Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 33 - Positioning
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4,493
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 33 of ? Unbeta'd.

Freedom!

Despite the urge to enjoy the way the air feels against her skin, the way that some of the tension falls off of her shoulders, as soon as she hits the roof, Ino keeps moving. She is well aware of the fact that the emotional surge of exhilaration is mostly a lie. Nothing has really changed and she's not much safer than she was inside of the building. If she gets careless now, well, it's an insult to every teacher she's ever had.

And she's been careless enough already for, like, at least three missions.

She's not going to think about that right now either, instead slinking her way across the roof and then, after checking to see if she can spot any presences, or feel their chakra, in her immediate vicinity (no to either of those), she jumps from the roof of the Main House over to one of the trees growing nearest. Once she's thoroughly ensconced and hidden in the leaves and branches, only then does Ino permit herself to relax just slightly.

Step One: Complete. Her eyes scan the outside of the Main House, which parts she can see, and considers where Sakura and Hatake-sensei were. Step Two: Circle around the building until I'm nearer the kitchen.

Step Three, she leaves up in the air for now. This would drive Shikamaru nuts, from her old team, and Sakura absolutely crazy, on her new team, so Ino decides this with some level of stubborn defiance. She works better this way, adjusting her plans on the fly and deliberately not trying to think a hundred steps ahead, trusting her subconscious to weave a path for her before she needs it.

Yamanaka luck, some call it.

Stomping on that thought spiral before it can do more than begin to murmur insidiously, Ino frowns, charting her path around the building.

Then she shrugs and slips out of the tree, landing on silent feet, a crouch that serves her well as she ducks past the bushes that, two days ago, she'd tumbled into during another game of 'protect the hapless civilian and fail miserably'. She hopes like hell that, once they get out of here, they don't have to go on any missions to protect civilians for a good, long time.

But even that embarrassment, of going through the bushes so ignominiously and the stung pride that came along with it, serves and nourishes a purpose now: she knows the shape and lay of these bushes, how best to crawl through them without making noise.

Going over the roof would be faster, but this is safer when she doesn't know what sort of enemy she might be facing. The roof is too open. Where would she hide?

This, though, is how she and her old team had slithered through the Chuunin Exams while being out-matched and over-powered by pretty much every other team. In retrospect, she's not sure what Asuma-sensei had been thinking to send them through it.

Yeah, they'd made it to the semi-finals, Shikamaru to the finals, but just because they had managed to scrape through didn't mean they were at all ready to actually become Chuunin. Weeks under Hatake-sensei's tutelage was just proving that more and more true.

I'd get my team killed, she thinks soberly. And now Shikamaru's got that on his shoulders because Asuma-sensei didn't hold us back.

Which got stranger still, the more she thought about it, because he'd held them back in almost every other way, relying on their Clan bonds and synergy to make up the deficits.

Sure, they'd made it, after all—

The only pride a ninja should have is in the measure of their skills, her dad had murmured to her, over the course of years, lessons all boiling down to one simple one. If a mission doesn't call for a fight, don't start one. If you can hide and sneak and not get caught: do that.

And they'd done that. Back then, they'd done that, faded into the scenery and they'd have made it, just fine, had she not literally dragged them out into Team 7's mess.

I don't regret that either, Ino muses, pausing mid-bush and listening intently, avidly, for anything out of place, a bird song that doesn't belong, the animal call of something that doesn't live here. For the feel of a presence guardedly watching her. I mean, in hindsight, it was stupid as shit, we all should've died, but I don't—I don't regret it either.

Though she is glad she didn't die. If she had, then who would be crawling around the outskirts of the Main House in an attempt to rescue Sakura?

(And that's what got her to move back then, too, in the Chuunin Exams.

She just can't not try to save Sakura.)

Nothing stirs, except her heart keeps on beating, loud in her own ears. Ino shakes her head slightly, carefully, to remind herself to focus. It only sort of works. She's used to a long ponytail, the elastic tight, the pressure and weight of that reminding her. Now it's just baby fine hair dancing along her cheeks, half a sneeze away from ruining everything.

But I won't let it, and she moves, quickly, before the sneeze can catch up to her, giving her body something better to do as she skitters across an open piece of lawn, unavoidable and dangerously innocuous. Nothing attacks her.

