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UPDATE: This chapter has replaced the previous "Into Madness" chapter. After some reflection, I realized that the previous "Into Madness" didn't live up to my personal expectations. From here on, please disregard everything that happened in the previous version. Sorry!
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Psychosanity
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Chapter 10: Into Madness
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"Ino?"
She turned—
—and was greeted by darkness.
The ground was soft under her hands, and several different sounds echoed through her ears. There was a shuffling of feet coming towards her and she turned her face to that sound, but darkness was still the only thing she could see. She swept her hand through the ground, feeling blades of grass tickling the spaces between her fingers. She tilted her head in thought. One of the sounds from before...
"Is that my name?" she asked the other person. Silence greeted her until…
"… yes it is, Ino," the other person replied. Ino smiled gleefully and clapped her hands together.
"Wow! I didn't know I had two names!" she crowed excitedly. She heard the stranger fidget nervously and take a step closer. Ino waited patiently, unsure of exactly what was going to happen. If she could see something other than darkness, she would have seen the other person with their hands hovering uncertainly in the air, could have seen the internal debate on whether or not to touch Ino.
"What's your name?" Ino asked when the silence became too boring.
"… my name doesn't matter," the person replied. "How did you get here, Ino?" she asked. Ino hummed in thought, looking up.
"I don't know," Ino said. "I woke up on the outside one day. Usually after I sleep I wake up outside, but this time I went to sleep outside and woke up inside." There was a long pause. It was so long that Ino started playing with the grass under her hands, picking at it and rolling it between her hands. She dug her toes into the soft dirt, giggling to herself. Ino wished she could see something other than darkness, wanting to see what colour the grass under her fingers was.
"The outside… what is it like?" the person finally asked.
"It's not fun," Ino said, frowning. "I want to sleep all the time, but the outside needs the sunshine too much." Ino turned her head in the direction where she sensed the other person was. "Can you go outside for me instead?" There was another pause.
"I will," the person said, and Ino began smiling widely until she continued on, "but not yet. Not now."
Ino deflated, dreading going outside again. Ino just wanted to sleep, but going outside meant that she had to be awake to share her sunshine with other people. She understood that it was a necessary job, but it was quite an unpleasant experience. Maybe that was why the other person didn't want to go outside yet?
The other person hurried to reassure her. "I promise you can sleep again, but you must endure the outside a little more. Can you do that for me, Ino?"
Ino sighed, but bobbed her head. "Okay…"
A hand came and stroked her head, leaving her with quiet warmth.
"Thank you."
—and smiled.
Meditation was crucial for a Yamanaka.
As a child, she had always fought against her father when he forced her to have these weird 'quiet' sessions. It was always utterly boring, and she had never understood the reason for it as a child. It felt more like punishment for a hyperactive child like her.
"We must have organized thoughts, my daughter," her father always told her when she complained for the umpteenth time about meditating. "It's very important as a Yamanaka." She would mumble and groan a little bit more, before plopping down on the pillow offered to her and closing her eyes.
In the beginning, she would fall asleep half the time. Her father always carried her to bed, and when she saw him the following morning for breakfast, she always blushed in embarrassment a little. But then she grew older, and she learnt more and more about her family bloodline, and those meditation sessions became training. Because she learned.
She learned that chaotic minds were a dangerous thing for a Yamanaka.
Her father had explained it to her this way: her mind was like a house. A big, broad, complex house. Kind of like the Hyuuga or Uchiha compounds. There were many sections and layers, and each of them had a very special purpose. Most people couldn't move their house once they built it; it was meant to be a permanent place. But the Yamanaka's had the special privilege of being able to move their house from place to place. Usually, the house wanted to move all at once, all together, because it was organized and clean and understood its purpose within the larger complex. But sometimes, one part of the house would rebel.
Maybe it decided that it didn't like the purpose it was given. Or maybe it was under a lot of stress and didn't want to move. Whatever the reason, the privilege to move was lost because only the whole house was allowed to move, not just part of it. And that was an issue, because for a Yamanaka, the privilege to move was the most important thing. It was their very reason for existing.
