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PART TWO CHAPTER ONE || AN AWAKENING
The thing is, when someone travels back in time, their original chakra and the host body’s chakra meld. Things like seals and dojutsu come along for the ride.
---
“Eww! Look at that weird thing on her forehead!”
It was Sakura’s fifth birthday, and she was mad. Her mama took her out to the faraway park that they never played at because it was too far away because Sakura’s papa was at home getting the house ready for her surprise birthday party. She was too excited to even ask why she was going to the faraway park even though she already knew -- her parents always told her she was too clever -- because she had never been to this park before!
Of course, the bad part of her birthday started out with her own mistake.
The grass here was softer and a deeper hue of green than any of the grass near her house -- where she lived was just the surface of the ocean and this was the hadal zone, a word she learned in the big kids’ book Sakura read the day before. She pretended to be a deep sea diver and ran to a hill on the other side of the playground while her mama talked with the other parents. At the crest, she took a deep breath in and rolled down.
She rolled down like any other hill she saw before, but when the rolling stopped, her head throbbed like it did when she tried to headbutt her papa and headbutted the wall instead.
And when three girls leaned over her, blocking out the sun from her still purple-splotchy vision, well--
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid Sakura for thinking they’d help her out. Instead, the girls started saying things her mama told her never to say to anyone, even if they were mean. Sakura couldn’t remember being mean to these girls, or even meeting them before.
“No Ami! Don’t kick her! What if that thing on her forehead is contagious?”
“Her forehead is so big because the rest of her face doesn’t want to touch it either!”
Her nose started feeling tingly; her vision started blurring. As far as Sakura knew, she didn’t have anything on her forehead! Any grass from the hill would have fallen off by now.
“Your tears are their victories,” a voice emerged from the angry feeling in her tummy, moving to the center of her head.
Because she was always told to trust her gut, Sakura got up on her own without saying anything to the girls. They might have said something, yet Sakura didn’t hear them. She made sure to ignore them as she marched over to her mama, facing the sky so her tears wouldn’t fall.
Luckily, her mama rushed over to her as she reached the top of the hill, so Sakura wouldn’t trip and give those girls more to tease her about.
“Honey, what happened to your forehead?” not her too!
“I,” Sakura sniffed, “Would like to go to my surprise party now.”
Her mama took a deep breath, “Okay” and cupped a hand over Sakura’s forehead. Sakura felt a cool misty sensation where the hand covered her face.
The birthday party brought a fleeting kind of happy that Sakura won’t remember years later, even if she tried. That night, her mama sat her down for a big girl birthday present. With all of her new five year old patience, Sakura contained her excitement until her mama finished cutting her hair. Her new hair was like a picture book princess’s: blocky, blunt bangs and shorter locks of hair that frame her face. She felt regal and powerful.
PART TWO CHAPTER TWO || THE BEGINNING (or perhaps, a middle?)
On a cloudless, starless night in March, hospital medic Haruno Kizashi delivered his daughter at home.
For an unbearable eternity, he and his wife grieved their third stillborn child. Another flower never to bloom. She was so small, so white, so at peace. They cried and cried and cried until a third voice cried with them. With both eyes open, Haruno Sakura triumphantly announced her entrance into the world.
Kizashi and Mebuki would have been overjoyed at that moment if not for a second swell of panic. With both eyes open, Haruno Sakura’s parents could clearly -- albeit disbelievingly -- see colorless, pupil-less eyes.
On a rainy evening so many years ago, genin Haruno Mebuki watched as a matching eye was pulled from her teammate’s face. Her cursed seal activated, both sealing away the Hyuuga’s Byakugan and inflicting one last cruelty. Kizashi’s four-man squad became a three-man squad as they left their Hyuuga teammate convulsing on the battlefield.
These eyes, her child's eyes were more white than her teammate's, the muscles of her irises barely visible, but it stirs an animalistic fear in her all the same.
On many days at the Konoha Hospital, paperwork declared a child with a kekkei genkai or a child with a mutation dead. As a medic stationed in the children’s ward, Kizashi visited the morgue to pray for their arrival in the Pure Land every time. More times than not, however, he found no body.
This child, his child looked more like him than his wife even with the inexplicable eyes, and he knew what happened to children born with inexplicable things.
On this night, genjutsu specialist jounin Mebuki, unwilling to grieve her daughter a second time, cast false color over her daughter’s eyes. While she tried to dye them the same green as hers, the latent Byakugan resisted, corrupting the color into an unnaturally bright jade.
PART TWO CHAPTER THREE || THESE RED STRINGS
In theory, Sakura was just his type. Naruto liked her long, pink hair because it stood out. Like him! If you mixed pink with yellow, you get light orange, which is the light version of his favorite color.
