PF

by Lazydaily

F

18. Chapter 22

When we trained, we trained in Daddy's mind, Ino says before she leaves. So—she reaches into her head, heaves out a massive folder, and drops it with a splat onto the swampy mud between them.

I stole this.

The cover flutters opens, and there, on the first page—

The name Yamanaka Sono stares back at her.

It is the Yamanaka file on people like Sakura—records on a war long fought and long-since won.

It is far from complete, redacted twice over—once by what must be Inoichi's hand, neat black bars and empty pages, and the second by… someone else. Sections of text that look like someone just reached into it and tore the ink directly off the pages. (A hand too small to be Inoichi's, too messy to be official.)

Most of the text is written in Inoichi's neat, even hand, but it has Ino's bulbous loops scattered irregularly throughout—in some places, as frequent as every word in five. Sono's name is almost always written in Ino's hand, in space altogether too big to fit a simple two syllable word. Inverted Minds, too—just a little bit crammed, like it was written in a space meant for a word just a little bit shorter.

The book is far from complete, redacted and edited and sanitized by a lifetime of clan heads, and then by Ino herself—

But it is also far from empty.

Sakura doesn't read it for two days, scared of what it might contain.

Whether she is afraid of what the Yamanaka did to people like her, or scared of what they might have done to the Yamanaka, she doesn't know.

(She keeps finding herself staring down at the picture on the first page of the file on Yamanaka Sono.)

(She was pretty, in a mousy sort of way.)

(Brown hair, endless green eyes.)

(She reminds Sakura of Hinata.)

(She doesn't look like someone who would slaughter their whole clan, but, then again—)

(Neither did Itachi.)

In those two days, Ino invites Sakura over to her house for a sleepover, and Inoichi looks down at her with pain in his eyes as he pulls the door open before her.

He places a heavy hand on her head before he sends her up the stairs to play with Ino, and she can feel the guilt in his chakra.

He doesn't apologize.

In those two days, Gamami finally relents to Sakura's summons and reappears before her in a poof of white smoke.

When the smoke clears, Gamami doesn't meet her eyes, even as Sakura scoops her up and squeezes Gamami to her chest.

There is guilt in Gamami's chakra that she does not voice, and below it—deep, deep below it where Sakura hadn't been able to catch before Gamami had unsummoned herself—there is a morass of jealousy, thick and furious and mean.

Why you and not me? it asks, even though Gamami does not. How could you have given it up, even for a second?

Neither of them apologize.

In those two days, Tsunade is officially confirmed, and Sakura is with her father when their family receives notice of a recission of an eleven-year-old law Sakura never knew existed.

"What?" her father had said, under his breath, the official missive slipping from his fingers.

"Dad?"

"It's fine, honey," he says, hands shaking. "I'm—" his voice breaks.

Sakura's never had any paternal relatives.

She, her mother, and her father are the last Harunos in the village.

She didn't notice until she was eight, but when she had finally had, hate had burned in her father's eyes as he told her of the nine-tailed demon fox.

The same hate burned in her father's eyes when he spoke of Naruto—when he told her to stay away from him, not to talk to him. (It was easy, because Naruto was super annoying and the worst.)

In one corner of their living room is a shrine to a man Sakura's never met and is not their blood—blond hair not so unlike Naruto's, blue eyes not so unlike Naruto's, a soft, gentle smile not very much like Naruto's at all.

He was an orphan, her dad said, when she asked. We'll honor him as one of our own, ensure his spirit has a place to rest.

In the demon fox attack, they all should have died, her parents slow, civilian legs not enough to outrace the fox that had chased them with murder in its eyes.

They didn't, because the Fourth Hokage took a claw to the stomach to give them the time to escape.

"I'm fine," her dad finally says, curling a hand around the back of her head and pulling her tight to his chest. "I'm fine," he repeats.

You know, Sakura has some thoughts of her own!

Primarily: What?

The Fourth Hokage?

What?

Naruto?

Sakura knows Naruto!

(It was hard not to!)

He's stupid!

(And kinda smelly!)

What?

(There's also Uzumaki Kushina, she doesn't actually know anything about Uzumaki Kushina.)

(As a fellow kunoichi she feels like maybe she should, but she really doesn't?)

(She should look into it.)

Sakura is still processing this.

Wait—

Kakashi is the Fourth Hokage's student, and Jiraiya is the Fourth Hokage's teacher.

Sakura has never seen either of them interact with Naruto. Come to think of it, she's never seen anyone interact with Naruto of their own free will, except maybe Iruka.

(In everyone's defense, he is, as she's already mentioned, super annoying and the worst.)

(She keeps coming back to this because in the aftermath of the revelation on his parentage a lot of people seem to have forgotten about this key Naruto fact.)

(Sakura will not be forgetting about it.)

She was hardly friends with Naruto, but she saw him. He was hard to miss, what with all the stupid things he does.

Everywhere.

All the time.

She saw him, and—he was always alone.

Sakura is with Kakashi a lot, and when Jiraiya has been in the village, he has generally been there because of her, so she's also been with him a lot.

She's never seen either of them interact with Naruto even once.

Jiraiya is… whatever. Sakura doesn't know Jiraiya very much, if she's honest, but Kakashi.

Kakashi was there for her and believed in her when no one else was or would.

Why her, and not Naruto?

(If that has to be the choice, she'll take it, but—)

Why her, and not Naruto?

She doesn't want to think about it, so she decides to distract herself with the Yamanaka file on Inverted Minds (Ino's handwriting).

The longest single report in the file is on Yamanaka Sono. It makes sense, if she thinks about it.

She had reduced the clan to nine people.

The closest the Yamanaka clan ever came to extinction.

(What cemented the genocidal hatred that drove the Yamanaka clan for the next two hundred years.)

The Yamanaka can read the minds of the recently dead (new news to Sakura). They can read their last thoughts and memories.

Publicly, they primarily use these techniques to interrogate dead prisoners once T&I are done with them, but they also have more private, sacred uses for them.

They use them to immortalize their dead, take their most treasured memories and spread them throughout the community, take the love and devotion they felt for their loved ones and gift it to those loved ones to remember them by.

(The Immortality Jutsu, they call it.)

They could not read the minds of any of the bodies Sono left behind.

Their bodies were empty.

The night Sono went mad, the Yamanaka tapestry that stretched back to Izanami herself was torn asunder.

(As for how they recreated the night—they had to hire Aburame and Inuzuka to map out the exact path of it—)

(Desperate to find a clue, any reason Sono would have done what she had done.)

(They never found a thing.)

Sakura takes a day.

She trains with Guy (because it's a Tuesday), she plays with Ino after she gets out of the academy.

Ino tells her about how mad Sasuke had looked when she had made five clones to his four.

"He's so pretty when he's mad, Sakura," Ino tells her for probably the fiftieth ime, and Sakura squashes the black, icy jealousy that boils up her throat at the sight of the dreamy, far-away look in Ino's eyes.

It wraps slick oily fingers around her heart, squeezing it until she feels like she can't breathe.

There's a file on each Inverted Mind the Yamanaka ever fought.

(There's a file on each Inverted Mind the Yamanaka ever killed.)

Sakura lays them all out in chronological order, stringing them up on black stars in the green sky above her.

First, there are wild Inverted Minds, the first two the Yamanaka encountered before Sono. Then Sono, then more wild Inverted Minds, and then the Hagoromo, interspersed intermittently with the wild Inverted Minds that had the misfortune of encountering the Yamanaka, and then…

Nothing.

Empty file after file.

Sakura reads the files in chronological order.

They are not just words but memories, too. Memories, primarily, really, the words only notes on interpretations and implications.

Sono's file is an outlier, the only memory a nine-way view of that last fight.

At first, the files are filled primarily with dying memories, pitted and broken by the damage that Inverted Minds inflict upon the Uninverted Minds they encounter.

Slowly, file by file, the pitted, broken memories fall away.

The memories contained in the files stop being final memories, stop having Status: Unknown at the top, and start having Status: Terminated, instead.

They start to become memories of actual battles, then easy victories, and then—

Nothing.

Nothing but twisted and broken ink in the shape of a child's fist.

There's nothing here, Ino says in sparkly purple ink on the first of them, and it is not as adorably bulbous as it was only a couple of files before. Her loops are jagged, and her ink is distorted by tiny little blotches that still smell of salt.

Inoichi had said that Mind Flayers had been eradicated fifty years before the founding of the village.

Eradicated, he'd said.

The Hagoromos had been a clan, once.

Children, elders—

The Hagoromos had been a clan, once.

Sakura stares down at file after file containing nothing but broken, torn ink.

Sakura eats with her parents, and her father is uncharacteristically silent.

