trans_9 | Melting Clock: Quarantine

"They're the guys who keep the supervillains under control, right?" Kon had explained his career in more or less those terms, if the super seemed more relevant to potential capable destruction (in the case of the villains) than actually being super at pretty much anything.

Then again, that made the heroes super just for handling these particular villains.

She had to blink as she realized, yet again, this kind of terminology was accepted across multiple worlds. "Superheroes. I wonder how many of them ever set out to be that way, or how many fell into it."

"Mostly, though they have stories with other plotlines too," Marco said. He might have met a few of them while on the ship, but he still couldn't help but reflexively think of comic book superheroes as just characters in a story. "And I'd say most fall into it. Who's crazy enough to decide they want to save the world without something to push them into it? Plus otherwise the origin stories would get boring."

"The origin stories?" She understood the words, if the idea was interesting. Whatever echoes of peoples experiences that scattered across universes were even divided into portions based on when another world decided a person's life story had really begun. Or at least when a hero had started acting as a hero.

The origins of superheroes. She smiled. "As far as who's crazy enough to decide on something like that without a push, wouldn't it be the idealists?" Her smile faded, thoughts drifting to Naruto. Blind idealism came from some of the unlikeliest sources. "It's what keeps them at it after seeing some of the reality of the world they're saving... I guess that counts as your push. Saying you'll save the world, and then actually having to do it..." she trailed off. Sakura didn't save worlds. She waited and hoped and fought to make sure the one person who could have saved their world survived to save it.

And he didn't even have the decency to be awake and around when she needed some of that idealism to not fall back into the kind of thinking she wasn't always able to shake herself back out of.

Like what she was starting to do now. Sakura shook her head, aiming for some clarity. Focusing on now, and the problems people like Marco were facing, was a distraction. A difficult to understand one, but a visible, frightening one for the people going through it.

"I'm guessing you don't have one of the boring origin stories yourself."

"Yeah, you know - how they got their powers and all? Decided to fight crime?" He said, not bothering to respond to the bit about idealism. He wasn't an idealist himself. When it was just a story? Sure, idealism was fine. In the real world, it didn't work that way.

"Nah, not really," he said, snorting. "But it doesn't matter, anyway. If by some miracle we ever get home, once we get Ax back home? That's it, I'm done. That's my last mission."

Her eyebrows shot up. "Really?"

"We can't all be ninjas who were trained to kill from birth, you know," Marco said, sarcastic. "And you know...it's not like the comic books, where no one ever dies and the ones that do just come back later. It's real. We could all die, and if something happened to me, my Dad..." Marco trailed off. His dad was in the pods somewhere, right? Some day, he'd wake up. Marco needed to be there when he did.

Her eyebrows weren't coming down anytime soon. It was the only reason she wasn't narrowing her gaze at him for his blithe comment on shinobi training. "He'd be all alone." It's odd to hear any child thinking in terms of leaving their parents alone, and it's a guess on her part on the alone -- no mention of siblings didn't mean there were none. "How long has it been just the two of you? Have you been fighting that entire time?"

"Nah, we'd only got the ability to morph for about a month or so back home. My Mom..." Marco's voiced cracked a little - it always seemed to do that, when he talked about her. Her death still hurt. "She died two years ago."

A month ago? Had he been fighting in his war for all of a month? "Did you know about any of this before then?" As vague as her question was, she meant to be asking about the Yeerk infestation. There was falling into something, and there was falling into something.

Did he have any training whatsoever?

"It must have been hard," is all she found herself saying, not well equipped to deal with old loss. She couldn't say she understood, if she knew plenty of people who could. Single parent households had a fairly high occurrence rate in Konoha, like the rest of her world. Particularly the shinobi world.

Well. Thereabouts. Marco couldn't quite remember exactly how long it had been. "About the Yeerks? Nope. See, they can be infesting anybody, right? And they act just like their host, so you'd never even know that they were a Controller."

Marco didn't say anything about how hard it was.

"Then how did you learn? How did you end up being able to morph in the first place?" Without being chosen, without being prepared to fight? Certainly, training didn't mean you were prepared in the end. Sakura knew that much from personal experience. Knowing in theory what to do, practicing against peers over what to do, it meant nothing when faced with an actual situation requiring action.

She'd learned the hard way that she had only been prepared to die, back on their mission to the Country of the Waves. Ready to die defending their charge, but not able to fight for him. Not able to fight for months, even if she had the training.

And she'd almost always had an obvious enemy to face. Not hidden, not masked behind people she could know. There were only so many spies, and so many Orochimarus, in the world.

None of them had ever worn the face of someone close, let alone as close as family. Good friends.

Even thinking about it made her shudder, rubbing one arm like she'd caught a chill in this ridiculously consistent, humid, moist environment. Weirder things could happen.

