Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 40 – Anatomy
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 5,840
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 40 of ? Unbeta'd.
Sarutobi Hiruzen, the Third Hokage, had been present when his father had killed himself and had done nothing.
Cold, hard logic shuts down everything else:
What's the point of showing me this? he demands, transmuting his emotions into something colder and more stable. Hokage-sama has passed away in this timeline. There's no way of even knowing if my timeline occurred in the same fashion as this one did.
But all his questions—of which he has many and, as he watches for another time, the loop still on repeat, these questions are multiplying—everything comes down to that one: why is he being shown this? What does it matter?
That's dangerous thinking, to want to dismiss something, and he recognizes that. Just because he doesn't understand doesn't mean it isn't important.
But it's not that important, not here and now, right this second he thinks grimly. I can't allow it to be. Sakura's still in trouble and Ino's waiting on me.
Try though he might, he can't budge the jutsu around him, the darkness that turned into a sepia flashback of the worst kind. Even when he pricks himself with a kunai, judging a minor wound to be the lesser of two evils given everything–the pain is sharp, biting and immediate, and it does absolutely nothing.
I am not going down like this. I refuse.
He renews his efforts, redoubling the determination to escape, and narrows his concentration to that goal, until he is hardly aware of the scene that continues to play around him.
It's a sound that slides through his focus. A terrible crunching, slobbering noise, like a garden pest grown overlarge and ravenous. Something mindless and hungry. Hunting.
Is this it? Is this what the voice was waiting on–a disturbing review of memory to distract me and then…?
He looks but cannot spot anything. A skittering, almost clattery noise makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
He knows that noise.
The monster.
Sakura crosses her arms and frowns. Inner does the same, in almost languid mimicry, and Sakura decides to ignore that and focus. Inner is probably doing it just to get a rise out of her anyway.
"So," Sakura says, "what's the best way to get you up to the urn? All I can think of is I grab you, pirouette, and fling you up there with all my might. But if all you do is hit your head up there, I'd laugh and it wouldn't be very useful."
But funny. She'd think it was funny even though the circumstances make that emotion desperately inappropriate on… lots of levels.
Inner rolls her eyes. "Trust me," she says. "If you toss me up there, I'll take care of it."
"I guess we'll go with that, then," Sakura says. "Because I don't have a better idea and neither do you or you'd have said it."
"Just get on with it," Inner tells her. "You're wasting time."
She almost protests that it's her time to waste and shouldn't be an issue but, well, she knows that would just be wasting more time and the truth of it is that she's scared. She doesn't know that this is the right solution but all others look even worse. She's scared.
Sakura shakes her head, narrows her eyes, spends a moment using her imagination to make Inner much, much lighter–
"I weighed less than you to begin with, Fatso!"
–then grabs Inner by the arm and, refusing to entertain her doubts any further, does a spin any dance master would be proud of, and lobs Inner Sakura up at the urn with everything she's got.
Inner hurtles towards the urn.
"And I'm not fat!" she shouts after Inner.
Look. It matters to her.
Inner's headlong flight turns her from all sharp edges to gleaming ones, burning ones, lit by a burnished steel glow that steals away her humanity until she's all weapon, no longer visibly a teenage girl, and then… while Sakura holds her breath, Inner hits the urn.
Sakura wills it to break with all her spirit.
There's an absolutely magnificently clamouring clang, the sound of countless metal doors being slammed open and shut in a chaotic symphony that deafens her and she screams, clutching at her head, blocking her ears but the sound goes on and on and on, ramming right through the barriers formed by her hands.
The urn cracks.
Golden light, like sunlight turned to mist, pours out of the urn. Inner snarls and shoves herself through the cracks, intent on destruction now that she's been unleashed, even as the light forms a wave that Sakura, down below, has no chance to avoid.
She's swept away even as the ground she'd been standing on begins to shake apart.
Half a second after that, after bracing himself for combat, he also hears, quieter, much quieter no matter how hurried the footsteps are, of one of his students. Ino.
