She blushed. “No, I…well, it is confusing. But, um, also flattering. I’m not used to people looking at me like that.”
I grinned. “I can’t help it if you’re beautiful, sweetie. If you dressed to show it all the boys would be following you around with their tongues hanging out, and your sexy form is even better. But I’ll try to stop if you want me to…”
“No,” she shook her head, and put her hand shyly on mine. “Just…give me some time?”
“Of course,” I reassured her. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
I would have been tempted to press the issue, but I had a more urgent problem. It didn’t look like I was going to be able to control the crossover loops just by wishing, and it hadn’t escaped my notice that I’d met Naruto again barely six months after my crossover loop with Hinata. That was a sharp contrast to the near-decade intervals between my previous crossovers, and I had no idea what it meant. The crossovers might be getting more frequent, or they might be random, or they might follow any of a dozen other patterns I’d dreamed up within ten minutes of noticing the change. But there was one thing I did know.
I still wasn’t ready to meet the real Sasuke again, and for all I knew it could happen at any moment. It was time to do something about that.
Itachi raised one eyebrow minutely as he read the Root dispatch, and fixed me with a dispassionate stare. “Do you really think this bloodline of yours will protect you from the Sharingan?”
“No one knows, sir,” I replied carefully. “That’s why Danzo-sama sent me. I’m probably not immune, but based on my performance against other bloodlines I might be able to fight off the Tsukuyomi with proper training.”
“Pity,” he replied, and suddenly I was on fire.
I stifled a scream as I turned off my pain receptors and frantically tried to summon water, but that was never my best element. The modest shower I called down had no effect at all on the black flames, and by the time I realized it wasn’t going to work my fingers were too damaged to form seals. As I collapsed to the ground I barely heard his final words.
“Danzo would know not to ask me to train a weapon he could use against Sasuke,” he said coldly. “Whoever you really were, your clumsy attempts at infiltration will accomplish nothing but your own death.”
Ok, not one of my better ideas. Itachi was a consummate professional, unlike Tsunade, and he wasn’t going to be fooled by any casually concocted story. But I’d long since learned everything any of the jounin instructors would teach a genin, and nothing I’d found in the ANBU jutsu theft records was any help. There were hints that various groups had tried to develop anti-Sharingan measures over the years, but none of them were still around and the details of what they’d tried had been thoroughly scrubbed from the records.
Every source I could find agreed that the Sharingan was by far the most powerful remaining bloodline in the world, and even defenses that were impervious to normal genjutsu were generally worthless against it. So I’d never know if I was getting anywhere without a Sharingan user to test myself against, and it didn’t look like Itachi was going to help.
Hmm. Maybe it was time for some self-study?
For someone who always acted like the kami’s gift to ninja Sasuke was pathetically easy to ambush. I just waited underground at his usual training ground until he started on shuriken drills, then reached up and tagged him with a paralysis technique. I had him unconscious before he even knew what happened.
Not that I wasn’t tempted to leave him awake, but gratuitous torture is bad for the soul. This version of Sasuke might have belittled and ignored me for most of the time we’d known each other, but if I went around taking vengeance on people just for being assholes I’d never do anything else. So I reminded myself that he wasn’t the Sasuke I wanted to punish, and anesthetized him.
Doing the surgery on myself was a little tricky, but only because I wasn’t used to it. Healer aspect in shadow clone, warrior aspect in real body, stick with local anesthetic because I’m not quite good enough to maintain a shadow clone while I’m unconscious. No problem. An hour later I released the clone, switched places with my other self, and took my first look at the world through Sharingan eyes.
For a few minutes I might as well have been blind. I was sure I’d done a much better job than Rin did on Kakashi, but all I could see was a mass of strangely whirling colors. I tried to renew my clone so she could lead me to a less public place, but of course she came out with Sharingan eyes too. Spiffy.
Fortunately the jutsu gave me enough of a frame of reference to recognize that I was mostly seeing chakra, which gave me the clue I needed to sort things out enough to be minimally functional. Everything a normal person would have seen was oddly red-toned, and mostly obscured by clouds and swirls and streamers of chakra in every color of the rainbow. But in an hour I’d acclimated enough that it was no worse than groping through a thick fog, and an hour after that I was running through my technique repertoire to see what they looked like. There were odd after-images surrounding everything I did with chakra, but I could swear sometimes they appeared before I actually started. Was this how that predict-your-opponent’s-moves thing worked?
“Sakura, what have you done?”
Kakashi’s voice caught me by surprise, which showed just how messed up my senses still were. I turned to look at him quizzically, and he glared at me.
“Oh, you mean the eyes?” I said. “Don’t worry, Sasuke will be fine. I just needed to see how these things work. What do all the black and gold threads mean?”
He frowned, and drew a kunai. “You aren’t Sakura.”
I chuckled. “I’m just too distracted to pretend to be twelve. I’ve been living in a time loop for, hmm, maybe thirty years now? When you report me that will end the loop, and it’ll be this morning again. But seriously, don’t worry. If the loop doesn’t reset for some strange reason I’ll give the little bastard his eyes back and the Hokage can punish me if he wants. So, about those threads? The dark ones going into the ground could be gravity, except that it seems like only things with chakra have them. And the gold ones trailing out of our hearts into summon-space have me completely baffled.”
He shook his head minutely. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it’s obvious you’re insane. Surrender now and maybe we’ll try to cure you instead of holding an execution.”
Normally I would have gone quietly and played poor-confused-genin until the reset, but somehow I just couldn’t stomach the thought of surrendering. Not to a man I’d lost respect for years ago.
“There are people who can still beat me, Kakashi, but I don’t think you’re one of them. Orochimaru can kill me, but Gaara can’t and I’m pretty sure he’s tougher than you. Now why don’t you put that knife away and help me figure this out? I’m not sure why you don’t see the threads. Is it a gender thing, or do we all see things differently, or did Rin get something wrong when she was doing your transplant? You must at least have a guess?”
He replaced himself with a clone so seamlessly most jounin wouldn’t have caught it, and dropped underground while it charged me. I might have done the same, but I realized that I could see what the clone was going to do a split-second before it happened. That was too good a learning experience to pass up, so I drew my own kunai and met him head-on instead.
Kakashi was much better than I expected. His clone lasted through nearly a minute of furious close-range sparring, during which I realized that the Sharingan’s split-second precognition adds a whole new dimension to taijutsu. I was much faster and stronger than he was, and probably more skilled with taijutsu as well, but his greater experience let him exploit his Sharingan to the fullest while throwing out false tells to confuse mine. It was frustrating, but after the first few exchanges I quickly began learning to play the same game myself.