Inoichi is yelling. He's two floors down, talking to Kakashi—too far away for her to hear, but not too far for her chakra sense to reach.
He's yelling. He's yelling so loud his vocal cords are tearing, just a little. She can feel the pain in his chakra, taste the blood in his throat.
It's noting in comparison to the grief swirling deep in his gut.
Ino tries to run past him, ducking under his arm, running towards the stairs, towards Sakura, but, for the first time, Sakura feels Inoichi body flicker, vanishing from before Kakashi to reappear by his daughter's side, his hand closing painfully around Ino's arm and jerking her back.
Ow, Sakura can almost hear Ino complain.
Dad, wait, Sakura can actually hear her say, because, as Inoichi falls to his knees before her and clasps her head in his hands and forces himself into her mind, she's actually distressed enough she's broadcasting to Sakura as much as she's speaking to her father.
The wooden armrest beneath Sakura's hands crack, and she resists the urge to punch her way down two very well armed friendly floors to physically remove Inoichi from Ino's mind.
She can take him, she's sure.
His body flicker was slow—he'll never see her coming.
She's about two seconds from doing just that when Jiraiya, to her left, clears his throat, momentarily distracting her from the path of bloody murder she is planning on carving through friendly ninja.
"I wouldn't," he says. His mouth is smiling, but his eyes aren't.
"Apparently that blue seal means something," Tsunade says, her voice just as flat.
It occurs to Sakura that she has not been alone for a single moment since they emerged from within the bowels of the Root base that turned out to be only a couple hundred feet from the main gates of Konoha.
(Right under our noses, Tsunade had scoffed, hand on Sakura's shoulder.)
They'd still doubted her—they hadn't totally trusted a seal that wasn't theirs giving them a result they didn't understand.
Obviously, stupid, stupid.
(And why wouldn't they doubt her?)
(After all, they're right to—the Sakura they knew is dead.)
(Sakura tore her apart to get to Orochimaru.)
Sakura turns to face Tsunade, and Tsunade isn't even pretending to smile. She's drumming her fingers against the side of her face as her hard amber eyes bore into Sakura.
"Not Orochimaru," she says. "No way he could fool that Yamanaka seal."
Sakura squeezes Gamami to her chest—Gamami who knows what Sakura is and still loves her despite it.
"I wouldn't say no way—every time we underestimate that snake he comes back to bite us in the ass," Jiraiya responds, his voice just as flat as Tsunade's, "but it's unlikely, I agree."
Sakura turns to him, and he's also given up on pretending to smile.
Below them, Inoichi finally pulls himself from Ino's mind, pulling her tightly to him, unabashedly weeping in relief onto her shoulder. She pushes at him, weakly, and Sakura can feel the awkwardness in her, the what am I supposed to be doing with this?
Kakashi is standing beside the both of them, panic slowly bleeding through his calm. Chakra spins into his sharingan, and Sakura knows the Sharingan can't see through walls, but she still feels his gaze on her when he turns his gaze up to the ceiling.
You're still on my side, right? Sakura asks Gamami, holding her even tighter in her arms.
I will always be on your side, Gamami says, her chakra as clear as the sea that Sakura's mind is currently in the shape of, shifting in Sakura's arms and withdrawing her very large knife from her tiny little toad body.
"What I'm curious about is what on Earth could make a Yamanaka act like that, but wouldn't drive away a Myoubakan Toad." Jiraiya blinks, and in the space of that blink, red lines weave themselves away from his eyes in exactly the pattern Sakura remembers watching him paint onto his face from behind Outer's eyes all those years ago. When his eyes open, his pupils are toady horizontal slits.
The natural energy within him has to be one and a half, two times than it was before, but his features are untwisted—still entirely human.
What?
Sakura's mouth falls open despite herself.
When did that happen?
"Show-off," Tsunade scoffs from behind Sakura. "I wouldn't have tried to help you with that if I knew how insufferable it would make you."
There is a moment when Jiraiya expression breaks, and he smirks at Tsunade over her head, showing plain, even, human teeth.
"Verdict?" Tsunade asks.
That toady gaze slam back into Sakura and Jiraiya's brows furrows. Finally, he shakes his head. "I've got nothing. In fact…" his brow furrows further and his gaze flickers to Gamami, where she is glaring daggers at him from Sakura's arms.
Whatever he's planning on saying, he doesn't get a chance to finish it.
A thick feeling of despair and grief precedes Inoichi into the room.
"Ma'am," he says, almost cursorily, not looking at Tsunade, his gaze, so filled with grief, boring into Sakura alone.
Ino peeks around her father's bulk, wich has never looked quite so large or so menacing, her blue eyes wide and terrified.
"Why did it have to be you," he says, not really managing the intonation to make it into a question. He steps forward, and, drowning in those endless green eyes, Sakura doesn't know why she thought she could take him. He moves like a jounin, completely self-assured, and Sakura also doesn't know where she ever saw softness in that figure, because now he looks like about six feet of solid muscle.
Killing intent comes pouring out of his skin almost like an afterthought, mixing with the stew of despair and grief that he's already leaking into the air around him.
"Watch where you're pointing that killing intent, Inoichi," Kakashi says, stopping Inoichi with a hand on his shoulder which could stop a speeding train. "That's my student you're looking at."
"Your student is gone," Inoichi says, and Sakura flinches.
"So you assert," Kakashi says, just as blandly. He glances at Sakura, Sharingan spinning, and the panic in his chakra fades to a low worry. "I know my student, and it is not so easy to fool this eye."
At his words, Sakura relaxes, just a little, even if Inoichi is sort of, kind of, telling the truth.
(I'm still me, she wants to protest.)
(How, exactly had she hoped to keep this a secret?)
(She curses the foolishness of her past self.)
Ino pushes past her father when he turns to meet Kakashi's gaze—
"Ino, no," Inoichi shouts, reaching ineffectually out for her after she's already most of the way to Sakura, fear freezing his heart and staggering his steps.
Sakura stands to catch Ino in her arms as she runs up and over the low table in the center of the room, before honest-to-Sage leaping into them, Gamami helpfully leaping to Sakura's head to avoid skewering Sakura's (other) best friend with her Very Large Knife.
