- Becoming -
Sakura takes deep breath and counts to ten. Not because she's meditating or dialing in a sensory drill, but because she's mad.
"Are you sure you want to keep doing this?" Yume-Kakashi asks her. She could tell through their bond that he's losing patience with her experiment. To be fair, she was losing patience with herself.
With a huff, she shoves the blindfold off her face, giving him a frustrated glare. "I know we can make this work, I'm just missing something."
Unconvinced, he stares down at her body sprawled out in the dirt. The outdoor training ring around her is littered with training shuriken and boot marks from her last experiment. He cocks a wayward eyebrow at her. "Because it's going so well thus far."
She must have eaten an extra serving of stubborn that morning, because she levels him with an equally piercing gaze. A sweat soaked bang sticks to the side of her face. She pushes the hair away with the back of her glove. She's pretty sure there's sand in her hair too. There's sand in her boots and down the back of her shirt and the morning heat made everything so much stickier than it needed to be.
"Let's just give it one more try." She sighs. Every joint and tendon in her body screams when she moves.
"Maybe you should take a break first. Are your ribs still bothering you?" Kakashi asks. He sinks into a squat beside her.
Yesterday's training with the girls has left her beyond exhausted. So much for catching up on rest now that she was back in the village. Her right shoulder clicks every time she reached above her head, and her ribs are still bruised from where Hinata hit her hard. But she's determined to test out a theory that's been nagging her, body aches aside.
"I'm okay, I'm just sore." She reassured him. Why was she being so damn cranky? It wasn't his fault her experiment wasn't working.
Despite his unusually sassy attitude, Yume-Kakashi seems especially wary of her getting hurt today. He'd been like this ever since her bloody nose back at the Embassy Royal. He keeps fussing over her every movement like his presence alone might break her.
Yume-Kakashi might look and talk like her Sensei, but he's definitely inherited Sakura's anxiety. Any other day, she might have thought his concerns sweet. But not today. She's too preoccupied.
She had wanted to work on her Jutsu before her debrief with Tsunade. After today, she had a week long shift on call at the hospital. Work was about to become a monster that would consumed her free time. It would grind her down and spit out the bones of her once thriving social life.
Needless to say, if this next experiment failed, she would have officially waisted her last free morning for the foreseeable future. She picks herself up out of the dirt and looks around the training ring. Time for a new plan of attack.
While other training fields tended to be wide open spaces, training field 5 was targeted to workshopping Genin basics. Set deep in the woods just north of the great gates, field 5 was home to an extensive training course she had used often in her Genin days.
On the ground level, there are bullseye targets scattered throughout an impressive obstacle run meant for practicing kunai throwing while on the move. Overhead, a ropes course hangs suspended between the trees. The highest ropes are some 30ft off the ground. But today, she's interested in neither of the obstacle courses. The real gem of field 5 was the automated attack ring she's currently standing in.
Any Chunin worth their salt has spent hours here as a kid, loading and reloading the spring operated shuriken canons meant to practice dodging projectiles. Each canon was roughly the size of a bread box and could hold up to 8 shuriken at a time.
Looking down from the ropes course, the training ring looks like the face of a clock, 12 canons evenly stationed at a different number. Once the canons were loaded, spring released levers would launch wooden training shuriken at you. This forced the person in the middle to sense which canon the attack was coming from.
Sakura, being the adult she was now, could block and dodge all 12 canons if active at once. At lease, she was suppose to be able to dodge them all. Things had gotten very real once she'd added a blindfold to the equation.
She'd come up with this idea when Hinata mentioned wanting to practice some blindfolded Taijutsu at their next meeting. Today, she'd wanted to test the limits of her Yume-Jutsu and see if it Kakashi could expand her environmental awareness. Was it possible for him to tap into her subconscious and sense oncoming dangers before she could?
Sakura looks down at her filthy training clothes, brushing a piece of gravel from where it sticks to her skin. 17 failed attempts in the training ring had thus far indicated no. Kakashi could not sense what she could not.
She spends the next ten minutes resetting the 6 shuriken canons she has in rotation. She sighs, walking over to the picnic table just beside the training ring. She gulps down big drinks of water from her bottle, then opens up her Jutsu notebook. Inside, she had notes of how she thought she might be able to make some progress today. She knew that sometimes progress was often first disguised as failure, but things weren't looking up for her.
