Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 38 – Deeper
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 5,149
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 38 of ? Unbeta'd.
Hand-in-hand Sakura walks with Inner through the confines of the snow globe searching for a way to get deeper. Guided by some instinct she can't name, Sakura's steps don't falter even once as they weave through trees and grasses and step their way over the tops of babbling brooks and glittering blue rivers.
Fish dance under the surface, their scales gleaming with reflected light.
Should they have needed to, they could cover the ground much faster but Sakura keeps it at a walk–purposeful, though a little meandering–as there's no immediate reason to break into an impetuous run through potentially dangerous terrain.
"Is it dangerous here?" Sakura asks, as the thought occurs to her.
Inner shrugs. "We're inside your head. What do you think?"
Sakura makes a grumbling noise not quite under her breath. "I'm tired of that answer," she complains. "I can't do all of the thinking here."
"Why not?" Inner asks.
"Because you're the meaner part of me," Sakura says. "At least, I'm pretty sure of that. Which means, if it's dangerous, you'd know better than me. They'd be all of your thoughts, wouldn't they?"
She's still smarting from some of the language Inner had used before. It's worse, because Hatake-sensei would never, but it rings truer, too, because she's… she's basically saying it to herself.
Looking at the ugly parts of herself is… hard.
"You're a ninja and a thinker. There's nothing wrong with your imagination," Inner says, after a moment. "And we're inside your head. Of course it's dangerous. Don't be stupid."
Don't be stupid.
Ugh.
Sakura's fingers tighten their grip on Inner's. "I'm not trying to be stupid," Sakura says. "It's just that you know more about the inside of me than I do. I've never been here before."
She pauses.
Then asks— "Have I?"
"Consciously?" Inner says, with a shake of her head. "No. Not, consciously. Most of this is always in the subconscious."
"Including you?"
"Usually," Inner says. "Though I'm pretty awake for a subconscious thing. I always have been—we're not integrated very well."
Sakura glances over at Inner, marvelling at the way they look exactly the same but so very different. Inner, even though she's no longer shouting and vibrating with fury, is still all the sharp edges of her with nothing to soften them.
Beside her, Sakura feels very… round. In ways that have nothing to do with weight.
"Integrated?" she prompts, when Inner doesn't elaborate. "Why aren't we doing that very well?"
Inner frowns but before she can answer the world shakes and shakes and shakes, like someone has picked up her cage and is playing with it. Sakura is horribly reminded of the way the fake Ino had shaken her. It hurts almost as much.
Both of them are tossed to the ground and they clutch to it, and each other, until it slowly subsides.
Sakura rests her chin against the plush green grass she'd created earlier and is glad for her imagination's foresight. She feels dizzy. The phantom pain caused by the earthquake fades quickly enough but the dizziness, in here, lingers..
She's still holding Inner's hand.
"What was that?" Sakura asks, once everything has stopped spinning and she can sit up without wanting to hurl. Gingerly, she makes sure she's in one piece. "Is it whatever's trying to kill us?"
Inner looks up, as if she can see through the canopy of leaves to the barrier that serves as the sky. Her green eyes are brighter than the grass they sit on, almost glowing in the dappled shade.
Beside her, Sakura feels muted and ugly and she hates that.
"It doesn't mean anything good," Inner says. "If the globe is cracked before we escape…"
Sakura grimaces. "Then we'll be forced out the way they want us to rather than under our own power. I get it. Let's go. We're close to the best point to go deeper and find the center of us."
She gets to her feet and tugs Inner up with her. For a moment, they stand face to face, eye to eye. Sakura looks away and then, realizing what she's done, looks back at the self that is reflected in Inner's expression.
"I'm trying," she says. It feels like an excuse.
"Are you really?" Inner asks.
Sakura has no answer for that. "I'll try harder," she says, instead, and asks: "Why do you hate me?"
Inner looks at her as if the answer is obvious. "Because you hate yourself."
Sakura supposes that it was obvious, at that. "I'll try harder," she repeats.
"I'll be watching," Inner promises. It sounds like a malediction.
Sakura turns away, heading towards the spot she can feel pulling at her, and tugging Inner along. Inner comes without an argument, which is almost more terrifying than anything else.
