Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 41 – Choices
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4,725
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 41 of ? Unbeta'd.

Oof.

Ino lands properly, thanks to training, but she hadn't expected Hatake-sensei to throw her or for the force of the implosion to leave her feeling like she's been scalded, and landing properly or not, she decides that, for a few seconds at least, the ground is her new home.

And what a nice home it is. Soft and cool and damp. Probably crawling with bugs but, like, I cannot be fussed with that right now. Too tired.

Too drained.

She hadn't lied to Hatake-sensei at all: she is out of energy. Ino feels like her insides have been scraped bare and left to dry out.

Which: gross.

But I'm not sure where my chakra went, she muses, even as she gives up on lying on the ground and pushes herself into a seated position. Just in case something tries to come after her. She doesn't think she's got much of a fight in her yet but, like, she'd rather die knowing it was coming. The coin took a little but…

She hadn't expected this. This state of total dilapidated exhaustion.

She hadn't expected the implosion either but when she tries to muster up worry for Sakura, all she feels is sublime confidence that it will be fine. It's got to be fine.

It's just no longer up to her.

Ino forces herself to her feet, one slow inch at a time, and makes her staggering way over to a tree, hiding herself under the breadth of it. She has to fight off dizziness.

She doesn't have a soldier pill on her. They're not for Genin to carry usually and, well, she's never needed one before. To have them unnecessarily, as her Daddy says, is to come to rely on them.

It's different for Chouji, whose Clan uses them in their techniques, though it is still dangerous.

When she blinks, the world swaying around her, she knows she is perilously close to passing out.

"It's alright," the ghost of a beautiful woman says. "You've done your part, Yamanaka-kun. Nothing will harm you here."

"I shouldn't believe you," Ino says, because she's talking to a ghost as that's usually a recipe for absolute madness but, like her worry for Sakura, she's… peculiarly flat… about it. "But I do."

The woman smiles. "I'll keep watch," she promises.

Ino sighs and, despite herself, her eyelids droop.

"After all," Ino hears, as sleep steals her away, "that's what I've always done."

Kakashi lands in the eye of a firestorm.

Everything is painted green and, for the first time, he realizes the green is the shade of healing chakra. The air is thick and heavy, too solid to get a deep breath, and the courtyard is eerily quiet. Almost muffled.

Around the perimeter, the walls of green fire are falling, screaming and raging against the monster that is caught in their depths. Even as the battle rolls on, the monster's state remains inconveniently unsettled, constantly shifting.

Neither the flame nor the monster reach for him, though, and after eyeing their war for a long moment (mere seconds that feel like forever in his adrenaline fueled state) he dismisses them from his immediate concern.

Other than scattered bits of tile, stone, and desiccated weeds that are blown about due to–either Ino's breaching of the barrier or the fight that roars within it, encased behind green flames–there's nothing from that meeting of wills, titanic and grandiose as it may be.

It is as if he has stepped beyond that, to the relative piece of a tornado.

Hairs raise on the back of his neck because–that's not how implosions work. The area should be devastated, broken and battered, but instead…

Instead, it looks merely disheveled, he thinks, and that's all he has time to think before he's attacked from three different angles at once.

Clones, he realizes immediately, even as he dispels one of them with a kunai, and takes a blow from another against his forearm. They lack the substance of the real thing.

He breaks the neck of another, pretending they don't still all look like Ino (he will have nightmares later), and takes a sharp, biting sort of comfort from how the sound is wrong.

Clones.

He'll weigh that against the visuals.

The last one grins at him. Fearless and ferocious, far too much like the real thing, the stranger wearing her face beckons him onwards wordlessly.

To the side, he catches sight of Sakura, far too still, bound and bleeding on an altar. From a glance, he can tell she's not been flensed, but—she's still bleeding and he cannot see why and that feeds the flames of his fury. At each corner, stand another Ino, obviously on guard, and he suspects that they must be the real invaders.

One of them moves, shifting something he can't see, and he thinks it must have been the one at the altar before, putting together the ceramic shards into an… urn… he realizes, as the battle with the clone ebbs and flows. He sees an urn, glowing the same green, and he doesn't know what it means.

He does not even remember taking out the third clone, just that it disappears under his hands, and he advances on the altar, his chakra cold and ready.

"And that's done," the boss, the false Ino who must be the acting squad leader, says. Her satisfaction is clearly audible. "Mission accomplished."

