They don't tell anyone.
(How could they?)
(Everyone only just started trusting Naruto again.)
(Whether anyone should trust Naruto is something… Sakura doesn't want to think about.)
(What have they done?)
In the aftermath of it all, after Naruto has gone home, Sakura sits alone in her mind, Ino beside her in her real body, as Sakura… as Sakura stares up at a mind she no longer understands.
Even as her limbs regrow, first by the thousand, then by the million, and then by the billion, she looks up at her own mind, and whatever voice it was that had used to whisper into the back of her mind of how to slide herself through so she could take her body back—
It's gone.
For three long hours, she stares up at a mind she cannot even begin to comprehend. For the first time, Sakura is scared of her own mind.
Finally, three and a half hours after the nine-tailed demon fox tried to eat her alive, her mind finishes healing itself, and it all snaps into place, once again. The whisper in the back of her mind that told her of her own mind of its layout—its exact contents—returns to her.
But that feeling, it sticks with her.
That feeling…
It almost felt like her mind had belonged to someone else.
Just who did that whisper in the back of her mind belong to?
For the first time, Sakura feels like the answer is someone else.
(Naruto goes home, but Ino doesn't, and for those three hours, she sits at Sakura's side, hand clenched in hers, tears shining, unshed, in her eyes.)
(I'm sorry, she says to Sakura in a whisper she doesn't realize she's echoing through the flower connecting their minds.)
(I'm so sorry.)
When Sakura left Naruto's mind, she took a page out of the Hagoromo book, and left just a little bit of herself behind her.
(She didn't have much to spare, but she managed.)
She rises from the murky water after Ino has gone home, just after midnight, and the fox is already there, like he was waiting for her, like he has been waiting for the last ten hours.
He is smiling wide, wider than the width of the gate.
"I believe I owe you thanks, Haruno Sakura," he says, and the way he says her name—the way he all but revels in it—makes her sick. "If it weren't for you and that little telepath friend of yours, I may have never gotten my hands on my own kit."
Sakura's black blood turns to ice in her limbs.
He smiles wider, because of course a demon fox can read the body language of a creature which consists of nothing more than five tentacles, seven talons, and twenty mouths.
"What did you do to him?" Sakura asks in a twenty-mouthed scream that does not manage to break the sewer around her faster than the fox in the cage before her can heal it.
The fox smiles, just that little bit wider. "Don't worry, Sakura. I didn't hurt him." Wait for it— "A fox would never harm a child."
(She does not leave.)
(She lets her little pseudo body fall back apart, slips back under the water.)
(Sakura thinks she might understand, just a little, why the Hagoromo used the techniques they did.)
(If she has to, Sakura will use whatever tools she has access to to protect the people she cares about.)
It's fine, Ino says to her, in the days after.
He's the same he's always been, Ino says to her.
He's stupid and annoying, but he's not evil, Ino says to her.
The fox was just being a creep, Ino says to her.
Trust me, he can't lie to me, Ino says to her.
We'll watch out for him, Ino says to her.
We couldn't have turned him into a monster, Ino doesn't say.
This can't have been our fault, Ino doesn't say.
Sakura's memory is perfect, though, and her eyes cannot be deceived.
She knows what she saw.
They become friends with Naruto, and it's not just to watch him—
But it is at first.
(In the sewers of his mind lays five of her tentacles, seven of her talons, and twenty of her mouths.)
(Waiting.)
(Watching.)
Naruto learns to meditate (without their help), and they sometimes find him leaned back against tree, staring up at nothing, as his chakra and the infinite well of rage and hatred twitch and intertwine.
Within his mind, Sakura watches as Naruto slips into the demon fox's cage, lets the darkness swallow him whole without hesitation.
Whatever they say, she cannot hear it.
(We can't tell anyone, Ino repeats.)
(What have we done? she doesn't say.)
Every day, Naruto's teeth get just that little bit sharper.
That damn fox, he calls the fox.
That old bastard, he calls the fox.
Ugh, he's the worst, he complains.
All the while, his teeth get sharper, and the phantom tails Sakura sometimes sees behind him get just that little bit realer.
(They don't say anything to him.)
(Even as his teeth get sharper, even as those tails Sakura can see out of the corners of her eyes get realer—)
(They don't say anything to him.)
Ultimately, like everything, it becomes routine.
Naruto doesn't start going around digging people's livers out and eating them in front of them.
Sakura just has a new very annoying, very stupid friend.
It's fine.
(Kurama, Naruto says, once, like it's nothing.)
