Sakura kept to the tree line, acting casual. Whether she ended up leaving Konoha or stayed to investigate whatever had gotten Kakashi spooked, stealth was always the best policy. As it was, after decades of suppressing her aura to avoid and ambush The Others, she was confident only a sensory type could have noticed her; and even if they did, with her Naomi disguise she would hopefully just look like a random civilian out on a stroll.
The river rounded a bend, and she found herself on the edge of…not quite a fight, not yet. However, it was clear from everyone's body language that it was only a matter of time.
Asuma and Kurenai faced down the pair of travellers from the teahouse, faces grim. There was no sign of Kakashi.
"I never expected you to come back here," Asuma told the traveller on the left. "And as for you," he told the right, "I've seen your face in the S-rank bingo book. Hoshigaki Kisame: suspected of national covert activities, and killing a feudal lord."
Sakura couldn't see either of the traveller's faces, but they seemed unfazed. "Get out of our way," the first man said calmly. "We don't want trouble."
"Don't want trouble?" Kurenai laughed mirthlessly. "That's rich, coming from a comrade-killer."
"These people are annoying," the bigger man, Kisame, removed a wrapped parcel from his back that was almost as tall as he. The wrappings fell away with a single tug, revealing a sword covered in hundreds of serrated points. "Let's just kill them already."
"Wait," the unnamed man commanded, but Kisame had already sprung at Asuma, and Asuma leapt to meet him.
Kurenai wasted no time forming a series of complex seals. Sakura was out of range and clearly not the target, but she could feel the cottony tickle of the genjutsu wrapping itself around the enemy. To be able to feel it from even that distance, it must have been powerful.
She leaned forward, intrigued in spite of herself. If she wanted to actually leave the village, a high-level fight like this was as good a distraction as any. But she still hadn't seen Kakashi, and also there was something about the unnamed stranger that intrigued her.
He hadn't moved yet; probably the genjutsu had him convinced he was bound or blinded while Kurenai went for the kill. Asuma and Kisame were still trading blows, enormous sword against a pair of close-combat knuckle knives. They either couldn't let their focus waver long enough to check in with the others, or they were both confident their own comrade would win without help.
That should have been Kurenai's first warning sign. As she went for a strike that was, even with genjutsu, just a little too easy, her whole body seized up.
"You reversed it?" She stared down at herself in shock.
The man didn't reply, simply kicked out and sent her flying out across the river. She struggled, but whatever the genjutsu was showing her prevented her from breaking her fall.
Sakura swore silently. If the shock of hitting the water didn't jolt Kurenai out of it, there was a good chance she might drown.
So much for my great escape…
She dropped her henge and prepared to jump into the river after Kurenai, when another figure beat her to it.
Kakashi caught Kurenai in his arms, dispelling the genjutsu and setting her on her feet. A moment later, Asuma broke free from Kisame to join them. The river was, strategically, a worse position for them; but there was safety in numbers, and based on Kisame's close quarters fighting style there was a good chance they could force the enemy to join them anyway.
And indeed, both strangers dropped neatly over the path's side railing and onto the surface of the river below.
Sakura bit her lip, thinking fast.
Pros of Leaving:
-Actual freedom
-Chance to save The Others
-Chance to kill The Watcher
Cons of Leaving:
-Konoha will hunt me like a dog for the rest of my life
-Kakashi will hate me
-Kakashi might get in trouble for letting me escape
-I'll never see my friends again
Pros of Staying:
-Can help Kakashi and the others
-That might earn me a favour
-Kakashi wouldn't hate me
Cons of Staying:
-Plans for rescuing The Others will be delayed (again)
-I might never be truly free here
"Careful of this one," the unnamed man warned Kisame. "He's got a sharingan, which makes him dangerous. Even if he wasn't born with the body required to manage such power."
Kakashi lifted his forehead protector to reveal the sharingan in question. "Whatever you do," he murmured to his own allies, "don't look him directly in the eye. Only a sharingan can withstand another sharingan."
Something cold passed through Sakura's heart. Was this…
Kakashi stared the man down, sharingan swirling faster than Sakura had ever seen it. She didn't dare look at the other man's face, but he seemed to be staring right back at him.
Approximately three seconds passed, and then Kakashi jolted violently. The chakra he was forcing to the water's surface died, and he sank in past his knees before anyone else could blink.
But Sakura was already running. She caught him round his middle and hauled him up.
"Hey," she shook him gently when he didn't regain his footing but continued to loll against her side.
He groaned quietly, just enough to prove he definitely wasn't dead and probably wasn't dying.
