Update:
It doesn't work.
Sakura sits in Training Ground Three, back to one of the three posts, and frowns at the pond before her.
She's been trying to reproduce that snap-forward for the last week, to no avail.
She's succeeded once.
Once.
In a week.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more she tries to focus on it, the harder it is.
To control the autonomous is not so easy, perhaps unsurprisingly.
It's… slippery.
How could you control what your mind automatically thinks your location is?
See, this is why she didn't want to stare down at the yawning abyss of "where does your real body go when you're in the transformation jutsu".
The yawning abyss stares back.
It's all slippery nonsense that doesn't make sense.
Things she doesn't understand and—she's asked everyone she can think of, including the Hokage, Jiraiya, Shouko, Toumi—heck, even Shikaku and Chouza. (Not Inoichi.)
(He still has not apologized.)
(Sakura is not bitter.)
No one even knew what she was talking about. But Tsunade had come back to her after three days, and given her a scroll written in a hand that had once been horribly familiar to her.
She is not the first person to be perplexed by the nature of the transformation technique—a D level space-time jutsu that is all the more incomprehensible the longer anyone thinks about it.
Orochimaru, at least, had been puzzled by it once upon a time, too.
He had given up.
She stomps the ground in irritation.
What does she do?
She lets her chakra flood her body, lets it flow down her body and into the ground, forming into a tight web, and slams her fist forward in a deafening boom that shakes the earth and bows the trunks of about twenty feet of trees without breaking them.
She's so close! She can see it, she can taste it!
Stupid, slippery, nonsense—
Don't sharpen all your kunai—
Sharpen one until it can cut the world in two.
"What does that mean?" she shouts at the empty training ground around her. She twists, and drives her fist into the ground. "Shannaro!"
The ground beneath her fist explodes.
Okay.
She's had her tantrum.
Developing new techniques isn't her strong suit.
She's not a researcher like Orochimaru.
She's a good student—if it's in a scroll, she's confident she can learn it.
But develop a new technique—she needs to see it first.
She needs to…
She drags herself out of her body and down into the into open, gaping mouth of infinite teeth of a massive red fox (not quite Kurama) that her mind has currently decided to imitate. She finds the tooth that holds memory of the first time she performed her technique, drags herself back to the front of the mouth even as it gnashes closed around her, eternally trying to devour her, and she takes a big bite of one of her tentacles.
The world devolves into mostly-incomprehensible chaos, and she loses another couple thousand tentacles as she drags herself through the infinite, every changing mass of sharp, bloody teeth as they eat her alive.
She finds that tooth again, and burrows herself inside of it, reliving those five seconds she's seen all too many times before.
(As she does, a little bit more of her mind sets itself into comprehensibility behind her.)
She's thinking about this wrong.
She's trying to understand the technique. She's trying to understand how kinesthetic whatever whatevers work.
She doesn't need to understand it.
All she has to do is to imitate it.
She watches herself perform this pseudo-teleportation technique once more.
Ten times more.
Twenty times—
Wait.
Her mind self is fully healed when she drags herself out of that tooth and over to the grain of sand that contains her memory of her second successful usage of her pseudo-teleportation technique.
Yes—
Yes.
She drags herself back into her body to perform a simple transformation technique.
Over and over again she performs it, breaks it, performs it again—
She smiles, closes her eyes, and focuses.
Very carefully, she transforms herself into a petal two feet behind her.
See—
Everyone knows the that the transformation jutsu has two parts—the first is the initiation, a burst of chakra to change the shape, and the second is the holding, a skin of chakra which covers the user and holds them in the shape they've turned into.
But see, what Sakura can see now is that the second part of the jutsu is also made up of two parts.
One is a static pattern of chakra, and the other ever-moving.
Or well, it is except for the two times Sakura successfully performed her pseudo-teleportation jutsu.
That time, both patterns were static.
If she's right, one of those is to hold the shape of the transformation jutsu, and the other is to manage the position the user will take when the jutsu breaks.
She doesn't know how to manage that second part (second part of the second part?), the way chakra patterns affect the real world is incomprehensible at its core, but—
Well, she doesn't have to.
She performs the transformation technique, and, as easily as breathing, she holds both patterns static.
It's trivial.
She could have done this the day after she learned the transformation technique for the first time.
(Well, maybe not the first time.)
She breaks the transformation jutsu, and teleports two feet forward, into exactly the position she was in when she started the transformation jutsu.
She smiles.
Why bother with this mental image crap—
She has chakra control.
(She then does it one hundred more times in a row, just to make sure she's got it.)
(Look—having control of her mental image or whatever would let her move in any direction, yeah, sure, but this is a damn sight better than where she was this morning.)
(Yes, she does try to futz with the second pattern.)
(The results give her enough jutsu backlash to leave her retching on the ground for an hour.)
(She does it all day the next day and the day after that, because it's the weekend, and she can't spar with Kakashi until Monday.)
(She only fails twice.)
At her next spar with Kakashi, she charges Kakashi without warning, the moment he enters the clearing, his footsteps still light with the guilt of punching her in the face.
It makes him slow.
It makes him stupid.
It makes him predictable.
She ducks a fireball jutsu, easily dodges a chidori without a feint, and swaps with a petal over his hiraishin target because he made the mistake of making a decision before entering not-space.
She slaps the back of his head in retaliation, and he smiles ruefully.
"Alright, alright—"
He shakes his head, puts away his book, and raises his hands, his black eyes going cold.
"You want to spar that badly, adorable student? Then—"
She interrupts him with a wild charge, but this time, he is waiting for her, body flickering forward to meet her. Sakura uses a web to drag herself down under a baby-Chidori, driving an elbow into Kakashi's stomach, which he dodges with a body-flicker straight back. He destroys all of her closest petals with a whirlwind of tiny wind blades that she can't move her petals to avoid, so she gives chase on foot, and he spins through three hands seals to spark an inferno around himself that has her leaping away.
As she does, she transforms into an exact henge of herself three feet to her right, holding both patterns over her body in tight control. The inferno clears, and Sakura closes the distance, side-stepping a Chidori after correctly identifying his path, dancing under a water dragon, almost getting him with a punch to the abdomen, but he body flickers back—his chakra singing three different paths, and—
There it is.
