![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThis is part 7 of An Ounce of Prevention, a Naruto/Harry Potter crossover that I started as a giftfic for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
askerian.
Technically, it's an insertion of one HP character/plot device into the Naruto world, but that does count as a crossover of sorts. "An Ounce of Prevention" will not affect canon in either series; that is, it takes place during the Naruto timeskip, and significantly before CoS in HP.
---------------------------------------------
Chapter 7: Time Flies
---------------------------------------------
"Now you get to be patient," Anko said. "Forget what you know about fights -- intelligence ops take time."
So Sakura was patient, and cautious, and, one week later, slowly boiling over with frustration. She had learned all sorts of unimportant things, and nothing to let her say definitively whether Tomu was an enemy, a victim of a particularly nasty trap, or both.
Tomu told her about growing up as an orphan and knowing something about him was 'wrong' -- and how learning magic had been like opening a door and realizing he'd spent his life in a one-room prison when he could have been exploring a whole world. Sakura told him about her parents, and how they didn't quite understand that being a ninja was her life, not just her job, but how they did their best to support her anyway.
Tomu explained that wizards in his world hid themselves from people without magic, because they were outnumbered and afraid. Sakura didn't think that was the whole story -- really, if ninja ever wanted to, they could easily overthrow the daimyo and rule directly; the proper application of fear and rewards would go a long way toward keeping civilians content, and if the civilians weren't united, their numerical advantages became meaningless. But she held her hand and told Tomu a little bit about the system of kage and councils, and the contract laws that kept ninja and civilians working together.
They went on like that, back and forth and never mentioning anything really important, like how Tomu got into the diary, how the diary got to Sakura's world, or how either of those conditions could be reversed. She wasn't even sure Tomu wanted to go home. --Your world sounds much less willfully blind than mine,-- he wrote once, with a wistful air. Sakura couldn't tell whether to take that as a threat or as a sign that he might be an ally after all.
"I think I'm going crazy," she told Tsunade during her morning lesson, hands braced on her thighs while she gathered her breath.
"Everyone goes insane sooner or later," Tsunade said without sympathy. "If you're not strong enough to cope with that, you can always quit. I hear civilian life is much less stressful."
Sakura gritted her teeth and punched the cliff wall with renewed force. Gravel sprayed from the impact, leaving a several meter wide crater. "I'm not weak!"
"Maybe," Tsunade said. "Two more strikes with your right, and then switch to your left."
Sakura imagined that the stones wore Orochimaru's and Itachi's faces. It helped her focus.
That evening, Tomu mentioned that he could speak with snakes; it was an inborn gift, like a bloodline limit. Sakura had to set her brush aside and sit on her hands for several minutes to keep herself from telling him about Sasuke.
"Good girl," Anko said after Sakura closed the diary. "They say Anbu's a mind trip -- and it is, especially if you go in wanting to protect people -- but intelligence work is just as twisty. You have to tuck yourself away deep inside and show people what you need them to see. You have to be what you need them to see... without losing yourself along the way."
"How do you keep it all straight?" Sakura's voice was more plaintive than she liked, too much like the whiny little brat she wanted to put behind her, but Anko didn't take the chance to mock her.
"How do I keep all the layers straight? Fuck me if I know. It's a little like acting, a little like doing genjutsu on the inside of your own head, and a little like going crazy on command." Anko dropped her eyes to examine her fingernails, scraping at the chipped green polish. "One thing that helps is having a person or a place to come back to. You go there, and you train or talk or meditate, and you remind yourself which parts of your head are you and which are just camouflage."
She shrugged. "I use a place. I think it takes longer, but the only people I trust that far aren't people I'd dump that shit onto. It's a hell of a job to lay on a person -- watching you turn yourself inside out -- but some people are up for it."
Sakura considered the implications. "Um. But if you trust someone that far, and they want to help you, shouldn't you trust them to know their own limits?"
Anko's smile was humorless. "Probably. But I've never been good at teamwork." She strode out of the room, leaving Sakura alone with the diary.