"Take him," she commanded Asuma and Kurenai, pushing him backwards and trusting them to catch him before he sank again. As terrifying as the sight of him collapsing had been, he didn't have time to worry about him and the man in front of her.
She rushed forward, sword drawn. Even with the goggles hiding her eyes, she didn't dare look higher than the man's sternum. It would be more than enough information to lop off his head; but what if this was The Watcher? Kakashi was out of it, and if the connection to The Watcher's vitals was severed, her friends might starve to death Inside without ever knowing how close they had come to freedom.
The moment's hesitation was all Kisame needed to interrupt her first strike. His sword was almost as thick as Sakura, the complete opposite of her delicate katana, and he slammed it down on her with so much force that for a tense moment she thought it might snap through her blade and slice her to ribbons.
She chose not to fight strength with strength, but instead lowered her sword and pivoted out of the way. The man's momentum carried him forward, and instead of hitting her square on, the horrible sword only grazed her.
That was more than enough, though; each serrated tooth dug a chunk of flesh from her arm and she bit down on a cry of pain.
This is nothing compared to what you've endured before, she reminded herself, tightening her grip and spinning it back at the maybe-Watcher. As brutal as Kisame was, she couldn't waste a single strike on him until she was sure the other man was dead.
Kisame clearly disliked this. "What, am I not enough fun for you?" He tsked loudly, swinging to parry her faster than expected for such a bulky weapon. "Or else…?" He titled his head slightly, to show that he was now talking to the man behind him, "Hey Itachi, is this your jilted ex or something?"
Not 'Obito'?
The man named Itachi had barely flinched at either of Sakura's attacks, seemingly confident that his ally would cover for him. But now Asuma had recovered enough from the shock of Kakashi's defeat and Sakura's arrival, and he ducked under Kisame's next strike to aim a bladed punch to his ribs. It sliced through the man's grey flesh like butter, and he stepped back with a muttered curse.
This was enough of a window for Sakura to sidestep the melee fighters and come at Itachi for the third time. She dragged her sword up from hip height, catching the surface of the water so that droplets scattered in an arc ahead of her. This blow wouldn't be stopped.
Something tugged at the side of her head, pulling her goggles free. She turned automatically to catch them; but too late, she realised she had fallen for a trap.
The real Itachi held her goggles in one hand and grabbed her chin with the other.
"It's over."
The goggles fell from his hand.
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
Sakura opened her eyes to find that the world had disappeared. Instead, an unnatural orange sky roiled overhead, fading into blackness as it reached the horizon. She tried to move, but her body was bound against something that froze her into a standing T-pose.
"Where are we?" She dreaded the answer.
"I didn't want to have to use this more than once, if I could help it." Itachi spoke surprisingly softly for a supposed comrade-killer. "Hatake Kakashi could barely withstand my Tsukuyomi with his normal body, but without even a sharingan of your own, I'm afraid you won't survive this."
He drew a blade from thin air and plunged it into her side.
The pain caught her off guard, and she screamed; why hold back now? When that breath ended, before she could inhale to scream again, another Itachi appeared, with another sword. This one went higher on her chest, puncturing a lung.
Suddenly screaming wasn't nearly as cathartic anymore, and so she focused on keeping her breathing shallow and steady while the pain rolled between her twin wounds like a wave.
A third Itachi, a third sword. A third wound, this time in her leg, where it barely registered compared to the first two.
She watched the fourth blade disappear out of sight just below her chin. A hot scratch on her throat, then coldness, then nothing.
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
"There's 71 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds left."
Sakura blinked. The swords, wounds and pain had all disappeared. Once again she was face to face with a lone Itachi.
"How long is that Outside?" she asked, and her throat wasn't even hoarse from screaming. It was a total reset.
"Outside?"
"Outside the genjutsu." Since she was already caught, she looked him square in the eye.
His sharingan was framed by long, raven-black hair the same shade as Sasuke's. He was handsome, and a lot younger than she had originally thought. Possibly even younger than her. "At first I thought it might have been another pocket dimension, but," she glanced meaningfully at her unblemished body, "clearly not."
"Tsukuyomi: Nightmare Realm, may be a genjutsu, but it's indistinguishable from reality while you're inside it." He withdrew another sword and plunged it into her side, as if to illustrate his point.
She was ready for it this time, and while it still made her scream, it wasn't the throat-tearing shriek from before. "Tsukuyomi, huh?" she wheezed. "Listen, are there any other Uchiha besides y-"
The second Itachi appeared from out of her blind spot, stabbing her through the join of her shoulder.
When she was done screaming, she fixed him with a glare. "Ow."
When the third Itachi appeared, he paused.
"You bear pain well."
Sakura laughed. "I don't want to give you any ideas, but suffice to say I've gone through something similar before."