"I just don't think I'm made for this type of training." Kakashi says, following her over to the table. He rubs angrily at his temples and eyes. Can hallucinations get headaches? "I don't think I can communicate information beyond what you implicitly know. Trying to tell you anything beyond that just makes my eyes cross."
"Just give me one more try and I'll consider this a lost cause." She promises.
She flips to the page where she's written 'Blindfolded dodging exercises: Enhanced situational awareness?' and marks another tally in the fail column.
Kakashi hovered over her shoulder, squinting his eyes to read her frustrated chicken scratch.
Currently, she had 4 columns of notes, each one categorizing a different possible area of application. She was trying to figure out practical uses for her ability that went beyond luxury bubble baths and unnecessarily sexy hallucinations.
She's reached a point in her concentration where she can sustain a multi-sensory genjutsu even while running. That means it's time to get serious. Time to move out of the development phase and onto more practical trials.
The four columns were written out as such:
Field survival (Sensory alteration & Nervous system regulation)
Body Temperature regulation
Food qualities / starvation rations
Pain management / Self administered drugless anesthesia
Pros / cons VS just healing the wound. (Chakra conservation?)
Compound fractures
Poison ingestion
Enhanced perception / situational awareness
Blindfolded dodging exercises
Early warning system?
Rear guard / distance scouting like Kage-bushin?
Memory Recall
Visual memory of classified documents
Under cover missions
It's not that she doesn't enjoy quality time with her Sensei-not-Sensei, or the fact that she could recreate a blizzard in her kitchen now if she wants to. But at the end of the day, she was a Kunoichi. If there was a use for this ability that allowed her to save lives, it was her obligation to find it.
It would be easy to get distracted with recreating comfortable experiences, but ultimately, her Genjutsu is meant to help her deal with the uncomfortable. She is potentially pioneering a completely new field of study. She has work to do, and bubblebaths won't cut it.
She glances over to where Kakashi is looking down at her notes. He's definitely getting stronger…but he still couldn't be the eyes in the back of her head she'd hoped he might be. He could help her pick apart and study information she had already stored in her subconscious, but ultimately he could not tell her information she did not already know.
"Maybe we should try something less…dynamic." Yume Kakashi says. But she can hear what he's really thinking.
He's trying to persuade her to stick to some of the less dangerous applications. He wants her to switch to field survival trials. "We could go to the rec-center and use the ice baths. You could see if you can use Yume-Jutsu to convince yourself the water is warm."
"That's not a bad idea, but we can do that later." She says, looking back to her notes. "Just give me a few more minutes to rest and I'll finish with the dodging drill. I think your chakra-drain is wearing on me, I'm moving so sluggish."
Kakashi rolls his eyes, his silver bangs falling into his face. "Sure, it has nothing to do with the six hour boot camp you put yourself through yesterday."
"Yeah yeah." She huffs. She didn't know why they were picking on each other today. This was so different from their usual dynamic.
A new idea comes to mine. Sakura looks up at the ropes course overhead. She had walked those elevated tightropes countless times as a child. It was an experience she technically already had, somewhere in the recesses of her brain. The ropes were stationary, not randomly triggered shuriken with ever changing flight paths. Maybe she could walk the ropes blindfolded while Yume-Kakashi guided her?
He tilts his head, listening to the idea she isn't saying out loud. He frowns even harder at her now. "There is absolutely no way I'm talking you through a blindfolded ropes course. It's only going to end in you getting hurt."
"I think I need to get hurt." She counters.
At his look of confusion, she put her notebook down..
"Hear me out, okay? I think getting hurt has to be part of the next step. Before, I could barely walk without you disappearing on me. Now I'm able to run with you at my side, and I can even keep you around while holding my breath. But it isn't enough to sustain a Yume-jutsu through discomfort. I need to be able to sustain one through pain. If I'm ever going to be able to use you in a fight, you have to be okay with me getting hurt."
"I get that. But we are still figuring out what I can and can't do, Sakura. Why don't you get that we need to play this safe for now?"
