Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 37 – I_ _ _R
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4,943
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 37 of ? Unbeta'd.
Sakura opens her eyes.
The sky above her is black and speckled with sparks of stars that have been scattered like so many paint droplets. She blinks up at the sky, puzzled and disoriented, wondering how she got here, as it slowly sinks in that—she doesn't know this sky. These stars.
Fear seems so far away, too far away to bother her, like something someone read to her once, a long time ago, so Sakura just accepts that the stars aren't hers and the sky is something new, and carefully sits up.
It seems like the sort of thing to do.
She swings her legs down and they seem very pale against the black-blue depths of the sky. Which, she now realizes, is all about her, like she's in the center of a snow globe. Sakura laughs at the image and her breath escapes her in glittering, scattering bits of light, like fireflies on a hot summer's night.
When she reaches out to try and catch them, her fingers pass through the lights, the touch tingling through her.
Curiously, she looks to see what she had laid upon, but it is only more darkness. No flecks of light here, to dance about and dazzle her.
She feels very—good.
Safe, Sakura realizes, wrapping the sensation around her like the very thickest of blankets. Like there's never anything to be afraid of.
Dimly, from a great distance, some part of her stirs at that. What if there was something to be afraid of here?
What then?
But that, clearly, is nonsense and as Sakura picks herself up off of her featureless suggestion of a bed, standing now in mid-air, she ignores that small, pathetic little voice of her. She doesn't need to listen to it here. It will only say things that she doesn't want to know.
It lingers there, just under her surface. The quiet thing with the long, sharp tines that could wriggle her apart like so much angel food cake, like she's made of air, fluffy enough to float and so weak a knife isn't needed to separate the parts of it about.
But—no.
Since she's not paying attention to that inconsequential bit of her, Sakura spins about it a wide, carefree circle, stretching her fingers out as if she could touch the edges of her snow globe (she cannot) and, with a thought, garbs herself in a flowing robe, like a princess from a fairy tale.
Since her clothes are now a fantasy, Sakura shakes her head and allows her hair to follow suit, spilling down around her like a river of floating, flimy pink. It doesn't do anything but make her feel pretty and fancy and, given the oddness of this all, and that she is almost certain she's dreaming, Sakura doesn't see why she shouldn't feel pretty and fancy.
Extravagant, even, without the thrown stones or storming down graupel-snow's harder cousin; hail's softer sibling-of reality to dampen her spirits.
Maybe I am a spirit right now, Sakura thinks whimsically, floating upwards with a thought, her hair trailing below her, long streamers of sparkles coming off of the strands. Just because she can. But if I'm dreaming about this, I wonder why?
And, too, she's awfully lucid for a dreamer. Sakura knows her dreams and this... this is... odd, being both too unmoored from reality and yet, something about it rings too real to be a dream.
Still, nothing has hurt her yet, and she looks like a fairy princess from a children's story with no more effort than a thought, so Sakura tentatively decides not to worry too much about it. Yet.
She'll... keep an eye out, she supposes, though what that's going to accomplish is up in the air.
Much like herself and this makes her laugh as she spins, surveying the confines of her snow globe before she carries on, in good humour, to explore and see what there is to see while being what she feels like being.
Nothing to worry about, just looking because she can, and because Sakura is far to curious to not bother with checking things out.
The snow globe impression, it turns out, is pretty accurate. It's a large snow globe, this world she's in, but there is a barrier, clear and solid, feeling like glass under her palms that encircles the ground and reaches up, far above her, to come back down. A bubble, cut in half, the bottom of it the sturdy base.
Even though the darkness studded through with glinting, glittering lights is awfully pretty it is also very samey and, in that unrelenting sameness, rather boring when it isn't taking her breath away (Sakura realizes this is contradictory and ignores that-both things can be true), she eventually alights back upon the dark pedestal she had woken up on, the upraised bit of night that is solid under her feet.
There, Sakura wishes away her delicate sandals and wiggles her toes against the darkness (it is warm and soft under her feet, like the very plushest of rugs) as she considers the puzzle of what to do with all this space.
It's a bit of thing to muddle through, really, though thinking of that reminds her of her mother, making hot chocolate the old fashioned away, starting with real chocolate, rich and dark. A rare treat, in the quality of it.
Since she can, and it delights her to do so, Sakura manifests a cup of it into existence and wraps her hands around the hot mug, breathing in the steam before she drinks deeply of it.
Thus fortified, she turns her attention back to the sheer potential of the snow globe. Her kingdom of isolation? And she's the queen of it?
