Chapter Text
Kaguya and her armies scorch the world into an oblivion. In those final days, the ones that Sakura avoids thinking about, the sky is blotted out with the debris of calamity and choked with dark smoke. The air always smells of charred flesh and the land is barren.
Kagyua’s war against the world passes in a blur of fighting and blood. Fire rains from the sky and each breath inhaled tastes of burnt chakra and rendered flesh. The ground is littered with bodies. Sakura makes sure to keep her eyes averted as they pass by the multitudes of them, scared that she will see a familiar face in the rubble. Together the three of them run. Hunger claws at her stomach and her chakra coils ache with overuse. Naruto and Sasuke aren’t faring much better than her. They had been fleeing for months hiding in the ruins of the great shinobi nations. When they stop for the last time it is in the remnants of Wave. Wave had been a wreckage even before the world went to hell, but through its own destruction and the current war, a few ruined buildings still stood. The three of them huddle together in the shadow of one, shivering; the sky is bloated with fat black clouds and rain falls lightly, though the stench of death and destruction refuse to be washed away.
With a kunai Sakura makes a gash on the fatty part of her thigh and begins drawing the seal they've been carefully theorizing about for the last few weeks in her blood because just like everything else, they’ve run out of ink. The seal is a big winding thing, the dark whorls of it spreading over a few meters from its center. She’s never really been a fuinjutsu user aside from the basics but they were out of options. Sakura had learned it in the time they spent running-- she thinks their plan began sometime around after they lost Kakashi and they realized they couldn’t fight Kaguya and Madara head-on anymore.
From shinobi nation to shinobi nation, they had searched the smoking craters where buildings had stood and half toppled piles of rubble, looking for information about space-time jutsu and staying just ahead of their pursuers. And they had done it. Or she was fairly sure they had done it-- Sakura looks at the seal forming under her fingers as Naruto feeds the Kyuubi’s chakra into it while she works. Theoretically, it was fine, and realistically, with the help of Sasuke’s rinnengan, they should be able to ram her through any complications that arose. It has to be her, something about the Rinnengan and the Kyuubi wouldn’t let Naruto or Sasuke pass through. She is the only one expendable to fate.
“Hurry it up.” Sasuke furiously signs in Konoha field short-hand from where he stands watch, “They’re getting closer.”
Sweat drips down her brow as she focuses on adding the last swirling sigils to the seal. Even Naruto is looking somewhat drained from where he squats in the gloom.
“It’s done.” She signals to Sasuke while eyeing the cloud of dust on the horizon that is racing towards them. “We need to do this now.”
Naruto crouches next to the seal, the Kyuubi’s chakra leaking out of him in an orange haze as he begins fuelling the seal again. Sasuke looks at her and nods.
She feels a sudden surge of panic well up inside her-- the urge to say some sort of goodbye or I love you, just something to her boys who she’s been through so much with -- but Kaguya and Madara are so close now that she thinks she can make out their figures on the horizon.
She opens her mouth but before she can say anything Sasuke tells her, “Just do what needs to be done so we don’t have to do this again.” She nods. Naruto grins at her from where he’s kneeling. Her eyes well up with unshed tears.
“We’re out of time,” Sasuke says, opening one sharigan eye that whirls with the mangekyo. He then opens his other eye bearing the rinnengan and begins forming the hand seal for monkey, then boar, then rat. Then Sakura is falling through the dark.
When Sakura opens her eyes, she is blinded by fluorescent lights-- a sight she knows well from her time serving at Konoha’s hospital -- and she is being cradled in someone's arms. Blinking away the brightness, she feels a rush of relief to see her mother’s face--Mebuki Haruno’s face-- staring back down at her. We did it, we succeeded. She cheers internally, feeling a rush of relief.
The feeling immediately fades the moment she swivels her head to see who the man resting his hand on her mother’s shoulder is. Instead of Kizashi Haruno, Shimura Danzo is sitting there gazing down at Sakura with a calculating glint in his dark eyes.
Danzo looks younger than she remembers: there’s only one or two wrinkles and it makes him look less severe than he did in her time. There’s no bandage wrapped around his head or his arm, and the expression he has when he stares down at her is one she’s never seen on his face before. He still gives her evil bastard vibes though.
The few hours after her “birth” she remembers little of, it muddles together in a shuffle of hospital rooms, feeling warm in her mother’s arms, and Danzo’s ominous presence hovering in the background. Sakura relishes in it. She never thought she would have ever seen her mother again-- she vividly remembers being too late to save Mebuki and had to watch her be crushed under debris when Konoha fell for the last time.