The previous night he had knelt in front of the Fourth Hokage's shrine, head bowed into his hands, eyes clenched tightly closed.

The next morning, Naruto enters Sakura's chakra sense for the first time since Orochimaru.

It's not the first time she's used her chakra sense on him, of course, but… she had never even noticed the seal on his stomach, before—let alone what was inside it.

This time, her chakra sense effortlessly penetrates that seal, and—for a moment, there is nothing but boiling orange chakra all around her, so bright it blots out the sky and the sun and her own mind—nothing but burning fury and malevolence all around her.

Naruto walks out of her range, and Sakura finds herself on her knees, her cheeks faintly wet.

She blushes, pushes herself to her feet, stumbles into an alley, pushes herself back against a wall to take a deep breath.

What…

What was that?

Sakura remembers Orochimaru being sealed away inside of her.

She remembers Jiraiya saying that no seal is perfect.

Sakura had had ten day before Orochimaru twisted her into unrecognizability.

She had lasted seven days before she forgot her own name.

Naruto has had the nine-tailed demon fox sealed inside of him for eleven years.

Sakura slips through the village, crouches alone on a roof across from Naruto's apartment, her nails digging deeply into her palms as she resists the urge to crumple on the ground and cry at the fury and murder in the nine-tailed demon fox's chakra.

As her body adjusts to the terror, and she can see again, Sakura looks across the alley, through the window, down at Naruto.

She looks at the whisker marks on Naruto's cheeks.

Naruto has had the nine-tailed demon fox sealed inside of him for eleven years.

(Naruto is Naruto, Tsunade had said.)

(He is not possessed. He is completely unaffected by the demon fox inside him.)

(Naruto is a hero, Tsunade had said.)

Sakura cannot look away from the whisker marks on Naruto's face.

Sakura had asked Tsunade about Kushina, and Tsunade had told her, smile on her lips and sadness in her eyes—of her Uzumaki cousin, the Hot-Blooded Habañero.

Tsunade had shown her pictures.

Kushina did not have whisker marks.

(The next day, Naruto paints butts on Hokage monument, just as stupid as he's always been, becuase he's still Naruto.)

(There's not a shred of malevolence or deception in his chakra.)

(There never has been.)

Sakura goes to see Jiraiya, to ask him why.

"Why is he safe, and I wasn't?" she asks, and tries not to sound petty about it.

"Orochimaru was special," Jiraiya says, "that jutsu turned him into a living possession jutsu. The nine-tails didn't, so all you get are superficial changes from the chakra transfer."

(But what about Kushina? Sakura doesn't ask. Why not her?)

"The Nine-Tailed Demon Fox has not turned himself into a possession jutsu, so Naruto is fine."

After a moment, he continues—

"Thanks for the nightmares, though, kid."

Taken as a whole, the Yamanaka encountered two varieties of Inverted Mind: wild Inverted Minds and Hagoromos.

They shared very little, barely a technique in common. While the Hagoromos were predictable, a set of techniques shared across the lot of them, the wild Inverted Minds were as disalike one another as they were disalike the Hagoromos.

The Hagoromos existed as an almost dark mirror to the Yamanaka, commonly demonstrating a range of mental techniques clearly bastardized from the Yamanaka themselves, the shape of their minds negating the needs for the Yamanaka's unique physiology.

Unlike the Yamanaka, who possessed, read, or twisted the minds they touched, the Hagoromo simply tore them apart—their primary mode of attack was to slip a couple of limbs into their target's mind and rip it apart from the inside out.

They could shred their minds and scatter the pieces into the air around them, bubbled in chakra to protect the mind-fragments from the air, ready to attack anyone who made the mistake of running into one of them—all while still retaining enough of themselves to talk and act and fight.

They could spread their mind fragments from one victim's mind to another and would often sink a sleeper into one enemy, before retreating, having that sleeper shatter into pieces when that enemy returned to their camp, infecting and killing all it touched.

(Before the Yamanaka understood how to purge their minds from a Hagoromo's corruption, they killed themselves when the Hagoromo retreated.)

(It was better to die on a battlefield then to let your enemies use your own mind to kill everyone you loved.)

The abnormal shape of their minds made them immune to all but the most basic Yamanaka techniques. As far as the Yamanaka could tell, in the early days of their war, Inverted Minds appeared to be almost tailor-made to counter their every technique—do everything the Yamanaka could do, only better, stronger, easier.

They eventually learned countermeasures—techniques to burn a Hagoromo's chakra out of the air, letting the enclosed mind fragments boil away into nothing—a different set of techniques for sandblasting Hagoromo's corruption out of an infected mind. They honed the techniques that the Hagoromo did not know the theory to imitate. (The Hagoromo never mastered proper possession, so the Yamanaka learned to how possess the tiny minds of animals, how to replace the natural energy in trees with their own chakra to turn the entire world around the Hagoromo against them.)

They created new and more horrible mind techniques for breaking even the mind of the Hagoromo, now sealed away as too horrible to use against anyone else.

(The details are again torn out, nothing but Ino's tears and ragged, broken letters in its place.)

In the end, these countermeasures were enough.

They've been dead—eradicated, or so we believed—since about fifty years before the founding of the village.

Reading of the Hagoromo's primary techniques, something cold and dark slides down Sakura's back.

This… she doesn't want this. She doesn't want power that would let her break people without ever touching them, that would let her leaving nothing but empty husks in her wake.

She… doesn't want this.

That explains it then—the Sage taught them the technique, Sakura remembers Shima saying.

Sakura cannot help but wonder—did the Sage teach them these techniques?

Those mind techniques, however, were not the Hagoromo's only ones.

They had universally excellent chakra control, exhibiting a wide variety of techniques which were extraordinary to the Yamanaka of the time, but are either ordinary in Sakura's time, or are simply ordinary to Sakura.

Water walking, chakra reinforcement strength, grass-walking.

Sound cancellation, instantaneous sealless jutsu, chakra-impulse strength.

(Sakura already knew that her chakra control was fundamentally incomparable to what it used to be.)

This is not news to her.

In watching the memory after memory of the Hagoromo, Sakura can see why Inoichi described people with Inverted Minds as he did—

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.

Dead skin, he had said, and Sakura hadn't focused on it at the time, too overwhelmed by everything else he was saying, writing it off as a simple insult.

It was not.

The thing is—corpses are not devoid of chakra. A corpse has no chakra left in its reservoir, no chakra left in its chakra pathways, but for days, sometimes even weeks, it will retain just a little bit of chakra in every last one of its cells.

Unless someone died of chakra exhaustion, there will be nothing to consume that last little bit of chakra in their cells, even after their reservoir has burst with death and most of their chakra has exploded out into the air around them.

A corpse will be surrounded by a tiny, low level chakra halo until their cells finally break down, and that last little bit of chakra is released.

The Hagoromo felt like that. They felt like walking corpses.

In the memories of the Yamanaka, Sakura sees battles of entire armies (or what passed for armies at the time) of Yamanaka against armies of Hagoromo, and every last one of the Hagoromo had no chakra in their pathways, no chakra in their reservoirs.

They march towards the Yamanaka, eyes hard and pathways empty like an army of the dead.

(Sakura cannot help but share the fear the Yamanaka felt when they faced them.)

The basic mechanics are obvious to Sakura: in the aftermath of banishing Orochimaru from her body, she stole her chakra from her body into her mind.

She does it now, standing alone in her room, and, sure enough, the chakra is gone. She can't sense it, even a little.

So she's pretty sure how this technique works—all you have to do is take all your chakra into your mid, deliver it to your cells as needed.

The basic mechanics are obvious.

The exact mechanics are incomprehensible.

It would require stringing herself through the empty spaces in her mind, ignoring not just her chakra pathways and chakra tenketsu and chakra capillaries, but also every last one of her cells. She'd have to have each limb touch exactly one cell, deliver chakra to exactly one cell, without touching any others.

It's obviously, patently, impossible.

(Every last one of the Hagoromo were able to do it.)

(Except, well… except the children.)

(Ino didn't quite manage to tear out every reference to them.)

As "corpses", the Hagoromo proved immune to genjutsu, when the Yamanaka tried to hire other clans to help them, in the early days of their war.

(One of those clans were the Senju—in the first of the memories, Hashirama's chakra is wild, uncontrolled.)

(When he and his brother's genjutsu fail to take hold of the Hagoromo, effortlessly shrugged off—she sees him pause.)

(She can all but see the cogs turning in his mind.)

(Then she sees him turn his head to Tobirama and smile a smile that's just a little bit too wide for his face.)

(Tobirama smiles back at him.)

(Sakura can see no other benefits to this technique—she's already immune to genjutsu from the Closed Loop technique—but Sakura will not allow herself to be bested in what feels very much like it should be her strongest area.)

