Stealth was difficult when you felt as fragile as a newborn, with the energy to match. Laymen might think it was easy - just hide somewhere until you feel better - but the reality was, not making noise took work. A lot of work. You had to stay low, which was hard on the legs; you had to stay quiet, which was hard on the lungs; and you had to stay alert, which stressed you out something horrible.

And Sakura was already at her breaking point. Carrying an unconscious seventy pounds on her back wasn't helping, but Sakura had decided to take her stunned friend with her. Ino was the one with the expertise to know what was going on, even if her declaration that all the mental projections were harmless (literally) blew up in her face. And, Sakura supposed, she couldn't just leave her friend(?) baking out in the sun. Even if the blond was a -

The hiss of another improvised mine cut whatever curse Sakura could come up with short. She tried to jump, but it was the blast that lifted her off her feet. Sakura desperately held onto Ino, as much for stability as to keep the girl safe, as they both cartwheeled through the air.

Sakura tried to angle for a tent, but even with the fabric to catch her, she came down hard, with Ino's limp body slamming into her a second later. It drove the air out of Sakura as surely as a punch and she just rolled on the ground, gagging and wheezing, while a rain of sand pelted her from the sky.

She should have anticipated the entire campground being filled with explosive tags and flares. The bandits had come first, and now the traps she'd used to get rid of them. They were everywhere and Sakura could only spot them when she was almost stepping on one. It would have gone quicker if she could go slow, but she didn't have the luxury. If her mind was playing back the whole desert fiasco, then the Ami-nin would come next and Sakura didn't want to test if they could hurt her.

"Wish you would wake up," Sakura muttered once she got her breath back. Ino was still out cold, having not moved from where Sakura had pushed her after their landing. This was at least the third time they'd been blasted into a tent and the blond was managing to stay out for all of it.

She was going to give Naruto a run for his oblivious money at this rate. Still, Sakura crawled over to her and managed to get the girl over her back. The black smoke of the burn pits was still hanging in the distance, closer now than when she'd started at the towers, so Sakura knew she was making progress. She only hoped Ino's last hunch, about the old man, proved more correct than her hypothesis about the danger of her mindscape's creations.

I wish Ino would tell me what to do.

The thought made Sakura physically pause. I don't want Ino bossing me around, she thought angrily, glaring at the sand. A traitorous, weak little part of her mind thinking that. Sakura was her own person now - a chunin, even! Ino was the baby. Just a little genin.

But Ino always knew what to do, even if she didn't always turn out to be right. She wasn't stupid or impulsive, but she was willing to act. She didn't overthink things like Sakura did. Ino, who had been willing to hop up in the face of a storm of arrows. Ino, who actually opened the door in the little mental box Sakura had trapped herself in.

Ino, who had practically carried Sakura down to the camp in the first place.

Stupid, traitor brain. Sakura knew she would eventually have gotten out of her panic and tried to find a real way out of this place, even if she never would have guessed it was her own mind. Eventually. Probably.

Sakura glanced up at Ino's face. The girl was resting on Sakura's shoulder, breathing into her neck. The steady breathing of the unconscious. As long as Sakura felt that breathing she had a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other; fighting through her exhaustion. Stupid Ino. Stupid Kabuto.

"When I get out of here," Sakura said out loud, needing to fill the dead desert with some noise, "I'm going to help Orochimaru-sama skin Kabuto alive." There. That felt good to say. Sakura even smiled a little. "Thought I was going to say something sappy? Too bad, Ino. No blackmail material for you."

Ino snored in response.

The camp was dead silent as Sakura slowly picked her way through. The extra burden was a constant, as was the desert sun. For a dream, or a vision, or whatever this was, it was annoyingly realistic. Sakura felt every ache and pain as she avoided yet another buried ball of explosive tags by taking a longer, winding route through the tents. Each avenue of escape had to be checked and rechecked for a trap that would blow Sakura off her feet. She wasn't sure how many more times she could get up, especially with Ino weighing her down, so she was meticulous. The smallest pulse of chakra necessitated a detour.

"Maybe I should just throw you at the mines since you're so sure nothing can really hurt us." No response from Ino, but having someone to vent to lifted Sakura's spirits a bit. When had she last talked to anyone without an ulterior motive? Shikamaru? She hadn't talked to him, not really. They had been thrown together for a few hours. He'd saved her life, she'd saved his, they'd been separated. Boats passing in a narrow river, or something philosophical like that.