So she, ever the over-achiever, grasped her father's words and ran. She meditated every morning when she woke up, and every night before she went to sleep. Twice a day, she would slip into her 'house', reorganizing, rebuilding—sometimes even adding—things.
This time, however, instead of rushing off immediately to reorganize or rebuild or clean, Ino dropped into her mindscape and just stared.
Her house was still standing tall and proud, an echoed sentiment that could be seen by the straight lines of her back and shoulders. The door had been pried open, off of its hinges. It was hanging by a needle, swaying softly from the wind that blew past her. The windows received much the same treatment, completely torn from their sill if not hanging for dear life. A few of the roof tiles had chipped and fallen, leaving holes where the sun could shine through.
Ordinarily, those problems would've been fixed within the hour, but this time… this time it wouldn't change anything.
Ino watched as rain started trickling down from the sky, falling through the cracks in the roof or clinging to the walls of her house and sliding slowly, slowly down until they kissed the grass. Given time and neglect the rain would nourish the weeds, which would then sprout and grow and expand until they covered the whole of her dwelling... but the weeds wouldn't have the time to do that anyways.
Her house was soaked now, drenched and muddy. She walked on the stone path towards the broken door, stepping inside as rain came in through the roof and wet the floors of the foyer. The water left a trail of droplets as she stole further into the house. There was a library just ahead, on the right. It was a fairly large room, though Ino had saved some space for it to grow, because she had thought that it inevitably would. But now maybe she was just too optimistic.
There were a lot of bookshelves lining the walls. Each was labeled accordingly: "genjutsu", "hanakotoba", "gossip", being only a few examples. In past occasions, Ino found herself visiting genjutsu and gossip quite frequently, especially since gossip tended to need updating a lot. But this time, Ino ignored those shelves, and instead stood in front of a smaller bookshelf at the far end of the room.
It was barely to her hip and dusty from neglect. She knelt to peer closely at the scrolls shoved haphazardly into it. They were out of order, and some were quite unintelligible, but that was expected. It used to bother her before, but now she only smiled fondly as she picked one up.
The words were written in a childish scrawl, but they felt as clear as day to Ino.
(It's okay! I know the shadows won't hurt me.
… you're not scared?
No way! My daddy is the best ninja in Konoha!
[Crunch, crunch] But the Hokage is the best ninja, right?
Shut up fatty!
I'M NOT FAT I'M BIG-BONED!
AHHHHHHHH!)
Ino laughed through the wetness coalescing on her cheeks, reading on as she waited for her inevitable end. Amano would not like the vegetable his toy had become; he would dispose of her soon. In what way she didn't know, and she didn't want to know. But she knew it would be soon. Maybe a fire, maybe by collapsing into itself, but her house would be destroyed; it would be done. All that was left for her now was to revisit her long-loved memories, at this bookshelf titled "childhood".
(SHIKAMARU HELP ME!
...Troublesome.)
She discovered it after she had finished pouring through old memories and started to take a walk around, hoping to remember as much as she could before her perceived inevitable end. Instead, the ground on which she based her perceived her inevitable end became shaky, because she had found something so puzzling that it had led her into the library towards one particular scroll, hoping that it could explain something.
But the scroll could explain nothing.
Ino sighed in frustration, ignoring the mess of books and scrolls behind her, a consequence of trying to find this particular scroll buried in a pile of other literature. The antique, sought-after text lay opened on the table, the words inked in ancient scrawl. Ino learned how to read it already, having devoted a large amount of her time to learning it after her father had showed her the secret library. But nothing in it could explain what was outside her walls.
It didn't tell her anything about the house sitting across the way.
When Ino had first seen it, she paused in the doorway, chills shooting up her spine as she eyed the decrepit, tiny house that had never been there before. It wasn't close, rather it looked like a tiny speck in the distance, though a very visible, very wrong speck in the distance. Because there was only supposed to be one mind-house.
