Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 29 – Clean Sweep
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 5,275
Summary: AU. Sakura gives up on Kakashi as a teacher after Team 7 falls apart. Too bad fate, enemy ninja, and sheer bad luck have other plans.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 29 of ? Unbeta'd.
Three days later, Ino manifests her shell into the perceivable world.
Ino sits cross-legged in the depths of her mind, her hands steepled, as she gazes thoughtfully at her 'inner Hatake'. The original one.
She's actually quite proud of herself for having managed to sustain the existence of him for so long. It's been… an interesting adjustment, having another presence, no matter how false, always present inside of her mind. She wonders if that's how Sakura feels all the time.
She'll probably never ask. Daddy says not to draw attention to peoples' mental quirks unless they're actively dangerous and, so far, Sakura's other self seems to be a defense from intruders.
Much like her shell, now.
All the same, though, Ino misses the hushed silence of nothing but her own thoughts. Sure, sometimes those are loud, but those are also hers and it's different.
"So, the problem is, what am I going to do with you?" she wonders. "I can't just stuff you into a box and leave you there. You can't stay sleeping in my mind from now until forever. I only really need you when I deploy the shell and even then I wind up tattering you and having to put you back together."
Original Hatake stares placidly back at her.
"I know, I know," she says. "I have to keep you until the end of the mission anyway. Hatake-sensei's going to make me prove I can pull you out and put you away, like I'm folding an umbrella. But afterwards…"
It just seems so inefficient to have to get rid of him.
"Maybe Daddy will have a suggestion," Ino says. "I mean, yeah, I could re-make you from scratch if I ever needed you again but…"
Ugh?
"Anyway," she says, taking a deep breath. "Okay. Okay, it's do or die time now, no more practice runs. Time to see if we can take that last step from internal to external. The fail-safes are in place. We've got the unravelling down pat. We can do this."
She closes her eyes and then opens them.
"Let's go."
It's a cloudy, blustery day and if it doesn't pour later, he'll eat his hitae-ite, but mid-afternoon, the weather hasn't moved past threatening. Ino has taken a seat on the bench rather than under the tree she's favoured.
"After all," she'd said, just after lunch when they'd come back out to start their afternoon training, "if it rains, it's not like I'm going to notice and sitting on wet, cold ground isn't going to do anyone any favours. Besides, you're not going to let me do this while up in a tree, are you?"
Which… well, she'd been right. He hadn't been willing to allow her to do that, so she'd just laughed and settled herself on the bench, legs crossed, and disappeared into the depths of her own mind.
Just as he and Sakura had been absorbed into their own work. Three days wasn't anywhere near enough time for Sakura's taijutsu to get markedly better—but it was more than enough time to teach her a few new tricks, in addition to working with her to increase her stamina.
Ino's shell blooms across his senses like a flower opening up and he's taken off-guard, which allows Sakura to get a hit in on him.
Sakura laughs, delighted, and he agrees that she's right to be happy—it's a good hit and his own fault for being distracted.
He catches her next blow with one hand and holds up the other, a gesture for her to stop. She does, immediately, her green eyes showing her confusion as they're not anywhere near the time they usually stop for a break or for the evening.
"What's going on?" Sakura asks.
Kakashi smiles, which reassures her, and then says, "Close your eyes and look for me with your chakra."
Sakura is decidedly not a sensor type but being able to recognize a handful of familiar chakra signatures doesn't need someone to be a sensor. Her eyes light up as she catches on and then she obeys, closing her eyes, and sending out her chakra on a simple quest.
"Ino's gone!" Sakura says, and she sounds surprised despite guessing where this was going. "And… and there's two of you, Hatake-sensei."
Her eyes open and she spins to look at where Ino is sitting. "She did it!"
"Almost," Kakashi says, still smiling. "She'll have truly done it once she manages to come out of her trance and still maintain the shell she's created that feels like me. Can you feel any differences between myself and her creation?"
Sakura frowns. "I didn't notice anything, but I also wasn't looking really deeply into either of you."
"Give it a try," he says. "And I'll do the same. We want to make sure that her shell is as accurate as possible from all angles and your knowledge and impressions of me will give you a different perspective than I'll have. It's a bit of the difference between when you speak and hear your voice or when you hear a recording of your voice. They never quite match up with one another, right?"