Maybe she should be worried about it, really, since Sakura doesn't usually like being alone, but the longer this draws on without any risk or disaster the more she is convinced that it's just a weird, weird dream and that, eventually, she'll wake from it and barely remember it.
A silent wish and a mirror taller than she is appears. Delicate gold in intricate swirls form legs that support the mirror and a crown above it to ornament it fittingly. She studies her reflection, now that she can see it, turning this way and that, wondering if maybe she could make a wish to remember how she looks here, in this dream, when she awakes.
Or will she be left with nothing but tattered, flimsy recollections that will make her want to stamp her feet or toss a pot petulantly, seeking comfort from a physical release instead?
Ugh.
She doesn't want to think about it. Sakura finishes her hot chocolate, again studies herself in the mirror-and yes, she does wish she will remember, just in case it happens to work-and then, finally fortified, turns her attention back to the great expanse at her command.
Sakura rubs her feet against the darkness underneath her thoughtfully and then, with smile, turns it all too bright, verdant green grass. Soft and springy, spreading as far as her snow globe reaches. Up above, she turns the darkness into a sky. Bright blue, the colour of Ino's eyes, and she artfully dots the sky with puffy, fluffy clouds of the purest white.
The light, brighter now, once she hangs a proper sun in the sky, gives her a better idea of what she's working with and the grass' ending tells her where her limits are. All the better to build a world of her own design.
So what do I want to do with all of this bounty? Should I box it all in, adorn the outskirts in tall walls that will serve to transform this place into a bastion of safety?
There's an appeal to that idea, to creating a set of walls under her control, just in case someone takes her snow globe barrier away—she didn't create that so it cannot be under her control. Even in her dreams, some part of her feels the need to be practical about this.
It might be a fairy tale world but, like all dreams, it will end eventually.
And Sakura would rather it end by her waking up than by it turning into a nightmare that leaves her screaming.
She builds her walls, high and tall, pale as snowy marble but stronger than steel, almost lacy in appearance but impregnable by design.
When they're set to her satisfaction, she studies her country—both vast and small—and, kneeling so her fingers brush the grass, sends a ripple throughout the ground, leaving her with gentle, rolling hills that she spills babbling brooks and streams through and then she liberally dots this landscape with trees whose leaves are multi-coloured, each a different shade, like little living rainbows.
To ascertain her trees are where she wants them to be, Sakura floats up above, surveying the land while sipping at another cup of her mother's hot chocolate. She makes minute adjustments for… longer than she probably should, though time seems to be a thing that isn't working correcting… before deciding it has been arranged to her approval.
Realizing that she's not settled on a season, Sakura gives it some thought and decides that late spring sounds the best—everything is new, fresh, and flourishing. It's warm, but not yet hot, and the breezes still carry a comfortable coolness to them without the bite of autumn's winds, the warning of winter.
To the water, she adds a sheen of iridescence. Something that, in the waking world, would signal danger, warning, but here in dreams is just pretty. Only then, does she turn her consideration to the construction of buildings.
I don't know what I want to do with them, though, Sakura muses. Setting a scene was easy, pulling from daydreams and fairy tales, and the wall was simple enough, just making it high and strong and shade it in colours that doesn't distract from the rest of scene.
But buildings…
Those, those must be different. Those must be things where people can live and she's not sure of that, here in a world where only she is.
Wouldn't a city or even a town be awfully lonely all by myself?
She thinks it would be—and Sakura hates being lonely. She's far too familiar with it and all it does is bring back bad, sad memories.
So… no city, then, she decides, though that decision stymies her in how she should progress now. Banishing her latest cup of hot chocolate, Sakura floats through the trees and weaves through the air, feet brushing the waters of her streams, as she thinks about how to move on. I don't want to take all of this down and start from scratch again. I like all of this. It makes me happy. But it also feels kind of… empty…
And the more she explores what she has made, the more that feels right. Like there's something missing, though she doesn't know what it is.
Sakura takes a seat on one of the spreading branches of the tallest trees, her ankles crossed primly and her hair a banner streaming down behind her to nearly touch the ground. She dots the grassy carpet underneath with crystalline flowers just because she can, then returns to chipping away at the problem that gnaws on her here.
Maybe one or two buildings? But make them grand and ancient, like relics of a forgotten time. No colloquial architecture here, nothing easy to live in without care, but rather… something formal and wild, dripping with secrets of ages past.
She takes a deep breath and nods slowly, letting the idea settle into the bones of her.
I like it. I like that a lot.