(No one should know their minds better than Sakura knows hers.)

(Once upon a time, this mind was her prison, and she spent eleven interminably long years trapped within it.)

(She tries not to think about how the same must also have been true of every last one of the Hagoromo.)

In comparison to the Hagoromos, with their regimented set of techniques, wild Inverted Minds had almost no commonalities.

Some were civilians, some were monks.

Some were clanless ninja, some were clanned ninja.

Some had bloodline limits like yin-yang release, lava release, or the sharingan, while some of them were utterly and oppressively ordinary.

Some were sane, and others were, stark, raving mad.

There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, not a single unique technique shared between them, not a single technique shared with the Hagoromo, who never exhibited any bloodline limits at all.

Sakura reaches the end of the file, returns all the reports to it, and closes it.

She places it back into the infinite bookshelf before her, beside the book of Ino telling her You look prettier this way, anyways.

Sakura brushes a tentacle over You look prettier this way, anyways, and then over the flower that's growing out of the book of that day on the knoll before she threads herself back into her body, and opens her eyes.

The next day in the Hatake blood room, Sakura tells Kakashi about the file Ino stole, and he nods. She tells him its everything, about the techniques she doesn't want and the techniques she doesn't need.

He nods, humming.

"There's something Minato always told me—" his chakra sings a song of agony at his dead teacher's name, but he doesn't so much as twitch. "He told me that being the strongest isn't about shoring up your weaknesses—it's about honing your strengths. Don't sharpen all your kunai, he said, sharpen one until it can cut the world in two."

He laughs to himself.

"He'd say that and then he'd tell me I needed to consider my teammates' feelings more—I thought I was supposed to hone my strenths?"

He shakes his head, meets her eyes.

"This mind nonsense, that's not your strength. You kicked Orochimaru out, but sounds like that was just the nature of… that inverted mind technique of yours"—agony, pain. "Don't forget, you became chuunin by getting a passable imitation of chakra-impulse strength in fifteen minutes. Your chakra control is leagues better"—agony, pain—"but chakra control can never be perfect. Your chakra control is your sharpest kunai."

Another breath.

"Sharpen it until you can cleave the world in two, Sakura, and you'll be able to make jounin, I'm sure of it."

The sincerity drips off his face, and he leans back.

"And then we'll maybe let you use Sage Mode or the Hiraishin. You know, if you're good."

Sakura narrowly resists the urge to punch him in his stupid face.

(She asks him about Naruto, once, and the agony that blooms within him is indescribable.)

(She doesn't ask him again.)

This is a bad idea.

It's three days since she finished reading the Yamanaka file on Inverted Minds, and Sakura is in her room, holding hands with Ino—yay!—and Naruto—boo.

Sakura only found out Naruto was going to be here today when Ino showed up, dragging him behind her.

(Still, there is nothing but sunshine and stupid in his chakra.)

(He continues to be uncorrupted by the infinite well of hate and murder within him.)

It's not a bad idea, Ino says, despite the fact it is such a bad idea they are using her telepathy to talk about it so no one can overhear them. It's a great idea.

Yeah! Naruto agrees vigorously and with great ignorance. There's no way he actually understands what Ino is proposing.

She's pretty sure he's just really desperate for friends, and Ino knows this and is taking full advantage.

(Ino is kind of a dick.)

(Sakura kind of loves her for it.)

Sakura sucks in a sigh.

Does your dad know about this?

Ino pshes, which is a no. Unfortunately, Sakura's not gonna narc her best friend out to her father because a) she's still mad at him for calling her all sorts of nasty things at the Hokage meeting and then not letting Ino see her both of which he still hasn't apologized for, b) he might still hate her?, and also c) Sakura's not a narc.

(Sakura could also just tattle to whoever might be watching them, but see: c.)

Sakura changes tactics, turns to Naruto.

She's going to walk into your mind. Isn't that gross?

Ino makes an outraged face, but she started this! She's the one who wants to go say hi to a being with more chakra than the whole village, composed entirely of fury and hate!

The one Sakura had to spend like, six hours acclimating herself to so that being this close to it does not reduce her to a weeping mess on the floor!

It has not gotten less scary, she's just gotten better at handling it!

Sakura is the one being reasonable here.

Ino moves from outrage to anger, and glares at Sakura.

Sakura does not quail.

Nope.

Her mind-swamp evaporates with a crippling fear of rejection, but it's fine.

She's fine.

Even though Ino is mind-grumbling last time I ever invite you to anything, she's just lying.

It's fine.

Everything's fine.

Sakura is great.

Ino still thinks Sakura is great.

She's gonna let me meet the big mean fox sealed inside of me!

The nine-tailed demon fox, Sakura clarifies for him. The one that even the Hokage couldn't beat.

My dad totally beat it! Naruto mind-shouts, too-loudly, then looks away and fidgets. He just, he just had to die to beat it, but he totally saved my life with his sacrifice. He was—

Naruto stops speaking, tears forming in his blue eyes. He pulls his hands from theirs.

Ino glares some more at Sakura.

You deal with him, she says through the flower that links their minds, on account of the fact that, y'know, Ino is still just… the worst at feelings.

Problem is—Sakura is also… not great at feelings.

Sakura looks down at Gamami where she is sitting in Sakura's lap, not participating in their clandestine little telepathic conversation and pretty happy about it. Gamami looks suspiciously back up at her. Gamami may be worse at feelings than Ino, but she's also just… so cute.

"Look," Sakura says, thrusting Gamami out in front of her.

Irritation rolls off of Gamami in waves, but she isn't biting Sakura's hands yet, so Sakura's pretty sure she's still good.

"Look how cute Gamami is!"

Naruto looks up at her through his tears, and frowns. "She's a toad. Toads are gross."

"You take that back," Sakura says, pulling Gamami back and hugging her tight to her chest.

"No!" Naruto says, tears drying, frowning right back at her.

Sakura stands, one hundred percent willing to fight an academy student in her own, very breakable room.

"Stand up," she says. "You wanna fight? I'll fight you. Come on."

Naruto was crying before?

Sakura will give him a reason to cry.

Naruto gets up on his feet.

"I can take you!" he declares, very foolishly.

Sakura pulls Gamami closer to her chest, and readies herself to kick Naruto in his stupid face when Naruto suddenly becomes Ino. Sakura can tell from her chakra coils and also the way she holds her chin. High, like she's better than you, and everyone knows it.

(In fairness.)

(She is?)

"Would you punch me?" she asks haughtily Naruto's voice.

"He said toads are gross."

"Toads are gross."

Betrayal.

Sakura has never been more betrayed.

(Except that time the cute doctor she thought she could trust ripped her seal open and left her to die.)

"Ew, I'm a girl," Naruto says from Ino's body, poking himself in all manner of places he shouldn't be poking.

(AKA: anywhere.)

Color rises in Ino's cheeks, and she kicks her own body in the head.

"Ow!"

Sakura wouldn't punch Ino… but Ino would totally punch Ino.

A blink of an eye later, Ino is Ino again, and Naruto is Naruto again.

"Okay!" Ino says, standing up and stepping between them and blushing a little at the fact this solution had not occurred to her before doing something that gave Naruto temporary control of her body. "This is a stupid argument—"

"No it's not," Sakura says, meaning every word.

"Toads are super gross, they're warty and stuff."

"You take that back! Gamami doesn't have warts!" she actually has a couple warts on her head, but look, it's the principle of the thing—"Look at her beautiful face!" Sakura thrusts Gamami at Naruto, and Gamami radiates toady smugness.

And instead we should go meet the nine-tailed fox! Ino mind-shouts, because apparently she didn't actually need them to be holding hands. Both of you shut up and sit down! I don't care about your stupid problems! I want to meet a demon fox!

She glares at Naruto and Sakura in turn, and they slowly sit back down.

"Toads are still gross," Naruto hisses.

"Your face is—"

Sakura stops speaking when Ino glares down at her, chest heaving.

Sakura clears her throat.

"Aren't you supposed to be a chuunin?" Naruto taunts.

Sakura swaps with him in retaliation, leaving him very confusedly facing the wall.

Heh.

Suck. It.

This is the power of chuunin.

"Hey! What was—"

Shut! Up! Once Naruto has shut up, Ino turns to Sakura. Sakura, she says, very severely. Naruto's just a boy—

"Hey—"

—but you're not! Grow up!

Sakura looks at the ground, chastened.

Naruto!

Naruto flinches, and then looks up at her, fear in his eyes.

I'm going to pull you both into my mind, and then dive into yours, taking both of you with me!

Naruto frowns.

"Why do I have go into your mind and then come back into mine?"

Ino glares at him, and he closes his mouth.