"Because playing it safe doesn't prepare you for the worst!" She yells. Her voice echos out through the miles trees.
And then she understands why she's so cranky today. She gets why she's taking it out on him. Her shoulders sink from where they've become tense around her neck. Kakashi looks away, upset.
Tenten's warning shivers over her skin, an anxious energy that itches like an allergic reaction. The girl had grown into a formidable Kunoichi in her own right, and it was rare that she encountered something that put her on edge. If Tenten was legitimately worried about the attacks she had seen, it meant something bad was out there. Sakura needed to be ready for it.
She had to prepare for the worst, because she knew the worst was coming. If getting hurt today meant she would have even a slight advantage tomorrow, then that was a price she was willing to pay. Her Kakashi could agree with her or not.
The man in question stands up, running his hands through his hair.
Today, he was in relaxed lounge clothes. His headband is missing as it always is. Sunlight flecks across his bicolored eyes. They reflect in a way that Sakura must have seen her Sensei's eyes do once, because there was no way she could imagine something so pretty from scratch.
"Did Hinata hit you in the head yesterday?" He asks. His voice is the rolling of soft thunder in the distance. He's frustrated with her, but she knows it's from love. Everything he ever did for her was out of love. "You're the queen of playing it safe. Why the sudden interest in taking risks now?"
She considers her answer before relying. She thinks back to all the risks she's taken in the last few weeks: Slipping a note to the River General that might get her arrested. Standing in front of a panel of Daimyo asking them to bet on her. Taking a step, how ever small, towards a boy she deeply loves. Loving someone who might actually love her in return, for once.
"Maybe taking a few risks isn't the worst thing in the world." She says. "Besides, isn't that what you're kind of here for? To get me to take risks?"
Kakashi looks up at the ropes course she's considering walking blindfolded. "These aren't the kinds of risks I'm comfortable with."
She realizes he isn't just cranky. She isn't just cranky either. Something is fundamentally different about their dynamic today. She can't remember a single time where they've ever truly argued. They've always been in sync on ever level, his presence always a soothing bath she could slip into at the end of a long day.
But here in this clearing, his skin seems brighter. His movements feel jerky, and somehow more human. Before, he'd been this idealized, etherial creature that existed for her eyes and lips to consume. But something changed between them after he was able to push her away in the bathroom. Today, here… it's almost as if he exists within and beyond her.
There was no other way to say it. Today he felt less like a lucid dream and actually…alive.
"Are you okay?" She asked quietly, reaching out and putting a hand on his arm.
He flinches beneath her touch. He hadn't been expecting it. She realizes that, while he's been a fussy mother hen all morning, he's made no move to touch her since the Ryokan. He's been at her back all day, but this touch is the first true contact they have shared since he pulled her under the water and kissed her down to her soul.
At her touch, his eyes snap from the ropes course to her face. He's not looking at her eyes, but just below it. With a sense of sinking dread, she realizes he's looking at her nose. He's waiting for something terrible to happen. For her to start bleeding again or collapse unexpectedly. They sit, frozen like that for a count of ten. He's waiting for her to fall…
"I told you, I'm okay. You're not going to hurt me." She says. It's the quiet whisper of a magic spell, and somehow it works. She speaks his fear aloud into the open, and in doing so she takes away its power. After a moment, his shoulders un-tense. The tide of irritation between them begins to ebb. He reaches across his body with his other hand, placing it atop hers where it's rests on his arm.
"Actually, I've been wanting to talk to you about something, but I don't really know how to start." He says. He leans deeper into her touch, like he's trying to savor something before it's gone.
"Talk about what?" She asks.
He looks down at his feet, trying to begin. It strikes her that this side of him is so unlike the real Kakashi. But it doesn't feel like a lingering part of her own self either. This feels like a side of him she's only met once before, when he held her in the hot springs waters and told her to live a good life, regardless of who she chose to spend it with.
"I want to talk about why I'm here."
His piercing eyes catch her off guard, almost as much as this conversation. They so rarely talk about him like this, about who or what exactly he is. He usually avoids any mention of his being a Jutsu, though that's begun to change in recent weeks. Before, he would cringe at the implication he was anything other than a real soul.