Sakura stared after her, wondering, and then turned back to her desk as if drawn by a magnet. She wasn't getting anywhere with Tomu on her own, and while Anko's presence kept her honest, they weren't really working together, just alongside each other. She was just running in circles. What she needed was Naruto to come up with a brilliantly stupid idea that cut through her preconceptions, or Sasuke to explain exactly where she was missing an obvious mistake, or Kakashi to smile and obfuscate and drive her absolutely crazy until the pieces of the puzzle suddenly rearranged themselves and made sense.
She didn't have Naruto or Sasuke. Kakashi, though...
Slowly, Sakura smiled.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter
Back to Too Many Cooks
Continue to If at First You Don't Succeed
Read the final version on ff.net
---------------------------------------------
On a completely different subject, I can't wait until Vicky's graduation. You know why? After that, I am getting a haircut. I've been growing my hair out for two years now, and I am sick of it. But I think it might be nice to do it up all fancy just the once, since I'm already going to be wearing a fancy dress and pantyhose and makeup and whatnot, so it stays for another week and a half.
I tend to grow my hair for a couple years mostly because I always forget to get regular haircuts, but also because two years gets it long enough to donate to Locks of Love. The last couple times I cut it, I haven't gone shorter than about chin-length.
This time, I think I may do something drastic, like a pixie-cut, one inch long all over. I haven't had really short hair since I was a teenager (and even then it wasn't quite that short), but the sheer relief of not having to wash and dry and brush all that damn hair might be worth going to a barber every month and a half.
(Of course, when I do get sick of that routine and start growing my hair again, I'll have to put up with the doofy period when it's only halfway down my ears -- that is about the worst look imaginable on me -- but I've gotten through that before, and I'm sure I can put up with the irritation again.)
askerian.Technically, it's an insertion of one HP character/plot device into the Naruto world, but that does count as a crossover of sorts. "An Ounce of Prevention" will not affect canon in either series; that is, it takes place during the Naruto timeskip, and significantly before CoS in HP.
---------------------------------------------
Chapter 7: Time Flies
---------------------------------------------
"Now you get to be patient," Anko said. "Forget what you know about fights -- intelligence ops take time."
So Sakura was patient, and cautious, and, one week later, slowly boiling over with frustration. She had learned all sorts of unimportant things, and nothing to let her say definitively whether Tomu was an enemy, a victim of a particularly nasty trap, or both.
Tomu told her about growing up as an orphan and knowing something about him was 'wrong' -- and how learning magic had been like opening a door and realizing he'd spent his life in a one-room prison when he could have been exploring a whole world. Sakura told him about her parents, and how they didn't quite understand that being a ninja was her life, not just her job, but how they did their best to support her anyway.
Tomu explained that wizards in his world hid themselves from people without magic, because they were outnumbered and afraid. Sakura didn't think that was the whole story -- really, if ninja ever wanted to, they could easily overthrow the daimyo and rule directly; the proper application of fear and rewards would go a long way toward keeping civilians content, and if the civilians weren't united, their numerical advantages became meaningless. But she held her hand and told Tomu a little bit about the system of kage and councils, and the contract laws that kept ninja and civilians working together.
They went on like that, back and forth and never mentioning anything really important, like how Tomu got into the diary, how the diary got to Sakura's world, or how either of those conditions could be reversed. She wasn't even sure Tomu wanted to go home. --Your world sounds much less willfully blind than mine,-- he wrote once, with a wistful air. Sakura couldn't tell whether to take that as a threat or as a sign that he might be an ally after all.
"I think I'm going crazy," she told Tsunade during her morning lesson, hands braced on her thighs while she gathered her breath.
"Everyone goes insane sooner or later," Tsunade said without sympathy. "If you're not strong enough to cope with that, you can always quit. I hear civilian life is much less stressful."
Sakura gritted her teeth and punched the cliff wall with renewed force. Gravel sprayed from the impact, leaving a several meter wide crater. "I'm not weak!"
"Maybe," Tsunade said. "Two more strikes with your right, and then switch to your left."
Sakura imagined that the stones wore Orochimaru's and Itachi's faces. It helped her focus.
That evening, Tomu mentioned that he could speak with snakes; it was an inborn gift, like a bloodline limit. Sakura had to set her brush aside and sit on her hands for several minutes to keep herself from telling him about Sasuke.
"Good girl," Anko said after Sakura closed the diary. "They say Anbu's a mind trip -- and it is, especially if you go in wanting to protect people -- but intelligence work is just as twisty. You have to tuck yourself away deep inside and show people what you need them to see. You have to be what you need them to see... without losing yourself along the way."
