Time Braid

25. Insights

Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.

The day my punishment finally ended was the happiest day of my life.

I’d grown so used to the tides of emotion that filled me from the outside during my training sessions that it was strange to feel only my own honest reactions again. I’d expected another surge of pride and satisfaction, like when I obeyed a difficult order flawlessly. Maybe gratitude, like when he said I’d taken a punishment well, or even respectful awe like when he lectured me on how I should be.

But when my master marked off the last punishment session the only thing I felt was an immense relief that it was finally over. My training was done, and apparently that meant my emotions were my own again.

He unbuckled the harness that held my gag in place himself, and I pressed my cheek briefly against his fingers. He dislikes extravagant displays of devotion, but small gestures are permitted.

“Thank you, sir,” I croaked. My voice barely worked at all after so many days of screaming, and I could barely manage a whisper. But I wasn’t about to let a little thing like that interfere with my performance. “What… now?”

“Karin and Hinata will dismantle your bonds,” he said shortly. “After that your task is to recover your strength as quickly as possible. We are currently in Amegakure, but Nagato is the only member of Akatsuki we can rely on for support. Some of the other members are prone to senseless violence, so be careful to remain near Hinata or myself at all times until you’ve recovered.”

He turned and left as Karin entered, ignoring my whispered acknowledgement.

It took Karin and Hinata working together nearly an hour to pry me out of my bonds. Hinata disassembled each restraint band with a faint expression of distaste, carefully extracting the spikes that pierced my flesh while Karin worked to control the bleeding. The holes they left were surrounded by scar tissue, and several were badly infected.

My legs wouldn’t support my weight, but Hinata lowered me to the floor with surprising gentleness. I vaguely remembered I’d been close to some version of her once. Was she a friend, or just a fellow servant of the same master?

“Kunai?” I asked her, still struggling to talk.

She produced one without comment, and helped me sit as I began cutting out key segments of the chakra suppression seals tattooed into my skin. The cuts bled more than I liked with my body control crippled, and the repeated shocks to my chakra system as I broke each seal weren’t doing me any good either, but I judged I could stay conscious long enough to finish the job.

“What are you doing?” Karin asked irately. “The last thing you need is more stress on your system, little girl. We can remove those later, once I’m sure you’ll survive being released.”

“Fuck that,” I rasped. “Either… incompetent… or hate me… hope I die… not relying on you.”

I could barely hold the kunai, and I noted with disgust that my hand was trembling. But I’d managed to break all five seals on my right arm, so I switched hands and started working on my left.

“Idiot girl!” Karin growled. “I don’t understand why master is so obsessed with you. You’re just a scrawny little kid with a big forehead. You’re going to have those scars for the rest of your life, you know. Your body will never recover, and neither will your chakra, and they’ve already taken any secrets you might have had. You’ll never be as useful as I am.”

I ignored the clueless idiot’s rambling in favor of finished my left arm, and started working my way down my torso. Several of my tenketsu were damaged, which would degrade my control, but I was starting to be able to feel my chakra again. By conventional wisdom it should have been as crippled as my body, since that’s supposed to be the source of one’s physical energy. But it wasn’t. I was much weaker than what my instincts said should be normal for me, but it felt like I’d have enough strength to get the job done.

Karin plucked the kunai from my hand.

“Stop that!” She shouted. “Are you even listening to me? As our team’s medic I’m ordering you to stop making your condition worse. You’re going to be bedridden for weeks as it is, and if you don’t do as you’re told you may never walk again.”

I glared at her. I was not going to disappoint my master by failing at the first task he gave me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk being punished again. But I was too weak to fight. I probably couldn’t even sit up without Hinata’s help.

“Hinata,” I said, “memories… scrambled, but… trusted you. Allies? Friends?”

She looked down at me, and brushed her fingertips gently over my cheek. “Yes, Sakura. You’ve risked a great deal for my sake, and in any event I believe Sasuke intends for us to be partners. I will help you however I can. What do you need?”

I gestured to the seals on my back. “Finish, please?” I asked. “Don’t let… quack… interfere?”

“Certainly,” Hinata agreed.

“Quack? You little bitch!” Karin fumed. “I’m going to make you regret that one. Hinata, please stop this. We’re supposed to be treating her, not making her worse.”

“Sakura has the same orders, and she requested this,” Hinata said serenely, as she deftly finished off the seals decorating my back. “I trust her judgment.”