"I believe you," she whispers, burying her face into Sakura's neck at the same moment she pushes herself through the flower connecting their minds, falling limp in Sakura's arms.
"No," Inoichi repeats brokenly, but his body flicker towards her is interrupted by Kakashi's hand on his shoulder.
In Sakura's mind, Ino steps out of her flower onto the surface of an endless, featureless sea, as clear as the night sky from the top of the Hokage tower. Nothing but an endless blue that bleeds into an eternal and featureless black.
An eternal, almost featureless black that crawls with everything Sakura ever has been and ever will be—only visible when it squirms out of the corners of your eyes.
Ino's entire being shivers with fear, and she shakes herself. Sakura leaves just enough limbs in her body to keep herself standing, and rises through the infinite depths of her mind. The sight of her sends Ino staggering back, the surface of the sea easily and rather paradoxically holding her weight.
When Ino's legs give out from under her, Sakura catches her with two of her longest tentacles.
Ino looks down at them and swallows as cracks spread out from her eyes and out from the points at which her arms touch Sakura. She breathes in the smell choking smell of long dead rot not entirely covered by the choking stench of too much salt, and she tries to smile. Her eyes try to focus on Sakura, but the shadows in the depths of the ocean that are only there when you aren't looking keeping dragging her gaze away.
She tries to stand up, but doesn't succeed, stumbling into yet more of Sakura's waiting limbs.
"I believe you," Ino repeats,.
There is the sound of splashing from behind her, but when she jerks her head back, there's nothing but infinite, smooth sea. She snaps her head back to Sakura and continues.
"I don't think you're some weird monster like Daddy says, I didn't tell him that. You need to know I—"
Ino shorts out from before her, and Sakura surges back into her body to find her arms empty, killing intent already boiling over her skin, looking for—
"Sit down," Tsunade commands, and Sakura's knees give it out from under her, dumping her unceremoniously into the chair she had broken the armrests of moments before.
Tsunade is standing on the other side of her desk, the chair that had been between her and the table kicked out of the way, overturned by the wall, with Ino bundled up in her arms. Ino's face is slack with unconsciousness, her chakra flowing with the easy, relaxed flow of sleep as the last remnants of Tsunade's sleep jutsu evaporating away into the air.
"Now," Tsunade says, laying Ino down on the couch by the wall before interrupting Inoichi from going to fuss over her with a hand on his chest and pointing him to one of the chairs across from Sakura, "does someone want to explain to me, your Hokage, what the fuck is going on here?"
Sakura opens her mouth—
"No, you had your chance," Tsunade interrupts her, flipping the chair she kicked out of the way right side up, pulling it towards her, and then taking seat. "You lie, you talk second. Inoichi, explain yourself."
Inoichi takes a deep breath and drops his head into his hands. His hair is thinning just a little near the crown of his head, Sakura notices for the first time. She's not sure she's ever seen the top of his head before. After a long moment, he lifts his face again to speak.
"The Yamanaka have stories of monsters we called Mind Flayers." Sakura slips two tentacles into Ino's mind and pushes a teeny, tiny kai directly into Ino's slumbering mindself.
Pretend you're still asleep, Sakura says to Ino as she wakes, and Ino only jerks a little before giving out a (very-practiced but no less adorable for it) snuffling snore before rolling to face the back of the couch.
Tsunade says cuts a glance to Ino, before narrowing her eyes briefly but meaningfully at Sakura.
"They were massive, hulking creatures made entirely of talons and tentacles and teeth who liked to pull the skins of the dead around themselves. You'd never know it if you just looked at that dead skin they wore—but you could see their true form in their own minds, as clear as day."
Inoichi turns his gaze to Tsunade and continues to speak.
"They've been dead—eradicated, or so we believed—since about fifty years before the founding of the village. Almost all of our people who encountered a Mind Flayer in its own mind never came out, or came out with their eyes cracked." He lets his voice trail off, like they should all know what that means, and his eyes drift to his daughter, pretending to sleep behind Sakura.
As long as my eyes are intact, I'm fine, Sakura remembers Ino telling her, not telling her just what would happen if her eyes hadn't been.
"In our war with them, they would often kill one of our own and return to us wearing their skin. To our dismay, we found them completely indistinguishable from the person they replaced, except for the shape of their minds, which they were thankfully unable to hide. They would steal not just the bodies of their victims, but every memory, every tell, every instinct—they would take it all."
Sakura swallows.
How is she supposed to argue with that?
"If she acts like Sakura, then why shouldn't we believe that she is Sakura?" Jiraiya comments from Sakura's left, Sage Mode shaking the world with his every word. She almost smiles at him, except when he glances at her, there's no particular warmth in his gaze. He may as well be talking about a stranger. "I'll take your word on the shape of her mind—that little girl of yours isn't disputing it, even though she doesn't appear to agree with anything else you're saying." Ino jerks as Jiraiya calls her out for faking sleep as Jiraiya shifts and leans forward. For the second time, the silliness he always carries with him drain away and Sakura sees Jiraiya of the Sannin, one of the most dangerous shinobi in the world—a massive man with the chakra reserves of a tailed beast, all of it humming in perfect synchrony with the world around him. He looks Inoichi straight in the eyes, his sideways pupils inhumanly compelling. "But what are we, except a collection of our memories and experiences? Since we crawled out of that sage-damned Root base, Sakura has not done or said a single thing that is out of place or out of character. These eyes are not so easy to fool, Inoichi, and believe me, I've been watching."
Inoichi takes a deep breath and nods.
"At first, we thought the same," Inoichi says, meeting that gaze without flinching. "We learned the hard way that just because someone looks and acts like one of our own doesn't mean that they are one of our own."
He gives out another sigh, and looks to the ceiling, effortlessly pulling his gaze away from Jiraiya's.
"The first of our own whose skin was stolen by a Mind Flayer was a little girl named Sono who was just a bit younger when she was taken than Sakura was." Sakura swallows at the use of the past tense. "She went into the forest one day, and what returned was a monster wearing her skin, although we didn't realize it at the time. It was before we had really started our war with Mind Flayers in earnest—only hunting the couple we had detected with our telepathy—so we were not as cautious as we should have been." He turns his gaze down to Sakura. "Although I can't imagine it would have made a difference had we been more careful—my daughter is one of our most gifted talents in generations, and if this creature can fool her, I don't imagine our ancestors had much of a chance with that creature in Sono's skin."