Behind her, Sakura hears Inner sigh. It sounds pretty exasperated.
Sakura pretends she doesn't hear it and keeps following her… heart, she supposes, since she doesn't know what other sense she's feeling with right now… and just gives her feet permission to follow along.
"Have you always been around?" Sakura asks. "Only, I never knew you existed."
"You did, though," Inner says. "You've known I've existed for a long time. You just never thought it through. Who am I, you ask, well—you already know."
"You're me, but not, but also more me," Sakura says. "But that's not what I was asking."
Inner's grin is a sharp, biting thing again. No sign of avarice but there's a wicked, dark humour to it, where to laugh is the only recourse from tears and rage is only a papercut away.
"That's not what I was saying either," Inner says.
Sakura mulls over this as they walk. If there's a logic to Inner, she hasn't figured it out yet.
I've always known of Inner?
She scours her memory for anything like that. Her childhood and the Academy comes up barren of anything obvious. And yet…
That doesn't seem right.
But…
Sakura frowns. The only thing she can remember that might have been Inner was during the Chuunin Exam match with Ino. After it, when no one else was paying attention to them, Ino said Sakura had made her flower blossom, having forced Ino out of her mind and, there, Sakura had taken it as a sign that she was getting stronger, buoyed by Ino's grin and her tie that was a personal victory alike.
But I… I don't think Ino could be kicked out by me, not the way I am. That fight… I wonder if Inner was the one that won it…
It makes her feel weird to think of it that way. To think that their historic tie was due to Ino and Inner clashing, not herself versus Ino. Almost cheating.
"You're a shinobi," Inner says. "There's no cheating when it comes to winning for shinobi. Just using an advantage properly."
"I don't agree with that," Sakura says, though she frowns. "Against an enemy, sure, but even though Ino and I had to fight each other in the exam, we're not enemies and never have been. We were rivals but still… comrades. Still on the same side, both kunoichi of Konoha. Against your comrades, your friends, there's different rules. I didn't even know you existed to be able to beat her."
Inner shrugs. There's something savage to the motion, sharp and jerky, like there's no grace in her to spare.
"It—"
Sakura stops. Inner stops with her.
"We're here," Sakura says, kneeling to touch the ground. "This is the way out."
The green grass her fingers brush doesn't look any different from the grass around them. There's no obvious sign, no blatant indication, but all the same, Sakura knows this spot right deep down in her soul. This is the only way out.
She looks up to find Inner staring at her.
"It's a start," Inner allows.
Sakura grins up at her before she returns to her study of the ground. "I don't know any earth jutsu," she says. "And while we could just conjure shovels, I think that it would be better, and less obvious, if we just seeped into the ground."
"Gross."
"Definitely." Sakura prods the ground she's created thoughtfully, looking for a dip, a weakness in it, more by emotional feel than by touch. "We're still going to do it, though, no matter how gross it's going to feel."
She wrinkles her nose and stands, Inner standing with her, their hands still clasped tightly. Sakura thinks that they could let go but she also feels that it's better that they don't. They're both her, after all, and she's been letting a part of her go unaccounted for, apparently, for far too long.
"Any complaints?" she asks.
Inner arches her eyebrows. "Would you like a list?"
Sakura rolls her eyes. "Any immediate complaints?"
"No," Inner huffs.
"Then we're doing this," Sakura says, standing nose-to-nose with her other half. "Focus on that."
"Feeling like dirt is your job," Inner snarks.
"Oh, shut up, you're the dark, dirty side of me," Sakura snaps back and then closes her eyes, concentrating on, well, feeling like dirt.
Not emotionally, but literally, which is a totally different thing.
Inner cackles.
She imagines herself sifting apart at the seams, falling down piece by piece. And then, because this is a world of her imagination, she and Inner sink into the ground and go deeper.
Ino locates the master bedroom–or, really, what logically should be the master bedroom, given the location and the rooms around it having been eliminated–but she pauses outside of it, hesitating on opening the door.
There's an eerie glow seeping out from under it. So pale a blue that it's almost silver, like someone has captured a pocketful of stars and set them just inside for safe-keeping.
