Collapse, or Satori is letting of steam by writing crazyfic.

Collapse, or Satori is letting of steam by writing crazyfic.

Unread postby Satori » August 6th, 2011, 2:48 am

"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually -from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint -it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey...stuff."
-The Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who, "Blink"



It was only the foresight of a Citadel medical technician who specialized in PTSD that saved Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha from being reduced to clouds of fine red mist by an absolutely furious Sakura Haruno. Suzie Dermott had instilled psionic conditioning into her patient, carefully laid down to slowly weaken with time -wouldn't do to give her a permanent mental block- that dampened her rage reaction. Instead, the unfortunate victim of Sakura's ire was a tree that had the misfortune of being in training ground forty, which was quickly smashed to so much pulp by automatic fire from her SLS-7 gauss pistol.

The two shinobi gaped at the tree that had just been destroyed, and turned to stare at the girl wa was supposed to be their teammate. The strange, alien looking weapon was hardly the only thing to stand out. The cold eyes featuring the notorious "thousand yard stare" common to so many veteran ninja were definitely out of place on the face of 12 year old genin-trainee Sakura Haruno. Neither of them got the chance to ask what was going on before being preempted by the girl's angry rant. "Nine subjective years. Nine fucking years of psionic chirurgery and psychiatric counseling to put my psyche back into something resembling functional order, and it turns out that the string collapse that shattered my mind was caused by my-" that the word was a profanity was clear, even if it didn't sound like anything that had any right to be coming out of human vocal cords "-teamates!"

The two shinobi had the good sense to step back and raise their hands in placating gestures. But Sakura was far from done. "What the felgercarb did the two of you think you were doing? I expect this sort of idiocy from Naruto, but you, Sasuke, should have had the sense to realize that time travel is fething dangerous. And how the hell did you manage that anyway?"

"A sealing array the size of large house," Naruto admitted, warily. "Even then I couldn't crack the mass issue, so I sent only mental imprints."

Sakura blinked. "That shouldn't have been enough power to cause a string collapse - are you sure you didn't do a mass shift?"

"If I could have moves mass, I wouldn't have needed the mental imprint."

"Which is basically mindraping your past self. Because we didn't have enough of that going on." Sakura's weapon was now pointed squarely at Naruto's face.

"Hey, my past self would have agreed to the sacrifice, and Sasukes past self... well it's not like his mental state could have gotten worse" It was the wrong thing to say, but then Naruto always had a fantastic talent for that.

"Speaking of mental states, do you have any idea what it's like to have entire lifetimes' worth of memories shoved into your 15 year old head?"

Sasuke finally spoke up, his voice sympathetic. "I had Itachi's memories of killing my family forcibly pressed onto my memory, more than once. But I know that can't compare to a lifetime." He actually seemed contrite. "Sakura, I'm sorry."

"107."

"What?"

"One hundred and bleeding seven fucking lifetimes burned into my soul by large scale string collapse. Entire parallel instances destroyed, because someone thought tampering with the fabric of time was a good idea." That was punctuated by a glare. "107 people with phase harmonics close enough to mine to co-resonate, which means I got to feel what it's like to be torn apart by arealistic forces 108 times. I would have simple suffered cascading existence failure, except that I was fate-anchored to whatever was the cause of the collapse somehow."

Sasuke understood first. "Your destiny was intertwined with ours and fate wouldn't let you fade away into the void. So you came back with us when we undertook this mission. With 107 other Sakura's in tow."

She nodded, her anger temporarily drowned out by ocean of painful memories. "Not all of them were even named Sakura. But enough were. I remember raising a child with you, a beautiful little girl we named Tsukiko" Ignoring Sasuke's shocked glance at that, she rambled on,. "I remember avenging Naruto by putting a kunai through your remaining left eye. I remember dying with your katana in my kidney, still plaintively asking you 'why you left us'. I remember a dozen other histories with you." She stared at Sasuke, but he couldn't meet his eyes. "Do you know how hard it is just having you, both of you in front of me?" Her eyes zeroed in on Naruto now. "There's a fragment of me that wants to kiss you like I never had the chance to before dying at Sasori's hands. There's part of me that wants to slap you for saving the world but leaving me alone after. There's part of me that wants to put a incendiary round through your chest for murdering Ino. Those are all parts of me, screaming in the frail structure that holds my mind together. I'm not exactly the person who was your teammate. Not anymore."