"Right," Sakura says, then nods and closes her eyes again, brow furrowed in concentration.
Kakashi doesn't need to close his eye to concentrate on reaching out and inspecting… well, himself. It's more than a little incongruous to see his blonde student and yet feel what's basically a clone of himself, but that very awkward familiarity is useful to him now as he carefully inspects the sense of 'him' that emanates from Ino.
He does not try to do anything that would disturb Ino's concentration. That will come after, once she's proven that, when uncontested, she can function and act as herself while maintaining the sense of being him.
Once she's managed that, then will come the tests of making sure that she can hold it even while sparring or using her chakra to climb a building or running for her life and the less obviously physical tests—what would happen if someone probed her shell with their chakra? Would it react naturally enough to fool someone? Or would it be something that immediately gives the game away?
But I have a feeling she's going to pass those tests.
It's impossible to flawlessly recreate another person but Kakashi honestly can't tell a difference between how he feels and how Ino's shell does.
I suspect that's what took her the extra few days. She wasn't struggling to form the shell itself so much as she was ensuring that, once put into action, her shell would be able to maintain its viability.
"What a trip," Sakura says. "Hatake-sensei, it's like—it's really like there's two of you. I can't even imagine how she managed that. If she's using chakra, I can't tell."
"If she's using chakra," Kakashi says, "then I also can't tell."
Sakura looks at him, startled.
"I'm not a sensor-type either," he reminds her. "I'm not even sure if what Ino is doing actually needs chakra the way you and I use it or if it's more based on her bloodline limit. Any chakra usage is going to be directed internally, where we can't feel it."
Sakura nods thoughtfully. "I wonder if she'd explain how she's doing it to us?"
"I guess we'll find out when she wakes," Kakashi says, though he doubts it. She hasn't said much of anything about what she's doing inside of her own head other than if it's going well or if she needs to recalibrate a few of her ideas to adjust for… something. Ino hadn't even said what the something was. "But probably not."
"One day," Sakura says, a touch of rebellion in her voice, "I'm going to start my own Clan and we're going to keep a million random, silly secrets just to say we've got Clan secrets too."
"Clans keep their secrets for good reason," Kakashi says, though he smiles, knowing his amusement shows. "You know that."
"I also know that Ino keeps secrets just for fun sometimes," Sakura grumbles half-heartedly. "But yeah, fair. Can we go back to training now, Hatake-sensei? It doesn't look like she's waking up anytime soon and we can always stop when she does."
"Alright," Kakashi says, though part of him really just wants to keep examining Ino's shell. "We'll take it from the previous form. You're favouring your right side too much still."
Sakura nods, green eyes determined. "I'm not sure how to fix that. It just feels easier."
"Practise, mostly," Kakashi says, as they take their places. "Everyone has preferences and ways their body would rather do things, but what's easy isn't always right."
"Why didn't the Academy work harder on making us correct things like that?" Sakura asks curiously.
Kakashi considers that thoughtfully. He doesn't have a lot of experience with the Academy, having graduated so very, incredibly young.
"I would imagine," he says, "that they didn't have the time to harangue that many students of different levels of motivation and skill into ironing out their minor bad habits. They likely reasoned that it would be up to the Jounin-sensei to make those calls, should their students graduate, so long as the students had the taijutsu down well enough to pass the Academy exams."
"I guess it would be awfully hard to teach that many of us," Sakura concedes and falls into the taijutsu form they've been working on. Her brow furrows slightly as she makes a few changes, the ones they've already talked about but aren't natural feeling to her yet. Then she looks at him.
Kakashi takes a few moments help her make the minute adjustments necessary and then watches her flow through the motions of the form.
"Take it slow," he advises. "When you rush, you form bad habits. Speed will come."
She nods and they move on.
They're working on Sakura's aim, an hour and a half later, when Ino reaches for her canteen. Her presence still feels like him and, when they both look over at her, she beams tiredly.
Sakura glances at him and then, when he nods, she bolts over. "You did it," she crows, flinging her arms about Ino.
Ino laughs and says something in a low voice that makes Sakura smack her shoulder.
