ᗰOᑎᔕTEᖇ [🧡 ᑎᗩᖇᑌᕼIᑎᗩ 💜] [Ɱҽէąʍօɾքհօʂìʂ] Bσσƙ Oɳҽ

Reality

Chapter Fifty-Two

Reality

May 25, 2010

A woman was screaming, wailing a horrendous melody grating her ears. Ino wanted so desperately to cover them, to block out the painful ringing but...

She couldn't move.

Her body felt heavy.

Her mind detached from the world around her.

People were yelling...shouting at each other....bellowing at her...

Their words were indiscernible, muffled and garbled. She couldn't hear them...but the clatter of the blade dropping from her hand to the pavement below reverberated, louder than the shattering roar of a lion. Piercing the thundering circus around her.

She was shaking.

She didn't know how she knew...

She couldn't feel it.

Stiff, tense, her head moved mechanically on her neck, sweeping the scene from one side to the other. Her eyes felt stretched wide, beyond their capacity, and yet, she couldn't really see anything around her...or rather, she couldn't process any of it.

There was no fire...

No attack...

No broken buildings, running villagers or rampaging jubokko...

Konoha was intact and peaceful, disrupted only by the surreal circumstance she found herself in the midst of; kneeling as she was on the paved road behind a house in the residential district, hands bathed in the blood of an innocent...

"Sakura...?" she whispered, her confused gaze finding the woman she'd known a lifetime, "Sakura...?"

She didn't know what she was asking. Her lips were moving without her dictation and the only name they could form was Sakura.

She was lost...

So lost.

"Oh god Ino," Sakura wheezed, her ashen face the same pallor Ino had only seen on a corpse, "ohmygodohmygodohmygod..."

Shell shocked, the pinkette stumbled forward, steadying herself with a quaking hand on the blonde's bloody shoulder as she knelt ungracefully, painfully jarring, on the asphalt. Ino could only stare as her friend reached towards the child, healing chakra flowing from her palms. Her arms were shaking, her lips trembling, emerald orbs wide and haunted. Beneath the trance of the macabre world teeming around her, Ino could only watch the strange scene before her. She traced the little figure, all bloody and broken. Noting the wine colored stains in her pretty pink dress. Lingering on the glinting chestnut curls framing a cute pixie face splotched in carmine droplets.

Vibrations pinged her ears.

Talking. Harsh words.

Whispers. Horrified gasps.

Sobbing. Unfathomable anguish.

Rage. Explosive venom.

They drifted about her, these blazing sensations, their force and fury great, yet unable to pierce the numbness wrapped around her consciousness.

A man landed next to the two kunoichi.

Dazed blue eyes moved to the figure.

Green vest...

Leaf headband...

Shinobi...

"Sakura-san, what in God's name-"