I flickered up to sit beside her, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you alright?”
She nodded. “Yeah. For the first time since I was a kid, I think I am.”
“Good. I couldn’t see everything, but I figured the demonic chakra from the seal was trying to influence you somehow. No sign of any lingering effects?”
“I haven’t had the dreams for a week now,” she confirmed shakily. “That was the part I hated the most. Even worse than the pain function. It was like those genjutsu that make you see whatever you’re most afraid of, only it was trying to make me be… like he wanted. Hanging on his every word, crazy to kill anything he’d point me at, loving anything he did to me even if it was torture. It’s hard to resist that in your sleep, especially when it won’t let you wake yourself up.”
I put my arms around her, and for once she actually let me hold her.
“It’s over,” I reassured her. “You’re free now.”
“Finally,” she choked. “No one else could do anything, but you… thank you, Sakura! It was winning, eating my soul one little bit at a time, and I could see everyone who knew had already written me off. But now…”
Her control finally broke, and she collapsed into my embrace with a sob. I held her gently as she cried herself to sleep, then carried her back to bed.
She opened up a lot more after that. I knew she’d always been lonely in the village, with everyone who wasn’t terrified of her seduction skills treating her like a walking time bomb. But Hinata and I weren’t afraid of her, didn’t look down on her for her skills or blame her for what the Snake Sannin had done to her, and weren’t trying to get her to do anything in particular. We just accepted her, and treated her like a friend.
In retrospect, I think that’s what did it.
We ran a few easy missions after that, collecting bounties on a missing Sand nin who’d gone on a random murder spree and a gang of ex-soldiers who’d deserted to concentrate on their slave-trading business. We spent a few weeks with a clan of wind users who traded me their flight technique for my variant on Tsunade’s seal. We made a few training stops in the wilderness where Anko got to watch Hinata and I spar with our full abilities, and finally we treated ourselves to a weekend at the fanciest hot spring resort in Demon Country.
One evening the three of us were unwinding in our suit’s private hot spring after an afternoon of friendly debauchery when Anko decided she’d had enough.
“I give up,” she announced, throwing her arms out theatrically and nearly spilling the sake in the process. “If this is what I get for defecting, sign me up. Just promise me we aren’t planning to destroy Konoha or something.”
I laughed. “Are we private, Hinata?”
Hinata was lying back against the side of the pool with a wet cloth over her eyes, but she gave me a thumbs up. “Some local kunoichi was scouting the area a couple of hours ago, but it looks like we weren’t her targets. We’re clear for now.”
“Good. Konoha is safe from us, Anko. We might have to pretend otherwise at some point, but the worst we’d ever actually do is help Naruto clean house when he becomes Hokage. If you want to join us we’ll be happy for the help. I can’t tell you the details right now, but if you stick with us long enough that’ll change.”
Anko opened her mouth, and then abruptly closed it and looked thoughtful. “Is Naruto secretly the Fourth’s kid?” She asked after a moment.
“Yep,” I confirmed. “One of many, many secrets we figured out before we started this plan. I don’t think he even knows right now.”
“Then I’m in,” Anko said confidently. “I was never all that impressed with the old guard anyway. But unless you two are running some big confidence game on me I’m pretty sure I’ll be in favor of whatever your plan is.”
“Sakura?” Hinata interrupted. “I see one of paper-chan’s spy constructs drifting our way on the breeze.”
“Really? That’s good news,” I replied. “I was starting to think they’d just ignore us. Anko, do mind playing besotted love-slave for a bit?”
“Who’s pretending?”
The paper adept watched us off and on for another month without making contact, which started to get annoying after awhile. We did a few odd jobs to pay the bills, visited another minor clan, and did a bit of training among ourselves while we waited for her to make a move. It might have gotten boring, except that I’d finally figured out how to finish a seal design I’d been contemplating for months.
The resulting scroll was massive, a roll of paper three feet wide and nearly two hundred feet long, but that was fairly typical for such things. The first thirty feet were covered with an intricate array of seals that took days to plan and nearly a week to transcribe. It would have taken even longer in the real world, but I’d discovered that my aspects shared the same mindscape regardless of how far apart we were. So the Sakura who was studying seals in Snow Country spent all her free time on it, and the Sakura who was wandering the world with Anko and Hinata put in a few hours here and there, and between us we got it done.
The scroll occupied the entire length of the main table in the workroom I’d created for myself, but I’d made the place roomy on purpose. There were several smaller tables and plenty of room to pace, and the wide windows that lined one wall let the breeze in and gave me a wonderful second-story view of the field and woods I’d set up as a training ground. A dozen of Hinata’s water clones were sparring industriously as I finished, trying to perfect some sneaky new technique she didn’t want to use in the real world where our stalker might see it, and I let myself relax and enjoy the view for a few minutes.
Eventually she noticed me watching, and the real Hinata appeared at one of the open windows.
“You’re finished?” She asked eagerly. She’d been trying to figure out what I was up to for days, but I’d discovered it was fun to be mysterious.
“Yes. Have you figured it out yet?” I asked mischievously.
She frowned at the seals. “It looks like a summoning scroll, but that doesn’t make sense,” she complained. “You need the blood of the target to create one of those, and there’s no way to get real blood in here. Come on, just tell me!”
I laughed. “I’ll give you a hint. This big symbol that anchors the whole scheme? It’s my name.”
She frowned in confusion, as she traced out the seal work again. Then she finally got it, and her eyes went wide. “It doesn’t need blood because it’s like your chakra seal! Wait, you’re going to have Naruto sign it!” She exclaimed.
“That’s the plan,” I confirmed. “He’ll have to do it in here of course, but if he can’t already mind-walk I’m sure I can teach him. But it isn’t just for him. Would you like to be the second person to sign a summoning contract with me?”
“After Naruto?” Hinata asked excitedly.
“No, after me,” I said, and signed my true name to the scroll with a flourish. Which added an interesting self-referential level to the seal work, but I didn’t see how it could hurt anything.
She beamed at me, and added her own name next.
It took Hinata a few days to get the hang of summoning me, but it worked like a charm. She had a little more trouble when I was aspected, and for awhile I was frequently treated to the odd sensation of a summons trying to call a version of me that didn’t currently exist. But she got better with practice, especially once I explained my trick of splitting myself along chakra nature lines, and within a week she could call the aspect she wanted more often than not. Since summoning techniques are already designed to call targets from other worlds I was pretty confident that Naruto would be able to do the same from his loop as well.