Kakashi wanders over at a slower pace and, giving Sakura time to take a spot beside Ino on the bench and Ino the time to take another drink and cap the canteen.
"How are you feeling?" he asks. He's going to keep on asking that too. Ino has zoned out a handful of times a day for the last three days.
Nothing seems to be wrong but Sakura has confirmed that it's extremely unusual behaviour for Ino. So… they're both keeping an eye on that and Ino's just going to have to deal with that.
She makes a face at that question—in her defense, he's asked her that a lot in the last three days—but doesn't complain. "Pretty good," Ino says, with another irrepressible smile. "I did it, Hatake-sensei!"
"You did," he says, smiling. "Good work. I'm very impressed."
It's the truth. He had hoped she'd be able to do this, when he'd proposed it, but he had also known it was a long shot in the dark.
But Ino likes challenges. She will always rise to meet one.
"What's the chakra drain like?" he asks briskly. "How much focus does it take for you to maintain this and how long do you think you can manage it?"
"Does it feel weird?" Sakura asks, pulling her feet up under her to sit cross-legged on the bench. "Being someone else while being you at the same time?"
"It's a little weird," Ino admits. "It's like carrying a full glass of water very carefully? I should be able to maintain it as long as I'm conscious. The chakra drain is pretty minimal."
From the careful way she doesn't look at Sakura as she says that, Kakashi suspects that the chakra drain is only minimal because Ino's chakra stores are larger than Sakura's.
"I'm not going to be able to use any of my family's techniques while doing this though," Ino adds. "So we'll have to communicate the old-fashioned way. I couldn't figure out how to have the seeming of someone who wasn't my bloodline spackled over my essence and use my bloodline for communication."
"So you can't…" Sakura frowns for a moment. "You can't hear that?"
Ino shakes her head. "Not a peep."
Kakashi nods. "That shouldn't be a problem. Given the way your bloodline interacted with the presence of the entity in the Main House, it's probably for the best that you use your bloodline as little as possible.
"Can you fight while holding the shell? Use other jutsu?"
Ino considers that as the first fat drops of rain begin to splatter down on them. "I think so," she says, with a sly glance at both him and Sakura. "It's pretty well anchored. But there's only one way to really be sure."
"Spar?" Sakura says brightly.
"Spar," Ino agrees.
They both look at him.
Kakashi glances at the sky and, since that really doesn't tell him anything, goes with his gut feeling on the time.
"A quick spar," he decrees. "Then run about the perimeter. If Ino can hold her shell from now until bed, we'll begin canvassing the estate in earnest tomorrow."
Sakura bounces up off the bench. Ino follows a bit more slowly, clearly stiff from having sat there for so long.
He doesn't have to tell her to stretch. She does it without prompting.
Kakashi calls a halt to the spar before there's a clear winner (though he thinks Sakura would have won; Ino's speed and reaction times are slowed by the concentration she has to give her shell, that becomes clear very quickly) but Ino manages to use kawarimi twice and a basic katon jutsu—
And does so without her shell flickering even a little. If he closed his eyes, it would be Sakura versus him as far as his senses are concerned.
And that's another thing that only practice will improve—the more she uses the shell, the better she'll be at reacting while wearing it.
He is not surprised when Ino manages to hold the shell stable and present through the run, through supper and clean up and their showers. She holds it through his quiz on distances relative to each other around the estate and it's only when she crawls into her bedroll that the shell is dismissed, purposefully, not by accident.
Kakashi puts out the lantern and, as he does so, he says, "We're moving forward with the mission, starting tomorrow. Well done, the both of you."
He can't see the girls beam at him, but he knows they are.
It takes them four days to drag chakra nets over the outside of the estate, searching underneath the ground for anything that doesn't seem like it ought to be there. They find a bunch of bones—and not all of them in the cemetery area of the estate—and some really, really fancy jewelry, a bunch of coins, a few love letters, a single shoe, and nothing that looks anything like a summoning scroll. Not even a scrap of one.
They'd have gotten through the estate quicker, except that Hatake-sensei had still insisted that they do their morning and afternoon runs about the perimeter and that they train too. Their chakra can only hold out for so long, each day, before they're forced to stop and it's in the afternoons, once they're exhausted, that Hatake-sensei makes them work on their taijutsu.
