Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The worst thing about dimension travel, Sakura very quickly decided, was that she couldn’t find a way to blame Naruto for it.

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Sakura was on her first B-rank mission since making chunin and feeling quite good for herself when she accidentally tossed the enemy nin she’d been grappling with into an unidentified seal etched into the floor of the clearing. The man collided with the rocky ground with a yelp and bounced a solid foot into the air before Sakura came down on top of him, combat sandals first.

She had just enough time to register the sight of mystifyingly familiar carvings—now slightly splattered in the blood of the man who’s kidney she was pulverizing under her heel— and the sound of Kakashi calling her name with uncharacteristic sharpness before she felt the tell-tale lurch in her chakra of a foreign seal activating around her.

There was a blue-white flash of illuminated sigils, a sound like something ripping that really, really shouldn’t be, and a wheezed, “oh crap” from the Iwa shinobi beneath her — and then, between one blink and the next, Sakura is very suddenly no longer nestled amidst the snow-covered pines of the land of Frost— instead, she’s tumbling head-over heels through the sky above an unfamiliar landscape.

She snaps her legs and arms out immediately, training automatically taking over where her mind wants to take a moment to freak the fuck out. Carefully circulating her chakra through her body—less of it than she’d had a mere half a minute ago, but still plenty enough that it would take blasting through another few mid-powered jutsu until she really has to worry—Sakura wastes a second and a trickle of chakra on reinforcing her eyes and ears against the whistling wind while she orients herself mid-air.

Below her, she can spot the other shinobi falling quite a bit faster than she is; a blot of brown and green as he crashes through— a glass dome? …Ok, sure, whatever, focus. Reduced size and the waxed-canvas cloak around her shoulders means that Sakura’s persevering slightly better in her fight against gravity than the adult man, but it’s still a fight, and one she isn’t winning. But Sakura is a Konoha shinobi, and if Konohans know one thing, they know how to fall.

She pulls at the fold of her cloak and angles her body so she’s hurtling feet-first through the hole Iwa so graciously left her in the curved glass panels, something like 50 metres above the ground of what looks like it might be a really confused town square.

The thing about falling— or, more specifically, hitting the ground— is that it’s easy. For Sakura, that is. After the first dozen times Kakashi kidnaps you in the middle of the night to throw you off Hokage mountain as a brutal, if more or less well-meaning offer of training to make up for being so bad at teaching the first time around, you learn to land on your feet. (Not to mention that in Konoha it’s not unusual for kids to be taught how to hit the ground with a roll before learning how to walk.)

It’s all a matter of timing, and pin-point control— two things Sakura excels at. She draws her chakra to her legs, as she falls closer and closer to earth, propelling a small burst of it out of the soles of her feet a split-second before impact. At this point in the familiar equation, Sakura would usually release her grip on her chakra completely and let the thing at the other side of her technique catch a fist-sized explosion of raw power, but she has to be a lot more careful with dispersing the impact into the ground instead of through it while simultaneously making sure that the bones in her body stay intact.

All this is to say— Sakura hits the ground and it doesn’t explode underneath her in a shockwave that kills everything in a 100-meter radius of her with the force of her impact, which she’d like to think is pretty impressive. (Iwa didn’t even try, lying in a crater of his own making several feet from her. Pathetic). If Kakashi was here, he would definitely have something negative to say about the spider-web fractures emanating out from the still-slightly trembling rock beneath her feet, but she ignores the voice in her head that reminds her of this with practiced ease. You can’t make everyone happy. At least she hadn’t landed on anyone.

She takes stock of her surroundings. The weird dome is split into what she can see is at least four-different environments, filled with really strange looking people, and is about as big as it’d seemed from outside, which is really fucking big. Sakura has questions. Who the hell would make a giant dome out of glass just to put a bunch of mountains and a fountain in it?

A flash of movement in the corner of her eye has Sakura whirling around to face the nearby group of people clumped around the fountain. She cocks her head and tries to figure out what she’s looking at. Did she interrupt a fight of some kind? It looks like it’s been put at least partly on hold with her entrance, which she supposed made sense; she hadn’t exactly been trying to stay silent in her descent towards the earth. Anyway, whether they were fighting or not was less relevant to Sakura at the moment than what they looked like, which was super fucking weird, actually. So weird, in fact, that she’s so busy boggling in disbelief at the length of some random green woman’s neck that she almost misses the sloppily thrown knife heading towards her face. Almost.

Sakura steps to the side, plucks the knife out of the air and sends it back to way it came, only remembering at the last second to keep her aim from skewering anything too important. She has no idea if these people are even shinobi—depending on where she is, killing the wrong person could mean a diplomatic incident, which would be bad. (Though this was pretty unlikely, seeing as shinobi could usually kill pretty much whoever they wanted and get away with it as long as they were village sanctioned/had probable cause for retaliation, but appearances as weird as these had to mean bloodline limits, which meant more of a chance a clan could vow revenge on her for killing someone important.)

Sakura watches in mild befuddlement as the guy who’d thrown the knife at her — spines protruding all over his body, like some kind of demented hedgehog— crumples to the ground with a harsh cry, aforementioned knife sticking out of his shoulder. That was…unexpected. She’d been pretty sure it was like, a known law of the universe that the weird-looking ones had to be strong.

“Who the hell are you?” A pale-haired man dressed in black, (covered in—hands? What the hell?), rasps at her, sounding even more pissed off than she felt.

She doesn’t even get the chance to weigh the merits of introducing herself before another man, also dressed in black, yells, “Kid, get out of here!” An action that manages to draw her attention to the speaker’s long black hair and glowing red eyes.

Sakura’s adrenaline-filled brain makes the obvious logical jump from ‘red eyes and black hair’ to ‘Uchiha’ to ‘oh crap, oh crap, OH CRAP’ so fast that her head spins; a moment later, she’s letting sheer panicked instinct lead her to squeeze her eyes shut and punch the closest living thing to her fist as hard as she can.

The closest living thing to her fist turns out to be some giant bird creature. The giant bird creature doesn’t even budge. Sakura digs her heels into the earth to keep from being blown back by the shockwave of pressure that emanates out from the impact of her blow, strands of hair blowing away from her face. She draws her fist back and watches as the shiny black skin knit itself back together from where it’d been burned by raw chakra. The giant bird creature keeps blankly staring a metre or two above her head, like absolutely nothing of note has just occurred. It — they? Sakura doesn’t want to be rude, but also, like, weird — doesn’t even blink.

Ok, so Sakura’s intrigued. She’ll admit it. Forget the guy who on second glance looks way too undignified to even be Sasuke’s very distant cousin— she wants to know how this thing is still alive.

In a possibly ill-advised demonstration of why Sakura is not a diplomat, she immediately sends another punch aimed at the bird creature’s chest. It doesn’t even attempt to dodge, which Sakura would probably be insulted about if she wasn’t paying way too close attention to what her chakra is doing to bother. The giant bird creature, again, does not budge. It doesn’t even brace itself for a hit, just stands still, solid and unmoving. Another hit, and she’s finally jumping out of the way of a fast returning blow. It doesn’t matter, though, because she has what she needs.

The simple answer to the question of why Sakura’s punches don’t seem to be having any effect was that the giant bird creature was somehow…absorbing it. Not the chakra itself, which was left to skitter across the surface of its skin in crackling sparks of light, but the literal kinetic energy of her punch. Sakura would be tempted to say that the feat itself was impossible, except for the fact that that clearly wasn’t true.

So. Fine. Sakura was a tried and true employer of the philosophy of when in doubt, punch your problems until they stop being problems, but she could accept that that was maybe not a strategy that inspired success in this particular instance. It’s because of this acceptance that when the next clawed hand reaches for her, a fraction of a second after the last one, she doesn’t bother trying for another punch. Instead, she steps into the creature’s guard, pulls her chakra-bladed tanto from her belt, and cuts the bird creature’s arm off in one strong sweep.

Flickering away from the spray of foul-smelling blood, Sakura skids to a stop next to the fountain and watches in increasing aggravation as the bird creature proceeds to grow another arm, now that the first one is out of commission. It’s pretty gross to watch. Sakura has to split her attention from the grisly sight in order to kick away a suddenly rushing woman and duck under a knife strike in order to take a man out at the knees with a stab of her tanto. She registers in an abstract sort of sense that people are now starting to react to the new threat in their midst— her— and that the guy covered in hands is apparently not taking her ongoing attempt at defeating the bird creature very well, but seeing as he’s choosing to scream at her instead of spontaneously starting to sprout new limbs, Sakura is having a hard time…well, caring.

Just looking at the bird creature, you would never know someone had only moments prior cut off its arm. Cool, Sakura thinks, magnanimously. Now how do I kill it?

The answer she comes up with moments later seems way too obvious. The blade of her tanto sinks into the meat of the giant bird creature’s exposed brain surprisingly easily, tearing through brain stem and spinal cord with an anti-climactic squelching sound. She sticks her feet to the creature’s shoulders with chakra to keep from toppling off of it when she wrenches her weapon free again, making a face at the blood that sprays onto her cloak. She was so making Kakashi pay for it if she had to buy a new one.

Finally, thoughts of regenerating limbs still at the forefront of her mind, Sakura grabs the bird creature’s beak and wrenches the things head off its shoulders with a really gross sound. She hops off the body as it finally crumples to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, wrinkling her nose in faint disgust.

She brushes off her gloved hands a tad unnecessarily and takes a look around. It looks like the not-Uchiha man was busy while she was occupied; most everyone besides him is unconscious and trussed up in a strange scarf-like rope. Also, she can spot a group of younger looking people—still just as weird looking— a good distance away, hiding pretty poorly in some bushes, but she’s less worried about them and more about the maniacally twitching guy covered in hands who’s screeching about disintegrating her. Her shoulder hurts from when she’d wrapped her arm around the bird creature’s neck to keep it from throwing her off, but she’s still in good enough shape to send the man flying through the air with a punch to the face when he runs at her. Instead of hitting the ground, he sinks through the sudden appearance of a swirling purple portal; one that winks out of existence a fraction of a second before Sakura’s foot makes contact with it, swallowing hand guy’s shouts for retribution as it goes.