Sakura knows he'll go left, so she goes right until they are exactly three feet apart, and then breaks her transformation, depositing her directly in front of him, fist an inch from his flak jacket.
He does not react in time, and crumbles to the ground with a pained gasp.
Sakura looks down at him in stunned silence. Then she lifts her hands up in celebration. She jumps a little.
"I did it!" She jumps a lot, swapping with a petal she blew a hundred feet up in the air, and screams as she falls.
She hasn't caught him like that since he stopped telegraphing which Hiraishin seal he's going to.
Kakashi doesn't have Guy's monster-smile. When she does things like this, he doesn't smile. Instead, there's a considering gleam in his eyes.
"Oh," he says after a moment, chakra spiking with understanding. "Okay."
He is not quite managing the inflection, his expression flat. It takes a moment for the Anbu to drain out of his expression and he stands, stretching with a wince.
"You know what they say," he says with an obnoxious eye-smile, "if you only do it once—it's just luck."
He performs three signs in rapid succession, and Sakura is launching herself towards him to avoid the water dragon that is very suddenly crashing down upon her, leading her directly into the path of his (baby) chidori, which she correctly predicts the path of but does not successfully capitalize on when he vanishes into a hiraishin and blows a fireball the size of her bedroom at her.
She vanishes into a petal two feet behind her, swaps towards him, and transforms herself back into a human shape instead of breaking her transformation. He drives forward with a second chidori, and when she counters it, his chakra sings a song of three different paths behind him. This time, he's going straight back.
She gives chase, but he is, as always, faster than she is.
All the worse for him.
She breaks her transformation as he begins a hiraishin, and—
Her punch cleaves through nothing as a kunai presses coldly against the back of her neck.
Sakura first looks down at the hiraishin anchor directly beneath her feet before turning back to Kakashi where he is standing behind her, kunai pointed at where her skull meets her spine.
He eye-smiles at her.
"Be careful, Sakura," he says. "You're getting predictable."
Stupid.
Kakashi.
Stupid.
Not even a real ninja.
She'll get him.
That night, after practicing her new transformation jutsu a couple hundred times, Sakura takes exactly ten percent of her chakra and infuses it into a tree branch.
She gives the tree branch to Gamami, and Gamami stabilizes it.
Sakura leaves the village, runs for two hours.
She sits on a tree branch in the middle of a forest in Fire, not a single human being for miles, sticks herself to the branch beneath her (costing her 0.5% of her reserves), and slips down into her mind, leaving five percent of her chakra in her coils to keep her body alive.
She calls natural energy to her, and spins her chakra around it until it erupts into chakra.
Two minutes later, her chakra stops regenerating.
In her tentacles, she has eighty-four and a half percent of her chakra reserves.
No more, no less.
(Ten percent of her chakra is left with gamami, five percent is in her coils, point five percent is sticking her to the tree.)
(It's all accounted for.)
(It's all exactly accounted for.)
Looking at the pink natural energy dance over her tentacles, straining and trying to slip from her ever-changing grasp, trying to turn her body to stone, Sakura feels cold.
How can it know?
And also—
What is natural energy, again?
Sakura remembers, a lifetime ago, hearing the voice of natural energy, when it had almost killed her. She remembers how it had whispered to her of how good it would be to be one, to be together at last. She remembers the voice, like a million voice singing in perfect, wonderful harmony.
What is natural energy, again?
(It's the energy of the natural world.)
(The chakra of the earth itself.)
(Then why did I hear it talk to me? Sakura asks Shima, when she convinces Jiraiya to summon her.)
(Why does it hate lies?)
(Why does it care how much chakra I have?)
(Shima doesn't know.)
(It just does.)
Three weeks after Sakura gets Kakashi with her new remote henge trick once before failing to get him with it for the rest of the day (weaker than Guy Sakura's butt), she layers two transformations on top of each other.
(Four simple patterns.)
(It's almost hard.)
She breaks one, and moves two feet right.
She breaks the second, and moves two feet forward.
Sakura smiles.
Is everyone's chakra limited? Sakura asks Tsunade one day.
Tsunade looks up from the papers before her and meets Sakura's eyes for a long moment.
Yes, she finally says.
Why?
We don't know, Tsunade says. No one has ever been able to figure it out.
Each transformation is exponentially harder than the last. Maintaining six different patterns over herself is actively difficult.
Maintaing eight different patterns over herself makes her feel very distinctly like she's going insane.
It's alright, though—
It's nothing she hasn't managed before.
Another day—
Do you know how I could get more chakra? Sakura asks, feeling her limits crawling up on her every day.
(What can you do, with chakra control alone?)
Of course, Tsunade says, barely lifting her gaze from the forms before her, you just have to take someone else's.
Sakura remembers how Orochimaru's chakra had increased, just a little, after he had fully possessed her.
She remembers that—and she remembers how she had fought him before he had fed someone else's soul to the shinigami to seal her away.
Five simultaneous henges seems to be her limit—more than that, and she starts to lose control, and when she does, things get real bad real quickly.
(Puking your guts up for two hours from jutsu backlash is deeply unpleasant.)
She can teleport in five different (predetermined) directions, and—
She still can't beat Kakashi.
She feels like she hit a phase change—
She no longer feels like she's fighting "Kakashi, teacher", but "Kakashi, jounin."
She understands why Kakashi is flee on sight or kill on sight in every village but Fire (including the purportedly allied Sand).
Stupid—
Not even a real ninja—
When she had said that where Guy has brute strength and durability, and Kakashi had speed—Sakura learns that she forgot a key aspect of Kakashi's strength.
Where Guy has brute strength and durability, Kakashi has speed and sheer, raw brilliance.
She knows his sharingan can't see through her transformations, she knows that he cannot see the future, she knows that he cannot read her mind—
But every time they fight it feels so very much like he can do all of those things.
Gamami is kind enough to volunteer to help Sakura.
She holds out her hand, and gathers a tiny little orb of chakra an inch or so above her palm.
Sakura reaches out for it, takes control from Gamami, forms it into the single twisted seal for Sakumo's transformation technique, and—
Sakura wakes up two days later in the hospital.
There is a deep sort of guilt in Tsunade's eyes when Sakura raises her gaze to meet Tsunade's.