The four Inos scatter, giving him a wide berth, and he–

(He should really stop them, find out what they've done, who they are, keep them from escaping, make sure they can't find the real Ino, wherever she landed after he'd flung her.)

–he stares at the corpse of his student.

Sakura stares at Hatake-sensei's dad. "Um."

It's pretty pathetic, actually, that that's her reaction but—she doesn't feel dead so it sounds like utter nonsense.

"I'm still thinking," she says dubiously. "And talking."

"I've been dead longer than you've been alive," he says very gently. "And I'm still thinking and talking."

That… that's a rather distressing point. Since, well, he's right.

But also—

"I can't be dead!" she protests. "I was just fine a few moments ago! If I was dead wouldn't I be the one to know?"

"Your circle does," he says.

"My circle knows I'm dead," Sakura repeats dubiously, looking down at it. Okay, sure, it's a little paler than it had been but couldn't that just be because everything else is so very, very grey? An arid world drained of colour. She doesn't feel dead. "It's still colourful."

That seems like a really stupid thing to say but Hatake Sakumo smiles benignly at her.

Sakura isn't quite sure she should be taking comfort from that, given everything, but all the same… somehow she does. It's a very soothing smile.

She's sure Inner would hate it.

"It's still colourful," he agrees. "You're not out of time to choose how to decide what you'll do next."

Sakura carefully pokes at one of the little yellow flowers in her circle, thoughtfully, wondering if it's just her imagination that it seems to wobble a little too much from her gentle touch. She pulls her hands back into her lap and resists the urge to see what would happen if she deadheaded one.

She narrows her eyes at Hatake-sensei's dad. "Like, what?" she asks. "Aren't the only options to, you know, stay dead or… not? Can I still undo my death? You said we're outside of time."

Though Sakura doesn't know how she'd undo her own death. Somebody down there hadn't been playing fair at all and, well, going back and redoing the whole thing seems like… like it wouldn't change all that much.

They'd just had a conversation about that.

"Whether you wind up with the chance to live or die is out of your hands," he says. "Will power from here won't make your body work and … if you could go back from here, where would you go?"

She doesn't know.

"I don't want to go back and relive all the crap I've gone through," Sakura says, though she frowns. "What do you mean it's out of my hands if I live or die? Aren't I already dead?"

"There's dead," Sakumo says, gesturing to himself. "Dead where not even Tsunade-hime would've been able to save me if she'd come after I'd stopped breathing and bled out."

Sakura shivers. It's so weird talking to him and hearing him talk about his suicide so casually.

"But?" she prompts.

"But you're not dead like that," he says, and his gaze is so distant, so far away, that she almost believes he can see what's really going on, watch all the things that his wife, apparently, says she's not allowed to know.

"What does that mean?" Sakura asks. Demands, really, though he doesn't seem bothered by her rudeness.

"You died due to a heart attack," Sakumo says.

"I'm not yet fourteen!" she protests. "Heart attacks are for old people and sick people! I know they tossed me around a bunch and I'm sure I was pretty beaten up by it but I've always been healthy on the inside!"

His gaze turns openly amused. "It was induced," he explains, even as she flushes to the roots of her hair.

"In… induced…" Sakura doesn't know how to feel about that, the idea of it too large and unwieldy to unpack, the knowledge that someone tied her to an altar and did… whatever… to her and then caused her to have a heart attack. "I… I know there's medical jutsu that… can…"

She hasn't learned any, not having gotten very far in Tsunade-shishou's training before all of this, but she's always read ahead in her books. She knows it's perfectly possible.

And she's sure Ino could rattle off a list of poisons that could do the same thing, no chakra required, without even thinking about it. Poisons that could shock a heart into giving up, overload it until life itself crumbles under the onslaught.

But… but… why…?

If Sakura had been asked about dying before this she would've thought that, well, she wouldn't exactly get a chance to know how she'd died or anything like that.

Suddenly, she's grateful that she hasn't been allowed to watch.

What would it be like, to watch yourself die?

"As it stands, because of that, your life or death is in the hands of my son," Sakumo murmurs, very quietly. "There's a window of time, after a heart has stopped, that a person can be brought back. You're dead, yes, but… it may not be permanent. There's still a chance."

Her (figurative? soul? the part of her too stupid to lie down and die when she's already dead?) heart skips a beat.

