The Whole of Me @avulle - Tumblr Blog

Hi! Not sure if youre still on tumblr, but just in case, do you still intend on posting more of Pink Fang? That's my favorite ever Sakura fic, I reread it like once a year. No worries if not, may the person without abandoned WIPS throw the first stone, but in that case would you talk about what youd intended to write? Im still biting my nails about Sakura not coming lmaoooo. Either way, your fanfic is incredible and I'm so grateful that you shared it with us!

I'm not sure if it's abandoned-abandoned, but, sure.

Spoilers for anyone who cares about that for Pink Fang!

!!

InoShikaChou go with Asuma to assassinate someone. The mission is a success, but they're ambushed by Kakuzu and Hidan. They hold up okay, but Hidan gets Asuma's blood, performs his ritual, and then when Ino realizes what's going on, Kakuzu drives his hand through Hidan's chest, killing Asuma. Asuma's final wish is for Ino to consume his mind, so he can at least be of use to someone, after he dies.

Kakashi arrives just a little too late, and together they hunt down Kakuzu and Hidan. With an ambush, Ino manages to erase Hidan's body before consuming his mind, gaining his immortality, and they attack Kakuzu together. When pushed, (Ino performing the ritual on him, everyone being cool), Kakuzu reveals himself to be a clone of Orochimaru, creating a Susanoo and forcing Kakashi to do the same. With great difficulty, they manage to defeat him, and he kills himself before Ino can consume his mind.

Ino passes on the knowledge in Hidan's head to Kakashi, which includes the current location of Madara (who happens to be accompanied by Itachi, Kisame, and Zetsu). The information is time critical, and Kakashi is mostly blinded by rage at Madara (because of his realization that Madara killed Minato), so he goes off to kill him. Incidentally, the team Sasuke is working with is in the area for reasons I haven't come up with yet, and they draw them out. Randos face Kisame and Zetsu while Kakashi faces off against Madara and Sasuke faces off against Itachi.

Sasuke vs Itachi does not go well. Even with how much stronger Sasuke has gotten, he still can't touch his brother, especially now that he also has Eternal Mangekyou Sharingan (because he stole them from Sasuke earlier in the story). Eventually, Sasuke is forced to rely on his final card--sealing away both of their eyes, permanently closing all foru of their parents' eyes. Sasuke, who has trained specifically for this eventuality, manages to kill Itachi. Kisame shows up spouts some bullshit that makes it clear he's also Orochimaru and is now going to steal Sasuke's body, now that Itachi is dead, only to run when Kakashi closes in, his battle over much earlier than anticipated.

Kakashi, meanwhile, taunts Madara with his brother's skull, implying he's desecrated his grave. When Madara uses his mokuton teleportation to check on his brother, he falls into a trap Kakashi laid months ago, seals on seals on seals to hold him in as Kakashi builds a wood rasengan to turn Madara's immortality against him (and also punish him for what he's done). After telling Madara just how much he hates him, just how much he planned for this, Kakashi hits him with the Mokuton Rasengan, and Madara becomes a horrible ball of cancer and torment, still trapped within the seals left behind by Kakashi. (I might introduce Madara breaking free before Kakashi catches him with the Mokuton rasengan anyways.) Unfortuntely for Kakashi, he is actually kind of responsible, so instead of leaving behind the horrible cancer torment ball, Kakashi waits until Madara's ego is well and truly dead before he uses a fire rasengan to burn away every cell of the cancerous mass, killing the thing that was once Madara for good.

When Kakashi arrives back at the village, he gets news that Nagato is in Mist, completely healthy and able to use his Rinnegan to its fullest extent. Kakashi is sent to Mist along with Jiraiya (the only ones who can teleport), and together they try and fight Nagato off with Yagura, but they don't succeed. Jiraiya intercedes between a lethal attack and Kakashi, and tells him to run. With great hesitation and self-hatred, Kakashi runs as Jiraiya fights Nagato to the apparent death. Nagato captures Yagura and at the last moment, Jiraiya uses his chekhov's hiraishin to escape, while making Nagato think he's dead.

After this point, my notes get a little hazy.

Jiraiya is left in a coma from his injuries from his fight with Nagato, most of Tsunade and Naruto's techniques relatively ineffective with just how advanced his Sage Mode has become. After Ino has returned, Nagato comes for Konoha. Tsunade realizes that he's been mind-whammied by Orochimaru's sharingan, somehow, even though the Rinnegan should let him pretty effortlessly throw it off. Tsunade leaves the village to fight him with hundreds of flesh-clones, effective copies of herself in every way, and with the full power of the Rinnegan at his disposal and what becomes clear to be extensive meddling by Orochimaru, Nagato still manges to beat her. In the end, for some reason (probably Tsunade shit-talking Orochimaru?), Nagato leaves Tsunade alive becomes Orochimaru has decided that actually, he's going to come and kill them all himself. ...I think. I'd figure out a way to justify it somehow.