“But Hinata…” Karin started to whine, but trailed off as she saw what I was doing.

With most of the seals gone I had access to a decent chuunin-grade level of chakra, which was enough to strip the seals off my legs with a quick dance of chakra scalpels. Then I turned my attention inward, healing my damaged tenketsu and chakra coils. That restored my control to a reasonable level, and left me with full access to my remaining chakra.

There was just enough to transform myself to the adult form I’d memorized at some point in my hazy past.

Karin gasped and backed away as I stretched, reveling in the feel of being strong and healthy again. I gave Hinata a friendly hug, and rolled to my feet.

“Ah, that’s much better,” I said. “Thanks, Hinata. Give me a few hours of rest and I’ll be good as new.”

“Bu… bu… that’s impossible!” Karin exclaimed.

I patted her on the head. “You keep telling yourself that, kid. Hey, Hinata, is there a bath around here somewhere?”

Master examined me with an appraising eye as Hinata looked on serenely.

“So, it isn’t a chakra construct?” He asked. “You actually rebuild your body at the cellular level when you use this technique?”

“Yes, sir,” I said proudly. “I have lesser techniques that work more like a permanent henge, but this is the full version. This body is as real as the one I was born with, and a hell of a lot tougher. Imagine doing a full physical conditioning program for a couple of decades, until you reach the limits of physical training, without accumulating any training injuries or age-related deterioration. Except really what I have is better than that, because I’ve thrown in a lot of subtle physical enhancements based on my medical techniques. Improved joint flexibility, increased bone strength, that kind of thing. On top of that I’ve redesigned all my muscles to tolerate massive levels of chakra boosting, and integrated improved versions of Tsunade’s techniques into my style.”

“Hnn. You’re as strong as Tsunade, then?”

I shook my head. “My technique is optimized for speed and endurance, so my peak strength is only about a fifth of what she can do. But that’s still overkill against anything short of a bijuu, and I don’t have to telegraph my attacks the way she does. The other disadvantage is the chakra consumption. Right now it takes most of my chakra, so I need a few hours to recover after doing a transformation.”

“Interesting,” he said. “You were able to do this casually before, so I want you to determine why your chakra is so much weaker now and fix it. But I expect that will be a long project, so in the short term you’ll develop similar transformations for Hinata and myself. Do Hinata first, and let me know when you’ve finished.”

“Yes, sir,” I said eagerly. Finally, a chance to be useful!

“Now,” he went on, “I wish to observe the two of you sparring. Non-lethal techniques only. Show me what you can do, Sakura.”

The whole room was inside Hinata’s divination range, which was a hell of a disadvantage. Even at full boost she was faster than I was, able to flicker instantly wherever she wanted to be while I was constrained by acceleration and momentum. Her jyuuken was beyond flawless, a transcendent symphony of artful destruction, and her mastery of water techniques was equally perfect. Even Gai would have been lucky to last ten seconds against her.

But I could shake off most nonlethal hits in an instant, and I had far more ninjutsu to work with than she did. I lost the first match, but held my own in the second until chakra depletion forced me to concede.

Sasuke nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent,” he said. “Despite your rebelliousness you’ve carried out your original orders quite well.”

I tried not to grin too obviously, but the thrill of knowing I’d pleased my master was more than I could completely hide.

“You will be working closely with Hinata in the future,” he went on. “I want you to train together intensively until you’ve regained your full abilities. Inform me when this is done, and I will give you your next assignment.”

Oddly enough I already had a template for enhancing Hinata, though I couldn’t remember when I’d designed it. We spent a couple of days tinkering with it together just to make sure it was as perfectly suited to her as possible, and she was quite pleased with the results in her quiet way. But the project went much faster than I’d originally anticipated, and Sasuke was out of Amegakure on some errand when I finished.

So I thought I’d take a look at my own inner state while I waited for him to return, and see about undoing some of the damage I’d done to myself in my mad struggle to run away from my proper place. I was already getting sick of having so many of my memories scrambled, and I could feel something wasn’t right with my inner mindscape. All stuff that should be easy for me to fix with a bit of effort, right?

Silly me.

Sasuke had insisted on tearing open the path to my inner mindscape about halfway through my punishment, and his search for hidden tricks and traps had done quite a bit of damage. But the general pattern of lake and grove and house was still there, so I figured it would be far easier to repair than the utter chaos I’d been left with after absorbing my demon aspect. I stepped confidently up to the wreckage of the grove that represented all my most enduring feelings and gathered my will, intending to sing what was left back to health…

But I couldn’t find the words.