His other eye, Obito's eye, isn't even uncovered and yet the world feels like it's going in snapshots of seconds that feel like eternities as he takes in Sakura's battered, too still form. Snapshots that he'll remember forever.

He's lost comrades before, it's the nature of the career, being a shinobi is dangerous, and every time it happens he winds up feeling hollowed out and empty. Like he's had all his feeling scooped out of him, leaving behind a shell. A cleansing, but a poisonous one.

But he's never lost a student of his before. He's mentored in ANBU, Chuunin and Special Jounin who want an edge to their training, but—

But it's worse, now, with a Genin dead and him in charge.

It's the last thing he wants to look at, her body, and yet—

It dawns on him, in what feels like a moment pulled through the wall of forever, that none of her injuries, none of the ones that are visible, add up to a mortal ending. She's bloodied, yes, but now that he's closer, all the cuts are shallow, hardly more than scratches, aside from the sheer number of them.

This close, he can see they're in some sort of pattern. Like a ritual has been drawn in her flesh, each mark done purposefully, and the blood is not meant for result but rather an unavoidable side effect.

What were they doing? What did they want to achieve?

Questions he doesn't have answers to, though he pushes up his hitae-ite, Obito's sharingan spinning to life, memorizing everything he sees so that later, later he can draw it all out and look into what this meant and why it had occurred.

Now, though, he continues his inspection, adding up the injuries and they're… they're all minor.

The only thing is that she's dead. Her heart isn't beating and she's not breathing.

Even a diagnostic jutsu–he's no field medic, not even close, but no one survives ANBU without picking up some of the basics–tells him that there's no poison, there's absolutely no reason she should be dead.

Except her heart stopped and, with it, her lungs.

Which means there's no time to lose.

Restarting a heart, getting the lungs to work again–if it's done fast enough, before a brain has been deprived of oxygen for too long–is possible.

How long has it been since it stopped?

He doesn't know, though it couldn't have been long, a minute, maybe, because when he'd landed in here–

Her heart stopped when the enemy squad leader declared the mission a success, he realizes and hope is a firecracker in the bottom of his soul. He tries to ignore the crackling of it. That was mission end.

And that means–

That means he might be in time. He doesn't think about, didn't quite dare to look the other way, acknowledge that he might not be able to do it. Later, he'll think about that, no matter which way this goes.

For now, though, he cuts her free of the altar and gets to work.

He is no medic nin, but between having had Rin on his team and his time and experience in ANBU… he thinks he might know enough and, where knowledge falters…

Where there's a will, there's a way.

And his chakra holds lightning in it. Electricity. Bodies run on that, with that, tangled through their synapses.

With each chest compression, each in and out of her lungs that buys him time to get her heart beating again, Kakashi lances a spark of that lightning through her.

His gaze stays on her face, watchful for any change, anything at all, while he brings every bit of finesse he has to bear on whittling his chakra down to the smallest of pieces, tiny embers rather than gigantic strikes.

She is dead.

He knows this might not work. He knows that.

But he doesn't dare go stronger, go faster, or go less carefully. He might still fail and he… he doesn't know what he'll do if that happens.

But he won't be the one that kills her, by overloading her heart with too much chakra, too much electricity.

He won't. He can't.

Come on, Sakura, he thinks. You can do this, come on.

"A chance?" she echoes. Sakura can almost hear her heart pound in her ears and it's the strangest thing, the idea that it's not real, that's just her imagination, that her actual heart isn't beating.

Somehow, despite all of… all of everything she's walked through with Inner and the ghost of Hatake Sakumo, the fact that her imagination still makes it so her heart pounds as blood rushes to her is what strikes her as the most bizarre.

"Even… even when it was Kakashi-sensei rather than Hatake-sensei," she says slowly, needing to hear her voice rather than just think it even if—no, maybe especially if—it's all just her imagination. "Even then… he always came through, when it really counted."

She thinks on that a little longer, taking it a little further and then, almost hesitantly adds: "Well, when lives were on the line anyway."

Because he'd been actually really terrible about coming through when it had mattered to the team emotionally. Sakura's pretty sure she wouldn't make a very good Jounin sensei herself right now but… but Hatake-sensei is very careful with their feelings.

Making sure they know they matter and not just because they're a warm body he's stuck babysitting but because they're them.

"When it comes to the lives of his comrades," Sakumo says, "my son has always cared deeply. Perhaps too deeply."

Too deeply? What is that supposed to mean?