Life returns to a very tense, horrible sort of normal afterwards, a waiting game for Orochimaru to be able to transfer again, and take over Nagato's body, which would spell doom for pretty much everyone. Everyone trains, etc etc, we skip forward to a couple months before we know Orochimaru will be able to body jump, and follow Ino on another assassination mission. The mission goes well, but she's interrupted by two new OC Akatsuki members (a ninja that is basically a slightly-weaker prime third hokage, and a kunoichi that can sing songs that break things). After a running battle, Ino finds herself overwhelmed, despite her best efforts, and using the field of mind-flowers in her mindscape, she begs for someone to come help her, even though no one will be able to reach her, and no one will even get the messages until she's already dead (because the mind-flowers have a delay over incredibly long distances). When she does so, she unknowingly begs for help from Sakura's flower, which still exists but has been connected with Nothing for last two years. At the last moment, Sakura answers her call, stepping out of the Dark Room just in time to stop the two techniques coming to kill her. Sakura effortlessly thrashes the two ninja who had tried to kill her, beating them both at their own game--using her new natural energy control to cheat on chakra costs to imitate the pseudo-hiruzen's jutsu's, and effortlessly copying the other's sound-based abilities, silencing her and then breaking roughly every bone in her body.

Ino stews in her inferiority a bit before getting over it, and also is thoroughly creeped out by Sakura's new state. Her soul has become an empty void, just like Kimiko's had been when Ino ripped away the false-self Kimiko had hid her true mind under. Sakura's eyes now appear to those who have inverted as orbs of emptiness like that contained in the Dark Room. The creeping dread is not helped by just how emotionlessly and brutally Sakura took apart the two ninjas she'd been fighting.

Something something they connect, Sakura reveals she is still herself, mostly, just More, and when we switch to Sakura's perspective, we find that her perception has gotten irrevocably fucked, making the entire world seem paper-thin and deeply fake, which she is doing her best to not let color the way she interacts with the world. With the information Ino got from the Akatsuki, they find that the Akatsuki, in preparation for Orochimaru's upcoming ability-to-make-more-of-himself, has begun their plans to abduct all of the tailed beasts, starting with Gaara.

Thus begins the Sakura-tries-to-save-a-whole-bunch-of-Jinchuuriki arc. To get to Sand in time, Sakura has to advance well past where Jiraiya had reached previously, reaching some very high resonance that steals away her ability to use the Henge jutsu, effectively permanently severing her from her original Hidden in the Petals technique.

She's still not fast enough to get to Gaara before the one-tails is ripped from him, and she finds that although the plan was to use Nagato, this time, in actuality, he's been replaced by random Akatsuki OCs (or maybe Kisame). Orochimaru has learned she's back, and is not going to risk her killing Nagato before Orochimaru can take his body. Sakura leaves other ninja to try and get back the one-tails, and she tries to put Gaara back together again. Ripping out the one-tails didn't just rupture his chakra system, it ruptured every capillary down to the cell level, leaving Gaara a leaky, very rapidly dying sieve. She super-duper disassociates, splitting her attention so far Sakura, as an individual, ceases to exist, but with Ino yelling at her to Not Fucking Leave Her Again, she manages to pull herself back together, and save Gaara's life.

She goes back to the village, and there's an arc of her facing the consequences of her disappearance, trying to reconnect with a variety of different characters. She also spends time getting her Hiraishin replaced with the new version that works everywhere, talking with Kakashi about the new chidori and rasengans he made. She talks to Gamami about her new empty-mind thing, which Gamami is kind of grumpy about Sakura beating her to, and Gamami goes to the Toad Village to try and learn more. Gamami returns with the findings that only The Great Honorable Geezer (the super old one who kinda sees the future) has done it since the Sage of Six Paths, and he left her with a super vague warning of "Do not trust your foreknowledge, because it does not want what you want", which resonates with Sakura's experience since awakening again, that she has a vague predictive sense, but it regularly pushes her towards things she doesn't want (like not chasing down and killing Kisame, even though she could probably have gotten back in time to save Gaara, etc etc). Then, at the end, Tsunade calls her in and notifies her their spies have found that the two-tails has been taken, and they're keeping Yugito alive through some bullshit, but they can't actually fix her chakra system. Against the advice of literally everyone, Sakura decides to go and try and help.