Somehow my grasp of the celestial tongue had evaporated, and I knew that the method I ‘d used before wouldn’t work in a human language. It was the celestial tongue’s nature as a spoken form of seal mastery that had given my songs of healing their power. That, and my name.

“Well, alright,” I said to myself. “I’ll just back up a step. It was contemplating my name that started me on the path to recovery last time. I’ll just do it again.”

So I settled myself on the shore of my little lake of chakra, and discovered in a matter of moments just how misplaced my earlier confidence had been. Because I couldn’t remember my true name either.

“But… how?” I gasped in dawning horror. “How could I forget my name? That’s like forgetting myself. If I don’t know that, am I even me anymore? Master, what did you do to me?”

I dove for the next level down, suddenly terrified that I wouldn’t even be able to do that. That I wouldn’t be able to see myself. That whatever was wrong with me was much, much worse than I’d imagined, and I might never recover.

It was dark down there, and I recoiled in instinctive terror. It wasn’t the darkness of Sasuke’s punishments, but it reminded me of them too much to ignore. I opened my eyes to find I was trembling.

“I have to be stronger than this,” I told myself. “Master wants me to fix my chakra, and I can’t do that if I can’t delve myself. It isn’t even real darkness, it’s just my imagination. Wait, I’ve faced this before. This is just like the first time I ran away, when I was still too terrified to disobey any of my orders. Only this time the fear is getting in the way of obeying. Ok, then I’ll have to use my skills for good this time around.”

The fear of darkness that had grown up during my punishments was deeply ingrained in my psyche, and it took long hours to pry it loose and erase it. It shouldn’t have been that hard, but the fear resisted my efforts as if it were more than just a bundle of inconvenient mental associations. I’d never seen anything like that when I originally researched my old trauma-erasure technique, at least not that I could remember. But then again that was back when I was a desperate little girl. Hopefully this was just a sign that my growing mental abilities had made me resistant to purely physical brain-hacking.

Eventually the fear stopped growing back after I erased it, and I could close my eyes and fall into myself without panicking. I groped clumsily for the path I wanted, fumbling with a transition I was sure I’d done hundreds of times before, and finally dragged myself into the proper perspective.

What I found was not the dancing patterns of light that should have been there, or even the more static web of my time on the mountain. My old patterns were smashed beyond recognition, shattered by the brutal extraction of everything that had given my old life meaning. Now there was only a slow, sad spiral around my new obsession with pleasing Sasuke.

I sagged in despair.

“Oh, Sasuke,” I said softly. “Was I really so evil that you had to take away everything I was to save me? Was I so terrible that you couldn’t leave me anything of myself? This is way past the limit for stable fixations. If you leave me like this I’ll go crazy in a matter of months. I’ll get so obsessed with pleasing you that I’ll go psycho on anyone who can’t match my devotion, and that’ll make me useless to you.”

“What am I going to do now?”

Heal, came a faint whisper from somewhere in the surrounding darkness. Remember.

I looked around nervously, struck by a sudden conviction that I’d lost far more than some memories and a few techniques during my capture. That the Sakura who had last stood here had known secrets I couldn’t imagine, and the traps she’d left might swallow me whole if I wasn’t careful.

“I want to,” I admitted to the darkness. “But I have to do it right. I have to obey. I have to! I can’t face being punished again. I’m going to be a good girl this time, and make master proud of me, and I’ll never let loose anything that would make me disobedient again.”

Sculpted by pain? The voice asked with more sympathy than I’d expected. But then, it was my own voice. Why was I so afraid of it?

“Yes,” I admitted. “I… I’m sure it’s not what I would have wanted, before. But I was a bad girl then. I have to do better now. Um, who are you?”

A very bad girl indeed, the voice said with a touch of amusement. You don’t want me awake right now. But you need to balance out your orders and find some room to be true to our name again, or all your master’s hard work catching us will go to waste. A Celestial can’t live in denial of her name for long.

I was struck by a sudden suspicion about who I was talking to, and frowned. “I was afraid it was something like that. I’m not really Sakura right now, am I?”

Honestly? You’re a twisted shadow of our true self, but you’re a long way from hopeless. You can find your way back if you can manage to want to. Or you could let me show you the way…

“Oh, right, and then Sasuke catches us and we get punished again. No thanks. Um, I hope you realize this would be a really bad time for us to have some kind of mental dominance struggle.”