In actuality, he couldn't stand to be within six feet of her. One time, he tried to approach her, push through the butterflies in his stomach and goosebumps on his skin. He offered to help her up after someone tripped her, and she took it. Unfortunately, his hands were so clammy, she slipped from his grasp and fell on her behind.
Thinking it was one of his pranks, Sakura glared at him. He was used to everyone glaring at him like he was mud on their carpet all the time, but this was different. It was like she would eat him alive if he ever tried that again.
He ran away from her then and watched from afar ever since.
---
She fell in love with him, again.
The voice inside her head, the one that sounded like a different person, Inner told her it was fate. She liked to imagine a red, red string from her pinky finger to Sasuke’s and then imagine holding hands with him. What would happen if the knots on their fingers brushed together?
PART THREE CHAPTER ONE || AN AWAKENING, REVISITED
Sometime after she began attending the Academy, Sakura returned to the faraway park. Her father took her this time, after they finished an errand. Feeling tugged along by an invisible rope, she ran up the hill and down to the otherside.
The same three bullies found her at the bottom. “Loser, loser! You can’t hide your ugliness with a haircut,” they cried out like seagulls.
Anger rose from her stomach and made her face feel hot. Her eyeballs pulsated once, twice, then she saw what she had to do. Inner guided her like the armature inside a doll, moving her hands deftly. Sakura struck each bully once at the big glowy spot on their stomach and they all fell limp.
(No one ever connects it back to this day; however, none of those girls ever graduate from the Academy. In fact, they discover that their chakra reserves are bone dry. Three medical oddities.)
“Woah!” another girl called out from behind.
While Sakura thought she should keep her fighting stance up, her own body relaxed as she turned around.
“That was pretty cool of you!”
“Thanks… You’re Yamanaka Ino, right?”
“Yep! Let’s get along, Haruno Sakura! Hey, has anyone told you how pretty your eyes are? They’re seriously such a nice green.”
“Thanks.”
I made them myself, Sakura would say if she were an idiot. For the past few months, her mama insisted that she cast her own genjutsu like the big girl she was now. No one’s caught it yet, so Sakura guesses she’s doing a good job. It is lonely though. If eyes are the windows to the soul, nobody has seen her before.
PART THREE CHAPTER TWO|| SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST (though a whole lot louder and a whole lot worse)
Autumn comes, bringing hot, dry gusts of wind that strip the foliage from trees. Sasuke leaves and Naruto leaves.
When she asks Tsunade to take her on as an apprentice, Sakura can’t shake the gnawing feeling of deja vu. She can’t remember when she last heard Inner.
“I’m scared that I’ll make the same mistakes as last time,” she tells Shizune after five nights without sleep.
“What last time?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll make you a sleep aid.”
She dreams of mother wasps climb inside figs, breaking off their wings and antennae to crawl through, to lay their eggs. The fig melts them down into soup as payment for nurturing her young. Phoenixes are myths born in fire, but she is born of fruit.
In the morning, she shakes off pollen and awakens to find herself whole. Two people, three lifetimes of memories, all emulsified with bile and poured back into one body.
---
“Don’t let me see your face until a full month passes, ya hear me? Take a break kid, you deserve it.”
Tsunade gives her a month vacation from her training. To those who claim to know her, this comes as a surprise. Sakura has been so uncompromising focused on her training to catch up with the boys. To those who have claimed to know her in the past, this is no surprise. She was just a girl with a head full of daydreams about getting married or something, no real desire to become a shinobi. And maybe they were right, at least partially.
Her parents would have taken time off to have rare quality time with their daughter, but given the break was so sudden, they just couldn’t make it work.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Sakura waves them goodbye, sending them both off on their long term mission, “I’ll finally be able to get some peace and quiet without you two bickering and stomping around the house all the time.”
“Oh, my baby girl is growing up too fast for me!” her papa sobs in his usual dramatic fashion. Her mother gives him an indulgent sigh, then lifts Sakura’s bangs up for one last forehead kiss.
Sakura rests her back on the door after closing it. Take a break? Peace and quiet? What a joke.
Ino is already on a mission to the Land of Iron, so it’s unlikely anyone will try to look for her. Just in case, Sakura leaves a note on the kitchen table: “off to visit a family friend”. Vague, untraceable to a single “family friend”, and good enough.
---
"My dear children!" She cries the half-lie to the lot of them, arms outstretched. The small girl stands before them on the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path.
