AN: Sufficient Velocity and Space Battles are super far ahead, and the Pa tre on is on CH 107. You can find the link on my profile if you wanna just get there.
I'ma update this more often than normal for a couple of weeks to catch it up, but you know, go elsewhere if you want the chapters now.
Veiled in darkness, Sakura and Ino find themselves a little lost. The feel of fluid on their toes tells them they're still in the boss room, but neither of them have much they can say for sure about their surroundings. Pitch black is pitch black, it's that simple. "Sakura uh… darkness isn't a normal core memory." Ino finally decides to contribute to the moment, after a little bit of awkward splashing with her toes. Something wet lands on Ino's face, and Sakura just kinda sighs at the sound of it splattering on her.
"Yeah, well, this is different. I wasn't taking a nap or something, I was blind. This is the end of the fight, we should probably step back if we don't want to get covered." Sakura explains, grabbing Ino's hand and dragging her back. She doesn't have to see her to know where she is, after-all, with all this violence flying around and Vampire Gato's damned living spear in the air, neither of them has wanted to move from their safe space.
"You were blind for the end of the fight?" Ino asks, "but you can see…"
"I have new eyes." Sakura admits, "I was so scared because I wasn't sure I'd get new ones, but I did. The whole fear of permanent blindness and the relative recency of the event probably made this traumatizing enough it's forming a part of my surface memories. It's important for all the wrong reasons."
"Why would you do this?" Ino asks, "you didn't have to go blind, who shoves glass into their eyes!?"
"It was life or death," Sakura repeats herself from back when she could see, "Naruto or Sasuke might have died if I didn't."
"But not you?" Ino asks, and Sakura can feel her gaze on her, even though the darkness is too consuming for either of them to see each-other. She doesn't answer Ino's question, she just looks around at the darkness. "You couldn't see, Sakura, how would you have dodged an attack at you?"
"I actually charged towards him." Sakura shrugs, not that Ino can see it.
"Why!?"
Her eyes open, and with it comes light. They find they're at school, a much younger Sakura is writing in a notebook while young Ino sits to the side gazing out the window. There's nothing out there of note, in fact it's not filled in at all. In all her years at school, Sakura has no idea what the outside of the classroom looks like. She just, never bothered to look. It's like Ino's looking out into a sketch, and not a very well done sketch.
"What's this?" Ino asks, looking around at their empty classroom.
"I think this is when I came up with the Sasuke Uchiha Fanclub." Sakura says, looking through the room herself, as if searching for an easter egg or a rogue Iruka.
"What makes you think that?" Ino asks.
"Lots of important moments happened here at the school, but only a few would be considered really important, and you said we're in my core memories right now," Sakura says, walking up to her younger self, "and if I look closely, I can see that my hair is wet, not a lot of times that happened… I'm referring to outside of class too, by the way, washing my hair is new to me."
"Why was your hair wet?" Ino asks, choosing to sidestep that admittance swiftly and skillfully. She quickly walks up behind Sakura's younger counterpart to look, and spots the same as her crush. Young Sakura's got little water spots throughout her hair, and on her shirt.
"I said I didn't like Sasuke, so the other girls beat me up, then poured dirty water on my head," Sakura explains, "they said I was stuck up and didn't know my place."
"And that made you think you should start a fan club?" Ino asks with a little snicker, "why wasn't their cruelty a more important memory then?"
"I never cared about what they did, but I thought that maybe if I pretended that I had been lying, and was secretly a super fan, they'd leave us alone."
"Us?" Ino asks, "they never bothered me."
"And I wanted to keep it that way." Sakura says, observing the notebook, and its poor drawings. She was never very good at drawing, it required too much practice, too much dedication, and the only thing she had energy to put into outside of her school work was her gaming time.
"You started the entire club for me?" Ino asks, "that's very sweet of you."
"Well, it would have been nice if they'd left me alone too, but that was the goal. I figured if they kept tormenting me, eventually they'd turn on you, but if they liked me…"
"They'd like me too." Ino nods, understanding quickly, "I'm surprised I didn't think to do it myself."