It will still be lonely but it will be a deliberate loneliness rather than her echoing around like the last grain of rice at the bottom of the bag. A place where the dreamers dreamed and then moved on rather than never having arrived to begin with.
She thinks she can handle loneliness like that, if it's by her own design.
The buildings go up slowly, tall towers of forgotten antiquities, their existences weals of blight upon the pristine landscape she's crafted. Sakura allows them their imperfections, the way some of the stones are out of place, some fallen, some broken, but the stretch of them, the breadth of them still rising as if to say that, once upon a time, their existence had been a thing of awe.
It takes a long time. Longer still, when she goes back and reworks some of it, her impatience costing her extra after she'd tried to save time instead. She slows down further, then further still, each thought deliberate. Only placing each brick of imagination down when she's confident in where it belongs.
When she sits upon the half-decayed roof of the tallest of her relics, the shingles rough under her skin only because she's told them to be, Sakura wonders at how long it has been. This has been a very long dream and she's now getting tired-something she's never had happen to her in dreams before.
A rumble underneath has her glancing down but, no, it's just a stone that has fallen from the half-gone grip it had maintained. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to-
But now she is worrying, just a little, because dreams aren't things that stretch into eternity. Not the kind where the body sleeps. And sleep is tugging on her, now, which means-
It could mean a lot of things. It really could. She doesn't know enough, just enough to know that something isn't... quite... right...
Sakura finishes the building she is upon, sinking those thoughts into the careful meditation the work requires. This way, she can dwell without dwelling, do it productively, for all that she's usually just fine thinking her way through things without the need of a crutch to distract her body.
Is this entire thing a distraction? she asks, and gets no answers. What would it be distracting me from? What is the last thing that I remember?
But, oh, that's had to come up with an answer to. Like she is dredging herself through mud or molasses. The thoughts are sticky and slow and it doesn't hurt to pull and tug at them but there's such an odd feeling about it, weirdly uncomfortable.
What is the last thing she remembers?
It should be, she thinks, an easy enough to answer question. Falling asleep isn't complicated, not for her, and they've been in the Hatake estate for long enough that she isn't confused to think about it, there's no doubt, no belief that maybe she's in her bed, back in her home. She is on a mission.
So, if this is really a dream, I should have fallen asleep while Ino was one bedroll over, with Hatake-sensei nearby.
But she doesn't remember that, as the last thing. It feels wrong.
Sakura puts windows in one of her odes to times long past then takes them away, then puts them back again, paned differently, only to decide that, no, it's better without them. Too much time has passed for anything else to make sense.
In one corner of a window, she leaves a triangle glass grown cloudy with age, giving it ragged edges to show that the weather had broken it many years ago. Inside the room, she scatters the odd fragments of what used to be across the floor, blowing them into the corners, along with leaves and dust.
It makes her think of the guest house and their work on cleaning it and the Main House and how they've wandered through the halls of other peoples' memories.
But there's no one who will come here with a broom and clean it.
Sakura supposes that this is a perk.
Somehow, it doesn't feel like one. It just feels quiet and melancholy even though this was her intent. She'd wanted this. She'd built this with her own thoughts, intent, and imagination.
And yet… she doesn't know. Her creation leaves her feeling a little hollow, lonelier than intended, like she's willingly wandered into a trap and shut the door behind her.
Slowly, Sakura is coming to wonder if that, well, if that's exactly the case of it. But she…
What I want is to know what I don't know, she thinks ruefully. But no one seems to be in a hurry to answer me that either.
Worry still tugs at her but, here, it is hard to hold onto.
"Because you don't really want to know," a voice says. "You aren't really serious about figuring it out. That's so typical of you."
Sakura spins, her long storybook princess hair rippling with her movement. It doesn't tangle in her feet because she's told it not to, during the construction, but there's no getting away from the cloud of it that obscures her vision for a brief moment.
Then it clears and she's left… she's left to look at the intruder that has breached this snow globe dreamscape of hers.
Her eyes widen, because the intruder is herself, if every softness had been stripped from her. Like her lines have been drawn in harder, with a thicker pen whose strokes come out jagged.
The other her watches with narrowed eyes, the green of them poisonous with dislike (hatred?). The other her has hair that's never seen a hairbrush but also hasn't been cut—this her has never used a kunai to hack her hair off in the Forest of Death. Sakura knows the clothes she wears since they're hers, nothing different there, except how this other her makes her think of feral things, alien things.
When Sakura had picked her red dresses because they were cute.
The other her makes them a threat.
"Oh, stop that," the other her says irritably. "I'm nothing you haven't thought of before. That's literally the entire point of my existence."