(That's his name.)
(The nine-tailed demon fox.)
(His name is Kurama.)
(It doesn't feel like nothing, though.)
In the boring stretches of missions, and when she's not training with Kakashi or Guy on actually useful things, or hanging out with Ino or being harangued by Naruto, she tries to figure out the only Hagoromo clan technique she has any interest in ever learning—direct delivery technique, she's decided to call it. How to send chakra directly to her tenketsu without passing it through her chakra pathways at all.
(Yes, yes, the real version is directly to your cells, but Sakura wants to start with little steps.)
It's hard.
It's just as hard as she expected it to be.
(Harder, actually.)
She gets chakra burns on her elbows and the sides of her shins and her hair when she screws up, accidentally lets the limbs that's carrying an entire pathway's worth of chakra touch one of her cells.
She doesn't understand why she's doing it, why she's bothering. The end goal is to be able to directly deliver chakra to her cells without having to go through her pathways, her tenketsu or her capillaries. This is theoretically useful because each step is slow—it takes time to get chakra from your reserves to your tenketsu through your pathways, it takes time for your tenketsu to dilate enough to pass the chakra you want through your tenketsu, and it takes time for the chakra to pass through your capillaries—but for Sakura it is only theoretically useful, because Sakura knows exactly how much chakra she can divert from her pathways to a tenketsu so she doesn't need to wait, her chakra control is good enough she can permanently hold her tenketsu at maximum dilation, and can push her chakra through her capillaries without having to wait: they don't burn out, no matter how fast you put chakra through them.
So: why?
Well, because the Hagoromo did.
That however, raises a new question—
Even as she masters the basics, masters the first form—direct delivery to her tenketsu—and she moves on to the real test—direct delivery to each and every one of her cells (each and every one of her trillions and trillions of cells)—
Why did the Hagoromo learn is so universally?
It's… so hard.
Why did the Hagoromo learn to do it so universally?
Sakura's smart, she's talented.
She mastered the Closed Loop Technique in ten days.
And still it feels so impossibly difficult to her.
Why was it so critical to them?
What is she missing?
(So she keeps trying.)
(It's not boring, she'll say that much.)
On her fifth day after maybe accidentally corrupting the jinchuuriki of the nine-tailed demon fox and only son of the now-dead fourth hokage she owes her life to, Sakura visits the Hyuuga compound to see Neji.
Time to start getting her life back, time to start getting her sense of normality back.
It can start with this.
Sparring with Neji.
When she walks up to the gates, as she has done tens, hundreds of times before, Kimiko is waiting for her, as she always is.
She is waiting for her, and her eye sockets are empty—
Just as they have always been.
(Or, well—empty is probably not quite the right word.)
(They are full of… nothingness. Her eyelids do not droop, no. It is just that where her eyes should be Sakura sees—)
(Nothing.)
(Not blackness, no.)
(Nothing.)
Sakura had been so young when she'd first met Kimiko.
No one around her had been surprised at the emptiness where her eyes should be, so Inner Sakura hadn't even thought twice about it.
(She had thought Kimiko had simply lost her eyes at some point in the past, even though it should have been so clear that she could see.)
(In a ninja village, is it truly so bizarre?)
Sakura is no longer that young, and now—now Sakura has two memories of that first meeting—
One in which Kimiko had eyes, and one in which she lacked them.
"Congratulations on your freedom, Sakura-san," Kimiko says, her voice as even as it always has been, smiling a small, gentle smile that crinkles the skin around the eyes she doesn't have (just as she has always smiled). "It's so nice to finally meet you."
She goes to Toumi, and stares into her blind eyes—webbed with cracks poorly mended, interwoven with the broken lines of the cursed seal of false self, just as they always have been—and Toumi tells her that it is one of their clan techniques.
More secret, more advanced than even Toumi's own technique—what she explains is called the Zenshingan.
A technique which cannot be taught, only discovered for yourself.
(When she says it, Sakura sees a hint of regret in her features, a bit of sadness, and Sakura wonders what, exactly, happened to Toumi that broke her eyes in the way they've been broken–)
(If she tried to do what Kimiko did, and failed.)
That day, Sakura does not spar with Neji.
(She'll work on getting her normality back… another day.)
Five days after that, Ino inexplicably invites Naruto to one of their sleepovers, and Sakura wakes to Naruto wedged back into the corner of her bedroom, one clawed hand clamped over his face, only a single eye visible, his chakra a choking, raging hunger.
What have they done?