"How do you keep it all straight?" Sakura's voice was more plaintive than she liked, too much like the whiny little brat she wanted to put behind her, but Anko didn't take the chance to mock her.
"How do I keep all the layers straight? Fuck me if I know. It's a little like acting, a little like doing genjutsu on the inside of your own head, and a little like going crazy on command." Anko dropped her eyes to examine her fingernails, scraping at the chipped green polish. "One thing that helps is having a person or a place to come back to. You go there, and you train or talk or meditate, and you remind yourself which parts of your head are you and which are just camouflage."
She shrugged. "I use a place. I think it takes longer, but the only people I trust that far aren't people I'd dump that shit onto. It's a hell of a job to lay on a person -- watching you turn yourself inside out -- but some people are up for it."
Sakura considered the implications. "Um. But if you trust someone that far, and they want to help you, shouldn't you trust them to know their own limits?"
Anko's smile was humorless. "Probably. But I've never been good at teamwork." She strode out of the room, leaving Sakura alone with the diary.
Sakura stared after her, wondering, and then turned back to her desk as if drawn by a magnet. She wasn't getting anywhere with Tomu on her own, and while Anko's presence kept her honest, they weren't really working together, just alongside each other. She was just running in circles. What she needed was Naruto to come up with a brilliantly stupid idea that cut through her preconceptions, or Sasuke to explain exactly where she was missing an obvious mistake, or Kakashi to smile and obfuscate and drive her absolutely crazy until the pieces of the puzzle suddenly rearranged themselves and made sense.
She didn't have Naruto or Sasuke. Kakashi, though...
Slowly, Sakura smiled.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter
Back to Too Many Cooks
Continue to If at First You Don't Succeed
Read the final version on ff.net
---------------------------------------------
On a completely different subject, I can't wait until Vicky's graduation. You know why? After that, I am getting a haircut. I've been growing my hair out for two years now, and I am sick of it. But I think it might be nice to do it up all fancy just the once, since I'm already going to be wearing a fancy dress and pantyhose and makeup and whatnot, so it stays for another week and a half.
I tend to grow my hair for a couple years mostly because I always forget to get regular haircuts, but also because two years gets it long enough to donate to Locks of Love. The last couple times I cut it, I haven't gone shorter than about chin-length.
This time, I think I may do something drastic, like a pixie-cut, one inch long all over. I haven't had really short hair since I was a teenager (and even then it wasn't quite that short), but the sheer relief of not having to wash and dry and brush all that damn hair might be worth going to a barber every month and a half.
(Of course, when I do get sick of that routine and start growing my hair again, I'll have to put up with the doofy period when it's only halfway down my ears -- that is about the worst look imaginable on me -- but I've gotten through that before, and I'm sure I can put up with the irritation again.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-09 03:48 pm (UTC)how does she know, hmm? XD He's doing his empathy thing again, isn't he.
eeeee her wanting to tell him about Sasuke. ;.; And the Tsunade scene.
... KAKASHI YESS. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Pixie haircut? Now I kind of want to see. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-10 07:17 pm (UTC)Someday I will figure out digital photographs and stuff, or get somebody else to post a picture of me online which I can then link to, but for the readily forseable future, I will remain image-less. *sigh*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-09 06:49 pm (UTC)I have really short hair & I love it, even though I spike my hair so now I have the longest hair care routine I've ever bothered with. It's the sort of minor change that hangs around all the time & I can't forget, so it cheers me up a lot.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-10 07:20 pm (UTC)Short hair is fun. Long hair can be fun, too, but it generally takes more maintenance (washing, brushing, conditioning, etc.) in order to be made fun with braids and ribbons and whatnot. Mostly I have no time, so I just pull it back and run off to work.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-11 03:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-13 08:42 pm (UTC)Hair, not fic...
Date: 2007-05-11 04:44 am (UTC)Re: Hair, not fic...
Date: 2007-05-13 08:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-16 12:50 pm (UTC)I have a standing intention to donate it when I finally cut it, but until male pattern sets in, it's just become too much of an investment and too much a part of my self-image to part with.
Wish you luck on yours, though. ^_^