She does not tell Sakura she is forbidden from trying again, because they both know it won't work.
Instead, she holds out a hand, and summons a tiny slug to it.
"Tell her what you told me?" Tsunade asks the slug.
The slug turns its eyestalks to Tsunade and then turns them back to Sakura.
"The first of the restrictions," the slug says, each word like a Guy punch to the brain, pounding the truth of it straight through Sakura's skull, "is that of self-reliance.
"No inverted mind can use chakra that is not its own, no matter how it has been obtained—through common theft or blood sacrifice—lest it suffers the displeasure of the universe itself."
(The… first?)
Of course, Sakura should have already known this.
She remembers what happened when she tried to use Kurama's chakra.
When Sakura gets home, she sits on her bed, sets her face into her hands, and cries.
Gamami is at her side, adorably toad hand on her shoulder.
"What can I do," Sakura asks, "with chakra control alone?"
(If she uninverted, Sakura could do it.)
(She could borrow Gamami's reserves, use her as the world's cutest chakra battery.)
(Gamami would let her in a heartbeat.)
(She doesn't.)
The next morning, Sakura takes a deep breath, and sets her mind to training, once again.
She drags her focus back from the horizon, back from the limit she is worried she is rapidly approaching.
She hasn't hit it yet.
She can still grow.
As she slowly gets stronger and stronger and stronger still—
There's Ino.
They still train together, talk about Sakura's missions and Ino's classes while they pick flowers for her family's flower shop, but now, also—
When there's no flowers to pick, or Ino's grumpy because of class, or Sakura's tired from a mission, they don't lie around on Ino's bed and talk.
Or Sakura's bed.
They talk inside of Sakura's mind, as Ino's chakra slowly drains away to keep Sakura's mind from killing her.
As Ino speaks, she frowns and makes faces at Sakura's insides, like looking at it for long enough will make it make sense.
It never seems to.
She looks down at the little rock that her flower is planted on, and she isn't even a little bit smug.
She doesn't change her expression at all.
It's okay.
She flinches when Sakura's mind sometimes randomly inverts, when a sun blooms from a pebble, when the talon of Sakura's she's hanging onto vanishes, but.
She's still Ino.
She still looks at Sakura like—you look prettier this way, anyways.
She still gives Sakura secret little mischievous smiles when she suggests how they should dye Naruto's jacket pink, or how she thinks her dad's new desk is really ugly, maybe they should set that one on fire, too, and—
Sakura hunkers all of herself down next to Ino, spread across most of her mind, and it's almost like they're in Ino's room, or in Sakura's room.
Except, of course, Ino is still slowly killing herself.
(Sakura hasn't asked Inoichi if he knows about this.)
(The only way Inoichi could stop her is to stop her from meeting Sakura entirely, and pluck the flower from her mind, or permanently seal whatever it was he sealed onto Ino's hand the last time he decided he didn't want them to see each other.)
(The thought of it terrifies Sakura.)
Each time Ino drops into Sakura's mind, the drain on her reserves as she constantly heals the damage Sakura's mind does to her is a little less, but the world around her doesn't seem to get any more comprehensible.
She never seems to learn to understand Sakura's facial expressions, how when she wiggles the ends of her tentacles just so she's smiling, and when she bounces the point all of her tentacles meet up and down she's blushing and how when she's rolling and inverting her talon joints she's laughing.
It's a rainy, drizzly day when Sakura brings Kakashi to his knees three times to his ten.
He is smart, but so is she.
Every day, she's getting smarter faster than he is.
Each fight is a horrible, mind-twisting battle of predictions and wits that leaves her brain wrung out like a bad towel at the end of it, but she's winning them more and more often.
(She has yet to break Guy's arm for a second time.)
(She now kind of understands Kakashi's weird respect for Guy.)
She's close, but she needs something else.
He uses a shadow clone sometimes when they're sparring, which is really unfair, because, well—Sakura can't seem to do any clones at all (she's pretty sure it's the mind inversion somehow).
(This thing she thought was supposed to make her stronger seems to only be making her weaker, instead.)
(At the very least, her mind is now perfectly comprehensible, whether her mindself is whole or not.)
(No revelation comes with this knowledge.)
(The direct delivery technique, and… nothing to gain from it.)
(Sakura doesn't want to go back in a cage, but also…)
(Also.)
So, Sakura's been thinking.
Chakra control falls off quadratically with distance. It is four times harder to control your chakra when it is an inch away than it is when it is two inches away. Sakura's not entirely sure on the reasoning, that square unsettles her, (shouldn't it be a cubic?), but whatever.
Falls off as the square.
Sakura's chakra control is really good. She has reasonable control out to like… four inches?
Look, it's impressive.
Most people have lost basically all but the most basic control of their chakra at like half an inch.
However, despite that, clones exist.
(Physical clone techniques, that is—water clone, earth clone, shadow clone, etc.)
Clones exist, and clones can manipulate chakra, regardless of how far they are from the user.
That's weird, right?
Sakura's pretty sure that's weird.
Okay, so, update:
People with uninverted minds obviously cannot control two bodies at once.
(Look she forgets how uninverted minds work, sometimes, sue her.)
So clearly the clone must somehow split their minds.
She's tried to talk to Naruto about it, but apparently he'd never even thought about it.
Can you remember the things your clones do? she'd asked him and he'd been like
Umm? I think so?
Sometimes Sakura hates Naruto a lot.
She has him make a clone, goes and hides in the forest, and tells it a number before popping it perhaps a little more meanly than she has to.
Naruto remembers the number.
So: yes, clones split the mind of the user. (Or they copy the mind of the user? Unclear.) When the clone pops, the user receives all memories and experiences of the clone. In this sense, in fact, it is a bit of a blessing that shadow clones just pop when they receive any damage.
Sakura imagines getting the memory of your brutal death mid fight would be… challenging.
Okay, so clone techniques split the minds of the users.
Sakura would like to return to her original question:
Clones have chakra control (the same chakra control, in fact, she tested with Naruto), regardless of their distance from the user.
That's still weird, right?
That means that chakra cares about proximity to a… soul, somehow.
Sakura feels like that's weird.
