Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Sakura tried not to stare at the scene, but it kept drawing her eye. The way her ink doppelganger stared down in a satisfied way, as the little Sai weakly started twitching. She tore her gaze away and found herself staring into Sai’s eyes. Sai watched her for a second, with a dull almost sad expression on his face.
Slowly his mouth crinkled up into one of his smiles. “I’m really quite sorry Sakura... I should have been willing to fight… willing to die, rather than betray you… This seems like the best way… the only way to make things right.”
Sakura looked down at her hand that was holding the sword. Its edge gleamed in the dim light. It was so sharp… It would be so easy… Just the tiniest little whisper and it would be done.
A day ago… Hell, an hour ago, she was ready to fight Sai to the death. If she had met him on a street corner, she would have killed him in an instant.
And here he was, kneeling at her feet... his dark eyes staring up at her. He knelt there looking tired and resigned. Sai was hiding it well, but he looked more apprehensive than she had ever seen him. There was nothing to stop her from drawing the sword across his unprotected neck. No one would even blame her after what he had done...
Sakura had the sudden flash of another pair of eyes, dark onyx ones, boring into hers. “Sakura,” Sasuke’s voice echoed in her mind. “You’ve been very quiet... What do you think?” They were surrounded by the rest of the Konoha eleven. Familiar faces showing distrust, disgust and open hatred… but somewhere, hidden in those eyes of Sasuke’s was a plea. “Do you think you could trust me?”
Goddammit.
In his own stupid, stubborn, pig headed way… Sasuke was also asking for forgiveness.
Goddammit.
In her mind’s eye she leaned over Sasuke on the examining cot, Sasuke the traitor, Sasuke the murderer. “It’s true that not many people here feel like we can trust you,” she had said to the blindfolded Uchiha during her medical exam / interrogation, “But maybe... maybe you deserve the chance to prove us wrong.”
Dammit dammit dammit… This was stupid… this was so incredibly stupid… She had no evidence to prove Sai was telling the truth, nothing but his word and his story, but she found herself making this decision anyway.
Sakura leaned forward. Sai took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Stick out your tongue,” she said in a harsh voice she didn’t even know she had.
Sai’s eyes fluttered open. “Excuse me? What are you hoping to accomplish by…”
“Stick out your tongue goddammit!” she roared, pressing the flat of the tanto blade against his neck. She was praying she wasn't going to regret doing this. It was idiotic. It was insane.
Sai cast an uneasy eye down at the sword, but complied. Sakura leaned closer to study the seal. “Cutting ith ofth wont ethect the theal,” Sai slobbered as Sakura gave his tongue a tentative prod. “Ith been thried by others, alwayth with dithathterouth effecth.”
“Just be quiet and for God’s sake hold still,” Sakura growled. She moved her free hand to hover centimeters above the seal… sitting there, quiet and deadly… a series of six fat lines.
Sakura reached out with her fingertips and started to gently explore the edges of the ominous purple brand. She could feel the throb of chakra as it sat there waiting to dispense punishment and death.
Disarming a seal was a lot like disarming a mechanical trap. Both hold a lot of pent up energy waiting to be released by some specific trigger. Only in the case of a seal, instead of a pressure plate, of a tripwire, the seal’s trigger could be a command, or a phrase, or an injection of chakra.
Sakura knew she couldn’t use an active chakra echo to scan the seal, putting too much energy into the system had a high risk of activating the seal… and she wasn’t going to spare Sai’s life from the sword just to kill him by accident. Besides, depending on how the seal was constructed, there was even the risk of a possible explosion.
It was a modified teragram seal. Sakura flipped through her mental rolodex and brought up a score of crumbling scrolls from the Uzumaki clan, and a set of notes copied out by a mysterious author who scribbled love poetry to a nameless redheaded woman in all of his margins. After a brief moment of comparing images, she knew what she was up against.
The Uzumaki clan’s masters of seals would have called this a lattice seal. Six layers of sealing code and calligraphy packed so dense that each appeared to be a solid block of ink. The mystery note taker commented that it was one of the less elegant seals and went on about the artistic nature of the standard, off the cuff, hand made sealing jutsu. He despaired on the lattice seal’s utilitarian nature for a few lines, but did admit it had two major advantages.
It was extremely easy to apply in a combat situation, and it was very difficult to decode and disarm. To the Uzumaki clan, who used fuinjutsu in battle the way other clans used ninjutsu, it was considered a basic yet effective method of attack. They were easy to master and utilize in a high stress situation, like combat. Several of the books she had memorized referred to them as a ‘Silver class’ sealing jutsu.