There was only supposed to be one mind-house.
Once she had seen and fully realized the implications of this second mind-house, she darted into the library, her fingers clawing for the old scroll sitting in her "genjutsu" bookshelf. She started out slow—albeit with shaky hands—looking through the first few lines for any explanation, but soon enough the full length of it had spread on and over the table. It would now be her third time reading through it, trying to find any kind of hint. But still, nothing.
But she already knew that. She knew that what she'd done had no precedent; she was the first. Ordinarily, the thought would've given her pride, but now it just made her heart drop down into her stomach. She'd only thought about the honour and prestige of being first… she hadn't thought of everything else. She hadn't thought about the realities of being first.
She was alone, and worst of all she was clueless. Ino hated being clueless. That was one of the reasons she had a shelf in her library full of gossip magazines. The more that she knew, the more prepared she could be. Surprise came from a lack of expectation, and a lack of expectation came from a lack of knowledge, and a lack of knowledge and expectation could mean death for a shinobi.
Ino rolled the scroll back up and put it back on its shelf. If the scroll wasn't going to tell her anything she didn't already know, she just had to do some of her own research.
She looked out the window again, scrutinizing the house across the way. The gears in her head started to turn.
The jutsu was supposed to put her body in a doll-like state. It was essentially supposed to turn her into a vegetable. The plan was for Amaru to realize she was alive but unresponsive, and either kill her or dump her body somewhere to rot. But instead, it had created a second consciousness, a second personality, and dumped that consciousness into the driver's seat. So if Ino used Mind-Transfer on an enemy shinobi, would only her mind-house move, or would both of them move?
She shook her head. That was irrelevant. What do we do, Ino?
Well, standing around in her library wasn't going to accomplish anything, she knew. But the idea of stepping near that mind-house made her hackles rise. Who knew what was going to be there? Above her were blue skies and white, fluffy clouds. But she could see darkness at the edges of her mindscape, and somehow she just knew that it was bleeding in from the second mind-house. She couldn't see much from her permanently open window, as the house was just a speck in the distance, and preferred it that way.
Still, it wasn't as if she had any other options. The scroll wasn't going to tell her anything new, and she wouldn't be able to study it from inside the safety of her mindscape. So Ino exited her mind-house and headed across the way. She wandered far enough that her stone pathway melted into grass, and the sight of her mind-house looked like one of those picturesque paintings from the art store.
She was starting to doubt she'd ever reach the second mindscape until, like magic, the skies started to blacken. Dark clouds were rising overhead, only allowing the slightest rays of sun through its cracks. It dominated the sky, dark and gloomy. Ino paused at its edge, just inside of it.
There was no malevolence; she couldn't feel any. The mindscape didn't scare her, nor was it scared of her. It actually seemed rather oblivious, but Ino still kept her guard up. What was it Kakashi-sensei liked to say? Underneath the underneath, and all that.
Ino stared ahead, judging the distance. The mind-house wasn't too far away. Actually, it was surprisingly closer than she expected. To have such little space between the edges of its mindscape and its mind-house betrayed a kind of immaturity. So its owner was a fairly new mind? In her pursuit to lobotomize herself, had she created a mind-clone? But that made no sense; if it was a mind-clone, it would have copied the extravagance of her house. And this house…
It was pretty barren, holding no doors or windows to protect the inner contents. Grass surrounded the house in spades, almost creeping into the interior. There were no fences and no pathways. It was completely disorganized and yet somehow…
Ino walked further in, pausing at the threshold of the house. She peered in, noting the lack of walls in the house itself. It was just a little shack with one chair and one table, and a fine layer of dust over both. The floors were scuffed and the walls were splintering. The damage and neglect was something Ino had never seen before, but there was still something about this place that seemed… familiar…
Ino took one step through the doorway. Something in the corner of the room caught her eye, and she turned towards it. It was a dusty little bookshelf that barely reached her hip. On its shelves were only ashes, and the sight of them turned her blood to ice.