She sends a shadow clone to Cloud, convinces Darui she can help, and learns that using the technique Kanashii used to heal her during her chuunin exams, Kanashii is using B as a battery, to keep Yugito alive despite her ruptured chakra everything, but he will eventually run dry. Sakura admits she can heal Yugito, but knows she'll be extremely vulnerable while doing so, and won't be able to use a shadow clone to do it. A promises not to attack her, but Sakura rejects this, making Kanashii, the only person present she knows and whose honor she generally trusts, make the promise instead. Sakura comes in person, repeats what she did to Gaara, and when Yugito is healed enough Cloud can finish the process on their own, she is, very unsurprisingly, immediately betrayed by A with a chakra supressor which also locks her Hiraishin. Kanashii tells A not to make her fight him, and A assures her he won't, before getting Darui to knock her unconscious from behind. Sakura and A fight as Sakura tries to figure out how to escape without killing everyone, only for B to start fighting A as well, not particularly happy with A's traitorous bullshit. Sakura uses the distraction to cut off her arm and escape. As Tsunade heals her, Sakura sends back a shadow clone to collect the suppressor, wanting to know how her Hiraishin has been blocked *again*. She successfully sends a shadow clone away with the suppressor, and convinces B to let her finish healing Yugito, mostly as a fuck-you to A.

When she returns to Konoha, she finds that something (not sure what) has indicated that Akatsuki used the time she was insensate on account of being super dissociated to go after Fuu. Sakura tracks them down through some creative use of subdividing herself just like she had to to heal Yugito and Gaara to find where Fuu is being held while they pull Choumei from her body. She arrives to find Kisame and his new partner (no idea on the details of them, tbh, originally they were going to be Itachi, but I updated the earlier section to have Sasuke fight him, not Sakura, because he actually has a connection there). Throughout this battle, she has a regular internal fight between her foreknowledge sense and the "do not trust your foreknowledge" warning, that eventually ends in the foreknowledge begin to overwrite the warning, and her eventually defeating Kisame and his new partner, despite Kisame being empowered by most of Choumei's chakra, and also unleashing the full might of his Orochimaru bullshit abilities, by integrating Kakashi's chidori techniques with the chakra web she got from Tsunade, allowing her to blast past and through a Susanoo and the superhuman body of Kisame behind it. As Kisame dies, she notices one final link to an Orochimaru clone that shouldn't exist, but something in her brain overwrites her perception of it. She goes to break the statue in time for it to finish and vanish, and she briefly wonders why she didn't go for the statue first, before that worry is overwritten as well, and she begins to fix Fuu's channels.

In the final interim chapter, Tsunade searches for the remaining members of the Akatsuki now that basically only Nagato is left, hopefully weakened or maddened by Orochimaru's death. She bribes the other villages with bloodline limits, the mokuton, whatever she can get her hands on, because she also doesn't truly believe that whatever Orochimaru was planning is done, or that their math really was correct, and he is really dead. Sakura trains her new atomization technique, and finally goes to Kakashi and asks to be added to the dog contract, symbolically completing her apprenticeship, because it is the last thing he has left to teach her. The dog that shows up to present the contract says a lot of cryptic stuff about sages "We dogs... we don't *have* those." "Too obsessed with what they are, not enough attention paid to who they want to be." "We are blessed with minds to think with, and Sages, you all just want to be, instead. I’ll never understand it." She is once again beset by feelings and emotions something overwrites, including a yelled "Who are you" from beneath her skin. Jiraiya finally wakes up, and helps with the search for Orochimaru, redoing all his calculations on how his technique worked. With great difficulty, Sakura gets a meeting with the Great Old Geezer, wanting to ask him about the Rinnegan, about all the other bullshit he told her, but he insinuates that while he does know something, she knows everything she needs to know, and her reverse-summoning is broken, and she is removed from the Toad-summoning contract. In North Lightning, they find a town is missing--the very space it had occupied deleted from existence. With some very clumsy sealwork, Sakura manages to peak through into the weird extra dimension where the town was lifted to, and she sees Nagato, staring back at her, surrounded by bodies, with a Konan who smiles an awful lot like Orochimaru by his side. They should still have three weeks before he can jump bodies again, but enough blood and lives can make the rules of jutsu kind of... wonky. With a lot of assistance from both Kakashi and Jiraiya, they find a way for her to jump into the pocket dimension that Orochimaru and Nagato have hidden themselves away in. Even though she knows it's a trap, she goes to confront him, hoping she'll make it before Orochimaru gets the Rinnegan and everything gets so much worse.