"You're Sakura enough for me," Naruto promised, showing a rare moment of sensitivity to others. It didn't last long. "I don't understand, though. My time travel seal shouldn't have been any more stressful on time/space than the Hirashin."

"It might just have been the trigger for a Nagato event," Sakura told him, pulling herself out of her reverie to deal with business.

"So it's not my fault then!"

"You shouldn't have been tampering with time to begin with! There are dangers you couldn't even begin to imagine, let along guard against!"

"We didn't have much choice," Sasuke said, quietly, in contrast to his teammates' shouting. "Madara manged to collect all the biju except the Kuuubi and activate the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Only my possession of the Eien no Mangekyō Sharingan allowed me to resist, and I could only block the effect in a limited area."

"Okay, wait, Infinite Tsukuyomi? What the outer dark does that do, turn the genjutsu real?"

"No, Sakura, you mistake me-" Sasuke started to explain, even as Naruto cut in.

"No, it was the Izanagi technique that-"

"-by infinite, I mean it literally covered the whole world, and only a small are around me remained free."

"-allowed Madara to turn illusion into reality. Some sort of retroactive editing of events, I think."

Naruto suddenly found himself nose to nose with Sakura, the taller but notably slimmer girl somehow holding him up with one hand. "Reality revision? The big bad who apparently conquered the world at some indeterminate point in the future had the ability to change reality retroactively, and you didn't think this was important to mention when I talked about 107 parallel instances collapsing?"

"Ehehe. Sorry?"

"Okay, guys, let's try to focus here," Sasuke said, playing the peacemaker, "If Madara's unconventional spacetime Jutsu is what's responsible for this 'string collapse' thing, we're all on the same side here, right?"

Sakura let Naruto drop. "Brane walls can normally deal with temporal effects up to recursion attacks. But if they've been attenuated by repeated reality revision, any space-time jutsu could provide the spark that triggers the disaster. Temporal effects like that can propagate acausally. I need to report back to command. Now." She retrieved a small silver glob seemingly from out of thin air and let it float in air before her.

"Command?" Naruto asked.

"You don't think I survived ego resonance cascade on my own did you?" Sakura asked. "I was... saved by a inter-instance pan-human group, called the Citadel. The string collapse already has caused repercussions in 11 non-parallel instances, so after fixing me up, and putting me through Phase Agent training, they sent me back to tray and patch up the problem. I'm afraid that's going to have to take precedence over your mission."

Sasuke shrugged. "We're probably going to have to kill Madara as part of this patching up business anyway," he pointed out.

Sakura nodded in acknowledgement, but her attention was on her communication device. "Petal calling Jade. I have a complication with the mission..."

~*~

AN: Basically inspired by all the fanfics where Naruto or Sasuke timetravel and fix things while poor Sakura is left behind (in all senses of the word). But with the timey-wimey ball and all... well, you don't think it's that easy do you? Surely Naruto can't be the first one to think of trying to travel back in time to fix things (let's face it, he is rather stupid a lot of the time). Yes, this is a 'take that' kind of fic.

Sakura's profanity is from various sci-fi series, but the teachnobabble is just me. In her own personal timeline, Sakura was near the beginning of Shipuden when the String Collapse did the whammy on her, thus making her 15 at the, erm, time.

Oh, and are any of the people who offered to beta for me still interested? Aside from Kirai (Thanks man, I appreciate the help).
Satori
 
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Re: Collapse, or Satori is letting of steam by writing crazy

Unread postby LifeOfGesture » August 6th, 2011, 8:00 pm

I like this. I like this a lot. I'm a little surprised by how well Naruto and Sasuke took Sakura's lifetimes thing.
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