So, if chakra cares about proximity to a soul, then doesn't that mean she should be basically incapable of controlling chakra at her feet?
Presuming her soul is a point, of course, the quadratic fall-off of chakra control should mean that either she should be able to control chakra in a sphere that includes her hands and her feet.
This is obviously untrue.
Chakra is legendarily difficult to control around your feet, and easy to control in your hands. Sakura's pretty sure this is just because people mostly manipulate chakra near their hands rather than manipulating it in their feet or the middle of their backs.
Through an afternoon of experimentation, Sakura determines that, in fact, chakra control seems to be roughly constant at every point on her skin.
Hmm.
We're still in weird territory, right?
Sakura feels like this is still weird.
Now, you might ask yourself:
Who cares?
Answer:
Sakura.
(Obviously.)
Critically, Sakura cares because she cannot perform any clone technique.
And for once, it's not because she doesn't have the reserves for it.
She doesn't have the reserves for a shadow clone, yes.
But she does have the reserves for a water clone.
Like, not the reserves for uh…
Three.
But enough for two.
But the jutsu just doesn't work for her.
She performs it exactly as Kakashi demonstrates it for her, exactly as every scroll she can find describe it.
He frowns at her, and she gets the creeping sensation that this is her inverted mind, screwing her again.
He is the one who contacts Jiraiya and confirms—
He lost the ability to use all of his physical clone techniques when his mind inverted.
…what?
Okay, so it's obviously something about how it divides or copies the mind of the user, right?
Sakura and Jiraiya sit down and talk about it, including Sakura's questions about chakra control.
Stupid, basic questions that had Jiraiya looking like she'd just shocked his belief system down to its core.
He presses a hand to his head and frowns—
What? he asks himself.
What the fuck?
Sakura goes over the Yamanaka's horrible, horrible file on their genocide, and there's something that sticks in her mind.
Hagoromo made little mines out of their shredded minds, but when she watches these memories through someone else's eyes, she notices they're bubbled in chakra.
No matter how far the user is, those chakra bubbles seem to be completely unaffected.
Somehow, these fragments of the user's mind is letting the hagoromo control chakra at truly incomprehensible distances.
(The reason the little mind-mines are bubbled in chakra is because they're very delicate, and without them, the mind-mines would get shredded by even the smallest wisps of chakra.)
(And natural energy is, in so many ways, just something else's chakra.)
She performs her own experiments, for all that she has no interest in making horrible little mind-destroying mines, and finds—
It's not easy—it's in fact harder in proportion to the proportion of the mind present—one percent of you, one percent of your chakra control.
But that might as well be infinitely better than the quadratic fall off than Sakura has been dealing with so far.
See, Sakura can make a Sakura-sized water dragon. (It takes like a quarter of her chakra reserves, but she can do it.)
And she only needs like ninety… eight percent of her limbs to control her body and fight at full effectiveness.
(Shut up, it's impressive.)
See: Sakura's body is a perfect match for her mind. For every part of her body, there is a corresponding set of limbs that she needs to thread into it to have proper control.
So she should have to use all of her mind to control all of her body.
But direct delivery technique means she doesn't need a chakra system.
And turns out, that took about… two percent of her mind.
(Finally, the direct delivery technique is good for something.)
This mean she has two percent of her limbs free, for… whatever she wants.
Doesn't sound like a lot, but Sakura would like to note she has somewhere between a trillion and a quintillion limbs at any given time.
So she has a truly mind-boggling number of limbs, she can put into, well—
Sakura feeds them all into her little mini water dragon, walks all the way across the city, and then has it blow itself up with a detonation of chakra that would put a dent in even Guy.
(Not one percent of what she can actually put out, because it breaks too easily, the force destroying it before she can finish expelling the chakra.)
(But still way more than anything she's managed before.)
She smiles.
It's a rainy, drizzly day.
A couple days after Sakura figured out how to use the mini lightning dragon jutsu.
A couple days after Sakura blew up two percent of her mind to make a point.
Sakura stomps irritably on the ground as she waits for Kakashi to come. She looks at the pond, and draws out her mini water dragon.
She winces against the twenty-percent drain on her reserves.
She punches it, and it explodes, about ninety percent of its chakra getting sucked back into her.
She makes another, and a couple billion of her limbs into it, using them to set up a chakra system within it. Helpfully, she can trivially transfer her chakra from her actual body to her little water dragon, because direct delivery doesn't much care for the actual mechanical realities of the world around it.
She marches the water dragon over to a tree, grows a chakra web around its form, winding all the way down its body and into the ground beneath it.
She has it lunge forward and drive its nose into the tree.
The web breaks somewhere about halfway down the clone's body, full force of a tree-shattering punch rippling through the water it finds there, and the water dragon explodes.
Those billion or so of her limbs very suddenly cease to exist.
Sakura breathes in the chakra it released, remakes the water dragon.
Theoretically, she's pretty sure if she gets this chakra web right, she can distribute the force entirely around the water dragon, and punch at full strength through it.
(Or well, proportional to the proportion of her limbs within it, but the limiting factor is the chakra web blah blah blah.)
She threads her limbs through it once again, and has it slither back of the tree.
Nose-punches the tree again.
The tree explodes!
Woo!
The water dragon also explodes.
Boo.
She makes another. Threads herself through it, marches it over to a tree, and—
An overwhelming malice slams into her, shattering her concentration and the water dragon in front of her.
An overwhelming malice she has only felt from one creature before.
She turns right, and although she can't see it, she can feel it.
Kurama.
She can feel Kurama's chakra.
Has—
Has Naruto given in? Has he—
Then, just like that, it's gone.
Without the overwhelming malice, and with all of her attention focused on it, she can feel Jiraiya and Tsunade, outside the walls of the village, Naruto on his back before Tsunade, who has her right arm outstretched, one finger out, having clearly just flicked his forehead hard enough to throw him onto his back.
Kakashi appears beside Sakura.
"What's wrong?"
"Naruto. Naruto just used Kurama's chakra."
Kakashi does not look surprised.
"Only some of it," he says.
It sure felt like all of it.
That day, she makes a mini lightning dragon, which can take his Suffocating Horrible Jutsu all day, and she gets Kakashi down, five times to his ten.
