Sakura had a plan for dealing with The Watcher when her time came to be taken out. She had many plans actually, schemes she had developed through all her sleepless hours waiting in the not-quite-dark. The first thing she thought up was a method of tracking her age. Without a regular period, the only thing about her that would change quickly enough was the length of her hair. She took one of her kunai and, twisting as far around as she could, cut a line across her back where her hair currently reached. She silently thanked Sasuke's rumoured taste for long-haired girls; she wouldn't have been brave enough to try this with her old neck-length hairstyle.
She also learned as much ninjutsu, taijutsu, genjutsu and kenjutsu from the others as she possibly could. At the academy the fundamentals had come easier to her than most, and she had thought this made her a prodigy. Now, after meeting men and women who had done nothing but train for years on end, she realised she would have become a terribly mediocre ninja if she'd let herself believe in her innate skills for too long. Talents were lovely, but training was God.
She practised kicks and punches at the base of stone pillars, barely tiring, only stopping when she got bored or even, one memorable time, wore the stone down so badly that it snapped at the base and collapsed. She chased down Jun when she wanted actual hand-to-hand combat, and if Naomi was also around the woman usually tried to catch them both off-guard with a volley of projectiles (that they all carefully collected back up at the end).
The trio from Cloud were a different kind of challenge. Manami and Chu-chan were a surprisingly formidable team of puppet and puppeteer, and Pinch was an elemental polymath. Siren was a genjutsu user, and it took hundreds of attempts before Sakura could do anything against her other than listen, slack-jawed, as she sang of misty mountains and air so fresh you could taste it. When her voice conjured illusions of spring rain on pale green leaves, Sakura wept and begged to learn her secrets.
It was strange, how willing everyone was to share their techniques with one another. You weren't supposed to teach the enemy how to get the edge on you, after all. But it was hard to think of the only other people in your world as enemies, and it was understood that whatever The Watcher took them out to do, they'd all have a better chance of surviving it if they worked together to get stronger.
The only one unable to teach their coup de grâce jutsu was Teeth, who could create real water. Unlike elemental jutsu such as Water Dragon release, which was basically just water-shaped chakra designed to hurt anything that touched it, the water Haku created was gentle, and stayed still long enough that Sakura could stick her whole arm inside it. In a world with only stones, the feeling of cold water on her skin was like a drug. Unfortunately, Teeth had explained in that quiet way of his, the ability to turn nothing into water and water into ice came from his blood alone.
"I used to be able to make mirrors out of the ice, and travel between them," he'd admitted, during one of their longest ever one-on-one conversations. "It doesn't work in here, probably because space and time are already being manipulated by The Watcher."
"Why did you cut your teeth like that?" Sakura had blurted out before she could stop herself from ruining their quiet rapport. It bugged her, that someone would take a handsome face and ruin it with shark teeth.
"To honour the man who gave me purpose," he had answered, his jagged smile turning wistful.
All of this was just a way to pass the endless time compared to her plan to defeat The Watcher. It was clear that they could do something that stopped people running or fighting back, but if there was even a second that Sakura could capitalise on, she would twist it to her advantage.
As such, she practised honing her reactions until they became pure reflex. Every time she came across one of The Others, she jammed her fingernails into her palm: left hand if they were a woman, right hand if they were a man. Pain had long ago stopped being a concern for her, and her nails grew just as regularly as her hair, so it was easy to draw blood and leave a nice, noticeable mark every time.
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
Tobi rolled his eyes beneath his mask, confident that the man he was currently dealing with would have no way of knowing just how much he hated him.
"The target is a soft touch." Hikari Ando had stubbornly refused to call his brother anything but 'the target,' probably to avoid coming to terms with the fact that he was currently contracting his assassination. "He's adopted two children already, both bastard orphans. There's rumours he diddles them, but I've confirmed he's just a bleeding heart with no concern for the Hikari bloodline."
Tobi was currently in a backwater province in the south of Lightning, a place that the noble in front of him seemed to think actually mattered. "Sure, sure. Can't have a bastard taking over once 'the target' is gone."
"Thankfully they're both still underage," Ando sniffed, "but Mei turns eighteen in the spring. It's best for the region that I step in as the true ruler, and take her as a wife to stop any factionalism thereafter."
Tobi didn't care. This was just an easy contract to test his new toy, but he played his part all the same. "I have the perfect assassin," he said, and reached into kamui with his mind.
A black whorl appeared in the centre of the near-empty room in the house Tobi had appropriated when he first arrived in Lighting. The original inhabitants had filled it with various trinkets and trifles, most of which were now piled out back with their bodies. After a moment the whorl warped and spat out a girl with pink hair.