"Tomorrow," Ino says, once they're eating supper, "are we going inside the Main House?"
Sakura looks up, frowning a little. "There are still all of the smaller buildings. We haven't searched inside of them yet, not with anything but the chakra nets. If the scroll isn't underground, it wouldn't have given us an alert, right?"
"We've searched half of the buildings already," Ino points out. "A lot of them don't have enough left standing to sneeze in, let alone spend days searching through."
"I know," Sakura says. "It's just…"
Ino shrugs a little. She gets what Sakura is thinking about, boy does she ever, but they've been here for ten days already. If something was going to come out and eat them, it would have done it by now. So, now, they've got to risk it.
Sakura frowns harder, like she knows what Ino is thinking.
"We'll begin the Main House tomorrow," Hatake-sensei says, before they can devolve into bickering about their path. "From sunrise to sundown only."
"Yes, Hatake-sensei," they chorus.
"Are we going in fully armed?" Ino asks. They're always armed, even in the village, but there's a difference between what they usually carry and what they carry in a hostile situation. Hatake-sensei hasn't made them go fully loaded down for the last few days, but…
"Good idea," he says. "Yes. I know it won't be as comfortable but better safe than sorry."
Sakura nods. "Just because nothing has happened during the day yet doesn't mean it can't."
Hatake-sensei sets his dishes by the sink. "That's right. No training this evening. No chakra usage either. Spend this evening sorting through your kits and making sure you've got everything organized before tomorrow."
He doesn't say that there'll be a test on it but, well, Ino exchanges a glance with Sakura.
Another test. Sakura sounds amused and resigned.
Ino hides her smile behind her cup. Almost definitely. At least we know it's coming this time.
"Hatake-sensei," Sakura says. "Can you give us a rough idea of the floorplan of the Main House?"
Oooh, good idea!
"We never made it past the first floor," Ino adds. "And even that, we were only in a couple of rooms. The kitchen and the surrounding rooms, really."
Then she leaves it there and doesn't push the matter further. Hatake-sensei is thinking about it and, as he does so, Ino gets up and starts the dishes.
Sakura comes with her. "I'll wash," she says. "You did this morning's washing."
"Sure," Ino says, not at all complaining about getting to dry dishes instead.
Is he going to be okay about… everything? Sakura asks, shoving the thought at Ino.
Ino hums a little as she works and, after a moment, Sakura joins her. That's a really complicated question, Forehead.
You know what I meant! After a moment, Sakura adds: Pig.
And, honestly, I don't know. I think he's doing better since we're focusing more on an actual threat than just searching through musty old memories, but that doesn't mean he's going to enjoy going in there, where his dad…
Yeah.
Don't sound so despondent, Ino says. He's got us with him and that means he's not going to be able to get lost in his own head too much. It's going to be weird and creepy and he's likely going to have a lot of thoughts he doesn't want anyone else to hear but… he's our Jounin-sensei. He'll be fine.
How are you always so confident? Sakura asks, sounding a little envious.
Ino shrugs a little. If you can't be confident in yourself or the people you work with then, like, how are you ever going to get anything done?
Sakura mulls over that and Ino leaves her to it, not sure what she's said to make her teammate so thoughtful but—well, she's not upset, then it's fine. Once they're done the dishes, they look back at Hatake-sensei, who has been quietly…
Huh.
"One day," Ino says, "one day, we're going to notice when you leave and come back, you know."
He looks up from where he's bent over a sheet of paper, pen in hand. His eye curves in a smile. "Ah," he says, "but when you can do that, then who will be the teacher and who will be the student?"
Sakura laughs. "What could we teach you? Honestly, Hatake-sensei."
"You've both already taught me things," he says, still smiling, but sounding a little more serious. "Now come here and take a seat."
They do.
"Hatake-sensei," Ino says, after looking at his work. "You're kind of terrible at drawing."
Sakura giggles.
"Oh yes," he agrees. "Always have been. Luckily, floorplans are mostly straight lines and even I can manage that."
Ino giggles at that. She does like the way that he admits to his faults, not shying away from them or embarrassed of them.
Even though the drawing is… well. It's bad.
