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The red aura around Naruto is more than chakra. It presses down on Sakura, putting pressure on her lungs, her limbs; every breath becomes a struggle and every small movement is a fight. The feeling ignites something deep inside of her, something fast and weak and screaming. It begs her to run; to hide and close her eyes and pray it shows her mercy. She has never quite understood the way prey hesitates, paralyzed, but she thinks she does now. Her body is frozen; she can’t seem to move her gaze away from Naruto’s bubbling red skin and bright, slitted eyes, and she knows without a doubt that she will die for it.
Killing Intent, some distant part of her mind whispers, but she knows that it’s not the same as it was with Zabuza, when her team surrounded her and she had a clear goal. Now, Sasuke is dead. Kakashi is nearly incapacitated, Tazuna is cowering, and she is about to die.
If her mind wasn’t frozen, she might be thinking that she doesn’t want to die; she still has her wedding with Sasuke-kun, her (broken) friendship with Ino, her birthday in two weeks that her father is coming home for. She hasn’t seen him in months, and she wants nothing more than to be wrapped in one of his warm hugs, because she loves her mother, she really does, but it’s not the same as the smell of his soap and the tickle of his hair and —
She doesn’t want to die, Sakura thinks as the strange bubbling chakra consumes Naruto, as black spots begin to dot her vision, as her muscles tighten more than she thought possible and the utter certainty of her fate settles into her bones and being.
She doesn’t want to die. She’s not ready to leave — she’s not done, yet. At least let her have one last hug, one last loving look from her mother, one last argument soaked in history and lined with acceptance and friendship with Ino, one last —
One last everything.
She’s not done, yet.
Naruto lunges for Haku. The boy rolls to the side, but he’s not fast enough, not to escape the thing that Naruto has become. The thick red chakra doesn’t obscure the color of blood as it spills across the bridge.
“Haku,” Zabuza growls, voice anguished. He moved to jump towards Naruto, but Kakashi holds him back.
“Naruto —” Kakashi pleads. “Fight it — you can fight him —”
Naruto’s gone, sensei, Sakura wants to say, but she doesn’t; at first, because she’s not cruel, and then because Kakashi’s blood has joined Haku’s and now Zabuza’s and the creature cloaked in red is lunging for her.
I am going to die, Sakura thinks, and it is no surprise when dull claws sink into her chest and rip through her skin and bones as if her body is paper —
I am dead, Sakura thinks, as she stares into the face of the Death God.
Sunken eyes and peeling skin and a swirling cloak of blood and bone and shadow; the Shinigami has come for her, and she can no longer see the red chakra or her fallen comrades or the bridge that became a graveyard. Instead, she sees her death, and every other death, because they must all look the same in the Shinigami’s dark eyes.
No, she thinks. “I’m not done, yet.”
No one is, the dark eyes seem to say, but I come anyway.
“I’m not done,” Sakura says, but her voice is resigned and her thoughts are flatter, lacking the determination and longing that they held moments before.
You are, it says without speaking.
The sky is disappearing, and all she can see are those stupid, knowing eyes.
One last time? She wants to ask, but the words don’t leave her lips. The blood in her veins moves sluggishly, pulled by gravity instead of pushed by her heart, because her heart has stopped and she is dead.
Okay, she thinks, and reaches out to take Death’s hand.
The eyes smile.
Good girl, they seem to say; I’m proud of you, for living, but now it’s time to go.
“I still don’t really want to,” Sakura allows herself to say as her spirit steps over her fallen body. “I never got my hug. My dad gives good hugs.”
It gives her a long look, as if considering something, even as she moves closer. She innately knows that her spirit cannot step in the blood on the ground, but she avoids the macabre puddles anyway, placing her feet carefully.
“Okay,” Sakura says before the God. “I’m ready.”
No, you’re not, it says in return.
“No one is.” Sakura repeats its words, because there seems nothing else to say; the longer she looks away from her body, the less it seems to matter, and she knows that her life will remain in her memory but her emotions will not. They are a thing reserved for the living, she’s realizing.
“You have nice eyes,” she says, her small, pale hand encased in its own.
Hm. Do you want them? It asks.
“What? Ew, no.” Sakura wrinkles her nose. It seems to laugh despite still features and present silence, and Sakura gets the vague impression that a decision has just been made.
You will have my eyes, it says, the unspoken words echoing through her spirit. It continues: they will hold your soul, and in return, you will hold a piece of me. Hug your father, kiss your mother, and bring peace where you can.
Sakura, Death says softly as it kneels in front of her. Take this gift, and allow me to see life once more.