Sakura blinks. "You–what?"
It only now registers that the other Sakura is standing in mid-air, not even giving lip service to the pretense of floating or flying on gossamer wings.
"Obviously," the other her says. "You've spent ages playing with imagination, don't even try and tell me you're surprised that someone could imagine themselves just in the air without aid. You did it earlier, before you got ridiculous."
"There's nothing wrong with being ridiculous!" Sakura snaps, stung by that comment. "So what if I am?! It's a dream! If I can't even take the time to be ridiculous in a dream then what even is the point?"
This earns her nothing but a sarcastic clap. "Oh, very good," the other her says. "But you've spent most of this so-called dream of yours deliberately running from the truth. You know better."
"Stop it!" Sakura says. "Stop it!"
"No." The other her looks at her pityingly. "I get you've had a rough time today and all—I've been through it all too, so yeah, I really get it. But can you get your shit together? You make it awfully hard to love you sometimes."
Sakura flinches.
"Sorry-not-sorry," the other her sing-songs. There, again, she's not even bothering to pretend anything.
The thing is… the thing is… on the other side of it, Sakura would pretend in most cases. She can't even imagine–that word again–talking to a facsimile of herself and not pretending politeness.
"What are you?"
"You know me," is the withering answer. "Think about it instead of running away from it."
"Put yourself in my shoes!" Sakura argues back. She refuses to be crushed by anything that looks like her. She knows just how pathetic she is, after all, and that's–that's just… no. "I was dreaming just fine without you! Look at everything I've built! Who cares if it won't last when I wake up, the point is that I built it on my own merits, by myself, and then you show up to be nothing but an absolute cow!"
The other Sakura, the feral one, bares her teeth. It doesn't look anything like a smile. "And yet you're still running away from any possible answer."
"Only because you won't tell me!"
"Aren't you supposed to be smart?"
Sakura throws her hands up, giving a little scream of frustration. "I don't want you here and I don't want to know!"
"Well, I knew that," the other her says, unconcerned. "But I don't give a fuck about that. I'm not here to coddle your feelings. I'm here to save your stupid, insignificant life because if you go down, so do I."
"What?!"
The other her rolls her eyes.
Slowly, Sakura flushes. Its half rage, half shame, and none of it comfortable. Especially not when brought about by someone who looks like her. Who is part of her, apparently, and what does it say about her that even a part of her thinks she's barely worth anything?
"Ah, yes, because throwing yourself a pity-party is oh so useful," the other Sakura says acidly.
"Stop reading my mind," Sakura snaps.
"Can't."
"And just what is that supposed to mean?" Sakura demands.
"It means what it means! Stop being stupid!"
"I'm not stupid!"
"Then why are you acting like it?" the other Sakura demands. "You're so obsessed with not figuring out what's going on because it might suck and be uncomfortable! Get over it! Life is sometimes beautiful and sometimes absolutely garbage—even you should know that by now."
"So what if life is beautiful and garbage?" Sakura demands. "I'm allowed to revel in the beautiful parts and ignore the ugly when it comes to my own dreams!"
"Except we're not in your own dreams!" Other Sakura shouts, her poisonous green eyes narrow slits of near hatred.
It feels like she's been slapped.
Sakura recoils. "What—"
"Don't what me!" Other Sakura waves her hands in the air, the movement throwing off sparks of light that burn sharply. Hot enough to cut. "Don't make me go through another round of Groundhog Day with you just because you're too much of a coward to admit what's going on! You know what's going on and if you don't get your head out of your ass we're going to die!"
"Die?!"
Other Sakura slaps her across the face.
Sakura reels back, clutching her cheek, and scrabbling for the emotion to fight back, to react, except that it's not there, she can't find it. Just her burning cheek and a pain she doesn't understand.
She's loathed by even herself.
"And yet I'm still trying to save your life!" Other Sakura snarls. "So stop being a baby and be the kind of kunoichi you want to be. Would you really want to die and do so knowing you've let Hatake-sensei down? That Ino will never forgive herself? That your parents will grieve and weep and have to bury their daughter?"
Sakura stares at the feral lines of fury in the other her and thinks she understands why there's no fight in her, not in the here and now. Her feral, other self has it all.
But what am I supposed to do about what she's saying? Is she telling the truth? But what would be gained by her lying? So…
Sakura swallows. Her cheek feels swollen under her fingertips—her other self has a very strong arm–and while she watches Other Sakura rant and rave on, she doesn't truly hear her.
What am I running from? she asks herself.
She's supposed to know the answer. The radiant, violent arches that Other Sakura makes with her hands, gesticulating wildly as she vents her spleen say she should.