“Damn it,” Sakura mutters, irritated. Between that and the fight with the Iwa nin, she was so over mysterious teleportation as a means of ending a fight before it even began. Speaking of…

She trots over to the not-Uchiha guy, figuring he’s probably the closest thing she’ll find to a friendly. He hadn’t seemed to be on Hand-guys side, and he hadn’t tried to kill her yet. (Although she supposes she can admit that she threw the first punch. But what sort of idiot would put a miraculously regenerating Giant Freak in front of her and not expect her to find a way to kill it? Scientific method, yo.)

“Er-Hi,” she says, feeling a little awkward with the way not-Uchiha is staring at her. At least his eyes aren’t red anymore. Sakura conceals a shudder with a cough. Back on track, she continues, “Where exactly are we?”

If anything, that makes the man stare harder. It at least looks like not-Uchiha is opening his mouth to answer her, which is when two things happen in quick succession: Number 1, the entrance to the dome explodes in a cloud of dust and some guy in a yellow suit tight enough to put Maito Gai to shame bursts on the scene with a shining grin and an enthusiastic yell, before coming up short at the sight of a pile of unconscious weirdos, one (1) headless bird creature and two (maybe) shinobi, both very confused for assumedly different reasons. And number two, Sakura realizes a lot of things simultaneously, one of the most pressing of which being that the Iwa nin she’d been engaged in mortal combat with up until about five minutes ago was nowhere to be seen.

Worst B-rank ever.

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Kakashi blinked at the spot his apprentice had been standing mere moments before, casually releasing the corpse of man he’d been garrotting. Hm. He crouched next to the newly uncovered seal and pushed his forehead protector up higher on his forehead, blinking open Obito’s sharingan. He gamely ignored the instinct to damn caution to the wind and jump directly into the seal after his pink student in favour of studying the still-glowing markings. Markings that he…kind of recognized.

Aw, crap. Tsunade was going to kill him.

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A little known fact about Sakura is that before Sasuke, there’d been another pretty boy who’d owned her heart. His name was Minato Namikaze, colloquially known as the Yellow Flash: war hero, genius, seals master, Yondaime Hokage, and all around hottie.

She had a poster of him on the wall of her bedroom. From the ages of 8 to 11, every night before bed Sakura bid goodnight to the Yellow Flash’s smiling face. When she was 10 years old she came to the conclusion that the two of them were absolutely meant to be together. There was, of course, only one problem with this fantasy, and even at a young age, Sakura knew it.

The problem was this: Sakura knew exactly nothing about sealing. This was a travesty that obviously needed to be amended as soon as she was made aware of it. (No matter that the Yondaime Hokage was two and a half decades older than Sakura and also—oh yeah, dead. No, it was definitely her knowledge of space-time manipulation jutsu that was keeping them apart.)

Anyways, the point was that due to reasons she was definitely never going to admit to to any other ninja alive—except Ino, who’d been more than aware of Sakura’s little obsession seeing as she’d been the one to supply her with the poster—Sakura once spent three months straight consuming every single scroll, book and scrap of gossip she could find on the subject of Minato Namikaze’s Flying Thunder God Jutsu that could be accessed by an Academy student. Which meant that for better or worse, she had a very specifically curated working knowledge of theoretical sealing techniques in regards to—and in fact, only in regards to—temporal-spatial manipulation.

Long story short, due to a slightly inappropriate crush on a man who was widely considered to be a pretty heinous war criminal by anyone not from Konoha, Sakura was confident that she knew a fair bit more than the average working chunin about the multiverse theory. At least, she knew enough for ‘another universe’ to be her working theory on where the hell she’d ended up.

That is—in a metaphysical sense. Physically, Sakura was sitting in what she was pretty sure was supposed to be an interrogation room, in what she was at least marginally more certain was a police station. (Sakura sort of remembered the military police headquarters in Konoha looking slightly similar to this place, back when the Uchiha clan was more than a lonely boy in a too-big compound.)

Sakura’s still unsure whether going with these people when they sort of-maybe-arrested her was the best idea, but in her defence she’s feeling a bit overwhelmed. She might be prepared to pick out a hiraishin seal in a line-up of storage scrolls, but she is definitely not equipped to make first contact with an alien civilization! Aren’t there protocols for that kind of thing? Not that she expected Kakashi would teach them to her if they did exist, but she’d like to at least know about them.

She’s startled out of her slightly panicked spiralling about diplomacy by a cleared throat from the man seated across from her. Judging by the uniform and badge, he’s an officer, and the look on his face says she’s missed being asked a question. Right, right. She’s being interrogated, or something. She should probably pay attention. Not-Uchiha, seated next to him, looks disapproving. Or, he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open. It’s hard to tell.

“Ah, sorry?” Sakura laughs a little, embarrassed. The metal cuffs around her wrists jangle slightly where they connect to the table by a chain. She’s sure the restraints have to be at least mostly decorative—no way anyone would expect these flimsy things to even keep an Academy student cuffed for more than a couple seconds.

“Name, age, quirk,” the man says, smiling kindly. Something about him reminds her the slightest bit of Inoichi, which has Sakura on guard. She’d rather not deal with any mind probing today, thank you.

“Sakura Haruno, 13,” she starts, easy enough, before pausing slightly and deciding to throw in, “chunin of Konohagakure.” Another pause as she takes in their blankly uncomprehending expressions. Alright, then. “And, can you explain what you mean by quirk?” She’s pretty sure they aren’t asking to judge her personality traits—it made sense that different universes would evolve to end up with different meanings for the same words, even though it was pretty strange that the languages were the same at all. Sakura was electing not to think about it too hard.

The two men share a confused glance before not-Uchiha decides to speak up. “Your accent sounds rural; you might be more used to hearing it referred to as an ability or power?”

That doesn’t sound right. “Ah, I don’t think I understand—do you mean like a skill?”

Not-Uchiha stares at her. “Earlier,” he says, sounding so unimpressed that Sakura thinks it has to hurt, “you…pulled…the—Noumu’s head off. Of their body. Apparently, they were supposed to be strong enough to rival All Might.” It’s very clearly a question, despite the lack of inflection. The officer guy winces at the phrasing but looks equally as interested in her answer. Neither of them look pleased.

“Oh!” Sakura blinks. Weird question. “That was just basic chakra reinforcement.”

The guy on the left—the not-Yamanaka officer whose name she really needs to find out at least for her own sanity—twitches at her answer. Sakura eyes him.

Not-Uchiha caught the twitch as well. “Please don’t lie to us, Haruno,” he says.

She’s not lying! Exaggerating, at most. Fine, alright — manually augmenting your muscles with enough chakra to pull a head clean off a body is a little bit more than basic chakra reinforcement. It’s not like it’s Sakuras fault she never properly learned to gauge her own skill level. Also, what the hell does this guy know? She tries again, carefully choosing her words. “I augmented my muscle tissue while reinforcing the surrounding area against the strain in order to exert a pressure my baseline body would be incapable of producing.”

No twitch. “So you have super strength.”

This time, it’s Sakura who has to resist the urge to twitch. They don’t know any better, she tells herself. Look at them: they aren’t ninja. To distract them, and herself, she blurts out the thing she’s been trying to find out a way to say this whole time. “I think I’m from another dimension.”

There is a long, tense moment of silence.

“…Truth,” Not-Yamanaka says faintly.

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Shouta doesn’t want to be here. He just survived a villain attack with a first year class during the first week of school, he deserves to go home and sleep until every single one of them has graduated. He does not deserve to be sitting in an uncomfortable chair in an interrogation room with the kid who he’d watched unflinchingly kill someone—(not that they were entirely certain Noumu was a person, in the traditional sense, but still)—less than an hour before, directly after crashing 150 feet through the ceiling of the USJ. The kid still had blood splattered on her white cloak. Most of it looked new, but not all of it.

“What,” Shouta says, because he’s really hoping he heard wrong. Was this kid delusional, as well as homicidal and overpowered?

Haruno—her name’s Haruno, he should remember that—looks supremely unbothered by his and Tsukauchi’s disbelief. “Does this village have a central authority I should speak to?” She asks innocently, before pausing in thought. “Or—actually, do you happen to know your first contact protocols? With, like, alien civilizations?”

What.

First of all, Shouta wants to ask, do I look like the type of man the government would trust with any type of protocol, let alone ones involving aliens? Also, you look like you’d get ID’ed walking into a middle school. Also, most importantly, what the actual fuck is going on. “No,” he says, instead, dry. “Tsukauchi?”

Tsukauchi is staring at Haruno with an expression of such intense bewilderment on his face that Shouta is tempted to warn him he’ll get stuck like that. You’d think, by now, he’d be used to dealing with crazies. “He doesn’t know either,” Shouta says, because he can be helpful like that.

Haruno makes a moue of distaste. “Ok, well, I don’t really know mine either, ‘cause I’m just a chunin…”

There’s an awkward beat of silence where both sides of the table stare at each other. It’s interrupted by the sound of Tsukauchi clearing his throat. “Right,” he says, seeming intent on clumsily changing the subject. “I’d like to ask about the man with you, when you fell into the USJ.” Haruno cringes and shifts uncomfortably in place.

Shouta narrow his eyes. “You know him.”

Haruno makes another face. “Not really…”

The two men wait for her to continue. When it becomes clear that the pink-haired girl is more than happy just to sit there in shifty silence, Shouta sighs. “Elaborate. Please,” he tacks on, because this is very much a child and despite what probably everyone who has ever met Shouta would say, he’s not rude.