Sakura can’t breathe, but thankfully she’s dead and doesn’t need air. Instead, she only nods, confused and shaken and painfully aware of just who, exactly, she is — or rather, who she is not.
(Anyone special. That’s who she is not.)
It gives her no answer, no more information; it raises a blurred, shadowed hand to her forehead, and her spirit is consumed.
Haku’s mask is broken, and Naruto, skin bubbling red, pauses.
“You’re the girl from the forest,” he murmurs. As his eyes grow wider, the pressure bearing down on them lightens. Sakura inhales and the air tastes stale; it is a relief nonetheless, and Sakura savors the feeling of full lungs. She was dead — they all were, until the Death God gave them back life, and she knows without a doubt that it was real; an aftereffect of her death, perhaps, this feeling of absolute and utter certainty. The others hadn’t paused in their dialogue, seemingly unaffected and unaware of the brief foray into a possible future.
“Do you have a person that is precious to you?” Haku is asking, and Naruto is answering, and the red is receding, and Kakashi and Zabuza are paused in their wary relief and —
And —
Sasuke is breathing.
Sakura lets out a short, sharp laugh, one of disbelief and surprised happiness. Thank God, she thinks wryly, then takes a moment to wonder why she’s not crying, why her muscles aren’t trembling with the effort of holding themselves so tense for so long.
Then Zabuza is lunging at Kakashi, whose gaze is still flickering between Naruto and Sasuke. Sakura moves without thought, hurtling towards them before she makes the conscious decision.
Kakashi turns his head impossibly quickly and catches Zabuza’s sword with a kunai that wasn’t there before. Zabuza moves fluidly and brings himself closer to Kakashi, but his uppercut is swiftly blocked and the sound of chirping birds fills the air.
Kakashi sees Haku and Naruto and hesitates for a split second. It’s a split second too long — Zabuza takes full advantage, and Sakura can’t quite see what happens, but there’s a lot of blood.
“Kakashi-sensei,” Sakura tries to scream, but it emerges as a whimper, and then she is standing beside him.
She is beside them both, and Zabuza catches her eye, and the missing-nin freezes in place.
Kakashi uses the opening; birds scream; Naruto’s pained yell comes a moment after, and Kakashi’s fist is through Haku’s chest. Sakura feels, rather than sees, the moment the light leaves Haku’s eyes.
She sees, rather than feels, the moment his spirit steps out of his body.
He watches the scene with a bittersweet sort of satisfaction, his lips twitching upwards as Zabuza debases him, demotes his existence to one of a tool, dismissing the soul-deep loyalty that Haku held. Still holds, Sakura would guess.
No one else sees the spirit; his skin is greying and the hole in his chest is dripping blood and ash. Naruto is crying. He pleads with Zabuza, yells, screams. The missing-nin’s skin is torn more broken than it is whole, but he stands tall and strong in his grief.
Because Sakura can see the sadness in his eyes, the regret that is written between the lines on his face. Even if Kakashi cannot; even as Naruto begs for acknowledgment he has already won.
Haku drifts towards Zabuza’s side, still with that awful, sweet smile. Sakura does not follow; it is not her responsibility. It is not her place. She does not know what her part was, but she knows it has been played.
Sakura sees Gato’s death before it happens, and she is not disappointed. She doesn’t feel much at all, really; her emotions are farther away than they were before, and she briefly wonders if it’s a side effect of her death and subsequent return.
Zabuza, after cutting down his employer, dies on the ground by Haku’s body. His spirit is much more reluctant to leave. He settles when he sees Haku’s soul hovering above him.
Zabuza leads, and they meet the Death God together. It is a vague, blurry figure that gestures them forward, onto wherever spirits go when they are not given a gift as Sakura was.
She watches them walk away, and the scene is more familiar than it has any right to be.
She kneels next to Sasuke and gently traces her hands over his wounds; they are superficial, and the lingering scent of death and shadow and ash is fading on the wind.
Kakashi lifts him, stumbling and catching himself before Naruto can notice, and they slowly tread the path back.
Dinner that night is quiet, the air heavy with unspoken gratitude and confused grief. Sakura eats silently, and the others follow her example, until Naruto’s strangely subdued voice breaks the hushed atmosphere.
“Ah, Sakura-chan, is there something wrong with your eyes? They look a bit… weird.”
Sakura doesn’t blink; she’s not entirely sure what he sees, and there are no mirrors in the room to find out.
“No,” she says. Naruto frowns, leaning forward with his elbows on the table.
“Are you sure?” He asks, expression folding into one of offhand concern.