And if anyone would know… it would be the other me.
The worst part is that a lot of her, most of her, still doesn't want to know. It's going to suck and it's going to be painful and it's going to hurt her. She knows these things. Other Sakura has told her this, in a backhanded, roundabout way.
So why would I die? What would be killing me—us, I suppose—that first gave me a dream to play in?
It seems foolish, when thought of that way, but Sakura had liked her dream. It had been a lot of fun.
But she thinks of Ino dying trying to save her. Of Hatake-sensei visiting her name on the Memorial Stone. Of her parents, gray with grief.
I don't want to know the painful things waiting for me but… if I don't go, then I think things are going to be even more painful. Maybe not for me but, instead, for the people that I love.
Sakura slowly lowers her hand from her cheek.
I don't want that.
She wants to save her precious people, to protect them, to find a way to pay them back for all the things she's given her no matter how little she feels that she has deserved their good intentions.
So what am I doing here? Why am I just lying down and letting something kill me?
It's embarrassing, that's what it is, a humiliation of her own design. One so private that her own self is rebelling against it with all the rage and temper that Sakura tries so hard to hide most of the time.
And maybe, just maybe, that's why I keep failing. I've put all my rage, all my passion, all my strength into a crate and then locked in, tossed it into the darkest hole I could find and then spent my time wringing my hands about how I can't do anything right.
It's not fair how little Kakashi-sensei taught me. It's not fair that Sasuke and Naruto are more naturally talented at the field work. It's not fair that Ino knows more about being a ninja than I think I'll ever know. And…
And…
It's okay.
Life isn't supposed to be fair.
It's supposed to suck. To have pits and tripwires and betrayals. Just because I can't see everyone else's traps, their blunders as they fall for them, doesn't mean they aren't there. I'm not the only one who struggles.
Shame, deep and wide as a river, washes through her.
That's what everyone's been saying, isn't it? That I'm just as important as they are, that my struggles are just like theirs. Or… well, it's not that they're the same, it's that we all have them. That's how Hatake-sensei is able to teach us, isn't it? From having learned through his own growing pains. That's why Ino has drawn her battle lines wide and tall and thick and has, in choosing to be on my team, with me, has started a fight with her own Clan. It's why both Naruto and Sasuke ran away.
Sakura grimaces.
All she's been doing is running away too. To a man, Team Seven under Kakashi-sensei is bad at facing their own challenges head-on.
I wonder what demons Kakashi-sensei is running from?
But it doesn't matter right now. It might not ever matter.
Because she's been given this chance, one that most people never get, she realizes. Team Seven under Hatake-sensei is completely different. Hatake-sensei has his demons but he faces them. Ino screams defiance at hers with every breath she takes.
I want to do that too. I want to fight, rather than run, not just—out in the field. But in here, in where… where I think it matters more whether a person makes the choice to run or stay. Which is why I wasn't making any progress. I was looking for an external saviour. I was trying to make myself be one, even, without having done the real work.
The only person that can save me… is me. And that can only happen in here.
Sakura blinks.
Green eyes, poison bright, are inches away from her face. Close enough to kiss.
She hadn't even noticed when the Other Sakura had stopped ranting.
For a moment, Sakura feels embarrassed by that, but then—
So what?
—she realizes that it doesn't matter. That that's not the important thing.
She leans into Other Sakura, their foreheads meeting, the forest Sakura built is eerily silent around them.
"I want to live," Sakura says. "I know that I was captured by the enemy and they're performing some sort of ritual on me right now. How do I save myself?"
Other Sakura's grin is full of fangs. "You tell me."
Sakura closes her eyes, looking, searching, the dream around her is a trap in truth. But she's not alone and she's so tired of running and never getting anywhere.
"We need to go deeper," Sakura says. "And see what they're doing to us. I don't think the primary result of this is our deaths."
"How are we going to get out of here? We're trapped inside."
Sakura takes a breath, then another, and opens her eyes. "We go down," she says. "We go deep. Snow globes aren't really globes, after all. They're cut in half."
She takes a step back, then another, her finery fading into something more like herself, practical and sturdy. Her sandals protecting her feet. Her hitae-ite winds itself around her head again, a weight she hadn't realized that she missed. Somehow, this feels like a victory by itself, one worthy of champagne.
Sakura looks at the Other Sakura, then holds her hand out. "Are you coming?"
Other Sakura looks at that hand for a long moment, then reaches out and takes it.
"My name is Inner."
Sakura beams.
And Inner Sakura grins back at her.