He meets her eyes, his slitted red eye on hers, and she feels the fear in his chakra.
"What is happening to me?" he whispers. "Help me."
She takes him to the Forest of Death, kills the first spiked death moose she finds, and digs out its liver with a kunai that's really too dull for cutting open spiked death moose hide.
As she saws her way through it's skin, she remembers—
Foxes can't be reasoned or bargained with.
Foxes can never be tamed.
Even though any fox will regain its humanity if it abstrains from human flesh for a hundred days—no fox has ever escaped its beastly curse.
(The last one, at least, she knows isn't true—Kurama hasn't eaten anyone in a decade, and he's still his horribly, foxy self.)
Sakura gives Naruto the moose liver, and he eats it right out of her hand—raw and bloody.
When he is done, his eyes are blue again, and he is staring down at his bloody hands.
"What's happening to me, Sakura?"
He looks up at her, and his blue eyes are so wide, so trusting, like he cannot imagine a world in which Sakura doesn't know, or wouldn't tell him.
Sakura opens her mouth—and she hesitates.
That night, Sakura completes the direct delivery technique for the last joint on her left pinkie and something in her mind… shifts. She looks around at the labyrinth that is her mind, looks at the extent of a couple hundred billion of her limbs, all splayed out before her.
Her labyrinth is blood red on bone white, inherently two-toned, but some of the whites are brighter than the others.
Some of the reds are darker than each other.
Every bit of her that is a part of her pinkie is brighter, darker, realer.
She retrieves her limbs, curls fifteen talons around the base of a tentacle, and wrenches it free.
Her mind does not fall into incomprehensibility, so, lacking any better ideas… she eats the severed tentacle. When her teeth close on it, obliterating it, reducing it to less than nothingness, the labyrinth shatters into an incomprehensible maze.
All of it, that is, except for her pinkie. She sees one single path through the labyrinth before her.
Oh, she thinks.
That's why the Hagoromo learned this technique.
If you scatter fragments of your mind into the air, then you are opening them up for attack.
If someone destroys one of them, you can't have that utterly incapacitate you until your mind repairs itself.
Sakura wonders if that's the reason they learned it—
Or if they had simply been as disturbed as she was when they first lost a bit of themselves only to find their own mind, what should be their sanctuaries, rendered into incomprehensible nightmares.
There is a graduation that should be Ino's graduation, and Guy takes a team—a boy with no chakra named Rock Lee, a girl with more weapons than sense named Tenten (civilian-born, and all the more determined because of it), and, of course—Hyuuga Neji.
"Looks like I'll be taking your teacher," he tells her, smirking just a bit, when he knocks her down for the first time in two months in one of their regular spars.
He can see through her clones, now, using that same subtle dimness that Guy picks up on. He's learned to memorize every one of her petals, so he'll always know which one she is. He's learned to run his chakra through his muscles to speed him up, along his nerves to quicken his reflexes.
He has almost learned how to feint with his chakra.
His reflexes are already faster than hers.
She can feel him creeping up on her with every day that passes.
He is the most brilliant Hyuuga in a generation—maybe since the founding of the village—and she's… just Haruno Sakura.
No.
No.
She recalls all of her petals and charges him, straight on. He tries to slip around her punch, but she is already punching where he is dodging—he tries to take advantage of her stance, tries to block her tenketsu before she connects, but she doesn't need them. She plows straight on through, and when he spins, flashing white, she floods chakra through her system, plants her feet and puts her back into it, and she punches straight through that, too, the force of it cracking the stone tiles beneath her feet.
He goes down, tumbling across the Hyuuga sparring grounds.
Flat on his back, wheezing faintly, he laughs.
"I challenged Guy to a spar before I accepted him as my teacher," he says. "He beat me just like that." He coughs a short, bloody cough, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He staggers to his feet and straightens his back with a pained grimace. "I guess I'll have to start with you." He smiles, just a little too-wide, dropping down into the gentle fist stance. "Don't think you'll be able to beat me forever."
There's just a bit of the nasty, mean Neji still in him.
Thankfully, there's an awful lot of nasty, mean Sakura left in her, too.
Sakura smiles back at him. "Prove it."
(When she leaves, at just after sundown, Kimiko smiles after her, eyesockets as empty as ever—as filled with nothingness as always.)
("Good night, Sakura-san.")
(Sakura smiles back.)
("Good night, Kimiko-san.")