So, when had it been? When…

"Do you hate me?"

Sakura sucked in a breath and whirled around. Tents and sand. Where had the voice come from? Where?

"It wouldn't be fair to hate you."

The voices were from all around her, but Sakura recognized the second one. She even started to recognize the conversation. She closed her eyes, breathing heavily, but when she opened them there wasn't a desert. There was a forest, and a clearing, and a slab of concrete.

Sakura knew what was going to be on the stone, but she stepped forward all the same. "What is worth risking your life for, Sakura?" the voice of Kakashi asked.

Living. "To keep living, obviously!"

How long ago had it been? A month? A handful of weeks? Sakura swayed, slumped, went down to her knees. The damp, spongy grass and ground of the village was cool against her skin. Ino toppled off her back.

"Come on, I want to show you something important."

Sakura crawled to the memorial. There was a fresh sheen of powder at the foot of the stone that her fingers scraped through. She recognized what it was, but couldn't stop herself from looking up at the names anyway. Sakura knew what she'd see.

Haruno Sakura. Yamanaka Ino.

A violent gust of wind battered the trees and Sakura ducked her head to shield her eyes. When she opened them again, only miles of the desert was around her again. She was sitting on a wide, flat dune, overlooking the camp. Out of the tents.

Sakura looked around for Ino. The girl was a few dozen feet back. Slowly, she retraced her footsteps. At least she had dumped Ino face-up and the girl was still breathing.

What else was this place going to do to her, though? What could it do? What were its limits? She closed her eyes and sighed. When she opened them again, ready to take back up her burden, her eyes opened to a pair of sandals in front of her, standing in front of Ino's body.

One of the feet lifted and Sakura managed to get her hands up in time. The full weight of the kick hit her below her wrists instead of on the chin, but she was still bowled over backward from the force of it.

Sakura cleared her head with a shake. The man hadn't come after her. "Nice reflexes," he said. His voice was warped by the rebreather, but Sakura could never have forgotten it - it belonged to the man who killed Hinata.

He heaved up his umbrella onto his shoulders. "You almost made it," he said, slowly dipping his head past Sakura. She turned and saw the plumbs of the burn pits only a few dunes away. Far enough to sprint in a minute, if she were at her full strength. "I almost feel guilty."

Strangely, Sakura didn't feel scared. She pushed herself up to her feet and slumped into a taijutsu stance. "I already killed you."

The man's eyes crinkled. "Is that so? Well, you don't look like you're up to killing anything right now, so what if we cut a deal?" His umbrella came down, the tip stopping a hair's breadth from Ino's throat. "You go on your way and leave this one. You get to wherever you're going without a problem."

"No."

"Are you sure? I will kill you this time, girl. There's no giant snake to save you." He pointed at the dune they were standing on. "You'll die here. Right here, in this desert. Your soul will never find its way back. This will be your limbo, and I'll kill her anyway. There's no moving on from here without making a deal with me."

Sakura swayed. "You… how do you know…" She shook her head. His words were thundering between her ears. "You know, don't you? You know."

"More than most. This one can't save you. I don't know what can, but I know that she can't. And I know that you can't find whatever will save you if you've got her on your back, weighing you down."

He can hurt me. Sakura was certain of it. Whatever spell the bandits had been under didn't apply to this one. Her stance trembled. He was outside the projection. Somehow, he wasn't just a memory.

And he knew it. He knew that she knew it. "You're a survivor," he said. "You live. You run and you live. Maybe you run and live and then find me and kill me again later. But right now you can't kill me, and you have to make the right choice."

The right choice. The only choice. To keep living. To wake up another day. That's enough.

"That's not living," Kakashi's voice said.

"That's just not dying," Sakura muttered, and her hands slowly dropped.

The tip of the Ami-nin's umbrella lifted Ino's chin. "Looks like we have a deal," he said.

And Sakura hated herself because he did. She couldn't fight. She couldn't get Ino and run. One of them had the chance to get away. Ino would never know.

Ino would -

"Shintenshin no Jutsu!"

Sakura lurched. Not just her body, but all of her senses and perspective. A horrible sense of vertigo took her as she and Ino suddenly switched perspectives. Now Sakura was staring up at the tip of the Ami-nin's umbrella, laying flat on the sand.

