Time Braid

21. Understanding

Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.

AN: Responses to reviews can be found on my personal blog (see the home page link in my profile).

The written version of the celestial tongue is essentially a form of seal-crafting, and I’d discovered I knew enough of it to say things that can’t be expressed in the more limited vocabulary of conventional human seal masters. A normal summoning contract is built around a symbol provided by the leader of whatever group of spirit beings it’s tied to, and I’d wondered when Jiraiya explained this. Summoning seemed like the kind of thing that would require a true name, but how could a whole tribe of snakes or toads or whatever share one of those?

Only I’d realized on reflection that just because it looked like a single symbol after it was written didn’t mean it really was. My own name was just a stylized sakura petal at first glance, and I knew what hidden complexities lurked beneath the surface there. It was perfectly possible to write something like “the toads of the bloodline of Myoboku” the same way, as long as you knew enough about them.

So the symbol I’d built my summoning scroll around wasn’t “Sakura, the person who made this scroll”. No, in human speech it meant something closer to “the set of all persons who share the true name Sakura”. I wasn’t sure it would work the way I wanted it to, but I had high hopes.

I had to wait until we were done with the Forest of Death, because I needed something distinctive for my summoning to focus on if I wanted it to work right. But in some ways that was just as well, since it gave me time to pull myself together. Knowing I was stuck inside a world-spanning technique made of black chakra made my skin crawl, especially since I had no reason to think I was immune to its influence. But I’d probably been living in it my whole life and Astoria had still acted like I was an ok person, so it wasn’t irresistible. Logically I wasn’t any worse off that before I’d found out about it.

But that didn’t make it any easier to sleep at night.

I didn’t expect Naruto to have any answers, but I was still anxious to see him. He needed to know about this, and I wanted to see if his world had the same problem. It probably did, since his Konoha had the same tragic history as mine, and I was pretty sure that ensuring our history turned out tragic was exactly what the demons were trying to accomplish. But I needed to see for sure.

So after I kicked Ino’s ass and they sent us all back to town for our month of training I sent a shadow clone home to keep anyone from missing me, and made my way to one of the more remote hiding spots I’d found in the forest. Then I retreated into my mindscape to attempt a rather unconventional summoning. My focus was a girl not much different than I’d been the first time through the chuunin exam. One who’d survived the forest only because Naruto was watching out for her, and lost her match in the preliminary round. I’d been nauseatingly fixated on Sasuke back then, but the girl I imagined was started to see Naruto in a new light and wonder if she’d chosen wrong. Because the Naruto she’d been with during the exam was the looping version, and I knew he didn’t try all that hard to act like his old self anymore.

I did the summoning the slow way, with a full set of hand signs and a generous dash of my blood, and poured my chakra into the technique as it reached far, far across the gulf between worlds…

And a young Sakura in a nightgown appeared in the air before me, to fall in a tangle of limbs at my feet.

“Ack! What the heck!” She’d apparently been asleep, and she stumbled to her feet and looked around wildly while pawing for a kunai that wasn’t there.

“Calm down, Sakura. I’m not attacking you. I was just testing a summoning technique.”

She spun to face me, and did a double-take. “Who are you?”

“I’m you,” I answered. “We’re essentially alternate-universe doubles. If my technique worked right you’re a young version of me, from around the time of the chuunin exam. Right?”

She nodded cautiously. “Yes. But how did you summon me? I thought you couldn’t do that to a human unless they helped make the summoning seals.”

I patted the summoning scroll. “True names are funny things,” I said. “We’re different versions of the same person, so we share the same name. Which is the name on this contract, so in theory any version of me who signs it should be able to summon any other version who actually exists. Want to give it a try?”

“I… yes!” She replied, already seeing the potential. “But, I don’t think I have enough chakra for a technique like that.”

I chuckled. “That’s no problem at all. I’ll give you a chakra transfusion, an impression of me and a copy of my skill with the technique and send you back. Then you can give it a try.”

Her eyes went wide. “A copy of the skill? You can do that?”

I nodded. “Only with myself, so it doesn’t come up much. But yes, I can make copies of memories and reflexes and everything else that makes up skill with a technique.” I poured the bits she’d need into a memory bubble, and held it out to her. “Want to be able to summon a kickass older version of yourself whenever you need help?”

“Oh, hell yeah!” She grinned.

Ten minutes later she was gone, taking with her as much of my chakra as she could carry. I wasn’t sure it would be enough, but a minute later I felt the gentle tug of a summoning. I split myself, leaving one aspect here to carry on with my loop, and let the summon carry the other one away.

