The golden energy in my hand flared brighter at the words… no, not the words. The feeling. Was it driven by emotion, then? I shook my head, and extinguished it.
“But what about you, Sasuke? Have you gotten your vengeance yet? Was it worth losing everything else to have it?”
He shook his head weakly. “Information is a ninja’s greatest weapon, silly girl. I’m not going to tell you my story.”
“Damn it, Sasuke!” I growled. “Why do you always have to do things the hard way? Fine, if you’re that desperate to have me as an enemy I’ll play along.”
I slapped my hand down on his forehead and started a memory copy. His eyes went wide.
“Oh, no you don’t!” He hissed.
And detonated his chakra.
He hadn’t been as low as I thought. The explosion took out a good-size chunk of the Forest of Death, but my other aspect was well outside the blast radius.
“Are you alright, Sakura?” Naruto asked. “That can’t have been easy.”
“I’m just pissed that the only technique I have for countering his Sharingan makes me too damned nice to take revenge properly,” I insisted. “God, I feel like one of those vapid trash-novel heroines. If you ever hear me say I forgive him just put me out of my misery, ok?”
“I’d do it for you if I could,” Hinata offered. “You know I’m good at vengeance.”
“Hey now, that’s not what’s important,” Naruto said, pulling me into his embrace. “You’re the one I care about, Sakura, not him. Besides, you won.”
I chuckled. “I did, didn’t I? I spent so many years terrified of what would happen when we met again, but I beat him. What a relief!”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Sakura,” Hinata asked. “If it wasn’t a normal crossover loop, how did he get there?”
I sighed. “His Sharingan is fully developed. He can use it to rip open holes in the fabric of space, but his eyes don’t give him a way to navigate. Most Sharingan users would just turn that into a long-distance teleport technique, but he’s powerful enough to punch all the way through to an adjacent alternate world if he wants to. I’d guess he can’t control which world he ends up in very well, and there’s an infinite maze of them to get lost in, but that’s still disturbing. Give him a few years to work out the math and he might end up being able to visit any of us whenever he wants.”
“Damn,” Naruto exclaimed. “I hate to point this out, but for all we know he’s already done that. We need to find a way to warn the other Hinata. No, warning her wouldn’t help. We need a way to get me to her.”
“I can’t,” I protested. “I’m sorry, Naruto, but there’s no way I can summon you across loops right now. Your chakra is so massive I’d just end up pulling myself to you instead.”
“Ok, then can you get her here?” He asked.
I hesitated. “Maybe. If she’s willing to cooperate. But I’d have to let her sign my contract, and I haven’t had any luck manifesting it outside my mindscape yet. I don’t know that she’d trust me enough to come into my mindscape to sign it, and I’d be taking a huge risk if I let her in. If she found my inner mindscape she could turn me into a vegetable in about five seconds, and it could take me decades to recover.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Naruto said. “I don’t want you to take that kind of risk either. But this is Hinata we’re talking about. Can you at least talk to her, and see if she’ll listen?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Fortunately my Hinata had some idea of how her counterpart’s loops usually went, and what she might or might not do to the Sakura in her world. That still left a lot of variables to consider, and for the first few days I found nothing. Trying to summon a version of myself who didn’t actually exist was a complete waste of chakra, but at least it gave me a definitive ‘no’. No child-Sakura who just noticed Hinata seems kind of scary. No Sakura who’d been publicly embarrassed after the written exam, in any of a dozen ways carefully chosen not to spoil Naruto’s chance at passing. No Sakura who’d been tortured and crippled and left hanging from a tree surrounded by that Sound team’s mangled bodies.
Yeah, the looping Hinata really didn’t like me.
Once I’d exhausted the obvious options I spent a few hours thinking about how she might have reacted to her encounter with me, and probed a little further afield. That didn’t work either, but it kept me busy until after the preliminary round of the exam. Then I tried ‘a Sakura who just saw Hinata beat Neji like a drum’, and got a response.
I’d gotten the hang of targeting my summons better, so she didn’t appear in midair this time. She stumbled as if she’d been walking, and looked around wildly. I’d decided to do my work in a sealed-off area of my mindscape that looked a lot like my favorite training ground out in the real world, just in case I got a Sakura who wanted to be violent. To her eyes it probably looked like the real training ground seventeen.
“What the heck?” She exclaimed. Her eyes locked on me, and she stepped back nervously. “Who are you?”
“Relax, Sakura, you’re not in any danger from me,” I reassured her. “I’m you.”
She looked me up and down, and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “This must be quite a story.”
“I made a summoning contract with myself,” I explained with a smile. “It lets me pull in other versions of myself from alternate worlds. If it worked right you just finished the second stage of the chuunin exam, in a world where Hinata beat Neji instead of the other way around.”
She suppressed a shudder. “I don’t see how anyone could beat Hinata,” she admitted. “Maybe Orochimaru, or the Hokage, but not any normal ninja.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “It sounds like she’s the Hinata I’m looking for, and yes, she’d be a kage-level ninja by now. So, want to sign the Sakura summoning contract?”
An hour later we stood in the streets of her Konoha as the sun sank towards the horizon. I’d made a body for myself to avoid putting my counterpart in danger, and made myself fifteen instead of twenty so as not to rub Hinata’s nose in the fact that she was stuck in a child’s body.
“This is not a good idea,” the local me insisted as I made my way towards the Hyuuga compound. “Hinata is one scary girl, and she doesn’t like me at all. She told me if she ever saw me hit Naruto again Kakashi-sensei would never find my body.”
“Hmm. He’s harder to fool than you’d think,” I mused. “But Hinata can be pretty sneaky. She might be able to pull that off.”
“You’re not helping!” She growled at me.
I laughed. “Sorry, I forget how serious this must seem to you. Look, I know she’s a badass bitch, but so am I. Besides, I’m not here to fight her.”
“Why are you here, then?”
The soft question came from an alley just in front of us. Hinata stepped into view, and my local counterpart stopped and backed away with a gasp. I just smiled.
“Nice cloaking technique,” I admitted. “I didn’t sense you until you were well within attack range. I have a message for you from Naruto.”
Her eyes flicked from me to the girl behind me, and she made a shooing gesture. “Run along, little girl,” she said firmly. “The adults have to talk.”
Wisely, the local Sakura left.
Hinata body flickered to the roof of a nearby building with perfect finesse, leaving only the barest hint of a chakra trace to indicate where she’d gone. I followed, and found her waiting with that flawless composure the Hyuuga are so famous for. Despite her youthful appearance she was every inch the elegant noble lady, and I saw no sign of the frantic possessiveness that had dominated her actions the last time we’d met. Instead she was cool, distant, perfectly controlled, and ready to burst into violent motion at the slightest hint of danger. My heart ached to see her treating me as an enemy, no matter how I tried to remind it she wasn’t my Hinata.