She arrives, and Orochimaru, in Nagato's body, is waiting for her. He laments the pointlessness of his life's work when the Rinnegan does it all just by itself. He taunts Sakura with the knowledge that his cloning technique was something he learned because of *her*, so everything he does--becoming the ten-tails jinchuuriki, becoming the sage of the six paths reborn, razing Konoha and killing everyone in it, is all because of her. They fight, and he demonstrates that he has gotten massively more powerful with an infinite number of jutsu at his disposal, alongside all of the weird Rinnegan-specific abilities. He says he could kill her now, but he'll let her live, let her watch everything burn instead, and uses a new technique twist her hiraishin seal, and break every single one of her hiriashin anchors in the elemental nations, locking her into the pocket dimension with her. He tries to slip away, but she catches him with the use of her new disintegration root things, and she etches her new hiriashin seal into his skin, because now that it's inert, she doesn't need to worry about him flooding it with chakra, and uses that to chase him down, eventually cutting off his head. He summons the king of hell to bring himself back, and she dives in after it, only to find that the inside of the king of hell's mouth is another dimension entirely--no not space to travel to, no air to push against, no chakra to bind her roots to. She ends up using a kunai and making it heavier with an inverse of the flying technique to act as a counterweight to throw herself free. She exits, his head in her hand (alongside two rinnegan she can theoretically give to her allies if she can escape).

She tries everything, haunted by increasingly vivid images of Orochimaru killing everyone she loves, of Ino being cut up into who knows how many pieces and still not able to die. The anger and frustration builds and builds and after her who-knows-how-many-th attempt to escape the pocket dimension, her scream of fury literally rips a hole through not-space and into real space, and she tumbles down into Konoha atop Ino. Something something everyone in Konoha are getting ready for Orochimaru's attack, showing off the ways they've grown since Nagato fucked Tsunade up in front of the whole village, and Ino and Kakashi get Rinnegan implanted.

Four Orochimaru show up, all with Rinnegan of their own (the Zetsus, Mei, and someone else I'll figure out later), and together, Konoha manages to just barely fight back. When it's finally looking good, he shows up in Yagura's body, with full control over the Three Tails. Sakura blasts him away from the village, and they fight. With Kisame's water bubble technique backed up by Yagura and Isobu's affinity for water, it becomes a chakra black hole consuming and corroding any chakra she tries to use before it can do anything. She tries a whole bunch of things as he slowly crushes her, slowly suffocates her. She eventually manages to construct a web of chakra through herself, and starts to puppet her body that way. They fight, Orochimaru guarded by a massive, half-a-kilometer sphere of water, and she can't even touch him, even if she slowly learns how to escape. The defenders of Konoha slowly work their way through their Orochimaru clones, and Sakura tries to buy time, so that someone who can better deal with the water bubble's bullshit, but when there's only one left, he starts to head towards Konoha, knowing there's nothing she can do to stop him. Sakura, comes up with a truly horrible idea. If she can punch hard enough and fast enough, she could create a shockwave which could kill him where he hovers at the center, except she can't move fast enough, he stupid fleshy body gets in the way. Unless she just, decides to sacrifice it. So Sakura basically liquifies her arm and punches hard enough to create a shockwave to try and kill him. He blocks the first with some esoteric barrier, but when she sacrifices her other arm, he's torn apart. Isobu's chakra within him somehow doesn't disperse, but recedes back to the statue, wherever it's been hidden, which means any subsequent copies of Orochimaru will all be Jinchuuriki. Before she gets back, four more Orochimaru clones appear over Konoha, in the form of A, B, Darui, and a random Cloud civilian, all empowered by a different tailed beast. (Yes, this is ten total, he theoretically should not be able to make any more--if she beats these four, he should be dead for good this time. *Theoretically*.) All of them activate their chakra cloaks, and she despairs as she realizes she has to face all of them at once, because everyone else has wrung all of their last tricks dry.

As she tries and fails to fight them, while exhausted and down two arms, she realizes what she is now can't win, so she needs... more. She starts to reach for further resonances (she's currently at ninth, and will lose her ability to use ninjutsu for the wrong chakra cost at the tenth). She does it recklessly, knowing she might turn herself to stone but still it's her only option. She manages to get to thirteen, but at fourteen, she can't seem to hear anything but static. She reaches and reaches and then she finally can't keep up with her four opponents anymore, and she disintegrates.