"I haven't been here in years," he warns. "So do not expect this to be an accurate representation of the distances between locations. Some of the rooms are also likely to be different than what I recall. Things that are obvious from an older perspective aren't the same from a younger one and I was… quite young, the last time I was here."
They both nod, sobering up because there's nothing funny about that.
"This," he says, pointing as he goes, "is the main entrance. From here, this is the path we took last time. These rooms are the ones that we were in—and this one is where you were attacked and escaped from."
It seems so clinical and distant from the way she'd felt about it that night, spoken of this way, but Ino knows that this is the only way to really move past something like this. By going back in there, they're likely to be attacked again.
She shoves her unease away and focuses as Hatake-sensei walks them through the floorplan of his old home.
This is still the creepiest place, Sakura thinks as they slip into the Main House the next morning. The ground is soaked through—it had poured all night—and the air feels heavy and sodden, almost like a living thing wrapping about her to strangle her.
Even the sun is hiding and Sakura tries not to take that as a portent.
You're so dramatic, Ino comments. It's just another rainy, cloudy day in Konoha. They happen all the time.
Stop eavesdropping on me, Sakura thinks, though she doesn't really mind.
Ino just shrugs and doesn't answer.
Following Hatake-sensei, they make their way down the path they'd originally followed, back to the kitchen, which was undisturbed, and then through the rooms they'd been in before. The hair on the back of her neck rises as they look at the enormous claw marks gouged into the sliding door and the back of the bookcases they'd so carefully moved.
"What did that?" Ino asks, frowning. "Those claw marks don't even look like they were all from the same creature."
Hatake-sensei is silent for a long time before he says, rather grimly, "I don't know what did that."
It's very clear that he doesn't like having to answer it. It's equally clear that he doesn't like that they're in this place, here and now, putting themselves in a position where they might have to face whatever had carved their claws through wood and then dissipated without so much as trace of where they had gone. Sakura shivers.
"Let's keep going," Ino says finally. "There's no point in staring around at what's already been done. We're supposed to be looking for a summoning scroll not a monster."
Sakura glances at her but Ino is keeping her gaze mostly on Hatake-sensei.
"We might not have to fight at all," Sakura says, which is really the option she'd rather take. Like, they've spent a lot of time training just in case they are attacked but… optimally, it would be better if they didn't have to.
The downside is that they'd never know what the monster that attacked them was but, given that it's apparently living on an estate where no one has been in… a long time… not since Hatake-sensei left here, after his father…
It's really not surprising this place his haunted, Sakura decides.
"That's the plan," Hatake-sensei says. "But Ino's right. Come on and we'll get started."
It really is sort of tragic that we won't find out what the thing living here is, Ino comments idly as they follow Hatake-sensei.
I don't really want to fight whatever it is, Sakura thinks back. It's still pretty weird, too, whenever Ino talks in her head but Ino's been doing that more and more lately and Sakura's getting used to that too, especially once Hatake-sensei had explained that it was practice for Ino, and good for her. Those marks aren't cute, harmless things.
Oh, I know, Ino agrees airily. But it's the mystery of it…
You're just going to have to keep pining over it, Sakura says, ignoring the part of her wishes they could find out, safely, what it was.
Really, she agrees with Ino, even though it's a stupid thing to want to do and they both know that.
Despite his misgivings, the search of the Main House goes according to plan the first day.
And the second day.
They're forced to go much, much slower in the Main House than they had outside. The delay chafes at him, but Kakashi uses the extra time to work with the girls on refining their technique for rushing a room that may or may not be occupied (he runs them through both scenarios as well as what to do if the room were to be filled with non-combatants, combatants they can take, combatants that they can't take, and various mixes of all of the above).
They pass the third day without incident, aside from a mishap with a linen closet and some towels falling on Sakura that had… well. Kakashi really couldn't blame her for the shrieking that had ensued when the moth infested towels had landed on her, even though the volume had been unfortunate. It had provided further proof that they were reasonably safe during the day, however, since nothing had attacked them.
Other than the moths.
In any event, once that happens, Kakashi begins to relax, just a little, since superstition says that if anything can go wrong, it's going to go wrong on the third day. Day four dawns bright and clear and he's not expecting trouble.
And, so long as we're vigilant, we should be alright.
It's a comforting thought.
