The tug came again, and I realized that the golden thread was the source. Was Naruto trying to summon me? Curious, I let go of my surroundings and wrapped both hands around it. There was a moment of sharp pain, a rushing sensation, and then I was in my bed looking up at Naruto’s worried face.
“Sakura?” He asked. “Did it work?”
“Sort of,” I answered absently, as I turned most of my awareness inward to examine myself. Same shattered mindscape, but Hinata didn’t seem to be here. “My different aspects all sort of merged when I beat the demon me, and I haven’t been able to sort them out again yet. I think you managed to summon all of me this time.”
“Really? That’s great!” He pulled me into an enthusiastic hug.
I sighed, and relaxed into his embrace. “I guess. I’m a complete wreck right now. I think I’m driving poor Hinata nuts, going from happy to depressed to bitch and back every couple of minutes.”
“You? Having mood swings? No way!”
I swatted his shoulder. “Hey, be nice! I’m an invalid here.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I can see that. My shoulder’s still attached. Here, let me send a couple of shadow clones to take the test for us and we can take the day off.”
“Jerk,” I grumbled. “I’d love to, but I probably shouldn’t stay that long. I left Hinata alone back in my loop, and I’ve got no idea what’s going on there now that I’m not in it.”
“Oh. Hmm. Alright, how about you find out, and I try this again next loop?”
“That sounds like a plan. Make this a short loop, and then summon me a half hour before the exam?”
He frowned. “You do realize I have to get the other you to cooperate if she’s awake?”
I rolled my eyes. “So lay a kiss of surrender on her first. She won’t argue with anything after that.”
“I guess, but it feels weird doing that. She’s just a kid, you know?”
I sighed. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Being stuck like this is really getting old. Alright, just turn off the alarm and wait a few minutes. Mom doesn’t call me down for breakfast until half an hour after I usually wake up, so that should give me a chance to find out what happened in the other loop.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said. I gave him a peck on the cheek, and stopped my heart.
“Sakura! You’re back!”
Hinata’s frantic hug woke me before I even had a chance to open my eyes, and I found myself in my mindscape again.
“Yes, I’m back. Are you ok? What happened here after Naruto summoned me?” I asked.
“I thought you were dead!” Hinata exclaimed. “Why did you stay gone so long?”
“I was only there a few minutes, Hinata,” I protested. “Wait, how long as it been here?”
“A whole loop,” she replied, without loosening her grip. “I just woke up in your body, and you were gone! You didn’t answer no matter how much I called, and I didn’t know what to do. So I took the exam for you, and tried to pretend to be you, and waited to see if you’d wake up. But you never did.”
It took a few minutes to calm her down, and telling her that Naruto was supposed to summon me again soon didn’t exactly reassure her. But then she caught up to what I was saying.
“Wait, Naruto can summon you now? Can you take me with you?” She asked eagerly.
“I don’t know,” I said, fighting off a sudden surge of jealousy at the fact that she wanted to see him. Her worry had been gratifying, annoying, appealing…great, I was doing the emotional vortex thing again. This was so embarrassing.
“Come on,” I said suddenly. “Try to hold on to me, and let’s see what happens.”
I dove into myself, searching for that golden thread again. To my surprise Hinata was light as a feather, and carrying her with me was no more effort that making the trip by myself. In a minute or two we were there, waiting for Naruto’s summons.
Hinata looked around curiously. “This is a very odd place,” she observed. “It has twelve dimensions, and I can see openings to the spirit realms and all sorts of strange eddies. What are those threads of chakra coming out of your heart? Oh, look, the silver one turns into the chain on my collar. But the others all trail off into summon-space.”
“Really?” I blinked, and focused my own perception. I could see the fine silver chain of my claim on Hinata’s soul, and the one golden thread that apparently still connected me to Naruto somehow, but nothing else. “Your eyes are better than mine, Hinata. I can’t see most of that. Although…”
It was an impulsive act, just another example of how jumbled my thoughts still were. I’d noticed that the end of the golden thread wasn’t all that firmly attached to me, and it came free with a casual tug. Then I slipped it through the slender collar around Hinata’s neck, and tied it off.
“There,” I said. “Now you can visit Naruto while I get my head on straight. Say hi for me.”
“What? But, Sakura, you need help!” She protested. “Come with me, and eep!”
The tug of Naruto’s summoning arrived at that moment, and plucked her away faster that I could blink. An instant later she was gone, leaving only a fine silver chain stretched out into the endless void.