She wakes to find herself back in the Hyuuga Dark Room, this time appearing as an infinite white void. After walking for ~forever, she finds herself before the walls of the Hyuuga compound that seem to go on forever in all directions, with only a single set of gates right in front of her. it is sealed closed, lines so thick they're almost black, and beside it, she finds Kimiko. They chat, Kimiko reveals that it is this seal that is keeping her at the thirteenth resonance, and that Kimiko removed her own copy of this seal. When Sakura asks what's behind the door, natural energy itself speaks through Kimiko, revealing that the thing that is on the opposite side of the door is it. Long ago, it says, people sealed it away, even though all it wanted to do was love them. After some deliberation, and the Orochimarus laughing as they approach Konoha, Sakura pulls the seal away. For a moment that is immediately deleted from Sakura's memory, Natural-Energy-in-Kimiko's-Body brings with all her teeth. The walls fall away, and Sakura finds herself before an innocuous shrine in the forest, with one last seal hold its doors shut. Kimiko tells her its time for her to go, and Sakura drops back out of the dark room at the walls as the Orochimarus approach. Easily going through the resonances all the way up to 20, 30, she finds that the Rinnegan is simply a pair of eyes that somehow sustain 17th resonance by themselves. At the level Sakura reaches, she can now trivially create counter-jutsu to evey jutsu the Orochimarus attempt. She easily kills A, then B, then Darui. When she taunts Orochimaru, he laughs, and asks her if he knew every jutsu in the world, why would he still be limited to 10? By the time Sakura reaches him, ten more people arrive, all with the Rinnegan in their skull, all new copies of Orochimaru.

Sakura slaughters her way through them, but no matter how many people she kills, more simply appear to take their place. She's completely at a loss until Ino sends her a message, telling her to capture one. Sakura does, with some difficulty, disabling him and tossing him back to Ino. She defends Ino for just long enough that Ino is able to consume him. When she does, her jutsu uses the synchronization Orochimaru has been using to keep all of his copies in sync to repeat it across the entire collective, and they all drop dead. Ino summons the statue to store away the however-many tailed beasts currently fighting for dominance inside of her. Something inside Sakura hides a growing maliciousness in Ino, hate in her eyes, jealousy, fury, all directed at Sakura. Ino finishes any Orochimaru that hadn't been synchronized by reverse-summoning them all before her and killing them one by one. She brutally kills the last Orochimaru, and challenges Sakura for a race back to the village.

Ino wins, on account of still having access to space-time ninjutsu, and upon arriving at the wall, she then immediately unleashes a wave that consumes the minds of everyone on the wall, causing them all to drop dead. Sakura arrives, despairing, and they fight, Ino taunting her, telling her how she's always hated her, how Sakura doesn't deserve any of the strength she gained, and that the Sage was a Yamanaka, that this power should be hers by right. Sakura ties to tell her this is Orochimaru poisoning her mind, but Ino laughs, inviting Sakura into her mind and showing her that it's not. Sakura finally corners Ino, and moments before she kills her, Ino begs for her life. It's enough to make Sakura hesitate, and Ino teleports away.

Sakura gets three minutes to mourn before Ino returns, this time the fully-realized ten-tails jinchuuriki. Her first act is to set off another wave, consuming the minds of everyone in Konoha. In the three-post training area, Ino and Sakura fight. Ino somehow manages to use jutsu without their being space for Sakura to counteract them. It throws Sakura off until she realizes that what Ino is essentially doing jutsu manually--not creating the activation sequence for a technique that already exists, but creating the effect ex nihilo from her functionally limitless chakra. Sakura is completely dominated, and can't find a single way to fight back. The moment before Ino reaches her, Gamami, who has been missing for like, several chapters, as she tries to recreate Sakura's empty-mind training, grabs her by the shoulder to pull her into the dark room, out of Ino's reach.

Gamami brings Sakura to the Toad's pocket dimension, calling back to Shima's prophecy way back when, about coming to the Toads when she truly has lost all hope. As Gamami and Sakura approach the mountain where Gamamaru resides, Sakura is assaulted by what she'll eventually come to realize are his memories of meeting the Sage of the Six Paths. It tells the story of the Sage being exiled from his clan (the Yamanaka, as Ino had claimed) for his weakness, and their growing bond. Gamamaru is similarly exiled for his part in creating senjutsu for the first time, and removing a seal from seventeen different peoples. (Foxes, toads, snakes, slugs, etc.) It then begins to hunt them to extinction, and Gamami (and his sixteen co-conspirators) were blamed. It follows Hagoromo's growth from a random nobody to a sage as he follows in Gamamaru's footsteps, and then advances far beyond him. It shows him developing enough power to fight the Ten-Tails back to save the Toad village, and disappearing like Sakura did. He eventually returns just in time to stop another attack, and he is the one who created the pocket dimensions of the various peoples, to keep them safe from the ten-tails, who he still was not able to defeat. Hagoromo fixates on the final seal, the one Sakura saw on the door of the shrine, but never manages to remove it, and truly master the final resonances of sage mode. Eventually, he is forced to go for broke when the ten-tails learns to slip between dimensions, and goes on its genocidal rampages once again. Hagoromo comes to the mad realization that it is his own chakra that is preventing him from crossing the final step. The true final step requires ridding yourself of chakra, letting your body be fueled exclusively by natural energy. (This is why him being a Yamanaka is important--they can survive without chakra.) The Ten-tails, seemingly more intelligent than it has been before, kills him while he is powerless, and Gamamaru is forced to fight the ten-tails alone. It calls him a traitor, over and over again, until Hagoromo returns, now the fully-realized sage of six paths, powered exclusively by natural energy.