Haruno blows a piece of hair out of her face with a frown, expression turning thoughtful. Shouta can practically see her wracking her brain, like she’s trying to remember something. “…Ichigo Hakane,” she announces finally. “I was fighting him when I accidentally triggered a se—ah… mechanism? A mechanism that sent us here. Well, it sent us to the sky above that dome—the USJ, you said?” Haruno shrugs. “I can’t tell you that much about him. Um, he specializes in earth jutsu, I think?”

Shouta decides to set aside the parts of this he doesn’t understand for later consideration. For the sake of time, and also his sanity. “You were fighting him?” The kid nods. “Why?”

“Oh,” Haruno blinks, seemingly slightly caught off guard. Not the question she was expecting, Shouta notes. “Uh—he attacked us first?”

Despite not sounding too sure about it, Tsukauchi gives Shouta a subtle nod in regards to the statement. Truth. Everything Haruno has said so far has been the truth. So, either she’s delusional, or…

Tsukauchi is still talking. “Us?”

“Yeah.” Haruno nods. She doesn’t say anything else.

Shouta’s starting to get the urge to sigh again when his phone pings with an incoming text message. He’s sure he’d put his phone on silent before starting this. Tsukauchi is eyeing him with a disapproving look, while across from them Haruno just looks confused. “Apologies,” Shouta mutters, fishing his phone out of his pocket with a feeling akin to dread. There’s only one person he knows who would be hacking his phone to text him like this in the middle of an interrogation — because that is what this is, however relaxed it may be. Sure enough, the text is from his boss.

‘Ask her why she thinks its dimension travel! :D’

Shouta stares at the message for a long moment. Then he glances up, scowling, at the security camera hanging in the corner of the room. He can almost feel it laughing at him. (Hacking into a police interrogation is of course very illegal, but Nedzu tends to care only about following the law in so far as they coincide with his incomprehensible sense of morality. He won’t get caught, anyways.) The principal taking an interest in this case is not unexpected, but something about this whole thing has Shouta feeling off-kilter, and a little nauseous. He really does not want to pursue this line of questioning, but Shouta is nothing if not logical, and the pieces are steadily coming together to form a picture it would be ridiculous to keep ignoring.

“Nedzu,” Shouta grunts, for Tsukauchi’s sake. He’s not sure what expression is on his face, but it has the detective watching him a resigned sort of trepidation. No doubt, his thinking is following a similar line to Shouta’s own.

He sighs for real this time, swinging his attention back towards the pink-haired girl across from him. She continues to look almost completely at ease, only mildly curious despite the fact that she has been in this room for almost an hour now. Either she really isn’t worried, or as Shouta is starting to suspect, she is a very good actor. “Why do you think you’re in a different dimension?” Shouta asks, only a hint of regret in his tone.

Haruno blinks, tilts her head. Shouta sees her glance down at the phone in his hand. For a fraction of a moment, her face is completely blank; there is a sharp glint of intelligence in her pale green eyes that makes Shouta think, for a moment, of that calculated fighter he’d glimpsed in the USJ. Then she blinks, and is once again simply an amiable teenage girl, the only hints of a fight the blood splatter crusting on the white fabric of her cloak. “It makes the most sense,” she starts slowly. “For one, where I come from we don’t have quirks.”

No quirks? Shouta and Tsukauchi share a look, the latter nodding slightly to acknowledge the lack of falsehood, despite the constipated look of bewilderment still clear on his face.

“I’ve never heard that word in the context you seem to be using it,” Haruno confesses, a tad apologetically. She is remarkably affable, for all that she is currently cuffed to a table and being questioned by two adult men. She has yet to ask for a lawyer, or to call a guardian — a fact which Shouta tucks alongside his growing unease at the whole bullshit situation. “Instead, we have something called chakra. Every living thing, even the least chakra-sensitive, has a chakra system. Should have. I’m not the best sensor, but even I can tell that nobody here has any chakra at all, which shouldn’t make sense, none of you should even be alive and what about plants—“ she cuts herself off, cheeks flushing in what might be frustration or embarrassment. Coughing, she continues with more composure. “I haven’t recognized any of the names you’ve used for where we are, nor do you seem to recognize Konoha—“ here she taps the headband nestled in her hair, lowering her head so they can see the engraved metal plate in the centre. “—which would be super unusual even if you aren’t shinobi.”

Shouta absorbs this with what he’d like to think is an impressive amount of restraint. “Shinobi?” Ninja.

“That’s another difference: we don’t have, uh, heroes. I mean, unless you’re talking about war heroes…but here it seems like some sort of profession?”

Slowly, Shouta nods. In his periphery he can see Tsukauchi doing the same.

Haruno shrugs. “Instead, we have shinobi.”

“And you’re one of them,” Shouta states. It’s not a question. The pieces are starting to come together—the combat skills, the quiet calmness that is so out of place in a child coming straight from a villain attack, the strangely militaristic dress, the goddamn sword—and he’s not sure he likes what he’s seeing. “In training?” He adds, daring to hope.

Haruno just blinks at him. “No,” she says, glancing between the two men with a frown like she’s trying to guess the best answer to give them. “I still train, though, everyday!”

He rubs his eyes. “Not what I was getting at,” he mutters. Then, “You need anything else?”

“Huh?” Haruno asks, but Shouta wasn’t talking to her. Sure enough, his phone chimes almost immediately with another text from Nedzu.

The message reads simply: ‘It’s a good thing you have that guest bedroom XD!!’

He swears softly. Another text rolls in. ‘Make sure she sees Recovery Girl tonight! I look forward to meeting her tomorrow morning!’

Too many damn exclamation marks for a grown man. Grown — rat. Whatever. Shouta was supposed to have tomorrow off. He was going to stay in bed all day and watch terrible romcoms. Not babysit an inter dimensional ninja kid. But Shouta very rarely gets what he wants.

If only All Might had arrived to the USJ battle ten minutes earlier—then at least Shouta could blame this on him.

Chapter Text

Aizawa leads her over to the thing that he calls a ‘car,’ which is some sort of contraption that involves a metal carriage on wheels, one without horses and which smells really weird. It’s a different one than they’d rode in to the police station, but just as offensive to Sakura’s senses. With the adrenaline of falling out of the sky and directly into a fight having worn off, Sakura is wary to subject herself to another journey in the metal death trap. (According to the amount of these things she’d seen along the unnervingly smooth streets of the village, they were the primary form of transportation in this world, which was just—so weird. What kind of shinobi would willingly encase themselves in a metal tomb on wheels every time they wanted to go on a mission? What was wrong with good old-fashioned running? Sakura was Konoha-born and bred and she would gladly stick to tree-hopping, thank you very much.)

At least the metal didn’t look that thick…Sakura figures she could probably bust out of the ‘car’ if she needed to. To test it, she taps her index finger against the glossy metal side of the car, which makes an ominous creaking sound and rocks slightly with the force. A small dent forms beneath her finger.

…Whoops. Sakura was still getting the hang of appropriate force.

There’s a faint whirring sound and the window in front of her rolls down. Sakura makes an ‘eep’ noise and startles away, drawing her finger back. Aizawa peers at her from inside the car, looking slightly pained. “Please don’t break my car,” he says.

Sakura grins apologetically and slips into the car, ignoring the instinct that tells her that this is a terrible idea. The seat she lands on is a weird material, like something that really wants to be leather but clearly doesn’t come from an animal. She sniffs it. …Weird.

Clicking the strap they’d made her wear into place, Sakura glances over at Aizawa. He’s still staring at her, but his grimace is deeper, now.

Sakura can feel her face flushing with embarrassment. “What?” she asks, a tad more defensive than intended.

Aizawa closes his eyes briefly and mutters something to himself, under his breath. Sakura catches ‘of course,’ and ‘fucking child soldiers’ before he breathes out a sigh. “Next time,” the man says, “use the door.”

Sakura eyes the window she’d swung through to get into the car with a frown, and decides not to tell Aizawa she doesn’t know how to open it. Doors are for civilians, anyways.

Sakura tries not to gape too much during the journey, but judging from the looks Aizawa keeps sending her, she isn’t doing a very good job of it. It’s just that everything is so weird and big and she can smell the acrid exhaust of the other ‘cars’ even through the sealed metal doors of the current abomination.

She sits back in the weird fake-leather seat, pulling at the restrictive strap where it chafes against her collarbone, and shoots a glance at Aizawa, who is grumbling a little to himself as he navigates the jungle of wide roads and racing metal monsters. “So…” she starts, trying to shove away the awkwardness of interacting with a fully-grown adult man she’s only just met. “Quirks?”

Aizawa shoots her a look out of the corner of his eye. Grunts once. He’s not a very conversational guy, Sakura is beginning to understand. That’s fine — if she can deal with Kakashi’s unique brand of bullshit on a regular basis, she can handle one grumpy adult who thinks a monosyllable is an answer.

Sakura doubles down. “Does everyone have one?” Based on what she’d seen at the USJ, it didn’t seem like a stretch. Weird, but believable. Sakura was rolling with it.

“Mostly,” Aizawa says, eyes on the road. He’s something of an enigma — it was clear he’d rather be doing anything other than dealing with Sakura, but he’d also acquiesced to the idea of being her newfound inter-dimensional chaperone with little more than an air of long-suffering and a weary sigh. Seems he was used to dealing with bullshit — Sakura sympathizes.

Sakura accepts this with a nod. “Do you have one?” She’s assuming the whole glowy red eyes, floating hair thing isn’t just a fun little side-hobby.

Aizawa gives her a funny look. It doesn’t seem like he can figure out whether to be suspicious of her or treat her like an adorable and mistreated stray animal he’d found on the side of the road. Sakura is more or less used to this — she’s pretty sure it was the pink hair. Something about that coupled with all the knives and the proclivity to punch people’s faces off sent mixed messages, apparently. “Yeah,” the man says finally. “I can erase people’s quirks.”

…Huh. That would be useful. “Cool,” she says. “Where are we going?”

Aizawa grunt again. “U-A. Uh — my work. Hero school.”

