As she scraped the busted floor tiles of the hospital ward, feeling up for the end of the bed she was going to emerge on the other side from, Kiyomi felt herself planted inside one of those moments in one's life where one knew that what they were about to do would suck, likely even hurt a great deal. The problem with those moments was that they were essential, do or die kinds of moments because otherwise, they wouldn't be so necessary to experience – everyone would just choose not to walk that path.
The true definition of one's worth was being able to fix one's feet into the dirt and declare to oneself that you won't move.
The springs of a nearby bed shrieked a cry of distress, an early sign of inevitable doom of the backstabbing variety. Judging from the cruel smirk on the face of the blond bastard that delivered it to the blinded kunoichi, he enjoyed plunging a kunai into her back very, very much.
"Heh, I always keep just one clone around when the group gets beaten down. Just in case, nostalgia, you know, though you wouldn't get it…" Dark Naruto mumbled into Kiyomi's ear as he gently guided the dying body down on the ground. A ghastly howl followed by some phantasmal force shoving Dark Naruto forward and forcing him to trip over his recent kill just before it dispersed into a cloud of smoke in a loud poof sent the overly confident nightmare of the Konoha Hospital on his knees.
Once he stood back to his feet, he wasn't the same person anymore.
"That's funny because I do the same thing…" Kiyomi pulled in her chin underneath the high collar of Dark Naruto's tracksuit. Borrowing a body was an elementary thing in her condition. This way she could have seen something while working out the solution to all her current problems.
When she sent a clone out and stayed behind to try and hit a Dark Naruto with one of her Yamanaka mind-switching techniques, Kiyomi wasn't sure that she'd be able to house her mind inside of a clone. Clones were constructs of chakra, even she wasn't entirely sure what her hidden techniques did to one's chakra signature. The distinction between one's mind, one's soul and chakra was a bit too vague, even to a master of either of the three.
However, as a clone of Dark Naruto's emerged through the doorway and peeked outside, she realized that it was Dark Naruto that needed to dispel her actively. Until the clone was dispelled, the user had no awareness of what the clone knew or felt. That meant that Dark Naruto would have had no idea that someone had occupied the body of his clone, that being said, if he did choose to dispel it, for any reason, Kiyomi would be back in her original body and the original would likely learn all about the switcheroo.
Kiyomi jumped up and extended her hands out to the ceiling, focusing her chakra onto her fingertips to have them stick. That made it easier to pull her feet up and apply them to the ceiling to mimic the creepy manner in which these strange, dark manifestations of Naruto appeared to carry themselves around in. It didn't take long before Kiyomi ran into one of her own. The one that she did sight was the one that didn't attempt to hide, a handful more were lurking somewhere nearby, the red irises of their eyes pierced through the dark. These eyes, they couldn't have been natural, just what on Earth was this version of Naruto?
"There are intruders, did you see them?" Kiyomi spoke first, she didn't want to arouse suspicion. Every time the clone she was in would have gotten hit, she'd have pushed her luck that the original would keep her around at the cost of their chakra.
"Heard the commotion, didn't run into them, clearly, you know…" a Dark Naruto clone replied.
"You came in from the other direction, didn't you run into them?" another one hissed from the side.
"By the time I ran in, they were already gone, you know." Kiyomi shook her head, trying to mimic Naruto's mannerisms down to a tee. She did plenty of observation on his mug this past couple of days so it wasn't even remotely troubling to do. Plus, she had a handful of cheat sheets right in front of her.
"Who were those guys, I wonder…" another clone mumbled.
"I'm gonna go looking for them." Kiyomi declared.
"Why?" the most obviously positioned clone turned his head.
"What else are we gonna do here, you know? It's like we're just standing around, creeping and waiting for somebody to come our way. I'm gonna show initiative and find somebody to hunt, you know!" Kiyomi explained. She needed an alibi to wander off and search for some medical food pills, after all. There were few better than looking for somebody to attack. Somebody that the original wanted beaten or dead.
Though, just to be safe, Kiyomi decided to not probe around where these guys could see her. While from afar a clone looking for stranded ninja wandering around was similar to a clone looking for medicine, the illusion was easier to see through the closer one got. Plus, these guys seemed to imply that they've seen or heard nothing, which meant it would be quite suspicious of her to test them by searching the wards near them.
Kiyomi crawled around the ceiling on all fours, choosing to take a staircase that led her one floor down to where she may have begun her search. She kept bumping into Dark Naruto duplicates for the entire way down but once she descended one floor down, there seemed to be far fewer clones around. With just a little bit of waiting, Kiyomi managed to catch a moment when she was outside the vision of any other clone. That was just the opening she needed to drop down and run into a ward to scour it for supplies.