The third Itachi drew his sword. "Perhaps; but without the sharingan, you won't survive 72 straight hours."
She gritted her teeth against the blow to come, refusing to give him the satisfaction of another scream.
Want a bet?
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
"70 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds."
Sakura's wounds were once again healed back to whole, leaving only the memories of the last hour. It was like a blood clone dispelling, but on a scale on par with Naruto's mass shadow clones. And it wasn't close to stopping.
Luckily, neither was she. "Do you work with Uchiha Obito?" she asked, before he could stick a new set of swords in her. They'd managed a full hour (and innumerable Itachis) without a reset, which had been a gruesome study in the body's tolerance for pain and blood loss. Or it would have been, if this were her real body and not an advanced hallucination.
"Uchiha Obito is dead," Itachi calmly drew another sword.
"Wait!" She tried to throw up her hands, but of course they were still tied to the crossbar. "He's not, he's alive and he-"
The sword plunged into her side, and she resigned herself to another hour of silent agony.
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
"69 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds."
"He's called The Watcher and he steals kids and puts them in a place like this, but real."
She'd had an hour to think of what to say, and now she waited, tensed, to see if it was enough to spare her.
Itachi seemed to absorb her words in that methodical manner of his (after two hours at his hands, she had gotten to know his mannerisms pretty well). "There are only two living Uchiha," he finally said, expression revealing nothing.
Sword. Stab. Pain.
But Sakura had picked up the rhythm now. "You and Sasuke, right?"
New Itachi. Sword. Stab. Pain.
"You're his brother."
New Itachi. Sword. Stab. Pain.
"Why did you do it?"
Pain. Pain. Pain.
"Why didn't you kill Sasuke?"
Pause.
"You know my brother?" Itachi asked, expression as neutral as ever.
She nodded as best she could with six swords in her torso. "We're teammates."
Now, she could tell, she had more of his attention. "Hatake Kakashi is the jounin teacher of Team Seven."
"I know. I'm not his teacher, I'm his classmate."
Stab. Pain.
"It's true!" She howled. "I'm Haruno Sakura - look me up. A month ago I was twelve, and now I'm like this because of your!" Stab. Pain. "Fucking!" Stab. Pain. "Bloodline limit!"
A sword hovered somewhere around her navel, but she didn't care anymore.
"Fucking do it," she growled. "Thanks to your relative, I've spent half my life like this. I've been stabbed, beaten, fucking dissected…" That one, at least, had been consensual; and Kabuto had let her do the same to him. "I thought you might have been him, but you're not." She smiled, hoping the blood running down the edges of her mouth and along the scars on her cheeks made her look as crazy as she felt. "And he's scarier."
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
When Sakura had been Inside long enough for her hair to reach halfway down her calf, she had gone to visit Siren.
Perhaps her intentions had been written all over her face, or perhaps everyone went to her at some point, but Siren didn't seem surprised by her request.
"It's not as good as you think it'll be," she had told Sakura in that lilting voice of hers. Genjutsu has its uses, but that is not one of them."
"But why not?" Sakura pressed, and it sounded like begging even to her own ears. "Under normal circumstances, sure, but here…"
"Konoha." Siren took her face between her hands with a sad smile. "Illusions are lovely. But if you treat them as anything other than that…" She shook her head, and even the whispering swish of her locs had a musical quality. "You'll miss out on reality."
"Reality is awful." Sakura couldn't take it anymore. This place had eaten her entire childhood, and she had finally given up hope of anything changing now that she was an adult. "I want to see the sun again."
Siren's beautiful face turned serious. "Alright," she said eventually, "let's go for a walk."
Sakura's senses, used to a wasteland, were suddenly overwhelmed by sights, sounds, and sensations.
She was strolling along a wide street, the cobblestones beneath her feet slippery with condensation. People jostled her as they went about some unknowable urgent business, and like a dream, she couldn't seem to focus on their actual features.
A cool mist hung at the edges of the hubbub, diffusing the sunlight into a halo. Sakura stopped and raised her face skyward, drinking it in.
"Is this Cloud?" she asked, and suddenly Siren was standing next to her as if it had always been so.
"Yes and no. It's based on Cloud, but no illusion could ever do my home justice."
"But isn't it better to be here," Sakura argued, "where it's almost perfect, instead of back there where there's nothing except rocks?"
"There's also us," Siren countered, but only half-heartedly. "In truth, I understand your point. But could you really enjoy this forever?" She gestured at the illusory scene around them. "You have a knack for genjutsu-breaking. Could you really convince yourself this is real?"
"Yes," she said, but even now her instincts were prickling, urging her to disrupt her chakra flow and break free.