Also, Sakura, maybe be person-shaped?

Oh—right.

Ino pats her knee comfortingly.

"Is Sakura not normally person-shaped?" Naruto looks at her, eyes sparkling. "What shape are you normally?"

Fine, enjoy, don't blame me when your mind self breaks into little pieces and you can't put yourself back together again because you're not a Yamanaka. Ino makes a little preen as she says Yamanaka.

"Um—"

Naruto doesn't get to finish that thought, because Ino grabs both of their heads, and they're very suddenly in her mind-space.

This does not give Sakura enough time to fit herself into a meatskin, so she arrives in her full, currently-trillion-and-fifty-one limbed glory.

Naruto screams.

"Oh, whoops," Ino says, covering Naruto's eyes, which causes him to immediately latch onto her like a shaky limpet.

She grins conspiratorially at Sakura.

"Boys are such wimps, right?" she says as Sakura folds herself down. It's not hard—she's done it before, after all. She doesn't like it—but what she supposed to do?

Let Ino go and face the nine-tailed demon fox alone?

So she folds her limbs just the right kind of inside out, up and over her and down down down until she's something generically human-shaped. She opens her eyes and flexes her arms, kicks her legs, irons out the last few kinks, checking her own reflection in Ino's mirror until she gets it just right.

When she has it, Ino lets Naruto go, and he stares at Sakura with his mouth agape, fear fading from his face. The cracks that had worked themselves across his face heal before her eyes, orange chakra washing up from the infinite well behind his seal, just a bit of its hatred and anger gone, if only for a moment.

(Uh…)

(What?)

"Can all chuunin do that?"

Sakura is incredibly tempted to answer yes.

"No, it's because Sakura is great," Ino answers for her. (Sakura represses the urge to blush.)

Shaking the blush away and figuring it's worth one more try, Sakura says—

"The nine-tailed demon fox is scarier than me."

Ino glares at her as Naruto quails.

"I think—"

"Too late!"

Ino grabs them both, and then they're in sewers, stretching endlessly all around them.

Everyone starts this way, but it's still kind of sad and very gross. Someone should teach Naruto to meditate.

Someone… with infinite patience.

Not Sakura.

Definitely not Sakura.

Luke-warm water laps around Sakura's feet, and the low groaning of too much water in too small pipes echoes out of the walls.

In the distance, they can hear something big breathing.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

The sewers are normal, everyone starts with sewers. That breathing, though, that's… not normal.

Ino grabs both of their hands, and drags them towards the source of the breathing.

"Uhhh," Naruto says, trying and failing to drag his feet. "That sounds big and scary. Are we sure this is safe?"

"He'll be in a cage. Sakura's was in a cage," Ino says, entirely too confident in herself on account of the fact that if the nine-tailed demon fox was like Orochimaru, Naruto would be super possessed right now.

"Oh, well that's okay then," Naruto lies, trying to look less scared than he is.

Sakura prepares herself to kai, for when the nine-tailed fox is actually free and attacks them.

(Unfortunately, as this is not her own mind, she can't just delete and edit like she had with her and Orochimaru's shared mind before she yelled him out of existence.)

(So: kai it is.)

(If that doesn't work, well… she'll improvise.)

(This is such a bad idea.)

The breathing is echoing at them from all directions, but there is no hesitation in Ino's steps.

"I'm sorry about your mind-room," Sakura says in a small voice, thinking of the cracks she drove into the ground with her presence.

"Don't worry about it," Ino says, flashing a grin at Sakura as she continues to drag them forward. "I was thinking of redecorating anyways."

Unrelatedly, Sakura's sandals are wet. She tries to think her sandals dry, but she doesn't succeed.

Squelch squelch squelch.

She should probably focus on the horrible nightmare-beast they're actively going off to look for, but man.

Wet sandals are the worst.

Sakura is distracted enough she doesn't notice the massive, terrifying fox face hiding behind teeny, tiny, puny bars until Ino drags her to a stop. There is no body, not even a face, really—only red eyes and a massive, toothy grin which looks altogether too human to belong to a fox. She hears Naruto swallow heavily, and Sakura's a chuunin.

She can—

She's fine.

She's—

Totally fine.

She holds onto Ino's hand with all her might.

This is the beast that killed the rest of the Haruno clan.

She should be mad in their stead, furious of all the family it stole from her, before she even knew she was lacking.

She cannot find the anger past the terror.

"The first time you come crawling down to me, brat, and what—you bring your little friends?" the fox growls, his voice a literal mountain of sound, shaking the whole sewer system and physically driving them back with the force of it. "You think they can protect you from me?"

"I—" Naruto starts moving (stupidly) towards the bars, but massive claws lurch out from between them, sending Naruto staggering back, falling on his butt in the water.

"This damn seal," the fox curses.

Sakura's breath freezes in her chest.

This is the beast that not even the Fourth Hokage could defeat—a beast so horrible he had to sacrifice his own soul to seal it away.

"What do you want, brat?" he growls.

Ino steps forward. "I wanted to meet you," she declares, voice sure and unwavering.

The fox rumbles.

"You?" He breathes out a gust of hot, sticky air, that sends Sakura grappling for purchase to keep from being blown back. She finds, in the process, that she can totally stand on this water.

She feels kinda dumb for walking through it.

This means she can access her chakra, she realizes. It's a little roundabout, tugging it out of her body and into her mind-labyrinth and then out of her mind-labyrinth and into… whatever this is (words are hard, okay), but it's here for her, just like it always has been.

She tries to cast a sealless drying jutsu to escape from wet sandals only to find that just because she has her chakra doesn't mean she can do jutsus.

(There is no escape from wet sandals.)

She can't fight the nine-tailed demon fox, but she's pretty sure she can save Ino, she tells herself.

"Me," Ino says, trying to release both of their hands.

Sakura does not let her, so Ino drags her forward as she walks up to the bars instead—just behind where the fox's claws reached when he lunged for Naruto.

The disembodied fox face gets just a little impossibly closer, that massive grin spreading beyond the walls of the tiny bars of the seal.

"Do you not fear me, human?" he says, and she can smell burnt, charred flesh on his breath.

"I'm terrified," Ino says.

The nine-tailed demon fox laughs, long and rumbly and deafening before slamming his claws out, a good two feet further than they had reached when he had lunged for Naruto, and—straight through Ino.

Sakura's mind goes blank as she stares stupidly at the two foot thick claw piercing Ino from sternum to waistline.

Ino's mouth is hanging open, her eyes glassy.

Sakura… she was going to kai.

Before this happened.

That's why she's here.

She was going to—

The nine-tailed demon fox pulls, and Ino is very suddenly inside the cage—past the walls of the seal—her hand easily torn from Sakura's.

"Well, human?" the fox says, opening his too-wide mouth. "What do you think? Do I live up to your expectations?"

Sakurs slips some of her tentacles back into her own mind, easily finds her way to the the flower that should connect her mind and Ino's, only to find the flower frozen, and dead.

No.

She kais into it, and before her, Ino doesn't so much as twitch.

No no no.

Sakura kais again, and gets nothing again, kais again and again and—

The demon fox lunges forward, and Sakura reacts on instinct, ripping herself out of her skin and throwing herself into the cage after Ino with a million-mouthed scream. She drags herself up to her full height and slams full force against him. She might not be able to match him chakra to chakra (not a hundred to one, not ten thousand to one, maybe not even a million to one), but she can sure as hell match him pound for pound.

She drives her talons through the darkness where his face should be, but the chakra that is his entire being burns them away. They rebuild as fast as they burn, but when she tries to thread a couple of her limbs back into her own mind, tries to pull her chakra from her body into her mind, she hits a brick wall. She doesn't know what that could possibly mean—is the seal blocking her? Is the fox? She doesn't know—

She doesn't have time to find out. She still has the chakra she gathered for the drying jutsu that didn't fire—three percent. It's not much, but it's all she's got. She sends that three percent of her chakra down ten thousand tentacles, and slams them against him, gathering chakra at their ends and forcing all of that chakra out of them at the same instant, all directly into the nine-tailed demon fox's massive foxy grin.

(Jutsus don't work, but chakra-impulse strength operates on the same axis as water walking, which she already knows she can do—if she can walk on water, she can punch people so hard they explode.)

The inside of his caged mind is impenetrably dark, his body still invisible, but she can feel him heave back at the force of her attack, half of that smile blown away. Ino is thrown into the air, the hole the demon fox's claw carved in her chest not bloody but shimmering and crackling with static, and Sakura can do nothing but watch Ino stupidly for a long moment.

She'd been so stupid with fear and rage she had forgotten her plan. She was going to kai Ino back into her own mind. If that didn't work, she was going throw Ino back through the bars. She shouldn't have bothered to trying to hurt the nine-tailed demon fox in the first place.