It had been a few days since he'd taken out for her medical, and she was already starting to age. Her arms were more defined, and there were new scars on the visible parts of her small body. She blinked, disoriented, before her eyes focused on him.
"You-" she began, but then his eyes focused on her, and all independent thought was pushed out of her head and replaced with his will alone.
"Here she is," he turned back to Ando while the girl stood quietly. "Find a way to throw her in his path, and she'll do her job so well that your brother will become a cautionary tale about adopting random orphans for generations to come."
Ando circled the girl sceptically. "She's a bit young."
"You said he liked them young."
"But can she really…go through with it?" the man waved his hands vaguely, and Tobi wondered how anyone could be prepared to pay a stranger to murder their brother, but couldn't bring themselves to say the words out loud.
He removed a kunai from his pocket and Ando paled. But Tobi walked past him and reached out to the girl. He drew the tip of the blade down one side of her cheek, leaving a line of red that quickly welled over and dripped out on the floor. The girl didn't even flinch.
"She does what she's told. Take this, er…" he held out the kunai, and the girl took it. "Name?"
"Haruno Sakura," the girl said in a toneless voice.
"Sakura. Put a matching cut on your other cheek."
She raised the blade and did as instructed, while Ando watched in horror. "Stop!" he cried, but of course Sakura ignored him. When both of her cheeks were dripping blood, Tobi took the blade back.
"Problem, Mr Hikari?" he asked, the picture of innocence.
"She's a freak," he sputtered, and then seemed to rethink his explanation. "I mean, she'll never convince him she's a normal little girl if she's acting like a…like that."
"Oh, is that your concern? Sakura," he smiled at her beneath the mask. "Pretend you're an adorable little girl who's been found robbed and beaten on the side of the road by a nice man, and you want to go home with him."
Sakura's blank expression became suddenly filled with energy, her eyes widening and filling with tears. "Please sir," she begged of no one in particular. "They took everything. I can barely walk." And she fell to the floor.
Tobi laughed, delighted. Obviously all of his little experiments did as they were told, but Kakashi's kunoichi was really selling it. She was a natural. Without even really thinking about it, he leaned down and cupped her face in his hands. He rubbed a thumb along the length of each cut on her cheeks, smearing them into thick stripes. Now she looked just like the last kunoichi that had been on Kakashi's team. She whimpered, eyes pleading, still playing the role he had assigned her. It gave him a thrill to think that just as Kakashi had stolen Rin from him, he had been able to steal this little pink-haired replacement.
What fun they would have together.
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
Her stomach lurched, and once again Sakura found herself somewhere she hadn't been a moment ago, this time wearing clothes she didn't recognise. It had finally happened.
She checked her hands for fingernail scratches: if she could confirm The Watcher's gender, then next time she could move on to another feature like hair colour, and with enough time a full picture of their captor would form. The others had been sceptical of this plan, but if she could prove it worked, they could help too.
Her hands were covered in blood.
Some patches were still sticky, overwhelming any Outside smell with the meaty reek of it. She scrubbed at it, desperate and ashamed without knowing why. Beneath the blood was only bare, unbroken skin on both palms. Her plan had failed.
"No," she murmured, "no." There wasn't anything else to say, but it was just too awful to admit that she was no closer to knowing anything. She forced herself to calm down and take proper stock of things. There were other ways to learn, after all.
Smell was a bust, of course, but she did her best to sniff the new clothes and the soles of her boots just in case they told a story about where she had stepped. Nothing.
She moved on to touch, and as if it had been politely waiting for enough adrenaline to clear her body, sensation rushed in from all over. Superficial scrapes and bruises on her knees and elbows that barely registered after however long she had spent fighting The Others, but also two stinging strips on her cheeks that she was afraid to touch with dirty hands. It had been so long since she was properly dirty; showering was neither possible nor necessary Inside, where sweat and grime seemed to go away on its own if it happened at all. Could she even get an infection here?
She decided to put her face off a moment longer, instead patting the rest of herself down. She assumed her old clothes were lost, which was shitty because she had been wearing the red dress from home. But she hadn't been carrying anything truly important like her weapons or her forehead protector, and the new clothes were actually new. The leaf green overshirt hadn't been mended a dozen times using human hair, and the frilly cream skirt actually fit her. The outfit was a little childish, and there was a smear of blood on the front that worried her, but beggars couldn't be choosers.