Of course, since I’d left my body behind I appeared in her mindscape. The forest was just like the one I’d had in my own mindscape back before I came to understand my dual nature, and sure enough I was immediately confronted by a rather confused version of the warrior aspect I’d lost in my confrontation with the demon.

“You’re the older me.” She said. “But how did you get in here? Shouldn’t you be out in the real world?”

“I didn’t bring my body with me,” I explained. “That would have taken more chakra than you can hold. So, what say we surprise your other self?” I walked over to the locked door that symbolized my old insecurities, and pulled the key out of my pocket.

The younger me gasped. “You can open it? But how… well, I guess you must have gone through all this… wait, that means you understand why there are two of me!”

I chuckled. “Yeah, I do. Let’s go get the other you and I’ll explain all about our weird little bloodline.”

Teaching is fun. At least, teaching a younger version of myself was fun, and not just because we understood each other so well. In the space of half an hour she’d torn down the barrier of fear between her aspects and pulled off her first temporary merger, although she couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds. Then she listened to my thumbnail sketch of my own situation with increasing disbelief, until I offered to demonstrate some of my claims.

“How?” She asked. “Even if you’re telling the truth, there’s no way for me to actually see the time loop reset.”

“Maybe not, but I can demonstrate a few of the other implausible parts. Let me borrow your body, and I’ll turn us into me and go find Naruto.”

“I suppose I couldn’t stop you anyway,” she said. “Ok, go ahead.”

I’d burned off a lot of chakra already, but I still had more than enough to reshape her body into one I was comfortable with. Then I climbed out of bed to check my work in the mirror, and she whistled appreciatively.

“Is that what I’m going to look like in a few years?” She asked eagerly.

“Not quite,” I chuckled. “The perfect legs and abs come from insane amounts of taijutsu training, and I enhanced our natural ‘talent’ by about a cup size. But the face and hair are all natural.”

“Nice,” she said. “I wish I could do this.”

“Get Naruto to show you how he turns into a girl,” I advised her as I henged up something to wear. “That’s the ultimate basis for the technique. Speaking of which, let’s see what the man who turns into a dragon is up to tonight.”

It wasn’t all that late, so I expected Naruto to be out training somewhere. I made a circuit of the village with my senses fully extended, searching for his presence while I cloaked mine from the occasional patrolling chuunin. It wasn’t long before I caught the distinctive taste of his massive aura, and sure enough it led me to one of the training grounds.

Some mischievous impulse led me to shroud myself in my best invisibility illusion as I approached. If he was working on something interesting I wanted to get a good look at it before I surprised him.

“I don’t usually do this kind of thing.”

The voice was female, and I drifted to a stop in the shadow of a tree as I tried to place it. Someone I knew, but not well.

“You aren’t usually with me.”

It was Naruto’s voice, and the exited female gasp that followed made it pretty clear what was going on. I peered around a tree trunk, and caught sight of Naruto and a kunoichi with Inizuka clan markings standing naked in the moonlight. Naruto was taller than I was used to seeing him, a few years older and a lot more muscular. The kunoichi was a teenager herself, a lithe beauty with wild hair and amazingly perky breasts. She shifted, her face turning slightly towards me, and I realized it was Hana.

He pulled her into a kiss with one hand in her hair and the other toying with her breast, and the way she squirmed against him told me her protest had been strictly pro forma. A moment later she pulled away, and sank to her knees before him.

Holy crap! My host exclaimed. Naruto is having sex with an older kunoichi? Two weeks ago he couldn’t have arranged a date with Hinata if his life depended on it, and now he’s getting a blow job from a hot chuunin? He really isn’t the boy I remember, is he?

I held tight to my invisibility illusion as a stab of jealousy pierced my heart. Had he lied when he spoke of marrying me? Was he just leading me on? What did she have that I didn’t, anyway? I swayed as insecurities I’d thought long since banished tried to send me fleeing into the night with tears in my eyes.

Hey, are you alright? Don’t tell me you have a thing for him?

“Yes,” I whispered. “I thought… but then again, we aren’t married yet, are we? I’ve always felt free to play around in my own loops, so can I blame him for doing the same?”

Married? My host shrieked. To Naruto? You’ve got to be kidding me. Why on earth would you want to marry him?

