I manifested my Sharingan, and the dog-masked ninja stepped back nervously.
“Will you kill me too, Sakura?” Came a voice from behind me. I turned to find Naruto watching me with an uncharacteristically serious expression. Hinata gasped, and shot me a panicked look. Then her face froze, smoothing into an expressionless mask, and she stepped between us.
Facing me.
“Hinata,” I protested. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t make me,” she answered stubbornly.
“But, you know you can’t beat me!” I shouted. “Oh, I’m going to punish you!”
“I know,” she admitted quietly. “Even so, if you want to hurt him you must kill me first.”
“There’s no need for you to die tonight, Hinata,” came the voice of the Third Hokage behind me. “Although I’m quite interested to hear how you came to be in a body not your own, in the company of a demon.”
That was pretty much the end of it.
Oh, I fought them. I killed an ANBU with Amaterasu and body flickered away, knowing Naruto couldn’t keep up and Hinata would only fight against me for his sake. But by that point there were too many ninja on the rooftops, and there was no way I could break contact. I ducked and wove through blasts of fire and water, cloaked myself in earth armor and fought back as best I could. But I was up against the best Konoha had to offer, and killing high-level ninja is never easy. I chewed through dozens of opponents in a matter of minutes, but most of them were only clones. Then Kakashi showed up with Gai in tow, and it was all I could do to stay alive.
Kakashi was overconfident enough to meet my gaze, and I overpowered his transplanted eye in a burst of demonic power. Three days of torment was more than enough to take him out of the fight, but the effort tired me enough to matter. Gai saw his friend go down and whipped a blindfold over his own eyes, then proceeded to demonstrate that he could fight perfectly well blind.
Hinata hadn’t followed me. I caught a glimpse of her on a rooftop far behind me, talking to a young Naruto who had his arm around her shoulders. Bless it, I’d get no help from her now. I tried to drop into the ground, but someone had already sealed it against my technique. I batted a cloud of shuriken away and barely dodged another Grand Fireball as I turned to leap towards the wall again. I was faster than all but the most skilled jounin, and most of them were too old to keep up for long. If I could just get across the wall I might still get away.
Then the Hokage appeared in front of me again, the seals of a banishment already glowing in the air around him. A wave of power crashed into me, trying to force my demonic essence back to Hell, but my mortal self’s life still anchored me to the material world. I screamed in agony as the banishment tried to rip my soul apart, and staggered back.
Right into a pack of ANBU.
I took four killing blows in the blink of an eye, and everything went dark.
I expected to wake up in the Pit, or perhaps back in my mortal self’s bed. Instead I found myself in my mindscape. I sat up to find my mortal self regarding me steadily, while Hinata sat in her little bubble of non-awareness with a resigned expression on her face.
“Bless it!” I cursed. “That was not how it was supposed to go!”
“What did you expect?” My mortal self said calmly. “You’re a misery demon. Your purpose is to spread suffering wherever you go. What made you think your own life would be immune?”
“How do you know that?” I said sharply.
“It was in your memories,” she explained. “It was clear enough, once I took the time to look.”
How does she keep surprising me like this? A mortal shouldn’t be able to read my instinctive knowledge like that, and she was nowhere near qualifying for ascension.
“There’s some truth in that,” I admitted reluctantly. “But you don’t understand. Yes, demons can affect fate just by their presence, and the type of effect depends on our breed. But my aura of misery shouldn’t affect me! That would be stupid. It just spreads over my enemies, and the mortals around me.”
“Like Hinata?” She pointed out.
I gasped in horror. “No!”
“Yes,” she insisted. “I can see it, you know. The dark power welling up from that thing you call the Nidhogg system. The way it flows through your half of our soul, shriveling everything it touches before leaking out into the world around us. The way you shape it to work your techniques, and the patterns it forms on its own when you aren’t paying attention. You can never have a mortal lover for long, demon girl. Your own nature will destroy your happiness every time.”
I could feel the truth in her words even as she spoke them. “No. Please, no. I can’t be alone forever.”
“You won’t be,” she reassured me gently. “It’s time to end this.”
Then she grasped the veil I’d woven over our mindscape, and ripped it apart.
The darkness around us parted, revealing the ruins of the forest that had stood here when I first arrived. Hinata shot to her feet and looked around wildly, and I realized that for the first time she could see where she was.
“Sakura?” She turned to me uncertainly. Then she caught sight of the second pink-haired girl, and gasped. “Sakura! But, two of you?”
A civilian might have been confused, but Hinata has never been one of those. Her eyes narrowed as she made the obvious deduction, and whirled to face me again. “You’re an imposter!” She cried.
“Not quite,” my mortal self corrected. “She’s half me and half demon, the creation of a trap that was supposed to corrupt me. But it isn’t going to work.”
“I’m not giving up!” I snarled in frustration. “You can’t get out, and Hinata can’t save you. If you won’t give in I’ll just have to use stronger measures!”
For the second time Hinata stepped between me and my goal, her face settling into an expressionless mask to hide her fear.
“What are you doing?” I shouted at her. “Hinata, you can’t do this. Naruto I can understand, he was part of our deal. But you belong to me! Why are you trying to go against me?”
“I belong to Sakura,” she explained. “But if there are two of you, I can choose light over darkness.”
I ground my teeth. “Fine. I’ll deal with you later, ungrateful little bitch.”
Wounded as she was she had no hope of resisting my power. I bound her with a casual thought, and turned back to my other prisoner with bared teeth.
But my mortal self…laughed.
A cold knot of fear clenched in my gut at the sound. Why wasn’t she afraid?
“Hinata, just relax. You can’t fight her here. Her nature gives her control over misery, suffering and despair, and the more of those things you’ve felt in your life the more power she has over you. An innocent child would be immune to her techniques, but a woman who’s suffered as much as you have is too vulnerable. I didn’t free you to ask for help, sweetie. I just thought I owed you the chance to watch this.”
“Watch what?” I stalked towards her with clenched fists. “So what if you’ve figured it out? You’ve suffered too much to resist me. No matter how strong you are, you can never break free.”
“Do you remember the Sakura that Naruto made?” She said sweetly. “The girl with a heart big enough to love the whole world, and enough courage to face down the Kyuubi? We merged once, and because of that we’ll always be connected. And when he hasn’t summoned her in his loop, I can do it in ours.”
I froze, and looked around nervously. I didn’t feel another presence, but I didn’t like the sound of that…
“Oh, don’t worry, our soul is only big enough for two aspects at a time,” she reassured me. “She can’t manifest here tangibly right now. But she can lend me her dreams, and let me give her my nightmares to keep.”