As she had expected, Gaara’s mind was a desert, currently in a sandstorm. There was a giant sand monster that was tied with traditional sealing rope to the ground, and it roared to the sky. “Blood! Give me more blood!” It shouted, laughing maniacally.
Hm, what animal is that? It kind of reminds her of those tanuki statues, not the appearance of real tanuki, but the fantasy version with the buddha-like body, with the overlarge testicles conveniently ignored as a sanitized depiction. The tail was a bit long though.
Still, she reached out with her telepathic senses and tried to figure out a good angle of approach. What is here besides the obvious problem? Solutions are typically somewhat close at hand, after all.
“Bloo- wait.” The animate tanuki statue paused. Could it sense her? “Ninshu?” What? “No, it doesn’t feel right. There’s no Yang.” The statue looked around, tail lashing like an annoyed cat. “Who are you? Where are you?” Tanya withdrew her extended senses, having found something. “Running away, are you?” He asked smugly, pleased with her cowardice. “You should! For I am the One-Tail, Shukaku! All should fear my might!” He paused, grunting as if realizing his mistake. “Boy! Why aren’t you feeding me more blood? I, your mother, want more!”
Okay, that should buy her some time. She wasn’t able to put Gaara into a trance like she could if this was her previous life, so hopefully Sasuke will be able to keep her body safe, and Naruto would be capable of staying alive with clone spam and that giant toad he mentioned he had up his sleeve.
Still, in this half-buried stone building… was a small child. Gaara, of course, but younger, about seven years old. “Hello.” Tanya said, putting on a smile.
“Huh?” Asked the child, turning to face her. He had a ball in his hand, and he anxiously turned it over in his hands. “Who are you?” He asked, “Do I need to kill you, too?”
“I’m a friend.” Tanya replied, “I’d prefer if no one dies today. Even you.” The boy clearly had plenty of blood on his hands. Idly, she put a time bubble around the both of them, the mental technique functioning thankfully perfectly within his mind, even when it didn’t outside in reality. “Have you had to kill a lot of people? I know what that’s like.” She said commiseratingly, sitting down cross-legged in front of the boy.
Gaara’s inner child was shocked. “You do?”
“Yep. It sucks.” Tanya insisted, “I mean, sometimes it’s pretty cathartic, if it’s someone real bad, but most of the time it’s just a waste.”
“Mother says that killing affirms my existence. I’m alive, and they are not.” Gaara said, although he was somewhat uncomfortable with the idea he was parroting.
Ech. Real piece of work, that guy. “I’ve put a barrier around us.” Sort of, people outside the accelerated time bubble would have a bastard of a time making out anything. “No one else can hear what you say now, it’s just you and me. Is that really what you think?”
Gaara started breathing more heavily. “I’m alone again? Mother’s gone?” Hoo boy, he’s panicking.
“Not at all.” Tanya said easily. “I’m still here, after all. I have to take the barrier down to leave. Now, can you answer one question for me?” She asked.
“Not alone… Good.” Gaara’s inner child said to himself. His hands dug into the rubber flesh of the ball, clearly anxious. “What is it?” He asked.
“Who’s the giant tanuki statue outside?” She asked.
“That’s Shukaku.” Gaara said, “He speaks for Mother. She keeps him sealed inside me, so I can kill the village that killed her.”
“...I’m going to need a lot more context for that.” Tanya said ruefully. “I’d like to hear the story.”
“O-okay.” Gaara said, “For as long as I can remember-” He spoke slowly, with fits and starts as he got distracted explaining some small detail before getting back on task with minor prods from Tanya. It was a socratic method of therapy, pointing out inconsistencies by asking clarifying questions, which causes the patient to realize that things didn’t quite add up.
Apparently, Suna mistreats their jinchuriki even more than Konoha did, which, after spending the last month with her teammates on an alternating schedule, was a very low bar to fail to clear.
Eventually, he wound down his story. Tanya checked her mental watch. With the time differential… It's been forty seconds. Naruto should be able to buy at least that much. “What now?” He asked.
“Well, it seems to me that there’s not much I can tell you that you don’t already know.” Tanya began, leading Gaara to her preferred conclusion. He nodded numbly.“Shukaku’s the bloodthirsty one, and he says that stuff about your mother just to convince you to do it.” Gaara winced, but nodded. “It’s understandable.” She said, to soften to blow, “You’ve never truly grown if you can’t look back on yourself and call your younger self an idiot. There’s no shame in making mistakes.” Sometimes, all a patient needed was validation to do what their own thoughts said they should, but didn’t due to inertia, anxiety, and other social pressures.