Outside, a shock of blonde hair materialized.
"Troublesome woman…"
Ino bit her thumbnail in irritation. It wasn't like she was trying to be troublesome. She was bossy because she had two lazy teammates and a mild-mannered sensei. She gossiped because that was the best way to keep abreast of current events and not be surprised by everything. She took care of her appearance because if someone underestimated her just by her looks, that was their own fault and they deserved whatever they got coming to them.
In all those things, Ino disagreed with Shikamaru. She wasn't being troublesome, she was just being a ninja, which was, you know, kind of her job.
But on this? Ino could agree she was kind of… troublesome.
After all, who else was troublesome enough to make a copy of themselves?
Ino almost tore her nail off.
More than that, who was dumb enough to make a copy of themselves that retained only the ashes of memories of their childhood, and then put that copy in the driver's seat?!
She put her head in her hands and groaned.
Ino was really, really, really in over her head this time.
Her copy was lying on the grass, face pointed towards the sky, but didn't react to the groan. It didn't react to anything really, although part of that was because it couldn't see. It was an interesting predicament; while her copy could see on the "outside", it was incapable of sight on the "inside". If she hadn't had more pressing matters to attend to (namely, how she was going to get herself out of this hole she'd dug and placed deadly venomous snakes in), she would have liked to spend more time studying this strange disconnect in sensory perception.
(Her copy was singing an out-of-tune song to itself, replacing all of the lyrics with 'Hina-chan', 'Forehead-chan', and 'Shadowman'.)
It wasn't unheard of to have multiple personalities in one body. A lot of crazy ninja had had multiple personalities. They were highly unstable and very dangerous, hence their swift executions, but her father had been able to research a few of them before they were inevitably offed. She was kicking herself now for not asking her father more about their psyches.
Well then. This posed a problem. Ino knew the rules of her village quite intimately. And even if she didn't, she'd have at least remembered the important ones. One of which was the decree that all clinically insane ninja had to be executed, for fear of public safety. If her father or some other clan member came poking around in her head (which, by the way, why hadn't they yet?), they'd see that she had an extra personality and would be forced to declare her clinically insane. Konoha couldn't risk having one of its ninja switch personalities in the middle of a dangerous situation and endanger the mission.
Ino looked over at her copy making grass angels in the field and resisted the urge to scream.
She'd somehow survived death by a madman only to fall right into the path of execution by her own village. Great.
But perhaps there was more luck on her side than she realized. For one, she and her copy hadn't been executed yet, despite the fact that she was definitely not herself anymore. No one had come poking around yet, though Ino wasn't willing to let her guard down on that one. She wasn't sure why they were keeping her alive even though it seemed quite obvious she had lost her mind, but she wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
There were two problems. One, she was no longer in control of her own body. Two, even if she somehow regained control, if someone ever came poking around in her head they'd find two personalities and have to declare her clinically insane anyway. So how did she solve her two main problems?
There was no rhyme or reason as to how to switch the personality currently in the hot seat. From what she did remember of multiple personality psyches, the triggers were different for a lot of people. But even if Ino managed to figure her trigger out, that still left her second problem hanging in the air like a bright-ass neon light begging for attention. Since she'd gone through such a lengthy and traumatic experience, a psych eval would be non-negotiable. The copy would be discovered in her mindscape in nanoseconds.
She tapped her lip in thought.
Alright, first things first: one of these mindscapes needed to go. Anyone who came poking around in her head would notice the two mind-houses immediately. Two mind-houses meant two personalities; two or more personalities meant a multiple personality disorder. Her solution was simple: combine the mindscapes.
That didn't solve the whole other copy she had made and which one of them was the driver and which wasn't, but it was a start. Baby steps. So. Mindscapes. Combining mindscapes. That was simple, right?
Ino grimaced. Right. Simple. Because breaking apart her entire mind house to merge it with a less developed one was so simple. She eyed the little shack behind the copy of herself, sighing.
How did one go about merging mindscapes?