Hero school. Sakura rolls the words around on her tongue a couple times, but they refuse to make any sense. Hero. That’s what Aizawa was, right? A hero. The word means something different here, she’d quickly realized. Not like the Yellow Flash — and Sakura’s pretty sure that Aizawa might not even see him as one, seeing as how he’d reacted to her killing that Noumu thing. “Why?” She decides to ask, instead of any of the other stuff she wants to know about — there’d be time time for that later, hopefully.

Aizawa sent her another one of those funny looks. “You ask a lot of questions.”

Sakura huffs, trying not to scowl. She’s literally asked him like three things!

Maybe Aizawa realizes the same thing, because he relents. “My boss wants to speak to you.”

“Your boss? Is he the leader of this village?”

Aizawa laughs, a startled, barked sound, like it’s been punched out of him. “No,” he says, sounding a little horrified. “Not — no.”

Sakura eyes his weird reaction skeptically.

_____________________________

The kid submits herself to Recovery Girls exam with the ease of someone who is well accustomed to receiving medical treatment. Shouta is…unsure whether to view this as a positive.

She asks a lot of questions, anyways — though most of them go well over Shouta’s head. What the hell kind of business does a thirteen year old have knowing about hematocrits?

Recovery Girl sends Haruno out to wait in the hallway while she discusses her findings with Shouta. Which is, you know, a little morally dubious and uncomfortable, but Shouta is used to it and Haruno doesn’t seem to care, dutifully trotting outside to allow the two adults to discuss her medical results with relative privacy.

Recovery Girl seems unduly excited. “That girl,” she proclaims, with a sweeping gesture, “is not human.”

Shouta mulls this over. Accepts it with a shrug. “Yeah.”

Recovery Girl shoves an incomprehensible chart in his face. “Look at her oxygen levels!”

Shouta looks between her and the chart blankly, until Recovery Girl blows out an irritated breath. “She has double the levels of nitrous oxide in her blood as she should! The oxygen stats in her hemoglobin are off the charts!”

Shouta continues to not understand a word being said. “And that’s..bad?”

Recovery Girl rolls her eyes, like she cannot believe she’s dealing with this level of stupidity and ignorance. As if she couldn’t just as easily be working at, you know, an actual hospital, rather than a high school full of people who only care about their health so long as it means they won’t break anything too important the next time they have to punch someone. “It’s fantastic,” she says. “That child could probably summit Mount Everest right this moment without having to stop to catch her breath.” She gives Shouta a very pointed look, one that means she’s thinking about his somewhat shameful smoking habit and is being very polite by not mentioning it out loud.

Shouta stands up, feeling a little harried. “Well, great. If she’s fine, then…?”

Recovery Girl shoos Shouta out of her office with a stern word that Haruno needs to eat more than the average child and that he might as well follow her diet, seeing as how skinny he is. Shouta endures this with the usual grace and silent understanding that they both know he’s not about to do that. Judging by the way Recovery Girl scowls at him, she is well-aware of his thoughts.

“Get her some new clothes,” she tells him, before shutting the door in his face.

New clothes? Why would—oh right, Shouta remembers, as he exits the infirmary and finds Haruno sitting on a plastic chair in the waiting area, she’s still covered in blood.

He manages to scrounge up some clothes from the lost and found that would probably fit Haruno, which he bemusedly watches her throughly scrutinize.

“The bathroom is over there,” he points. She ignores him in favour of sniffing at a shirt that is, now that he looks at it next to her, probably at least three sizes too big. “It’s clean,” he adds, when she doesn’t appear to be finished smelling it anytime soon.

Haruno gives him a dubious look. “It smells weird.” She holds the offending article of clothing at arms length with a wrinkled nose. “What’s it made of?”

Shouta checks the tag. “Polyester.”

“What?”

“It’s like—plastic.”

Haruno’s answering stare is blankly uncomprehending.

Right, Shouta thinks, alien ninja child. He resists the urge to sigh and rub his eyes. “Just—it doesn’t matter. Can you just go change?”

Haruno appears to have no compunctions of letting her own irritation show, as she lets out a gusty sigh. “Why do I even need to change? My clothes are fine!”

Shouta stares at her. Seriously? “You’re covered in blood.” Also, you stink, he doesn’t say. Because he’s polite like that.

Haruno glances down at herself in surprise, as if only just now registering her condition. “Shodaime’s ball sack,” she…curses(?), fingering a rip in her heavy-looking beige cloak. “This was new! I spent half my last C-rank pay on it too, you’d think it would last longer…” She grumbles for a few more moments before returning to the topic at hand. “Well, my clothes are fine anyways, can’t I just wash them?” She cocks her head as something seems to occur to her. “Do you people have washing machines in this dimension?”

So she knows what a washing machine is, but not plastic? Or a car? Shouta shakes the thought away. “Fine,” he says, tired of this “put that stuff on and I’ll show you where you can wash your clothes.”

Maybe Shouta shouldn’t have mentioned Nedzu’s desire to meet her, because now Haruno won’t leave it alone. Looking — and smelling — a little less like Shouta had fished her out of a slaughterhouse, she follows him to his apartment with an obvious air of disgruntlement.

“I thought you were taking me to your leader?”

Shouta really wishes she would stop phrasing it like that. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow.” He fishes his phone out of his pocket and navigates to a food-delivery app, not even bothering to check his no-doubt empty fridge. “Do you like udon?”

Haruno blinks at him, faintly befuddled. Shouta realizes, a little late, that maybe Japanese cuisine didn’t translate across dimensions. “Like…uh. Noodles?” He tries, a little lamely.

“I know what udon is,” Haruno says, eyeing him judgementally. Well, fine. Shouta puts in an order for way too much udon while the kid goes back to scanning over his apartment like she’s checking for threats, planning on charging the meal as a work expense. Nedzu can deal.

He elects not to think too hard about whether aliens could stomach the local food — Recovery Girl didn’t mention anything about dietary restrictions, so obviously it wasn’t Shouta’s issue. Hopefully. He tacks on an order of steamed vegetables anyways, just in case. (Vegetables were good for kids, right? Shouta didn’t really know. His interactions with teenagers generally started and ended with teaching them how to not die young, grisly deaths. It didn’t extend to health class, thank the lord.)

He looks up from his phone when he felt something small and furry patting at his leg. The cat yowls at him, put-out at Shouta’s lack of attention. With one hand, he picks the thing up and deposits it into Haruno’s arms without much thought.

Haruno stares at the furry creature, open-mouthed and bewildered as she holds it at arms length, a little like someone would a grenade set to explode at any moment. “What.”

Shouta squints at her. Do they not have cats where she comes from? “It likes being held,” he says. His phone rings in his hand with an incoming call from Hizashi. Shouta declines it outright and, after a moment of thought, texts back: ‘Still alive. Leave me alone,’ before turning his phone on silent. There — that should keep him from worrying too much.

Haruno continues to hold the cat like a live weapon, scrutinizing it warily. “Does it have a name?”

“No,” Shouta says. He just calls it Cat. Then, a little embarrassed by this fact, he adds, “I found it in an alley.”

Haruno looks enamoured. “You’re a good kitty,” she tells the cat, very solemnly. She tries to shift her grip on it and ends up mostly cradling it like a particularly fuzzy baby, bouncing it a little in her arms as she coos. “Not fat at all!”

Alright. “I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping,” Shouta decides. “Food should get here soon.” Then a thought occurs to him, a little belatedly and very awkwardly. “I have a female coworker I can call over to stay here tonight? If that would…make you…more comfortable?” Holy fuck he’s bad at this; isn’t he a teacher or something?

Haruno stares at him for a long, inscrutable second, still silently bouncing the cat. Finally, she says, a bit apologetically, “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“Never mind.” That’s probably for the best — Shouta doesn’t really want to deal with Nemuri right now.

_________________________

Inter-dimensional udon tastes pretty much like normal udon, which is a bit of a relief. Aizawa very clearly pretends he doesn’t notice Sakura discreetly checking her food for poison, but he looks a little weird about it.

His apartment is nice, albeit a little depressing — spartan, in the way that Kakashi’s is, but lacking in copious amounts of dog hair and bookshelves full of pornographic literature. Sakura is pleasantly surprised. The cat threw her for a bit of a loop, but maybe she shouldn’t have been expecting anything else — this guy isn’t actually Kakashi, for all he seems also to be a weirdo supposed bachelor/trained fighter/teacher. He hasn’t even fake-smiled at her or ruffled her hair a single time since they’ve met, for one. Which should be a relief — but. Well. (Does Sakura miss Kakashi? That’s a weird thought.)

Sakura knows there’s stuff she’s supposed to be doing right now — reconnaissance, information gathering, whatever — but the food is warm in her stomach and the cat is purring on her lap and she’s starting to nod off a little despite herself. The excitement of the day is catching up with her, and Sakura would really like to pass out before the lack of adrenaline turns into dread and overthinking every single moment of the past however many hours since she’d arrived in this whack-job dimension about all the things she might’ve done wrong.

Maybe this Aizawa guy is nicer than Sakura had figured because he doesn’t even wait for her to yawn before stealing her empty dishes and shepherding her into the room he’d pointed out earlier for her to sleep in. It’s a guest room, supposedly — another way this guy was different than Kakashi. Kakashi didn’t have guests, and when he did he acted like he hadn’t invited them over and didn’t know what sleeping was. (Sakura had spent an embarrassing number of nights curled up in an enormous dog bed with eight smelly canines when the uneasy silence and unspoilt girlishness of her childhood bedroom became too much for her to bear without ripping her hair out or gouging a kunai through the clean pink walls. Every time, Kakashi woke her up in the morning with theatrical, affected surprise, like he hadn’t let her into his apartment in the first place. But that was just the way he was.)