She careens into him, her thin, strong arms grabbing hold of his waist, and even as he helps to control her collide so they don't both fall over, in the depths of him, Kakashi knows he'll forever be haunted by what could've happened if he hadn't heard her—
She'd have died and at his hands.
"Hatake-sensei!" she says urgently. He looks down at her and her eyes are empty and unseeing and, he realizes with horror, that she has flung herself into this and is not tied into the jutsu. Ino is blind to everything around them.
What leap of faith did she take, coming in here?
It humbles and terrifies him in equal measure, for he doesn't deserve that unswerving sort of loyalty, hadn't even been aware that he'd earned hers, but she keeps talking—
"The monster's coming but, listen, do not attack it. Let it eat the scene."
There's no time for him to even question this before the monster is upon them and he sees it, limbs coalescing then deforming, reforming and reshaping a hundred times a second, thousands of needle-like claws chipping away and a great, gaping maw that bites the sepia-tinted world that had held him captive.
It chews up the endless loop of memories he'd tried to forget and swallows them, gasping, gagging, and choking them down. So very angry.
The monster is a whirlwind of fang and claw and ephemeral rage made tangible for these seconds that occur in stop and go heartbeats. It is transformed into a tsunami of tumultuous temper, having broken free of whatever had dammed it up. Splinters of his memory go flying and, when one hits his cheek, drawing a thin line of sharp pain and hot blood alike, he pulls Ino against him, hiding her head against his torso.
She shivers and trembles—fear? Excitement? He doesn't dare make a guess, not with this student of his—and makes no protest as interminably, it seems the frenzy will go on for forever.
Then, abruptly, it is over and like fog breaking up with the rising sun, the monster disperses and they're left crouching on the rooftop.
He breathes in deeply.
Ino squirms and he lets her go, taking a chance to make sure—yes, her vision is back, her blue eyes sharp and intent—and while she looks a little battered, a little bloody (some of the memory nicks had gotten her, though not all of it looks like it had come from that) she… she seems whole and well.
"Sorry," she says, though she doesn't sound very sorry about it. "Sorry for disobeying your orders to stay put on the other side of the rooftop, Hatake-sensei."
A completely mad urge to laugh bubbles up inside of him. He squashes it ruthlessly.
"Given the circumstances," he says dryly. "I'll pardon it."
Her tired smile is like the sun lighting up, though it fades when she looks over to where green flames still burn, a barrier intact and dangerous. One they know far too little about.
"Hatake-sensei," she says, looking back up at him. "I can get the barrier down, but I'm not going to be good for anything else. Is that… I mean… "
His heart feels tight. He's never heard her sound so forlorn. "I can handle it from here," he assures her. "Will taking the barrier down be safe for you?"
Her expression grows inscrutable. "Yes," she says, and something about the way she says it leaves him uneasy. "But it's got to be now, before the sun rises."
Kakashi rolls his shoulders. "Then do it," he says, and promises himself he can and will question her later.
Ino pulls something that glitters like a fallen star out of one of her pouches and flings it, hard, at the barrier. The monster, screaming and wailing, re-materializes, chases after it, and slams into the green smoke wall.
For a moment, all is silent.
Ino sits down hard and breathing heavily, her face pale even as he realizes that mingled with the monster is her chakra, somehow, tied into the whole mess. He thinks it might be the thing the monster chases—
but that's not a Genin skill!
-and as the barrier implodes, collapsing inwards, an inferno rises from the ruins.
He grabs Ino roughly and throws her away from the courtyard. The roof won't be enough protection.
Then–
"Sakura!" he shouts, and flings himself down into the burning fray.
Sand, thick and gritty, scrapes against her arms when she wakes up, blinking, and feeling like she's been wrung out and dried in the sun after having washed up upon a shore. A shipwrecked soul.