A faint laugh echoed through the darkness. No worries. The last thing I want to do is make things even worse for us. Promise you won’t report me, and I’ll promise not to mess with you.

It was a sign of how unbalanced my conditioning was that I didn’t even have to think about it. “Of course I’m not going to report you! If I do I’m sure to be punished again, but if I don’t there’s a chance I might get away with it. I’ll feel guilty as hell about not living up to master’s expectations, but that’s nothing compared to being punished. But please, please, don’t try to run some subtle scheme to corrupt me again, ok? There’s no way that would work, and if I know I’m going to get caught anyway I’ll have to say something.”

You really are fucked up, aren’t you? Don’t worry, I’m smarter than that now. Our bright side must have had a plan, and I don’t want to screw it up. I’ll just go back to sleep until our true self wakes me. But you’re going to have to get sane, or eventually you’ll fade to the point where I have to take over to keep us from dying.

“Yeah, I understand. M-… Sasuke told me to recover my full strength, and he wasn’t specific about how. Besides, he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble catching me if he wanted me dead. I’ll figure something out.”

Glad to hear it. Good night, mortal girl.

“Good night, demon girl,” I replied. “Sleep, please, and stay asleep.”

The sense of presence faded, and I sighed.

“Now even my own mind isn’t safe for me,” I lamented. “This sucks.”

The next few weeks were a difficult time for me. Sasuke wasn’t interested in my problems, and besides I wasn’t about to say anything that could be taken as a criticism of his training methods. I was sure he’d take that as a ploy to undermine his work somehow, when in reality that was the last thing I wanted. I was desperately trying to prove myself to him, to be loyal and useful and someday earn his approval, but to do that I had to make myself stable.

Without my name. Without setting off any of the traps I was sure must still lurk in the inner recesses of my mind. Without changing anything about my training, because that was sure to earn me another punishment. If not for my master’s command to recover my full strength I couldn’t even have made myself try, and I had no idea if I could succeed.

Without Hinata I might not have.

Sasuke was usually gone on his mysterious errands, and I took the chance to work on myself. But my partner couldn’t help notice that I was spending more and more time in meditation, and one morning she stopped to ask about it. Since I was deep inside myself at the time I failed to notice her, but she was too determined to be stopped by such a minor obstacle.

Somehow, her presence in my mindscape felt so natural that I didn’t even notice she was there until she put her hand on my shoulder.

“Eep!”

I spun away from the maze of broken memories I’d been trying to piece back together to find her floating in the darkness with me, a worried frown on her face.

“Hinata? Wait, how the hell did you get in here?”

“All your defenses opened for me,” she said thoughtfully. “I had only meant to knock at your door, to get your attention. But nothing ever tried to stop me, and I could feel where you were. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Oh,” I said dumbly. Well, it was true that I didn’t really mind her being here, and my defenses were still rather shattered. But even so, that was very odd indeed.

“Hinata? What were we to each other?” I asked hesitantly. “I keep having these… feelings…”

“We’ve barely met, Sakura,” she said gently. “Whatever relationship you had must have been with the version of me in your loop. But apparently she and I are so alike that your reflexes mistake me for her, and I must admit I find that intriguing. I’ve been alone for so very long now, but… partners should be close, should they not?”

“I’ve always thought so,” I agreed. “I’d like that, very much. Just don’t hesitate to tell me if I get carried away, alright? I keep getting these flashes of… well, let’s just say your family must have been scandalized.”

She smiled faintly. “They often are. But I came here out of concern. What is this place, and why do you find the need to spend so much time here?”

I sighed. “This is me,” I said with a wave to the patterns of light around us. “The little glows are my memories. The patterns they form describe my personality. Sasuke told me to regain my full strength, so I’ve been trying to fix what I can. But I lost my true name somewhere along the way, and without knowing that it’s hard to get anywhere.”

“I can well imagine,” Hinata replied. “I don’t understand why Sasuke was so harsh with you. My own training was no more than a dozen sessions, once he realized he couldn’t erase my love for Naruto.”

I shrugged. “I guess I was really evil or something. Wait, you still love Naruto?”

“Oh, yes,” she said sadly. “I always will. But the man I love doesn’t exist anymore. We had fifteen beautiful years together, after I finally found a way to stop the invasion and win his heart at the same time. He defeated Pein and Madara, became the Sixth Hokage, even united the Elemental Nations. And I was his wife. We had five children together, three sons and two daughters. Little Maya had just entered the academy…”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “What happened?”