All of the books on sealing jutsu in the Fifth Hokage’s library had belonged to Tsunade-sama’s grandmother, so they were not quite up to date. The newer ones made passing mention of a ‘Golden class’ sealing jutsu that was under development. A seal that was supposedly unbreakable. A seal that required a second seal, a key seal, if you will, to release it. That particular scroll never said why, or what this seal was going to be used for, only that it was a gift from the head of the Uzumaki clan to his eldest daughter.
Sakura had read them all. She had all the information that existed today on how to disarm one of these seals. She could easily read every line, every word as if the book in question was propped up right in front of her eyes… She had just never found the time to practice them before… and now… there wasn’t any time. Sai had insisted he was alone, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some Root backup squad keeping tabs on him, dogging his steps.
Sai shifted nervously as Sakura traced a fingernail on the seal. “Thakura… I would rather…”
“Sai? If you move again, I’ll kill you.”
Sai blinked. “That wath the general idea… It is jutht that…” Sai stopped and gently pulled his tongue away from her fingers. ”Sakura, if you truly wish to kill me, I would much rather you just used the sword and gave me a quick death. It’s significantly less painful than choking… I know I have done you a great wrong in recent days but I feel you owe me at least…”
Sai’s voice abruptly stopped in a croak as pressure from the tanto was laid across his throat. “Shut up,” Sakura snarled. “You did wrong me… but I’m not going to let you die, not here and not now… Oh no... That would be too easy. You are going to repay every last hurt you did to me. You say the Shimura clan turned you into a weapon to use against your friends? Well I’m going to turn you back against them. I’m going to pick your brain for every last sordid detail about them and Root… and I am going to bury them with it!” Sakura threateningly leaned forward during her angry tirade, and Sai started to lean back. “They all think they’ve gotten me beat. Those assholes think: ‘Oh look there, it’s just Sakura! She used to be so high and mighty, assistant to the Hokage, but really, what can she do now? She’s just a broken useless girl… Don’t move I said!” she barked, and Sai immediately sprung back to the upright position. “Now, stick out your tongue and leave it there!” Sakura exhaled, flexed her fingers, and began to try to disarm the seal.
Step one: First find the receiver. Every seal that was remotely activated, had a piece of code that was keyed to a particular command or chakra. For example an explosive tag had a very simple script to notice a sudden flux of energy, like what would happen when a shinobi directed chakra at it in a focused manner. The typical tag also had sections to allow for activation by a tripwire, or fire, or some other kind of physical damage.
As far as seals went, explosive tags were extremely crude. They were just a switch holding back a tremendous amount of stored energy, like that one little pebble that is preventing an avalanche. This tetragram binding seal would be much more complex. It had to allow for remote activation and sensory activation, like whenever Sai said a forbidden word. The receiver would have to have multiple contacts with other portions of the sealing code. This seal wasn’t just a linchpin, it had to have some logic functions too, and logic functions meant it needed a power source.
There, she found the block of sealing code for the receiver, or rather what she hoped was the block of sealing code for the receiver. It appeared to have an ‘antennae’ node, like what you’d find in the standard explosive tag. Hoping that the designer of the seal wasn’t clever enough to build in false trails and specific booby traps, she began to ferret out various chakra channels and trace them, one by one, to other parts of the seal.
The first lead to an inscribed command that she assumed would induce massive swelling. It was familiar of a medical sealing jutsu inscribed on a patch to produce an antihistamine reaction… so she was fairly confident with that guess.
The second chakra channel went to an enormously complex block of encrypted sealing code. Bits were referenced and cross referenced and linked together in huge spaghetti like chains. She studied it for a while and couldn’t make head or tails of it. In the end Sakura just went on, hoping that that section was just the code block holding the list of Sai’s forbidden topics.
The third line went right into the chakra reservoir. Sakura sat back and admired the cleverness of it. The reservoir was siphoning directly off of Sai’s chakra network, preventing the need to constantly recharge the seal. That wasn’t in the original Uzumaki design. Someone had been very clever with this. She held out her fingers and gently touched that part of the seal, probing to see how much chakra was stored within. Sai winced as her chakra echoes caressed that throbbing pocket of malevolent energy.
“Sai?” Sakura asked quietly, her eyes closed. “Do you have a senbon, a kunai, and some wire I could borrow? I realize I told you not to move, but if you reach for those items slowly, I think I can contain myself from killing you.”
Sai did move slowly. Then he froze as she tucked the tanto blade under her arm, so she could use two hands to loop the wire through the kunai handle. There was a splash as the tossed the knife in the running water of the wide sewer canal.