Anyway, Sakura does a cursory check of the room’s security — something weird and electric which she disables (fancy way of saying she rips it out of the wall and bashes it with a kunai before it starts beeping) — before setting up her own traps and shooing the cat out of the room with a bit of regret. (She can’t be sure it’s not a spy, or something. Cats are shifty, everyone knows that.) Then she curls up on the bed, clutching her tanto in her fist the way a civilian might a stuffed animal or Naruto his stupid little frog wallet, and tries not to think too hard about the man with unknown abilities sleeping in the next room over, while a whole dimension away her Sensei scratches his head and uselessly ponders where the hell she’d disappeared to.

_________________________

Kakashi crumpled up the notebook paper he’d been scribbling on with a soft curse, tossing it on top of the steadily growing pile of others like it. His butt was starting to get cramped from sitting so long on the stone floor, and his hands were cold. He knew he should’ve invested in gloves that had fingers.

When he got Sakura back, he was going to handcuff her to Pakkun and actually not let her leave Konoha until she was at least his age. Also, they were going to have a very serious conversation about checking her surroundings before she started tossing people into mysteriously unactivated seals.

_________________________

The talk with Nedzu goes more or less anticlimactically, considering how much Shouta had been low-key dreading it. Haruno takes the whole genius talking animal thing without about as much tact as she has everything else so far — Shouta isn’t sure wether thats just her personality, or a product of the whole child-soldier thing. Because, and he really can’t stress this enough, Haruno is a child soldier. Who apparently Nedzu has decided Shouta is the most qualified to deal with — not just as a house guest, no, no. The rat has decided Haruno should be placed in his class. As if he didn’t have enough to deal with with this years bunch of hero-hopefuls.

“She’s not even old enough to be one of my students,” Shouta says, desperately trying to get the rat to see sense.

Nedzu, who has just submitted Haruno to an impromptu IQ test that she was somehow just as excited to take as he was to implement it, is unmoved. “I don’t see the issue,” he says mildly, refilling Haruno’s cup of tea. Haruno continues to watch the both of them with silent interest, those too-sharp green eyes steady and curious.

Shouta resists the urge to groan like a grumpy teen. Trust Nedzu to make him feel eighteen and stupid again. “She’s a child,” he tries, ignoring Haruno’s quiet scoff of offense. “She should be in middle school — there’s a reason heroics doesn’t start until first year.”

Nedzu tilts his head, one of those silly human gestures he copies because he thinks it makes him more personable or something, like it isn’t wildly unnerving to watch another species pick and choose elements of humanity at will. “If she was a normal human child,” he allows.

It’s clear he’s going somewhere with this. Shouta narrows his eyes, unyielding. “Yeah.”

Nedzu smiles a little. “How much do normal human children know about theoretical physics?”

Shouta rubs at his temples. “I would assume very little,” he replies honestly, because he knows trying to weasel his way out of an answer would do no good here.

The rat hums thoughtfully. It’s not a good sound.

Haruno bounces her gaze between them like she’s watching a tennis match, a little furrow between her brows. She tentatively raises a hand. Nedzu gestures at her gleefully, like he’s saying ‘see? Already better behaved than your other students!’

Shouta grits his teeth. “What.”

Haruno lowers her hand, dropping it into her lap, and clears her throat. “If I’m understanding this correctly,” she starts slowly, flicking her eyes towards Nedzu, “the lethal force I used when incapacitating the enemy combatant at the USJ was outside the bounds of what would be considered a necessary use of force by a civilian. Is that right?”

“You stabbed it through the brain,” Shouta feels the need to remind her. “You tore its head off.”

Haruno waves a hand, like sure, whatever. Shouta can feel his blood pressure rising.

“That’s correct,” Nedzu says, with a disproportionate amount of glee.

Haruno nods, like she’s decided something. “And because of that, I need to stay under your supervision?”

“Well,” Nedzu says affably, steeping his hands together and giving her a closed lip smile. “You do have options. You could, of course, stay at UA, as apart of our vigilante redemption program —“ a thing Aizawa is only learning about now, and very likely had not existed before this morning, “—or, you could surrender yourself to police custody. There would be a trial, possibly bail — I won’t bore you with the details, other than that it would be a long and arduous process.”

He isn’t mentioning the very real possibility of the Hero Public Safety Commission catching wind of the whole thing and deciding that someone with Haruno’s abilities was better off in their custody — which could mean anything from a straight path to Tartarus or Haruno mysteriously disappearing and re-entering society some half a decade in the future as the newest, shiny rendition of whatever the hell Hawks is. But Shouta is well aware of it.

Haruno tilts her head, tapping her finger against her chin. “That makes sense. Except — the way I see it, you’re leaving an option out.” Her face is glassy and devoid of expression — like a doll. Despite everything, despite the way he’d almost witnessed this kid pass out into a bowl of udon the night prior, Shouta can’t help but feel a shiver go down his spine. Kids shouldn’t look like that.

“Oh?’ Nedzu’s eye glints in an ominous sort of way, one that means he’s intrigued and about to make it everyone else’s problem. Shouta shudders and eyes the exit. “And what would that be?”

“Well,” Haruno says, still with that strange, casual blankness. “I could always just leave, don’t you think? Like, I don’t have to stay here. I could just..go.”

Nedzu’s smile widens, showing a hint of canine. “You’d be hunted down,” he says, equally as conversational. “Even if we didn’t send anyone after you, the police wouldn’t have the same compunctions.”

Haruno considers this. Shrugs. “Sure,” she says easily. “That would probably suck. But everyone’s been acting like it’s a really big deal that I killed that Noumu thing, ‘cause it was so strong. Right? So, you know — why should I believe anyone in this world would even be able to stop me?”

Huh. That — kind of sounds like a threat. Are they being threatened right now? Shouta would really like to believe Haruno is just overestimating her abilities, like any arrogant thirteen year-old with a run-of-the-mill strength quirk, but she doesn’t sound arrogant. She sounds more or less like she’s stating a fact.

Shouta looks to Nedzu, who’s fully grinning now. “That’s right. Well then, Haruno, what could we do to convince you to stay?”

What. Shouta stares at him. Are they bargaining with the child soldier now? Is that what they’re doing?

Nedzu shoots him a look. Shrugs. The fucker has the gall to look amused.

Haruno takes a sip of her tea, appearing to mull it over. After a moment, she says, “The weapons you use here are slightly different than what I’m used to,” face still carefully blank but now in a way that Aizawa thinks is probably concealing glittering excitement. “I want to know how they work. Access to schematics and materials.”

Absolutely not, Shouta wants to say, immediately, incredulously—but he knows this isn’t his call to make, so he just grits his teeth and waits to see how the rat will respond.

Nedzu is silent for a beat too long. Then, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” He continues when it looks like Haruno is going to protest, saying, “I am responsible for your safety, and the safety of this school. I can not willfully put that safety at risk by supplying you with weapons.”

Haruno lets out a gusty sigh, but something about her disappointment seems affected, like she’s not really that surprised. She might be a trained ninja-assassin-whatever, but she is, after all, only thirteen. “Fine, I guess. Well, what about medicine?”

“Now that, I can do.”

Haruno’s mask cracks into a sunny smile, cheeks dimpling in a way that might on anyone else look adorable but now just seems vaguely ominous. “Great! I’ve kind of missed being in school.”

“It’s a deal,” Nedzu says cheerfully. The two pint-sized creatures smile at each other like heathens. Shouta becomes very suddenly aware of something rising in his chest that feels an awful lot like dread. He has a very bad feeling that his life is about to get a lot more troublesome.

___________________________

Class starts again on Monday, which means Shouta has one whole day to prepare his newest student for life as a high schooler. Which, apparently, includes going shopping. Because, as previously mentioned, Haruno currently possesses all of two outfits, both of which are not appropriate attire for anyone that’s not homeless or a child assassin. (Which, technically, Haruno is, but — well. Appearances are important(?) Apparently(??)) Also, he needs to buy groceries. So. Shopping.

“Hey, I know that guy,” Haruno says, pointing at a shelf. They’re in one of those big-box warehouse stores, because Shouta would actually rather die before willingly stepping foot in a mall and it’s the only place he knows sells his favourite jelly pouch brand in bulk. Haruno seems a little in awe of it all, with a healthy dose of bewilderment at the display of excess around them. (Maybe her world doesn’t have capitalism? Although — child soldiers. You win some you lose some.)

Shouta follows her pointing finger towards a cheerful yellow mug emblazoned with All Might’s face. “He’s the number one hero.”

“That’s the guy who was totally late for that fight the other day!”

Shouta would actually pay real money to have her say that to the man’s face.

Haruno squints at the garish mug. “Why is his face on pottery?” As is quickly becoming a trend, she looks to Shouta for an answer to her question. He really needs to introduce her to the internet, if only to get some peace.

“It’s merch,” he explains tiredly. “People buy stuff with their favourite pro-heroes on it to show their support for them. Or something.”

“Hm,” Haruno looks thoughtful. “I think I understand.”

She does? “You do?”

“Mhm! It’s like—I, uh…I mean, myfriend used to have this poster of the Yellow Flash in her bedroom because he was super…inspirational and stuff, so I guess it would make sense to want to have stuff to remind you of your heroes. Except,” she tilts her head, suddenly pensive. “My friend only had that poster because it was leftover from the third war, when they were commissioning stuff to convince citizens to invest money and supplies to the war effort…is that what it’s like here?”

Shouta tamps down on the knee-jerk urge to ask about this war—judging by the nonchalant way Haruno talks about it, there’s little chance it involved her in the way he fears. Instead, he focuses on her question, hoping she’ll expand more on the inner workings of her world. The more she talks, the clearer a picture he gets. It’s not a very nice picture. “It’s similar in some degrees,” he allows, getting back on track. He’s probably not the best person to ask about marketing, but at least he has stuff to say about it. “Heroes receive a significant portion of the money generated from official merchandise, though realistically the vast majority of the stuff on the market is made by third party developers. Mostly, merchandise lets heroes market themselves to a wider audience then they’d receive only through responding to villain attacks. And purchasing it is a way for people to interact with their favourite heroes in a way that’s more or less removed from violence or tragedy.”