“The Kyuubi’s chakra finally killed him,” she said. “We knew his resistance was weakening, but there was always one more threat that only he could face. Then one day we were trying to seal the No-Tail Beast again, and he had to call out a fifth tail of the Kyuubi’s chakra, and it just… ate him.” She bowed her head, and a single tear ran down her cheek.

“To my shame, I was blinded by my grief,” she went on. “The No-Tail killed me in my distraction, and the loop reset, and… and now my children are gone, my husband is gone, everything is lost to me. That wonderful little boy you call Naruto? I can’t see the man I love in him. Not the one in my world, or in Sasuke’s, or even the one that loops like we do. The Naruto I love is the man who gave me my family, and he… never existed.”

It felt so natural to hold Hinata in my arms that it didn’t even occur to me how improper the Hyuuga would consider it until she was safely cradled in my lap. But she didn’t object. She leaned into me, and let me hold her for long minutes while the tears ran down her cheeks.

It did not escape me that when Sasuke found he couldn’t destroy her love for Naruto, attacking her ability to recognize him would be an obvious fallback plan. I was quite surprised to discover that being dedicated to serving my master didn’t prevent me from hating him.

Eventually Hinata stirred, and wiped away her tears. “I apologize,” she said softly. “I came here to help you, not to burden you with my own cares.”

“It’s alright, Hinata,” I reassured her. “I don’t mind. Besides, I’m not sure there’s anything you can do for me.”

“Oh, but there is,” she insisted. “You said you’ve lost your name, didn’t you? Well, here.”

She pulled my summoning contract out of her sleeve, and handed it to me.

I gaped at her. “But… I thought Sasuke had my contract?”

She shook her head. “No. He didn’t want to risk signing it, and without that connection he was unable to claim it. But I duplicated that trick Orochimaru uses to carry the Kusanagi long ago, so it was easy enough to take it with me when I reset. I lack your masterful touch with the sealing arts, but I’m certain the central figure of this contract must be your name.”

She unrolled the scroll, and I noted with irritation that there were quite a few signatures there I’d never wanted. Nagato was bad enough, but the name Yugito appeared four times. Wasn’t that the Nekomata’s jinchuuriki?

Then she reached the seals of the contract proper, and I leaned closer. The neatly organized shapes were as familiar as the back of my hand, and to my relief I found that I could read them as easily as ever. There were some flourishes that were quite different than the Toad Contract that Jiraiya had used as an illustration when we’d discussed this back on my mountain, but I could follow most of them. And there in the center of the array was a symbol Jiraiya hadn’t taught me.

Sakura.

Artful elegance and lighting calculation. Passionate love and brutal violence. A million ephemeral splashes of color weaving a dance of contradictions as eternal as time itself. Me.

I pulled Hinata into a hug and kissed her soundly before I realized that was probably overstepping my bounds. Fortunately by the time I stopped she was too dazed to be mad.

“Your kisses are dangerous,” she told me with a faint smile. “But my heart is taken, so please don’t do that again.”

“I can’t make any promises,” I said playfully. “You’re just to kissable to resist. Oh, thank you, Hinata! I think you’ve just saved me.”

Sasuke’s transformation template was much harder than I’d expected. Partly that was because I’d never done it for a man before, and that made enough of a difference to throw things off. It didn’t help that he had some crappy hack job of an enhancement set already, which I had to reverse-engineer and rationalize and then integrate with my own modifications. But what really slowed me down was the fact that it was so nerve-wracking being around him.

I so wanted to do well, to impress him and be useful and show that I was really truly a good girl now. The need was a burning ache that would have been a wonderfully effective motivational tool if I hadn’t found myself terrified out of my mind whenever he looked the slightest bit unhappy. But Sasuke has never been a cheery person, so I frequently had cause to be glad for my ability to consciously control my physical reactions. I’m not sure what he would have done if he’d noticed me cringing and trembling with fear all the time, but I don’t think it would have been pretty.

When the transformation was finally done Sasuke spent a couple of days sparring with Hinata to get used to it. I was amazed at how good he was, especially since I vaguely remembered beating him once before. But that was when I had a phenomenally superhuman body to work with, and his was just well-trained. Now when he activated his cursed seal he could almost match Hinata at taijutsu, and they were both much better than me.