He's gotten better at faking a Hiraishin, but there are two of her (kind of), now. Two sets of eyes. It's weaker than her, but hey—
So is Kakashi.
The little mini lightning dragon's nose punch can incapacitate him just fine.
Sakura grins down at him when he falls, and he doesn't grin back at her (because he's still not Guy), but he nods just a little.
Five times to his ten.
Just a little bit more.
Sakura will turn twelve in four months.
She wants a promotion as a birthday present.
A couple of weeks after that, Ino's flower stirs—
Incoming, Ino yells through it—
And something that is very much not Ino but also more Ino than Ino has ever been emerges from the flower, exploding out from it in a cloud of limbs.
"Hi," she says, in a beautiful melody of a million mouths speaking in disharmony.
"Hi," Sakura says, and they discover that hugs as a quadrillion and three limbed beings and infinite limbed beings, respectively, are pretty tricky.
It's really unfair that Ino is still prettier than her, even when she's a cloud of limbs.
Ino sees her jealousy in her elbows and her canines and laughs at her, wiggling and squirming in a laugh. Sakura can see in Ino's tongue-teeth and seeing-tentacles Ino's fondness for her, and it causes about sixty-two of her stars to collapse into white dwarves.
Ino looks around her, at Sakura's everything, all laid out for her to see, and Sakura is not overwhelmingly consumed with the desire to force her out of her mind and also maybe eat her alive, like she was with Shima and Fukasaku.
She finds Sakura's Sasuke-murder rock, snorts.
"You better not," she says, dead serious, and Sakura nods.
She's not going to go murder an academy student.
No matter how good it would make her feel.
It's wrong.
She won't.
Definitely.
No.
Ino finally looks down at Sakura's Ino rock, and Sakura can see the smugness in every single one of her limbs, as present as her now-staggeringly-complicated chakra system, here in her true form, just as it was in her fake mind-body.
The number of tenketsu studded across her body is as ever-changing as her limbs, and Sakura is mesmerized by it.
"Come on," Ino says, hooking two twenty-jointed talons around two of Sakura's tentacles and sending them both tumbling down through the flower beneath them.
Ino's mind is brighter than hers is, more stars, more light that comes from nowhere—on one side of the rocks, and not on the other.
Ino is spread across half of her mind-universe, but all of her eyes are pointed down, where Sakura has gathered all of her feet, because she didn't want to go scrambling and tumbling down into nothingness. She spreads her limbs out across Ino's mindscape, only scrambling for purchase once or twice, but Ino's teeth shine in irritation (she wanted Sakura to go tumbling into the yawning void below them) even as she rolls her tentacles in laughter.
Sakura looks down, and sees the rock she was standing on.
In retrospect, it's obvious.
This is Ino's Sakura rock.
Except, it's not a rock.
It's a sun. A small sun, only two, three times wider than the flower itself.
It tells Sakura how much Ino loves her, and behind it, she can see the black hole not quite sucking up more star material than it makes for itself, Ino's…
Ino's furious raging jealousy.
Of her.
Sakura turns all of her seeing tentacles and teeth to Ino, and the chirality of Ino's talons pop back and forth in embarrassment.
"You have a Sasuke-murder rock!" she says. "This isn't weird! Don't look at me like that!"
Sakura looks away, spreading her eyes over the rest of Ino, the asteroid belt of her attraction to Sasuke, and the gas-giant of her love for the village, and the rings around that that are her combined irritation for and love for her father. (The deep-seated fear of what he will do when he finds out she did this.)
(Oh, Sage, what did Ino do.)
And, woven in everywhere, is a faint sense of superiority that's slowly getting sucked away into the dual black holes of Sakura and Sasuke-Neji-Shikamaru.
"So!" Ino shouts, her voice breaking apart some lesser planetoids and some blank, boring rocks the size of galaxies. "Sasuke got first in shuriken class again. I think he's training more, just to beat me."
She gives a full-bodied pissed-off undulation because just because she likes Sasuke does not mean she's okay with losing to him now that she's gotten a taste of victory.
Beneath her, hidden on the inside of a rock, is her fear of exile, when her clan finds out what she's done. Tucked inside of it is her fear of getting her mind wiped clean, like the Yamanakas used to do to skin-crawlers.
"Gross," Sakura offers, and Ino gives an aggrieved thousand-mouth sigh.
"Right? Boys." She huffs, and then her eyes catch on her Sasuke-asteroid-belt and she gives out a little dreamy sigh before remembering actually, she's angry with him right now. "He's being trained by the Uchiha clan head! That's not fair!"
Sakura does not mention that Ino is also being trained by her clan head, but Ino sees it in one of her elbows anyways.
"Yeah, but we're just the Yamanaka—" Ino says, insulting her clan for the first time in her life, Sakura is pretty sure, "—his is the Uchiha! Like—I heard Danzou had a whole bunch of sharingan implanted in his chest and Uchiha-sama ripped them out of him with her bare hands."
Sakura gives out a joint-inverting laugh, and tries not to think about the black hole beneath (well, now above) her.
(In the back of her mind, she is still repeating—)
(What did Ino do what did Ino do what did Ino do—)
(What is Inoichi going to do to her when he finds out about it?)
Sakura returns from a mission near the cloud border, and finds Jiraiya lounging on the couch in Tsunade's office.
She hasn't changed yet, and her clothes got pretty wrecked in the fight. Her clothes, and her replacements. The back of her dress has basically been entirely torn away, and her flak jacket is in two pieces in her hands.
She does not blush.
Not even when Tsunade says "Making a fashion statement, Sakura?"
She kicks Tsunade's desk hard enough to send it skittering back into her chest, and she laughs.
"What happened to—" Jiraiya says, twisting to look at her back and then falling silent.
Tsunade's smile slips off her face.
"What is it, Jiraiya?"
"Sakura, what's that on your back?"
Sakura reaches back. She did manage to reinforce her back enough it should only be mildly abraded.
"What thing?"
"The seal."
Sakura thinks.
"Oh!" Then Sakura looks at the ground, trying not to blush.
"Oh?" Jiraiya presses.
"Um, Orochimaru put it on me when he was me. It, um, gathers natural energy? It's fine, I've been dismissing it or using it."
Silence answers her.
"It's fine," she repeats.
