carefully executed maneuvers (bendytimed before clone plot) [closed]

[encourage]

Time was difficult enough to figure out on ship when she was having a good day. The mild hangover she'd had this morning (drinking water and forcing herself to down slop from the mess hall had kept it mild) had morphed into a milder headache and light sensitivity that had mostly faded by the time she'd picked up her omnicomm and run across Lash proposing some kind of celebration.

It was in the sensoriums, which was anything but good in Sakura's general opnion, but as she stared down at her omnicomm yet again, she had wondered if it would be a decent distraction to keep her mind off the stupidities of last night and early in the morning. If nothing else, given that she wasn't expected in MedBay today, it would fill in some time before she heard back from Marco. So she'd gone. What was there to lose?

It was only later, after she'd excused herself from the sensoriums and everyone within them, that she realized why she probably hadn't heard from monkey boy. Staring at the desk in her room, she looked between the omnicomm she'd just set down and the one that was on top of a book.

The slow realization that the omnicomm she'd thought had fallen out of her pouch last night hadn't fallen anywhere. She hadn't had her omnicomm with her. She'd walked off with someone else's omnicomm from where Marco lived. With her luck, it was probably Marco's omnicomm.

Sakura shouldered her satchel once more and raced down the stairs. If anyone was around to see her, she probably looked amusingly out of sorts, still dressed for the beach and heading back out within minutes of finally getting home. It didn't take long to make her way over to his residence, relying on shinobi speed to cut down on travel time. She came to a stop at the front door, running her hand through her hair to get it to calm down before she knocked. Best to get this started. By now, she owed a few apologies.

I am never drinking again.

Comments

[livestoannoy]

"Dolphin's have instincts that tell them how to swim," Marco pointed out. "Not to mention flippers. Do you know how much easier it is to swim when you have flippers?" Give him dolphin morph any day.

He looked at her, half expecting her to go and make fun of him for not being able to swim well. She didn't look like she was going to though, so he shrugged. "Pretty much. I used to be even worse."

[encourage]

She paused, trying to envision his worse. Sakura concluded he basically made a show of not drowning quickly, if that was the case. "A lot easier, I'd think. That and webbing, anything to increase surface area."

Human beings weren't exactly equipped to be brilliant swimmers, but there were ways of becoming better. "This is you after taking lessons?"

[livestoannoy]

"Normally I'm not that bad!" he protested, crossing his arms, "Normally I don't have people pushing me in the water--" yeah, he's looking at you there, Sakura "--and I'm not jumping in fully dressed. You just..surprised me."

More like startled, but Marco wasn't going to say that.

[encourage]

"Uh-huh," she said, doubtful. "I'm sure it's regularly surprising when someone you're watching swim pulls you into the water, too."

She stepped back, then pushed off, arms keeping steady while her legs propelled her backward. "I'd never see that coming, personally."

[livestoannoy]

"No, why would I be surprised?" Marco said, sarcastic. "Obviously someone always tries to drown me whenever I go near a body of water."

He narrowed his eyes, suddenly suspicious. "Why did you do that, anyway?"

[encourage]

"I was curious," she said, standing again. With the direction she'd moved, she was now standing more out of the water than he was. It was one way of pointing out where the water was even shallower without directly saying as much. "If your reluctance came from something other than lack of swim-gear."

She shrugged, rubbing one arm as she thought. "It just seemed odd to me, if I didn't think about it much when you were a dolphin." It wasn't much of an explanation, but Sakura wasn't used to entirely reporting her connective logic when it wasn't necessary. "What about learning?" she asked.

[livestoannoy]

"You could have just tried asking," Marco said, rolling his eyes. Seriously, why did she have to go about everything in such a roundabout way? "And what about learning?"

Stubbornly, he stayed around where he was. He didn't her to go around pointing out shallow spots for him. And besides - now that he wasn't unexpectedly finding himself in the water, he could manage a lot better.

[encourage]

"Yes, because that's always incredibly effective with you," she pointed out, barely managing to keep from sounding as dry as he usually did. "I'll keep it in mind for next time."

As for what about learning, she figured he already knew. Letting go of her arm, she held both hands out, palms up. "Learning how to improve your ability to swim."

[livestoannoy]

"I already did that," Marco pointed out. "As you can see, I am just destined to suck at swimming. At least with morphing it's not that big of a problem. Usually."

[encourage]

"Usually?" Sakura crossed her arms. "You accept a usually? Who was teaching you? Someone who tied a flotation device around your arms and told you to doggy-paddle across the pool?"

Pool of water, that was. She had no concept of the kind of pools that were standard in his timeperiod on Earth.

[livestoannoy]

"Hey, you try demorphing and remorphing in the middle of the ocean while there's a massive storm going on sometime," Marco said, feeling annoyed. "And what the hell is this, twenty questions? I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that dates aren't meant to include interrogations."

Okay, so from a certain perspective dates actually did tend to involve twenty questions. Marco just conveniently decided to ignore that fact.