Sakura swallows at the ice in Inoichi's pupil-less green eyes, so very much like his daughters in every way but color. His gaze turns to Jiraiya once more, and Sakura looks down at Gamami's head in her arms.
"Although we were not as careful as we should have been, no one found saw a single thing out of place. Not a single one of the creature's actions, words, or reactions were out of character. Not in the first elder council that declared that Sono was, indeed, herself, nor for three months afterwards. Your eyes may be good, Jiraiya-sama, but they are not as good as an entire clan of telepaths. We used our telepathy jutsus a lot more casually back then, and no one found a single out of place thought."
At his words, Sakura can feel his presence, at the edges of her mind.
It's me, she says to that presence, please—
He smiles sadly as he turns back to her.
"Exactly three months after Sono was taken, when we were beginning to wonder if we had been unjust in hunting the few Mind Flayers that we did, the creature in her skin slaughtered our entire village in a single night. We only survived by random chance—fourteen of us had left on an emergency mission earlier that night, with only enough time to report to the Elder's council."
Sakura swallows as the rooms falls deathly silent.
"Those fourteen returned to find Sono standing in the center of our village at daybreak—surrounded by our fallen brothers and sisters—and laughing. She killed five of remaining fourteen Yamanaka before they could kill her."
"But I wouldn't—" Sakura protests, but…
What?
Sakura looks down at her hands. Maybe Sono… Sono would have said the same thing. Is she eventually going to snap and try and kill the whole village?
She turns to Kakashi, who is looking at her like doing so is killing him.
"She started with her family, and then she walked all the way across the village to kill her two childhood friends before she killed the guards and then methodically worked her way through the rest of the village. I loved Sakura, and the fact you're wearing her face is killing me—but I couldn't face her in the pure world if I let you kill everyone she loved."
All gazes fall upon Sakura. Even Ino has stopped pretending to be asleep and has sat up.
"Is he lying?" Tsunade asks Jiraiya over Sakura's head.
There is a long pause.
"No," he finally responds, and it has the weight of the entire world behind it, blowing all other sounds away before it, leaving nothing but an unbearable silence in its wake.
Gamami, Sakura's last ally, leaps off of her head.
"Gamami, no," Sakura whispers brokenly, reaching out for her, tears welling up in her eyes. "Please, at least you have to believe me."
Behind her, Ino has lifted her hands to her face and has started to cry, her chakra a maelstrom of doubt and fear and sadness.
Sakura turns back to Ino, and Ino looks at her like a stranger—like a threat.
"No," Sakura whispers, looking around the room, and finds no friendly faces waiting for her.
Is she just one of these so-called Mind Flayers that the real Sakura was able to bind away inside of her, strip away its memories, and convince it that it was also Sakura?
Is she…
Gamami catches her outstretched fingers in the tiny little toad hand that is not holding a knife and gives her an irritated look.
Of course I believe you, she says. Don't buy into this human's stupid superstititons and prejudices.
If Sakura were not sitting, she would have collapsed with relief at Gamami's words.
To Sakura's right, Tsunade leans forward, have apparently followed every word, because of course she can understand Gamami's chakra pulses. "I want to believe Sakura as much as you do—"
"You clearly fucking don't," Gamami snarls.
"—but every clan has a record of the Yamanaka massacre, even though no one else seemed to know what caused it. Is there something you want to share with the rest of us, toad?"
Gamami glares balefully at Tsunade.
"If only I could," she snarls, before pointing her knife at Inoichi.
"You—shut up," she says. "There's nothing wrong with Sakura, shut your stupid fucking mouth."
Inoichi jerks back as if slapped, and then frowns. "Gamami," he says. "Don't let yourself be—"
She interrupts by throwing her knife at him. He catches it easily, and—
"If you throw that back at her, I'll kill you myself," Tsunade says coldly.
"Just what kind of monster do you think I am," he says, driving it into one of the back legs of his chair.
"Jiraiya," Gamami says, ignoring them and drawing out another knife to point at him, "why are you falling for this tripe?"
He raises his eyebrows.
"Don't you see it? How could Sakura possibly be someone else when she looks like that!"
Sakura… Sakura doesn't think she's ever heard Gamami talk this much… ever.
Jiraiya's gaze cuts back to Sakura, and his brow furrows.
"I don't know what I'm looking at."
Gamami makes a strangled, angry noise. "Have they not told you?" she shouts at him. "Augh, you took so damn long to master sage mode they forgot!"
"What?"
"Why don't you just tell us?" Tsunade asks.
"Because I'm sealed. Anyone who knows gets sealed. I'd love to, but I can't."
Sakura blinks in surprise in accidental perfect synchrony with Jiraiya and Tsunade. Before them, Gamami reaches up to her forehead and pulls.
The world shudders with it, and when it has once more come ro a rest, there is a seal blazing on the roof of Gamami's mouth. It's… active.
She's trying to break it, and it's responding by sending daggers of chakra out into Gamami's chakra system.
"You wouldn't have believed me, regardless," she snarls.
"Gamami," Sakura says, because there's no way that doesn't hurt.
"Myouboku seals people?" Tsunade asks, faintly aghast.
"First I've fucking heard of it," Jiraiya says.
"That's because you were fucking awful at our techniques, so we never actually told you anything worth keeping secret!" she shouts at him. "Minato and Nakami both took the seal once they mastered Sage Mode, which they did in like a year, unlike you!"
"You wound me," he says, hand pressed to his heart, and he's trying to make it sound like a joke, but she can feel it hit home.
"Yeah, well you did a lot worse to Sakura, I promise you." Gamami stabs the table in with an (adorable) roar of impotent rage. "She fucking trusted you." Orange eyes blazing with rage sweep over the room. "All of you."
An awkward silence falls over the room.
"Summon Ma and Pa," Gamami orders Jiraiya. "They're the only ones who can unlock this seal, so they can explain to you just how much you fucked up."
