The next morning I made myself an adult body so I wouldn’t have to monopolize the local Sakura’s time, and led Naruto off to one of the more private training areas for a talk. Once there I made Hinata a body as well so she could join in, and set about explaining what I’d found.
“That does sound pretty intimidating,” Naruto said judiciously. “So you can see the same thing here?”
“Yes.” I’d had to do the whole dive-into-myself meditation thing again, but it only took a few minutes. “It looks just like when I saw it in my loop. I’m still not sure exactly how it works, but what I can see of it doesn’t say good things about our odds of living happily ever after.”
Naruto sighed. “Damn. I’m not sure what to do about this one. Well, except for stopping Pein of course. That part’s obvious.”
“I guess,” I replied. “He has a good point about stopping the ninja wars, although the first phase of his plan is kind of messy.”
Naruto gave me a look like I’d just suggested eating babies might be ok in some circumstances.
“Sakura, please tell me you’re joking,” he said. “His plan involves killing millions of innocent people! I don’t care what he thinks he’s going to accomplish, that’s evil.”
I opened my mouth to point out how it wasn’t that simple… and closed it. It is that simple. Every radical political movement in history has promised a brave new world of peace and harmony if we just kill off everyone who stands in the way, and all they really lead to is more death and destruction. There were dozens of ways Pein’s plan could go disastrously wrong. How did I think for even a second that it might be worth trying?
One of the ethereal wisps of darkness that had swirled around me dissipated.
“Oh, my god,” I breathed. “What just happened?”
Naruto frowned at me. “What do you mean?”
I turned to look at him, and realized for the first time that unlike Hinata and I there were no tenuous strands of darkness wrapped around him. If anything the background field seemed to shy away from him, leaving a little bubble of space that the vast technique didn’t cover.
“It can’t touch you?” I said in shock. “I see. It was doing something to me. Not direct mind control, but… hiding implications? Making me not see alternatives? Something like that. But when you told me I was wrong it blew away like smoke. I don’t think it can touch you at all.”
Hinata gave me a concerned look. “You didn’t say it was affecting us, Sakura.”
“I wasn’t sure what I was seeing,” I replied. “There’s a sort of swirling in the fog around everyone, like it coalesces into these faint streamers of darkness that actually reach into people. But I didn’t realize what it meant until I felt one let go.”
Naruto released his hold on his chakra, letting it expand into a dense blue cloud twenty feet across. The darkness slunk away from it, the tendrils that had surrounded Hinata and I retreating to hover at the edge of that protective field.
“Did that work?” He asked.
I nodded, and scooted closer to him. “Yes. It didn’t undo anything, but the whole area inside your aura is clear now.”
“Why?” He asked thoughtfully. “I suck at genjutsu, and I don’t have holy powers or anything like that. So why doesn’t it work on me? And if it’s a technique, why can’t Hinata see it?”
“Actually, I think perhaps I can,” Hinata said. “I can see the chakra fields of active techniques, but they aren’t literally shaped like seals. That part is some special quirk of Sakura’s vision, or perhaps a side effect of knowing the Celestial tongue.”
“Unfortunately the natural world is full of big, low-intensity chakra fields, and normally they all blend together. If the field Sakura sees is so uniform, and is weaker than the Gaia field, it makes sense that I’d never pick it out as something unnatural. And people are normally surrounded by all sorts of complicated interactions between their own chakra and their surroundings, most of which no one really understands. Now that I’m looking for it I can see faint shadows that might be what Sakura is talking about. But I don’t know why you would be immune, Naruto.”
“Neither do I,” I admitted. “Maybe this is why Astoria called you the hero of the age? But I don’t know what that means. I wonder if this is why it’s so easy for you to reach people like Gaara?”
He shrugged. “Could be. But I think we’re going to have to find a demon or kami or something to explain what’s going on with this. Hey, maybe the Kyuubi would know.”
I suppressed a shudder. “Could we trust anything he told us?”
“Point,” he conceded.
We lapsed into contemplative silence for a few minutes. I let my sight return to normal, so I wouldn’t have to watch what was waiting for me beyond the bounds of Naruto’s aura. The idea that something so evil could influence me so subtly was deeply disturbing, and I soon found myself seeking reassurance in my man’s arms. Hinata must have felt the same, because she wasn’t far behind me.
“Can we stay here, Naruto?” I asked after a few minutes. “Just for a loop or two?”
“Of course you can,” he reassured me. “You can stay as long as you need to. I don’t mind being stuck here as long as we can be together. Say, how exactly did you get here on your own, anyway?”
I managed a smile at that. “Maybe I’ll show you. Can you do that Yamanaka mind-walking technique yet?”
“Sort of,” he replied. “It works fine on jinchuuriki and my own clones, but when I try it on anyone else they just pass out.”
“Huh. Probably just another side effect of you having more chakra than god. We’ll take it slow, but I should be fine.”
“Ooooh god,” I panted. “Naruto, be… careful. Fuck, you’re sooo big.”
“You sound like you’re auditioning for an Icha Icha movie, Sakura,” Hinata teased me. “Is it good for you, mistress? Should I get you out of those panties and help?”
“Wench,” I gasped, as I carefully led Naruto down the end of the path through my jungle. I was leaning on Hinata pretty heavily, because my legs didn’t want to work. It’s a good thing we’d worked out how to make it so she could tolerate walking through my defenses, because I didn’t dare lean on Naruto. “He’s… oh! Damn it, I feel like I’m a toy balloon being stretched over the Hokage monument. Naruto, please… ah! Don’t… don’t use any jutsu here, ok?”
“Yeah, sure Sakura,” he said reassuringly. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Then he put his hand on my shoulder, and I stumbled again.
“Don’t!” I warned him.
He cocked his head curiously. “Did you just have an orgasm?”
“Yes!” I blushed. “God, you are a menace to chakra sensors everywhere. Close your eyes and take a step, and we’ll be there.”
A moment later we stood among the trees of my garden, where my other aspect waited for us with the Sakura summoning contract. She was a little better off than I was, but not by much. Naruto’s chakra was so overdeveloped that it took a miracle of subjective perception to make him fit in my mindscape at all, and it kept warping around him unpredictably. Since my mindscape was, in fact, my own mind, this was quickly making it impossible to think straight.
The fact that it felt so intimate didn’t help. It wasn’t sex, exactly, but being stuffed so full of Naruto’s chakra was… intense.
“That’s it, huh?” Naruto asked. “I guess that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about anyone stealing, as long as you don’t take it out.”
I was too busy kneeling on the grass collecting my wits to answer, but Hinata did. “Um, Naruto, it isn’t made of anything real,” she pointed out. “So she can’t take it out into the real world.”