me, I think it's what made your seal burn blue, and my mind changed," the lies taste like ash on her tongue, but she lies regardless, pulling up Outer's (of Sakura's) memories of looking straight into Kakashi's face and lying about anything and everything she could get away with. "Orochimaru didn't stand a chance. I erased him, and all of the chakra and memories he left inside of me. I didn't want them."
I never wanted them.
Tsunade and Kakashi are staring in her silence, and she fidgets.
From below her, from Gamami, she senses… understanding?
Sakura looks down at Gamami. To be honest, even she doesn't know what happened to her. She doesn't know why she ever had an Inner and an Outer.
I can't say, Gamami says, and Sakura can feel the truth in her words, hammered into her by Gamami's sage mode.
"Are you sure you managed to remove his memories, reverse the partial possession?"
Sakura nods.
Tsunade whistles.
"Sage's ballsack kid, what the hell did you do."
Sakura shrugs. She did what she had to do.
There is part of her that had wanted that grassy knoll that Outer spent so much time in. It was pretty. It meant a lot to her.
But it was never anything more than a pretty lie. How could something so empty be her entire mind?
Tsunde laughs a bit to herself, shrugs for her to continue.
"I also got rid of all of the foregin chakra inside of me, and I almost died, but I figured out how to make more. Once I woke up, Danzou attacked me."
"I feel like you're leaving out all the interesting parts. How did you apply Kakashi's seal? I thought that was impossible."
"It is," Kakashi says, grinding her forehead protector into her head again.
Sakura glares up at him, and there is smug pride shining in his eyes.
It is not enough to keep her from elbowing him hard enough to break a stone wall.
"Oof," he says, not actually hurt.
"It's a two part jutsu. The second part is really hard, so it took a lot of tries,"—thirty-seven tries—"but I got it."
"It is?"
"You don't have to do the second part," Sakura mutters, a little grumpy about it. "The seal on your back does it for you."
There is more silence.
"Well, what I've learned is that you did a whole bunch of bulslhit. Great job pulling it out of your ass. I'm really glad you're not dead, kid."
Sakura smiles.
"Are you the Hokage now?"
"Long story," she says, shrugging dismissively.
Which!
Rude!
Sakura's story was long!
And she still told it!
Grumble grumble grumble.
Sakura, Daddy just told me Jiraiya left. You're still okay, right?
Yeah, Sakura says. I'm fine.
She is answered with grumpy Ino-silence.
I'm coming to see you.
Tsunade says something to Kakashi, but Sakura doesn't hear it.
Ino, no!
It's too late.
Sakura pulls herself out of her chakra pathways and muscles and tenketsu and nerves and out from around her chakra reserves, and brings all of herself to Ino's flower as Ino steps out of it, and—
Her eyes bleed as she tumbles from the sheer side of the cliff her flower had been growing on.
Sakura catches her with all of her non bladed tentacles, jamming the bladed ones into the sheer cliff wall and easily catching them both before they fell into the boiling lava.
Ino looks up at her, eyes bleeding and also crying.
She screams.
"It's me it's me it's me," Sakura says, trying to not sound like she's speaking out of a thousand bladed mouths in the space between her currently-twenty-quadrillion and two limbs.
Ino's eyes rove madly around her—at the space between Sakura's limbs that reflect light backwards and inverted—then at the churning sky above them both, echoing with silent screams that are visible all the same—then at the not-surface of the cliff whose twisted lines recall broken bodies and screaming faces—then at the the boiling lava that really looks quite a bit more like blood before Sakura finally covers her eyes with her softest tentacle. Before Orochimaru died, she could feel the sight of her mind-self tearing away at him, his eyes bleeding and his soul-self breaking, just at the sight of her.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry."
Ino takes a gasping, sobbing breath.
She takes another, and the another, too quickly, until she is hyperventilating.
Sakura feels her actual body fall to the ground—hears Tsunade and Kakashi's shouts. She ignores them, glancing up into the broken sky, none of the spaces between the stars truly empty.
Ino is still not really breathing. Thankfully, she doesn't need to.
"Ino," Sakura says, succeeding in speaking out of only half of her mouths, and Ino flinches.
Sakura moves Ino up, away from the boiling blood-lava beneath them, away from the bubbles which smell like very regret Sakura has ever had, carries her up the twenty miles to Ino's flower in five steps.
"Here, this is your flower," she says, getting herself all the way down to thirty-one mouths. It feels wrong, it feels like lying.
Lying in the real world was one thing but lying here, oh it's so much worse. It makes the black blood flowing through her limbs boil.