The other end of the wire she coiled about the senbon needle. Sakura exhaled again to steady her hands and poised the point just above the seal’s chakra reservoir. “Don’t move,” she said firmly. “If you move too much here, I might trigger the seal, and then you’ll die, and it won’t be quick… Are you ready?”
Sai gave the tiniest nod. Sakura inhaled. “Okay… One… Two…” She jabbed the needle down. Sai flinched, but not enough to matter.
Chakra flowed down the wire in a thin line of blue fire, arcing down into the water where it was pulled away by the current. It was the only way she could think of to drain away the stored chakra with no tools and no medical assistance.
Sakura wiped the sweat from her brow and gave a cursory exam of Sai’s throat. Still normal… no swelling… good. It looked like the first part of this operation was a success. “This has got to be the most insane medical procedure I have ever tried,” Sakura grumbled under her breath. “Much worse than the time I tried to filter all that poison out of Kankuro’s internal organs… what the hell am I thinking?”
“Well I would athume…” started Sai, the needle bobbing as he spoke.
“Be quiet,” barked Sakura. “I can’t be distracted right now.” She stared at the wire in silence. After a few minutes, the blue glow in the wire began to fade, and Sakura found herself breathing a little easier. “Okay,” she breathed, mostly to herself, “it looks like I’ve drained the chakra reservoir that was powering the seal. That should give me a little bit of time if I mess up and trigger something.” She looked down at Sai’s confused face. “The seal could still house a trap somewhere…” There were a few minutes of silence as Sakura traced out the chakra lines connecting to the reservoir and delicately cut them away.
Sai gave a short grunt. “Can you remove it?” he asked, a tremor of hope creeping into his voice. “I was alwayth told that it couldn’t be removed without killing the bearer.”
Sakura shrugged, and pulled her hands away, wiping at her face again. “We’ll see… But right now, I want you to do something for me… In that artist story you were just telling me, what was the name of the master’s lieutenant?”
“Thakura…” started Sai with a pained look on his face.
“Just try it,” she insisted.
Sai took a deep breath. “Tamago,” he said and winced with anticipation.
Using her chakra echoes, Sakura ‘saw’ the dense block of coded script send out a tiny pulse that fizzled and died on the severed connector en route to the reservoir. Sai looked up in wonder. “His name ith Tamago,” he said slowly with growing glee. “I can thay it… hith name is Tamago.”
Sakura couldn’t help but give him a grim smile. “Was Tamago… He’s dead, remember?… Now be quiet, I’ve got a long ways to go before I’m finished working on this.”
*******
After freeing Sai from his seal, the pair of them sat down and had a long talk. They had agreed that it would probably be best for the both of them if Sai were to just ‘disappear’ for a while… After all, if the Shimura clan found out that he was not only alive, but free to spill all of their secrets, they would be moving heaven and earth to silence him. Well… to be perfectly honest, Sakura had done most of the talking and Sai had done the agreeing… She wasn’t one hundred percent certain that she could trust him, but he was certainly acting like he would jump off a bridge if she told him to.
Having no place else to reliably go, Sakura returned with him to the Inuzuka compound to find her parents. Tsume Inuzuka, the head of the clan and Kiba’s mother, had already granted the ‘disgraced’ Harunos a place to stay, and Mebuki and Kizashi were settling in, despite the fact that they both stuck out like a pair of perfumed pomeranians amongst all the half feral dogs and even wilder culture of the Inuzuka clan.
She was definitely not happy about having Sai as an extra guest. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing bringing this little shit into my den?” Tsume bristled when Sakura walked through the front gate with Sai in tow. “It kind of defeats the whole point of trying to keep those Root assholes and their lackeys off of our land, if you’re just going to invite them in pretty as you please… Besides… wasn’t he trying to kill you earlier today?”
It took all of Sakura’s persuasive skills and the better part of four hours to slowly bring her around to the idea that the information in Sai’s head would be worth more than the satisfaction Tsume would get out of pummeling a known Root agent. She had to tell the Head of the Inuzuka clan Sai’s story twice to convince her that he wasn’t in control of his own actions during his betrayal of Sakura. It took both her and Kiba together to convince Tsume that Sakura might actually be skilled enough to successfully remove a Root controlling seal.
At the end of it all they wore the Inuzuka clan chief down. “Fine,” Tsume said with a unbelieving snort. “You want him that bad, he can stay here. But he’s not a guest. You two can feed him and clean up after him. If he’s playing us, and it turns out he’s a Root spy… we’re going to make sure he really disappears.” She turned and focused her angry stare at Sai. “You hear that artist boy? The first sign of trouble out of you and you are dog chow! You got that?”
Sai nodded once. “Perfectly clear.”
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