As long as they're not inside this seal he can't hurt them.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Fuck.

She remembers Kakashi's words—berating yourself in the middle of an op has never saved anyone—save it until you're home and no one can die while you yell at yourself—so she shoves those thoughts down and away.

She still waits too long. By the time she's flinging herself up towards Ino, the demon fox has recovered enough to intercede between them, his massive hand catching Sakura and throwing her back into the bars.

No, the darkness around her says, as the fox's red eyes sparkle with malice and his smile grows ever-wider in the darkness.

Above them, Ino falls without moving, static trailing after her, and Sakura shoves Naruto back when he's stupid enough to try and come into the cage with her even as the sight of her is tearing him apart. When she does so, in that moment in which she has a tentacle outside the fox's cage, she can suddenly access her mind again. She rips all but five percent of her chakra out of her body while she can (kai-ing into the Ino's dead, frozen flower five times as she passes it) before throwing herself back at the fox, setting the chakra she has stolen from her body dancing along her limbs.

Crawler, the darkness continues. It's been a long time since I ate one of your kind.

She keeps herself anchored to the invisible ground (that her limbs do not shatter by their very presence) so he cannot send her crashing back into the gates once more and pulls herself up to her full height before slamming into him. This time, his claws don't simply cleave through her. She tries to pin him to the ground, but even if he cannot cleave through her with the inherent corrosiveness of his chakra, he is still so, so much stronger than she is. She blasts out explosions of chakra with each blow, and it is not anywhere near enough.

In a blur he is above her, blocking out her vision of Ino, his massive jaws closing around a good third of her.

She fires half of her chakra reserves out of her in a single moment, and his head vanishes into a mist of orange chakra.

She surges around him and finally reaches Ino, cocooning all of her billions of limbs tight around Ino—

"Open your eyes," Sakura screams from a million mouths, firing a kai off into Ino that doesn't even make her twitch. "Open your eyes open your eyes open your eyes," Sakura repeats, firing off kai after kai after kai into Ino's limp form trapped within her.

Okay.

Okay.

She knew this could happen.

Calm down.

Below her, the demon fox's head is whole once more. and he is grinning up at her, his killing intent boiling up with that red gaze like a physical thing.

Sakura searches for the gate, the way out, and finds… nothing but darkness.

When Sakura turns her gaze back down to where the fox had been smiling beneath her, he's gone. His laughter, however, is everywhere around her.

Sakura remembers the stories her mother used to tell her of foxes, why to never trust a stranger on the road, never to trust anyone who will not show their ears or their feet. Her father's family was Fire, as old as the Sage and then some, but her mother's family (the Kanemoto family) are from a small village in North Earth.

In Fire, the stories of foxes are ambiguous—sometimes tricksters, sometimes benefactors. Ethereal and capricious, but rarely just evil. Creatures to be cautious of but who can be bargained with.

In Earth, the only stories of foxes are of evil, pernicious creatures with a ravenous, unending hunger for human flesh. They can only be hunted and killed, and never reasoned with.

Sakura puts it out of her mind.

The Demon Fox is terrifying and also evil: news at eleven.

Okay.

Okay.

Think.

The laughter continues, coming at her from all sides, left right left right up down and directly behind her.

The air around is as thick with the nine-tailed demon fox's seemingly-infinite chakra as it is with that choking darkness, meaning her chakra sense is as blind as her eyes—or the holes in the world that pass for them, when she's in this form. Not matter how hard she looks, no matter which sense she looks with, she cannot find—

A mountain of fox crashes into her, and she is thrown to the ground with a crunch of a couple ten thousand of her talons. Two massive hands press her into the ground, and the fox's mouth yawns before her. She has barely any chakra left, so his hands burn through her exo skeleton and her thick, leathery skin.

She struggles against his grip, but he holds fast, and she can't just let herself come apart, can't let herself expose Ino (who is still uncrunched, fine but for the hole that still isn't healing in her chest) to the ravenous hunger in his eyes.

His jaws come crashing down upon her, and she tries to fire off her remaining chakra to blow his head off again, but she doesn't even have enough to loosen his grip.

He pulls back, and Sakura's mind-self tears.

Her mind is momentarily blank. Not with pain—this body is at least absent that—but with a simple blankness as her mind tries to work around the massive holes that have been torn into it.

She tries to focus—

Break this down to its simplest parts.

She needs chakra.

She needs chakra, but she can't even reach into her mind to pull that last bit of chakra from her body.

Wait.

Sakura flings Ino away and, for the second time, she reaches out to the natural energy that so loves to itch at her skin.

Come to me, she calls out, hoping it is not blocked from her like her mind and her body, and come to her it does.

Natural energy boils out of her skin in a pink ocean of power.

It's too much, far far too much, almost entirely unusable to boot, but Sakura doesn't care—he is not like her, he is not immune—she shoves her limbs into his mouth, calling more and more natural energy to her.

He wants to eat her?

He can choke on her.

For the first time, she can see the full expanse of the nine-tailed demon fox's massive body. He is a horrifying amalgam of human and fox, the torso and arms of a massive human man with the face and haunches of a fox, hunched over on all fours. Nine massive tails wave behind him.

His jaws snap closed on the limbs she has forced down his throat, and Sakura's mind stutters.

He grins, his red eyes clear of the seal of false self, how did she miss that?

You think you can poison me? he says, the pink natural energy Sakura poured into him boiling away into bright orange chakra. Do not confuse me with a human, crawler.

He throws her back towards Ino with a derisive laugh, forcing Sakura to flip over Ino to prevent turning her to stone.

Sakura drags herself to a stop before flinging herself right back at him.

(Around Ino, so she doesn't get splashed with the natural energy that's still boiling off of Sakura's skin.)

Okay, okay.

That didn't work.

However—

Her reserves, which had been so empty, are now boiling over.

When he touched her limbs where they were wreathed in natural energy, his chakra did not burn her.

She can fight.

She couldn't do this with her actual body because her actual body would be instantly turned to stone, but who cares.

She can do it now.

Whatever the ground of his mind is made off shatters under her limbs, and she crashes into him at speed. His body vanishes into explosions of orange mist at her strikes. She has only the tiniest fraction of his chakra, but she can loose her entire reserves with every blow. (She wouldn't be able to as a human, not without liquifying her delicate human body, but this body is more than strong enough to take it.)

He stops smiling.

She drives him back.

He tries to slip back into the darkness, but she the glow of natural energy lets her see him, even if the miasma of chakra around her still renders him invisible to her chakra sense, so she catches him easily, throwing him further and further back into his own mind.

She carves a line of orange mist up an arm, and blasts half his face into orange mist, before placing two blows into his stomach. His back bows, but doesn't break, and he forces her back with a slash of his claws that threatens to tear her in two, and before she can follow up on her advantage, he is fully healed, as healthy as ever, and she is forced to dance back from him before his jaws snap off a quarter of her limbs.

Everything she does to him is healed in an instant while the damage he inflicts on her is slowly but surely piling up. She is still down a third of her mind from when he took his first bite out of her, and she's losing more limbs than she's gaining.

Even if she wasn't, she can't even hope to wait for him to run out of chakra because the natural energy boiling over her skin loves him just as much as it loves her, alighting into his orange chakra as eagerly as it alights into her own.

(To say nothing of the fact that even setting that aside it feels all but infinite.)

With each tangle of limbs, she pushes him just a little bit further back, never relenting in her assault—

She is driving him back, but she is not winning.

How can she win—how can she win?

Again and again they clash, leaving her a little worse for wear and him the exact same, and—

She lands five lucky blows in a row, and she literally blows him in two, his top and bottom half falling apart and then disintegrating into a fine orange mist.

For a moment, it's just sitting there. Churning, waiting, trying to reform.

On instinct, she reaches out for it, and pulls.

The cloud that is the nine-tailed demon fox turns into a spiral with her at its center and Sakura proceeds to begin to eat the nine-tailed demon fox alive.

The cloud stutters, but no. Sakura digs her metaphorical fingers in, and—

The nine-tailed demon fox very suddenly reappears before her, lopsided, breathing ragged. For the first time since Sakura has had the misfortune of meeting him, he is not smiling.

Sakura smiles with all of her seventy-three million mouths.

There it is.

She's sure she should be thinking of her clan, all the cousins and uncles and grandparents she never got to meet—

But she's not.

She's thinking of Ino.

This fucker tried to eat Ino, fuck if she's not going to return that favor a thousand fold.

There isn't going to be anything left of him.

He's going to scream as he dies.