She cannot quite pin down what Danzo and her mother’s relationship is. He keeps her at an arm's length and is not warm, though he is not cold either, nor he does treat her with the dismissiveness she would expect from him when interacting with a civilian. Her best guess from eavesdropped conversations and their body language is that, in this timeline she’s slipped into, Sakura is the result of their casual hookups and that Danzo is planning on wiping Mebuki’s memory of her and him soon enough.
On the last day of her family’s stay in the hospital, she’s proven right. Sakura feels a little twisted up about it--almost bittersweet-- she never got to really say goodbye to her mother in her last life. Overall though, it's fine with her; the fewer people she has to worry about in this life the better.
Their goodbye lasts a few moments with Mebuki blissfully unaware and Sakura a squirming non-verbal baby. It’s obvious Mebuki doesn’t quite understand what's happening when the Yamanaka root operative steps into the room with Danzo.
“Say goodbye to your mother, Sakura,” Danzo practically coos at her as he picks her up and takes her over to Mebuki. Sakura’s eyes mist a little as she says goodbye to her mother. Wrapping her chubby baby hands around Mebuki’s neck, she clutches tightly for a moment and inhales her perfume--the same scent she wore when she was Sakura’s mother the first time. And then Mebuki’s confused expression smooths out and her eyes roll up as the Yamanaka invades her mind.“The staff and the paperwork have been taken care of?” Danzo says to the second Root agent who has poked her head in from the hall.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, you may go.”
Somewhere in the hospital, Sakura’s birth certificate sits in a filing cabinet with only Shimura Danzo listed as her blood-father and guardian. At the bottom, in fine print, she has been formally listed as his successor. Mebuki’s visit is wiped from the records.
It’s better that her mother isn’t around. Sakura doesn’t want her innocent mother to even have the opportunity to be collateral damage in her plan to fix everything. Sakura hasn’t really thought her plan through--she never really thought the fuinjutsu was going to work--but she is pretty sure she’s going to have to kill Danzo while stopping the Uchiha Coup and the Massacre.
With her mother and the hospital paperwork taken care of, Danzo whisks her off to the Shimura compound. Sakura gets her first glimpse of it from her portable bassinet as Danzo steps through the compound’s large gates which open to one of the main streets of Konoha and into the main courtyard.
The courtyard is bracketed by two sprawling houses with sloping roofs, however it's obvious the main house lies straight before them, towering over the two others. The edges of the roofing are capped with ornate gold accents and the building itself is three stories in height with large balconies that Sakura can spy from where she’s nestled in Danzo’s arms. As they enter through the red lacquered doors and into a dark hallway, dimly Sakura can sense the muted chakra signatures of what she assumes are root agents lurking around.
Danzo proudly shows her to her room, just a few doors down from his on the second floor.
“Here’s your room, Sakura,” He says, bouncing her against his hip a little as he takes her out of the bassinet to show her around. She still hasn’t quite reconciled the image of a doting father and the Danzo from her last life, and she flinches away.
The room is nice, much nicer than anything she’d ever had before, but she’s an heiress now, after all. A queen-sized bed is shoved in the corner with a thick fluffy comforter, and stationed in the middle of the room is a white crib with one large pillow and a few stuffed animals. It even has its own adjoining bathroom where she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror--a pudgy baby face stares back at her from Danzo’s arms. Her eyes are still green but they’re such a dark shade that they’re closer black rather than her original eye color, and her hair is a short cowlick of deep maroon.
Her first year at the Shimura estate passes in almost no time at all. She spends much of it asleep or occasionally with Danzo as he cradles her absent-mindedly while trawling through village paperwork in his personal study. When Danzo isn’t around, a chunin called Kikyo watches her. Though her mind is an adult's, her body definitely isn’t. She often finds it frustrating being trapped and helpless in her tiny new body.
When she learns to walkway earlier than a normal child would, a thoughtful glint appears in Danzo’s eyes, and her training as a ninja begins not long after.
She never really understood how much of a disadvantage she had as a civilian-raised shinobi, but she does now. She receives only the best of the best training as the Shimura clan’s heir. They begin with basic taijutsu forms and easy katas and, under Danzo’s tutelage, she makes improvements even she didn’t think were possible in a child’s body.