Being the team weakling again really grated on me, but Sasuke wasn’t concerned.

“You were never suited to being a serious combatant, Sakura,” he told me one day. “The fact that you aren’t helpless anymore is convenient, but you’ll never be capable of meeting a serious enemy head-on. Your strength is your intellect, and your role is always to support the rest of your team. You should only engage a foe directly when you can easily neutralize them by exploiting some weakness.”

That one really burned, but I wasn’t allowed to argue with him unless I had solid proof I was right. Had I ever beaten an opponent just by fighting them, instead of using the loop to out-level them or take them by surprise? With my muddled memories I wasn’t sure, but I knew people like Nagato could still crush me like a bug. Besides, as much as I hated being considered weak I had to admit it would be nice if I didn’t have to fight alone anymore.

“Yes, sir,” I replied, reluctantly giving up on arguing the point. “In that case, should I be working on anything in particular?”

“Your chakra is recovering, but you’re still barely a third as strong as when you were healthy,” he said thoughtfully. “Beyond that, we’ll need to see how your special abilities can be used to support the plan. But first, follow me.”

He led me to a disused portion of the tower, and into a fairly large chamber with a door like a bomb shelter. When he sealed it shut behind us a surge of chakra flowed through the thick steel, and I knew no one was getting in or out who didn’t know the proper code for the lock.

“It’s time for you to learn what we’re fighting for, Sakura,” he said at my questioning look. Then he turned, and rattled off a long series of hand seals. After a moment a spinning disk of shadows coalesced in the air before him, and then space itself ripped open with a strange hissing sound.

“A time portal?” I exclaimed. “Then you did activate your Sharingan’s temporal powers. I thought you must have, but how? You don’t have a daughter to—”

“Stop,” he said harshly, and I did. “How do you know about that?”

“Um, that demon I absorbed? She had a sort of operator’s manual for the Sharingan in her head. I know all about the higher Sharingan variants and how to activate them.”

“Hnn. Never speak of that again.”

“Yes, sir,” I said contritely. “Sorry, sir, I should have known not to bring it up. Are we going through the portal?”

“Yes,” he said shortly. “Stay close. The other side is dangerous, and losing you now would be bothersome.”

He stepped through the gaping wound in the air and vanished.

I contemplated leaving an aspect here just in case, but realized I had no idea what it would do to me to have two connected aspects at widely different points in the time stream. Besides, I didn’t have permission to aspect myself. So in the end I just followed him through.

The portal led to what I recognized as the top of one of the steep hills overlooking the capital of Fire Country. It was night, but the moon overhead was a crimson orb marked with black tomoe. In the bare instant it took to notice this I felt myself caught in a genjutsu more powerful than anything I’d ever imagined. There was a momentary feeling of being measured by some malevolent, invisible intelligence, and then an angry whispering invaded my consciousness.

Give up. Despair. Stop fighting. Your cause is lost. Your gods have abandoned you. Darkness reigns forever. Die now, while you still can, or your soul will be lost with the world. There is no one left to save. Every mortal is corrupted now, and they will all hunt you down like an animal. Your own mother will strangle you. Your sensei will shove a chidori through your chest. Your first crush will stab you to death with a spear made from the bones of the boy who once loved you. The civilians you’ve saved will mob you, and burn you alive…

The urge to just kill myself now was overwhelming, and I might have done it if I’d been able. But Sasuke didn’t want me dead yet, and besides I didn’t have permission to reset my loop. The despair ate into my conditioning like acid, and I realized with a terrible clarity that it would only hold for a few minutes.

Then Sasuke turned my face to meet his eyes and caught me with his own Sharingan, and the compulsion faded to an annoying background buzz.

“Thank you, sir,” I said shakily.

He nodded. “Look around,” he said shortly.

Below us the city lay in ruins. Here and there a bonfire burned, and I could see human shapes gathered around them. Ragged figures dancing in the flickering light, running and fighting and rutting like animals. Here and there an especially sturdy structure still stood, surrounded by screaming crowds. As I watched one of them suddenly shifted and partially collapsed, undermined at one corner by an earth jutsu. A crowd poured in through the opening, and faint screams drifted up from within.

There was a surge of black chakra nearby, and a foul presence cloaked in human form appeared beside Sasuke.

“Back again, kid?”

The oily tone was familiar, and after a moment I realized it was Kogura.

“I hope you don’t plan on hanging around long,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve only got six left on our list, you know. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours now.”