And maybe I am, at this point…
Sakura pushes herself up, kneeling on the beach, and looks around at the twilight of it. All of it is in shades of grey.
I can't tell if that's progress or not, she realizes. It was black, before, until I gave the world colour, but now… does this mean I'm closer to waking up? Where am I? Where's Inner? Am I still in my own head?
Sakura tries to will some of the greyscale sand to turn a warm, sunny beige and, while it had been as easy as literally just thinking of it before, even when she exerts true effort and tries to force her view upon the world, nothing changes.
Nothing changes.
Okay, she thinks. That… that doesn't seem good.
Because either she's lost control of her own mind or she's… in someone else's.
Can I be in someone's mind when that someone was in an urn? Am I communing with dead people now?
"Inner?" she says, hoping by speaking aloud that Inner will respond, but there's nothing from her. Just more eerie, grey quiet.
But I don't feel alone. Does that make any sense.
It doesn't, not really, even though as far as she can tell she is alone and also doesn't feel alone and–
I can't wait to wake up and not have to deal with all this weird mind crap. Ino can have it. Is it always like this? I'd rather wear in public the sparkly barrettes my mom got me when I was two than deal with this. That'd be humiliating but this is just frustrating.
At a loss for what to do, Sakura goes exploring.
She quickly learns that her surroundings are super boring. If it all was any greyer, then she'd be covered in ashy residue with every step she takes.
Since there's so little colour, she finds herself paying more attention to the details of the sand—the sand isn't all the same shade of grey, some grains are darker, some are lighter—and the straggly, low bushes that dot the ground a little ways past the beach. They look tired and she doesn't think that's just the way they've been leeched of colour.
She doesn't try to look at herself. She can see her weird, grey zombie-looking hands just fine and that's enough for her. Sakura doesn't want to see her reflection while she's looking like a corpse or like a weird facsimile of a shriveled up grape. She's not a raisin. She doesn't even like raisins.
I won't be a zombie because I will get out of this and I will stay alive, she thinks stubbornly, leaving the beach and heading inland, the ground underfoot just as bland and dulled as the rest of everything. Inner went through a lot of trouble to get me here and Ino and Hatake-sensei would miss me. And I don't want to die.
With that thought, the ground under her feet turns brown and green—healthy, normal colours, ones that she sees all the time when she's at home or out training. The verdant greens and warm dirt brown are almost too bright, in this greyscale world, and her eyes water as she looks down at the vibrant grass.
"What are you doing here?" she asks it, surveying the circle that's appeared around her. She kneels down to touch the grass—it feels totally normal—and then, deliberately, shifts a half foot to the side. The circle of colour obligingly moves with her and, as it does, the grass she'd just touched loses all colour again, blending into the greyness.
"Um."
She takes a few steps. The circle follows her—or, well, it remains with her, because she's the epicenter of it.
She tries spinning and cartwheeling and running and, like the world's most faithful dog, the circle keeps up with her while she does everything she thinks of. Unlike a dog, though, it doesn't leave her even when she gives into temptation and throws a stick for it to fetch.
(How a circle would fetch anything she doesn't know, but she tried and, had it worked, she'd have had an answer to a question no one else would've asked.)
"Okay," Sakura says, once she's gotten tired of trying to get away from the circle. Her limbs feel kind of heavy, like she's been training for a long time. Wherever she is, physical exertion seems to mean something. "So. You mean something. But what do you mean? Why are you stuck on me?"
It doesn't answer her, obviously, but she feels better for having asked the question aloud.
She sits down in the center of it, since she's stuck there anyway, and considers.
"You showed up when I decided that I didn't want to die." She hesitates a moment and then shrugs. It's still true, after all, so… repeating herself is fine. "I don't want to die."
The circle doesn't expand. It also doesn't contract, which is probably a good sign, though she doesn't actually know. For a brief moment, Sakura misses the Academy with an almost physical ache. Her marks in the physical subjects had been terrible but she'd always known what to do both in and out of the classroom.