There’s a pause as Haruno supposedly mulls that over. “I don’t really understand,” she admits eventually, “why would you want your possible enemies to be more aware of you if it’s not in a display of power?”

Shouta grunts and shrugs. Good fucking question. “I’m definitely not the right person to ask about that, kid.”

Haruno blinks at him. “You don’t have merchandise?”

Shouta grins wryly. “I’m an underground hero,” he says, “it’s my job to stay unknown. It would be illogical if I was going around selling stuff with my face and name plastered all over it.”

He gets the sense that Haruno approves of this answer, though she quickly becomes lost in thought. Actually, she’s looking a little nauseous. Shouta hopes that it doesn’t turn out that she is allergic to something she ate, after all.

(Unbeknownst to him, Sakura is currently thinking about the well-known shinobi back home, and trying to imagine them commissioning merchandise that looks like them. That leads her to thinking about Kakashi-shaped dog toys which is a pretty funny idea actually—until this then morphs into the mental image of a bunch of people running around dressed up like him, or god forbid, like Gai-sensei. She conceals a shudder and vows to bury the mental image deep in her subconscious.)

Once their arms are laden with bags full of clothes, toiletries and food, Shouta lets them back in his apartment with an immense amount of relief, back aching. This is why he never buys groceries — it’s way too much work. But Recovery Girl had sent him a sternly worded text about not allowing Haruno to follow his very simple and carefully curated diet of coffee, jelly pouches, and the occasional protein shake, so sacrifices had to be made. Shouta just wishes those sacrifices weren’t at the expense of his poor abused musko-skeletal system.

Haruno immediately deposits herself on the floor and starts pulling articles of clothing out of the bags. “Hey,” she says, holding up a pair of pants with a look of disbelief, “where are the pockets on these things?”

Shouta shrugs. He’d kind of just been throwing stuff into the cart while Haruno was busy staring wide-eyed at everything and anything in the store, eager to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Haruno scowls at the pants like they’ve personally offended her. “What the fuck.”

“Hey!” Shouta frowns at her, momentarily caught off-guard. “Language.”

Haruno blinks up at him in innocent confusion. “Huh?”

Is Shouta really going to have to explain to a thirteen year-old girl why she shouldn’t cuss? He thinks about it for a moment, before summarily deciding that you could not pay him to care enough. He sighs, aggrieved, and pinches his nose. “Just — never mind.”

Haruno eyes him suspiciously for a moment before turning back to the offending article of clothing dismissively. “I guess it doesn’t need legs,” she mumbles to herself, before pulling a strangely archaic knife from…somewhere, and lopping one pant leg off at the knee. (Where the hell had she been keeping that?)

Shouta raises his eyes to the heavens. “Haruno,” he says, in a tone of endless patience, “what are you doing?”

Haruno waves the now-asymetrical pants at him. “They need pockets. Um. Do you have any thread?”

Without answering, Shouta opens a nearby drawer and withdraws a pair of scissors and an emergency sewing kit before wordlessly exchanging them for the knife. “I’m keeping this,” he says, stowing the weapon in his pocket and hoping it won’t rip a hole in his pants. “No knives.”

Haruno tests the blade of the scissors on her finger and makes a face of disappointment. “These aren’t even sharp!”

“That’s sort of the point.” Shouta finally hauls the bags of food into the kitchen and starts putting things away. Over his shoulder, he calls, “Don’t bleed on my rug!”

There. Shouta was great at this. Whoever said teenagers were difficult?

Chapter Text

Sakura wakes up on her first day of UA with a verifiable skip in her step. She’s excited — and can you blame her? She’s in another dimension. So far this has proven to be a bit more boring than she’d first hoped, but she has high expectations that that will change soon. Based on how unenthused Aizawa seems to be, he thinks the whole thing is going to be a shit show. Sakura’s pumped. Not even the ridiculous, scratchy grey outfit he tells her she has to wear can lower her spirits.

Aizawa has to tie the tie for her — Sakura’s got no idea what the purpose of it is, seeing as it’s way too soft to act as a proper garrotte and high-key feels like it’s cutting off her airway, but she submits herself to wearing it as long as she can bear. It’s probably a cultural thing, and Sakura doesn’t want to be rude. She tucks her Konoha headband in the pocket of the heavy jacket (polyester, again, and Sakura would really like to know what the deal is with that) and dutifully follows Aizawa out the door of his apartment. He lives within the walls of the school, which she supposes makes sense in terms of security and such, but also means he doesn’t out of bed until about fifteen minutes before class starts.

“Did you want breakfast?” Sakura had asked him, after he’d deemed her uniform acceptable and poured himself a steaming cup of coffee. (Sakura had given up fairly quickly at trying to figure out the weird, futuristic machine herself — she didn’t drink coffee, but Tsunade did, albeit always with a copious spiking of whichever liquor happened to be on hand. She was somewhat surprised to find that coffee transcended dimensional boundaries, alongside things like cats and udon.) “I made porridge.”

Aizawa abruptly looked a little guilty, like maybe he’d forgotten people need to eat in the mornings. “That’s ok.”

He went to feed the cat and stopped short when he realized Sakura already had. He had a sort of pinched look on his face when he said, “You don’t need to — I was going to get you food on the way.”

From where? Sakura had had a thought that this seemed unlikely, but accepted it with a shrug. “I don’t mind.”

“I just mean —“ Aizawa ran a hand through his hair and blew out a sigh. “Kid, you’re in my care, now. I’ll feed you, alright? And the cat. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Sakura had said, a little bewildered. She wasn’t really sure what the issue was. Was he mad at her using his food? Suddenly nervous, she’d said, “I can’t pay you back ‘cause I don’t have any money from this world, but I can —“ She hesitated. What can she do? Sakura has two skills in the entire world, and they are punching things until they stop getting up and being an overachieving little know-it-all. She swallowed and tried again. “I can —“ but Aizawa interrupted her, face looking even more pinched.

“You don’t need to do anything. You’re a —“ kid, he was probably going to say, and Sakura appreciated the way he stopped himself, because she’s not, “a person,” he settled on, “in a tough spot. And now you’re my student, so. It’s my responsibility.”

So Sakura nodded. Smiled at him, like that cleared everything up and she was totally on board now with being his burden to bear. What she thought and didn’t say, was so what? Sakura had been someone’s student before. She knew what it meant, for an adult to look at her and think of her as a duty before a person.

Aizawa had frowned at her easy acceptance and opened his mouth like he was going to say something, before he’d glanced at the clock and cursed under his breath. “Alright,” he’d said, in a tone that meant this conversation likely wasn’t over, “let’s get going.”

Sakura’d shovelled the last of her porridge into her mouth and trotted over to him, shouldering the bag filled with school supplies. Aizawa opened the door for her and shooed her out. Under his breath, she’d heard him mutter, “Out of the frying pan...”

____________________

…And into the fire. Or, as it’s colloquially known, a class full of twenty first year hero students.

Shouta waves a lazy hand towards Haruno. “Right,” he says, eager to get this over with, “this is Sa—“

“Sakura Haruno!” The girl in question steps forward with a bright grin, supremely unbothered about interrupting him. “I like trivia games, anmitsu and training! I dislike bullies and traitors…” a dark look overtakes her features for a moment as she grinds one of her fists into the palm of her other hand. Aizawa wonders if he should tell her to stop talking, but the sudden cold suffusing the room passes as quickly as it came, leaving Aizawa with cold sweat prickling at his back and wondering if he was only imagining things, Haruno with a sunny smile back on her face as she continues. “My hobbies include studying, training, and going out to eat with my friends! And, my goal for the future is to become super strong—enough to beat up a certain person and have them arrested for their crimes!” She throws up a peace sign that somehow manages to come across as menacing.

Everyone in the class stares at her. Haruno holds the peace sign.

“What the fuck?” Bakugou barks after a few long seconds have passed. This manages to break the silence well enough, as everyone starts talking at once.

“You’re that girl from the USJ!”

“Oh my god she like totally ripped someone’s head off—“

“—why’d she introduce herself like that?—”

“Is she even old enough to be here? This seems kind of—“

“—sounded like she was applying for a dating app—“

Once Shouta’s had enough, he flashes his quirk, glaring at them until they quiet down enough for him to draw his head back and put in his eye drops. “You’re all being way too loud for this early in the morning.” He looks to his new pink-haired student, who seems a bit perturbed by the chaos she’s caused, blinking in slight trepidation at the class. “Right. Haruno is your new temporary classmate. Haruno, go sit down.” He thinks she’s going to do just that, until she approaches the empty desk he’d placed at the back of the classroom and instead of sitting in it, proceeds to pick it up and move it across the classroom, until she is sitting directly next to the window. Aizawa briefly raises eyes to the heavens. Why, he thinks, why me.

At least Haruno is seated now. Yaoyaorozu, at the desk in front of her, looks startled.

“Ok,” he starts, relieved, “now that that’s settled—“

“What?!” Kaminari straightens with a shout, looking incredulous as he leveled his teacher with a finger. “You can’t just drop a new classmate on us and expect us to move on, just like that!” Most of the class nods along with him in varying levels of nonverbal support.

“Sit down,” Shouta tells him, unamused. He has no intention of speaking about this any longer. Well, at least he has something he’s sure will redirect their attention. “There are more important things to worry about right now. Starting today, we will be training for one goal in mind… the UA Sports Festival.” Shouta hid a cheshire grin in his scarf as 20 pairs of pubescent eyes swivelled towards him with pinpoint focus.

_______________________

“So, Haruno—“

Sakura interrupts her. “Call me Sakura!”