“Because I love him,” I replied. It came to me then that this was a defining moment. I could slink away and have a good cry and never tell anyone what I’d seen, but then I’d never fully trust him again. I could stalk into the clearing full of righteous fury and punish him for hurting me, but I’d be a hypocrite even if he never knew. I could try to write it off as ‘boys will be boys’ and pretend it didn’t matter, but I’d be lying to myself. Was there a better choice I wasn’t seeing because of that damned demonic technique?

Was this how he was going to feel, if he found out what I’d done with Anko?

I don’t understand. I mean, I guess he’s not as bad as he used to be, but why Naruto?

Yes, I realized. That was it. I could understand.

“What you’ve seen is him halfheartedly pretending to be a kid,” I told my host. “I’m… about to do some things you might not want to be around for. Would you like me to change you back, and make myself a body of my own?”

…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

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.”

“Don’t be silly, Hinata, of course she can. It’s made of her chakra, so she could henge it just like a shadow clone. I bet there’s a way to get solid things in here too, for that matter. I’m pretty sure Itachi and Orochimaru both do something like that with their fancy swords.”

I merged my aspects, which helped a little. “Where do you come up with these ideas?” I muttered. “That’s so crazy it might actually work, but right now I need you to… to… oh… um, yeah. Sign this thing. Please? I can’t take much more of this.”

“But Sakura, it’s only been a few minutes,” Hinata chided as he signed the contract. “Don’t tell me miss ‘go all night’ is already done? Should we give you a chakra transfusion to keep you going?”

“More chakra is the last… thing… hey. That might work!”

“What might work?” Naruto asked.

“Come over here and you’ll see,” I replied. I grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. Then I stumbled again as my vision blurred, and found myself leaning against him.

“What happened to not touching?” He asked.

I giggled. “I’m already high on your chakra, mister. I might as well enjoy it. Now come on, I want to see if this works.”

I pulled him over to my chakra storage seal, which looked like a fist-sized diamond full of blue light, and explained what it was. Hinata gasped, and I gave her a saucy grin.

“That’s right, my pretty. There’s no reason it has to be my chakra in the seal. Go ahead, Naruto, see if you can put a chakra feed on it. Just be sure to throttle it, because if you blow it up I might not survive.”

Naruto rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a moment, and I swayed back to lean on Hinata instead of him. Everything was getting a little hazy, and I didn’t want to pass out before we tried this. Then I noticed how sexy Hinata’s neck is, and started kissing it.

Then Naruto’s hand was on my shoulder again. “I don’t think this is a safe way to try it,” he said. “If you want more power I’ll put you on a chakra link in the morning, and we can run loops until you’re happy with it.”

“Tomorrow?” I asked dreamily, falling back against his chest. “What about tonight?”

His hands came around to cup my breasts, and the sudden sense of connection was so strong I couldn’t see anymore. I was lost, dissolving happily into my man’s aura as all barriers between us were washed away.

“Well, first I’m going to cancel this mind-walking technique before I accidently hurt you,” I felt him say. “Then, if you’re still conscious, I’m going to show you how much I appreciate the fact that you trust me enough to invite me in here.”

“Can I help?” Hinata asked with a giggle. “I think she’s too far gone to call me out right now, but I’ve always wondered what it would be like to make love to her in here while you’re doing the same outside.”

It was days before I managed any expression but a dreamy smile.

Naruto left a shadow clone behind to impersonate himself, and we spent the rest of the loop in a nearby town where we all knew from experience no one would notice us. I barely left his side the whole time, and none of us did much training.

I did, however, send an aspect to visit the local version of me several times. She was refreshingly innocent, full of questions about me and Naruto and our various activities. Oddly enough she didn’t pester me for techniques, but then again she wasn’t nearly as motivated in her training as I was. I wondered about that, until I realized that it wasn’t until my repeated deaths in the chuunin exam that I’d gotten serious about improving my own skills. With the looping Naruto on her team this version of me had never faced anything like that, so she still thought a couple of hours a day was a reasonable training schedule.

She was also rather bemused with Hinata’s presence in our relationship.

“Why do you share him like that?” She asked me one day. “I mean, I get that you’re friends, but I’d think that sharing a guy would strain any friendship.”

“You’re missing the obvious again,” I told her with a grin. “Naruto can be two guys whenever he wants, so it’s not like we have to compete for his time. Besides, Hinata and I are as close to each other as we are to him.”

She gasped. “You don’t mean…”

I laughed. “Yes, we do. Yes, I like girls that way. Yes, that means you do too.”

“But, Ino and I aren’t like that!” She sputtered.