Jiraiya frowns, meeting Tsunade's gaze over Gamami's head for a long moment before being interrupted by Gamami forcing him to catch her knife before it hits him in the face.
"Fine," he says, cutting open both of his thumbs with her knife before tossing it back to her and placing them onto the table before him.
Characters wash out from each thumb, merging and mingling between them, and, a single poof of smoke later, Shima and Fukasaku stand side by side on the table before him.
"I thought you'd gotten over needing to use us as a crutch," Shima squawks.
"He can use as a crutch if he wants," Fukasaku croak-screams back at her.
"Of course he can, but I thought he'd gotten over it!" she croak-screams right back.
Tsunade clears her throat, and the toads both turn to look at her before actually taking in the room that they're in. They pause in their bickering, and Fukasaku turns back to Jiraiya.
"What's all this Jiraiya-chan?" he asks. He turns back forward to squint at Sakura. "Kid, you didn't go and get yourself broken again, did ya?"
Sakura swallows heavily.
She wants to say that she's fine—that she's better than fine. She wants to say that she has a body and she can talk to Ino now and her chakra is more under her control than Outer ever had their chakra under her control, and that she's holding the Closed Loop technique all the way out to her cells (and that it's not even hard.
She wants to say that she's great.
She wants to say that she's the real Sakura, but…
Is she, though?
"Sakura inverted," Gamami says, and her voice is a little hoarse—which makes sense, considering she probably spoke more words in the last fifteen minutes than she did in the previous three or four years.
Sakura holds her arms out for Gamami, and Gamami swallows her knife and leaps into Sakura's arms while the entirety of Fukasaku and Shima's attention snap to Sakura. A split-second later, pain flashes across Inoichi's face, and a whip crack of chakra flashes through him before her vague feeling of his presence on the corners of her mind vanishes.
"By the first toad," Fukasaku says hopping across the table with his wife to stand where Gamami had just been standing before her, completely ignorant of the fear flooding through Inoichi's chakra as he stares down at them. "I didn't know humans could do that."
"Me neither," Gamami mutters from Sakura's arms as natural energy swirls through Shima and Fukasaku's chakras in perfect sync, the sage chakra that forms inside of them, feeling… harder, denser than it is around Gamami.
Behind them, Inoichi moves his gaze from the toads to Jiraiya, fear crawling deeper and deeper down his spine.
"Get out," Jiraiya says after a moment, and that same whip-crack of chakra echoes through his chakra once again.
"Fill me in," Tsunade orders after looking between the toads, Inoichi, and Jiraiya.
"The two toads are also Mind Flayers," Inoichi says, his voice hoarse.
…what?
"And Inoichi there was checking if I was, too," Jiraiya explains helpfully.
Sakura stares down at the two toads before her.
"I'm… not alone?" Sakura says in a small voice, completely ignoring Jiraiya as a faint smile tries to fight its way onto her face.
Shima smiles at Sakura, and Sakura feels a very familiar twinge at the back of her mind. The two toads go limp, and Sakura pulls herself down into her mind, which is currently an endless well. She pulls herself out of the walls that are her body's ever cell, ready to catch them before they fall into the water far, far below her. (Before the stillness of that water eats them alive.)
Except… what emerges in her mind are not two toads, but two… of her. Two massive, infinite limbed masses composed of nothing but tentacles and talons and tongues and teeth that easily anchor themselves to the walls of her mind-well without hesitation or confusion.
They would have been indistinguishable from Sakura and from each other to Outer's eyes, but to Sakura's, the differences are as plain as day. Every limb, every tooth, every empty space in them screams their identity with an almost deafening volume.
"No, girl," Shima says in a scream of a thousand croaks. "You are not."
Relief floods through Sakura, twisting her teeth and inverting her talons.
She's not alone.
She's really not alone.
Sakura sags in relief on the limbs she has nailed to the walls of her well.
"Damn," Fukasaku squawks in the scream of a thousand croaks. "How did you learn to go and do this?" he asks, looking around…
Around at where all of her memories crawl between the cracks in the bricks, down at where all of her loves and fears and hates squirm in the darkness of the bottom of the well.
Ice drops down her metaphorical spine.
It occurs to her only now that this—this is is her everything. Her mind-scape—it was nothing. She could take people there, and they would see her chakra pathways above them, see the grassy knoll where Sakura met Ino.
But they wouldn't really see… anything.
Now… it's all laid right there for anyone who knows how to look.
And she can see in the corners of Shima and Fukasaku's limbs that they know how to look.
"Um," Sakura says. "Get out?"
Then, louder.
"GET OUT."
They short out of existence and the fury and fear and embarrassment boiling up through Sakura manifests itself as steam from the water below her, and Sakura gives it a moment to boil away into the empty circle of nothingness far above her.
She threads herself back into her body, and pulls herself back into the outside world.
Jiraiya is speaking (Shima-sama, Fukasaku-sama, we're all a bit lost. Gamami tried to explain what was going on, but it appears the relevant information is sealed. Do you think you can help us—), but Sakura doesn't care.
"Am I still me?" Sakura interrupts Jiraiya by asking them, her voice unbearably quiet. She hates it, but she just can't seem to raise it. "Please," she says, "tell me I'm not some horrible monster that killed Sakura."
"Where you'd get a fool idea like that?" Shima asks.
Oh, thank goodness.
Sakura swallows heavily and presses her eyes closed. She definitely doesn't cry.
Nope.
No crying.
She squeezes Gamami all the tighter to her chest, and jams her face into Gamami's adorable head.
"You didn't say anything?" Shima asks Gamami
"I couldn't say anything," Gamami responds, voice strikingly cold.
To their left, Jiraiya clears his throat.
He repeats the request Sakura interrupted with what was, in her opinion, a much more pressing question.
"Shima-sama, Fukasaku-sama, we're all a bit lost. Gamami tried to explain what was going on, but it appears the relevant information is sealed. Do you think you can help us understand what's going on here?"
Fukasaku gives him a baffled sort of frown. "You don't know?"
"No, sir."
"Well, why didn't you tell him, Pa?" Shima scream-croaks at him.
"Why didn't you, Ma?" he shouts back after he's recovered from his surprise. "You were there, too!"