If she hadn't already committed herself to this as being the only option, other than running away… but, well, there are no other options, not that she can think of, and she's tired and scared and dirty and worried for the rest of her team.
And this is her plan.
Really, if looked at under that light, it's a good thing that there's a weird glow. It means that something is behind here and since she's looking for the monster… she's certainly found something.
Ino scowls at the glow.
So, if I die, well, it was a good attempt?
She braces herself to run, steps to the side of the door so she's not in the entryway should something be flung at her, and then reaches over and slides the door open.
Other than the light, nothing spills out or tries to kill her.
It's almost anti-climatic.
She peeks around the doorframe, eyes sweeping the hardwood floors, the legs of the furniture, and–
On the bed, the monster lays, a shifting mass of claws and fangs with a desiccated look about it. It is an emptiness that leeches light, rather than gives it off, a dirty sort of darkness. Even with it being still, she can't figure out the shapes of it. They keep changing. She thinks it might be sleeping and it is only because of that fact that her gaze moves on and then stops.
A woman, an absolutely lovely one, who even if she hadn't been glowing like a fallen star would be ethereal, sits neatly on the bed, drinking a cup of tea, like there isn't an abomination inches from her.
"Come in," the woman says. It is not an invitation but, rather, an order hidden in the reeds of good manners and polite speaking. "And shut the door. I owe you some explanations."
There is no sense of malice here. According to her untrained sensor abilities there's also not anything she recognizes as chakra.
And yet.
Ino weighs the odds of her getting away from this unscathed as she studies the woman, trying to place her. She needs the monster. She–
She draws her breath in sharply.
She recognizes this woman and, in that moment, a few things fall into place. Hatake-sensei more obviously looks like his father but, staring at her, Ino can see all the ways he looks like his mother.
Ino's interest lays more in politics than history but, well, the story of what had become of Hatake Sakumo had been both. Hatake Yua had been little more than a footnote in it.
But there had been pictures.
"Oh, fine," Ino says, stepping into the room and very deliberately turning her back—her skin prickles with fear underneath the bravado even though she's almost certain this woman means her no harm—as she shuts the door tight. "If you kill me, though, I'll come back and haunt you, don't think I won't."
Hatake Yua laughs. "A ghost to haunt a ghost?"
Ino shrugs as she surveys the floor and then, with a grimace, folds herself down onto it. When I get out of here I'm going to splurge on one of the fancier hot springs. Bet Sakura will come with me. We deserve it.
"I mean," Ino says, "you send a ninja to kill a ninja. Everyone knows that. How much of this all is your doing?"
"Why," Hatake-sensei's mother says, "all of it. Let's talk about the why and why you're the only one who isn't incapacitated right now."
"What's happening to Sakura?" Ino asks immediately.
The ghost of a woman long dead smiles at her. "Something necessary."
Ino scowls.
It itches at her to ask how a ghost could possibly have hired a team of ninja to break into this estate–without Hatake-sensei knowing even–but she swallows that irreverence. Maybe she'll get an answer to it if she–
"I'm listening," Ino says, and waits.
And maybe she'll tell me why the enemy were all wearing my face.
Going down, going deeper... really sucks a lot.
It's weird and gross and she can feel grains of sand and dirt rubbing against her insides and it makes her want to start screaming. Sakura has tried to imagine the sensations away but she can't.
She hasn't asked Inner if she has managed that. Sakura doesn't want to know the answer to it, not really, because she'd die of envy if Inner could do what she couldn't in this particular case. It wouldn't be fair…
Then, eventually, after forever and an eternity past that, she's spilling out of the ground, reforming herself grain by grain, and feeling weird and soft, like she's forgotten to put her bones back together quite right, like she's made of jelly. Sakura shakes her head, trying to dismiss that feeling and looks around.
Inner is still holding her hand.
Sakura finds that comforting. There's not much about Inner that is comforting, really, so Sakura takes this small thing and hugs it tight.
"Where are we?" she breathes.
The world around them is drenched in twilight and mired in a murky, burning fog. Lashes of green, too thick to be lightning, are woven through the mess like ribbons in a girl's hair. The flagstones underfoot are unkempt and overgrown by sharp-edged grasses and straggly weeds.