Her chakra coils are the biggest surprise in this life. Already her stores are bigger than they were when she was a genin, the perks of being a clan-born shinobi this time around, she supposes. Born and bred for war. She still has her chakra control, though. Her chest warms at the thought that her chakra control must’ve been inherited from Mebuki and that, even though she’s lost her mother twice, she still has this.
There’s a practice range for kunai and senbon on the grounds behind the main house. Danzo takes her there and drills her in throwing from different angles to moving targets until her coordination feels almost comfortable. Sakura grows used to the dimensions of her smaller body; her chakra stores are relatively non-existent and her control is clumsy but under Danzo’s watchful eye and her nightly meditation it's improving.
Danzo’s a surprisingly gentle instructor; he pushes her but never over her limits. She expected much worse from the whispers she heard about Root in her past life and from Sai’s own recountings of his childhood. Her life falls into an easy rhythm, her days full of training, then meals that Kikyo cooks, and then sleep on the softest bed she’s ever had. Danzo and her wake at sunrise every morning and sit on the porch overlooking the back of the compound grounds, they sit in silence and meditate.
Overall, Danzo seems both intrigued and grateful at her maturity. She’s lucky that there have been enough strange prodigies in Konoha that he doesn’t think too much of it. They sit in silence eating breakfast and sipping tea before Danzo leads her in chakra building meditation and katas. After meditation Danzo has her run laps around the compound and after that an hour of strength conditioning, she’s still young so he allows for breaks every ten minutes. In her new body what once would’ve been easy is hard work, sweat pours down her face and Danzo offers her a towel in the pauses between exercise sets.
After that dark-haired Kikyo will serve them lunch and natter on about her poisons research and preparation of the tokujo examinations. Danzo listens with a detached interest, Kikyo is a distant branch member of the Shimura family, one of the only few left. She’s caught a few glimpses of the others, but Kikyo is one of the few active shinobi that the Shimura clan has. Like most Shimura, she’s inherited the clan’s kekkai genkai proclivity for weapons, and after lunch she takes Sakura through the paces of kenjutsu. She’s fifteen and both fast and strong. Her whipcord muscles ripple as she moves her blade like an extension of her body. Sakura never learned kenjutsu in her previous life and their sessions leave her aching and sore.
Every other day training with Kikyo is replaced with Aoi, who is obviously one of Danzo’s root operatives. She keeps her chakra signature muted at all times and moves with an uncanny grace that’s at odds with her gruff personality. She teaches Sakura a slippery sub-style of Konoha taijutsu and whatever basic ninjutsu Sakura’s relatively small reserves can handle.
The only people Sakura really sees regularly are her instructors and Danzo, though she can sense subdued root agent chakra signatures fluttering around the compound. She’s still not quite sure what year it is. But from occasional comparisons of her to Kakashi, Mebuki’s ringless finger, and Danzo’s lack of bandages, she figures she was born a little before the massacre which means she’ll be able to stop it.
Danzo is impressed with her progress, even if Sakura isn’t. Kenjutsu is getting easier with each training session, she was never a weapons specialist in her past life preferring to use her chakra-enhanced fists but the Shimura clan is renowned for their prowess and the clan’s natural affinity for them has smoothed the way for her in this time. Oftentimes if Danzo is not busy with work he’ll watch her training and ruffle her hair when she comes in after, remarking on his high expectations for her. Danzo’s face looks weird when it is beaming with fatherly pride, and it evokes a strange feeling in Sakura’s chest. The juxtaposition of this Danzo and the war criminal she knew in her past life is too strange for comprehension.
She receives praise from her other teachers as well. Aoi, who is always rough and condescending, will occasionally remark about how she’s Konoha’s newest prodigy, and Kikyo makes it no secret that she thinks Sakura might graduate earlier than Kakashi.
Though Danzo’s role as a doting parent and patient teacher is surprising, she’s glad she’s not being conditioned like a root agent. Sakura’s fairly sure she would lose whatever sanity she had left in the crucible of root’s conditioning. She’s good at compensating for her trauma, she pushes down panic attacks and cries only at night in the privacy of her room. During the day the busyness of her life leaves little time for her to ruminate on everything she has lost and her time at the end of the world.
Her training goes on, she outgrows her crib--thank God-- and Konoha’s leaves go from green to red and back again.
When she's three, Danzo throws open the sliding doors of her room and has everything wallpapered in a pink that is the same color as her hair from her last life and has golden metallic cherry blossoms emblazoned on it. She still takes after Mebuki in this life in appearance, and though her new hair color and eye color have taken some getting used to, she stopped caring about her appearance a long time ago.