[encourage]

"Why did you have to?" She could do annoyed right back. Even more importantly, if it was dangerous to do so -- why had he needed to? Based on some necessary change, between animals? Some limitation she wasn't aware of? After all, that was one of the things she hadn't asked Kang.

What the limitations were, pending he actually knew.

"Is that the case? So what are you pretty sure dates do include? Mind reading? I'm sure that goes well. Tell me, what am I thinking right now?" You have no more idea what dates include than I do.

[livestoannoy]

"Because that was the only way to get onto the beach! If we weren't in morph they'd have seen that we were human, and then we'd have been dead. Are you happy now? Or are you going to demand a blow by blow for the entire mission? Why is it that you get to know so much about me, but I still know hardly anything about you? How about you tell me about one of your missions instead, huh?"

He fell silent, and looked away. He didn't want to admit that he didn't really have a clue. He was sixteen, dammit. Or...somewhere thereabouts. Other guys his age had had girlfriends. Kissed girls. Maybe even had sex. And what had he had? One date. One sucky, complete disaster of a date. And at this rate, he was going to end up with another disaster.

[encourage]

Sakura responded by hitting the water with one hand, rather expertly sending water splashing toward Marco's face. It was a response to his looking away, like pointing out his own inexperience was a bad thing. Maybe it was! Guys were sensitive about weird things, and he'd been more sensitive than she was most this -- thing.

"That has everything to do with my job. But if it'll make you feel better? Fine."

Muggy as it was, she still felt ridiculous standing up anymore. He wanted some turnaround with sharing? Then he'd get some. Sinking down into the water, she pushed further back, heading toward the deeper waters.

"One of our earliest missions around Konoha was retrieving the Lady's pet cat. As far as I can tell, that cat regularly escapes just so genin teams can be ordered to track the poor thing down to be smothered in love by our esteemed Lady. Pretty amazing, isn't it? A cat retrieval mission."

[livestoannoy]

Marco stepped back, shaking his head a little from the water. Well if that was how she wanted to play it, then he was going to splash some water back in her direction too.

"Right, so...after I mention a deadly mission where we could have all been discovered and killed, you decided to share a a cat finding story. A cat which is apparently the generic kiddy mission. Nice. Real nice," he said dryly. He hadn't really minded the way she'd avoid saying anything before. But before, he'd been doing the same thing. And for the most part, they'd been even. Now after melting clock, and everything that had happened there, she'd managed to end up knowing more about him than he'd have been comfortable telling someone he'd known for ages. They weren't even anymore, and Marco didn't like it.

[encourage]

Some of the water managed to hit her. Sakura wrinkled her nose, ducking under the surface of the water and resurfacing somewhere to the left. "If you want better answers, Marco, ask better questions." She knew she sounded tense. No matter the reality that she did know more about him than he did about her, it didn't make her comfortable.

Sharing was primarily something you didn't do, not verbally. Not talking about past. If maybe we should. We shouldn't have to learn about the past by digging through records. We shouldn't be that isolating as to forget why things have happened the way they did.

[livestoannoy]

Marco scowled, sinking under the water a little himself, right up to his neck. How to even know which ones where the rights ones, when he hardly even knew enough to know where to start?

There was something that she'd mentioned in passing a few times though. "What about your teammates?" he said quietly. "What are they like?"

[encourage]

She stilled at that, not having quite expected him to ask about them. She should have, she guessed. She'd even mentioned them obliquely earlier.

For a moment, it probably looked like she wouldn't answer. Sakura submerged again, changing direction. When she came back up for air, she was within touching distance. She didn't want to have this conversation at a distance.

She'd rather not have this conversation at all, but remembering... "I think about them a lot, you know. Naruto's an idiot, but he's the best man I know." An odd statement to make about someone presumably the same age as she was, and sincere. All said quietly, with an edge of tension because she knew how well sound carried on water.

"Teams have different designations from year to year. We were Team Seven, assigned together right out of the Academy. Myself, Uzumaki Naruto, and Uchiha Sasuke. The theory is we're a balance for each other." She almost smiled at that, remembering them as they had been at eleven. She'd been so selfish back then. She was still selfish now.

See? She was even mentioning herself in her own thoughts. "Naruto was the bottom of the class, and the class clown on top of that. I can understand why now, but at the time, it just irritated me. Sasuke was top. He kept to himself, and was probably the most driven in succeeding out of any of us. Almost everyone had a thing for him. Kids are kind of stupid that way. I was... would have been top of the female half of our class if I'd been better at practical application by then. I knew the theory better than our teacher. I could explain the theories better than our teacher."

She was talking about herself again, so she cut herself off. "We were assigned to Kakashi -- ahh, Hatake Kakashi. He had a pretty bad record with passing teams. He never had. Needless to say, we were the first group he passed. I'm not sure if that was more surprising to us, or to our Academy teacher." She looked to Marco, hypersensitive to him saying anything condemning. He had before in the past, and she wasn't in the mood to hear it again, not over something that really mattered to her.

[livestoannoy]

He did raise an eyebrow - he wasn't quite sure how putting the worst and the best people together was balanced, and why was she dividing her class into the 'male' and 'female' class? - but he didn't say anything. Instead he just nodded, indicating that she should keep going.