She locks his chakra away inside of her, bound by her chitin and chakra and impossible geometry, and launches herself back at him. She can't use his chakra without giving it back to him so she'll just lock it away inside of her until there's nothing left of him.

And then, well, she's sure she can find a way to dispose of it afterwards.

He has reformed his body, but his chakra is still thick as a sludge all around her, so as they clash again, as he tries and fails to rip his chakra from within her (the maze she has tucked it away in holds true), Sakura turns his entire mind into a whirlpool of his own chakra.

His hobble is already gone, that lopsided-ness with it—it didn't persist for even a moment, but still—

He's slower than he was.

His chakra isn't infinite.

He fights for control of the thick chakra miasma all around them, but he does not succeed. Sakura eats half of it before he finally gives up, pulls it back into his own body, and—finally, Sakura can see.

(The entrance remains lost to her—the seal blocks the outside world from the fox's mind as well as it blocks the fox's chakra from the outside world.)

(It's not perfect, but there is nothing in the village that has even a tenth a percent of the chakra of the nine-tailed demon fox.)

Someone is laughing, a horrible cacophony of grunts and groans and shrieks, and for a long moment, Sakura does not realize it is her.

She now sees every one of his movements before he makes it, all but screamed out by the sheer volume of his chakra, no longer hidden by the miasma that had so choked and blinded her.

You think you have me beat, crawler? the darkness growls from all around her as she carves lines of the demon fox's hide whose orange mist she consumes, as she blasts holes that no longer heal quite as fast—

"Yes," Sakura says, crashing into the demon fox again, reducing his face to orange mist which she proceeds to suck out of the air. "I—"

A quarter of Sakura's limbs vanish in a blast of purple energy.

I had been hoping to just eat you, the nine-tailed demon fox growls as he snatches the chakra that had been locked away in those limbs from the air. But if you insist—

Sakura scrambles out of the way of his second shot, the raw power forming in his mouth only a moment before it is fired through her.

In her scramble to get away he gets the upper hand, pinning her to the ground and opening his mouth. A ball of purple energy grows between them, larger and larger, sucking in the natural energy on her skin, forming a mixture of sage chakra above her as it grows ever larger.

She struggles, tries to slip from his grip, and three quarters of her vanishes in an instant.

The other quarter, however, tears itself free, grabbing most of his chakra that she lost and crashing into his back, ripping and tearing at his fur with long bladed talons, firing off an earth-shaking explosion into the base of his spine that sends him cracking into the stone that his mind's floor is made of.

The fox roars in pain, and Sakura loses a couple thousand limbs to a blast of purple energy that comes flying from one of his tails.

Sakura throws herself back, and one barely manages to dodge the two follow up attacks he throws from two different tails.

There are balls of purple energy glowing from each of the fox's nine tails, and his face is twisted into a mask of pure hate.

She slashes a long line through the fox's right eye, knocks out a knee with a blast of chakra, severs one of his tails with five concentrated blasts in quick succession, and loses another half of her limbs to one of the fox's death rays before she can get away.

By the time she has wrestled her mind back from the blackness, his tail has either healed or regrown itself, and she has lost over half of the chakra she had so painstakingly ripped from his body.

It is like fighting ten foxes at once—each of his tails seems to have a mind of its own, sending out a ray of pure death at her if she fails to pay attention to him for just a second, and with each passing minute, there is less and less of Sakura left to fight him while he stands, untouched and fully healed—there is less and less of his chakra locked away within her, as he gets just that little bit faster.

No.

No no no.

Sakura can't die here.

Sakura can't leave Ino here.

She still has his chakra within her—it's not much by his standards, but it's two hundred times what she normally has. If she detonated it with chakra impulse strength, she would bleed it back to him, but chakra reinforcement strength keeps chakra use entirely internal. The chakra will still be slowly used up, but the rate is dramatically lower. All she has to do is rip it from him faster than she loses it.

Sakura sets the fox's chakra dancing over her skin. For a moment, it is as if the world stands still—

And then Sakura is torn apart from the inside out.

That thing about there being no pain in this body?

Yeah, no.

Sakura's body comes apart with an agonizing scream, every last one of her limbs split open to let the offending chakra free.

The demon fox laughs, sucking his chakra out of the air around them, not even bothering to take advantage of her weakness.

What's wrong, crawler? Did you truly think that you could use my chakra with no consequence?

Sakura's mind is blank with pain as the fox circles her, still laughing.

The contract you signed for that form, human, was to never use power that was not your own.

His jaws lash forward, and Sakura's mind stutters as a quarter of her mind suddenly vanishes.

The consequences for breaking that contract are—

Sakura's mind stutters again.

Quite serious.

Again.

If you were still human, that might have worked. Go on, try to go back to your human shape—

Again.

I've always preferred the taste of human flesh to a crawler's chitin, anyways.

The next time the fox lunges for her, she spreads her now-healed limbs to meet him, opening long lines of orange mist along his face, only to be immediately being blasted by a ray of purple energy from two of his tails at once.

Even if she uninverted, she doesn't have any of his chakra left to use.

The demon fox laughs at her as she is forced back by his claws and tails and teeth.

Think, Sakura, think.

He is faster than he was before, and there is less than there was before, but the problem is unchanged—

Ten of him, and only one of her.

She loses another half of her limbs, now only a twentieth of her original limbs still intact, and she can feel her thoughts drag with the force of it.

Ten of him, and only…

Only one of her?

Maybe Sakura doesn't want those Hagoromo techniques (she wouldn't be able to rip the fox's mind to pieces in the first place—that's what she's currently trying to do), but if it's to save Ino, then well—

She's willing to make an exception.

If there are ten of the nine-tailed demon fox, then there better be ten of her, too.

Sakura rips herself apart.

(If the Hagoromo could do it, than so can she.)

Her vision comes back into focus, and she's one of seventeen different writhing masses of tentacles, all boiling pink with natural energy, the nine-tailed demon fox at their center.

She doesn't get to him in time, but three of the other tentacle masses do, and the others tear themselves into smaller and smaller pieces to outnumber and overwhelm him, stripping off lines of orange mist from him and sucking it up and locking it away inside of them.

With each division, their minds get a little emptier, their thoughts a little complex.

Eventually, there are only two left—

Consume.

The being before them cannot be allowed to continue to exist.

It must be consumed—nothing of it must be left behind

And—

Protect.

There is a point behind them that they care about it, and that the fox cannot be allowed to reach.

He cannot be allowed to approach it.

He cannot be allowed to shoot his weird death lasers at it.

Protect.

Consume.

Protect.

Consume.

Consume.

Consume.

Con—

Then, suddenly, the point they wish to protect is beside them—

Enough, the world all around them says, and the fox is directly over the point they were so trying to protect from him, his massive claw inches from—

INO.

Sakura reconstitutes herself in a moment, the five hundred fragments of her mind snapping back together. There's barely half a percent of her left, but that's more than enough to understand what's happening.

Before her is the nine-tailed demon fox, and beneath the middle claw on his left hand is Ino's face.

Ino's eyes.

She knows exactly how fast he is—she has been fighting him for… who knows how long. He looks… ragged along the edges, a tenth of his chakra locked away inside of her, and his chest is heaving.

It isn't enough.

(It wouldn't have been enough, even if he hadn't resorted to threatening her—)

(There's barely any of her left, and there's still ninety percent of him left.)

(How had she ever thought she could win?)

(He is the nine-tailed demon fox.)

He is more than fast enough to put his claw through Ino's eyes before Sakura can reach him.

"What do you want?" Sakura asks.

His right hand crashes into her and pins her to the ground. When this started, she was as tall as he was, and now she's barely larger than his hand.

I want to eat, for the first time in two hundred years, the darkness around her says as a ball of purple death lights itself on three of his tails, and he sets them around Ino before raises his hand from where it had been hovering above Ino. But, before that—

The demon fox's massive grin is suddenly before her.

Tell me your name, crawler, his teeth sink into her and tear off a good third of what is left of her, releasing a good four percent of his chakra into the air. When she reconsitutes herself, he is still speaking. No one has managed to take that much of my chakra since Tatsuyama. Tell me your name, crawler, and I will remember it.

Sakura can look at nothing but Ino, static still dancing from her chest, and—

A stretch of twenty feet by a hundred is suddenly scoured away by a blast of purple energy, beginning an inch from Ino's head.

Tell me, crawler, the nine-tailed demon fox repeats, as the orb of purple death regenerates itself on the tip of one of his tails.

"Please," Sakura says, screaming it out of her seventy-six remaining mouths. "Let her live."

There's a pause.

I will… eat her quickly.

Sakura can still run. He has her pinned, but she could rip herself apart, hide herself away. However he summoned Ino, she doubts he can do it to her—because if he could, he wouldn't be threatening her.