"It's been almost a year," Tsunade says.
Sakura looks away.
Jiraiya sighs.
"Alright, let me see it."
Sakura turns.
Tsunade sighs.
"It looks like you'll need to stay a little longer, this time."
"Yeah, I'll move my schedule around," he responds, and Sakura tries not to sink into the floor.
It's fine.
It actually takes three weeks to remove.
Once Jiraiya finds out what it does and how much natural energy it dumps into her system, he stares at her.
"You've been able to use all of this?"
Sakura looks away. "Yes?"
He mutters something, which sounds a lot like "Some kids are just fucking monsters," which.
Rude.
Sakura stretches.
She just got back from a month-long mission to Earth last night.
Forty days.
She enjoyed actually sleeping in a bed again, and also having a warm shower, because, turns out! Producing hot water is a bloodline limit!
Sakura doesn't want to talk about it.
She definitely doesn't want to talk about how Kakashi pointed out she could just heat it after she got back.
Yesterday.
Smirking.
Laughing at her.
He's fine.
She only broke like.
Three of his ribs.
She was with a team of two other chuunin, protecting the firstborn son of the current lover of the Earth Daimyou. He was being attacked by missing Rock nin, and their contract literally forbid them from looking into why.
So they spent a week getting attacked by missing Rock nin for reasons they were forbidden from knowing—and they couldn't kill them.
Couldn't let the firstborn son or his husband and daughter die.
It's not like the Rock nin they were fighting were particularly strong—low chuunin at best—there were just. So many of them.
All while protecting some annoying nobles who wanted to do stupid things like sit at the top of of tall cliffs and have picnics while watching the sun rise.
It's good to be back.
In her own bed. In her own house.
Or, well, her parents' house.
They got finished warding it with proper, ninja-grade wards just before she had to leave. She had only gotten to sleep in her own bed once before her mission.
It's a good bed.
(Kakashi's beds all suck.)
("If you spend enough time sleeping on rocks, soft beds start to get really uncomfortable.")
(Heresy.)
She cracks her back, pulls herself out of her body, gives her true-self a nice good stretch, peers down at Ino's sleeping coils through her flower, threads herself through the point at infinity for a nice relaxing dismemberment, slips herself back into her cells.
It's just before four in the morning, so her parents aren't up yet. Sunday, so it's Guy day.
She nudges Gamami to see if she wants to come, gets a fuck off, and then slips out of her room. She checks on her parents (it's fine, Sakura isn't constantly terrified they're gonna die) before slipping out into the pre-dawn light.
She spreads her chakra across half a city block before rocketing herself into the air without so much as leaving a footprint. (She does fracture a couple rocks that lie on one of the lines of her chakra webs, though.) She lands on the Hokage monument, takes a deep breath, and looks out on Konoha.
"It's a nice view, isn't it?"
Sakura jumps and turns to face a red-faced Tsunade, sake bottle in front of her, cup in hand.
Sakura… cannot feel her at all.
"When you're Hokage," she says, words a little slurred, "you have to suppress your chakra to get any time off."
Yeah, no?
Chakra suppressed people don't feel like people, but they're not gone! They're like! Trees! Leaves! Cacti!
This…
This is not that?
Tsunade is sitting there like a literal hole in the world!
Tsunade laughs.
"Close your mouth, kid," she says, tipping the cup into her mouth and shivering a little as she swallows. "You'll catch flies."
Sakura tries.
But she does not succeed.
"That was a nice jump you did there, kid. You're really getting a handle on that, aren't you?"
Sakura blushes a bit, and Tsunade snorts, refilling her cup and stifling a yawn.
"What are you doing up, kid?" she says.
"Training with Guy," Sakura says, walking to Tsunade's side and sitting beside her.
Tsunade snorts.
"You kids are totally insane."
She looks sideways at Sakura as Sakura drifts closer to her, peering down at her skin, which her senses tell her have no chakra at all. Sakura meets her eyes, and coughs, backing away.
"How'd you learn—" Tsunade pats the Hokage monument, her chakra flashing through the entire mountain, distributing the force of her path throughout it.
Shaking it.
Sakura feels.
Very outclassed.
"I um, copied you?"
Tsunade laughs, low and rumbly.
"You sure you don't want to go and ditch that teacher of yours?" she says, taking another drink.
Sakura shakes her head.
"I'm the Hokage, you know," she slurs, and gestures to the village laid out before them, "strongest shinobi in the village."
Sakura looks awkwardly away, and Tsunade laughs again.
"You could also teach me?"
"Nah, I don't like sharing," Tsunade says, pouring herself another cup of sake and draining it one long gulp. She lets out a long contented sigh, slams the sake cup down into the mountain, once again flashing chakra throughout it.
Shaking it.
Again.
"You ever had a drink, kid?" Tsunade asks, leaning back on her arms.
Sakura shakes her head, and Tsunade glances over at her. She raises one of her hands and knocks it against Sakura's chest. Sakura feels a flash of medical chakra wash through her.
"You're probably still too young for it," Tsunade says with a sigh, putting her hand back behind her again. "Old enough to kill, old enough to die, but too young to drink. What the hell did we even build this damn village for?"
There's silence between them as Tsunade stares up at the sky, and Sakura stares over at Tsunade, whose skin is still just.
So devoid of chakra.
She pokes her bare shoulder, and Tsunade cuts a glance to her.
"If you become my apprentice, I can teach you this," she says.
"You could teach me even if I'm not your apprentice," Sakura says, and Tsunade laughs, her voice echoing out across the still-dark village. In the distance, Sakura can see a flash of green as Guy flies across the village on his hands. Using only his hands, he flings himself halfway up the walls, then reaches out with a single hand catching the wall, and throws himself the rest of the way.
Guy is.
Pretty insane.
"You're cute, kid."
Tsunade rolls her head to face Sakura, and her amber eyes flash in the pre-dawn light. Chakra rolls into existence under her skin. Rotating into sight, and then back out of it again. Again, rotating, in and out.
It's like.
Her chakra was out of phase?
What?
Sakura drags her chakra sense down into herself, focuses down and down and down onto her chakra, until it is no longer continuous, tiny little chakra particles flying through her limbs, and.