"Why?" Naruto is shouting at Kurama. He is inside the cage, but not as far as he usually is, for once well within Sakura's vision, well within earshot, and he has the nine-tailed demon fox's searing orange fur in his hands. (It does not burn him.) "Why did you do this to me?"
"Because you are my kit," Kurama says, flattening Naruto to the ground with one of his distressingly human shaped hands, just barely visible in the light. He bends down, too far, his face nothing but a smile and a pair of eyes. "I have made you strong."
"I don't want your strength!" Naruto shouts, pushing at Kurama's hand where it weighs heavily down on him.
"I don't care. My kit will not be a weak human—they are prey, brat. Look at them."
An illusion of her and Ino waver themselves into existence just on the fox's side of the bars.
Naruto glares fiercely up at Kurama for a long moment before slitted red eyes slip over to the illusions Kurama created, and she sees the horror in his face when he sees exactly what Kurama saw.
"No!"
Naruto slips out from under Kurama's paws in a boneless twist that no human could ever perform and shoves his finger up at Kurama.
"No!" he repeats, nine tails fanned out behind him for only a moment. "I'm Uzumaki Naruto—son of Namikaze Minato and Uzumaki Kushina—and I'm going to be the Hokage of Konoha! I'm going to protect everyone, believe it!"
"Protect them?" Kurama growls, flattening Naruto once again, his face turning down to face Naruto. "Fool—humans can never be trusted—they have hunted us for as long as we have lived—"
"Because you hunted them!"
"They are food," Kurama bellows back at him. He sweeps his hand back, and the darkness is torn back with it, revealing the massive plain of volcanic glass they are standing on. "This is what they made of our home! I was born the last fox, recreated in their image because humans opened a portal to the world eater, and it burned us all alive."
The glass crumbles, and the gate and Kurama and Naruto are tumbling down, down, down, down, until they are in a lush forest, a beautiful waterfall in the background.
The village comes alive behind him, foxes of all colors and sizes, human shaped, fox shaped, and Kurama shaped. Then, suddenly, Sakura sees a horrible creature—like a human on all fours, a single massive eye in the center of its face. It twists towards them, its grin a gaping hole of too many teeth.
With its lipless face, its gaping maw, Sakura can almost see it mouth something, even as its tails lash, the mountains in the distance erupt, and screams echo.
It almost looks like it is saying—
Found
You
Even long after the world is dead and silent, after the last fox is dead, the lava does not stop pouring forth from the mountains in the distance, more and more and more and more until the world is nothing but lava, and at the center of it that creature smiling a pleased, contented smile.
The world snaps back into a single plain of volcanic glass, and Naruto staggers into Kurama's leg.
"Your village's very founder—your beloved Hashirama—enslaved me, enslaved my eight siblings for his own image of peace, and even then, the humans are not satisfied—a long-dead man took my freedom from me once more, tore me from within your mother to raze your pathetic village to the ground."
Wait—
What?
"If only he had set me free, I would have done it and thanked him for the privilege, but humans have no honor or shame. There isn't a speck of their so-called humanity in a single one of them."
Kurama ends his tirade, and silence falls heavily between him and Naruto.
"And you want to protect them?" Kurama says, in a smaller voice, darkness once again consuming his mind. "They would kill you if they knew what you were."
"What you made me," Naruto says, in a small voice, staring down at his feet.
"Even your little friends only keep your secret because they know what will happen to them if the village finds out what they did to the village's precious dead hokage's son—your precious Haruno Sakura has left a fragment of herself here in your mind so that she can kill you if you ever step out of line."
Kurama points directly at where her limbs lie, inert and motionless in the shadows beyond the gate. Naruto looks back at her, horror written across his features, and Sakura finds the water and the shadow that had hid her gone.
She rises from the water, and cracks do not spread across Naruto's face from his unsealed eyes when he meets her gaze.
No, he mouths.
"Naruto—"
"They will inevitably turn against you," Kurama interrupts her. "The only way you can be safe is to kill them all—raze the village. I will give you the power to do it. Remove that seal, and you can have more than enough."
Naruto has not turned back to Kurama, his eyes still on her.
She won't let him. She's already hesitated one time too many.
If his mind can take the force of hers, then, well—
Sakura's real body lands in a crouch by Naruto's real body's side.
"No," Naruto interrupts, too-quietly. He turns his gaze up to the fox. "No, you're wrong."
"I'm wrong?"
"You're wrong about people. I'm going to protect everyone—even from themselves."
"Naruto—"
"And that includes you!" Naruto shouts up at him. "I'm going to free you! I'm going to find your eight siblings, and I'm going to free them, too!"