“Which is why you immediately thought of her?” I asked smugly. “Of course, you’ve been busy feuding over Sasuke since you were eleven. But ask your other self what she thinks about kissing Ino.”

She frowned in concentration for a moment, and blushed. “Oh, god. I’m such a pervert.”

“Hey, be glad we’re not lesbians,” I pointed out. “You don’t ever have to act on it if you don’t want to. You could just settle down with a guy, and no one would ever know. But it does give you more options than being straight.”

She looked away. “My inner pervert seems to think we should use you as an inspiration.”

“Oh? You mean make up with Ino, and try to catch Sasuke together?”

She nodded.

I sighed. “That didn’t work out so well for me. I guess your circumstances are different, but you’ve got some major obstacles to overcome if that’s what you want. You need to be a lot stronger to get Sasuke’s respect, and Ino would take some convincing. Three-way relationships are a lot harder to make work than normal ones.”

“Will you help me?” She asked softly.

“If that’s still what you want when the loop is over,” I replied. “Just don’t rush it, ok?”

I lifted the veil a few more times that loop, trying various little experiments to get more of a feel for what I was seeing. One of the things I noticed was that there were a lot more of those tendrils of darkness around Hinata than me, but over the course of a few weeks with Naruto several of them unraveled for no apparent reason. After that we all agreed that it would be a good idea to have Hinata spend more loops with him, and maybe have some long conversations about as many important things as possible.

I wanted to do the same thing myself, to be honest. But I was the only one with supernatural contacts who might be willing to tell us something useful, and it might take a few loops to get one of them to talk. So instead I volunteered to go find out what I could by myself, and Naruto reluctantly agreed.

The reset found Hinata back in my mindscape, of course, but it wasn’t long before I felt Naruto’s summons. With a proper contract between us the gentle tug I’d been used to was replaced by an immensely strong pull, and I realized I probably couldn’t resist it if I tried. His chakra was just too much stronger than mine for that.

Fortunately I managed to aspect myself quickly enough, and the summons only took one of me. It was the work of a few minutes to find the young Hinata in his loop and steal a sample of her blood so I could make my version a body, after which I dismissed myself and settled back into my own loop alone. Then I finished dressing, and made my way to the testing center for yet another repetition of that stupid written exam.

I was pretty sure I could penetrate the Hyuuga secure wing with just my own skills, but it was a tricky job and I needed to pull it off perfectly to maximize my time with Astoria. I didn’t think she was going to summon me to her office again, and it might take some time to persuade her to tell me anything. For that matter, I’d better put some serious thought into how to convince her to help at all. I couldn’t afford to piss off her boss by trying to scam her using the loops, so I had to get this one right the first time around.

Eventually I decided it would take several days to get my plan together, which meant I’d have to actually do the second exam to keep my loop going. So I left an aspect in Konoha to continue planning while I reluctantly packed my supplies and joined my old teammates for another repetition of the Forest of Death. As I watched Sasuke’s fight with Orochimaru play out yet again I idly wondered if there was a way to do this that didn’t require at least one of me to have to live through the exam. Shadow clones had the same problem as aspects in that respect, and the idea of an illusion that persistent didn’t seem feasible. Maybe I could bribe an alternate-universe Sakura to do a few loops for me?

Orochimaru finished with Sasuke as I was lost in thought, and turned to me with an amused look. I shrugged.

“I can’t possibly do anything meaningful against the strongest of the Sannin, sir,” I explained politely, playing up my insignificant genin act. “If you wanted us all dead we would be. Is there anything you’d like me to pass on when he wakes up?”

“Such a practical child.” He chuckled in that creepy way of his, and patted me on the head. “Perhaps I’ll have a use for you when the time is right.”

Then he body flickered away, leaving me to roll my eyes and carry the boys off to shelter. I was just getting them settled when I felt a half-familiar presence entering our usual camp site. I frowned. The signature was a lot like Sasuke, but much stronger. Was Itachi wandering around the forest? What had I done that would cause that?

I turned to find a dark-haired man with Sharingan eyes watching me from across the little clearing. But it wasn’t Itachi.

“I see I’ve finally found you, Sakura. Come here, and tell me what you’ve done since your little escape attempt. If you’ve followed my instructions well enough I may be lenient in your punishment.”

My shocked gaze fell to the boy at my feet, still unconscious from the cursed seal Orochimaru had just inflicted on him. Apparently I wasn’t the only one of us who’d discovered a way to cross loops.