For Ino, though, she can pretend—that she only has one mouth—that her voice is not a twenty million voices screaming in disharmony. She can pretend she is not actually and many limbed creature with impossible and ever-changing geometry.
She replaces the tentacle over Ino's eyes with another a moment before the previous one turns into a twenty-jointed talon.
Ino, still crying, reaches towards her flower, her fingers brushing it, and then she stops.
"Is it really you?" she says.
"It's really me," Sakura says, working herself down to two mouths which can almost speak in harmony. This body that reduced Orochimaru and now Ino to gibbering terror is more actually her than the body that waits for her in the real world.
She does not say this, because she figures Ino doesn't really want to know.
Ino takes her other hand, and raises it to the tentacle Sakura has placed over her eyes. Kakashi is shaking Sakura, eyes panicked, and she blips out I'm fine, Ino came to see me.
Gamami repeats it for her, and Tsunade places a hand on Kakashi's shoulder, speaks in words Sakura doesn't bother hearing. She can pull it up later, if she needs to.
Ino's hand is still on her tentacle. This is one of her dry ones, so she doesn't recoil in horror. She has the wet ones tucked under all the dry ones, along with all the ones with teeth.
She feels like that's a probably a lot.
Ino runs her fingers along it, then drops her hand to tentacles beneath her. She flinches as the one beneath her finger vanishes, replaces by two talons for a moment before Sakura slides them out from under her.
Ino pushes herself out from under the tentacle, and Sakura doesn't stop her, because she's pretty sure no one can stop Ino once she's decided to do something, even if it's really dumb.
Ino looks up at her, where she's hanging from a cliff that's as tall as the world itself, all of Sakura's love for Ino and Tsunade and Kakashi and her parents and Neji and everyone else all coalesced into a single cliff which splits the sky and then the clouds and then the sun, where it sits in the center of a churning black sky. The geometry shifts, and the world is now one massive salt plain, each individual grain of salt every moment Sakura has ever experienced.
Ino's eyes bleed at the infinite, every changing shapes the salt makes all around them, but she doesn't cry. The longer she looks, the more cracks spread through her, out from her eyes, down her face, into her hair.
"Ino, I'm hurting you, you need to leave," Sakura says out of only one mouth, now, ignoring the tears of blood boiling up from the salt grains all around her.
"Who do you think you're talking to," Ino says, voice haughty even as it shakes. "I'm the heir of the Yamanaka clan, you know." She reaches out for one of Sakura's talons, and Sakura holds it very still, so it razor edges don't cut her open.
"I erased Orochimaru," Sakura says. "I don't want to erase you by accident."
No matter how still Sakura holds her talons, their edges still cut, and cracks begin to walk up Ino's hand from those cuts.
"I'm a Yamanaka," Ino says, even as black lines spread out from her mouth, and—
She's breaking. The cracks are getting denser, reaching further. Every second, there's more of them, accelerating faster and faster and they're in her hair and her hands and her nose and everywhere but her eyes.
Nothing has broken yet but she looks so fragile—feels so fragile.
"I'm sorry, Ino," Sakura says, and uses their contact to push a Kai directly into Ino's chakra pathways. Her body shorts out, like a broken television, and Sakura crouches back over the flower, alone in a sea of blood-red sand in the shape of every thought Sakura has ever had.
Generally, Kais to the body of a jutsu user will safely end mind jutsus, but—
Ino? Sakura asks.
I was fine, Ino says, voice angry, and the salt plain explodes out into an endless night sky in relief.
You were breaking.
Ino gives out an exasperated huff that's still a little teary.
Sakura receives the sight of Ino in her bedroom—except it's too big to be a bedroom, a bedroom the size of a palace, Ino standing on top of a vanity whose mirror is the size of Hokage mountain, glaring at her own reflection.
Her reflection, which is perfect, clear of all the cracks the sight of Sakura's true self and true mind had etched into them.
"As long as my eyes are intact, I'm fine," she says, hacking off her arm with a kunai. Sakura flinches, but it's back in the blink of an eye. Her chakra reserves move not at all.
The vision ends, and Sakura is crouched over Ino's flower again.
Don't you dare, Ino says. If you break that I'll never forgive you.
You're gonna use it to come in here again.
Unless you're gonna run away from Konoha, I can just dive into your mind when I see you again!
Sakura sighs a sigh that sparks five new stars beneath her feet.
I was really worried, Sakura says, checking out her eyes where they're tucked next to each other in a planet the size of her pinkie nail. Jiraiya is above her, frowning down at her. He's—
Sakura surges back up into her body, bats his hand away.
"Don't," she tells him, and his eyebrows raise.