“I still have to destroy Konoha, though.” He said, “Father told me to.” He added.
Tanya nodded sadly. “That’s a bridge we’ll have to rebuild once the fire’s out.” She said, putting a new spin on an old saying. “For now, I think I should have a chat with the One-Tail, and see if he can be made to see reason.” She flexed her fingers as she stood up, loosening them up. “If not? Well, I’m sure I’ll think of something.” The time-acceleration field went away, and she walked out to face the gigantic chakra beast.
“Oh, it’s you again.” Shukaku said, glaring at her. “Damn ninjas with their hiding. Ruining Father’s gift.” Oh? What was he talking about?
Still, she rallied her mental strength, projecting a sense of power beyond her physical size. It was still small in comparison to the titanic beast, but she wasn’t a ninja for nothing: she was faking an even greater power than what she was actually portraying. She suspected that Shukaku wasn’t actually that competent in a mental battlefield, as if he was, sealing him into people wouldn’t be such a good idea. “Must you torment this child just because of the sins of the father?” She asked rhetorically.
Shukaku snorted. “Please. Lying about your strength was the first ninja perversion of Ninshu.” Oh? “Don’t expect that to fool me. Still, you’re the most fluent human I’ve seen with Father’s sacred gift, so call me… intrigued.”
Tanya tilted her head. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of Ninshu.” She said simply, “I would love to speak with you further on the topic, but there is a more pressing matter: Gaara.”
The great tanuki statue of sand hummed. “Well, if you’re trying to appeal to my good nature, forget it.” He grumbled. “They sealed me in that brat before he was even born. Can you believe that?” Oh. Gaara didn’t know that part. Ew. “Made him born premature, killed his mother, and then they treat him like shit. Disgusting humans.”
“...and yet, you decide to make things worse for him.” Tanya observed.
“I make him earn his scorn! I show him the only way to survive in a world that hates him!” Shukaku argued back. “What’s more, him dying outside of the Land of Wind benefits me. I’ll reform eventually, and Suna can’t seal me back in that damned pot without giving me a chance to run if the brat dies here.” The tailed beast laughed.
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Tanya tilted her head. “Shouldn’t you stop protecting him, then?” Shukaku went silent. Ah. “...You’re not the one protecting him.” Tanya stated confidently. Shukaku’s energies jolted, the beast maintaining an outward poker face, but he could not hide from her. “Who…” Tanya asked, before going for it. Taking a deep breath, and working up some crocodile tears, she shouted “HELP ME!” While pitching her voice exactly like Gaara. She actually could do a lot with her voice as a mundane skill, but in a mental world, it was downright easy.
The sand beneath their feet surged upwards, and a woman of sand formed in the air. “I’ll protect you!” The construct shouted, glaring at Shukaku.
“I see.” Tanya said, looking over the construct with her mental senses. It wasn’t a sapient construct, but more of a representation of a semi-sentient chakra technique, directed by a fragment of the ninja’s soul. Or, given that it was likely done as her last act, a large fraction of it. “Run interference, please. I sense an outside connection that I’m going to explore.” It was right at the giant beast’s tail.
“Wait, no!” Shukaku shouted, and Tanya dove into the space directly behind him. Where does this go?
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The place that the outside connection led to appeared to resemble the collective unconscious more than anything else. Mostly nothing, but with more connections spiraling off into the distance. Hm, which should she tug at? She spent a moment trying to see what kind of information she could glean from the connections.
One felt like… bubbles? Seems legit. Another… steam. Yet another… wait, that felt familiar. It kind of felt like Naruto, but… She tugged on that connection.
Naruto tumbled out of the wormhole that just popped up. Behind her, Shukaku roared as he manifested. “Don’t you dare trespass on this place!” The tanuki shouted, incredibly angry with her.
“What is-” Naruto asked before noticing Shukaku. “Oh, Gaara’s here too! Alright, time to-” He put his hands together in a seal.
“Stop.” Tanya said, “That’s not Gaara, it’s the One-Tailed beast, Shukaku.”
“Eh? Who’re you?” Naruto asked. Tanya looked down at herself and then shifted her appearance to an aged-up version of her current life’s body, as before. “Oh, Sakura!” Naruto exclaimed, immediately understanding. “So is this why Gaara stopped moving?”