Most Akatsuki are caught off guard by this, expressions transforming into annoyance or mild confusion. How did she get here? Why is she speaking to them like that? Itachi just looks horrified as he stares at his brother's former teammate. Is he having a weird dream? It's better than the nightmares, but still…
Unasked questions are answered as wooden horns emerge from her forehead, pushing her bangs from her face and revealing the rinne-sharingan underneath. The natural white of her eyes reveal themselves as she allows the genjutsu green to dribble away, rain on a window.
“No longer will you toil to bring about the ten tails, for I have delivered myself into this world.”
Her voice seems to be three.
“I do have one more task for all of you. Stay here and help me start an orchard.”
It seems Itachi will not be killed by Sasuke’s hand as he wished.
---
She falls in love again. Her red string of fate has nothing to do with it; it’s been cut and discarded.
They meet, as many legendary couples do, on the battlefield.
Karin! Karin! Karin! Her heart beats so loud it moves Sakura’s entire body. Red oozing out from her wound by Sasuke’s sword, red hair that matches, bite marks peeking out from under her cloak. In that moment, Karin, who gives her chakra away unlike other shinobi who just take, had stolen a piece of Sakura that Sakura herself did not think she had anymore.
“Ne, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura averts her eyes from Karin and fights an enamored smile from surfacing, “Take me with you. I’ll leave Konoha.”
“I don’t like your expression. What are you hiding?” he grunts in return.
Her hand touches the corners of her mouth. Sakura was just so caught up in the moment, her muscles just didn’t listen-- Ah, who is she making this excuse for anyways?
“Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. I really need you to stop causing trouble.”
“You think those flimsy words will stop me?”
“I let you kill Danzo, isn’t that eno-”
“You ‘let me’? What a laugh.”
“I put Lady Tsunade into a,” ‘medically induced’ wasn’t the right word,”... coma to lure Danzo out from his rat hole to come to this Kage Summit for you.”
“Wha- How do you have-”
The rinne sharingan opens on her forehead as Sakura slips her hitai ate to her neck, “You’re disrupting my plans. I think you need to relax for a little bit.”
He is snared, much like an unsuspecting rabbit, by her tsukuyomi. The world she has crafted for him is not a cruel one. In fact, Sakura designed it to be the pinnacle of relaxation after reading thousands of psychology and therapy texts. One cannot fix a house if the gates are locked, after all. Without a word, Zetsu emerges from the ground, catching an unconscious Sasuke before he falls. She closes her eye.
“I hope this isn’t too forward of me,” Sakura says before picking Karin up. Drowsy from blood loss, the girl just makes a consenting, “nhn.”
As she and Zetsu make their way back to where she left Naruto, Sakura channels healing chakra into Karin.
PART FOUR CHAPTER ONE || AS THE DOMINOS FALL
Less and less people with chakra are born a year. No one notices it, not at first. Clans like the Hyuuga are the ones who point it out, alarmed by how few dojutsu users they have left. Not even their desperate inbreeding yields the results they demand. Riots sprinkle the Nations, and conspiracies are whispered through thinning shinobi communication networks.
Sakura’s favorite is that there’s something in the water or that it's vaccines -- as Tsunade’s disciple, she’d suggested mandatory inoculations to be included in Konoha’s new standardized health care system and even developed a few herself. Konoha’s standards, with its reputation as the most medically advanced village, caught on, sparking the growth of an industry that even civilians could partake.
None of the attempted uprisings resulted in anything more than a minor annoyance. The vast majority of the population are civilians who adapted to life with less help from shinobi. They saw it as a way to modernize.
Wait no --
All of the attempted uprisings seeded restlessness in naturally restless shinobi. Secret and not so secret wars broke out across the lands. Those restless shinobi lose their battles, and we all know that losers don’t write history books.
---
When Haruno Sakura became the Rokudaime Hokage, not even Uzumaki Naruto could argue. After she made a name for herself ruthlessly making Bingo Books obsolete, shinobi could only bow their heads to what would come next. After years of hearing her speak by Tsunade’s side at Five Kage Summits, the other four Kage unanimously agreed that she was the most qualified candidate.
---
Even as the other Hidden Villages struggled to call their forces “corps”, Konohagakure became a force of peace, quelling outbreaks of insurrection in every country.
As a tribute to the shinobi hidden in the leaves, civilians never cut down the trees that rose in the battles’ wake.
---
Shinobi as a whole were often too reliant on ninjutsu and genjutsu, both of which die out as teachers no longer have disciples to carry on their legacies.
Taijutsu thrives.
During her first Chunin Exams, if anyone were to guess who out of the Konoha twelve or even Team Guy would be the world’s most sought after teacher in little over a decade and a half, Sakura doubts they would have picked Rock Lee. Across the land, Taijutsu dojos open up, even becoming popular among civilians because it requires no chakra. He becomes a celebrity teacher, and students from across the lands seek him out.