Each of them, always facing the same way, even as they speed through her non-euclidean insides.
She twists one, and feels a blip of wibbly wobbly screwy-ness in her chakra sense before it snaps back to its previous orientation.
Sakura comes back to herself, and finds Tsunade smirking faintly at her.
"I heard you taught the Yamanaka girl your mind inversion technique."
Sakura's blood goes cold.
Inoichi still doesn't know. Ino has no great compunction against lying, despite what the mind inversion technique is "supposed" to mean, and is all too willing to live functionally un-inverted, for when her father might brush against her mind.
(Sakura might or might not have some feelings about how quickly Ino seemed to have mastered that particular technique.)
"How do you know that?"
(Also, Sakura didn't teach her, she taught herself.)
"An idiot drunkard told me," Tsunade says, rolling her eyes and looking to the sky, and Sakura can breathe again. "You know, if what the Yamanaka and Senju records on the Hagoromo records on the technique are correct, she'll be able to use it far better than you ever could."
"Of course she can," Sakura responds without hesitation, and Tsunade laughs, long but not particularly loud, at the sky above her. "She's Ino."
Tsunade sits back forward, unseals a new sake bottle, pours another cup.
"Maybe if we had a couple less clan ninja like me, and a couple more civilian-born ninja like you, this world would be a little better," she says, downing it with a faint grimace, slamming the cup down with a soundless strike that shakes the whole mountain.
Sakura doesn't know what to say to that, so she says nothing.
She looks out at the village, and sees Guy leap off of the wall above the third training ground and go plummeting down to the training ground.
"Go on," Tsunade says. "But Sakura, first take a good look—" she tosses the empty sake bottle in the air behind them, and then she turns and punches it. For an instant, chakra is spread through her whole body, her arm, her chest, down to her butt, and then out across the entire hokage monument—but from here, now that she's looking, she can see more filaments fragmenting off of the larger ones, spreading down and down into tinier and tinier filaments until they barely exist at all, all throughout her body, all throughout the Hokage monument. This is not a web of chakra, Sakura realizes. They are roots. The bottle explodes into glass dust in an entirely silent explosion, Tsunade's chakra threading through the air and smoothing the sound shockwaves out of existence. Tsunade's butt didn't move even a little. (Although the Hokage monument did, just a little.) "Go, show that muscle-bound idiot what real strength looks like."
Sakura smiles at her.
"As you command, Hokage-sama," Sakura says, giving Tsunade a little mock bow before imitating Tsunade's web of ever smaller filaments, each reinforcing the larger ones, distributing out the force of her jump to the mountain, and rocketing off into the air. She feels the mountain take the full force of her jump, shifting but none of it breaking, and she smiles.
She hits the ground halfway across the town, landing silently, spreading the force out across the block in a silent, safe landing and rocketing herself off again. She misses her target (right beside Guy), and hits the pond instead. It holds, just a little water splashing over up on the shore.
Guy turns to her with a smile.
"I see you have been training, My Most Youthful and Adorable Pseudo-Student!" he whisper-bellows. (They had gotten complaints from the people who lived in the closest apartments. Half a mile away.) "Such Youth, I endeavor to match it with my own training!" He gives her his nice guy pose.
Sakura grins.
"Tsunade gave me a couple pointers."
Guy's smile widens, and the ground breaks under his feet. Sakura creates two water dragons, but he easily dismisses them with sharp, explosive jabs they can block but can't dodge.
One day.
Sakura blocks a punch, ducks under the follow up, drags her knee up and elbow down to block the kick he sends at her side. She swaps behind him, reforming with her fist a hairsbreadth from his skin, but he still manages to dodge it, spinning to knock her hand away, leaving it to explode in a wave of force that tears half the leaves off a tree behind him. She teleports straight back before he can finish his counter, but he's body-flickering after her in a moment, ducking under her attack and then blocking it when he finds she has been punching for his new location the whole time. He slips into her guard and drives a devastating hook punch into her side.
He isn't pulling back from it, but his attention strays from her as he waits for her to swap away again. Instead she gets her block down just in time, threads a chakra web throughout her body and down through her feet, redirecting his punch's force throughout the clearing and responding with a single jab at his chest.
He sees her coming at the last moment, jumping back and lifting his left arm to block, but she makes contact anyways, totally overextended, releasing her fist to lay a single finger against his arm, and—
His arm breaks, and he's tossed physically across the clearing in a deafening explosion. She is unmoved. She vanishes into a petal to keep herself from falling, and re-appears above him, where, for the first time, he is lying on his back, staring up at the pre-dawn sky above them.
She grins down at him, and he grins back up at her.
"Most youthful, my Dear Pseudo-Student."
He gets up, wincing as he sets his broken arm with his unbroken arm. There's a flash of chakra which is decidedly not green, and—
"Muscle Splint Technique."
He releases his broken arm, and it holds.
What.
He turns to face her.
"Again," he says.
She gets him two times over the next three hours, but each time her chakra roots break, sending her tumbling away and leaving his arms intact. He goes down to his knees, but no further.
But then—
Dodge dodge counterattack miss block swap block jab—
Contact.
Her roots hold, and Guy's right arm breaks.
This time, he doesn't go on his back, but down onto his hands and knees. Sakura can see his grin from where she stands across the clearing.
He sets his arm, faces her, and—
"Gate of Life," he says. "Open."
Chakra floods his body, more than his system can take, leaving his skin bright red and inflamed, and—
Sakura learns, over the course of next thirty minutes, in which she fails to so much as touch Guy, why Kakashi seems to be of the impression Guy is stronger than he is.
What.
At the end of it, Guy is on his hands and knees, chest heaving, unable to stand, but. She is flat on her back, and no better.
She's not sure she'll be able to stand for a week.
What.
What was that.
Two weeks later, and Sakura is frowning at the cloud of flower petals before her.
There's nothing special about water. It just contains her limbs and channels her chakra.
The water dragon is convenient because it's a nimble jutsu that is fairly easy to control, but—
That's the thing.
She's been controlling her petals for years now.
And she doesn't need to make them dance like her little water dragon can dance if she just fills the air with them.
She raises a hand and a single petal floats down onto an outstretched finger. She imbues it with a couple billion of her limbs. She tosses it into the hair, and it explodes with nowhere near enough force, the fragment of her mind compromised before she could get off the full power of her blow.