Kurama's massive red eyes blink stupidly in the darkness.
"What?"
There's a pause before Kurama continues—
"That will kill you, brat," he finally says.
"I'll find a way!" Naruto shouts. "Because even if you're mean and you tried to kill Ino and Sakura and you turned me into… whatever I am—"
"A fox."
"You're still the only one who was there for me, when I was little. I remember you—the warmth that rocked me when I was too scared to sleep, the tingles that healed my scrapes and bruises, the mom in my dreams—that was you, wasn't it?"
In the darkness, Sakura sees, for a moment, the figure of a woman, too beautiful to be human, with hair the color of blood and whisker scars carved deep into her cheeks. From a distance, she could almost be confused for Kushina.
Almost.
"I'm going to protect everyone," Naruto repeats, wrapping his arm around the phantom of a woman before him even as she turns back into Kurama's foreleg. "Everyone."
"You're a fool, brat," Kurama says.
"If that's what I have to be to fix the world," Naruto says, "then I'll take it."
He releases Kurama, walks out towards Sakura, red eyes slitted, two fox ears on his head, and nine blonde tails clearly visible against the darkness, and, for the first time, the sight does not fill Sakura with dread.
"I'll prove you wrong," he tells her. "I'll prove I'm not a danger to this village."
Sakura opens her mouths to say that she believes him, that she doesn't think he's a danger to the village, just that she…
She just couldn't take the chance.
Her real body sags next to Naruto's, back to the tree he is laying among the roots of.
With one hand, in a motion so casual Sakura doesn't think to stop it, Naruto reaches up to the seal on the gate above him, and rips it free.
Sakura's twenty mouths falls open and Naruto jabs a finger back at Kurama, torn seal still clutched tight in his hand.
"I'll take the power you offered me, old man," he says. "But I'm going to use it to fix the world, not break it."
And then his eyes roll up in his head and he collapses as the gates before him open, the impenetrable darkness of Kurama's mind billowing out like so much black smoke out into the sewers Naruto never bothered to renovate.
"Yes, I'll remember that," Kurama says, padding silently forward in the darkness until he is standing over Naruto. His massive red eyes meet hers as darkness curls around where Sakura stands in the sewers of what was once Naruto's mind. His smile widens. You should leave, the darkness says. I have not eaten in… far too long.
When Sakura hesitates, his smile grows ever-wider.
Or you could not.
Sakura hesitates, fist over Tsunade's office door.
"Just come in," Tsunade yells at her from beyond it.
Next time, tell me the truth the first time.
I'll take your side against the whole damn village if I have to.
Sakura pushes the door open.
"Sage's ballsack, Sakura, what the fuck did you do?"
(She didn't actually tell the truth.
(She said it was all her.)
(She suspects Tsunade knew, regardless.)
Guy comes to see her after graduation, after she's already heard the news from Neji.
"I'm sorry, My Most Youthful Pseudo-Student! I have greatly enjoyed our spars,, but I am afraid we must limit them! I have decided to pass my Youth on to Proper Students of my own! But Never Fear, Pseudo-Student! You will always remain dear in my heart! We can still Train Together!"
Kakashi is at her side, and he frowns. "Oh, there's no need, I think Sakura has learned more than enough from you."
He ignores Sakura's wave of killing intent, dodges her (very subtle) punch at his kidney.
"What is this, Eternal Rival? Do you not wish for me to train your Most Adorable Student any longer?"
Kakashi shrugs and body-flickers away when Sakura tries to stomp on his stupid foot. She glares at him, before looking up at Guy, who is frowning.
"What about you, my dear Pseudo-Student! Do you still wish to train with me?"
Duh.
Obviously.
She nods.
There is a flash of something inhuman and feral in his smile before he smothers it with his nice-guy smile.
"Then we needn't concern ourselves with my least Youthful Eternal Rival! Once a week at the third training ground!"
With that, and without saying which day of the week, or what time, he vanishes in a cloud of leaves.
She turns and glares at Kakashi.
"Don't look at me like that. You try doing three challenges with Guy a week for a year and a half. I had to get out of it somehow."
She keeps glaring at him.
"Please," he says, flipping a page of Icha-icha, his chakra barely twinging when he flicks his gaze to her. "After you hit him for the first time, you were stuck with him. At this point, not even the Hokage could convince him not to train with you, if you wanted."
Sakura smiles, just a little.
Naruto's eyes when he wakes, three days later, are still red.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she can now always see his ears and his tails.
(No one else notices.)