Siren made a few extra hand seals, and Sakura felt the edges of the genjutsu pressing so close against her psyche that the prickling dulled to a vague tickle.
"I could make you believe it was real," she said softly, "and you could waste away inside any dream or nightmare I decided to give you. And if you told yourself to stop fighting enough times, you'd eventually lose the ability to do so."
The sunlight grew stronger, burning hot and bright until Sakura seemed to burn along with it. It raced over her skin like a thousand tiny electric shocks, like pleasure meeting the borders of pain. She groaned quietly. "Siren…"
"If you kill the part of you that knows it's fake, you'll kill yourself." Siren continued to push the illusion, spearing her with needles of white light.
"Stop!" She was unravelling, burning from the inside out. "Siren!" Her heart was racing, and her nerves were seconds from short-circuiting entirely.
"Make it stop," Siren urged, gripping her shoulders with fingers like tongues of flame.
"It hurts."
"Do you want it to be nice again?" Siren asked sweetly, and she nodded helplessly.
"Please."
"Then make it nice, Konoha."
"I can't," she sobbed. Her body was going to explode. "It's your genjutsu."
"But your mind. This," Siren shook her like she was a ragdoll, "isn't your real body, it's just another part of the dream. If you let yourself believe you're really here, you're trapping yourself for me."
Sakura tried to fight the burning feeling, tried to tell herself it wasn't really her heart that was racing, but an illusory heart. An idea.
"It still hurts," she said finally, and Siren nodded.
"And if it were a nice dream, it'd still feel good." The light receded, slowly, like the sun was setting. After a few minutes the sky was totally dark, and Sakura realised they were back Inside. Or rather, they had never left.
"So why not make a nice dream, and just keep it that way?"
She braced herself for another punishing illusion, but Siren seemed to have already made her point.
"Because you'd have to shatter your psyche to do it. You'd have to open your mind up to the illusion, or have it opened up by force. Good or bad, the dreamer is always separate from the dream. Don't forget that."
"So no endless dreams of freedom for me, huh?" Sakura smiled wryly, and Siren wrapped her arms back around her shoulders.
"Not unless you want a lobotomy to go along with it. I'm afraid you're stuck with us, kid." She leaned in, pressing her dark lips to Sakura's.
They had enjoyed each other's company enough that the invitation was clear. Sakura's head was still buzzing with the aftershocks of the genjutsu, but if she was stuck in hell without even dreams to comfort her, at least The Others would make sure she'd never have to endure it alone.
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
"72 hours have passed."
ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ
There was a splashing, and dimly Sakura realised it was the sound of her goggles hitting the water.
I'm back.
Itachi released her chin and stepped away like she was already dead. And indeed, now that her body was no longer suspended in the air, she dropped into the water like a stone.
Every nerve was so tense that even the coldness of the river felt like a brand new assault. But, she reminded herself, she wasn't really wounded, and if she didn't do something quick she really would drown.
Moulding chakra felt like an ordeal unto itself, especially when her body was in panic mode. If she waited too long underwater, she'd draw breath just to scream, and then she'd be no help to anyone.
She forced herself to pause, to look up at the surface and follow the glowing outlines of chakra-infused footsteps just above. Itachi was moving away from her and toward the others. What had he told her, three days ago?
"I didn't want to have to use this more than once, if I could help it."
But he had, and if he did it a third time it would break any one of them. It had already broken Kakashi, and he was the strongest.
That thought threatened to send her panicking all over again, but she clamped down on it and focused on angling her body just so. Then, when she forced all her chakra to her feet…
She shot out of the water like a cork out of a champagne bottle, right at Itachi's back. Her sword was still in her hand; weapons training gave everyone a death grip, of course, but also she knew it would take more than Uchiha Itachi to separate this particular sword from its master. It was cursed, after all.
Itachi's reaction to her miraculous recovery was just delayed enough for her to graze a stripe up his back. It was shallow, and he recovered from the surprise far too quickly, but hopefully it was enough to keep his attention on her and not the others. Kakashi was still limp in Kurenai's arms, and Asuma was covered in his own blood after going toe to toe with the awful, serrated sword.
Sakura landed lightly, keeping her eyes focused on Itachi's feet. Even now, part of her wanted to run away instead of risk going back to that genjutsu space; but an even bigger part of her was prepared to fight Itachi to the death out of pure spite.
Fortunately, Itachi didn't seem willing to test her. "Let's go," he said to Kisame. "No more distractions."
If there was anything more than complete apathy in his expression when he looked at her (still standing, still fighting), then she would never know.
In a second, the pair had disappeared, and after another five seconds, she allowed herself to believe it was for good.