It would go far smoother to do so when she had a functional pair of eyes to spare. Kiyomi pulled on a nearby drawer and smirked when she saw an aluminum sheet with a pair of medical food pills packed into it in a set of eight. She stuffed the sheets of pills into her warm and thick pockets. The ones on Naruto's trousers appeared to have some zippers, she'd just have to be careful with the ones on her tracksuit…
Hurray for the functionality of boys' clothing…
Kiyomi crawled back up on the wall, feeling the pills slide about in her side pockets. This would be a pain, she'll be hanging upside down the whole time, had it not been for the feathery weight of the pills, they'd be falling right out. Kiyomi clutched her tummy just to be careful and crept out of the room.
She was beginning to feel bumping in her head. A creeping up migraine, as if her head was a gate and there was some strongman trying to rip it open by splitting it apart. She knew that feeling, not the literal pain of a migraine, she knew that one, of course, she knew that this feeling came from the awakening resistance of the target's will. Her jutsu, as childish and second-natured as it felt, put a strain on Kiyomi's body and that strain multiplied over time. That only meant that whatever will a user had to resist would grow exponentially the longer the jutsu continued.
In other words, Mind-Body Switch was a jutsu designed for gathering intelligence, not picking another life to live.
Kiyomi entered back into the staircase, this would be the first test of her weird new strut and it hit her right in the face from the get-go.
"What's wrong with you?" a Dark Naruto turned his head in confusion.
"Got caught off-guard by the genin, you know." She tried explaining why she scaled the ceiling and took shadowy corners while clutching her gut the whole time.
"Didn't disperse?" the clone wondered.
"I like to keep one clone around, you know." Kiyomi moved one of the arms she used to cling to the wall to brush it through the back of her head, just like Naruto tended to do when he was embarrassed and happy at the same time.
"Where are you going now?" the clone asked while Kiyomi tried to creep past it and back to the corridor leading up to the ward where her unconscious, defenseless body laid sprawled out under a hospital bed.
"Looking for the bastards that beat me up, you know!" Kiyomi shook her fist.
"Forget that. We're gathering up on the first floor." The clone shook his head.
"Why?" Kiyomi scratched hers.
"Huh? What do you mean why? The Kirigakure guys are down there, you know…" the Dark Naruto squinted.
"Oh, just that… I thought it was something else…" Kiyomi tried playing her obliviousness off, here she found out one disadvantage of trying to play herself off as one of Naruto's clones – she wasn't receiving constant updates from dying clones about what killed them and where. That meant that the more she spoke, the more she'd be exposing herself and her lack of common knowledge all clones shared.
"Just that?" the clone wondered about Kiyomi's lack of enthusiasm shown toward attacking the Kirigakure ninja.
"I mean, a party of genin here and there… You're looking for what, three guys, right? We got our asses beat by six of them and two of those guys were already on their last legs, you know." Kiyomi shrugged.
"Six? You're looking for six genin all by yourself? Ones that beat an entire party of us earlier?" the clone crept closer, growing a tad suspicious. It must have happened eventually – Naruto was not the brightest tool in the shed already, had he been one, she'd have been ousted from the start. The clones would have had some password system or something with the password changing with each dying clone relaying a new password to prevent just this sort of situation.
"Shut up, don't you think I'll win!?" Kiyomi tried to pass herself off as a total idiot. "They were a really annoying bunch, they knew me, said my eyes were different…"
"Oh…" the eyes of the Dark Naruto clone sunk in shadow, his blond hair obstructed the view but when the light returned to gleam red from his eyes, it did so through crystal prisms of tears. Tears that shook Kiyomi to her core. "They hate us, don't they? Hate us, just like everyone else…"
"Yeah… Neji, Lee, Tenten…" Kiyomi listed the names of the people she spoke of, hoping to ignite a spark in the clone to give her more substance to talk about. Right now, as good as she was at infiltration, she sort of lacked something to sink her teeth into.
"Neji… That guy never liked us to begin with, you know." The clone shook his head. "Though he's worse than even the two-faced lowlifes pointing fingers at us and calling us monsters and freaks! He doesn't know that we're a monster, that we're a freak but he hates us anyway."
"Y-Yeah…" Kiyomi thought she understood. "He hates us for Naruto, not for… That's why I have to show him, break every bone and make him swallow his words, poke his smug eyes out for good measure!"
"Shit, now I kind of wanna go with you!" the Dark Naruto clone snickered. "Hmm… Does beating up Kirigakure ninja feel right… Does kicking Bushy Brows' team's ass feel right…"
Kiyomi couldn't contain a snicker. The Bushy Brows' nickname caught her unaware. She wasn't sure if she heard Naruto use it before but she knew exactly whom it referred to, that was why it was so funny.
"Sorry, just all the talking made me start imagining things. Bushy Brows is beaten up already, showing him will be the easiest." Kiyomi tried to shrug her snickering off, it was rough since she had to repeat the nickname herself and by nearly corpsing she revealed just how unnatural it was slipping off of her lips.