"We're pretty close to where you actually are," Inner says.
"Only pretty close?" Sakura asks, wondering what would happen if they stepped into the fog.
"You can't get all the way back," Inner says. "Not right now. You're still unconscious in the waking world."
"Should I be worried about that?"
"Probably," Inner admits, looking up. The green lightning makes her look like a sickly wraith. Something dangerous and fragile at the same time.
Sakura shivers.
She shakes her head, dismissing that facet of her unease (there are plenty of others to go around) and, with Inner, she slowly does a circle. This–
"This is what my snow globe really looks like, right?" Sakura says. "Rather than the pretty story I was creating or the darkness I started out with."
Inner's frown is all sharp edges when she looks at Sakura, but Sakura gets the feeling that, for once, Inner isn't frowning at her. "Yes," Inner says. "Kind of. Again, differences between asleep and awake blah blah blah."
Sakura studies the overgrown grass and the old, old stones that had once been clean and washed.
"We're in the courtyard," she says, kneeling down to press her free hand against a couple of the stones. She pushes against it and there's a bit of give, a bit of stretch in it. Like a dream. "The one with all the Inos who were going to do something to me."
In here, even as worry spools about her being, Sakura wonders why the enemy had been so focused on never letting anyone see their real faces. They'd had her where they wanted her–still do, really–and yet…
"That darkness I woke up in. That was supposed to be me, unconscious, wasn't it?" she asks instead. "Only, most people don't wake up inside of themselves, but… it was because you exist that I did, isn't it?"
Inner shrugs. "I'm the one that's got to deal with the shit you don't want to. It is literally the reason for my existence. What do you think? I told you to stop being stupid."
"I'm trying," Sakura snaps. Maybe if she repeats it enough, Inner will accept it.
They huff in unison, snapping their gazes away from one another.
After a moment, the strangeness of this makes her giggle, despite herself, and Inner leans against her, so they're back to back. Their fingers are still laced together, though without talking about it, they adjust so it is more comfortable with their new positions.
"Time in here is liquid, isn't it?" Sakura says and, though she makes it a question, she doesn't need an answer. It has to be. "If this is the depths of what's going on out there, in here, how do we stop us from dying?"
Because she doesn't see anything that looks like a threat. Just a big, harrowing sort of emptiness within a trap.
"There was… something to do with the ceramic thing. The urn." Sakura mulls over this. "Which means maybe they're trying to raise the dead? Can people do that? No, wait, that's a silly question. I'm sure someone out there has created a jutsu or seal that can do that, ninja are weird people."
"You're weird people," Inner comments. "Does it matter what the end goal is if all we want to do is survive?"
Sakura's fingers tighten on Inner's. "Do you want to die?"
Inner bumps the back of her head against Sakura's. It's enough to make her blink, hard, with the pain.
"What was that for?"
"I didn't go through all that shit of getting you to pay attention for you to just die," Inner says. "What do you think, genius? I could've just left you to rot in your own delusions and waited for the end."
Sakura supposes, put that way, she deserved the skull bump. "But now I'm not in my delusions—or I'm in so deep that I've also deluded myself into believing in your existence which, if that is the case, I'd like to go back to playing pretty princess dress up if it's all the same to you—"
Inner scoffs.
"-but, presuming this is reality, then what's going on? Sure the locale is high up there on the creepy scale, but it also seems to be lacking in, you know, conflict. Something to fight against."
"Are you asking for help or just whining?"
Sakura rolls her eyes. "Can't I do both?"
"I don't know, can you?"
"What am I missing?" Sakura asks, and resists the urge to roll her eyes again since Inner can't see her do that. "I can guess, for some reason, you can't fix whatever it is that's wrong without me, since you bothered to wake me up."
"You're the primary," Inner explains. "I'm just a reflection of you, a repository of all your ugly things you don't want to deal with. I can impact you and I can defend against an overt attack but I'm not the one that has to have the will to do so. When I got rid of Ino for you, it was your will that carried the strength I used against her in the Chuunin Exams."
So I did cheat, Sakura thinks and heaves a deeply put-upon sigh. But now isn't the time for that particular regret.