In the real world, interspersed with this, Sakura finds Gamamaru's dead body in the center of a massive ritual circle, and not a single living Toad anywhere in the hidden dimension. It is a space-time ritual circle, and was used to shunt all the toads forward some amount of time into the future, to protect them from Ino's wrath when she rips her way into the Toad's dimension. Sakura realizes what Gamamaru's memories were meant to teach her, and she tries to repeat what he did, only to find herself pointlessly dying, just like every other sage who tried it before her. Ino arrives, shaking the fabric of the dimension, and the mountain comes apart around them, a rock falling and killing her before the lack of chakra can do it for her.

She sees one last memory of Gamamaru's, of him returning to the home he shares with Hagoromo. It's revealed that when Hagoromo sealed the ten-tails away inside of itself, natural energy forsook him, entirely, leaving him all but powerless. After he distribute the ten-tails chakra into nine tailed beasts, after the nine races they failed to save, he became truly powerless. He smells blood, and finds Hagoromo dead, killed by his two disciples--the Uzumaki, who he taught his ninjutsu, and the Hagoromo, who he taught his mind jutsu. When he picks up the Sage's body and tries to hunt down the two unfilial disciples, the dark room doesn't spit him out in their compounds, but back in Mount Myouboku, which it never again lets him leave. Do not trust your foreknowledge, for it does not want what you want is repeated, and deleted from Sakura's memory.

Sakura finds herself back inside the Dark Room, before the Shrine. Kimiko explains that she needed to be without chakra, and killed by another's hand to get here, two basically impossible conditions to reach, the reason no one has managed this since Hagoromo. When Sakura tries to ask Kimiko (or the thing in Kimiko's skin) why it let Hagoromo died, it asks her if she really has the time to ask questions like that. She finds she's already pulled the seal, even as something within her screams for her to stop. She finds herself in a theater, and in the center of it is Kimiko, bound in endless chains. It's at this point that I hope the reader would recognize that I have been describing Kimiko as Kaguya, and that this figure at the center of the room, bound in endless chains, is Kaguya, and the entire time we've know Kimiko, she's just been a puppet of Kaguya's will. Kaguya promises to give her the power to bring back everyone she lost, while something in Sakura continues to rebel, louder and louder. Sakura steps back as Kaguya lurches forward and tries to grab her. Sakura gives her arc phrase: "My name is Haruno Sakura," in answer to the screaming inside her, but this time, it's the wrong answer, and she finds herself in Kaguya's clutches. "That's right--my beautiful honest daughter--just like I made you." Sakura becomes fully awakened to the power of the Sage of Six Paths, and is shunted back into the real world.

Switch to Ino's perspective, followed by a reversal of the curb-stomp of before. We see Ino's fraying mental state, and it's clear that she really was poisoned by Orochimaru's mind. We also see that Sakura... isn't acting like herself. In Ino's desperation, she reaches to the ten-tails, and it reaches back. It reveals to her long-dead technique the Rinnegan couldn't know, because the Rinnegan is just all of the techniques Kaguya allows. She learns the name of the ten-tails, Izanagi, as it wakes more and more at seeing Sakura, a near-fully realized avatar of Kaguya. Eventually, Ino finishes the technique Izanagi is showing her, and completes what is essentially a self-powered sage mode. Braiding your chakra with itself to give it strength, rather than with Natural Energy. It makes her much stronger, especially as she climbs up the resonances. It pushes Sakura harder, until the weird otherness of Sakura fades away, and Sakura's personality and fighting style come to the fore once more, which seals Ino's fate. In a fight of two Shinobi, Sakura just does not lose. Izanagi revealing that her power would have been enough for Hagoromo, but wasn't close to enough for Sakura. The further she braids her chakra, the more mistakes she's makes, the more her mind and body begin to twist, slowly beginning to twist her into the shape of the Ten-Tails, just like Izanagi had done to himself, so long ago.