Another petal falls into her hand, and she imbues it with a similar number of petals, and tosses it in the air, building roots all around it, as if it was the tip of her finger, and—
The roots shatter, not enough to anchor onto so far from the ground.
She takes ten petals in succession, and creates a nice little lattice out of them, each petal connecting to two others, the four bottom petals rooting their chakra through the ground, and—
A deafening boom rips through the clearing, enough to blow her hair from her face, enough to shake the branches of every tree in the clearing around her.
Sakura smiles.
There we go.
Finally, a reason for the mind-inversion technique.
Something she couldn't have done any other way.
Gamami stands from where she is sitting kinda grumpily on the surface of the pond, the orange natural energy pouring into her body doesn't waver.
Sakura blinks, and then smiles far, far wider.
"You did it!"
(The ten petals she imbued with her limbs disintegrate from too much concentrated chakra.)
Gamami radiates smugness, and Sakura jumps to her feet, and then swoops Gamami into her arms.
"I did it," Gamami says, smiling a nasty little toady smile, still in Sage mode, even as Sakura spins her around. Sakura plants her feet, and flings Gamami into the air in celebration, and Gamami croaks with extraordinary displeasure.
Sakura grumbles.
Why does no one else like flying towards the ground at speed?
She launches herself after Gamami, and catches her in her arms. Gamami glares at her with bloody murder in her eyes, fists her tiny hands in Sakura's dress, like that could actually stop Sakura from pitching her into the air.
She is also 100% still in Sage mode.
"You did it," Sakura says excitedly to her, as they crash soundless into the ground. "You're so great, you did it!"
Gamami stops glaring to smile smugly.
"I'm the youngest toad to do it in centuries," she says. "I am amazing."
"You are," Sakura agrees, lowering her face to rub it against Gamami's.
Gamami endures this, and then falls limp.
Sakura feels a foreign entity in her mind universe, and tumbles down into it after Gamami.
She finds Gamami looking around her, her limbs spread across most of Sakura's mind, and.
She takes Sakura's breath away.
"What," Gamami grouses, shifting uncomfortably, and ducking a couple seeing-talons to look at the Sakura's Gamami-galaxy. She wanders over to it, and loses herself in its depths.
Sakura follows her.
"You're just—"
Sakura can see her emotions, plain as day, all over her.
Pride and contempt and fondness and happiness and nervousness and everything else.
"You're beautiful," Sakura says, perching all of herself on a rock that will only exist for another minute and twenty second.
Gamami's teeth rotate with bashfulness.
"Shut up," she says.
Sakura peeks out of her eyes in the real world, and, lo and behold:
"And you're still in Sage mode!"
"I've been in Sage mode for three months," she says, the slime on her tentacles rolling with pride. "It's harder to be out of it than in it at this point."
"Uh-huh."
Sakura shifts to another rock a moment before the one she was on vanishes.
"I wanna hug you," she says, skipping closer.
"Don't," she says, and the twists in her elbows says—
Why are humans like this?
Sakura tackles her, all of her quintillion or so limbs crashing into Gamami's like five quadrillion, and sending them both tumbling out of Gamami's galaxy, down and down and then up right left and inside out.
Gamami catches them, because Sakura is just, totally okay with this, and in fact actively encouraging the tumble, tying a couple million tentacles across the suns of her galaxy, and then using another million more to catch Sakura on instinct.
"Aw, you caught me. You do love me."
Gamami immediately drops her, and Sakura laughs in a fully-bellied joint inversion as she goes tumbling through her own mind universe.
Why had she never done this before!
She pushes off against rocks only there for a split second, sending her on a raucous trip through her own mind-universe while Gamami watches her with judgemental eyes from where she is spread across the galaxy which is Sakura's love for her.
Sakura swings herself to a stop, catching on Ino's rock, swinging past Kakashi's star, settling herself again on a very temporary rock in front of Gamami.
"Do you like it?" she asks. "I made it just for you."
Gamami scoffs by turning about half of her talons inside out.
She looks down at it, and Sakura can see her mushy feelings in how her tentacle blades get all dull and shiny.
Sakura giggles.
"Shut up."
"You dooo."
"Why are you like this," Gamami says grumpily, and Sakura tackles her again, sending them once again ricocheting through Sakura's mind-universe, and like.
Maybe she shouldn't be doing so much damage to her mind-universe?
You know, by extinguishing stars beneath her massive bulk, and knocking planets out of alignment and breaking rocks, but.
She feels fine?
It's probably fine.
Gamami eventually tires of playing the part of the world's least-euclidean pinball, and slips back out of Sakura's mind, and into her own. Sakura can't follow her, so she falls back into her body instead, having to take a moment to figure out which way is up, and by that she means—where all of her cells are.
She blinks down at Gamami, and grins down at her.
"You're great," she repeats.
Gamami takes a deep breath, and then blows a massive fireball into the air. Easily the width of the clearing.
Sakura looks up at it, and then back down at Gamami.
"I feel like we're gonna get in trouble for that."
You'll get in trouble for it, Gamami says, crawling up to Sakura's head, having tired of using her mouth to speak. I'm not even a Konoha ninja. How could they get mad at me?
Sakura feels like it's actually worse if you're not a Konoha ninja.
She waves awkwardly at the trio of three Anbu that show up, swords out.
"It was just me," she says, and they glare at her.
Gamami chuckles to herself on Sakura's head.
After them come the Uchiha police, who don't look any happier with her.
"What, no one even got hurt!"
This doesn't seem to make them feel better.
They eventually all leave, and Sakura sits herself back down at the edge of the pond, and re-summons the petals Gamami totally destroyed with her massive fireball.
She catches a single petal in her hand, and then turns to look at Gamami, who open her mouth and produces Sakura's hidden in the petals scroll, because she's always paying attention, even when she pretends she isn't.
Sakura unbinds the petal from the her Hidden in the Petals jutsu, imbues it with a couple billions of her limbs, and then rebinds it.
It vanishes, and all of her limbs go with it. They do not regenerate.
She conjures it again, and they blink back into existence.
Sakura smiles one more time.
Looks like she has some work to do.