Thankfully, he spares her the struggle of trying to find the right questions. He sits down next to her and takes a deep breath.
"I've been having…thoughts. Like, thoughts of my own."
What ever he was going to say, this is the last thing she's expecting.
"I don't know how to explain what's happening to me, but something has been different since… since I was able to push you back." He chews on his words like he's tasting them first, but none of them taste exactly right. "I don't know how to explain it other than… I feel like I'm becoming."
"Becoming what?" She asks him. She wants to understand him, but she is so out of her depth here.
"I don't know." He says, and looks away. "I remember every second of our time together. From the very first moment you dreamed me into existence, right up into this moment right now. While I have second hand memories of your life when I'm not around, I only know them like a story that's been told to me after the fact."
Sakura sits in silence, trying to processes his words. He surprises her by lifting one of her hands in his and bringing them both up to eye level. He pressing their palms into each other, like they were each one half of the same prayer. "When you first started summoning me, I only ever existed here. And when I wasn't here, I also wasn't there."
His words, while abstract, make sense in the nonsensical way that dreams do even when they shouldn't.
"But lately, I've started remembering other times too. Times when I'm there, but not here. Times where I belong only to myself. I don't know if it's liberating… or lonely."
A question catches in her throat, and she has to force it out. "How?"
"I don't know that either. I don't even know if it's real, or if I'm just imagining things. I don't know if I'm manifesting on my own or if… maybe I'm just dreaming. Is it even possible for a dream to dream?"
He spreads his fingers, and she spreads hers. Their hands are a star outstretched between them and he can't take his eyes off of it.
She doesn't know how to answer him. She doesn't know what he needs from her in this moment. She doesn't know how they went from arguing about training strategies to… what ever this is. But it doesn't matter what she does or doesn't know. He needs her, and that's all that matters.
So instead of trying to use her words, she does for him what he had done countless times for her. She closes her eyes and tries to feel what he isn't saying. She senses what he needs through tips of their fingers and the edges of her mind.
His emotions come rushing over her like a tidal wave. He is so much stronger than she's ever felt him. For a moment, it's hard recognizing the layers of his complex feelings from her own. It's like pouring oil into water when he shares himself with her. Briefly, they are one perfectly blended thing and it takes a minute for their feelings to separate again. She has to pull herself away from him before they once more belongs fully to themselves. She can answer to his heart if not to his words.
"You're scared, aren't you. " She finally says, breaking the long stretch of silence.
"Yes." He says, dropping her hand. His bi-colored eyes pierce her through, one grey, one red. "Yes, I'm scared. I'm scared of what ever I could become, and I'm scare I'm going to hurt you in becoming it. But I think…there's a silver lining to my dreams. I think they can help me figuring out why I'm here."
She's never thought about why he was here. She'd never even thought to question it. Of all the questions she had regarding her Jutsu, why had never been one of them. She had just accepted that he was. That had been enough for her.
"Do you have an answer?"
"No. But I'm figuring it out. And when I do…" He pushes a thought to her, and she feels it come down their bond.
"I'll be the first to know." She finishes for him.
Then he smiles at her and she smiles back. His expression is a forced mask of reassurance, but she doesn't know what else to do. He's always been the one helping her figure things out when she's scared or overwhelmed. She never thought she would need her to return the favor, or how she might even begin.
She wants to keep talking to him like this. She feels cold when he pulls away from her, walking back to the training ring. He shakes out his limbs like you shake out your fingers when your hands fall asleep.
"Come on, we can talk more about this later. We have work to do." He says.
It's like he's trying to put himself back together, to reconnect with the role he was originally meant to play. He puts his hands in his pockets and relaxes into a pose that is so much like her Sensei, she could swear it was really Kakashi standing there.
She knows that they are different men, different beings entirely. But sometimes the resemblance is so uncanny, she wondered if she could tell them apart were they to stand together.
She doesn't remember when she stopped thinking of him as a Genjutsu of her Sensei and started thinking of him as his own person. This whole thing was starting to get really messy, like a tower of Jenga blocks seconds away from collapsing.