Time flowed differently in minds.
Meditation often took hours, but the time spent meditating felt like minutes. It was easy to be aware of her surroundings while she meditated though, always conscious of threats or surprise attacks. But it was different when she had forcibly locked herself in her head. Ino wasn't sure how much time had passed. She hadn't bothered keeping track when she first got here, sure that she would have died soon after anyways. And when she eventually realized she wasn't going to die because she had somehow created another her, too much time had already passed for her to even attempt to figure it out.
She tried not to think about how much time had been wasted while she was working on her double mindscapes. The constant walking back and forth between her and her copy's houses had taken so much time. Especially when she was carrying building materials or furniture. Thankfully, the time it took to traverse between the two places had started to feel shorter. She speculated that it was a result of her mindscapes overlapping more and more. Soon, she thought, she wouldn't have to traverse at all; she would simply be in her mind.
Ino smiled at the thought and sat down on the floor in her half-built foyer. Though it was quickly dashed away by the thought that it wasn't really her mindscape, and as a result it may not be hers to drive anymore. The tears pricked at the backs of her eyes, but she grit her teeth. That was irrelevant for the moment. She'd just take a short break before continuing the merging again. One step at a time, remember Ino?
The merging mostly consisted of adding to her copy's mindscape using everything from her old one. Since this mindscape was the one in the driver's seat, Ino figured she'd just have to rebuild everything here. It was easier than doing it from scratch, that was for sure. She'd already put all the walls and floors in. Now it was simply a matter of moving her furniture. The nice thing about rebuilding a house in her head was that her stamina was virtually limitless. Mental exhaustion was still something to worry about, but Ino wasn't a kid anymore. She knew how to handle her mental stamina.
Ino sighed and closed her eyes. She kind of understood Shikamaru now, how he wanted to just laze around and look at clouds all day. Her mind hadn't stopped working since she used the jutsu that backfired on her. Energy was still being replenished regularly, because her copy was still sleeping and eating, but when Ino wasn't being forced to sleep she was working on her mindscapes. Because really, what else would she do in here?
Her sigh was long and loud, and she fell back onto the wooden floor of her in-progress foyer. If she managed to bring herself back to reality and didn't sleep for three days after all was said and done, she would probably just knock herself out via one of Sakura's "you're-being-extremely-annoying-right-now" hits for Naruto.
Her eyes opened, staring listlessly at the ceiling as she felt a tingle on her cheek. It was a familiar feeling, but she couldn't place it. The feeling was comforting, she thought. It made her heart expand and her toes warm. She reached up and touched her cheek. Her lips parted in surprise. The tears at the back of her eyes forced their way to the front.
"Shikamaru…"
His touch was so familiar. She thought that she would be able to remember it anywhere.
Would it have been too selfish of her to wish that she could be the driver right now? To see him and tell him she was sorry for fucking everything up? Because she didn't even know if her stupid, half-baked plan would work. Because even if there was one mindscape, there were still two Inos. And there was a very high possibility that the copy would continue to replace the original.
Her tears fell slowly, getting in her ears and hair. Eventually, they drip-dropped onto the floors.
"What am I doing?"
"Ino..."
"Ino... it's almost time..."
"It will be over soon... you can sleep soon..."
"Just a little more... and then you can sleep."
The resentment was the first thing to bring her back.
One moment she was neatly fitting a a scroll back onto a shelf, and the next she was staring into the faces of men she'd seen before. Grotesque, twisted faces of people who had laughed and jeered and debased her. There was no realization of where she was or what she was supposed to be doing; all she wanted was to see those faces twisted in agony and repentance. Let them feel what she felt all those times; the disgust, the violation, the degradation, the hopelessness.
Let them feel it all and die.
They fell at her feet, mouths gurgling and eyes rolled into their skulls. They cried tears of copper. That was all that was left of them. And then she was spiralling through a mindscape (hers?) for secondsminuteshoursdaysshedidn'tknowitwassohardtotell and then she was staring into a field of ninja and bandits.