"You don't really learn morphing. Not like you learn how to ride a bike or play basketball. It's a technology the Andalites invented - you touch one of their blue boxes, they do whatever it is that makes it work, and then bam! You can morph. But you still have to learn how to control each morph." Like he'd had to learn how to control the ant morph. For a moment, Marco's eyes clouded over as he remembered.

Ant morph had scared the hell out of him. The way that he'd had zero control, had had to fight just to even remember who he was...morphing might be cool, but it wasn't worth turning into things like that. Wasn't worth having to fight in a war, and risk death.

If they ever got back, Marco knew that he wasn't going to fight anymore. Not ever.

Funny how the things one knew weren't always the same as the things one ended up living through.

Sometimes, Sakura thought to herself, I wonder if there's anything technology can't do. Other than utterly replace the need for free-thinking organics. Then again, maybe there were worlds where it already had. Artificial Intelligence was only artificial because it was created in a way outside the standard understanding of birth; an organic creating life from manufactured materials, building off a different blueprint.

All irrelevant, while also relevant. "Controlling each animal's instinct? I take it if it's genetic, you only get instinctual responses, or genetic memories. If they exist." In the books she'd read on the subject, it'd just been theorized. "How does that work with higher degrees of sentient beings?"

"No memories, just instincts." Marco was silent for a moment. "I don't know what it'd be like morphing a human. I've never done that. Dolphin's probably the smartest thing we've morphed, and that wasn't that hard. Dolphin's way fun."

It was the other end of the scale that was harder.

Like ants.

"I kind of had that feeling." She smiled, thinking back to her first (and honestly, only) time in the sensoriums. She didn't like the illusion of control the place had, if she had to admit that as a training mechanism... she needed to get past her own mental blocks.

She almost mentioned the beach, then thought better of it. He'd mentioned it being partially based on a place his mother used to go sailing, and right now, his mother was dead to him. Better to avoid coming back around to that topic altogether. "Do you ever end up morphing, just for fun?"

Sakura was honestly curious, if it served a secondary purpose of focusing on more positive things. She was striking metaphorical gold in being a downer, and it wasn't something she was particularly happy about... if it was strikingly like looking back at many careless things she'd said or implied over the years. Orphans are so selfish... The selfish one had been her, all along.

Marco grinned, happy to get distract himself from the disturbing memories of the ant morph with ones of the dolphin instead. "I didn't morph for fun much back home - we always had to be careful, you know, in case anyone saw us? But oh man, I'd totally morph dolphin for fun. They have the best instincts. Like, they totally just want to play around."

Which explained a lot of his general mood back then, at least while he was a dolphin. She wondered if letting an animal's instincts ride foreground was a general kind of pick me up for the one in morph.

She figured that was likely the case, to some extent or another.

"Matches the grin they're always wearing." She grinned herself, fingers up and tracing the general outline of her lips with a lazy half-circle. Sakura ended up scratching her nose at the end of that, finding her own gesture ridiculous. "My Academy teacher was named Iruka, actually. Dolphin. He had a scar right across his nose." She let the hand still on her face trace the general shape of Iruka's scar, then let it fall back down to her side. "He was a good teacher. Smiled a lot -- yelled a lot, too. At least at all the trouble-makers."

Marco tiled his head. "'Iruka' means 'dolphin'?" he asked. Hard to tell whether that's what Sakura had meant, or whether she was trying to say that somehow in her crazy world, people with scars on their noses were thought to be like dolphins.

"Let me guess. You never got yelled at, 'cause you were always too busy trying to be a good little student?" he said, smirking.

"Mmm!" She nodded, holding up a finger as she reiterated the point. "Iruka means dolphin. Sakura means cherry blossom, if you're familiar with the flower. Naruto is a fishcake, Kakashi is a scarecrow." Only those names had no context, and she was reluctant to give any more of one. "Not that any of us resemble our names all that much." She ran a hand through her hair, looking up to the side. "Other than me, I guess. That was more coincidence than planning."

She'd been born bald, after all.

Sakura scoffed, rolling her eyes. "Who had to try? I was an excellent student. Top of my class. Aced all the tests. Hey, I aced the chuunin test, which is supposed to be imp--"

Oh. She didn't want to get into talking about the chuunin exams again, let alone right now.

Sakura shrugged, trailing off and smirking. Hopefully it'd be enough of a distraction in and of itself to steer the conversation back on whatever course it was on anymore. "What can I say? I have a gift for learning. Might have been lacking a little in application, but we can't all be perfect." Her arms were crossed over her chest again, putting on a show of boasting she wouldn't usually indulge in. Not anymore. These days, Sakura knew her limitations. If anything, she was a harsher taskmistress over her lacks than her teachers ever had been. Once she'd stopped thinking they didn't matter.

Growing up was a necessary pain.

"Seriously? Fishcake? Do I even want to know what the hell that is, or why someone would decide to name their kid after it? And who's Naruto and Kakashi?" Sakura might not want to talk about them, but that didn't mean Marco wasn't going to ask.