[encourage]

Take that argument up with the entire Academy system. Sakura had thought it was stupid at the time, if her reasoning had nothing to do with logic.

She waited. When Marco didn't say anything, she started reluctantly speaking again. She'd never had to summarize her teammates before. It felt... awkward to be doing so now. "Naruto and Sasuke-kun were competitive. They helped each other improve that way, I guess, if I didn't really understand at first." She shrugged, neglecting to say if she understood it later. She was leaving a lot out, backstory and history that wasn't entirely hers to tell.

"Things were fine until the Chuunin exam. Don't," she warned pre-emptively. "It had nothing to do with how old we were. Sasuke-kun was targeted by a defector of the village, a very dangerous man who'd taken on someone else's appearance to register in the exams. When we were in the forest, he attacked. It won't make sense, but to keep a long story short, this man managed to inflict a seal on Sasuke-kun. It's called a Curse Seal. One in ten survive being marked like that. Sasuke-kun lived."

It changed everything. She hadn't known how completely back then, and it wasn't obvious for some time after. She had trouble saying the next part, not exactly noticing that she shifted back, rubbed at her arm under the water's surface. "Sasuke-kun ended up leaving the village months later. Naruto went off to train with one of the most famous living shinobi in our world." Who also happened to write porn. "I begged our Hokage to take me on as an apprentice. That's pretty much the story of the original Team Seven. Two and a half years later, Naruto came home."

There was that hesitation again, as if she expected to be interrupted and would have welcomed the derailing.

[livestoannoy]

Marco rolled his eyes when that 'Chuunin Exam' came up again - didn't matter what Sakura said, he still thought the whole thing was completely stupid. There were a few other things in her story that didn't really make sense though. "What the hell is a Curse Seal?" he asked. "And why did this Sasuke guy end up leaving?" Who knows, maybe he was the smart one, considering how insane her village was. But Marco had the feeling there was more to it - the fact that he'd left relatively soon after he'd gotten this curse thingy wasn't a good sign.

"Actually, while we're at it...what's a Hokage?"

[encourage]

She answered the last question first, leaving one arm folded protectively over her torso. "The Hokage is the leader of my village. Remember the five great nations? Each one has a kage leading their hidden village. Ours is the Fire Kage. Tsunade is the fifth Hokage we've had since the village founding, over eighty years ago. She's my master."

She frowned, bringing both her hands above the water's surface and performing the tiger seal. "You have to understand the different kind of seals we have. This is a hand seal. There are seals you write out in ink, and then direct to perform a specific function. Think of them like activation codes. You want to perform a specific task or function, and you do a certain seal or set of seals to achieve that task or function. Curse seals are more elaborate. They change you when they're inflicted, anchor themselves to you physically. It allows you access to the creator of the seal's chakra, in a way, but I theorize the access lets something more than that through. It... grows. Kind of like a really bad rash, only it's like watching ink move on someone's skin. The problem is in the seal taking over, and the person who put it on you taking you over at the same time."

If you weren't strong enough. Sasuke had been, one way or another. "As for why he left, I don't know." She did, in part. "At least not well enough to not have to tell you more about Sasuke-kun than I knew for years."

[livestoannoy]

Marco whistled, impressed. "You were the head ninja's apprentice?"

When she described how seals worked, he listened closely. This was the kind of information he'd been lacking - details about how her powers worked, what they could do. He'd seen hand seals before, but he hadn't had anything to go on about what they did until now. "So you need some kind of seal in order to use your fancy ninja powers?" he guessed. "What about your wall destroying? You never used any hand movements for that, you just tapped it." He narrowed his eyes at the mention of curse seals. That he didn't like the sound of at all. "So curse seals manipulate people," he said flatly. "They let someone else control you."

[encourage]

"They're far from the only thing, but yes. Curse seals can in theory function that way. There are far more dangerous and direct methods, but the list itself would take too long to lay out, and I personally can't perform any of them." Not the ones she had in mind, at least. It was a partial omission, since improving genjutsu meant she could manipulate the senses; it was a form of controlling someone else.

"... Ninjutsu is a specific set of skills. Chakra itself can be used to directly interface with your environment." He'd neglected a few other instances of her use of chakra that fell outside the parameter of seals. Most of what Sakura did had no need for being directed through seals. "You remember walking on water? That's a standard skill for any shinobi. Using your chakra to spread your weight over a greater surface area, and adjusting for the changes in the water's surface. Waterbugs work similarly." She set her hand on the water, fingers pressing against the surface of the water. It dimpled slightly around each fingertip. Subtle, but demonstrative. "No seals involved, because I'm not asking the water to do anything. I'm manipulating myself, not my environment."

[livestoannoy]

"So your teammate - the guy who cursed him. Do you think he make him leave?" Marco asked. There was something...something missing in what she was telling him, but he couldn't figure out what.

"So you need seals for anything external, is that it? You don't need it to punch walls, because it's not the wall you're manipulating, it's the hardness of your hand?" he said, trying to grasp the workings.