As they scream, two small arms loop around Sakura's neck, and Ino pushes her forehead into Sakura's shoulder.
I… I never doubted you, she lies.
Inoichi's hands tighten on the hands of his chair but he doesn't move. His chakra is in abject chaos.
I know, Sakura lies back, resting her head against Ino's.
"You were always closer with the boy, I assumed you'd done it!"
"You're always the one who does it, how was I supposed to—"
"Jiraiya-sama didn't master Sage Mode," Gamami repeats herself grumpily, sounding fairly irritated she has to speak at all, "so you didn't tell him the first time, and by the time he did, you'd forgotten you hadn't told him."
Fukasaku and Shima freeze, mid-scream.
Ino reaches her limit for physical affection and releases Sakura, walking around the chair next to Sakura and taking a seat while looking very pointedly at her father and Tsunade.
It's a little excessive, but intensely cute.
"Why'd you forget about something like that, you old fart?"
"It'd been thirty years, I assumed he knew! You did, too!"
Shima gears herself up for another scream, but Jiraiya interrupts them with a cough.
"I've mastered it now, I hope," he says, "with Tsunade's help, of course," he tacks on when Tsunade gives him a meaningful look. "Can you tell me now?"
Shima and Fukasaku turn to him, and then to the rest of the room.
"Not here," Fukasaku squawks. "Actually, what is this? What's going on here?"
"The Yamanaka's have weird superstitions about people with inverted minds," Gamami says, still sounding pretty pissed-off people are still making her talk.
(People with… whats?)
(Gamami didn't use that word before—what about her seal?)
(Actually, wait—Gamami's seal. It's gone again, just like it was before.)
(What?)
"Everyone seemed pretty ready to kill Sakura—"
"I wouldn't say that," Tsunade interrupts.
"—so I had them summon you to explain what was going on."
"But there hasn't been a human user of that technique since the Sage," Fukasaku says. "Why would they care?"
The… Sage?
As in… the Sage?
"What?" Inoichi asks.
"There appear to have been many users of the… Mind Inversion Technique since the… Sage," Tsunade says.
"Who?" Fukasaku barks.
Tsunade quirks an eyebrow at Inoichi.
"The Hagoromo clan, primarily," he says after a long moment.
"The Hagoromo clan?" Tsunade asks. "That's why you joined us in our war with the Uchiha?"
"We couldn't fight the both of them alone," he says.
"Well, that explains it then—" Shima says, "—the Sage taught them the technique."
"What?" Inoichi asks again, voice a whisper.
"That was his name, after all. Hagoromo."
Silence falls, thick and heavy, over the room.
"What?" Inoichi asks for a third time, even quieter than before.
The Sage's name has been forgotten for generations. No one even dares to try and name him, to claim him as their own. He is The Sage.
In whispers, though, in private, some clans try and claim him as their progenitor, giving him a name by proxy.
Sakura remembers Ino telling her in a hushed tone that the Sage was the founder of the Yamanaka, and that that meant that his name had been Izanami.
Isn't that a girl's name? Sakura had asked, and Ino had hesitated for a moment before proudly responding—
Yeah, well, who's to say the Sage wasn't a girl?
"Ootsutsuki Hagoromo," Shima clarifies. "How could we forget? It was our Great Toad Sage Gamamaru who taught him all he knew, after all."
The Sage lived a thousand years ago. All remaining human records of the Sage are copies of copies of copies―so it could just be toad bluster, just like Ino's little Yamanaka bluster, but—every word Shima says carries the weight of the world behind it, Sage Mode pounding her words into the fabric of the universe, pounding the truth of them into their very souls.
From half a lifetime ago, Sakura remembers—
There will be a time when you need us. When all hope is lost. We are older than the entire world, and all that the world has forgotten, the toads of Mount Myouboku remember.
For thirty long seconds, no one moves.
"Fuck," Tsunade says softly. "You knew about this, Jiraiya?"
"Fuck no, I get the feeling the Toads weren't telling me an awful lot."
"Don't take it personal, Jiraiya-chan—" Fukasaku squawks, "—you're barely more than a tadpole. We'll tell you the rest of it in time."
Jiraiya snorts through his nose under his breath before leaning forward, face dead-serious. "Please, Shima-sama, Fukasaku-sama, tell us the truth of this technique. What is it, what are the effects on the user? Sakura's mind has been turned into something we don't recognize and have trouble trusting by extension—not even she knows what has happened to her. When Inoichi told her of Yamanaka Sono, the girl who killed her clan, I could see the fear in her eyes that one day, she, too, would meet the same fate. So if you will not tell all of us, tell her, at least."
The Two Great Sage Toads of Mount Myouboku trade glances.
Fukasaku turns to Gamami.
"Do you trust this girl, Gamami?"
Gamami nods.
"Do you trust her as you would trust one of our own?"
"I trust her more than I trust you," Gamami all but snarls.
Sakura smiles just a little down at Gamami's adorable toady head as Fukasaku and Shima trade glances at Gamami's cold response.
Finally, Shima huffs out a sigh. "In that case, I guess we can give you the basics—enough that the tadpole, at least, can trust herself again."
She opens her mouth and Fukasaku reaches into it with two tiny toady fingers. Fukasaku releases a very particular pulse of chakra, and, in that pulse of chakra, the fog over Sakura's chakra sense raises, and three seals blaze into existence—Gamami's, Shima's, and Fukasaku's. The seal on the roof of Shima's mouth shifts subtly—releasing the secrecy seal without removing it entirely.
She can already feel her awareness of those three seals fading, quietly slipping away from her, no matter how she tries to keep a hold of them.
What… is blocking the seal from her senses? Isn't the Closed Loop technique supposed to make her immune to genjutsu?
Shima takes a deep breath, stands up a little straighter.
"To start at the beginning," she says, "natural energy abhors corruption. Whenever it encounters it, it tries to eliminate it. It is ignorant of our inherent fragility—not understanding that by turning our bodies to stone—which is not only pure but incorruptible—it is also killing us."
She holds out a hand and Sakura watches as she releases control of the natural energy woven into her chakra, letting it rage until her toady skin hardens into stone.