It's almost aggravating to know there's a real, legit possibility for danger in here, to be actively heading towards where it ought to be, and to have nothing go wrong. It's probably terrible of her to wish that something would because then, at least, the tension wouldn't be killing her by inches.

While it would be deeply satisfying to punch someone in the face though, I don't have the time for that. It's not safe. It's an appalling level of indecision that part of me even wants a disaster like that. I should work on that.

The thing is, she has, and she will, and Ino knows better to invite these things out into the world by speaking of them.

In the back of her head, though, she's pretty sure there's always going to be a small voice clamouring for disaster! Drama! Doom!

Ino thrives on these things.

She loves the peace of flowers, planting them, watching them grow, taking care of them.

But she also loves—she loves fixing things and she can't fix anything if it's not broken.

I'm not broken, she thinks rebelliously, but otherwise embraces the seed of the idea that—that it'll be okay. She screwed up, she's lost her powers, but somehow, one way or another, she'll fix it and she'll be stronger for it.

The bright, hard determination that flares from that, hard candy sweetness, warms her through even has her fingers complain that the ground is damp and they're cold.

She flexes them, and then crawls up another tree, this one much closer to the kitchen. She can see the window she'd lost herself looking out from earlier.

And now everything opens up. A plethora of ways to go!

Should she peer into the window? Skip it and try to guess where Sakura would have gone? The only place Hatake-sensei would take them that they haven't been themselves yet is the old wing, the one where his family had actually lived.

Should I go check that out?

Ino hides herself a little deeper in the foliage and then closes her eyes, carefully trying to reach out with her sensor abilities. They're different from her Clan powers but not so different that she doesn't understand the basic concept of how to use them.

She just has to… stretch the ability out, a muscle that needs practice to grow.

This isn't how I'd have planned to learn but, like, okay. Okay. I can do this.

The worst part really is how she keeps trying to reach out with one sense while she needs to reach with another but that's an emotional problem, not a logistics one, and Ino carefully pares down her feelings, tucking them away to be looked at later, deep into a reservoir of things to deal with another time, so she can knife-sharp wield the ability she wants to.

I know you're here somewhere, she taunts, empty teasing. So where oh where are you, chakra signatures? Are you hiding from me? Bit stupid, that, because I'm going to—

Found you.

Ino's smile is not very nice at all.

(But it's also perfect.)

And, yeah, they're heading for the old wing. So, too, does Ino, taking the crawling, painstaking route through dirt and leaves, grass and flowers. A series of bumblebees bounce about her head, carefully inspecting her, as she eyes them right on back.

They don't sting her, and she carries on. Razor-thin grass blades leave little red lines on her legs. Less than a cut, not really a welt, but marks that say where she's been all the same. They'll fade before night falls.

I'd like this wrapped up before then, though, she admits, if only to herself. I'm not sure I want to be creeping around the outside just knowing that creeping around the inside is the weird monster thing and actual intruders. Seems a bit of an over-indulgence in things to fix, really, and far too many ways it could go wrong.

Retreating back to the safety of first base is an option but it is one that she feels would be—

There's no shame in running away but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't even try.

And if she fails, if there's nothing she can do to help, then there's still something:

Then I chakra blade myself out of here and get help.

Choosing to do nothing at all, to hide away in first base by herself? That's just a way to shirk responsibility and that? That is shameful. It's a discarded option before she even shuffles her deck of choices.

Movement has her freezing, pausing, eyes narrowing as she hunkers down mentally, locking her chakra down even harder (I am a bug, I am a bug, I am—oh, hell, I'm a bee, nothing more, there's enough of them around here) and she waits and waits, breath held, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe (in and out, carefully, carefully, don't take a full breath, take it shallow and slow, just like in lessons), and she waits.

That's one thing she has over Sakura, undeniably so. Sakura comes off as the more patient one, especially when she's playing the good, meek girl, the mask she wears around people she wants to make a good impression on, but it's a lie. A lie. Sakura is a roiling mass of impatience and anger and anxiety and prone to exploding. Her heart is a tender mess of contradictions.