Instead, she focuses on the same feelings that had led her to this spot in the first place. Searching for something, anything, that might be a threat to her.
"I don't feel anything strange in here, nothing that's stranger than everything was already. And you're here, we're no longer in a dream land where I could be slaughtered without ever realizing it… so… what is it?"
Inner's sigh is as deep and heart-felt, honestly to the point of being rather insulting, as her own had been.
I suppose, maybe, that it makes sense we'd both be kind of… dramatic… inside of here… Sakura concedes, a bit ruefully, though she doesn't say it.
"Isn't it obvious?" Inner asks witheringly. "Where's the make-shift altar they were tying you to?"
Sakura freezes.
"That's…," she says quietly, trailing off and then having to start again. "That's a damn good question."
Because it's just her, Inner, and a whole lot of desolated, empty courtyard. No braziers burn with flames. No altar. No urn.
"I doubt you know," Sakura says, feeling a prickle of terror skate down her spine. "But what was in that urn? Who was in that urn? We found it broken but they were putting it back together. Are they refilling it?"
Inner laughs at her. "How am I supposed to know?"
"Fuck," Sakura mutters, then cringes. She doesn't like using language like that.
"No one is here to judge you," Inner points out.
"You're here and you're the judgiest of them all," Sakura says, then tugs on Inner's hand, stepping to where she thinks the altar had been, back in the waking room.
"Help me find the altar."
"You could say please," Inner says, though she comes along willingly enough, a step behind her, like a shadow to her light.
"Just get to work," Sakura says.
That makes Inner laugh, high and sharp and brittle. She does not explain why it's funny and Sakura doesn't ask. Not all answers are good.
With the both of them searching for it, it doesn't take long for them to find it. The problem is that, once they do, it's out of their reach, cradled in the eerie light up above their heads, and wreathed in a menace that exudes the warning to be wary, a warning against approach.
Sakura shades her eyes and looks up, peering through both the smoke and the light. The altar itself is just translucent enough that…
"There's another me strapped to it," Sakura says. "… That's the physical me, isn't it?"
"The subconscious representation of your physicality, yeah," Inner says. "It can't really be anything else. I wouldn't let there be yet another personality in here."
"I have a lot of questions about that," Sakura mutters, but she doesn't take her eyes off of her body. "But I think we need to figure out how to get to me and wake me up. I don't think the writhing and screaming I'm doing up there is good for any version of us, conscious or unconscious. Can you tell why I'm in that much pain? And why we can't hear it?"
Inner frowns, raising her free hand as if she will claw at the air, tear the distance between them and the body apart. Her nails, Sakura notes, are both jagged and very sharp.
After a few long moments, Inner shakes her head, and drops her hand.
"No," she says. "Just that they're doing something to you. I get the impression that, whatever it is, it's fairly significant beyond just the pain."
"Significant beyond the pain," Sakura murmurs. "I really wish we knew what the end goal was, but for now… I think I need to be woken up. I can't see that keeping me asleep will help any. Do you have any suggestions?"
"We could throw a temper tantrum," Inner says. "We're pretty good at those."
"We are," Sakura admits, though part of her cringes for that. It's true but… put that way…
"Who cares if it sounds childish?" Inner asks. "Are we going to throw hands or what? I could totally take you."
"That's a fight, not a tantrum," Sakura says, laughing despite herself. "We're not doing either."
Inner studies her with those eyes that are both oh so familiar and oh so alien at the same time. "Then what are we doing?"
Sakura tilts her head back to look at the altar, at the unconscious representation of herself upon it. At the urn. It glitters along the cracks, gleaming lines of adhesive and precious metal alike holding it together where it had fallen apart.
"We can't just wake up my body in here, I don't think," she muses. "Well. Sort of. We're trying to accomplish the consciousness coming back up and that faces outwards, not inwards. But the thing is, that up there, isn't what my real body is going through, right? But it's a representation of it, right?'
"Can you get to the point?"
"I'm thinking," Sakura says. "And, before you get on me about thinking aloud, note that you'd hear me anyway if I kept my mouth shut, right?"
Inner grumbles something under her breath. It's not complimentary.
"As I was saying," Sakura continues, "a tantrum might wake us up, it might not. We're used to those, you just said so in not so many words. So I've got a different idea."
