My internal alarm woke me a few minutes before the end of the loop, just as I’d planned. I was snuggled up to Naruto’s back with one arm thrown over his side, my hand resting on Hinata’s bare hip. For just a moment I felt a twinge of jealousy that he was holding her instead of me, but it didn’t last. I was the one who’d told him to dismiss his clone before we drifted off to sleep, after all.
I sat up silently, and sat for a moment gazing down at my…family? Not yet. But maybe someday. Naruto had won my heart years ago, and there certainly wasn’t any competition in the loops that might steal it away. And Hinata? I’d been quietly lusting after her for years now, and I’d liked the younger version well enough. Since gaining her older self’s memories she’d been darker, more ruthless, and I suppose civilians would find her disturbing. But I’m not a civilian. She was still fighting her way free of a personal hell as dark as anything I’d ever faced, but she was winning. I couldn’t help but respect that, and she’d grown into a kunoichi I was proud to have at my side.
Could I love her?
Maybe. Time would tell, and to all appearances we were going to have a long, long time together before these loops ended. I gently brushed a lock of hair away from her face, and copied her memories.
It occurred to me to wonder, not for the first time, what was really going to happen to her when the loop reset. If Naruto and me were about to be pulled backwards in time, then when we changed her past this version of Hinata would be gone, never having existed at all. But then why didn’t Naruto and me meet every loop? Were we, perhaps, from different alternate worlds, each looping in a different copy of the same timeline aside from the occasional cosmic collision? Or were we jumping from one alternate world to another in some infinite sea of parallel universes? In that case this Hinata would wake up tomorrow with both of us gone, and we’d never meet again.
I shook my head, and suppressed a sigh. There was no way to know, and I could drive myself crazy again wondering. So instead I laid my hand on Naruto’s head, and called up the gift I’d made for him so many years ago. A month of thanks for his part in saving me from my own personal hell. Yes, it meant that he’d know what Sasuke did to me, but he’d also know I was long since over it. I could live with that.
When the memory transfer was finished I bent to kiss him goodbye, and felt a faint tug someplace deep in my mindscape. I froze in surprise, turning my senses inward to identify the odd sensation…
…and awoke in my old bed, in my old body, on the morning of the first day of the Chuunin exam.
9. Descent
Needless to say I made my next loop a short one, and ended it thinking of Naruto again. But alas, it wasn’t that easy. I tried again the next loop, and the next, but after a half-dozen failures I was finally forced to concede that there must be more to it than that. I did, however, notice a few oddities about the loop end that I’d missed in my initial explorations.
The first time around I blew off the exam to spend the day training. I was perfecting my ability to do taijutsu drills while water-walking with a Rasengan in each hand, an exercise that simultaneously challenged my control and endurance. I kept at it all day, with just a couple of breaks for meals, and only stopped about fifteen minutes before the loop end. I thought I’d established long ago that my one-day loops ended at 1:47 AM, but it seemed like the shared loop had ended a few minutes early and I didn’t want to take chances.
The next loop I knocked off training an hour early, thinking that maybe I needed to spend more time thinking about Naruto to trigger a crossover. I’d spent at least an hour wandering through the ruins of Konoha reminiscing before our shared loop, and I couldn’t think of anything else I’d missed. So I settled myself under a tree at the edge of the lake I’d been training on and tried to recapture the same state of mind.
About twenty minutes later the loop reset.
Further investigation revealed that not only was the reset point not fixed, it was considerably influenced by my own state of mind. If 1:00 AM rolled around and I was just waiting for the loop to end it would reset right away, but if I was in the middle of something it would considerately wait for me to finish first. Unless I never stopped, in which case the reset would come right around 1:47.
“That sounds suspiciously like some person is controlling it,” Hinata pointed out when I explained the situation.
“Maybe, but I think it’s actually tied to our own minds somehow,” I disagreed. “That last shared loop the reset didn’t happen until after I woke up and did your memory copy, even though I was asleep at one AM. It wasn’t until I was finished and kissing Naruto goodbye that it triggered. So either my thoughts are affecting it, or whoever controls it is reading my mind.”
“Or they can see the future,” Hinata pointed out. “Surely anyone who can send you back in time repeatedly could send themselves notes as well?”
I groaned.
“The more I know, the more confusing this gets!” I complained.
My relationship with Hinata was equally confusing. She’d actually shocked me a bit with her sly little suggestion about putting on a show for Naruto, and she’d certainly enjoyed herself at the time. But now she could barely look at me without blushing, and she carefully avoided touching me while trying to pretend nothing had changed. If she were some civilian girl I’d had a fling with that might have made sense, but why on Earth was Hinata acting like an insecure teenager?
Maybe because she is one? My other self offered. She might seem like a hardened jounin sometimes, but don’t forget she’s really just a teenage girl with that jounin’s memories impressed on her brain. Maybe there’s more to maturity than just having the right memories?
I considered that. “You know, you might be on to something. I’ve noticed she seems to be more shy at the beginning of a loop than the end, and her chakra control starts out a bit shaky as well. All I’m copying are conscious memories and some reflexes, so it makes sense that everything else would still be the old her.”
Right. That includes all those subconscious parts of the brain we never figured out, and probably a lot of feelings and habits and other nonverbal stuff too.
“Great. So what do we do about it?”
Most of me had no idea, but the ghost of the Sakura that Naruto had made thought it was obvious enough.
Honesty. Respect. Love. Faith. Patience. Give her enough of all five, and it will work out in the end.
Well, what the hell. It was so crazy it just might work. I waited until near the end of our loop to broach the topic, but once I’d started I tried my best to follow my own advice.
“Hinata, I know you’ve been uncomfortable around me since that last loop with Naruto,” I began. “I guess I can see why, too. But I want you to know that I would never do that to you without your permission. Yes, I’m attracted to you, and I’d love for us to be together, but I’m not going to push you. This must be complicated enough for you as it is. So, if you need time to sort out your feelings, I’ll wait. And if you decide it was just too weird for you, and you don’t want to do it again, that’s ok. Your friendship means a lot to me, Hinata, and I don’t want to jeopardize that for anything.”
Hinata smiled softly. “Oh, Sakura!” She said, “I should have known. But what about you? I know how you are. I was trying not to…um…tease you.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, I guess being a perpetual teenager has left me a little on the horny side. But I’ll be fine, honest. I got used to controlling myself years ago, back when I used to use Sexy Technique all the time, and I can always take a loop off to be with Anko or the old Naruto if I need to. Or are you saying it bothers you to think I might be checking you out?”