The faces were blurred and unrecognizable, but maybe that was also because she was spiralling and then she wasn't and she still hadn't figured out what was up and what was down but the eyes called out to her. There was white and blue and green and brown, but then there was darkness, eyes of darkness and she yearned for those eyes, for oblivion and peace and darkness.
There was another set of darkness. But these ones… they were filled with malice and venom and terror. They had taken from her, again and again and again, and she wanted everything back. Looking into these eyes, she knew what brought her back this time. She revelled in it, noticing that a slow burn had ignited under her skin from when she stared into the same eyes that had tormented her for days. She knew this feeling. She had felt it in her youth, towards a boy who had chosen selfishness over friendship. Compared to now, that feeling was just a growl. This time it raged and snarled and roared. Ino didn't listen to it before/
She listened to it this time. She let it burn through her throat into her head. She let the power fester there as those terrible eyes grew closer and closer until she could see past them; past them to the small wisps of smoke, blue like her eyes.
She reached out and took them back.
She woke up inside her head. Her copy was sitting across from her at the dinner table. There was that same dazed look present over its eyes, the one that had been there since the beginning, but there was also a surety and sentience that moved in its posture. Maybe that was to be expected; after all, Ino had only just finished putting the library back together. But it was curious; she didn't remember walking from the library to the dining room after placing the last scroll in its proper place. The library had been the last thing left to do, and Ino had purposefully planned it that way. If her copy had any mention of jutsu or shinobi before Ino "came back", they would have executed her almost immediately. The scrolls that pertained to her existence as a ninja were therefore conveniently left as the last to shelve.
"Now what?" The copy asked, cocking its head at Ino. It still couldn't see anything but it knew Ino was there. She thought that was strange; in the mindscape her copy had an uncanny sense of her surroundings, which was completely different from its senses in reality. Ino would have wanted to take the time and discover the reasons for (and consequences of) that disconnect of sensory perception, but her hourglass ran dry a long time ago.
Ino gazed steadily at the eerily familiar girl sitting across from her. "I don't know," she admitted. It wasn't like she had been following the guide of "how-to-uncrazy-yourself". If anything, she had made the guide of "how-to-fuck-up-your-entire-brain."
The copy frowned. Ino was a bit unsure if her copy knew what she was thinking, but it seemed plausible that it did. They were, after all, the same person.
Kind of.
"So…" Ino started, "are you still controlling our body?" The copy shook it's head.
"Our body will not awaken until there is only one of us."
Ino froze.
"But—"
"But you are confused about the how," her copy interjected. Ino's jaw snapped shut. 'Took the words right out…' Her copy smiled, and the gesture seemed somewhat sad. "How do we forget things that cannot be forgotten?" The copy asked. Ino twitched a little. Was it testing her? That was absurd. Whatever the copy knew, Ino knew, because they shared the same library. They shared the same knowledge. So that meant she knew the answer to this; she just had to find it.
Her eyes closed. She ran through what she knew so far about memories. They tended to be easily forgotten and misremembered if a long time had passed between the memory and the moment of recollection. Memories could also be influenced by outside sources. Maybe someone suggests the jacket was red, and you agree because you're unsure.
But those were for recalling memories. Forgetting memories was different. Time could still be a factor, but usually it was based on relevance and repetition. If knowing something could decide whether or not you lived, you would definitely remember it. And if you did something enough times, you'd never forget it.
But forgetting memories was different from forgetting the existence of an entire other consciousness in her head. And given that someone was probably going to probe her brain to make sure she was psychologically sound, they would probably find her little secret...
Unless she hid it.
Ino looked up and the world tilted, and then she woke up again.
"Ino?"
She turned—
—and whispered his name. There were tears in his eyes from the dust settling on his hair and nose. They spilled over his cheeks as he regarded her with a kind of incredulity. His hand was cupping the back of her head, fingers tangled in her hair; she could feel them trembling. He repeated her name, and she whispered his again.
He kissed her.