"God, Sakura, you're so vain," Ino sneered one day. "Everywhere you go, you carry around that stupid looking mirror with you! It's not even a cute mirror, either!"
Sakura ignored her, turning the small handheld mirror over and over. Sure it wasn't a pretty mirror -- kind of old and woodsy but then again, it's the one her mother had given her when she had her sign that scroll one day and told her how it works. She then warned her to always keep it on her person and to never use it except in dire circumstances. To date, her mother had never used it; her father had, though, and the results she remembered were such that she never wanted to use it herself.
Sakura's curiosity was tempered by her deep need to abide by rules so she opted to not find out what hidden secret resided in the mirror at the now. Though she sort of wished it would be something to scare the pants off of Ino.
---
Several years later, during the second phase of the Chunin Exams, Ino, Shikamaru and Choji stumbled upon a very bloody scene. The three Sound genin that had started a ruckus before the first exam began were all lying about on the ground very much dead. Their bodies were torn asunder, faces gruesomely fixed in horrific screams she could could swear she could still hear even though she was nowhere near the site. In their mouths, bees crawled out like reborn locusts -- in fact, the entire area hummed of the winged insects.
In the middle of the carnage cowered Sakura. Her ugly little handheld mirror had been dropped onto the ground as she visibly shivered all over. Over in the hollow of a tree, Sasuke's and Naruto's bodies laid as if dead men. none of them were touched by blood or by bees.
"What the hell happened?" Ino wondered aloud as she and her teammate carefully picked their way through the bloodbath. Shikamaru looked green and Choji wasn't faring any better.
"I summoned him..." Sakura whispered, eyes lifting up to reveal their haunted, tearstained complexion. "I summoned him..."
"Summoned?" she repeated, puzzled. "Summoned who?"
"I..." Sakura's eyes widened in horror looking past her shoulder. "Ino!"
Alarmed, the blonde ninja turned her head quickly, her body preparing for whatever was approaching.
The only thing she saw was a hook jammed into a bloody stump of an arm before it sank into the flesh of her neck.
---
"Why...?" Sakura cried softly, silently. Team 10 -- Ino, Shikamaru, Choji -- were just as torn apart like the Sound genin. Fresh new blood soaking in with old blood. Their manged, eviscerated bodies were rapidly accumulating more bees invading their exposed cavities. Sakura couldn't look away from massacre or the dark-skinned man in the heavy, fur-lined longcoat, with a white scarf wound around his neck, neatly tucked into place. His right hand had been brutally replaced with an oversized rustic hook, the thing that ripped apart all the genin in the area.
And he was looking down the lane, to where the once-sleeping Sasuke was starting to stir.
"Why are you doing this!" Sakura shouted, her voice quavering with emotion.
"Because you asked me to, Sakura," the black man spoke in his dark, raspy voice. "You wanted to destroy the the three before. You wanted me to 'scare the pants' off her." He rudely pointed to Ino's severed head with his slick polished shoes.
"No..." she spoke in terror, a childish memory once discarded, now roaring back in full vividness. Her stomach threatened to turn itself inside out.
"Yes... though my fulfillment of your desires come at a price, Sakura." He knelted down in front of the crying girl, catching her chin between the steely fingers of his large hand as he had her look at him.
"Become my victim," Candyman said with a smile.