"What in the nine hells."

But Sakura could move. She slapped the umbrella away and rolled past the stomp the Ami-nin tried to finish her with. Chakra surged through her - strange, unfamiliar chakra, but still chakra. Glorious chakra.

"Doton! Earth Flow Spears!" The thicket of sand-colored lances sprang up around Sakura's - Ino's - body, forcing the Ami-nin to jump, but Sakura was already on her feet and running through seals. "Katon! Grand Fireball!"

"Suiton! Water Horn!"

The two elements clashed in midair, releasing a cloud of steam that seared in the desert heat. Ino's body was slower than Sakura was used to, but it bent out of the way when the Ami-nin tried to swipe her head off with that heavy umbrella through the sudden smokescreen. She caught it under an arm when he tried to pull it back and twisted her whole body to wrench it out of his grip. It flew off the top of the dune a moment later.

Across the way, Ino shouted, "He's using the steam to hide!", but Sakura didn't need the advice. She felt powerful again. Full of energy. She crouched low to the sand, feeling it with Ino's chakra. It didn't want to move - her first doton had been a trial - but Sakura would make it move.

"Doton! Bedrock Coffin!"

An enormous slab of hardened sandstone sprang up from the desert. Sakura let out a haggard breath when it materialized, but she sent it slamming down anyway. It cut through the lingering steam like a bull, pushing the cloud apart. Sakura caught sight of the Ami-nin running from under it and pushed all the chakra she could into her legs.

Ino's body flickered. One second it dozens of feet away, the next it was beside the Ami-nin, hanging in midair, chakra-infused kick already chambered. Sakura could see the shock in the man's face just before her shin slammed into his eyes and face with all the force of Ino's entire reserve of chakra. He rocketed backward, upper body falling just under the massive slab before it collapsed onto the sand.

The dune shook from the force of it. Sakura had put as much of Ino's chakra as she could into that doton, and then the following shunshin. She was also fairly sure she'd pulled a ligament in Ino's leg, and the familiar shakes of chakra depletion had already started. But the Ami-nin… the half of his body that wasn't under the sandstone slab was twitching. He'd been shorn off at the lower chest, blood and organs spilling out over the desert. It hadn't been a clean cut.

Ino caught her as she fell. "You don't do things half-assed," she said, with a tremor in her voice Sakura could have ribbed her for. If she wasn't so very tired.

But the blond didn't let her go to sleep. She slapped her cheeks, pinched, and did whatever she could to keep Sakura awake. "Come on. We're almost there," she said. "You don't get to trash my body and then take a nap."

"You could take it back," Sakura slurred, but she knew Ino had a point. She struggled to her feet. "I carried you all the way here. You could let me rest for a bit."

To her surprise, Ino stopped tugging on her. The blond was probably only looking out for her own body, but Sakura appreciated it anyway. They walked toward the edge of the dune, rather than run. The Ami-nin wouldn't get any deader and if there was something else out there then Sakura didn't think she could deal with it anyway.

"This is weird, right?"

Sakura blinked and flipped one of Ino's loose bangs back. "The body thing or the Ami-nin thing?"

Ino rolled her eyes, which looked entirely too petulant on Sakura's face. "The body thing, forehead. I'm used to your brain trying to kill us by now."

This conversation Sakura could deal with. She was even starting to feel a little better, and not just because she was getting a chance to rest. Ino being conscious made her feel secure. She wasn't going to be taking orders from the blond anytime soon, but it was still nice to have someone else there.

Even if you had been ready to throw Ino to the wolves to survive.

Sakura could almost hear the Ami-nin laughing at her. She pushed it to the side. "I mean, it's weird feeling like a genin again," Sakura taunted. That felt better than thinking about what she'd almost done. "Do you even train?"

Instead of the instant fire Sakura expected, she felt Ino slump. "I train," she muttered. That was all she said. No insults, no names.

It was uncomfortable. Ino was the strong one. The rock. The… leader. Sakura's goals had changed from a year ago, but once her entire life had revolved around this very moment. The moment Ino realized that she, Haruno Sakura, had moved past her.

It didn't feel as good as Sakura had once imagined.

Sakura wasn't good at consoling others. She had a lot of blind spots when it came to being empathetic; she could admit that. But Ino being quiet and mopy wasn't something she liked.