Danzo is more than impressed with her progress. When she’s about three and a half and slightly above gennin ability, close to chuunin, he takes her to her first clan head meeting.
He makes quite a bit of fanfare about it too. The week before, he takes her shopping for clothes for the event. It’s exciting for Sakura, shopping aside since she’s barely left the compound because of Danzo’s overprotective streak. Konoha looks mostly the same aside from the patrols of the Uchiha police force milling about. Ichiraku is still there and she resolves to ask Danzo to let them there for lunch.
Danzo leads her into an opulent kimono shop (a place where even on her jounin paycheck she wouldn’t have been able to afford) where they’re met with a harried shopkeeper who takes her measurements.
It takes some time for the older woman to fuss over her and by the time they leave the shop after Danzo hands over a hefty stack of Konoha notes to the shopkeeper Sakura feels relieved. As nice as the woman was, the fitting had been tedious and she was ready to go.
“Can we get Ichiraku’s for lunch? It smelled good when we walked by earlier.”
“Sure,” Danzo says smiling down at her.
Ichiraku tastes the same in this life as it did her last. She stops the tears from spilling down her cheeks thinking about the last time she had been there. Naruto and Sasuke had argued over something stupid again and had nearly spilled Kakashi’s ramen on him. She feels a pang in her chest at the thought of them, she tries not to think of how they probably met their end at the hands of Kaguya and Madara before she was whisked away. Maybe once she fixed everything she could see them again when they were born in this timeline; though they probably wouldn’t be her boys anymore just like there was no more Sakura Haruno, they would probably still be born but there would be no Naruto and Sasuke as she knew them if her plans were successful. She rubs at her eye with her sleeve, turning her back to Danzo so he can’t see her moment of weakness. He still notices when she tries to subtly sniffle.
“Something wrong Sakura?” He says.
“No, just allergies.” He nods his assent and goes back to eating his ramen, he gets allergies too whenever the weather turns as the seasons change. Though their silence is comfortable and she’s become more relaxed around Danzo in the years they’ve spent together the contrast of it in comparison to the noisy meals she had with her old team make her heart ache all the more.
The kimono arrives the day before the clan meeting, wrapped in paper sheets in a heavy lacquer box. It's the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. The outer layer is a deep red silk, a shade lighter than her hair--she feels a pang when she realizes it's almost the same shade as the qipao she wore as a child-- and the obi is a softer pink with golden flowers threaded into it in a swirling pattern. The bottom of the dress is threaded with more gold etched patterns of clouds, leaves, and more flowers. The inner layer is a soft light pink cotton and there’s a fur muff for her shoulders and neck to protect her from Konoha’s autumnal chill. She gets the first layer on no problem and manages to sloppily tie the obi with her stubby arms. When she meets Danzo in the foyer he fusses over her, adjusting her kimono, arranging the fur muff, and retying her obi. Danzo himself is dressed in his usual black yukata though his hair has clearly been combed through.
When he’s done fussing, Danzo takes her hand and they step into the frigid autumn air of the main courtyard, onto Konoha’s busy streets, joined by the chakra signatures of the Root agents trailing behind them.
The meeting takes place in one of the lower levels of the Hokage’s tower. The whole fourth floor is dedicated to conference rooms for this type of thing. Sakura’s geta click softly against the polished wooden floor. It looks similar enough for her heart to squeeze in its just--it feels like almost any second she’ll see Tsunade storming down the hall or Shizune scurrying by.
Her heart is racing as she and Danzo enter the room, they’re a couple of minutes early and most of Konoha’s clan heads are milling about idly chatting.
She recognizes a teenage Asuma milling about under Saurtobis’ watchful eye and an even younger Hana Inuzuka hiding in her mothers’ skirts. She spies Fugaku and Mikoto Uchiha holding a tense conversation with some Hyuuga. Besides the familiar faces, there are more she doesn’t recognize though. She’s almost shocked to see Naruto’s parents laughing boisterously in the corner shadowed by a sullen Kakashi.
Her palms get clammy at the sight of Kakashi, she doesn’t realize she’s staring until he meets her gaze with a hostile one-eyed glare. Her heart is pounding, all she can see is Kakashi’s head being chopped off by Kagyua while Madara holds him down with a binding jutsu over and over. Kaguya ripping his head clean off with a vicious twisting motion. Kakashi's head twitching for a few moments on the ground before going still. The triumphant grins on Madara and Kagyua's faces. Vomit fills her mouth, she's shaking, there’s blood everywhere all over her hands, her face, her hair, and Kakashi’s head is still rolling on the floor. A firm hand squeezes her shoulder.