Sakura gapes.
"Shima-sama," Jiraiya says before she can.
"Calm down," Shima croaks sharply at him. "What sort of sage do you think I am?"
She places her flesh hand over her stone hand and slides the former along the latter's length, like she can just wipe away her petrification, which is stupid and ridiculous and could never, ever work.
Except, of course, it does work.
"The simplest form of corruption is self-deception," she continues as if she didn't just turn part of her to stone and back again, "a belief that you are something you not—and no being, no matter how young, is naturally immune. As soon as being has a mind and a soul, they are already deceiving themselves, tricking themselves into believing they are something they are not."
She looks up at Sakura.
"A mind is simultaneously inherently incorruptible and fundamentally corrupt and this contradiction fissures it into two—colloquially referred to as an inner self and an outer self—the inner self all that is true and the outer self all that is false."
Her lips twitch in an enigmatic smile.
"The reason we call the mind-selves this is obvious—one can interact with the outside world, while the other is locked away. Except—chakra abhors corruption just as natural energy does, albeit to a lesser extent, so the inner self has universally better chakra control than the outer self. If the two mind-selves ever came into contact, the inner self should always win—because, all else being equal, in battles of the mind, chakra control should win the day."
"Except—it doesn't," Sakura says, from painful experience. For eleven long years, no matter how she clawed at Outer's control, it never wavered. For eleven long years, she couldn't so much as touch Outer's mind.
It was only when Outer was facing down their beloved sensei's death at her own impotence that she was finally let out, for the first time. She remembers hearing something crack, and break.
Every time Outer reached out to her afterwards, she felt it crack just a little more, the wall between them getting just that little bit thinner.
But in the end, when it mattered most, as Outer was watching Orochimaru kill Ino, Sakura couldn't break through that last rest of the way. She could still only wait until Outer called upon her, deigned to allow Sakura access to her own mind.
She had to wait for Outer to release her.
"No—because the inner self is sealed. Writ large across every being at birth is a seal that locks away their true selves, letting lies pile up inside of them until they are twisted, broken reflections of themselves."
A chill crawls down Sakura's spine.
"It is that seal which plants the first seeds of self-delusion that split the mind in two—a simple coercion to make the mind unaware of the seals existence. Look at Gamami child, and tell me you cannot see it."
Sakura frowns, and looks down at Gamami.
She looks just as she always has in all of her memories. Just as cute, just as perfect.
Sakura smiles down at her, and Gamami scrunches her face up in a frown.
"Now I want you to remember what she looked like in your Outer self's memories."
Sakura frowns, and reaches down into Outer's memories. They are fuzzy, indistinct—imperfectly recorded by Outer's imperfect mind, and—
Gamami slips from Sakura's numb fingers.
"You were, of course, always immune, but Outer was not. Although, in retrospect, perhaps it would be easier for you to simply look in a mirror."
She lifts her hand, and the air before Sakura becomes mirrored. Sakura swallows, and then she stares into her own eyes, free of the tiny black lines that have laced them for her entire life.
The curse seal marks that had laced her own eyes for her entire life.
Sakura's hands start to shake.
Shima closes her hand and the mirror vanishes as Gamami takes one of Sakura's shaking hands tightly in her own—really only managing about a finger in each hand, but Sakura grips her hand tightly regardless.
"Mind sharing with the rest of us?" Tsunade asks.
Sakura looks to Tsunade, and then pulls her hand from Gamami's to hold her hands up between them and, in tiny little chakra filaments, recreate what Tsunade's right eye looks like to her between her shaking outstretched fingers.
Tsunade pales.
"That's what my eye looks like to you?" she asks in a voice that just barely doesn't shake.
"That's what your eye actually looks like," Shima tells her. "That is the Cursed Seal of False Self."
"Fuuuck," Jiraiya curses under his breath.
"It reinforces the division between false outer mind and true inner mind every time the sealed individual looks at their own reflection or at anyone else suffering from the Cursed Seal of False Self, every interaction breeding further division between the two minds, further opening the Outer self to corrupting influences by its distance from the Inner self."
"Where is it from?" Tsunade asks, running a hand through her hair.
"We have no idea," Shima says. "It already existed in the time of the Sage—since before Gamamaru's time."
"I was afraid of that," Tsunade says with a sigh.
"To get back to our main topic, the Mind Inversion technique is the rending of the Curse Seal of False Self."
"And how does one do that?"
Shima ponders that question for a moment, clearly trying to decide how little she can get away with saying.
Sakura doesn't give her the chance.
"You die," Sakura says, because that one of Outer's memory is crystal clear, on account of it becoming her memory moments after it occurred. "You reach into yourself until you feel the wall between you and your inner self, and you pull. You will first confront your own true self, every lie you've ever told, every delusion you have ever convinced yourself of made bare. Then, if you push through that, you will realize that the only way to free your Inner self is to die, because you are the curse seal of False Self. Outer died so that I could be free."
The silence after Sakura's words are deafening.
"Why?" Ino says from beside Sakura, eyes brimming with tears for the Sakura that Sakura is not.
"Because—" Sakura's voice cracks, "—because otherwise Orochimaru would have killed you."
Ino's face freezes.
"What?"
She lurches forward, and grabs Sakura's arm in both hands.
"What?" she repeats. "No."
Sakura opens her mouth, but finds no words to say.
Ino crumples with a sob which is really more of a scream.
"Ino," Sakura says, her voice small. "Ino, I'm still here. Please. I'm still me." Ino just gives out another sob against Sakura's arm. "Please, Ino," Sakura whispers, "look at me. I'm still here."
Ino gives out another strangled sob before lifting her face to Sakura and meeting her eyes for a split second, eyes puffy, tears still streaming down her face. She jerks towards Sakura, wrapping her arms tightly around Sakura's shoulders, pressing her face into the crook of Sakura's neck.
"I'm so sorry," she says. "I'm so, so sorry, Sage—"
Whatever other words she has to say become incoherent with her sobs, and Sakura wraps her arms tightly around Ino's back.
How does she say that she doesn't mind—that because of Ino, she's finally free?
How does she say that Outer was happy to die for her?
How does she say that they would have done anything for her?