She would just have to leave Ino behind to do it—it's not like staying will save her.

If she stays here, lets the demon fox eat her, then all she's doing is buying Ino a couple more seconds of life.

Black blood boils up from within Sakura as she weeps, overwhelming and extinguishing the natural energy she is no longer trying to pull from the world. Darkness returns to the fox's mind, making him once again all but invisible in the darkness.

She can still see Ino, illuminated by the static dancing from her chest and the three glowing balls of purple energy hovering above her.

I'm sorry, Sakura thinks even though she can't access the flower in her mind that would let Ino hear her. All I can give you is a couple more seconds. I'm sorry, Ino.

Ino twitches.

"Haruno Sakura," Sakura finally says, not looking away from Ino.

Goodbye, Haruno Sakura.

The foxes jaws close, Sakura's perception of the world skips once, twice—

The world edits itself.

When it is complete, Ino is standing before her, one hand reached back to her, resting on one of her few remaining tentacles, and one hand stretched out towards the demon fox, her blue eyes blazing. The hole in her chest is gone, as is sixty-five percent of her chakra.

"Ino," Sakura whispers brokenly, wrapping three or four tentacles tightly around her, just to make sure she's there, and Ino's face tightens.

"I'm sorry, Sakura—I'll get us out of this."

The demon fox's bright red eyes bore into them both, and he laughs, low and dark and dangerous.

You'll get out of this, the darkness around them says, the orbs of purple light on the fox's tails extinguishing themselves, dropping the fox back into darkness. A moment passes, and the eyes and mouth are gone as well. How, exactly, do you intend to do that?

Sakura feels the world shift twice in rapid succession—for an instant, Sakura swears she can see the gate behind them—and Ino's chakra takes another dip.

No, the darkness around them laughs, and Sakura easily flings the both of them away the moment before the demon fox crashes into where they had just been. (He has not returned the miasma to the air, and although she cannot see him in the darkness, her chakra sense can find him all the same.)

You never did answer my question, the darkness says. Did I live up to your expectations?

Sakura helps Ino pull herself to her feet, and Ino's hand tightens on the tentacle that is still sitting in her grip.

"I think you maybe exceeded them," Ino says, and her voice is sure, even though her hand on Sakura's tentacle is shaking.

Laughter echoes towards them from every direction.

I have to say, you exceeded my expectations as well.

Again, Sakura pulls them out of the path of the demon fox's attack.

It's slow.

He's playing with them.

She's not sure she can fight him if she also needs to protect Ino. (She's not sure how much longer she can fight him at all.) Does she need to protect Ino?

Well, the darkness says, the demon fox's grin unmoving as the entire space around them shakes with his voice. Any last words?

"Yes," Ino says.

The fox eyes before them tilt and his grin widens.

Well? he asks.

"Naruto?" Ino calls out into the darkness.

Her chakra jerks down another ten percent, and the darkness is suddenly gone from around them. For the first time, Sakura can that the hard surface beneath their feet is a massive plain of volcanic glass, perfectly flat as far as the eye can see, marred only occasionally by where Sakura and the demon fox had broken and pitted in their fight.

In the distance, Sakura can see the gate, and she can see Naruto behind it, frozen, hand raised against a barrier of orange chakra that vanishes a moment after the darkness does.

"We kind of need your help?" Ino says.

"Uh?" Naruto says, blinking at the sudden light, hand falling through the bars, but just barely managing to stop himself from stumbling through himself.

The demon fox vanishes into a blur, suddenly above them, jaws open. "Die," he sanrls, making Naruto lurch himself in with a cry of—"No!"

If only he wasn't too far away to do any—

Ino's chakra jerks another ten percent down, and Naruto is suddenly where they were a moment before (they are now about thirty feet behind it). The demon fox freezes, massive mouth feet from Naruto's head.

Naruto's legs give out from beneath him, but the demon fox doesn't move.

He makes no move to eat Naruto, his prison.

The distance between them vanishes, and Naruto catches a glance at Sakura's massive bulk before recoiling, cracks spreading across his face at the sight.

The demon fox snarls, pulling back and snapping his jaws closed, orange chakra arcing off his body and into Naruto, fitting itself into those cracks and sealing them closed.

"Sorry, Naruto," Ino says, and it almost sounds like she means it, reaching down and helping him to his feet (and coincidentally placing him directly between her and the demon fox, keeping her body in contact with him at all times). "This is not how I wanted this to go."

"You offer his life for yours?" the demon fox snarls. "Coward."

Sakura shifts her weight, hiding most of her limbs behind Ino so that Naruto won't keep breaking himself by accident from seeing her out of the corners of his eyes, but unwilling to fully fold herself down into a human form in case she needs to stop the fox from killing them once again.

"But really, what could I have expect from humans."

Still hidden behind Naruto, Ino says, "You know, my mama was friends with Kushina."

"My mom?" Naruto asks twisting back to Ino.

Ino nods.

"We have pictures of her on the mantle, her and daddy and a little baby me." She leans forward, and pokes the whisker marks Naruto's cheek. "She didn't have these."

Naruto frowns and pats at his face.

The demon fox, however, hasn't moved.

"In class, Naruto's always doing stupid stuff."

"Hey!"

"He gets hurt, sometimes. I'm sure he's broken his arm at least twice, but he never needs a cast." The demon fox digs his claws deep into the black glass beneath his feet. "I asked Mama, and she said that Kushina got broken arms all the time, because she did the same kind of stupid stuff that Naruto did, but she always had to get a cast."

Naruto frowns.

The demon fox doesn't move.

"She deserved what she got," he says.

"Hey! That's my mom you're talking about!"

"I wanted to meet you, to know. Why is Naruto special?"

The demon fox snorts. He raises a hand to squash them like ants, and—he hesitates.

"No," he says. "It—"

"Then kill him. Kill all three of us."

Everyone is silent, Naruto looking back and forth between Ino and the nine-tailed demon fox before them.

"I maybe kind of thought that it was because you like Naruto, and that meant you weren't as bad as they say," she looks guiltily back at Sakura, one of Sakura's few remaining tentacle still clutched tightly in the hand she doesn't have curled around Naruto shoulders, "but you are, so—why?"

Naruto looks back and forth between them, flinching whenever he catches a glimpse of Sakura out of the corner of his eyes.

"You're the reason I sometime get warm and tingly when I fall from things?" Naruto says, about two or three sentences late. "Wait, why?" He surges forward, out of Ino's arms.

Ino jerks after him—"Naruto, no—" but she's too late.

The moment he slips from Ino's grasp, the fox has slapped him away, tumbling hundreds of feet in a moment, and the demon fox's jaws are snapping closed on—nothing but glass, Ino and Sakura suddenly standing before the gates, half a mind away.

The universe jerks, and Ino collapses into Sakura's waiting limbs as her chakra begins to drain at a terrifyingly fast rate. (Behind them, the gates jerk away, jerk back, jerk away, jerk back, never present for long enough for Sakura grab them or pull them through it.)

"No!" Naruto calls futilely out from far enough away she shouldn't be able to hear his voice, but hears his voice all the same, as a massive orb of purple energy blasts towards Ino and Sakura, loosed from a tail the same moment Sakura and Ino vanished from beneath his jaws.

Before Sakura can pull Ino from its path, Naruto is before them, arms outstretched. This time, it isn't Ino's chakra who takes a dive—it's Naruto's.

The fox stumbles forward, one distressingly human hand outstretched, curling his hand like he's trying to catch the ball he fired towards them and slamming it into the ground. The ball of purple energy stutters and dies not two feet before Naruto's face, and this time, when the gate comes back to them, it doesn't leave.

Sakura throws a couple hundred tentacles out of the gate, wrapping a hundred or so around the bars, and then driving a couple more through the surface of Naruto's mind just in case. Even as she carries Ino out the gate with a couple thousand tentacles, she lunges for Naruto with the rest, only for the distance between them to suddenly erupt into miles. Ino slips through the gates, and the mind around her is plunged into impenetrable darkness.

Sakura carries Ino a good thirty feet before letting her drop to the sewer floor. Miles before the tentacles still curled around where Naruto had been only moments before, she can feel the chakra of the nine-tailed demon fox, Naruto pinned under a single paw, and she can feel him twists his head to face her and open his mouth.

Mirroring balls of energy manifest themselves all around her, materializing out of nothing—

What was it that Inoichi said when he had stared down Orochimaru?

We are the Yamanaka, Orochimaru. We walk the minds of others—we stand up against them in their own mind, where they are all but Gods.

The nine-tailed demon fox was never doing anything but playing with her.

Sakura slips back through the gates before twenty balls of purple energy hit her at once.