"Not filling me with confidence you're not still being possessed," he says, but he says it with a bit of a laugh, like the idea of it is a hilarious in and of iself, straightening up in his crouch. There're like eight ninja in the room now, three of them gathering the ten other survivors, the other five taking care of the bodies.
What color did the seal burn, she remembers Jiraiya asking Tsunade as he crouched over her prone form.
Bright blue.
She remembers Jiraiya snorting—Seals for detecting corruption run from red to purple, from most corrupt to least, so that should be fine, but man do I not want to have to find out whatever the fuck blue was supposed to mean. What the hell did she do to herself to kick Orochimaru out?
Sakura picks Gamami back up, who's currently all but glowing with orange sage chakra. When Kakashi was panicking, she wasn't scared at all.
From within her, Sakura hears Ino say—
I was scared, too. Her voice is small, because Ino is bad at feelings. I… I won't go into your mind without asking again, I promise.
Sakura feels rings of relief bloom around Ino's rock-planet.
But that doesn't mean I'm never going to do it again! I'm just going to ask first! Don't think you're getting out of this without explaining what happened!
Sakura can feel Ino's determination flickering through her water lily, and her rings of relief fade into stars as she sighs.
"Seeing my mind broke Orochimaru into little pieces," she says to Jiraiya in the real world. "I don't want you to get broken like that."
Jiraiya's eyebrows rise into his hairline.
"Well, shit," he says.
"Hey idiot," Tsunade says, voice sharp. "A little help?"
"Yeah, yeah. So grumpy—is this what you're going to be like now that you're the big bad Hokage?"
"I'll rip your balls off and feed them to you."
Jiraiya makes a face, coughs out a "Don't like that, nope," then draws lines of blood across his hands before grabbing the edges of the seal and lifting them into the air. They buzz with displeasure, and—"Kakashi, lift the kid"—he tucks them back under the too small Root ninja, folding the seal over itself just right, so it looks like it was always that dense, that tightly packed.
"How long will it hold?"
"An hour? Maybe less." He wipes the blood off on his pants, and instead of staining them forever, the bloodstains wither away into nothing. She can feel a faint flicker of chakra, but not enough for a proper jutsu, nothing she recognizes.
"You have any clothes tucked away in those seals of yours? Transformation clothes make my skin itch."
Jiraiya produces pants, a robe, and underwear, all that look a lot like they would fit Tsunade perfectly. In his other hand, he dangles a pair of sandals.
She looks at them, then up at him.
"Why are you carrying around my clothes? Actually no. Why are you carrying around my underwear?"
"It's not the first time you've used your horrifying blood-teleportation jutsu."
"The Clan Protection technique," she corrects, but doesn't complain further, the clothes she's wearing vanishing for a moment before she pulls on the clothes he's offered her.
Jiraiya doesn't look away, a faint smile on his lips until Tsunade's fist collides with his face and sends him head over heels to face plant on the ground.
"And after I gave you clothes I bought with my own—"
He stops speaking when Tsunade stomps on his back hard enough his ribs crack.
"Makoto, Hajime, take the kid to the hospital, have Shizune lead them through setting up for the seals for the Healing Resuscitation Regeneration Technique. I'll be there to lead it as soon as I can, tell Shizune to keep him stable until I arrive."
"Kakashi, kunai." He hands her one of his hiraishin kunai, and she sets it on the boy's chest.
"Have her to throw that if she loses containment."
"I'm a jounin of Konoha, Hokage-sama. Don't you think you could find a better use for my talents than a messenger hawk?"
"Don't bitch. If you didn't want to get used as a messenger hawk, you shouldn't have learned such a damn useful messaging jutsu. Give me another kunai."
He does, and she hangs it from her pants. She steps off of Jiraiya and crouches down to heal Jiraiya's ribs with a touch before dragging him up to his feet.
"Ow," he says.
"You have a haori in there? I feel like my tits are gonna fall out of this."
He hands her one, and she pulls her arms through it. She does not actually pull it closed over her chest, but Jiraiya is altogether too distracted by staring at her chest to point that out.
"Everyone who's got a live one, take them to T&I. The rest of you, take care of the dead as you would one of your own. We'll be going through the records to find out their names—just because Danzou brainwashed them doesn't mean they're not still Konoha ninja. I want their names on the memorial stone."
There's a shiver of approval that washes through the four Anbu in the room.
"Shikaku, take however many you think you need and sweep this base. Don't be hasty, I don't want any more dead ninja today."
Shikaku inclines his head.
"Sakura, Kakashi, Jiraiya, with me. We have things to discuss."