“There’s no need to be nervous Sakura.” Danzo says, his voice jarring her back to the current moment. The Aburame he was talking to is looking at her a little strangely. “Maybe you should step out for a moment and get a breather before the meeting starts, I remember how anxious I was when I went to my first clan conference.” Sakura nods mutely, grateful for the excuse, and wipes her clammy palms on the soft silk of her kimono as she rushes out.
The bathroom is still in the same place and she has no trouble finding it, Sakura washes her face in the sink and stares at herself in the mirror. The dark red hair and her black jade eyes will never stop being jarring in this life. She has a haunted look in her eyes, after a moment of deep breathing she pulls herself together until the girl looking back at her looks demure and poised. After all her training she will not embarrass Danzo or the Shimura clan at this first meeting. Get it together Sakura.
She feels more like herself as she strides down the hall though she can feel her nails digging little crescents into her palms. When she reaches the big double doors that lead into the conference room there’s a stranger idly standing in front of them. They’re about the same height, meaning he’s a kid as well.
“Execuse me.” Sakura says, trying to be polite. She nearly does a double-take when the young boy turns to reveal that he has Uchiha Itachi’s face or at least a version of it lined with baby fat.
“Oh, I didn’t realize there was anyone my age attending the clan head meeting,” Itachi says with a mild expression.
“I’m the Shimura clan successor-- Shimura Sakura-- I’ll be attending the meetings from now on.”
“Uchiha Itachi, it is a pleasure to meet you.” Itachi opens the doors gesturing for her to enter first.
“Nice meeting you as well.” Sakura gives him a curt nod before scurrying off to find where Danzo is. Though when she looks back over her shoulder, Itachi is watching her with an inquisitive look.
The clan meeting is not eventful, she finds that village politics are just as tedious in this time as in her own. She listens to the elders bicker among themselves, laughing silently whenever Danzo catches her gaze and deliberately rolls his eyes at their antics.
On the walk home, Danzo complains about “the drivel that idiot Fugaku spouted” and the light mood that had settled over Sakura during the meeting fades at the reminder of the strained tensions between their clans. It is a sudden reminder that the clock is ticking and she still needs to figure out how to save the world.
When she’s four and a half, Danzo’s training gets more intense. He introduces a more intensive set of katas, one she recognizes from her old life--the same ones Tsunade had her start with when she first started building her strength. As her shinobi education continues Danzo surprises her by bringing in a parade of civilian tutors--the same ones who tutored the Daimyo’s successors--. She takes to it like a fish in water, learning finance, history (much of which she knows from her previous life but it does fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge about Daimyo’s territories), and politics.
“If you’re going to be the successor to the Shimura clan you need to be more than some brute whose only strength is fighting, politics require more delicacy and common sense than most of these idiots in this village have,” Danzo says to her as an explanation for lessening some of Shinobi training in exchange for the civilian tutoring.
Danzo does not hold back his praise of her. When she gets a particularly tricky seat of seal combinations--tricky if she hadn’t been a jounin ninja in another life--he smiles at her warmly.
“It seems my lovely daughter is a prodigy to rival the likes of that Uchiha brat they’re always yelling about in the village. You will be the restoration of both the Shimura clan’s greatness and Konoha’s.”
Something warm flutters in Sakura’s chest at the praise. Later that day, Danzo gifts her a new set of kunai with little sakura blossoms engraved into the flats of the blades.
“I think it is time I share the Shiumra Clan’s kekkai genkai with you, Sakura.” She finds herself wondering at the statement.
Sakura finds out it is not so much a kekkai genkai as it is a version of Orochimaru’s mad science.
Danzo escorts her from the compound under cover of night. Though she still has a long way to go before she’ll try healing anyone, her small body having no issues with hiding her chakra signature or sticking her feet to the sides of Konoha’s buildings as she struggles to keep up with Danzo’s fast pace. They end up on one of the smaller roads of Konoha, a relatively ubiquitous quiet street a few blocks down from the Hokage tower. Sakura watches as Danzo opens a wooden door set into a low wall whose shingles reach just over their heads. The door swings open to reveal a small garden. Danzo takes her hand and tugs her along to the other side of the yard where a low square building sits among the greenery.
The building opens to what appears to be a rather small living quarters. No lights are on but her eyes adjust to the darkness after a few minutes while she waits for her father to finish shuffling around.