Yaoyarozu goes bright red, but most of the other kids at the table just nod and throw out their first names. Sakura’s making friends! Reconaissance! She’s clearly great at this stuff — that bitch who’d given her a B- in the Academy for infiltration was off her rocker. (Apparently Sakura was ‘conspicuous’ and ‘brash’ and had ‘the bedside manner of a raging bull.’ Fuck her anyways — Sakura had totally talked Naruto into egging her house after school. How was that for covert?)

After homeroom, Sakura had been shuttled to meet with that old lady in the nurse’s office to talk about what she’d be learning from her while the rest of the class went to English. (Apparently this was the least important class, and one that needed at least a working knowledge of a whole new language to participate in, so Sakura got to sit it out.) Now it was lunch, and Sakura was sitting with a bunch of her temporary classmates while they tried to find a polite way of interrogating her as to where the hell she’d come from and what she was doing in their school. (They weren’t doing a very good job of it — Sakura was very good at dodging questions, and had no reservations concerning lying wildly about her past and current plans.)

“Sakura,” Yaoyarozu says finally, cheeks still a little pink. Sakura smiles brightly at her. “Where are you from?”

Sakura waves a hand, casual. “Oh, a really small town in the mountains. You haven’t heard of it.” (Technically true — her parents were from Lightning, before they got driven south during the Third Shinobi War. It’s why Sakura is so good at rock climbing.)

“Is that why you sound like a hick?” Kaminari asks curiously.

Sakura feels her smile tighten on her face. Her eye twitches a little. “Do I?” She asks pleasantly.

Kaminari must sense the rising danger because he gulps and hurriedly waves his hands. “Not in a bad way — sorry! I just mean — uh — it’s…charming! Yeah, charming!”

Sakura shares a look with Jirou, who rolls her eyes. Boys. She graciously lets him off the hook and goes back to shoving rice into her face. The food here is so good it’s crazy.

“Wow, so far?” Yaoyarozu smiles at her in faint confusion. “And your parents are ok with you being away from home so young?”

Huh? Sakura’s thirteen. She’s literally an adult. She cocks her head at Yayoarozu, swallowing her mouthful of food. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

Yaoyarozu blinks at her like she’s surprised. “Oh. It’s just — well, I guess my parents would be pretty nervous letting me move across the country on my own…”

“Yeah,” Jirou agrees with a nod. She twirls her long earlobe around her finger (weird!) and rolls her eyes again. “My family is so overprotective. They barely let me take the subway here every morning.”

Sakura…doesn’t really get it. Is this a cultural thing? Her parents are — nice, she supposes. They never really talked all that much, especially since Sakura’d been made a bonafide ninja, but her and her mother still exchange letters when they get the chance. The two of them are very rarely in Konoha at the same time, and ever since her dad died — well. The less said about the fraught few weeks after the Konoha Crush the better.

She makes some noncommittal noises and pretends to be too busy eating to talk further. Maybe her new classmates are more perceptive than she’d thought, because they drop the line of questioning and move on to discussing the upcoming Sports Festival without pushing her further. Sakura breathes an imperceptible sigh of relief, but when she glances up from her food she meets a pair of narrowed red eyes across the table.

Sakura narrows hers right back. What, she mouthes.

Bakugo scrutinizes her for another suspicious second before jerking his head away with a huff, going back to grunting monosyllabic answers at Kirishima’s excited description of the past few years’ festivals.

Whatever. Boys were so rude.

_________________________

She brings it up to Aizawa later that night, while he’s cooking. She’s sat at the kitchen table, breezing through some physics homework she’s decided to make a marginal effort at to keep up appearances. The whole scene is frighteningly domestic. She’s only seen Kakashi cook once in his life, and that was when he’d slaughtered a gigantic bear and skinned it in front of her, and Sakura, Naruto, and Sasuke had been too busy taking turns throwing up to roast it over the flames like they normally would. (Kakashi usually couldn’t be assed to make a fire and prepare food while they were in the field, telling them that if they didn’t want to eat field rations they’d have to hunt and cook for themselves. He always stole some of whatever they made though — even that time Naruto had burnt a bunch of squirrels to a crisp.)

Finishing an equation with a flourish, Sakura keeps her voice deceptively casual as she asks, “What are parents like here?”

The sounds of Aizawa trying not to burn an omelette pause. After a moment, he sticks his head out of the kitchen to look at her, holding a spatula that’s steadily dripping egg on the floor. His face looks a little pinched around the edges. “What?”

Sakura pretends to be very engrossed in solving a problem that she’d already figured out a glance and doesn’t look at him. She shrugs. “The other kids made it seem like it was a big deal that I was so far from home…I was just wondering, I guess.” This suddenly feels like a very stupid question — who the hell cares? But Sakura’s not about to take it back. She’s not a wimp.

The smell of something burning wafts slightly from the entrance to the kitchen. Aizawa curses softly under his breath and looks over his shoulder. “One sec.”

A few moments later, he returns and deposits a very brown omelette in front of her, looking faintly embarrassed. Sakura thinks that this is well-deserved. What kind of grown man doesn’t know how to cook? He places a second omelette, so burnt it’s practically black, at his own placemate and sits down with a sigh.

Sakura prods at her omelette. It jiggles a little, clearly under-cooked in the middle, and she bites back a sigh of her own, thinking longingly of the school’s cafeteria food.

“Haruno,” Aizawa says slowly. When Sakura glances up at him, he’s watching her searchingly, with a look on his face like he’s unsure what to say, or maybe just constipated. Eventually he says, tentative and slightly awkward, “do you…have…parents?”

Sakura scowls at him, offended. “Of course I do!” Then she hesitates, and something absurd and incomprehensible compels her to add, “well, my dad died a few months ago. So — I have a mom, I guess.”

“Oh. I’m — sorry to hear that.”

Sakura shrugs and shoves a bite of rubbery egg into her mouth. “‘S fine.”

Why the hell had she said that? Literally half the people Sakura knew had dead dads — it didn’t mean anything. It’s not like they’d even got along or anything, when he was alive. He’d just been — you know. A dad. It was whatever.

“Was he…are they shinobi too?”

Sakura shakes her head. “Nah. Well, not really. They were both genin after the war for a couple years, ‘cause they were immigrants, but that doesn’t really mean anything. Genin’s for babies and civilians.” They had never even killed anyone. Sakura had always been so embarrassed of that.

Aizawa has a bit of a funny look on his face, one that has Sakura suddenly worried she’s spilled too much. Crap. She really wishes she knew what the protocols were for this — does she treat him as a hostile or an ally of Konoha? She’d never figured there might be more ways to classify someone outside the village.

“What are parents like here?” She asks again, getting back on track.

Aizawa rubs a hand over his mouth. “I am really not the right person to ask,” he says after a moment, stiff and apologetic.

“Ok.” Sakura swallows her disappointment and goes back to her food, mentally berating herself for pushing. She can’t even pretend it’s for the sake of reconnaissance — Konoha won’t care about what parents are like in this weirdo village. Sakura doesn’t even really care. She’s just curious — the same way she’s curious about what the hell quirks actually are, in a biological sense, and why everyone trusts cars so much that they’ve built the entire infrastructure of their city around them.

“They care about your happiness, and keeping you safe.”

Sakura glances up. Aizawa’s looking at her like he’s trying to figure something out. “That’s the main thing,” he continues slowly. “What a parent is — at least, what they’re supposed to be.” His mouth twists a little into bitter amusement. “I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not the right person to ask.”

There’s a story there, but Sakura won’t ask for it. The same way she never asked Sasuke what his parents were like, or tried to ponder whether Kakashi had sprang forth from the space before the Third War fully formed with implanted sharingan in place. She doesn’t even know this guy — she doesn’t need his life story. Sakura just says, “Oh, alright. What’s the Sports Festival?”

And because despite only knowing her for a couple days Aizawa is already used to Sakura’s unending wealth of questions, he lets the subject change to safer waters without bothering to hide his relief.

_____________________

The novelty of going to school had worn off very quickly for Sakura. She does sort of miss being in the Academy, in the sense that she misses when life was so much less complicated and all she had to worry about everyday was whether Sasuke would look at her or Ino would be able to hang out after class. Back when being a ninja was this nebulous, far off thing full of awesome jutsu and cool outfits, and killing people was only theoretical. But Sakura can’t go back to that blissful ignorance — she doesn’t even really want to.

All the kids here seem so…innocent. It’s a weird thought, considering they’re older and not-technically civilians, but it’s true. Most of them are barely even Academy level. They’ve probably never killed anyone. Sakura’s killed loads of people, more than she can count. (That’s a lie — it’s 14. But Kakashi says counting her kills is a habit for amateurs and psychos, so she’s been trying to stop. It’s only that sometimes Sakura can’t help it.)

She sits with her knees up, picking at the fabric of the weird stretchy clothing she’s been forced to wear. By the end of the first day, she’d changed out of the school uniform. When confronted about it by Aizawa, she’d just cocked her head at him, confused. “What, you were serious about me wearing that? It’s so uncomfortable, no way!”

“You seemed fine this morning,” he’d pointed out.

“I thought it might have been a ceremonial thing,” she said, “I didn’t want to be rude.”

This one is a bit better than that grey monstrosity with the skirt, but equally as ugly. Glumly, she stares out at the field of sparring students and sighs gustily. “I don’t understand why I can’t fight anyone,” she complains. It’s not the first time she’s made this clear, and Aizawa responds the same way he’d done the first three times.

“You’re thirteen. Legally, we can’t let you participate until you’re the same age as the first years.”

So lame. “What sort of cultural exchange is this if you won’t even let me do anything?”

“This is not a cultural exchange,” Aizawa tells her, without turning his head. “Technically, you’re a vigilante who’s in the midst of a rehabilitation.”

Sakura blows out a breath. Whatever. This world is so weird. You rip one guys head off… At home, the worst that would get you was a bounty, not a lesson in morality from a bunch of schoolteachers. “Your students suck anyways,” she mutters, irritated. She’s getting antsy, with no one to fight the past few days. She wishes Lee was here, or Kiba. Hell, she’d even settle for Neji, that’s how desperate she is for a spar. “Maybe I’ll just run off and join some villains.”