---
In another life, people settled for what they were given, fought for what they had left. Loss after loss, struggling to hold on.
In this life, they fought for more.
---
"I don't think my dream was ever really to be Hokage. It was the acknowledgment and the respect that came with it that I wanted," Naruto says uncharacteristically thoughtfully over team dinner the night before they departed, "I feel held by Sasuke, like he really knows who I am."
They fit together neatly, Naruto and Sasuke. When they come back to Konoha -- they never come home to Konoha, home is anywhere they are together, but never Konoha -- to visit, Sakura can see how they move as a smooth unit. Cooking, sparring, walking through town, and all the quiet moments in between all look like their own little conversations.
Sasuke: distrusted for his eyes, loved for the spectacle he became, hated for leaving the village.
Naruto: despised for the demon sealed into him, loved for the war hero he became.
It's the same tune played with different notes.
They are away more than they're with Sakura, which would hurt if she couldn't look at her own life with ancient eyes. Context is key. Knowing they're out there living on lives that are loving and fulfilling? It's enough. And knowing they're alive because of her ? Well, that's euphoria.
---
Sakura does not have children, and neither do most of her friends. They seem to have, collectively, come to the resolution that bringing more "life" into the world will only create more death. No one wants to leave a child behind when they die.
---
Karin dies as her wife holds her hand.
“Could you remove your genjutsu, Sakura? For me?”
“Yes, my love,” she turns to the others in the room, “Would you leave us?”
Suigetsu is the last one out,”You’re always so vain, Sakura. Even that Tsunade would let her old lady face show sometimes.” He smiles a goodbye to his friend.
“I am never the graceful one, aging is no exception,” Sakura says, and Karin lets out a weak laugh.
When they are alone at last, Sakura closes her eyes and opens the third, lets horns push through her skin, nearly covers the entire floor with her white hair.
Karin blinks, eyes cloudy, “It’s a shame you didn’t introduce yourself like this, dear. I would have fallen for you right away.”
“I wouldn’t have lived my life any other way.” Sakura leans in to kiss her, just catching Karin’s last breath.
---
By the time Neji and Sakura are the last of the Konoha twelve, the world is unrecognizable from the days of chunin exams and caged bird seals.
“Do you still believe in destiny?”
“Yes. Since I was eighteen, I have always had this feeling that I was supposed to be dead. Not as though someone or something was out to kill me per se, but that I was living the wrong path. I lived past the age I was meant to, and then I kept on living.”
“You’re a gloomy old man.”
“You’re only a year younger than me. Besides, it’s not as if I disliked living these extra decades. Ah, checkmate.”
Sakura glares at him and resets the board.
---
Generations pass.
The orchard grows.
Humanity passes into a quiet sleep.
PART ONE || THE END ...
"Poor child, pathetic child," Kaguya takes Sakura's chin in her hand, "they left you behind." Kaguya cocks her head to the side, never breaking eye contact, "Again. Again they left you behind. Do not fret I will send you after them."
And because it's the end of the world and maybe the blood loss is making her too light headed and for some reason the pain shooting up from where her legs should be flew far, far away, Sakura cries out bitterly,"They were all I had! What else could I do but follow them to the end of the world."
"You could have destroyed them."
"But I loved them! I- forget it. You wouldn't understand. Just kill me and I'll run to catch up to them in the afterlife."
"Oh, oh, but I understand more than anyone. Naruto, Sasuke. Hashirama, Madara. Asura, Indra. Hagoromo, Hamura. They stole from me and left me behind first."
"I just wanted to catch up and show them I could stand beside them… Take back my dignity."
Kaguya drops her chin, electing instead to lift Sakura up with wood that curls under her arms and around her waist. Sakura closes her eyes and pretends it's Captain Yamato.
"I will make you a deal."
“What?”
“I will allow you a chance to ‘take back your dignity’.”
“And what do you get in return?”
“Companionship.”
---
Reincarnation happens all the time, not just between generations of the greats and the demigods. Nobody will ever know if it occurred before humans had the ability to cultivate chakra, and isn't that sad? Cosmic questions going unanswered because there is never any true way to turn back time. The future affects the past affects the future effects--
This is all to say there was a moment between exhaling her last breath and settling back under her newborn skin.
There was a moment when she could see the colors of a next life she could have had -- washed clean, memories blank, and ready to try again -- and after that, a glimpse of a land untethered to suffering. And as she gazed upon their ethereal weightlessness, their iridescent astral flagellum reaching out for her, Sakura stepped backward.
Biting the metaphorical chakra fruit, she exchanged her chance to end her suffering for a way to extend it further. Instead of breaking out of this bitter cycle, she rooted herself down.