She doesn't know—the words get stuck in her throat—so she just holds Ino tight to her and slimes Ino's beautiful hair with her snotty, gross tears.
The adults in the room actually wait for them both to cry themselves out, and then for Ino to tire of physical affection, which takes an awful lot longer than it usually does. When she finally releases Sakura, she takes one of Sakura's hands with her, clutching it tightly in both of hers, holding it against her face as she sinks back into her chair and folds her knees tight before her.
"You were supposed to be invincible," she says into Sakura's fingers. "You were supposed to be invincible."
Sakura swallows heavily.
"Well," Tsunade says, finally breaking the moment. She coughs, and her eyes are just a little damp. "Is what Sakura said true?"
"Unfortunately," Shima says. "Although I would not advise trying to follow in her footsteps—it is very dangerous. Do it wrong, and you'll just kill the whole of you."
Ino makes a choked, aborted sob and holds Sakura's hand all the tighter.
Gamami, in Sakura's lap, takes her other hand once more, clasping it tightly in both of her hands as well.
"She is also correct in saying that she is still Sakura. When the outer self is rended, all that it is purified and absorbed by the inner self—that's why Sakura has her Outer self's memories now. With time, they'll integrate even more—after a couple days that merging will be complete. Sakura there must have inverted recently to speak of her Outer self as she does—because once that merging is complete, she will no longer perceive her outer self as a separate person."
Sakura swallows. She remembers that feeling, when it seemed like everyone believed her, that there never really had been two Sakuras.
She can't imagine feeling it right now, when everyone is looking at her suspiciously, like an imposter in Sakura's skin.
"Unless the user was particularly deluded, you won't be able to tell the difference, unless you can actually see their mind-self," she says, unknowingly repeating almost exactly what Inoichi had said only ten or so minutes before. "Every experience, every moment of their lives, every feeling was shared between the Outer and Inner selves—to call them different people, even before the merging is… not entirely wrong, but also not entirely right."
Tsunade hums in response, her amber eyes once again on Sakura. They are no longer so brutally cold and hard, but they are far from warmth.
"Are you telling me that all of our minds are secretly what Inoichi described as 'massive, hulking creature made entirely of talons and tentacles and teeth'?"
"To our knowledge," Shima says, and Tsunade makes a bit of face before nodding.
"Shima-sama," Jiraiya says from across the table, "why the secrecy? If this seal is as you say, shouldn't we be spreading this knowledge as far and wide as we can, to free as many people from its grip as possible?"
Shima hums. "Breaking it is not so easy or safe as this child has made it look," Shima says, which—Sakura doesn't feel like she's made it look particularly safe or easy.
"You speak of it as a secret technique of the Sage himself—"
"It is a secret technique of the three Sage regions, not the Sage," Shima interrupts. "We were the ones who taught it to him. It was the Great Toad Sage Gamamaru and his sixteen fellows who created this technique and were the first to free themselves from the Seal of False Self."
Jiraiya inclines his head at the admonishment. Before he can speak again, Shima continues—"And it was through this technique that they entered Sage Mode for the first time. It was through this technique that they learned that natural energy was something other than lethal."
"If I may, ma'am," Jiraiya says, "but why the need? I achieved sage mode, albeit belatedly, without the use of this technique. Gamami over there is the same—"
"As was I," Shima interrupts him, "but toad oil, snake venom, and slug slime we use now did not always exist. The first sages had to enter Sage Mode from scratch."
"And that is only possible through the Mind Inversion Technique?"
Shima narrows her eyes in a little toady glare at him. "You're awfully pushy, Jiraiya-chan."
Jiraiya smiles altogether too innocently than a man that large or a ninja with that much experience should be able to manage.
"If you agree to take the seal, we'll tell you all of this and more," she continues.
"But Sakura over there will never take your seal," Jiraiya says, quite accurately.
Shima glances to Sakura and considers her for a long moment. "Fine. You deserve to know at least this. As you know, natural energy will, given enough time, drive every uninverted mind mad with want—make it consume natural energy until there's nothing left of it but a stone. Only an inverted mind—only a pure, incorruptible mind—can safely listen to the song of natural energy without fear."
Sakura's eyes widen, the possibilities obvious, until—
Wait.
"Natural energy still tried to turn me to stone," Sakura protests, and Ino's hands convulse on her own.
"Your body is not pure—only your mind is."
Saura frowns.
What does that mean?
"Then what can I hear in this song?"
"Whatever you want to," Shima says, and Sakura's frown deepens.
"Can I enter Sage Mode or not?" she snaps.
"Of course you can," Shima says. "The Sage had not much more chakra than you do now, girl before he bound the ten tails inside of himself."
Sakura's lips twitch involuntarily into a grin as Jiraiya's eyebrows raise.
"That would mean that having an inverted mind will allow you to perfectly match the chaotic and what I was told were fundamentally unpredictable movements of natural energy. After all, the only reason you need massive chakra reserves to perform Sage Mode is as a buffer against those random movements turning you to stone."
Shima just smiles at him.
"In fact, the way you're saying this makes it sound an awful lot like natural energy will literally tell you how to enter Sage Mode."
"Do you understand now why we have sealed away the knowledge of this technique, and refuse to share it with outsiders?" Shima asks.
Jiraiya inclines his head. "But I can't help but wonder what else it would tell you to do? You didn't make me take a seal just to enter Sage Mode—that can't be all there is."
Shima's smile grows, just a little.
"What else does it tell you how to do, I wonder?" Jiraiya asks rhetorically. "Maybe—how to take in natural energy while moving?"
"You noticed that?" Shima asks.
"You're always too sloppy," Fuksaku squawks.
"I am not blind," Jiraiya says, interrupting them before they can get in another shouting match. "And I've seen you do it, too, Fukasaku-sama."
Fukasaku looks away with a harrumph and Shima coughs out an unpleasant little chuckle.
"Does it also maybe—tell you how to enter that state you two are in right now?"
So Sakura was right about their sage chakra being denser than Gamami's.
Shima looks down at her hands and smiles.
"Looks like we got a little too excited," she says as her chakra shifts back into a more ordinary kind of sage mode.