It's a stupid, risky plan. If it had involved her actual body, Sakura would never have thought of it, but somehow, in this strange, half-dreaming endless reverie, it makes sense to her.
"Stop patting yourself on the back," Inner complains. Her nails are sharp as blades as they dig into Sakura's hand.
"What if we break the urn, instead?"
Savant.
That's what they call him, behind his back, in whispers that eventually make their way back to him, the genius of Konoha.
Kakashi has never denied his intelligence—but as an adult he's never claimed the title of 'genius' or 'savant' either. In this, he likes Gai's nindo, working to become a genius of hard work rather than relying on natural, inborn talents.
Which require a lot of work to utilize to their fullest extent anyway… a thing people always forget.
(He doesn't know it, can't know it because it's not his memory, but the Kakashi of this time, the one he displaced, commenting about how there will always be people younger than Naruto and yet stronger than himself—well, he would agree with that, had he but known about it.)
Genius, though, is mired in human emotions. Tangled with the swirls and sways of them.
Kakashi watches his father kill himself in tape on loop, over and over again, with a voice he doesn't recognize crooning at him, asking him what he sees.
It's training, then, that takes over. Nothing innate about that, painstaking work of years to turn practice into instinct, his mind gently disengaging from the scene emotionally, locking down the brittle, broken bits of himself, and just…
Observing.
(Later, he can fall to pieces. Later, he can do that and then have the time and space to pick himself back up again.)
What does he see?
At first, he sees only what he's always seen. His father killing himself. The rise and fall of a kunai. The scent of blood and remembered bewilderment and terror. Back then, it had kept him silent. Back then, it had kept his father from ever knowing he was there and watching.
But still the voice goes: What do you see?
So he looks harder.
"Am I allowed to go closer?" he murmurs, a question he'd never thought he'd ask.
The voice doesn't answer but, when he tries, there's no way past the door. His view, therefore, is limited by that.
A negative thing under one guise but it also narrows his focus and means there's less he needs to pay attention to.
What am I looking for? he asks silently, irascibility clawing at the extremities of his forced disassociation. He shoves it away, doesn't let it gain a foothold. What mystery is there in my father's death?
The voice doesn't answer him and from the hollowness of the silence, Kakashi suspects that he has been left to his own devices. That no help will be given, no aid provided.
On one hand–deeply frustrating. On the other…
It implies that I should be able to figure this out myself.
Which is all for the better, really. Kakashi has never liked relying on answers that other people have come up with. At least, not when he doesn't trust them.
And hopefully there's no Chuunin or Jounin alive that would trust an unidentified, disembodied voice.
Perhaps it's better that he's left to his own devices.
Though, as he watches his father kill himself again, Kakashi thinks that 'better' is an awkward word that fails to properly encapsulate the situation.
Some things ought to be inviolate. This memory is one of those things.
Grinding his teeth, Kakashi shakes his head, once and then twice, then refocuses.
Ignore the feelings, the way it twists and stabs. Look past that.
Old, old lessons. Wartime lessons. He's not sure if they teach the Academy students these days how to disassociate at will.
I'll have to check with Sakura and Ino, he thinks and dwells on that through the next few cycles of his father's death.
It is a loop without an end, no one to hit pause or stop on the tape.
What am I looking for?
The answer comes to him slowly, in bits and pieces. There's no smoking gun or obvious clue. He's not even sure what he's looking at, at first, but… distorted by time and memory and the jutsu that has tossed him into his…
He thinks he's got it. What he'd missed back then.
And it rocks him back on his heels because Kakashi doesn't know what to think about it. Gobsmacked, the way few things really leave him these days, and part of him is struggling to breathe despite the way he's locked every emotion he's ever had down tight.
He cannot feel this right now.
But under the haze of a jutsu, obscured by the darkness and the time and the fact that, for all of it, Kakashi had only been a child. Talented, brilliant, but a child who was watching his dad kill himself.
He doesn't blame himself for not having noticed.
Sarutobi Hiruzen is there in the room. Had been there. Was there? The uneasy state of time right now doesn't matter–
The Third Hokage had been present when his father had died and had done nothing.