“Six what?” I asked. He was only a class two limited, so I was pretty sure I could take him if it came to that. But something about this situation was making me feel like I’d forgotten something important.

“Oh, you brought a minion this time,” Kogura said, looking me up and down. “Not bad. An older Sakura, right? Well, take a good look, sweet cheeks. This is the end of the world, and we won.”

I frowned. “Sasuke? What’s he talking about?”

“This is the true end of Akatsuki’s plans,” he replied. “They claim the power of the bijuu, and Madara uses it to create the red moon. Then his genjutsu drives the whole world mad, and the demons take everything.”

“Heh. There goes another one,” Kogura said gleefully. “Oh, you should see the party down in ops central right now. Only five righteous mortals left in the world, not counting your little pet there. You are going to get her out of here soon, right kid? Or, hey, the system says we’ve got a pending recruitment offer out on her. Sure you don’t want to say yes, Sakura? Hell, I’m in such a good mood I’ll even throw in a couple of souls as a sweetener. Who do you want? The local version of yourself? That Ino girl, or maybe Hinata? They’re all roasting on the barbecue, just waiting for someone to save them.”

“No thanks,” I said, feeling a little ill. Five righteous people left in the world? They wouldn’t last long under these conditions, and when the last one died it was all over.

Wait. I was a righteous person, but Sasuke wasn’t? How could that be, when he was the one who taught me to be a good girl?

Because a good man wouldn’t be brainwashing people into serving him, obviously. Suddenly my understanding of my own place in the world seemed terribly fragile. Was I really an evil person who’d been rescued and redeemed, or was I just a victim of a psychopath? Was there even any way for me to know? And did I want to, when knowing might lead me to get myself punished again?

Was Kogura planting seeds of doubt in my mind on purpose? That was the kind of thing demons did, but even if he was it was still the truth. Demons can’t lie about things like that. But then what was the slimy bastard up to?

Then I saw the rest of the implications of his offer, and smiled a tight little smile. If I was just a hapless bystander who couldn’t do anything the demon in charge of Fire Country corruption operations wouldn’t have known who I was, and he certainly wouldn’t bother trying to tempt me at this point. Offering souls to a corruption target like that was almost unheard of.

“You know, Kogura, your boss isn’t going to be happy that you just told me I’m a pivotal figure in all this,” I said. “I don’t know how to stop you yet, but I can keep trying as many times as I want to. Sooner or later I’ll figure it out.”

“Oh, please,” the demon scoffed. “You ninja always think you’re so smart. I was just feeling generous, but if that’s how you’re going to be I withdraw the offer. It doesn’t matter anyway. Oh, there go the girls on Crescent Isle. Only three left, and they’re all together in the middle of Hidden Lightning. How many crazed ninja do you think they can fight off before they go down?”

Sasuke’s sword flashed out, almost too fast to see, and cut the obnoxious demon in half. He flicked dark ichor off the blade as Kogura’s corpse toppled to the ground, and calmly sheathed it again.

“Come,” he said. “He’ll be back soon, and he can be annoying when pressed.”

He turned and led me back through the portal. When we were through and it was safely closed he turned to me with a grave expression.

“You understand now?” He asked. “You were correct. We are the only hope of stopping that. If not for the loop it would already be too late.”

“What do we need to do, sir?” I asked tightly. “Kill this Madara person… wait, Madara? Uchiha Madara? He’s still alive?”

“Yes,” Sasuke said. “But he is only a pawn, and the world is full of those. The heart of Akatsuki’s bijuu weapon is an artifact created by the demons, and if it is ever filled with the power of the bijuu there are countless ways it can be used to end the world. Unfortunately there is no mortal power that can destroy the device, and our opponents can easily arrange for it to be found again if we attempt to hide it.”

“I see. But you have a plan?”

He nodded. “The Kyuubi is the key. Without the power of the nine-tails it would be impossible to create the red moon, or any other worldwide effect.”

“I see,” I said slowly. “So we need to destroy him somehow? But we can’t do that while we’re looping, can we?”

“It might be possible,” he said. “But even if we found a way they might still undo our victory in some future loop. No, I intend to take no chances with the opportunity fate has given me. First we must defeat Naruto without killing him, so that he is unable to use that freakish chakra of his to resist me. Once this is done I will then use my final technique to cast us all into the void between worlds, where we will drift frozen in time for all of eternity.”