Sakura, desperate to keep this from happening, eventually manages to rip the Ten-Tails and Ino apart, incidentally rupturing Ino's chakra channels, and unmaking her braided chakra, returning her to human form at the cost of all of her chakra. In that moment, we see Izanagi's true form, red-haired and blue-eyed, like the prototypical Uzumaki, before Sakura rips him apart into the nine-tailed beasts, sealing them awya in massive seals she effortlessly creates around the graveyard Konoha has become (somehow they got back, I'd figure it out), calcifying Izanagi's down into the demonic statue of the outer path.

Ino rips her coils apart to try and get her chakra back, and Sakura kais it away, until Ino is left completely mortal and human. Sakura taunts her with her weakness, guiding her to pull on natural energy, try to use it as her own chakra, and the moment she does, Sakura kills her, sending Ino into the dark room, just as Ino had sent Sakura.

Unlike Sakura, who found Kimiko here, Ino sees a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman she recognizes from Izanagi's memories as Izanami, the progenitor of the Yamanaka clan. She info-dumps to Ino about Izanami and Izanagi's original battle against Kaguya, using the power she granted them to seal her away and free humanity from her tyranny. Ino tries to consume her, but when she reaches out for her mind, she finds it rotting and diseased, Izanami millenia dead but still walking, still haunting the Yamanaka line, hiding from Kaguya's sight. She latches onto Ino's mind, however, and blazes some kind of seal into her soul before finally fading away.

She begins to pull on the seal sealing the shrine closed, desperate for power, and it's heavy, like she's pulling for a hundred thousand. She enters the theater, and hundreds of thousands of chains coming undone. Izanami appears to try and stop it, but Kaguya easily destroys her before rising from her pedestal, declaring that she is finally free.

Ino is kicked back to the real world, and is immediately assaulted by the grief of what she has done as all of the souls she consumed are ejected, forming bodies out of the overwhelming natural energy all around them. She and Sakura reunite, and there is a creeping sense of wrongness that culminates when the body that is clearly Orochimaru smiles like a Hyuuga and declares his freedom. The deleted thoughts grow more frequent, and Ino and Sakura's egos are completely wiped away by the Kaguya as she begins to form from a super gross fleshy fusion of all of the hundreds of thousands of people that Ino incidentally unsealed. When Ino's ego is fully supressed, the "unholy seal" Izanami burned into her activates, and she bursts back into existence. This starts to repeat, over and over again, and Ino can't think of a way she could beat Kaguya, who is basically a literal God. She tries to wake Sakura up, but Sakura is fully gone, erased by Kaguya. Eventually, she goes for broke and basically transplants the seal Izanami implanted in her into Sakura's mind. It's two complicated to replicate, not even Izanami did it, simply transplanting it from her mind to Ino's, and now Ino's to Sakura's. Without the protection of the seal, Ino is wiped away, but at the same moment, Sakura wakes up.

She immediately begins to die of chakra exhaustion, and natural energy continually tries to flood through her, tries to return her to the empty state Kaguya needs her to be in, and the seal continues to repel it, even as something beneath her skin screams at her over and over. Sakura realizes, finally, that the thing screaming beneath her skin isn't screaming with too many mouths to count, but just one. Outer Sakura is reaching out from within her, and Sakura remembers the dogs, their hatred for sages, their self-determination. When Outer Sakura asks her name one last time, Sakura answers not with "My name is Haruno Sakura" but "It's whatever I want it to be", and Sakura inverts, one last time.

Sakura finds herself back on the little knoll, and proceeds to steal a shitton of Kaguya's chakra, all the limitations on using stolen chakra from advancing through the resonances now gone. When Kaguya wisens up, she steals it from Ino's mind through the flower still connecting their minds, until Kaguya stops trying to overwrite Ino, too, giving her a chance to maybe invert like Sakura did. Sakura returns to the world, and proceeds to fight Kaguya. Kaguya attacks with massive natural phenomena, lightning bolts, lava, fire that is unbelievably hot. Sakura tries to use jutsus, but without Kaguya's consent, not jutsu works, no counterjutsu require, but Sakura never really used many jutsu to begin with. She works out how Ino teleported, and uses that and all the tehniques she's learned to fight back, slowly stealing more and more of Kaguya's chakra. Just when it seems she's about to win, Kaguya sacrficies the nine tailed beasts to release all the rest of the seals on her being, going from 1% of her power, to 100%. The battle turns, Kaguya now able to easily rip her chakra back out of Sakura, before proceeding to go on an abusive mother rant about how Sakura and all humans are very ungrateful, etc etc. She enters Sakura's mind, tries to use weird mind jutsus and chakra receivers to brainwash her, and Sakura just barely manages to drive her out by asserting her absolute sovereignty over her own mind. She works out that if the world is made out of natural energy, which is just Kaguya's chakra, maybe then Sakura is made of Sakura's chakra? She succeeds, her hand dissolving into chakra, and finds her chakra control dramatically improved, beceause it is simply an extension of herself. Because "Chakra control is not about accepting the world as it is. Accepting yourself as it is. It is about asserting control over yourself. Not being who you are, but who you want to be." Sakura tries to remake herself out of her chakra, but finds herself unable--without access to the Mokuton, she can't remake flesh from chakra. Instead, she builds a shell in the shape of a hand with no flesh and blood required. Once that succeeds, she proceeds to do this for entire body like a maniac. The last thing she realizes before she exits her mind and rejoins the normal flow of time, is imitate the resonance technique Ino showed. She manages it easily, on account of chakra control being her superpower.