"Okay," she says. "You didn't care when I mentioned Hatake-sensei and Ino. So… is it just me?"
Sakura looks down at her hands. Like the rest of her feels, they look a little battered and tired right now, but they at least look like her hands, in full colour, and she finds that comforting.
"It's got to be just me," she says slowly. "Because that's all we've done, just gone deeper and deeper, and while I don't know what the urn is doing to me right now, I've managed to get out of my mind while the walls of it were collapsing."
Which is actually super terrifying if she dwells on it. Sakura wants to just shunt those feelings away, but she doesn't know where they'd go right now.
Is Inner back in her own mind, dealing with the collapse?
"I'm really scared," she tells the circle. "I actually really don't know what's going on or what's going to happen to me and I'm not sure how to fix it myself. Can anything get to me in here? If Ino were searching, would she find me?"
The circle doesn't give her any comfort but it also doesn't judge her the way she judges herself for these feelings.
Sakura sighs.
"Nothing makes sense in here," she complains. "I can't believe I'm stuck dealing with all of this. I don't know that I'd like to be dealing with what was happening out in the real world either. I suppose that's probably why I'm not out there, right now, though, isn't it? Even with the very real threat of death I'm still hesitating. I want to live but I just…"
The circle really is a nice thing, she decides. It still makes her eyes water to look at it, but it also feels safe, almost cuddly.
"I'm so bad at follow through." Sakura sighs. "That's why I keep stalling. It's safe in here, so that means I either need to expand my bubble or get out of it entirely because I know good and well I can't stay in this bubble of vibrancy and never forge onwards. Inner's probably right to hate me."
And that's messed up, isn't it, that she's got a personality inside of her that hates her.
Sakura picks herself up, dusts off her hands, and looks at the grey expanse.
"This isn't even my mind anymore," she says, feeling more confident in that with every moment that passes. "And that's pathetic. No wonder I'm so badly out of alignment."
Sakura takes a deep breath.
"But I'm still me and maybe I'm not all that great but I'm trying and I want to keep improving and this is SUPER FRUSTRATING!" she shrieks the last two words, letting them reverberate through the area.
And–
Behind her, someone claps.
Sakura spins so quickly that her ankle twists wrong and she lands flat on her ass. Which would be humiliating, traumatizing, horrifying, except that she's still managed to turn herself around and that means she can see who was clapping and some things are more important, more arresting, than her own humiliation.
She gapes.
He's tall, taller than Hatake-sensei, though only by an inch or two, and wow, it's got to be something in ninja clan genes because Hatake-sensei looks a lot like his dad and that commonality seems to be really normal in the clans.
I will never, ever mention the world inbreeding aloud to any of them, Sakura decides fervently. Ino loves me but she'd kill me.
But Ino also looks an awful, awful lot like her dad.
"Close your mouth," Hatake Sakumo says gently. "Or you'll catch flies."
She snaps her mouth shut immediately, face burning, wondering why the universe seemed to love making her play the part of a jester.
Hatake Sakumo is as grey as the rest of the world, aside from her circle, and Sakura wonders how hard it is to look at her, bright and vibrant, her pink hair, red dress, green eyes—all of it, she must be nearly glowing against all of the gloom here.
He folds himself onto the grass and watches her calmly.
"How am I in a dead person's mind?" she eventually manages to ask because, seeing him, it's obvious whose mind this place belongs to.
Then immediately realizes it might not have been the best thing to question because—what if he doesn't know he's dead?
If he's surprised, however, he doesn't show it. The White Fang of Konoha has a better poker face than his son by far. He shrugs slightly. "You're the one that invaded my space," he says. "I couldn't answer how you got here."
Sakura looks around at the grey, grey, grey world around her and her eyes widen as she realizes that the reason it's all grey and she's so vibrant is because he's dead and she's not. She's not.
"It's a long story," she says, looking back at him. "And I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm not used to all of this internal mind stuff."