"Yeah, I'll go with, you know!" the clone stuck to Kiyomi's ass like a wet leaf. She clenched her fist in displeasure and moved on, hearing the faint dragging of the sandals across the ceiling or the walls as well as the moist taps of his hands touching those same surfaces too.
It might have been sheer luck that helped the pair not run into any more Naruto clones on their way back to the ward. Then again, the clone did mention that every other clone received a message about a Kirigakure team beating up a squad of Naruto clones. That must have been how the bunch that found them before found them as well. So the Kirigakure team tried sneaking through the first floor… It might have been that they didn't even try to sneak around, they just wanted to bypass a whole bunch of exposed, main street traversing by crossing through the hospital and saw no need to ascend to the upper floors.
"Huh… Are you sure you know where you're going?" the clone wondered.
"Of course I don't." Kiyomi shook her head. "They poofed everyone else away, I was the only one left and by the time I got back to my senses the ward was empty."
"Man, I should have gone with everybody else…" the clone sighed in disappointment.
"You're probably right…" Kiyomi weaved a hand seal. The clone grunted in pain as a bubble of expanding air mass blew it off the ceiling and slammed it into the floor. With her leading the way and dragging both her hands and feet across the ceiling, it was a simple matter to draw a small Wind Release chakra seal that expunged all the chakra out at once when triggered.
The problematic part was that now a whole bunch of clones would know all about what happened, she needed to be fast. Kiyomi, still in a foreign body burst into the ward and ran up to her bed, rolling out a kunai in her right hand and throwing it at her gut while canceling the jutsu at the last possible second. The clone failed to tense their hand and stop the plunge in time. The dazed head from being shoved into the back corners of his own mind must have done that to him, Kiyomi went through a fair deal of that sleepy haze herself while she shoveled the floor for the pills that the clone had dropped.
She popped one, it couldn't have been the right one – she could feel great physical strength surging through her system. That wonderful feeling of being capable of accomplishing anything, like on a lovely morning after a night one had the sleep of a lifetime on. The disgusting part was that Kiyomi was still blind, meaning she popped a blue one. Another blue one might have done serious harm to her, even if she took a stronger medical food pill that wasn't a blue one, she might have still gone through nasty side effects if not done more harm than good.
Who knew that after surviving the nightmare of a lifetime inside the body of the monster she would get stuck in popping pills while blind? It was such an elementary yet such a specific peril that she hadn't even prepared a plan for it, she rushed things to outrace a possible attack by the Naruto clones once they felt two of them disperse and receive the knowledge back that one of their clones was compromised fighting a blind kunoichi.
Shit. She didn't have time to try and be clever, Kiyomi popped a different sheet and let a round, plastic-feeling marble slide out into her hand through feeling it up. It felt mushy and moist in taste, kind of like mashed tomatoes with a chili aftertaste – a red pill. It was a tad weak but it should have treated the damage to her eyes. The problem was that Kiyomi had no idea when it would do so.
"Was it here!?" she heard a grunt in the doorway. It was far too dark to know if the pills were having any sort of effect just yet. Who knew, it might have taken ten, fifteen minutes or half an hour. The pills usually were reliable enough to pop one in the middle of a combat situation and expect it to be of some aid in that same encounter but… The pill was weak, the damage was extensive and popping more pills after being lucky once was just asking for trouble. Even if she popped the same sheet of red pills, she'd be taking a second red pill right after accidentally taking a blue one, she was no medical ninja but while mixing two reds was of no immediate concern, mixing two of them over a blue one might just have been of great concern.
"Who the hell knows, all these wards look the same!" another grunt, mirroring the tone and voice of the first one replied. Great. A whole group of them showed up. Time… If only she had a little more time…
Kiyomi tried reaching out for her sheet, try and slip it over herself and wait it out while under a Cloak of Invisibility Jutsu. She heard a chuckle, her hand froze, an influx of fresh air blasting right at her face followed by a loud thud suggested that the bed she was hiding under got thrown aside and that she was now lying right in front of the group of clones that came here looking for her.
"The food pills, she took a pair already, a blue one and a red one." One of the clones pointed at the two packs of pills, noting the ones that were missing one food pill.
Of course they'd know she was looking for pills inside one of their bodies, the mind of their peer was trapped in the farther corners, out of control and shit out of luck but it was still there, still able to see and feel everything that Kiyomi did with his body, meaning that those same experiences got transferred back to the original and those assholes.
"Hmmm… A blue one and a red one? Did you intend to patch yourself up or were you just reaching for the right one? Didn't think things quite through, you know…" a Dark Naruto clone mocked Kiyomi. The young woman cried out in pain after the clone stomped at her, she couldn't see a damned thing! Even worse – they knew she couldn't, they couldn't have been oblivious to the grievous injuries on her eyes, even if they'd start closing up in a short second.
Time… If only she had more time…