"Right, all those top marks just came naturally did they? I guess all those textbooks must be for decoration then, since you obviously didn't need to bother with any actual effort," Marco said, rolling his eyes (which indicated pretty clearly just how high his opinion was of Sakura's good student status). "Or maybe they just liked you because you're a nerd."

She could be more mature than a thirteen-year-old. Really, she could! It's why she didn't roll her eyes in response... yet, and bit down on her irritation. He's just a kid.

It's not worth it.

"Fishcakes are spiral patties that go in ramen," she said, forming her index finger and thumb into an approximation of a nartuomakis general size. "Red spirals on a white, kind of star-burst shape. Besides, don't most names mean something? I'm sure his parents had a reason, if they actually got to name him." She hesitated, knowing it was possible they might not have been able to. Still, for a name like Naruto, she had a feeling they had. "Unless Marco means nothing on your world, your name has some kind of meaning behind it, too."

She still hadn't specified who Naruto was, let alone Kakashi. "Something like 'likes being annoying,' or 'hits growth spurt later in life,' or 'likes to quote things from his world and assume people from other worlds follow exactly what he's saying and find it as hilarious as he finds himself.'" She smiled brightly.

It really wasn't fair to say to someone who acted so much younger at an age where she expected a different kind of attitude toward reality, which might have accounted for some of her looking mildly embarrassed and concerned. Sakura glanced away, crossing her arms over her chest. She got around to answering his questions about who these mysterious names actually were. (And ignoring his statement as to how naturally those marks had come -- because those grades really had come naturally. She'd been as much a teacher's pet as any other eager kid trying to prove to someone that she knew what she was doing, and that she was good at something.)

"Naruto's my teammate. Kakashi-sensei's my first instructor after the Academy. Along with Sasuke-kun, we're Team Seven." That was enough on that. If her posture was a little more defensive, her expression a little more closed off, it was because she didn't know how to talk about any of them. They all had to be waiting, sleeping in the pods.

There was no other possibility.

None.

"That has got to be the stupidest thing to name someone after, ever. This 'Naruto's' parents mustn't have liked him much if they named him that," Marco said, snorting.

Marco grinned, mostly unbothered by Sakura's needing (though it did fall for just a fraction of a second when she made a jibe about his height). "How about 'incredibly smart and funny'?" he added, before shrugging. "But I don't know what it means. I don't think Mom and Dad really cared. They just wanted something that wasn't some stereotypical Spanish name, but didn't sound really Anglo either."

He tilted his head, watching her. Was it just him, or did she seem a little defensive? Why wouldn't she want to talk about her teammates? "Ah, so by your powers combined, you're Ninja Team Seven? Do your teammates have highly visible hair colours too, or was that just you?"

"Considering neither one of them lived all that long after his birth, that's a tough call to make." Her tone was clipped, if she was relying on village records at this point. Naruto had a registered birthdate, if she hadn't been able to find the names of his parents on record. He'd been entered into the orphan registry the same day.

Considering the timing, his mother had probably died in childbirth during the kyuubi attack on the village. His father, pending he was a shinobi (and he likely was) had died with the countless others protecting the village from annihilation.

It wasn't her story to tell, and she realized she'd said much more in defensive anger than she meant to. The only people with any right to criticize were podded -- or was standing right here in front of Marco.

"Does that make you either?" she asked, drawn back to a niggling remembrance of how hard he'd laughed when she'd mentioned possibly being Chinese. "Spanish or Anglo?" What an odd country name. Ang?

"Just me. Blond and black don't stand out as much, though Kakashi-sensei is white haired..." Her lips curled up in a small smile, wondering if that was a Hatake trait. Considering Chiyo's reaction, and how closely Kakashi was supposed to resemble his father, it might have been. "Doesn't exactly matter." Though if she thought about it, Sai added another black haired teammate, and Yamato evening them out with brown. If she considered herself the red-head, they had a full color spectrum on Team Seven, past and present. Unrelated, if amusing, realizations.

Marco winced. "Right," he said, deciding that maybe he should drop the whole topic of this 'Naruto' guy.

He certainly didn't want to be hearing about dead parents right now. As weird as it was, talking about where his parents had been from was a much preferable subject.

"Am I Anglo? Dude, I'm not White," Marco said, rolling his eyes. "And Mom wasn't from Spain. They just spoke Spanish in the country she was from."

What did color have to do with anything? Or was White the Anglo country? Spanish was a language, and was spoken in other countries? Was this usual, or unusual? Did most countries not have a unifying language? She knew not everyone spoke the same language, even back home, but someone had to travel a decent distance to find someplace where they wouldn't be understood.

"All right, that's two more things you aren't, smart--ypants. What are you?" Since apparently the answer could be anything plus a rainbow orientation.

Melting Clock: Quarantine

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