"Boil it down to the basics," he advises. "If you can't summarize something in one sentence, you're still adding too much detail. Strip it down."
She bites the inside of her cheek and thinks about this.
"Take your time," he adds. "This moment is outside of it."
Sakura is deeply tempted to ask how that even works and how he could know that but, meeting his eyes, she instead frowns and tries to do what he's suggested.
Back to the basics. Summarize in one line, one sentence. Can I do that?
An awful lot has happened. She doesn't think he's talking about a run-on sentence. That would be too easy, right? It's funny, but maybe it's because he looks like Hatake-sensei, but she wants to do this correctly, maybe win his approval…
Hatake-sensei was probably right, she realizes, feeling shame churn in the pit of her stomach. I do think transactionally.
"My mind was collapsing so, when I saw your urn, I broke it in order to save myself," she settles on.
It leaves out a lot of things, including Inner's very existence, but it had occurred to her that she has no proof that this is the real Hatake Sakumo and could very well be a face the enemy is wearing to fool her. As far as it goes, though, it's also the truth.
I am dancing on a wire on a boat crossing the ocean. I need a ginger chew or something to settle my stomach. I hate this part of being a ninja. Lies within truths and underneath the underneath.
"Good first attempt," Hatake Sakumo says and, despite herself, Sakura feels a warm glow of accomplishment. He glances over the gloomy landscape of his dead mind. "A lot of things are happening outside of here, aren't they?"
"Yes," she admits. "But I couldn't fit them all into one sentence and I don't know everything that's going on anyway."
Her circle feels smaller, all of a sudden, though the size of it hasn't changed. She touches the grass and soothes herself with the feel of it. Blissfully, boringly normal.
"Part of getting older," he says, "is realizing you'll never know everything that's going on. You can only do the best you can with the information you have at the time. Sometimes mistakes will be made. Sometimes people will judge your choices."
"Does it ever stop sucking?" Sakura asks. "Like, all of this is just… kind of garbage."
Hatake Sakumo laughs. His face is more expressive than she's ever seen Kakashi-sensei or Hatake-sensei be, and they haven't been exactly closed off, either.
"I'm going to take that as a no," she says, rather dismally.
"The thing with choices," Hatake Sakumo says, "is that every day is filled with them. Many of them, you make without even really thinking about. What to drink, what to eat, what to wear–"
Sakura goes pink.
"-perhaps you do think about that," he allows, smiling. "But would you say those are important choices, most of the time?"
Sakura considers that thoughtfully. "That depends on who it is supposed to be important to," she says slowly. "I care about how I do my hair but I guess most people probably don't."
"Good," he says approvingly. "Choices of that ilk are important to you, personally, but do not have much, if any, impact on your life."
She frowns. "Sometimes clothes really do matter though. Like how Tsunade-shishou wears the Hokage hat and robes for formal things. When usually she doesn't, even though she's always the Hokage."
"Tsunade-hime's the Hokage?" Hatake Sakumo asks thoughtfully, as if a few things have fallen into place for him. "Saa, that is quite a change. This…"
"It's a long story," she says. She doesn't really want to go through the whole… thing… Sakura feels that living through it here, telling that story here, might be a little more real than it usually is.
"We have time," he says, "but perhaps not the patience. You are correct that sometimes making choices about your attire will matter. Not all choices are immaterial."
Sakura hesitates. "Like the choices that led to you dying?" she asks, before she can talk herself out of it. "Those… those were pretty important choices, weren't they? Not just for you but for… a lot of Konoha and Iwa and more…"
He rubs his chin thoughtfully. If he's bothered by her bringing up his death, he doesn't show it.
"Those were important choices," Sakumo-san says. "And they did have an impact on a great many people. The thing is, that's all very easy to look at in hindsight, in retrospect, and go 'I should've done such and such a thing differently'. If I went back now, with what I know, maybe I would do something different."