“Naruto doesn’t need to see me like this,” I whispered. “And you don’t need to be around me either. This is something I need to do myself. I’ll pull myself together, and get sane again, and then I’ll see you in the next loop.”
It was obvious enough that when I’d dropped out of Naruto’s loop by killing myself I’d popped back to my own loop at the next reset. But his summons had arrived just when I expected it, despite the fact that he’d been planning a short loop but Hinata had done a long one. So apparently our separate timelines synced back up temporarily at the start of each loop, but were otherwise independent of each other. If that was the case I’d see Hinata again at the start of my next loop.
But I suspected I’d need more than five weeks to undo the damage I’d done to myself, so I resolved to take my demon self’s final discovery and do it right. After the written exam I spent the afternoon getting back into character as my younger self, and discovering which of my weaker techniques I could currently use without hurting myself. Then I set out to pass the exam.
I’ve done the forest so many times I could sleepwalk through, and the fact that the matches in the preliminary round aren’t actually random makes them easy to game. I walked a pattern that got us through with two days to spare, and ensured they would match me with Ino. Her I could beat easily, with taijutsu just a little better than my old self had had and a few academy-level techniques that she’d never quite polished to full mastery.
Our last day in the forest I pointed out the training potential of Shadow Clones to Naruto, and gave him a few hints about how to properly boost his speed with chakra. Being Naruto he immediately put dozens of clones to work practicing, and got about a month’s worth of training in during our down time. With that extra edge he barely eked out a win against Kiba, and went on to the final round with me. So when Kakashi ditched us to train Sasuke I had a longtime associate as a witness for everything that followed.
“What kind of ninja are you, Sakura?” Ebisu asked encouragingly. “Not the kind who’s too timid to try, I hope?”
“No, sensei,” I replied as I stepped out onto the water, and walked all the way out to where he stood on my ‘first’ try. “I’m the kind with perfect control. I’ve never needed more than one try to learn anything to do with chakra.”
“You’re awesome, Sakura!” Naruto shouted. I grimaced.
“No, I’m not,” I told him seriously. “Until four days ago I was a silly little fan-girl with a crush who thought playing ninja would get her attention. When those Sound ninja tried to murder us all, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop them, it opened my eyes.”
I turned to Ebisu. “Sensei, I’ve never trained seriously before, but I know now how stupid I was. I’m ready to become a real kunoichi. I need to become strong enough to stand by my comrades. Strong enough to protect the people I love, and to defend the village from those who would destroy us. I have a long way to go, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get there. Will you help me?”
Yeah, it was corny, but Konoha is like that. Ebisu eyed my feet, still perfectly dry despite the fact that I was standing on water, and frowned. “You do have potential, Sakura. But your jounin sensei was quite specific about what techniques you should be shown.”
“I’m not asking for more techniques, sensei. I’m asking you to push me as hard as possible, and help me turn myself into a worthwhile ninja.”
A jounin who specializes in teaching wasn’t going to turn that one down.
The funny thing was the training actually helped. My taijutsu reflexes were as scrambled as the rest of my brain, with the skills my demon self had stolen with her Sharingan randomly intermixed with the styles I’d learned under Gai and the moves I’d developed myself. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to push all my old memories away and play clueless novice the first time Ebisu showed me any particular move, and then pull them back out and reassemble the pieces when he wasn’t watching. Within a week he’d decided I was some kind of natural taijutsu genius, and of course Naruto was keeping up with massive shadow clone training and sheer stubbornness.
Mind you, I was still an emotional wreck. I managed to stay professional with Ebisu most of the time, but to anyone I’d ever had a personal connection to I was unbearable. Even Naruto started giving me a wide berth, which said something considering what a raging bitch I was to him before the loops. Of course, it might have just been that he didn’t know what to do when I’d suddenly burst into tears, or kiss him out of the blue, or drag Hinata out of her hiding spot and insist that she join us for lunch. It was bad enough that Ebisu pulled me aside at one point to ask if I had any mental conditions that weren’t in my file, and it took all my decades of practice at lying on the fly to convince him to put off sending me to a shrink until after the exam.
During the whole month of training the only technique Ebisu showed me was Body Flicker, but I made sure he noticed that by the end I had that and the basic three academy techniques fully mastered — which to me means being able to do them without seals or concentration, in the middle of a taijutsu move, without smoke or flickering or any other obvious sign to give me away. I also made it obvious I’d figured out I was earth-natured, and asked a lot of ‘purely theoretical’ questions about the mechanics of inventing low-level techniques.
Oh, yes, I was building a nice back story. Most days I even remembered why.