Sakura looks at her blonde teammate; properly, this time, not one of the irritated, charged glances that she typically sends his way, or the superficial overview that she would give a casual acquaintance. A red shadow is at his back. A menacing creature looks over his shoulder, its gaze obscured but no less dangerous. His skin seems bright with the power it contains; Kakashi similarly shines in the corner of her eye.
Naruto is not harmless, she thinks, (as if she needed confirmation after the bridge), and says, “I think I’d notice something so obvious, thanks.” Remembered annoyance bleeds into her tone and Naruto looks mollified; at least someone is acting normally, she can practically hear him think. A part of her is glad to soothe his fears; the other half is carefully aware of Kakashi’s curious glances in her direction.
Sakura is tired. She can feel the day’s events bearing down on her, so she excuses herself with a mumbled apology. The bed is welcoming, but she knows that she isn’t likely to find sleep tonight, despite the exhaustion settling into her bones. She breathes deeply; the smell of blood and the memory of ash follows her as she climbs out of the window and onto the roof.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, perched on the tiles. Time moves strangely. It is at once too fast and too slow, and she is aware of its passing in a way she never was before.
She watches the insects on the ground and wonders how short their lives will be. The grass is oversaturated with water; it will die soon, she thinks. The blades have begun to wilt and the green is getting duller, slowly, and if grass had lungs it would be in the midst of drawing its last breath —
Sakura blinks, and the color that had been leaching from the ground returns. She feels oddly calm; more settled than she was before, and from what, imagining the slow decay of nature around her? The thought does not bother her near as much as it should, and Sakura contemplates going back inside.
Inside, to stare at the ceiling and listen to the loud breaths of her teammates, to be surrounded by the scents of food and sweat and stale blood. To feel their exhaustion as if it is her own, to fake a smile or force a complaint to appease their (Naruto’s) worry.
Sakura doesn’t move.
A bird flies past; a feather falls, followed soon by another, again and again until a meaty skeleton is all that remains. The feathers drift down from the sky, not quite a genjutsu, but something that feels more like a premonition. She watches the bones crumble to dust before shaking her head, and the bird is flying whole once more.
Sakura doesn’t know how long she sits there, watching the birth and death and rebirth of everything around her, but it is long enough that she finds herself using the stars for light.
Something rustles behind her, and she knows without looking that it is Kakashi. She appreciates the purposeful noise, however unnecessary; the warning feels a bit like acknowledgment, and it is with this thought that she sends him a small smile. The moon is behind him, casting his face into shadow. He sits beside her, and they don’t speak for the rest of the night.
The sun rises in a blur of color. The horizon is obscured by the trees and most of the sky by clouds, but it is a beautiful sight nonetheless. Kakashi’s hair looks almost yellow. At some point, he had laid back on the roof tiles and closed his single eye; Sakura knows that he did not sleep, but she is glad he rested, and even more glad he chose not to speak. She isn’t sure what she would have said, and if she was to guess, she would say he felt the same.
She is the first to stand, and Kakashi lazily opens his eye. Maa, that time already?, he seems to ask, and Sakura gives a minute shrug in response. The sound of her teammates’ arguing drifts from the kitchen; it was too much to ask that they would still be asleep, it seems.
Kakashi reluctantly follows her back in and gives both Naruto and Sasuke an unimpressed look.
“I’d save your energy for the trip back,” he remarks mildly. For three blessed seconds, it works; Sakura can’t say she’s surprised when they pick up from where they left off.
Still, she can’t bring herself to feel annoyed. Her emotions are still farther away than she is used to, and besides, any irritation she might have felt is largely overshadowed by the relief of having them there, alive, and not with broken bloody bodies on the bridge.
“Good morning, Sakura-chan!” Naruto’s grin is almost blinding, but Sakura is glad to see it all the same. “Tsunami-san made breakfast, and —”
He continues, but Sakura is busy inclining her head in gratitude and pointedly ignoring the creature peeking over her teammate’s shoulder. It is not her place to confront what lives in his heart.
Breakfast moves quickly, and it is not long until they are saying their goodbyes. Sakura watches as Tazuna dies of a heart attack and Tsunami from sickness and Inari from a wound in his chest, and formally bows before pulling each of them into a tight hug. Her teammates and sensei look at her oddly, but Sakura can’t bring herself to care.
It is not her place to change things, but something feels right about this last comfort.
(She has a feeling that this is the last time she will see them, and there is something reminiscent about the way they let themselves be drawn in without argument — it reminds her of stepping towards the Death God’s outstretched hand.)
“Goodbye,” she says, and walks away.