He reaches out and plucks a few strands of Sakura's bright, vibrant green grass. She watches as they wither and fade as soon as they leave her circle.
The wind catches them, from his palm, and they float away. She follows their path with her gaze.
"But if I had to do it all over again, if I only knew what I'd known then," he says. "I'd have made the same choice."
She jerks her head around to look at him. "What?!"
He'd let his hands be soiled with the blood of both villages drawn into war all over again?
"Think about it," he says. "At that point in time, I made what I decided was the best choice. If I only had that information again, knowing nothing of what would come after… I would make the same choice. I can look back and regret the choice I made but, at the time, I had no regrets. I trusted my own judgment."
Sakura puzzles through this. Sitting here, outside of time with her sensei's dead father, nothing seems impossible.
"I guess that makes sense," she says, once she's managed to set aside her revulsion at the idea of going back and starting a war a second time around. "But it sounds almost like… fate, then, if it can't be changed."
"Fate can do many things, can mean many things," he says. His expression is indecipherable as he looks out over his landscape. "But the choices we make are still the choices we make, with what we know at the point that they occur. If you had to relive being a new Genin, without knowing anything of what was coming, would you make different choices?"
Her cheeks flame with shame and embarrassment both, the rush of blood heady, as she shakes her negation.
"But if you went back as you are now, would you?"
She presses her lips shut on the immediate urge to say that, obviously, of course she would, because it's clear that he wants her to think about it.
"I don't know that I could," she says, after what feels like an eternity. "No one would believe me if I told them what was coming and… I could take my training more seriously, be less cruel to Naruto, but I don't know that I'd be able to change anything, just as I am. Not meaningfully, I don't think. Would being friends with Naruto have made Sasuke stick around? Would taking my training more seriously have helped in the Forest of Death against Orochimaru?"
Sakura shrugs a little. "I don't think the me that I am now would change much."
It stings to say that. It really does. She says it anyway, being brave here, in a conversation she doesn't really understand, with a man long dead.
"So," he says, "if that's the case, then what is there to do?"
"Move forward," she says. "That's… that's all you can do, right? Is this another lecture on how I shouldn't dwell on the past? Because I've had several conversations about that already and they're kind of… tiring."
"This is a conversation about choices," Hatake Sakumo says.
"But why are we having it?"
"For one, you're the one that entered my mind," he says, ever so very dryly. "By breaking the urn."
"Why didn't Hatake-sensei notice the shards were from your urn?" she wonders suddenly. "Had he already been switched, I wonder?"
"I couldn't say," is the reply.
It's not a very useful one but Sakura bites her tongue on that. "What's the second reason we're having this conversation?"
"You're at a crossroads," Hatake Sakumo tells her. "And very soon, you're going to have to make a choice. Where that choice will lead you, I don't know."
"Can't you see the future, if you're outside of time?"
"Every choice can lead to a different sequence of events," he explains. "Some might be very close to identical, while others will deviate greatly. The future is being built one choice at a time. Some choices are more likely to be made than others, which is how seers can glimpse at the future–there are stable 'lines', so to speak–but people are changeable and so our minds change like the wind does and sometimes we make choices that cannot be predicted."
"So… if my future can't be seen," she says slowly, "then that means I've already deviated. I'm on an unstable line, where nothing is easily foreseen."
"Correct," he says. "Do you know what choice changed that?"
She's made a lot of choices lately. Some to do better, some to be better, but at first Sakura can't think of one that would really impact anything other than… well… her. Even Hatake-sensei being subbed out for Kakashi-sensei, though that was great, she was learning loads, wouldn't have changed her trajectory that much, not until…
"Oh," she says, because it's so obvious once she sees it. "It's when I decided I wasn't going to be a medical ninja, isn't it?"
Hatake Sakumo smiles. "There's a great number of timelines where you're a medic-nin," he says.