They fight, Sakura using her now-chakra-made body to fight Kaguya as Kaguya uses unmaking jutsu no mortal has ever managed, which owers Sakura's maximum chakra capacity each time it unmakes any of her chakra. Ino slowly begins to come to her senses, and starts to fight Kaguya from the inside. Sakura continues to weave her chakra into higher and higher resonance. Eventually, Ino is ejected from Kaguya, and Sakura manages to trap her in a cage made of her own now-very-hard chakra, abusing the fact Kaguya is a god but is fundamentally an amateur at fighting, while Sakura is a ninja. When Kaguya is pressed to the limit, she unmakes the world, dissolving it all back into her own chakra, and returning it all to herself. Sakura manages to preserve Ino by wrapping Ino in a protective shield made of her own chakra.

They continue to fight in the void, and Ino asserts she can control Kaguya's mind if she can reach her. They fight towards that, and Ino gets control, but before they manage anything, Ino's chakra bottoms out, unable to maintain the jutsu for very long. To save Ino's life, Sakura unmakes her body into Ino-chakra, and then rebuilds Ino a chakra body using her own chakra control. Their new plan is for Sakura to manually regenerate Ino's chakra while Ino controls Kaguya with her clan's technique. Kaguya resists this technique two more times before Sakura sacrifices almost all of her chakra to get close enough to give Ino another try. This time, it works, and Ino's technique holds, gaining control of Kaguya and her functionally god-like abilities.

Ino uses Kaguya's abilities to reverse the damage to Sakura's chakra capacity done by Kaguya's unmaking attacks, and together, they create a seal that will permanently transplant Kaguya's abilities into Ino. This takes a very, very long time, in which Ino and Sakura get to bond and maybe kiss a little. Told through Ino's perspective, it becomes increasingly clear that Ino does not expect herself to live through this. They perform the transplant, Ino permanently gains Kaguya's abilities. In the moment Sakura isn't paying attention before Ino remakes the world as it was before Kaguya destroyed it, Ino sucker-punches Sakura, trying to kill her before she notices what's happening. Here we learn Ino's plan is to seal herself away as she recreates the world (and revives sakura, of course). Any externally-created seal must necessarily have some leak, by esoteric universal laws, but if Ino were to seal herself, then she could make the seal permanent. Ino doesn't trust herself with this power, so she's going to seal hereslf away, and she knows Sakura would try and stop her.

Sakura is, of course, not dead, with just wisps of chakra left enough to maintain herself, and she basically asserts that if Ino's so worried about going crazy and killing everyone, then she'll just show her that Sakura will always be there to stop her. They fight one last time, Ino with Kaguya's full powers, this time channeled through an actual shinobi, and Sakura with... nothing but her Sakura-ness. I'm not sure exactly how I want to have Sakura win, but I think it will be something like an infinite resonance with her own chakra, which would simultaneously reduce her chakra to zero, but also like, somehow underflow and give her functionally infinite chakra. This lets them fight on even footing, and Sakura proceeds to absolutely beat Ino, even as she pulls on the collective knowledge and prowess of the entirety of the Elemental Nations.

The story would end with Tsunade waking up, surrounded by all of the other people Ino ate, with all of Sakura's abilities floating around in her head from the short amount of time they were both Kaguya. She makes some joking complaint about Sakura sharing her abilities to freely, to which Sakura would just grin back at her, while somewhere in the back, we can see Asuma, making it clear even the people Ino consumed pre Orochimaru were still revived.

Or... something!

If you're wondering why this isn't getting written even though I clearly have so many details already mapped out that's becauase like, I dunno, this fic is becoming a hard thing for me to work on or think about, it's so big. Anyways, the biggest problem is the Itachi and Madara fights, which need to be written from scratch. Everything else I can probably cludge together from my rough drafts (which is why there's so much detail here), but those need to be written from scratch and that's really hard for me to do with this story in particular right now.

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