Ino sits and Ino waits and she is like stone, immovable.

When it matters, time is immaterial, her patience limitless and depthless.

Who is it?

The answer will reveal itself, soon enough, and she keeps her own counsel, keeps herself safe, a carefully forged balance beam wondering what will step wrong and trip over her.

Movement passes and, with it, infuriatingly, is nothing to be seen.

A genjutsu? A henge?

Ino considers that carefully, still frozen, not daring to move quite yet, even when the chakra-slick knowledge of someone being near her has separated enough that she feels she can breathe.

I know this chakra, she realizes. It's not mine or Sakura's or Hatake-sensei's but I know this chakra.

That… that narrows the list of who it could be down quite a lot. She has a wider social net than most of her peers except, perhaps, Hinata—though in Hinata's case that's almost an accident of birth; she's pretty sure Hinata would rather not know all the people she does—but it's still only a handful of leaves, a fistful of pebbles, compared to the entire village.

There's the matter of Sakura and Hatake-sensei to consider but, also, there's no time to delay: with a snapshot crack of judgement, Ino adjusts her goals, her plans, and sneaks off after the chakra signature that's oh so familiar but that she just can't quite place.

I wish I understood what was going on, Ino thinks, but even her mind's voice can't quite hit mournful for not knowing. The mystery is, by itself, part of the exhilaration. If there's a traitor to the village and I know them… then it's my duty to find out who it is and what they think they're doing.

It helps assuage her conscience that they're going very nearly in the same direction that she'd been headed already. A different target, if it leads her to both goals, is perfectly fine. No one needs to know.

Except she does and that's the whole point.

They're at the walls of the old wing now and, even from the outside, it's easy to tell that once upon a time, this was a home, not just a place to show off wealth and entertain guests. This is where people rested, relaxed. It's in the set of rotting geta, just outside a sliding door. In the way an old lantern has fallen over, the glass cloudy and broken, the bodies of moths dead inside of it.

(They are always drawn to the flame; Ino understands that urge well, though she tries not to get burnt.)

Here, the old, filthy curtains are patterned in huge, lopsided florals, nothing elegant or noble about them but something someone might pick for themselves to look at every day.

Something about them leaves her with a lump in her throat, poignancy nearly tangible, because it's easy to picture these curtains in the early morning light, someone opening them with a laugh, and in that imagining, they're beautiful.

This estate is the saddest place she's ever been.

Ino shakes it off and keeps going.

She decidedly does not dwell on all the sheer grossness that touches her when she winds up under a balcony, with the bugs and the things that have made their homes there. The reeds that have grown up, wild and full, provide her with a perfect place to hide with a perfect place to settle in and get a good look at—

Across the way, across this small courtyard garden, this boxed in space, she has a great view of straight across from her. At first glance, nothing but another paper door, time-battered and bruised, but the chakra presence she's been following is right past it.

Being out here after dark wouldn't be her idea of a good time but Ino does take a moment to mourn the fact that it would be so much easier if it was dark enough for the enemy to light a lantern. Shadows could tell so much, a silhouette speaking a thousand words in a movement.

But she doesn't have that, so she'll make what she does have work for her. Sakura calls her 'Pig' an epithet based on the meaning of her name. It's meant as an insult, sometimes, and a compliment, sometimes, but the most important thing is that, well, it's not wrong.

Boars are stubborn, temperamental things and hard to dissuade from a purpose once they've settled on on.

Ino knows good and well that this describes her: she goes after what she wants, when she wants it, relentless in her pursuit of it.

And right now, right here, I want to know who is behind the door.

Of course, she can't just go and slide it open—or well, she could, but that would probably end poorly for her—but while she's never been in this part of the building before, she has memorized the blueprint that Hatake-sensei drew for them. She's been all over the ground outside of this wing.

If someone wants to leave the room she's across from—they have to leave from the door she's looking at. There are no windows. That room was originally meant for personal storage of the family. Things like out-grown clothes or seasonal decorations.

They could, she supposes, break through a wall or something but Ino would hear that, so she doesn't worry about it. She murders a spider that tries to crawl on her and goes back to hiding her chakra under the seeming of a bee.

