…no. If you don’t mind me seeing, I, um, kind of want to know what I’ll be like in a few years.
“Alright. I’ll let you watch, but please don’t say anything. This isn’t going to be easy for me.”
Hana was a very pretty girl, wild and strong and fetchingly animalistic. Naruto had pinned her against a handy tree while I was frozen in indecision, and she’d eagerly spread her shapely legs so he could take her from behind. But as I watched Naruto’s aura started to slip from his control, and her eyes glazed over as an impossibly huge wave of male chakra washed through her and every nerve in her body lit up in response. Judging from the sounds she made she must have climaxed a dozen times in the next minute. Then her eyes rolled back, and she passed out.
“Ah, damn it,” Naruto cursed. “Not again.”
I stepped into the clearing, and dropped my illusion. “I guess I picked a bad time to figure out how to cross loops on my own,” I said softly.
Naruto froze. He slowly turned to look at me, and then carefully laid Hana on the ground and stepped away. “Sakura?” He said uncertainly.
“Yeah, it’s the real me,” I confirmed. “Do you do this a lot?”
He sighed. “Not as much as I used to, for obvious reasons. Um, why aren’t you trying to kill me?”
I chuckled sadly. “I’m trying to be more grown up than that. I’m… hurt, Naruto.”
He winced, and I realized that simple admission had had more effect on him than any screaming tirade. He really did care about my happiness.
“I know we hadn’t made any promises about this, and our lives are very strange. I know it’s not rational to blame you, especially since I’ve done the same thing. But it still hurts. How would you feel if you’d walked in on me with Anko?”
He rubbed the back of his head. “You and Anko? Jeez, Sakura, that’s like the definition of hotness. I’d cheer and take pictures.”
I smiled. “Jerk. You know what I mean.”
“I know, I know. I didn’t want to rub your face in it. I just… for a long time, between the first time we met and the second, I’d gotten to where there were half a dozen kunoichi I like that it was easy to start something up with. Some of them I got tired of, but some of them… well, I really started wishing I could bring them into the loop. Until recently I’d still get together with one of them every so often. I don’t love any of them, but they can be good friends.”
“I’m guessing this little problem is a recent thing, then?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Yeah. Anko is still ok, but I don’t dare try anything with TenTen or Temari anymore. And now I guess I have to write off Hana too. Damn it! I like Hana. She’s fun, and loyal, and pretty damned tough for a chuunin.”
I knelt to scan the unconscious girl. She was just knocked out, but her system was so flooded with endorphins she might as well be sleeping off an all-night orgy with a team of hentaijutsu experts. She still had more of his chakra in her system than her own, and god knows what that would do to her.
“Looks like you need something to help keep your chakra under control when you’re distracted,” I said.
He looked at me oddly. “You’re trying to help me solve this?”
I rose, and walked over to lay my hand on his chest. “I want us to be on the same side, Naruto. Always and forever, no matter what the challenge may be. My jealous streak doesn’t like to see you with anyone else, but I understand wanting someone you can connect with when we have to be apart for months at a time. I’d be happier if it could be me, or at least Hinata, but if this is something you need I’ll do what I can to help you.”
He gathered me into his arms, and gently kissed me. “You know, none of them can hold a candle to you,” he said huskily.
“You’re damned right they can’t,” I purred. “Now, let’s see if we can’t salvage something from this evening.”
I sank slowly to my knees, locked my eyes on his, and set to work finishing what Hana had started.
“Wow,” my host sighed dreamily. “I never imagined it could be like that. I don’t suppose I could stand in for you when you go back?”
I laughed. Naruto was asleep, but here in her mindscape he wouldn’t hear us. “You know, I’ve gotten so used to being aspected I don’t think I’d mind. But your chakra is a lot weaker than Hana’s, so I don’t think it would work.”
“I think I just found the motivation for some intensive chakra training,” she chuckled. Then she frowned. “Wait. This means all that stuff about the time loop is true. I won’t have time to make much progress, and besides, what happens to me when the loop resets?”
“My best guess? Naruto goes back in time five weeks, and none of this ever happened to you.”
She sighed. “That sucks. Is there anything we can do about it?”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “I’ve got you covered. I can take a copy of your memories when I go, and give them back to you whenever we meet again. With all the work I’ve done on my mindscape I could store a couple of lifetimes in there easily.”
She shook her head. “That’s a neat technique, but it’s a short term solution. What happens when you get out of the loop? Am I just… gone?”
Now it was my turn to frown. I could see the Bright Kami blowing off a re-write of history as no big deal, just like Skuld had been willing to act like the first version of my meeting with Astoria never happened. But if four versions of the same person became one that meant people were going to die, and I couldn’t see them granting a wish that would kill the whole world three times over.
No, I was thinking like a human. My demon self hadn’t known much, but there was an image from her implanted memories that came to mind. A map of creation. Billions of stars in a galaxy, billions of galaxies in a universe, countless parallel universes branching off to infinity. And a little arrow pointing to a nondescript planet orbiting an average little star, with a blinking label that read ‘you are here’. There was no way even a wish could make copies of something so incomprehensibly vast.
Wait.
Parallel universes.
“That might be it,” I muttered. “The wish sends us back to a fixed point in time and space, but dimension travel is much easier than time travel. So if the wish somehow set our destinations for adjacent parallel worlds, instead of our own world’s past, that would explain things. But there’s only one version of each of us per world, so… it exchanged us? No, why would it… maybe if the initial target selection was wrong… but then how can we have crossover loops? Damn, I thought I was onto something there.”
“What are you talking about?” My host asked.
“I still don’t understand what the wish actually did to us,” I admitted. “I think it must involve alternate universes somehow, because I can’t see how else to reconcile the fact that our personal timelines sync up at the start of each loop with the way we each have our own personal copy of Konoha to live in. That would mean that you’re as real as I am, and when the loops do stop you’ll just go on living out your life here. But every once in a while two of us start a loop in the same world together, and I don’t see how that would happen.”
“I see.” She gave me a thoughtful look. “Well, there’s one thing we can test. Copy my memories, and then do the same thing with the Sakura from one of those other loops. Then at some point you can try summoning both of us at once.”
“Hey, that’s a good idea!”
Just as I’d hoped, I was still linked to my other self through my mindscape despite having been summoned to a different loop. So it was easy enough for her to drop into our shared mindscape and let go of her body, and since Hinata was inhabiting my mindscape instead of a physical body at the time that neatly got both of us into Naruto’s loop