Inside one of the pockets of her new skirt were a handful of sweets, the hard, fruit-flavoured kind that came wrapped in crinkly plastic. Each one was like a jewel in her hand, and she stuffed one in her mouth immediately. When was the last time she had eaten? She understood now why food drops were such an event for the others. They'd gotten some old chicken bones a while ago, when her hair was about a centimetre shorter. The fight for them had been brutal and quiet, and Sakura had slunk off to lick her wounds without getting a taste. Any shards that hadn't been gnawed to dust had been turned into sewing needles, and even the smell of chicken on them was long gone.
The sweetness of the candy was so strong it almost burned on her tongue. She had a wild urge to spit it out, but that was unthinkable. She'd suck it slowly, savouring every second, and then she'd hide the rest somewhere safe until she could figure out how best to trade them. Her hair was getting patchier and patchier over time, between mending clothes and bartering for gear. Even four candies could give it a decent break.
Karin didn't seem to be coming for her this time, so Sakura decided to get moving. It was easier to navigate Inside now that she knew what she was looking for. The stones weren't completely identical, and The Others had left markers telling you how far out from the central zone you were getting. She was currently three hundred stones out.
Instead of going to the central zone, where most of The Others stayed, she overshot wide toward Sensei.
He was sitting on the surface, legs kicking idly against the pale stone. Sakura raised her hand in greeting as she approached, and he returned the gesture.
"Sakura," he smiled. Everyone else called her Konoha, but Sensei seemed more immune to the idiosyncrasies of Inside than most, as if he knew he had to remain normal by Outside standards for the day he inevitably returned to his old life. "You're bleeding."
"On my face?"
He nodded, hands already cupping her cheeks and filling them with a warm, itchy feeling. "These aren't fresh; I'm afraid you'll have some faint scars."
The idea of two facial scars would have broken the Sakura of old. The Sakura of now had more practical concerns.
"Can you teach me medical jutsu?"
She'd put it off because she didn't want to become the new Sensei, forced to sterilise women and patch sparring injuries for the rest of her long captivity. But knowledge was power, and Sensei had remarked more than once that she had the chakra control necessary to be good at it.
"New clothes," he remarked, instead of answering. "Did you get taken out?"
She nodded. "My plan didn't work though. No marks, see?" She'd wiped as much blood as she could from her hands, and the rest would disappear over time as part of the weird cleaning magic of Inside.
Kabuto examined her bare hands politely. "What do you think that means?"
This is why she had come to him first. The Others would have dismissed it as a failed experiment, and resented her for reinforcing their helplessness against The Watcher. Sensei treated it as another lesson.
"I assumed it meant I didn't have the chance to do anything when I saw them," she began, and found it was easier for her brain to return to the problem now that it could be recontextualised as a puzzle. "But maybe I did have enough time to cut my hands, but not enough time to figure out what gender they are."
"Interesting," Sensei said, focused on his work. His glasses reflected the blue of his chakra so brightly that she couldn't see his eyes properly, even inches away from them.
"That could mean…that could mean they're androgynous, I guess. Or else, maybe their face was covered? That can be my next test: left hand for androgynous, right hand for face covering. And no mark at all if I don't actually see a person." Better to believe another pair of blank hands would be part of the test, and not a sign of its failure.
"Sound logic," Sensei said, and Sakura thrilled at the praise.
"So will you teach me medical jutsu?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe?" Sakura frowned. She'd gotten used to everyone sharing their abilities with her. "What do you want?"
"What do you have?" he asked, expression still calmly focused on healing her. She bit her lip. Did he know about the candy in her pocket somehow?
"I've got…I could…" She tried to assemble her assets in her mind's eye. "Hair. I could give you a whole braid, cut it right at the scalp? Or else…" She hadn't been around long enough to scrounge extra clothes, and she wasn't quite desperate enough to strip the shirt off her back and run around in nothing but her (increasingly outgrown) training bra. But thinking about that made her think of another thing people bartered with Inside, something that had endless supply and demand. "What do you want?" she asked again, because if he wanted that, he'd have to be the one to say it.
"I'm not sure," he smiled pleasantly, his chakra fading until it was just his bare hands pressed to her cheeks. She blushed at the intimacy of the gesture now that it wasn't being done for healing, but at least he didn't seem to be thinking about that as he removed his hands and tucked them calmly in his pockets. "We could just say you owe me a favour?"
A favour could still be that, but the vague idea of doing something, someday was a better deal than giving up a candy, so she agreed.
And just like that, the deal was struck. She spent a lot of time with Sensei, learning the theory of anatomy and medicine as best she could without books and proper resources, and slowly mastering the art of medical jutsu. Sensei had tried to teach The Others, but the level of control required to get really good was too finicky for them to bother with it for long. For Sakura, it was one of the easiest things she had learned since falling into the dark, and just after another six inches of hair growth had been marked in scars on her back, she had become a fully-fledged medical ninja.