The other Sakura did a backwards somersault off my block to land a few feet away.
“You’re the real me,” she said with a fierce grin. “I was hoping I’d find you.”
A sea of flame filled the courtyard from one of those army-killer ninjutsu Kakuzu is so fond of, but we both ignored it.
“You do realize I’m going to kick your ass?” I replied. “You’re just a copy.”
“Yeah, but you’re crippled,” she shot back. “Come give it a try.”
We each opened a sixth gate, and flew at each other. At that level of boost every block produced a thunderclap that blew out any shadow clone within twenty feet, and we moved so fast there was no point in bothering with ninjutsu. Kakuzu’s giant blasts of fire and lightning moved around us in slow motion as he fought Hinata and her clones, occasionally grazing one of us but never doing any real damage. I wrapped myself in confusing genjutsu and went invisible, hoping to catch her off guard, but she saw through my ploys better than I could have. She copied me, and I took several bruising hits before I got the hang of seeing through her illusions.
Then she turned into water just as I landed a solid punch to her chest. For a split second I was trapped in place, not sure if this was real or illusion, and our eyes met. Something that should have been invisible leaped out of her eyes into mine, and she grinned triumphantly.
There was someone else in my mind. I ripped my arm free and backed away, frantically splitting my attention. It was Hinata. Their Hinata, not mine, but all my inner defenses were open to her. I split myself for the first time since Sasuke had taken me, dropping an aspect into my mindscape in hopes of forcing her out before she could do anything. But she just smiled at me.
“You have nothing to fear from me, Sakura,” she said softly. “Don’t you remember my promise?”
“What promise?” I asked uncertainly. Her shadow clones were just fighting a delaying action now, and the other Sakura wasn’t attacking. What were they trying to do?
“My soul is more dragon that human, Sakura, and you are my most precious treasure. I will guard you for all the ages of eternity, till the stars die and the twilight of the gods brings the end of all things.”
Something deep in the depths of my mindscape blossomed open, and everything came out. My real inner mindscape tried to resume its proper place, smashing aside the fragile work I’d done in my attempts to rebuild it. All the memories I’d hidden rose up to push the patterns of my thoughts back into their proper shape, but so much was missing that there was nothing for most of them to mesh with. My old feelings for Hinata and Naruto welled up with unstoppable force, and smashed headlong into my unbreakable devotion to my master.
I screamed.
The pain was terrible, almost as bad as the punishments Sasuke had inflicted on me, and if not for that grim experience I would have passed out instantly. But there was a battle going on, and someone was going to need my help once I figured out which side I was on. I clung desperately to consciousness as the shards of my shattered soul clashed and ground together.
I felt soft warmth against my lips for a moment, as the other Sakura tried to merge with me. But I was too divided to even attempt such a thing, and she gave it up after a moment. Instead she abandoned her body, and stretched her soul over mine like a bandage in an attempt to help me reintegrate. The pain eased as my mindscape settled into place, but even with her help the rest of the damage wasn’t going to heal anytime soon. Assuming I dared accept her help with anything else. She was me, but she was on the other side. Wasn’t she?
“Think we should kill the bitch?”
It was Hidan’s voice. They’d beaten the last of Hinata’s clones, and both our opponents were in my head now. Were they caught, or was I?
“No, we’ll let the boss decide,” said Kakuzu. “But go ahead and taste her blood, just in case.”
Sakura? Hinata asked worriedly. Did it work? Are you yourself again?
That was the key, wasn’t it? I didn’t have time to be confused and helpless. I didn’t have the luxury of retreating to a mountaintop to spend a year putting myself back together. One way or another the fight that was happening right now would decide all of our fates. Whoever I really was, whatever side I was really on, I needed to sort myself out and wake up right now or I could lose everything.
But how? I didn’t know a technique that could do that, did I? I pawed through a jumble of memory, mine and my counterpart’s, looking for things that could help. My name. Celestial seal-crafting. Orochimaru’s research. A storage seal that held enough chakra to level a mountain.
Yes.
I stepped into the heart of my true inner mindscape, the grove whose trees were all my deepest feelings, and sang into being my own personal version of the Heaven Seal.
I craft a seal of transformation, drawn on my soul and brought to life by my will, powered by the strength stored hidden in my mindscape, inviting the blessings of heaven for sure operation, focusing all effort through my Name, to make me Sakura!
The seal formed on my forehead and lit up with a pure golden glow, announcing that my invocation had been accepted by whoever was in charge of such things. Then the glow turned blue as a rush of human chakra from my storage seal filled it, and everything inside me began to move. The spikes of compulsion Nagato’s techniques had pounded into my consciousness were torn free, shattered and forcibly ejected from my mind by the power of the seal. A dozen permanent genjutsu were isolated, examined and pronounced not Sakura in the blink of an eye, and blown away in the following instant. There were foreign presences in my mind…
But one was my own precious Hinata, a soul tied to mine by eternal bonds of mutual devotion, and she was always welcome inside me. The other was a different Sakura, but in this instant her soul was more true to my name than I was. At my probe she again offered to merge with me, and this time I was whole enough to accept.
Her memories merged with mine, replacing everything I’d lost in my long weeks of ‘training’ under Sasuke, and the spiral of obsessive servitude that had dominated my thoughts since I’d been released from my cell blew apart. The sparkling motes of thought and memory reassembled themselves in something very like their old patterns, but stronger and surer than before. Odd ripples cascaded through my chakra, straightening kinks and removing blockages I’d never known were there.
I was whole again, as strong as I’d been when Sasuke caught me, but the seal wasn’t finished. It wanted to make every part of me express the full potential of my name, and there were things in me that didn’t. Was that a problem? It was my own seal, and I could turn it off if I wanted to.
I didn’t.
The damaged defenses around my inner mindscape healed next, but that was nowhere near the end. The jungle that served as my outermost defense blossomed into a thorny maze of twisted spaces so vast an intruder could wander them for years without crossing his own trail. The inner landscape it protected blurred into a quantum superposition of overlapping possibilities, an endless array of subtly different landscapes that shifted in and out of reality in response to my will.
Of course. My inner mindscape reflected my personality, but every aspect I wore was a little different. Shouldn’t each of them have her own personal mindscape, shaped to properly reflect her nature?
Now they did. A dozen inner worlds bloomed into full reality as all the aspects I’d ever worn awoke, overlapping where we were the same and diverging where we differed, surrounded by a filmy haze of other possibilities I’d never chosen to make real.