Time passes like molasses, minutes falling away like crumbling pillars from ancient monuments, and Ino waits.

By the time the door opens, she's lulled herself into a state of peaceful alertness, a calm that's deep as a lake on a windless day, and that's really the only thing that keeps herself from giving her position away out of shock.

Because the person leaving the storage room is herself.

"I don't know," Sakura says, her complaint casual and teasing. "Hatake-sensei didn't tell me anything."

Ino laughs. It helps to hide the way she doesn't look great.

Sakura still wants to call her on that, mostly out of worry, and a little out of nerves because the fact that someone or something is still watching them is grating on her. Hatake-sensei would be super disappointed in her, though, if she went off and gave the unknown enemy something to use against them.

And, well.

She'd be disappointed in herself, too, because she knows better than that.

(But the idea of Hatake-sensei's disappointment burns more; she's used to disappointing herself.)

"Now that we're both here, are you going to tell us?" Ino asks.

Hatake-sensei smiles, the expression easy to read in the curve of his eyebrow, the way his one eye crinkles at the corners.

"I could," he says affably. "Or we could cut out the conversation and just head there."

Sakura swaps a glance with Ino, who shrugs slightly.

Sakura hesitates a moment then shrugs too. Maybe they'll lose whoever it is that's watching them on their way there or they'll get lazy or careless and they'll spot them and then… they'd deal with it. However it falls out.

"Let's just go," Sakura decides, with a little nod. "Is there anything we need to know before we're there? Most of the estate has been pretty self-explanatory."

Except the ghost-monster-thing. The way Ino keeps zoning out when looking at the sky and losing time. How something in there is now stalking them.

… Sakura decides she's not going to ignore that but that she's going to just stick with what she'd said. Physically, most of the estate itself has been self-explanatory.

It's not her fault that everything else has gone sideways and gotten weird.

Maybe it's a Team 7 curse, she muses. May you live in interesting times and all that rot.

But, really, it does feel like Team 7 has been cursed with exciting lives sometimes. None of her peers seem to have endured nearly the number of hot mess disasters as her team has.

"This is less self-evident than usual," Hatake-sensei says thoughtfully, though he also seems a bit amused. "But that's part of why I thought you two should come and see it."

"Then lead the way," Ino says cheerfully. "We're not going to complain about a break from going through old, dirty things."

Everything about the interaction sounds normal but, as they follow Hatake-sensei down the hallway, Sakura wonders at why it sounds...

Scripted.

That's it, really, she realizes. It isn't that it's wrong or out of character but it sounds like they're saying something they've practiced.

She keeps her frown off her face with some effort. Internally, she scowls. Nothing is adding up quite right. But nothing is wrong either.

This all stinks.

For a moment, Sakura considers the idea that Hatake-sensei and Ino are communicating mind to mind and that this is their ploy to key her into their plans but... that doesn't make sense either. If Ino is talking to Hatake-sensei then she'd be able to talk to her the same way.

Which means that's off the table as an option entirely, which is both a relief and a concern. It would have been aggravating, insulting, and just plain rude of them to exclude her from a conversation of minds (and it would have hurt her feelings quite a lot) but the other options are worse.

What if the reason I feel like I'm being watched isn't because someone is following us but... rather... because I'm the only one of 'us' that's the real one?

"What do you think it will be?" she asks Ino, in a low voice that Hatake-sensei will definitely hear. That's okay, she's not trying to keep it from him.

In all honesty, Sakura has no idea what she's doing or what she's trying to achieve. This is why she hates having to improvise. It always feels like juggling and that's- well. When it comes to emotions and thoughts, that's not her greatest skill.

But it might draw something out, something to point her towards a direction. She's fishing for any information at all.

Should I try to get away? she wonders. So far, she's not in any obvious danger. So far, she's been fine. It just gives her the heebie jeebies, the culmination of a bunch of niggling little things, ever-so-slightly off that adds up to-a problem. They haven't even done anything but…

Try and lead her to the one area of the Main House she hasn't been yet.

"Maybe he found the scroll?" Ino murmurs.

That doesn't even make sense as an answer, though Sakura nods like it does. If he'd found it, then he would have brought it to them, and the mission would be done and over with. "Maybe," she says, then adds, in an attempt to make that makes sense: "What if it's stuck somewhere?"

