“Thank you!” I applied a quick pain block, and hugged my other self gratefully. “That was a nightmare.”
“No problem,” she replied cheerfully. “I’m just glad these barriers we’ve been working on actually did something. But what are we going to do about her?”
Suddenly I realized I was lying in a heap with not one, but two copies of myself. I sat up hurriedly and stared. The extra Sakura was fuzzy around the edges, flickering like a badly cast illusion. But as I watched her wavering form slowly stabilized, resolving into a girl who looked like a softer, more innocent version of my sexy form.
“No,” I breathed. “He didn’t. He couldn’t have.”
“If you say so,” my other self commented. “But she looks pretty real to me.”
I realized with a start that the newcomer had a key in her hand. I looked up, and confirmed that the door I’d come in through had somehow managed to close and lock itself while I wasn’t looking. Lovely. Well, as long as she was in here I could probably take it away from her if I had to.
She groaned, and I bent over her to see if I could help. She cradled her head in her hands and whimpered. “Oh, god, that hurt. What happened?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I said. “Although I think I’m starting to get the picture. Who do you think you are?”
She looked up in startlement. “I’m Sakura, of course. Who are you?” She looked me over for a moment, and then glanced around at the forest. “This place…seems familiar,” she said hesitantly. “I think I’ve dreamed about it.”
“I’m the Sakura who’s actually in the time loop,” I said, “and this is my mindscape. I’m guessing you’re the version Naruto’s been conjuring up with that reality-warping technique of his.”
She eyed me uncertainly and frowned. “Maybe. I don’t remember looping on my own after the time we met Naruto, at any rate. Are you saying you do?”
I nodded. “Yes. For another decade and change, and now we’ve crossed over with Naruto again.”
“So I’m just some kind of chakra construct? That sucks.” She looked around again, and finally noticed that we weren’t alone. “Wait, then who’s she?”
My other self chuckled. “I’m the little voice in the back of your head that you used to pretend wasn’t there. You know, at this rate we’re going to start needing nicknames to keep track of each other.”
I chuckled, and the newcomer frowned. “Great, I guess the loops did drive me crazy in the end.”
“No, this is normal for us,” I explained. “It’s a recessive bloodline. We could probably do something about it if we wanted to, now that I understand what’s happening. But having an invisible twin in the back of your head is pretty handy when you’re under mental attack, and it’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
“Yeah, but three is a bit much,” my other self pointed out. “Is she going to disappear when that technique runs out, or is this permanent? Because I was really looking forward to some hot reunion sex with Naruto, but if our head is going to get even more crowded I’m going to have to give him a good chewing-out first.”
“Tell me about it,” the newcomer complained plaintively. “It’s bad enough forgetting most of what happens every loop, without getting a split personality on top of that. Can’t we just merge or something?”
I smiled in relief. I’d been a little worried that she’d try to take over, but apparently even a screwed-up copy of me has the right instincts about these things. As long as I keep choosing to help myself instead of fighting over control I should be able to handle anything.
“Actually, I’d like to give that a try,” I suggested. “You started out as a copy of me, so our memory formats should at least be compatible. If we’re too different personality-wise we might not be able to hold a merger, but if we both want it to work I think there’s a good chance it will.”
“I think not wanting to die when this technique ends is pretty good motivation for making a merger work, even if you are probably going to be dominant. How do we do this?”
I was confident this would be an easy solution to my latest weird problem, but I should have known better. Instead of the neatly catalogued order of my own mind, her memories were a swirling chaos of distorted impressions. There were days spent training with Naruto, and quite a few nights in his bed, but the details bled together until I had no idea if they’d shared a month or a decade. They’d tried to stop the invasion, over and over in a swirling fever dream of blood and violence where one of us always died in the end. Usually me of course, because these days the only opponent around who could stop Naruto was Orochimaru himself. We’d researched techniques, but those memories were so hazy I wasn’t at all sure what they’d been. We’d vacationed in places I’d seen in my loops with Tsunade, usually alone but sometimes not.
I noticed with a start that Naruto was always there, in every fragment of memory, and then I finally realized why their confusion had such a familiar feel. They weren’t my memories at all, not even those of a copy. They were his.
I might have given up then, except that I’d already caught sight of something that confirmed the suspicion I’d had when I first laid eyes on the copy. Deep in the heart of the maelstrom was a fragment of awareness that still throbbed with the pain of being ripped away from my own soul, and was still bound to me by slender threads of blue and gold. Chakra and….something else, I wasn’t sure what.
No wonder I had such a headache.
I touched the construct, and found a clumsy echo of my own probe reaching back. Sure enough, it was another me. She was a full-fledged aspect as far as I could tell, as real as the one I’d known for so long, but somehow in the process of her creation the connection we should have shared had nearly been severed.
My probe returned impressions of a younger, less jaded Sakura, one who’d never lost the innocent optimism of youth. I was far stronger than she was, but it was obvious at a glance that she was much happier. The threads that tied us together grew stronger as we touched, until I could hear her thoughts almost as clearly as my own. She looked as deeply into me as I had into her, and gasped in concern.
You’ve seen so many things that I haven’t, she said. You really are the real Sakura, aren’t you? But then what…oh, I see. I’m a new aspect, made out of you somehow.
“Yes,” I replied. “I’m guessing that Naruto’s technique imprinted your mind on mine, but your personality wasn’t strong enough to suppress mine. Then our other aspect pulled us in here by force, and the stress separated us. Hmm. I think we could make you stable, if we want to go that route. But the way we’re bleeding into each other I don’t think it would be hard to merge again either.”
Good, she said firmly. You need me more than you realize. You’ve become more powerful than I ever thought I could, but you’ve lost so much along the way.
“Are you really that sure the younger Sakura knows better than the older one?” I chided as I continued my scan, noting a number of things that didn’t seem quite right. “I was you once, and if you’d seen the things I have you would have ended up the same. Well, minus this ‘perfect girlfriend’ stuff the goofball’s done to you. You do realize he’s managed to turn you into a complete nympho, don’t you?”
The woman who voluntarily studied seduction techniques under Anko thinks this is something to complain about? She shot back. Besides, you’ve completely misunderstood, and you’d know that if you weren’t halfway down the road to becoming another crazy paranoid jounin. You’re right that I’m not just a younger copy of you, but if you think Naruto was trying to turn us into a sex toy when he made me you’ve forgotten everything you used to know about him.