For the first time since standing in his dining room, Sakura wishes she could talk to the real Kakashi. She wants to tell him about her Jutsu and her complicated feelings for him, even though he clearly doesn't feel the same. Not because she needs them to be reciprocated, but so she can just let it all go. She wonders what Kakashi would make of his imaginary counterpart, if he ever learned about him.
"You know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, right?" Yume-Kakashi looks over his shoulder at her. He can feel her thinking about her Sensei through their bond.
At her guilty look, he points to the loaded Shuriken cannons still waiting for her last blindfold experiment. Like Kakashi, his words always have a second meaning.
"Insanity you say?" She says, standing up and walking over. "Then I guess it's a good thing I'm a doctor."
She won't push him to keep sharing if he doesn't want to. She decides instead to just be there for him whenever he's ready to talk.
"You ready?" She asks.
"I'm ready enough." He says with a sigh.
And so, despite her protesting muscles and his throbbing headache, they offer themselves back into the fold. She follows the man of her dreams into the middle of the training ring. She takes out her headband and ties it over her eyes, adjusting the fabric so she'd sufficiently blinded. The sounds of the forest come alive around her, and she finds the activation button with the edge of her boot. When she depresses it down into the earth, she hears the click and whirl of the wooden shuriken rolling into place inside their canons.
Silence settles over the forest. Something dead ahead of her makes a noise.
"12-o-clock." Yume Kakashi says, just as the canon launches its cartridge into motion.
She hears another series of noises click and latch. She dodges a second round of shuriken.
"6, 11. 2 and 3." Kakashi calls to her.
She is able to dodge one and block the other with a kunai she pulls from her leg holster. She falls into a back bend, landing her feet into a round off to dodge the next two shuriken. Hope starts to flutter in her chest, but she doesn't let it fly. The other experiments also started well like this. It wasn't until the projectiles started coming faster that she started having problems…
A rogue shuriken pegs her hard in the back of the head, making her stagger forward before righting herself. Damnit! She hadn't heard that canon click.
She gets pegged by another volley of throwing stars before she can make sense of the noises again. As each canon nears the end of its cartridge, the springs start launching shuriken faster and faster. Now they assault her, landing in multiples.
Yume-Kakashi is able to call out the occasional direction after she's already heard it, but at a certain point there's too many noises. She can't make heads or tails of them all echoing throughout the clearing.
She gets absolutely pelted by shuriken that. Had her eyes not been covered, she would have been able to dodge all of them in her sleep. She lands wrong when a pair of shuriken catch her painfully in the shin. She falls clumsily onto her side with a skid. The air fills with the last wave of wooden projectiles, and then the forest is silent once more.
Out of 40 total shuriken, she's maybe dodged 16 of them.
"Pathetic." She growls at herself, shoving the headband back up onto her head. Once more she's laying on her back, sprawled in the dirt like a first day Genin.
"Better than a 30ft fall from the ropes." Kakashi says, rubbing at his temples. Maybe this exercise really did give him a headache.
Sitting up, she pulls her training notebook out and flips to the page with her tally marks. She puts a violent, angry slash through 'dodging drills' and snaps the book shut with a huff. Her most hopeful idea was officially a wash. Maybe her Yume-jutsu just wasn't meant for hand to hand combat.
"Stupid." She grumbles into her lap. There's dirt all down her sides and probably in her hair again.
"I am not." Yume kakashi defends, not a bit put off by her small temper tantrum.
"It's not your fault." She says, looking across the clearing. "The firing order is randomized, there's no way to predict it. I guess I can't expect you to know what I don't know."
A look of mischief crosses his face. It brings the color back to his cheeks and erases the worry that's been harbored there all day. "I know at least one thing that you don't." He says.
It's amazing how his smile alone can always lifts her spirits. Whether he is a genjutsu or not, she never wants to see him unhappy again. "Oh? And what's that?" She asks.
"It's after 11. You're late for your debrief with Tsunade."
Sakura scrambles for the watch at her wrist, realizing he's absolutely right. 11:10.
The look of mirth he gives her before he disappears will stick with her for the rest of the day. His enjoyment comes at the expense of her dread, but it's a cost she happily pays.
But shit, Tsunade was going to kill her.
Soon, she's running out of the training field and back towards the great gates. She doesn't even have time to clean up the scattered shuriken before she goes.