“It’s a good thing he did.” Tanya said seriously. “I apologize for distracting you from your battle.”
Behind Naruto, another projection appeared, a massive orange-furred red fox with human-like hands. This must be the nine-tails. “Human, why are you here? How are you here?” He demanded.
“It’s this damned ninja!” Shukaku shouted, pointing at Tanya. “She can use something like Ninshu! It’s not the same, but she broke into here!”
“I’m clearly missing some context, here.” Tanya said, waving her hands to disperse the hostility. “What is this place? What is Ninshu?”
“Woah, what’s the party about?” Said a large dark-skinned man who popped in from another connection, one she didn’t check, along with a gigantic tentacled ox beast. Quick count… Eight-tails. “This place’s usually dead, by my recount.”
“Are you two having a spat again?” The eight-tails rumbled.
One by one, the other tailed beasts sensed the usage of what was apparently some kind of mental meeting room, and showed up themselves, some with their container and some without.
It was a very illuminating discussion.
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It was interesting, finally trying out ‘being a normal girl’ for a bit after the invasion was fought off. Yes, there were a few missions she had to go on, most notably one to fetch a depressed drunkard who was the only one left who was qualified to become a replacement Hokage that hadn’t yet turned down the post. She turned it down too, but Naruto was stubborn and convinced her otherwise. Tanya rather thought that her presence was superfluous, but it did give her the opportunity to finally treat Sasuke after his brother destructively hypnotized him again.
Becoming the Hokage’s apprentice was fantastic for her long-term plans. It was quite helpful learning a bunch of physical medicine, because it was difficult for people who had never heard of it to see a therapist as a doctor if they couldn’t treat regular injuries as well. She’ll need to become a big name in medicine in order to be able to successfully ‘develop’ psychiatric care as a formal medical discipline.
It wasn’t until after the state of emergency passed that she was able to fulfill the agreement with the unfashionable but earnest ninja Lee. It went… reasonably well, for something planned by a young teenager (she suspected his teacher, who is not actually his father, helped him), but it ended with Sasuke and him fighting over her, which was, honestly, the best way it could have ended. It was rather flattering, as the old revulsion she had towards romantic interest from men never seemed to manifest. She suspected that the ‘hard reset’ that was becoming Sakura had allowed her to shed some old baggage.
Granted, it also didn’t seem to make that attention (except from Sasuke) any more appealing than, say, the thought of having a spa day, but that just meant she hasn’t changed that much and was still asexual. The difference, of course, was she was now willing to honor Sakura’s wishes and give marriage a try, just to have a new experience. Assuming she could convince Sasuke to get on board with the whole thing. That should not be difficult, given his reaction to the date with Lee. Will she regret this? Maybe. But… maybe not.
Fortunately, most of the more minor issues with having an organic body again was handled by the expedience of her still possessing Sakura’s brain, and thus muscle memory was all intact, the various biological urges felt a bit foreign at first, but she knew what each one was and was able to eat, sleep, stretch, scratch, and handle bathroom matters without any hiccup Well, actually there were a lot of hiccups before she found that mental ‘hiccups off’ switch again. Evolution was messy. It was a little startling to realize just how alien her existence had become in that gynoid body, but she had at least fifty years to re-acclimate, assuming she doesn’t die in battle.
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One of the drawbacks of being the second most skilled medic in the military (she did pity Shizune, but the woman was only Tsunade’s apprentice because of her relation to the woman’s ex-fiance, not because of any particular talent on her part. She was number three.) was that any time someone diplomatically important got hit with something nasty outside the village, ‘Sakura’ was the first one tapped to send to Suna when the Kazekage (Gaara, surprisingly, was able to claim the seat. Given how compassionate he was even after all that Shukaku did to him, this was not that surprising that he had it in him once that influence was blunted) got attacked by an international criminal bomber. Blast Release was rather impressive, she had to say.
She wasn’t there for the bomber’s victims, but instead the bomber’s partner, who was the foremost master at the ninja art of puppetry… and also an insane criminal. Like most puppeteers, he took advantage of the separated nature of his tools and his person to use incredibly potent poisons that couldn’t be immunized against.
That’s what she was called to deal with. The Kazekage’s brother was dying from those very venoms, and it was up to her to find the counter-agent. Fortunately, while this exact blend of hemotoxin, neurotoxin, and heavy metal doping was somewhat novel, the individual components were compounds that the Hokage already had the knowledge to counteract, as they were all proprietary Suna toxins that Tsunade had to invent counters for during the war. With not only her tutelage but her personal antivenom encyclopedia at hand, mixing an antidote was within her ability.