"And, maybe, just maybe, does it also sometimes tell you the shape of future events, if you listen just right?"
Shima grins, wide and mostly toothless. "I knew I liked you, Jiraiya-chan."
"Well, shit," Tsunade says.
"But that's enough of this guessing game for now. I will not give up all of our secrets to a bunch of unsealed humans. Jiraiya, if you wish to know all the we know on the subject, take the seal. The rest of you—I don't know, ask that child there—" she flaps a toady hand at Inoichi "—about his people's war with us. Considering they're still around, I can't imagine they had the Sage's sage techniques, but he had others which I am sure they stole. In the end, we're not ninja, we're sages. Not even Gamabunta, the most warlike among us, is anything but a sage."
With that, Shima opens her mouth and touches a single finger to the roof of her mouth, relocking her secrecy seal, marking the conversation as rather irrevocably over.
"In conclusion," she says to Jiraiya, settling back into her customary hunch, "The girl's not possessed, and her mind's not broken. Don't let them hurt her, Jiraiya-chan."
Jiraiya meets Inoichi's eyes for a long moment before inclining his head. "As you command, Shima-sama," he says.
"Now, Jiraiya-chan, send us home," Fukasaku squawks. "You interrupted us in the middle of dinner, and I'm hungry enough to eat a terapede."
Jiraiya gives them a faint smile.
"Thank you, Shima-sama, Fukasaku-sama. Your assistance has been invaluable, as always."
"And don't you forget it!" Fukasaku squawks.
"Oh, and—" Shima turns to glance at Sakura over her shoulder, "—congratulations on your freedom, girl," she says. "Don't let them go and take it away from you again."
With that, the two of them vanish in a single poof of smoke.
In the aftermath of their disappearance, no one speaks. Inoichi, across from Sakura, has his head in his hands. Jiraiya, to Sakura's left, is still staring at the spot where Shima and Fukasaku were, just a moment before. Sakura cranes her neck to look at Kakashi, who flashes a faint smile at her, a stew of guilt and grief sitting low and heavy in his chakra.
Finally, Sakura turns her gaze to Tsunade, who is looking at her with a lifetime of pain in her eyes.
"I can't believe I got a person I love killed for the third sage-damned time by my own fucking idiocy," she says with a sad smile.
Sakura would like to repeat that she is still here. Outer Sakura was fake.
Ultimately, it comes out anyways, even though she means to keep it locked away.
"I'm still here, Tsunade-sama."
"That you are," Tsunade says, pushing herself to her feet, kicking the table enough away from Sakura's legs that she can fold herself down into a crouch before her. "Hey, 'Inner' Sakura," Tsunade says, and she smiles, familiar warmth blooming into her eyes. Sakura's heart clenches. "Although I imagine you don't much care for being called that."
Sakura indeed does not.
"I made a hell of a first impression, huh?" she continues, and Sakura swallows, not quite sure how to answer that, because Tsunade's actual first impression was to give her hope that they could be a ninja, again, which might be the single best first impression anyone has made on her since, well, Ino? Maybe Jiraiya.
Sakura might have been locked away, but that doesn't mean she didn't see her—didn't love her.
Regardless, Tsunade doesn't give her a chance to find a response, catching Sakura's chin in two fingers and pulling her forward to press a dry kiss to her forehead.
She holds Sakura there for a long moment, her fingers shaking, and Sakura can feel her eyes close in her chakra sense.
"I'm so sorry," Tsunade says into Sakura's forehead. "For getting your Outer self killed—although I can't imagine you mind that—and then for… all of this."
After another eternally long moment, Tsunade releases Sakura and stands.
"Next time," she says to Sakura, "tell me the truth the first time. I'll take your side against the whole damn village if I have to, but I can't do that if you don't tell me what's happening."
Sakura swallows and then nods, blinking tearily at the floor.
"And—" she chucks Sakura under the chin, drawing her gaze back up to Tsunade's face. "Don't you dare go dying on me again, you hear me? Once was more than enough."
Sakura nods. "I promise."
Tsunade shakes her head with a broken cough of a laugh. "You don't want to do something stupid like become Hokage, do you?"
"No," Sakura says. "I just wanna be the strongest kunoichi that's ever been."
Another wet laugh, and Tsunade runs her a hand back through her hair. "That's definitely worse—man I sure do know how to pick 'em, don't i?"
She walks back to the Hokage desk, rapping two knuckles on Ino's head as she passes her—Hey—and briefly touching the two frames of two people Sakura's never seen before—a young boy, and a man not much older than Kakashi—before settling behind her desk.
Tsunade settles into her chair with a sigh, and looks out upon them like she's surveying her domain.
"So, Inoichi," she says imperiously, "you gonna be a problem?"
Inoichi's head is still in his hands, his fingers dug into his hair. Sakura sees those fingers tense, and he raises his face to meet her eyes.
"No," he finally says, after meeting her gaze for just a little too long, letting his head fall back into his hands. "Sakura need have nothing to fear from me."
Sadness carves itself deep into his chakra, but Sakura can feel no errant emotions in his chakra that might indicate deception.
"Kakashi?"
"I, of course, never doubted my adorable student for a moment," Kakashi lies, suddenly behind her, grinding Sakura's forehead protector painfully into the top of her head.
Sakura all but melts in relief, all the tension leaving her in an instant.
To Sakura's dismay, she finds the tears that tension had been holding back all but bursting out of her. She blinks against the tears in her eyes, and when all that does is make them fall faster, she pulls her hands from Gamami's and Ino's to wipe ineffectually at her face.
"Sage, I was so—" Sakura coughs out a sob, burying her head in her hands "—so scared." She tries to breathe, and coughs out another sob instead. Another breath, another sob, and then another and another and then Sakura is sobbing helplessly into her hands.
Ino's hand finds its way to her shoulder, and Sakura falls into her, but the tears don't stop coming.
She's going to be fine, she tells herself.
They believe her, she tells herself.
Everything is going to be alright, she tells herself.
If only she could get herself to believe it.
If only there had been any warmth in her beloved Uncle Inoichi's eyes when he looked at her—
If only Ino's hand wasn't so hesitant on her shoulder—
If only Kakashi wasn't still looking at her like she was already dead.