Konoha’s gates are a much-welcomed sight when they come into view. They are home; no more bugs and ration bars and sleeping on hard ground in cold dirt. The trip back could have been much worse, but it was still less than comfortable, and even Sasuke breathes a sigh of relief.
The gate-guards nod to Kakashi as he passes. Naruto is grinning and Sasuke is scanning his surroundings with new eyes. If Sakura does the same — if she lets herself see the fall and death and decay of the village she holds most dear — it is out of a morbid fascination, and she both regrets and revels in the knowledge.
Naruto and Sasuke do not have parents and Kakashi does not have children, so they are unthinking as they head directly towards the Hokage’s office. Sakura briefly considers requesting permission to visit her mother and father before submitting her report (oh, how badly she wants to see them), but in watching her team — it would be cruel to remind when what they had lost (or never had).
When they are called to meet with the Hokage, Naruto speaks quickly and loudly, his words punctuated by sweeping hand movements and demonstrative body language. Sakura is not asked to speak, though Kakashi side-eyes her when mentioning Zabuza’s split-second hesitation when she jumped to Kakashi’s side. Sakura isn’t bothered by being overlooked; perhaps a week ago, she would have interrupted Naruto’s external stream of consciousness, but now isn’t a week ago, and she has since met a God and watched a thousand deaths.
She blinks away the image of the room collapsing in on itself and the Hokage’s skin going pale from blood loss. It is distracting, this new habit of hers. Absentmindedly, she wonders if it’s playing a part in her recent dissociation.
Probably.
Naruto is still talking, but he’s only repeating bits and pieces, now, having finished the actual mission debrief. Kakashi is beginning to look desperate — or as much as he can with most of his face hidden behind his mask.
They end quickly, after that.
Sakura walks the path to her house slowly. It’s enough to garner a few strange looks; a pink-haired genin, covered in dirt and dust, trudging alone with her gaze downcast. Sakura doesn’t particularly care what they think, but she knows the power of village gossip, so she speeds up and pastes a more appropriate (determined, purposeful, ninja-like, whatever) expression on her face.
She walks into her house without knocking, and is unsurprised to find it empty. Her father is most likely at the market, selling his wares and spreading the stories he’d picked up along his travels; his mother is probably hovering nearby, making friends with the merchants in the other stalls.
Sakura finds some leftover rice. She hesitates for a moment — what about her diet? — before taking out a pair of chopsticks and eating it with relish. Her diet can wait. She saw Sasuke die — she’d rather focus on preventing a repeat than on winning his love. The latter would still be nice, of course; but the bridge had opened her eyes (or, as she’s beginning to believe, the Death God had stolen her eyes and replaced them with something… more).
She does not stay in the empty house, instead choosing to make her way to the market. She blinks seven times; she really needs to learn to control herself, because even if no one pays attention to her, someone is bound to notice. She lives in a ninja village, after all, and at some point she is going to see a death gruesome enough to startle her out of her newfound apathy.
It is easy to find her mother, in her red shirt and bright yellow scarf. Her father, as Sakura had predicted, is only across the square, beaming his practiced welcoming smile.
“Mom,” Sakura greets, and her mother spins around with a gasp.
“Sakura! You're back!” Sakura lets herself be dragged along as her mother races to her father’s stall. She watches as his grin softens, becoming much more genuine as he sees her.
“Sakura-chan,” he greets softly, and folds her in his arms.
Sakura only barely holds back her tears. This — this is why she came back. She pulls her mother in, too, and breathes in the scent of her family. They are warm, and soft, and completely, utterly civilian. She cannot feel their chakra; their presence is overwhelming in a much more welcome sense.
“I missed you,” Sakura chokes. “I missed you both so much.”
Her father steps back, holding her by the shoulders to give her a once-over. “How did your mission go?” He asks, and Sakura isn’t sure what to say, because how do you tell your parents My team and I all died and I met a, maybe the, Death God, and I told him I wanted another one of your hugs and he gave me back my life and my team’s life and now I might have his eyes — ?”
“It’s confidential,” She says instead, giving them a shaky, watery grin.
“Of course, of course,” her father dismisses, and pulls her close once again.
Dinner is a celebration. They eat their favorite foods and spare no expense. “You came back to us,” her father says when Sakura looks like she might protest, “and that’s more important than any holiday.”
“Next time, you should invite your team,” her mother adds. “We’d love to have them, too.” Sakura agrees, and her smile doesn't dim for the rest of the night.
(In the morning, she cries, because the Death God’s gift is maybe a curse and the vision of her parents’ lifeless bodies, their empty gaze and slack expression, will haunt her forever.)