It still doesn't make sense, but Ino goes along with it. In fact, Ino grins at her, sharp-edged and a little wicked.

This leaves Sakura even more unsettled because she's seen Ino grin like that before but it's not, it's not her friendly grin. It's the one where shit is about to go down and she's gleefully anticipating it.

"Maybe he's hands are too big," Ino suggests, raising her voice enough that Hatake-sensei glances back at them. "Or he's too old."

"Someone's asking for extra training, I see," Hatake-sensei says.

Ino squawks, holding her hands up, shaking her head, and falls silent. Sakura giggles, though it is the last thing she feels like doing.

I think, I think I need to get out of here, Sakura realizes, her mind racing. She has no proof of anything, nothing but instinct, but those instincts are telling her that all of this is wrong. But how do I escape Hatake-sensei and Ino? One's a Jounin and the other can read my mind.

Despair threatens to drown her but—but Hatake-sensei doesn't think I'm worthless. He's glad I'm on Team 7. Ino literally switched teams to be with me. Part of her still wants to insist that there's no way for her out of this but she's had a lot of time to think, this mission, and a lot of time to hurt.

And a lot of time to heal, if only a little.

The facts are that Ino and Hatake-sensei think better of her than she does.

And I'd bet that they wouldn't think, not even for a moment, that I couldn't figure out a way to escape from this situation.

Their certainty, sharp like a bite of pineapple, comforts her and she draws that tightly around her doubts, containing them, for the moment and giving her a proper space to think in, one that isn't awash in feelings.

I'm being stupid, she realizes, almost immediately. If Ino's been replaced, then who ever replaced her can't read my mind. That's huge. That gives me a lot more breathing room. Hatake-sensei's a Jounin and whoever it is that's impersonating him isn't bad at acting like him, but Ino or I could probably act a lot like him, if we put our minds to it. We know him well enough. So whoever it is might not be a Jounin.

The so-called Ino not being able to read her mind is a fact she's pretty certain of. Hatake-sensei's replacement not being a Jounin is much, much shakier.

Sakura acknowledges that grimly.

But it's three Genin to take down a Jounin, so says the Academy, on average. But they don't say it takes three Genin to get away from a Jounin.

So maybe one Genin could do so.

And I've got an advantage, though, oh, it's an ugly one to admit to, even in the back of her head. No one expects me to be good at anything. I bet they won't either. They'll underestimate me.

Ruthlessly, she kills the self-pity that tries to well up. She doesn't have time for that.

I'm fully armed. I might not know many jutsu, but the ones I do know, I know really, really well.

The biggest problem is, she's running out of time. They're almost out of the hallways she's been down before.

I'm not ready! But even in her head, it's a muffled complaint. Loathsome but easily ignored.

As they pass a window, she says a prayer that this won't wind up in her under a shroud, and stops suddenly, rigidly, staring out the window. She stops so abruptly that Ino almost walks into her.

"What was that?!" she says, putting very real anxiety into her voice. "I thought I saw something out there! Something moved!"

"What, like a bird?" Ino asks, peering out the window. "It might've just been a squirrel."

Hatake-sensei is silent but he's gone on the alert—and, to her, this is enough to confirm that he's not who he ought to be because it's not his alert.

"I know how a squirrel or bird moves," Sakura protests. "It didn't move like that at all. It moved weirdly. I don't know what it was. I know nothing is supposed to be in here with us—but I saw something. What if it's the monster? Hatake-sensei, you always say that just because we haven't seen it in the daylight doesn't mean it couldn't make a move!"

She's grasping at straws.

"Shouldn't we go out and see what it was?" She gulps. "What if it got us from behind because we didn't bother to look underneath the underneath?"

"I'll go look," Hatake-sensei says, after a moment. There's a very real frown in his voice, which Sakura is pleased by. It means this might—might—have a chance at working out for her, that he didn't expect this. "You two, stay where you are."

"Yes, Hatake-sensei," they say, in tandem.

Then, blessedly, he's gone, and Sakura is left with just the person wearing Ino's face.

Now I just need to get away from her. One down, one to go.