Once that was dealt with, enough information had been gathered that the rescue mission for the captured Kage was able to go underway with her at hand to ensure that Sasuke was unharmed. Oh, and everyone else, too. While she’s at it. Tanya chuckled to herself at her own private joke.
“Am I boring you, Leaf ninja?” Sasori drawled. Oh, right.
Tanya slipped out one of her fans from her kimono’s sleeve, the very picture of an elegant lady. Opening it to show off the image of Shukaku and Kurama locked in battle, which was modeled for her to paint last year, she giggled again. “Oh, are you done having your moment with Lady Chiyo?” She asked demurely. She has way too much fun acting like a noble lady in front of hardened killers. Drives them nuts. “I believe we have some business to conduct. Specifically, I need to preserve that foreign dignitary’s life, and you need to be dismantled into your base components.”
The large hunchback chuckled. “Confident, are we? I know who you are, you know. Sakura Haruno, jounin. Student of the Fifth Hokage, medical specialist. Uses mind jutsu to confuse her enemies.” He threw off his cloak, revealing his body to be a giant puppet that he was, presumably, sheltering within. Which she already knew from Elder Chiyo. Apparently, Sasori’s a lot more level-headed than your average S-class ninja. “You shall not fool me!”
Tanya frowned, snapping her fan shut. Sighing, she pulsed her chakra, and her kimono was sucked into its designated storage seal, replaced by an armored bodysuit, her fans were sucked into their own storage seals, and she put her hands into a single complicated seal that activated her Chakra armor. “Brute force it is.” She said simply, before breaking open four chakra gates and moving.
Ninja fights tended to be over quickly. In Sasori’s case, he had a truly massive arsenal of weapons and tricks. However, he was primarily stopped by two things: First, Tanya had a veteran ninja that provided support. Second, his primary threat was poison, and her chakra armor insulated her from that. Sasori was a ninja of precision, capable of mass murder, but not really mass devastation. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t have a few hard-hitting tricks, but they were a small fraction of his arsenal, and Chiyo’s support was invaluable when it came to identifying them and ensuring that they missed, as he presumably relied on his ally to handle large scale destruction and thus was unready to deal with… honestly, Tanya wasn’t entirely clear on how this man was supposed to defeat a tailed beast container. The fact that his partner handled that part in this case was quite telling, really.
Really, she just wished she had the chance to question the man on his puppet body methodology. It was for the best, really. She wasn’t exactly planning on extending her life unnaturally this time.
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That battle was the opening move in the Fourth Great Shinobi War, although like most Great Wars, that wasn’t quite apparent immediately. It took a bit for the war to grow in scale properly. After going through many layers of treacherous viziers, they eventually found the woman behind the plant behind the man behind the… you get the picture. Who was then sealed away or destroyed or something due to some kind of reincarnation thing going on with Sasuke and Naruto. She wasn’t quite clear on, nor did she particularly care, about the specifics once it was made clear that it didn’t come with any memories or knowledge that mattered.
After that, though, things went rather smoothly. She became Lady Uchiha, and while Sasuke decided, after hearing the true version of events from Itachi’s own reanimated mouth, that he didn’t need to go having a big family to repopulate the compound or whatever, she still got to experience the wonders of motherhood.
What did she think about it? Well, marriage wasn’t bad. Sasuke was basically asexual himself, so the vast majority of their nights together were just being comfortable in each other’s arms, plenty agreeable to her sensibilities. Motherhood was quite enjoyable, actually. Little Mitoko was a darling, and eventually became the Eighth Hokage.
But… in the future, she’d definitely prefer to adopt. The whole process of pregnancy and childbirth was just horrible. 1/10, would rather fight an alien invasion again. It wasn’t so bad that she’d do anything drastic to avoid it, but there’d have to be some pretty big perks attached to having those children before she tried it again.
Did she regret doing it at all? Not even a little bit. She died surrounded by her great grandchildren, executed by a suicide seal of her own design after she once more used her mastery of Yin chakra to suppress her experiences. To the children, great grandmother passed peacefully with a smile on her face. Only one of the people in her presence there knew what she was doing, and that was the grey-haired, crying Naruto. She wished she could have spent more time, but her heart was mere weeks from failure, and that organ was far too important to chakra production for any mechanical or seal-based replacements to function properly.
What will she do next? Maybe she’ll be a boy again…