“There it is,” She hears him mutter, shifting one of the large rugs that blanket the floor over to the side. It reveals a trap door that Danzo raps his knuckles against in a distinct rhythm. Sakura has a distinct feeling of unease pooling in her stomach.
The door slides away, and Sakura finds herself face to face with a younger version of Orochimaru. A feeling of revulsion rolls through her.
“Ah, there she is,” Orochimaru says, circling her.
Danzo nudges her.
“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Sakura says, swallowing her disgust, giving him a shallow bow.
“This is Orochimaru, one of the legendary Sannin. He’s a...” Danzo pauses, a thoughtful expression on his face, “a consultant for Root.”
Sakura internally snorts.
“Well then, shall we get started?” Orochimaru says, rubbing his hands together eagerly. He’s creepier than she remembers, and she feels a burst of sympathy for Sasuke. Well, that’s not ominous at all.
Orochimaru leads them through a maze of dimly-lit tunnels, so twisted that Sakura loses her sense of direction in the gloom. Finally, he stops and leads them into a small sterile. There’s a medical recliner with a sheet of plastic and even a few diagrams of the body’s different systems on the wall. It almost feels like a regular doctor’s office except for, well, the fact that it's in an underground labyrinth under Konoha and there’s a creepy snake man eying her like a piece of prime rib.
Danzo must be able to tell she’s on edge from her body language because he gives her a reassuring pat on the back. His own action surprises him, pausing halfway through the motion as if it was more instinctual than a conscious act.
God bless him, she thinks her sanity must have come unwound in the fuinjutsu that landed her here because it does actually make her feel a little better. They’d faced much worse in the end than Orochimaru, but perhaps it was because he was responsible for the beginnings of her adolescent trauma, when she had been the weakest link and her boys were still inexperienced genin, that he managed to leave a lasting impression.
The experience is relatively painless overall. Orochimaru has her sit on the medical recliner, the paper sheet wrinkling under her weight while he does a chakra diagnostic. His chakra feels cool and slimy as he checks her system over.
“Her chakra coils are beautiful, I’ve never seen anything like them,” Orochimaru says, the layer of excitement coating his voice sends a shiver down Sakura’s spine. She can feel where he pauses in the exam to take a closer look at the tenketsu on her palms, exclaiming again. As gross as it feels, she’s glad to know that the chakra control exercises she’s been secretly doing have been paying off. She actually shudders when he runs a finger on her palm.
“They’re so developed already.” He side-eyes Danzo. “Perhaps she could be my apprentice?”
Danzo says in a tone that brokers no room for argument, “Absolutely not, Orochimaru. She’s too busy with her training as the Shimura’s clan’s successor.” Sakura feels a rush of appreciation for the man-- Orochimaru may still be loyal to the village at this time, but there is no way she wants to spend any more time around him than necessary.
“Get on with the exam, I want to see if she’s ready.” Sakura holds still as Orochimaru finishes the diagnostic, giving Danzo positive affirmation that she is indeed ready for whatever shady kekkai genkai Danzo has cooked up. “You see, Sakura, while doing my research on Konoha’s Kekkai Genkai for my defense project, I made a startling discovery along with Orochimaru and his late assistant Shibuki Uchiha’s help.” He pauses, looking over at her. “We discovered something quite miraculous.” Sakura feels her sense of unease building as Danzo goes over the cabinet and pulls out a jar.
In the jar, there are two bloodshot Uchiha eyes spinning wildly in the flesh they’ve been mounted on.
“Yes, my poor assistant, she had a chronic condition and we couldn’t cure it in time,” Orochimaru purrs from behind her. “And I do hate to let anything go to waste.”
“We discovered that those with Shimura DNA are compatible with any other Kekkai Genkai, meaning you and I can have any Kekkai Genkai we want, we just have to take it, no chakra shortage or any hindrances. And Orochimaru has just confirmed what I suspected.” Danzo pauses, looking at her thoughtfully. “Your chakra coils and precise control make you the perfect candidate I’ve been looking for to be the recipient.” Sakura can feel her heart racing-- she had let herself get complacent, falling into the ease of daily life being the Shimura heiress and Danzo’s beloved daughter, and now they were going to experiment on her.
“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt at all,” Orochimaru says as she tries to back away. The last thing she feels is a sharp jab in the vein at the crook of her elbow before blacking out.
She wakes up in her own bed in the Shimura compound. Mid-morning light is streaming in through the large window, casting beams of sunlight onto the floor and her duvet.