"Why do you think Hatake-sensei is circling around the west wing?" Sakura wonders.
Ino makes a face at the box she's sorting through (old spoons, of all things) and then looks up at Sakura. They're in one of the storage rooms on the first floor, back behind where the servant quarters would have been, long ago, when people actually lived here.
She doesn't drop her shields or reach out with her mind, but she does mentally peer over her barriers to see if Hatake-sensei is in the room next to them or something like that. He's not, so Ino answers Sakura frankly:
"It's probably where his family actually lived," Ino says, finishing sorting through the box to make sure it's all just spoons and nothing more exciting (sadly, it's just spoons). "I mean, odds are huge if the scroll is here, that's where it'll be, but… it's also probably where his mom died and it's definitely where his dad committed suicide."
"I know that," Sakura says, a bit impatiently. "But we're already here, looking through everything. Wouldn't it make more sense to just—get it over with? Rip the bandage off?"
"He doesn't seem to think so," Ino points out. "And maybe it's also a lesson in thoroughness and working from the least likely to the most likely places out of an abundance of caution."
Sakura makes a grumbling noise in the back of her throat and Ino ignores that. If Sakura had asked Hatake-sensei these things, Ino would say she was being cruel, but being frustrated and asking questions that really shouldn't be asked between teammates is… all right.
"Besides," Ino says, "it's kind of ghastly to think too long and too hard about going through Hatake-sensei's parents' stuff, you know? Given what little we know of their history."
Sakura shudders.
"We'll get there soon enough anyway," Ino adds. "We've got, what, ten rooms left of this wing and then—"
"There's the attic and the chimneys," Sakura finishes. "And we should be able to finish most of that today. A lot of the rooms are mostly empty. The servants cleared out this place when they left. Which seems pretty fair, really."
Only because there was no one alive who needed to hire new servants.
Ino doesn't say this though, figuring there's no point, and instead just shrugs as she stuffs the box of spoons back where it came from and pulls down the next box.
They work in silence for a while, aside from the odd swearing fit (splinters run rampant as they dig through these old things) and grunts when they've got to move something heavy. Hatake-sensei drops by a few times, to check in on them.
Ino has given up on the shelf she'd been working on (she'd found another box of spoons, a box of new bamboo chopsticks, still in their sleeves, a lot of folded pairs of socks, dried up ink pots, and a heavy, iron grill, still in the box it must have been bought in) and moved through the next shelf (this one had been easier—aside from an abacus, it had been empty; she'd just had to check for hidden panels) and just started yet another one, on her side of the room, when Sakura breaks their companionable quiet.
"What do you think this was?" Sakura asks, holding up a broken piece of...
Ino frowns at it from where she's methodically removing books from a shelf. It looks like ceramic from across the room. "Some sort of fancy plate? Some people collect those."
"Maybe," Sakura says, giving the piece another look. "It's kind of weird that this is the only piece of it, isn't it, though?"
"What?" Ino puts the book she's holding (something about galaxies) on her latest stack and wanders over to the curio cabinet Sakura had been looking through. "There's no other bits of it?"
"That's why I was wondering what it was," Sakura says, sounding aggrieved. "People don't just keep broken shards of things around. Not usually anyway."
Ino peers into the cabinet, believing Sakura but also needing to see for herself because that is weird. She's not sure it's important, in this long-abandoned house, but...
"I guess we could ask Hatake-sensei," Ino says. "Have you tried a kai on it? Just in case it's a disguised thing?"
Sakura shakes her head and rectifies that, fingers forming the seal quick as thought.
But the broken piece of whatever stays as it is.
Ino gingerly probes it with her mind.
"I don't sense anything from it," she says, after a moment. "It's either really well hidden or it's just a broken bit someone felt necessary to keep. Maybe as a memento?"
Sakura sighs and gently sets the shard on the table she's using to hold the junk from the cabinet. "Do you think we're going to get that strange when we get old?"
"How should I know?" Ino says, going back to her bookshelf. "You're older than I am."
"By six months!" Sakura protests. "I'm not old!"
Ino laughs and, after a moment, Sakura does too.
"Pig," Sakura mutters, without heat. "I'm going to ask Hatake-sensei to look at it anyway since it's the most out of place thing we've found yet."