The moment she steps back through the seal, the nine-tailed demon fox slips out of her chakra sense, and Sakura is rendered fully blind once more.

She lets all of her limbs retreat to Ino's side and folds herself up into a human shape before slumping down into the sewer water beside her, exhausted, staring at the blank wall of darkness before them.

She hears nothing but silence coming from beyond it. Sakura thinks of Naruto's whiskers and all that Ino said—why Naruto, she had asked—and Sakura remembers another story her mother told her when she was altogether too young to hear it.

Once upon a time, the story went, there was a man, a very happy man, with a family of eight: a beautiful wife, a son of twelve, a daughter of ten, a daughter of eight, a son of five, and two beautiful newborn daughters. He was as happy as he'd ever been, and he prayed every night that his happiness could continue, that he could provide for this wonderful family he had built, but it was not to be.

On the seventh day of his thirty-sixth year, war came to the man's country, sweeping over the land like a tidal wave, and it dragged the man and his eldest son away in its grasp. For five long years the man endured hell, dragging his son from the jaws of death again and again, and in those five long years the man lived at least twenty, but lived he did—and his son lived with him.

Finally, the war receded, out like the tide, leaving bones and bodies in its wake, but the man and his son still lived. The man and his son walked on their own two feet, their horses long since dead, for three long weeks to return to their village, their family, their home, and their dread only increased with each salted, burned village they passed.

There was nothing left of their village when they reached it, all the houses they knew burned to ash, the people they loved naught but bone. The man and his son lost hope then, looking upon the desolation their village had become, their feet moving not out of any sense of hope but because they had lost the will even to stop, intent on moving until they found the sea and continuing on still.

However, upon cresting the hill in the barren wasteland that their village had become, the man and his son found a single house miraculously standing at the end of the lane. A single house, alone among its neighbors, untouched and beautiful, exactly as they remembered it, and lo and behold from within who came out the door but the man's beautiful wife, accompanied by the wonderfully grown figures of two of the man's daughters, round cheeked and smiling, with his mother's noses and his father's ears and his own eyes on display.

The man and the son fell to their knees where they stood and wept, and the woman and her two children did not vanish like a mirage but came to their side, comforting the man and his son, welcoming them home after so long gone. The woman told the man of the loss of two of their wonderful sons and two of their beautiful daughters, but the man could not even find it in himself to grieve them again, for he had already grieved them fully upon seeing razed village after razed village.

That night, for the first time in five years, the man and his son ate well, gorging themselves on meat, and it had been so long since they had last eaten meat that they could not notice that the meat did not taste like any meat they had tasted before. They were so blind and delirious with happiness that they did not notice that the woman never removed her head scarf even though they were inside, and they were so blind and delirious with happiness they did not notice that the two children kept their feet carefully tucked under them, hidden beneath their long skirts.

After that meal, the first good meal that the man and his son had had in so long, the man and his son collapsed where they sat, the man beside his children and the son upon his mother, the weariness of their three week trek and the agony of their five long years weighing them down as the woman and the children sung them a lullaby of feasting they had never heard in a language they didn't quite know. In their last moments, the last thing they see are their families beautiful faces, smiling widely with all of their teeth, so glad to finally have them home.

That night the man found himself drawn from his deep, blissful sleep by the low murmurings of voices, the whistling of the wind, and the smell of blood and viscera in the air. He smiled as he woke, recognizing the voice of his beautiful wife and wonderful daughters. He opened his eyes to his wife's beautiful smile, lips painted a deep red, the stars above her head like a crown, the moon shining silver on the blood red ears that poked up through her hair.

"Hi, Daddy," his children said, crouched on the other side of him, their hands and mouths sticky and red, skirts bunched up before them, revealing long, thin paws. "Mama said we had to wait for you to get up—we're so glad you're finally awake. Our older brother already woke up for us, but"—they set their red hands on his shoulder and smiled from ear to ear—"we're still So Hungry."

It was only then that reality finally penetrated the man's delirious veil of happiness and it was only then that the man finally registered the smell of blood and viscera, how out of place it should be in his home, and it was only then that the man registered the stars above him where there should be the roof he had built with his own two hands, and it was only then that man saw his wife's ears and his children's hind legs for what they were. The man scrambled away from the foxes before him, and their illusions finally dropped fully from his senses, revealing the world around him for what it was, revealing the home he had built as nothing more than ash, revealing the creature he thought to be his wife for the fox she was. Three sets of nine red tails waved before him, three sets of teeth, too wide and too sharp to be human, and the man feel to his knees in despair, for he saw not only the reality of what had become of his family, but the reality of what the foxes had already done to his son, what is left of his body lain not six feet from where he had been lying, his blood the red that had so stained their faces and hands.

The man wept for all that he had lost, not even attempting to flee as the family of foxes approached him, not even attempting to flee as their laughter danced along his senses, their grins growing every wider in the corners of his vision until they were splitting their faces grotesquely in two, nothing but gaping maws of teeth. They came to him on all fours like the beasts that they were, slow and languid, drinking in every last drop of his despair, his misery, his grief.

Only once it was spent did they reach him, the monster that had pretended to be his wife pushing him onto his back, and he did not even resist it, even though he could, even though in his five years at war he had killed five foxes when they had come for him and his son, even though he knew exactly how he could do it, because there was no point to it.

All the man did was make one last request—"If you kill me, beast," he said to the mother fox before him, "then please, at least have the decency to lift the illusions on your children—do not make me watch my own children eat me alive," for the illusion hiding the terrible teeth and the tails of the mother fox's young from his view had lifted, but the illusion of faces with his mother's noses and his father's ears and his own eyes had lifted not at all.

The mother fox laughed, loud and long and low before she leaned down beside him, her teeth bypassing the soft flesh of his neck to settle beside his ear before speaking, in his wife's wonderful, melodic voice—

"What's wrong, dear husband? Don't you recognize your own children?"

Sakura had been six when her mother had first told her that story. She hadn't been able to sleep for two weeks straight.

Sakura stares forward into the darkness, fear crawling up her spine.

Ino's arms close around her, pulling Sakura tight to her side. "I'm so sorry, Sakura," Ino whispers into her hair, and Sakura can feel the wetness of her tears against her hair, her ear. Ino's hand are shaking.

Sakura wraps her arms around Ino in turn, tries to offer comfort, but she can't look away from the bars before her.

"Sakura?" Ino asks her, voice a little hoarse, pushing herself off of Sakura and glancing back at the gates that still have yet to yield Naruto. "Are you worried about Naruto? Don't worry, there's really no way he'll hurt him—

"A fox would never harm a child," Sakura finishes for her, in that same sing-song cadence she remembers her mother saying, all those years ago.

Don't worry, Dear Husband—

A fox would never harm a child.

Ino hesitates before pushing herself to her feet and holding her hand out to Sakura. Sakura lurches forward to catch Ino's hand, and Ino pulls her up.

"What?" Ino asks.

Konoha has had three jinchuuriki. Mito, then Kushina, then Naruto.

Those whiskers—neither Mito nor Kushina bore them, but they became the jinchuuriki of the nine-tailed demon fox at ten and twenty-three, respectively.

A fox would never harm a child.

This is Fire. There are almost no Earth immigrants—her mother's family is one of the few. There was no one to tell Minato the consequences of giving a fox his infant son.

Sakura bottles up the memory of her mother telling her of the man and his son and passes it to Ino when she feels the brush Ino's mind against her own.

Ino blinks, and then the blood drains out of her face.

"What?" she says. "I… I've never heard any stories like that."

Yeah, Sakura feels like most people in Fire haven't.

Ino turns back to the darkness before them, her fingers tightening on their still-linked hands, and Sakura can feel the horror swirl a little deeper, a littler harder into her chakra.

Her chakra sings a song of what have I done?

"It's fine," Sakura lies. "He was sealed in Naruto for eleven years, how much could having him…" alone, behind the seal, matter?

Ino nods, even though Sakura couldn't even finish her stupid sentence as the seconds tick into minutes, and then—

Finally, the darkness parts before them, and Naruto emerges from within it. Unharmed, of course. (A fox would never harm a child.) At the sight of them, he smiles just a little bit too wide for his face, his teeth just a little too sharp. Behind him, nine shadows wave.

"Oh, I'm so glad you're okay!" Naruto says, rushing towards them, the nine shadows in the darkness behind him vanishing when he pulls himself free of the gates and crashes into them like they're friends (even though they're really not), his chakra as full of sunshine and stupid as it always has been. "I'm so sorry," he says, even though this was their stupid idea. "I'm so glad you're okay," he repeats.

Sakura hugs him back on instinct (even though he's Naruto), only barely processing his words, because Naruto's eyes—

There is no longer a cursed seal of false self on Naruto's eyes.