And it wasn't that Ino's body was weak. Sakura gave her arm a flex and felt the tension and power there. Ino had led her entire class for years. Years. Girls in Iruka's class didn't compete for first place - they competed for the spot after Yamanaka Ino.

And for the first time Sakura finally realized what she had been going up against. Ino had the power, the chakra, and even the stamina to beat a lot of the boys in the class, but Sakura had never recognized her strength. Not really. Sure, Sakura knew she would have been faster and stronger in her own body, but Ino's wasn't weak.

But getting the words out… saying it out loud that Ino had been better and stronger all those years…

Sakura tried. She opened her mouth several times, ready to say something, but she just couldn't drag them out.

"Switch back," she said instead. Ino glanced up at her, but Sakura didn't meet her eyes. "Feels weird. Switch back."

Sakura was prepared for vertigo this time, as well as all the aches and pains of her mental body. It felt comfortable. Ino seemed better too, even though she made a show of checking herself over. Sakura didn't miss the relieved sigh the girl let out.

"Did you have to almost break my leg?" she complained. There was a bit of swelling there from the kick she'd given the Ami-nin, but chakra had done a lot to lessen what it could have been.

"Did you have to wait until the last second to switch with me?"

Ino frowned like she'd eaten something sour. "I was going to wait longer, but I didn't exactly trust you not to just take his offer and run off on me." She said it flippantly because she was joking. Her teasing smirk gave it away.

Sakura's whole body sagged. If Ino had waited just a few more seconds, she thought. Had she been so willing to just throw Ino away like that? Sakura expected that the disembodied voice of her teacher would cut in as soon as she thought that, but there hadn't been any new audio flashbacks since she'd dealt with the Ami-nin. Sakura wasn't complaining - she didn't want to remember that conversation anyway - but now it was just her and Ino and the guilt.

But Sakura at least knew how to deal with it - think of something else, ignore the feelings, and repress. And change topics.

"We're only a few minutes from the burn pits. I have some questions for you, too."

Ino looked askew at her for the abrupt conversation shift, but she didn't argue. She even took point without being prompted. "So what questions?"

Too many. "Why are you so sure that the old man is the key to this? How do you know he's not just some crazy projection like everything else?"

"Because you said you didn't know him," Ino replied, sounding sure. "You knew that guy a second ago, right?" A nod from Sakura. "And you knew the bandits, and I'm guessing you knew the bombs. Everything here is just your crazy mind talking to itself except for the old man."

"Sounds… logical."

"Because it is, Forehead! I'm a Yamanaka; I know these things."

Sakura rolled her eyes. "I guess that's why you got blown up a little while ago. Because you're so sure and smart about things here not being able to hurt us."

Ino let out a weary "eeeeh" at that. "This is my first time diving into someone's head like this. So I was wrong about one thing. Sue me."

"Think I got a case?"

The blond tossed Sakura a look over her shoulder. "Try it. I've got the character… witness… es…"

She trailed off. "Shit."

Sakura turned. At first she thought that Ino had been reacting to the admittedly-disturbing discovery that the Ami-nin's body was gone, but her eyes caught movement in the far background. Slow, small movement, but movement on a scale that boggled Sakura's mind.

A mountain was coming toward them. A lumbering, lurching, massive mountain of a titan was on the horizon. The dust cloud it was kicking up was immense; it reminded Sakura of a desert sandstorm. An actual force of nature.

"I know you didn't see something like that in Suna," Ino muttered, in awe.

Sakura might have laughed. At least, something resembling an incredulous chuckle burped up from her stomach. "Not… not even close, Pig. Is that a raccoon?"

Ino didn't have an answer, because Ino wasn't standing there anymore. Sakura only saw her fading back as she sprinted toward the burn pits, as fast as she could. Scurried right over the side of the dune and tumbled down the side, clawing at the sand to go even faster, until she landed in a frantic heap at the bottom.

A dozen more dunes to go and Ino attacked the next one with the same ferocity.

And, for once, Sakura didn't feel like arguing with the part of her brain that said she was just following Ino again.

If it had a problem with it, Sakura was more than happy to let it stay here and meet the angry raccoon creature no more than a few minutes away from them.

AN: Seems like an easy chapter, right? Short, right? No. I've been working on this DEMON for months now. Months. Rewrite after rewrite. Screw it; the goal of finishing Loyalty this year demands we press! Press and press and press evermore toward the breach, my good readers!