"Well, it was a lot of work. It was the first time I'd ever been outgoing towards other people and tried, even if it was a lie… I wanted to hide a lot more than not liking Sasuke, I was worried if it got out how much I liked games and stuff like it, that might turn on you too. Games have gotten a little more accepted over the years but the stigma was really bad back then."
"And at some point you started trying to hide from me as well…" Ino trails, "you did a really bad job."
"Trying and succeeding are different things," Sakura defends herself, "we should probably move onto the next memory. There's nothing interesting to take from this, it's just me planning for an hour while you sat there bored. Eventually we went home."
"I bet this was very interesting for me, you look so intense right now, like out of nowhere you suddenly gained life. There's no way I didn't notice back then, you just weren't paying enough attention to see me looking." Ino says, walking up to herself, and touches her own head.
Within an instant, the girl changes, her view focused on Sakura instead of the window. "I bet I couldn't take my eyes off of you for a moment."
"So my memory is wrong," Sakura shrugs, "what's it matter?"
"It matters because it means you missed when people cared about you." Ino huffs, "in your core memories you feel alone when I was right here!"
"Yeah, well… not sure I can do anything about that." Sakura says drolly, "my eyes were locked on the page, not you."
"And my eyes were locked on you, never noticing the page." Ino says.
"And this is a frontal memory becauuuuseee?" Ino asks, elongating her final word while Sakura looks around and largely ignores her. A smaller her sits behind a make-shift desk made of cardboard and stationed in an abandoned building. It was a good building, even if it's currently dark and painted darker shades. She hardly remembers it like this, empty and forgotten, and it's vaguely possible it never looked like this at all and she just filled in the blanks for this. There's some rotting garbage on the ground, a few newspapers over there, the whole thing looks stereotypical.
She has a lot of different papers she's sifting through while looking rather annoyed.
There's several other girls in front of her, each waiting their turn to pass over the next page.
"It's the first time I had to arbitrate a dispute in the club," Sakura explains, "we had just found this place, and gotten permission to use it after a rather large debacle involving village permits and a whole lot of puppy eyes, and everyone had different ideas on how we should decorate it." The memory of the entire club standing around an administration desk, fluttering their lashes and giving the poor chunin adorable gazes is a strong one, but it seems it's not strong enough to be what they're exploring.
"And that's important because…" Ino trails.
"It was the first time someone expected something of me." Sakura shrugs, "I know the whole club was stupid, and I never truly cared about what it was for, but it felt nice to have other girls seeking my opinion instead of stomping on it. I had to collect everyone's ideas and figure out a compromise that left no one out. I was smart enough to do it too, so I got to feel accomplished."
"The club looked horrible." Ino points out with a bit of a deadpan to her.
"Well, yeah, it was an amalgamation of like thirty different ideas from completely different girls with completely different tastes. It was never going to look good if I was fair, and I was." The setting doesn't wait for them to move, it swaps on its own, showing off the club as it's been for years. Colorful yet covered in blots and black ink squirts like a squid attacked.
There's a bookshelf but it's covered in snacks instead of books. There's a painting that'd normally fit well, but it's hanging from the ceiling. Not hung up on the ceiling, it's hanging by a string in the frame and basically floating above their heads.
They used church pews for seating, but they're painted rainbow, and her cardboard desk turned into a cardboard podium with an iron frame to hold it up, which is really all that was needed, the cardboard is aesthetic.
"You get this is terrible." Ino points out.
"Yeah but it was ours, and even if I thought they were all crazy, they were my friends for a while." Sakura admits with a big grin, looking around the place that became one of her homes for a few years. "It's easy to look back on this with negativity, and I feel really bad for how this club made Sasuke feel, but… This place was important to me."
"You tried to get them to give you money, then disbanded it." Ino snickers at her.
"We all show our love in different ways." Sakura titters, giving a mysterious waggle of her brows.