"Tsunade-shishou says I'm not entirely hopeless," Sakura admits, and for the first time wonders if Tsunade-shishou had been so half-hearted with praise because Sakura had been so skittish about receiving it. "Well, she says more than that, but…"
But that's about all she's willing to share. That she's leaving things out doesn't seem to bother Hatake-sensei's father. Nothing really seems to, with him.
"If there's a lot of timelines with me as a medic-nin," she says tentatively, "then doesn't that mean I'm supposed to be one?"
"No," he says, immediately and firmly. "It only means that you have the ability and the opportunity to become one. It indicates nothing about if that path is 'good' or 'better' than any other path. There's no way to get away from a life with challenges. In your paths, you didn't always become the same kind of medic-nin. And there's also a great number of paths where you chose differently, to not become a medic-nin at all, and none of those paths is the same either. There's no continuity… except that you made a choice."
Her thoughts reel and she feels dizzy. For a moment, she feels a tight, painful pinch in her chest. It's like he's singing some weird opera where she doesn't know the language or the plot and yet is expected to follow along.
To keep up.
"Can… can I see my futures?" she asks.
He shakes his head and, despite having expected this, Sakura finds herself obscurely crushed too. "Tempting as it may be," he says, "a person cannot see their own future. They must have the ability to make their own choices, without foreknowledge."
"Doesn't me knowing I could make a good medical ninja count as that, though?" she wonders.
"Didn't you already know that?" he asks in return, his voice rather gentle.
She's not sure what to make of him but she's also not sure what to make of her or any of this. She's glad that, whatever he is, a hallucination or a ghost or something more or less than that… she's glad that he's kind.
"I…" Sakura studies her circle of colour, wondering if it looks paler and more wan than before, before deciding it's just a trick of her sight. Her mind's so full that she's tired. That's all it is. She blinks, twice, to clear her vision and nods. "I guess so. I know a lot of people don't have any talent for it at all."
But even after all the work she's done on her self-esteem, even with all the people she's got now who think she's worth something, Sakura still struggles with admitting that, hey, maybe she is pretty awesome to have that as a talent.
Sakura decides this is a bad path to continue talking their way down and searches for a new question to ask. She doesn't want to poke at her insecurities.
"If… if I can't see my futures, but we're outside of time… can I see the present? Is Ino okay? Is Hatake-sensei?"
"I'd let you see them," Hatake Sakumo says, after a long moment. "But my wife's busy and told me to keep my nose out of her business."
"Your wife?"
"Most beautiful woman in the world," he says, so genuinely that Sakura is charmed almost despite herself. "Viciously clever too. Never went through the Academy, never interested in war, but she's always been the political one of the two us."
Sakura bites her lip. She wants to hear more and yet she's not supposed to be here to listen to romances between the dead—even if they had once been alive.
"So… so the whole… thing… down there has something to do with you and your wife?" Sakura isn't sure what to make of that. "Doesn't that mean all of this is, well, is your fault? I want to get out of here. Go home."
"Of course it's our fault," Hatake Sakumo says comfortably, with the same breezy ease he's answered most of her questions with. "It's the Hatake Estate. We're both buried here. Who else would be haunting this place?"
"How did a pair of ghosts hire ninja?" she asks. "Why did you hire them?"
She doesn't ask why they're down there torturing her—if that's what they're doing, now that she's unconscious—because… she's not sure how to put it. He's been nothing but amiable and congenial here in… in… his head…
Ino, if she could hear me, would be shrieking with jubilant laughter at my confusion, Sakura thinks sourly. Because Ino is awful that way.
She misses Ino terribly right now.
"My wife handled those details," he says. "My job was much simpler: I just needed to talk to you about choices. It's important that you know to reflect on them and consider what making them could mean."
"But why? What choice am I supposed to make?"
His smile fades. "It'll be up to you," he says, "but the choice is… what will you do next?"
Sakura blinks. "What?"
That sounds suspiciously simple.
"See," he says, "the thing is… what I don't think you've realized yet–is that your body is already dead. Your mind just hasn't caught up."