Sakura wants to ask about that, wants to hear what it means, but that—she can't even pretend otherwise, it's just another way for her to ignore the fact that she's dead and can't do anything about that.

That it's all in the hands of her sensei now.

It's not even that she doesn't trust him, it's not about trust at all. It's just… just… that's her life.

And she doesn't even have the pretense of control over it.

She wants to lash out, rage against that idea, start screaming and never stop but…

Sakura takes a deep breath, closing her eyes as she draws air in, slowly and determinedly, and then opens her eyes as on the exhale. The grass in her little circle is growing paler. It's not just her imagination or a trick of the light.

"Okay," she says, "okay. Since Hatake-sensei's going to do his best to save me—" that much she knows "—then I've got to do my part. I'm going to need to make a choice, about what I do next. That's what you said."

Hatake Sakumo nods amiably. "I did."

"And if the choice about living and dying is out of my hands, but I still need to make a choice," she says carefully, wanting to make sure she's followed this so far. "It follows, then, that the choice I've got to make… it matters whether I live or whether I die. It still matters. Either way."

Which, even as she says it, makes very little sense.

It earns her another nod of agreement, however, from her sensei's father.

"What is the choice I need to make, then?" she asks. "One that matters even if I'm dead."

"Or even if you're alive," he says, smiling faintly. "Death hasn't particularly stopped my wife and I."

The very worst part of that is… he's not wrong. She supposes that, from his point of view, it all seems rather academic.

"I'd like to live," she says plaintively. "Rather than look at it from your perspective."

He laughs.

"My choices," Sakura insists. "What are they? What am I choosing between? You said that my choice would be whatever I do next–what does that mean?"

"It means what it means," Sakumo tells her, even as he stands up and gestures for her to do the same. "But whatever you choose, it will matter."

Even though its a motion that she's done a million times before, without even thinking about it, this time the movement of getting off the ground leaves her woozy. She rests her hands on her knees, taking a deep breath, before forcing herself to straighten.

Sakura tries to pretend the world doesn't spin slightly in her vision.

It's probably a bad sign.

Just like the way her flowers and grass are beginning to wilt, brown spots appearing slowly enough that she can't see them arrive but fast enough that every time she looks away and then back, there's more of them.

Bad signs everywhere.

"My choice," she prompts.

She's running out of time. She can't run away from reality now. No matter how much she wants to.

He studies her, his expression impossible to read, aside from the solemnity that hangs over him like a shroud (oooh, bad thought, Sakura scolds herself) for a long, long moment.

Then he holds out one hand to her.

She looks at it, then back up at his face.

"Your choice," he says, "is to remain in your circle or will you step out of it, of your own volition?"

She looks at his hand like it's a snake, about to bite her.

"The choice is up to you," he says. "No one else can make it for you. There's no one to tell you what to do."

"What happens with each choice?" she demands. This predicament is so frustrating. "If my circle is a representation of my life then leaving it means I've killed myself! Doesn't it? Doesn't it?"

Hatake Sakumo smiles, but he says nothing, and his hand remains outstretched as she's left to make a choice between two options.

And no idea of the ramifications of either!

Sakura spins, turning her back to him, and as she does so–it hits her:

But we almost never know all the ramifications of our choices! That's what he was saying before, about going back in time, if we didn't know differently, how could we choose differently? And how, even if we did choose differently–would that mean other people would also choose differently? There's no way to say. One person making a choice doesn't mean the person next to them is going to change their mind.

And not even the Yamanaka can make up the minds of everyone in the village, even if they cheated outrageously. There's always going to be the element of random chance.

She wishes she could punch random chance right in the face.

But he'd also said that, whatever I picked, my choice would matter. Even if I died. Or if I live. And that means… that means stepping out of my circle can't be a death sentence, in and of itself, because otherwise the choice to do so wouldn't matter if I live!

Sakura glances over her shoulder and is unsurprised to find that he's still there, still smiling, his hand held out to her. He doesn't react to her looking at him, just stands there, waiting for her to make a choice.

My choices are stay in this circle, that's slowly dying, or step out of it and… it's his mind, his world. What does that choice mean for me? What will it do to me? If I die, will I wander forever with him? If I live, what will happen?

Her circle seems so small. It always had been but, now, as the bright colours fade and she gets weaker and weaker, Sakura is scared of her circle. She's scared of dying, even though that choice has, apparently, been taken out of her hands.

