So I settled myself on the shore of my little lake of chakra, and discovered in a matter of moments just how misplaced my earlier confidence had been. Because I couldn’t remember my true name either.
“But… how?” I gasped in dawning horror. “How could I forget my name? That’s like forgetting myself. If I don’t know that, am I even me anymore? Master, what did you do to me?”
I dove for the next level down, suddenly terrified that I wouldn’t even be able to do that. That I wouldn’t be able to see myself. That whatever was wrong with me was much, much worse than I’d imagined, and I might never recover.
It was dark down there, and I recoiled in instinctive terror. It wasn’t the darkness of Sasuke’s punishments, but it reminded me of them too much to ignore. I opened my eyes to find I was trembling.
“I have to be stronger than this,” I told myself. “Master wants me to fix my chakra, and I can’t do that if I can’t delve myself. It isn’t even real darkness, it’s just my imagination. Wait, I’ve faced this before. This is just like the first time I ran away, when I was still too terrified to disobey any of my orders. Only this time the fear is getting in the way of obeying. Ok, then I’ll have to use my skills for good this time around.”
The fear of darkness that had grown up during my punishments was deeply ingrained in my psyche, and it took long hours to pry it loose and erase it. It shouldn’t have been that hard, but the fear resisted my efforts as if it were more than just a bundle of inconvenient mental associations. I’d never seen anything like that when I originally researched my old trauma-erasure technique, at least not that I could remember. But then again that was back when I was a desperate little girl. Hopefully this was just a sign that my growing mental abilities had made me resistant to purely physical brain-hacking.
Eventually the fear stopped growing back after I erased it, and I could close my eyes and fall into myself without panicking. I groped clumsily for the path I wanted, fumbling with a transition I was sure I’d done hundreds of times before, and finally dragged myself into the proper perspective.
What I found was not the dancing patterns of light that should have been there, or even the more static web of my time on the mountain. My old patterns were smashed beyond recognition, shattered by the brutal extraction of everything that had given my old life meaning. Now there was only a slow, sad spiral around my new obsession with pleasing Sasuke.
I sagged in despair.
“Oh, Sasuke,” I said softly. “Was I really so evil that you had to take away everything I was to save me? Was I so terrible that you couldn’t leave me anything of myself? This is way past the limit for stable fixations. If you leave me like this I’ll go crazy in a matter of months. I’ll get so obsessed with pleasing you that I’ll go psycho on anyone who can’t match my devotion, and that’ll make me useless to you.”
“What am I going to do now?”
Heal, came a faint whisper from somewhere in the surrounding darkness. Remember.
I looked around nervously, struck by a sudden conviction that I’d lost far more than some memories and a few techniques during my capture. That the Sakura who had last stood here had known secrets I couldn’t imagine, and the traps she’d left might swallow me whole if I wasn’t careful.
“I want to,” I admitted to the darkness. “But I have to do it right. I have to obey. I have to! I can’t face being punished again. I’m going to be a good girl this time, and make master proud of me, and I’ll never let loose anything that would make me disobedient again.”
Sculpted by pain? The voice asked with more sympathy than I’d expected. But then, it was my own voice. Why was I so afraid of it?
“Yes,” I admitted. “I… I’m sure it’s not what I would have wanted, before. But I was a bad girl then. I have to do better now. Um, who are you?”
A very bad girl indeed, the voice said with a touch of amusement. You don’t want me awake right now. But you need to balance out your orders and find some room to be true to our name again, or all your master’s hard work catching us will go to waste. A Celestial can’t live in denial of her name for long.
I was struck by a sudden suspicion about who I was talking to, and frowned. “I was afraid it was something like that. I’m not really Sakura right now, am I?”
Honestly? You’re a twisted shadow of our true self, but you’re a long way from hopeless. You can find your way back if you can manage to want to. Or you could let me show you the way…
“Oh, right, and then Sasuke catches us and we get punished again. No thanks. Um, I hope you realize this would be a really bad time for us to have some kind of mental dominance struggle.”
A faint laugh echoed through the darkness. No worries. The last thing I want to do is make things even worse for us. Promise you won’t report me, and I’ll promise not to mess with you.
It was a sign of how unbalanced my conditioning was that I didn’t even have to think about it. “Of course I’m not going to report you! If I do I’m sure to be punished again, but if I don’t there’s a chance I might get away with it. I’ll feel guilty as hell about not living up to master’s expectations, but that’s nothing compared to being punished. But please, please, don’t try to run some subtle scheme to corrupt me again, ok? There’s no way that would work, and if I know I’m going to get caught anyway I’ll have to say something.”
You really are fucked up, aren’t you? Don’t worry, I’m smarter than that now. Our bright side must have had a plan, and I don’t want to screw it up. I’ll just go back to sleep until our true self wakes me. But you’re going to have to get sane, or eventually you’ll fade to the point where I have to take over to keep us from dying.
“Yeah, I understand. M-… Sasuke told me to recover my full strength, and he wasn’t specific about how. Besides, he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble catching me if he wanted me dead. I’ll figure something out.”
Glad to hear it. Good night, mortal girl.
“Good night, demon girl,” I replied. “Sleep, please, and stay asleep.”
The sense of presence faded, and I sighed.
“Now even my own mind isn’t safe for me,” I lamented. “This sucks.”
The next few weeks were a difficult time for me. Sasuke wasn’t interested in my problems, and besides I wasn’t about to say anything that could be taken as a criticism of his training methods. I was sure he’d take that as a ploy to undermine his work somehow, when in reality that was the last thing I wanted. I was desperately trying to prove myself to him, to be loyal and useful and someday earn his approval, but to do that I had to make myself stable.
Without my name. Without setting off any of the traps I was sure must still lurk in the inner recesses of my mind. Without changing anything about my training, because that was sure to earn me another punishment. If not for my master’s command to recover my full strength I couldn’t even have made myself try, and I had no idea if I could succeed.
Without Hinata I might not have.
Sasuke was usually gone on his mysterious errands, and I took the chance to work on myself. But my partner couldn’t help notice that I was spending more and more time in meditation, and one morning she stopped to ask about it. Since I was deep inside myself at the time I failed to notice her, but she was too determined to be stopped by such a minor obstacle.
Somehow, her presence in my mindscape felt so natural that I didn’t even notice she was there until she put her hand on my shoulder.
“Eep!”