I'm awfully small, I know that. I'm not very important to very many people. Nothing I've done has ever made that much of a difference. I'm just… me. And that's… that's fine. I don't really like me, very much at all, which shows with Inner, but I'm still me. Haruno Sakura. And even if I don't like me, Ino does. Hatake-sensei cares about me, I'm pretty sure of that. Tsunade-shishou and Shizune do too and I'd like to become better friends with Hinata and Tenten and the boys… and I think that I'd like to learn to like me.

She looks at her circle for what feels like a long, long time. She watches the flowers fall off their stems, black and dead, all life having been leeched out of them.

Oh.

She turns around, looking at Hatake-sensei's dad, the man who'd saved his comrades over accomplishing his mission and been blamed for starting a war. She looks at how big his world is, even though it's dead, he's dead.

But he's standing right in front of her.

Shoulders straight, tall and strong, and fearless.

And Sakura knows what the choice really is.

It's been right in front of her the whole time. It was there before she even wound up in Hatake Sakumo's mind, even as she'd wandered through this long, lucid dream. It's been there her whole life and, each time she makes it, she struggles to commit to it again and again. It's a problem that's been stuck in her gullet time and time again. She keeps trying and then can't try long enough to really break free.

And that inability, that struggle, is why she couldn't leave her circle before, even when she'd tried.

Because I'd already decided that my circle was the sum of me, she realizes. That my circle was it, all that I was contained within. It actualized itself into something I could see when I said I didn't want to die but it wasn't to help me, it was to give me the boundary I'd drawn myself into. I caged myself.

And the choice, the one Hatake Sakumo says she needs to make now, the what will she do next…

He's asking…

Sakura looks at the circle she's standing in. At the way it is dying. At how outside of it, the colours are muted and grey and yet Hatake Sakumo is comfortable and confident and, yes, happy even in his death, even with what had ended his life.

She thinks of what he'd said, about this mattering whether she lives or she dies, and in the depths of her heart, she wants this.

No more trying. Just doing.

Sakura takes a deep breath. What's she waiting for? Isn't it enough stalling she'd done already?

So she makes her choice, reaches for his hand, and steps out of her circle.

I want to grow beyond the limits of what I am! I want to be more than my current self!

Hatake Sakumo's hand is very warm even as her circle dissolves behind her. She can't see it but she doesn't need to. She can feel the fizz of it as it bubbles away into the past.

"Well done," he says, and she looks up at him.

"I don't know where I'll go next," she confesses, still clinging to his hand. "I'm still scared."

He smiles, his other hand coming up to land comfortingly on her shoulder. "It's okay to be scared. The important thing is to not let fear control you and keep you from moving forward."

Sakura nods, glancing around at the large, wide grey world. She can't see an ending to it.

She wants to be as expansive as that, as comfortable in herself as that. As strong as that.

"Will my circle come back?" she asks. "Do… do we know, yet, if I'm going to live? Or… am I going to stay dead?"

"Having made the choice to leave your circle," Sakumo says. "Having truly stepped beyond it for the very first time. Do you think you could ever lock yourself up into it all over again?"

Sakura frowns. "I… I don't know. It was comfortable, being there, until… suddenly it wasn't. So I picked a different path, one that let me step out of it. I don't know where the path of me will go now though. What if it leads me back there?"

"And what if it doesn't?"

She hears what he doesn't say, that there's no certainty now, that she's left the structure she'd defined herself by and now… now it's up to her to make the path.

The path of me. I wonder where it goes?

Lightning screams across the sky, a forked tongue of blinding light, and thunder rolls in, hot on the heels of it. Sakura gasps, her knees turning to jelly as she collapses, only Hatake Sakumo holding her up keeps her from landing face down in the dirt.

Her chest is on fire.

"And now," Sakumo murmurs, "I think your other question has been answered."

A scream crawls through her, primal and powerful and fragile too, terror shaking her as again and again and again the lightning flashes overhead and in her eyes and she clutches at him, sure she's dying, that this time she's really going to know-

Hatake Sakumo presses a kiss to her forehead. The touch of his lips tingles cool and bright, like aloe on a sunburn, even through the pain she's in, and it settles deep into her bones even as she trembles and shakes like she's going to fall apart.

"A gift," he says. "You're a smart girl, Sakura. I look forward to you using it."

The grey, grey world falls to pieces as she screams.

And under Kakashi's hands, Sakura's chest heaves.