“That would be illogical,” Aizawa tells her. He doesn’t seem concerned at the validity of the threat. “Why do you think so?”

“Why do I think your students suck?” He nods. Sakura sighs and looks back at the field of teenagers, narrowing her eyes in thought. “…I guess they just aren’t very polished,” she says finally. “Most of them are so scared of getting hurt that they’re keeping themselves from really committing to anything.”

“Most of them haven’t been practicing very long,” Aizawa points out. “You aren’t allowed to use your quirk on public property, so there’s little chance to train them before UA.”

“It’s not just the quirks, though,” Sakura says. Although, yeah, those are a problem. “They’re too flashy, and predictable. Nobody’s fighting to take their opponent down.” Except the one with the scar on his face and the two-toned hair, and maybe the one with the tail, the students seem like they’re fighting to prolong a fight, not to win. It’s nauseatingly honourable fighting, too. Even academy spars were encouraged to fight dirty, but Sakura hasn’t seen a single nut-shot this entire time.

Aizawa hums and glances at her out of the corner of his eye. “Your concept of ‘taking your opponent down’ is a little different than theirs,” he points out.

Sakura rolls her eyes. “I know how to win a fight without killing anyone.” It’s just generally frowned upon — leaving an opponent alive is bad form, not to mention totally rude. She’s heard stories of shinobi turning their blades on themselves after a particularly nasty win, and Sakura never wants to put someone in that situation.

Aizawa hums again. “What advice would you give them?”

Surprised, Sakura glances at him, but he’s still watching the students, elbows resting on his knees on the bleachers. “Start with Midoriya.” He points at the green-haired kid squaring off against Kirishima.

Sakura watches him, zeroing in on his form and all the missed opening’s the red-haired boy is giving him. “He’s scared of fighting back,” she says after a moment, thinking out loud. Then she pauses and corrects herself. “Not scared — maybe just unaccustomed to it?” She cocks her head and chews on her lip. Midoriya is surprisingly good at dodging, staying out of range of Kirishima’s fists and keeping him off-balance, but every time he gets an opportunity to actually throw a punch of his own he seems surprised at it, faltering like he has no idea what to do next. “He telegraphs his moves too much, and fights like someone waiting to be hit.” Just then Midoriya gets clocked in the nose by a punch gone a bit wide, scrambling back on the mat. There’s a moment where he cowers like he’s expecting Kirishima to pounce on him and start whaling, before he appears to remember himself and jumps back up to his feet, blood streaming from his nostrils. Sakura winces, but Midoriya just clumsily swipes at his nose and raises his fists again, even though Kirishima has dropped his quirk and is falling over himself to apologize profusely, hands up and eyes wide.

“I’ve noticed that too,” Aizawa agrees, frowning. “Midoriya,” he calls out, raising his voice to be heard. “Go see Recovery Girl.”

“I can still fight, Sensei!”

Aizawa mutters something under his breath. Then louder, he says firmly, “I don’t care. This is a spar, go get your nose checked out. Take Kaminari.” The boy in question is sat in the grass, drooling a little and staring open-mouthed at everything around him like he has no idea where he is.

Midoriya pouts but acquiesces, tugging Kaminari out of the training gym with a hangdog expression of disappointment.

Aizawa watches him go with an irritable expression on his face. “Damn problem children,” he grumbles. Sakura muffles a snicker. Aizawa looks at her askance. “So. What advice would you give Midoriya?”

“I don’t know,” Sakura says. But then she thinks about it. “What’s his quirk?”

“Super-strength.”

Huh. Is that why he’d asked? “He wasn’t using it.”

Aizawa’s expression tightens. “It tends to break his bones.”

“Woah, seriously?” Aizawa nods. Damn. Sucks. Sakura tilted her head thoughtfully, warming up to the idea of analyzing these guys’ fighting prowess. “Well, I guess I’d start by telling him to start treating spars more like a fight and less like a beating. He doesn’t have bad instincts — it’s just a matter of inexperience. I’d tell him to stop telegraphing his moves so much, and teach him other ways to harm an opponent besides just straight-up punching them. He’s fast and small; he should focus on quicker, precise strikes rather than hoping to land a knock-out blow. Maybe work on his flexibility.”

Aizawa accepts this with a nod, unsurprised by anything she’s said. It’s obvious stuff. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Sakura says. “Give him a knife.”

“I’ll take that into advisement,” Aizawa says dryly. “Ashido next.”

They pass the rest of the class like that, Aizawa drilling her on how she’d advise his students to better utilize their skills. It’s clearly at least partly a tactic to get her to stop complaining, but he appears to be actually thinking about her suggestions and even challenges her on some of them. By the end of the class, Sakura still feels antsy but there’s something a little like pride warming her chest, that this guy was actually listening to her and taking her words into consideration.

Aizawa sends the rest of his students to go run laps to cool down, but calls out the guy with the tail to stay behind. He trots over to them, eyeing Sakura curiously. Sakura eyes him right back, wondering what this is about.

“Ojiro,” Aizawa says, nodding at him. “You’ve met Haruno?”

“Um — not really?” Ojiro smiles at her a little awkwardly, waving. Sakura waves back. “Hi.”

“Well, now you have. Great. I want you to spar with her.”

What?

Ojiro blinks. He looks at Sakura, who blinks back at him and shrugs. “Er,” Ojiro says, “Sensei?”

Aizawa makes a shooing motion towards them. “I don’t have all day, here.”

Ojiro continues to appraise Sakura with a slight frown, apprehension clear in his gaze. “Sensei…I’m not sure that’s—“

He’s looking at Sakura like he thinks she’s going to crack in front of him. Like she’s just a little girl or something, fragile and weak. She smiles at him, and turns to Aizawa. “What are the rules?”

“No using your quirk.” Sakura looks back at him blankly, until Aizawa rolls his eyes and says, “don’t augment your strength above average.”

Oh, right. The people here were still operating under the assumption that this was the only thing Sakura could do. It was very close-minded of them, but whatever. It was good to be underestimated, probably — admittedly, Sakura usually just found it horribly annoying.

“Is he using his?”

“Yes,” Aizawa says. Ojiro looks a little relieved, which makes sense. What would not using his quirk even look like? Was the tail detachable, like a lizard? It would probably be rude to ask.

“And keep it PG,” Aizawa adds.

“Huh?”

“No cheap shots,” Aizawa says. “Nothing above the neck or below the belt.” So no nut-shots. Damn, Sakura thinks, a little impressed. He totally has her number.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Ojiro says, looking aghast and a bit pink.

Aizawa says, “not you.” To Sakura, he demands, “got it?”

“Got it!” Sakura salutes him and jogs over to the sparring mat, bouncing a little in place in her enthusiasm to finally hit someone again. Ojiro follows her at a more sedate pace, still hesitant but now watching her more like he’s sizing her up, less skeptical.

“Wonderful.” Aizawa looks about as bored as ever, but Sakura would like to think he’s sitting a little bit straighter in his seat. “Get to it.”

The spar is…fine. Very anticlimactic. Less than three seconds after it started, Sakura blinks down at the older boy groaning on the mat and wonders if he’s having an off-day. She looks to Aizawa, but he seems unconcerned. Or, possibly, he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open.

“I said no super-strength,” Aizawa says. So maybe not asleep.

Sakura puffs up in indignation. “I didn’t!”

“No,” Ojiro says, pushing himself to his feet with a wince. “That was…a normal hit. I think.” He straightens and looks Sakura over with new eyes, appraising. “Again?”

Sakura grins and falls into a starting stance. The next spar lasts longer — Ojiro starts with a feint, but it’s obvious enough that Sakura only twitches to the left before ducking under his punch and swinging her body up and around so she’s clinging to his back, locking one arm around his neck and squeezing while gripping her own shoulder to maintain equal pressure. Ojiro reacts quickly, tucking his chin in and attempting to pry away Sakura’s arm, but her grip is firm and she wraps her legs around his torso to keep from being bucked off.

She’s prepared for it when he drops onto his back, Sakura taking the brunt of his weight as he slams her against the mat in an attempt to jar her out of the hold, and simply grits her teeth as the wind is knocked out of her and squeezes harder.

“Alright, alright,” Aizawa says, once Ojiro is starting to look more than a little red in the face. “You’re good.”

Sakura releases the hold and slaps at the boys side to get him to roll off of her. He does, collapsing onto his back and wheezing as the blood flow returns to his head. Sakura takes a few moments of her own, getting her breath back from being thrown against the mat.

“Ojiro,” Aizawa calls, one eye on Sakura, “you need Recovery Girl?”

Ojiro shakes his head and raises two shaky thumbs-up. “Woah,” he says, still gasping a little. “She’s…fast.”

“I’m getting that,” Aizawa says. He’s watching Sakura with slightly narrowed eyes, consideration clear in his gaze. Sakura pushes herself to her knees and watches him back, lifting her chin somewhat mulishly. “If that was a real fight,” Aizawa asks, no longer looking as close to falling asleep, “what would you have done?”

“Knife to the brain stem,” Sakura says, easy. She taps the base of her skull then mimes stabbing through it with one short strike.

Ojiro abruptly looks a little green.

Aizawa closes his eyes briefly, like he finds fault with Sakura’s answer. Which, by the way, is totally uncalled for — it’s literally the cleanest way she knows how to kill someone. (She’s never actually done it, since Sakura’s main offensive tactic tends to be blunt force trauma, but a kunai to the back of the neck is Shinobi 101.)

“Ojiro?”

“Uh…” Ojiro looks a little blindsided by Aizawa’s attention, still watching Sakura like he expects her to pull a knife from her ass and stab him in the face. “Try not to die?”

“Good instincts,” Sakura tells him honestly. She turns to Aizawa. “Can I fight you now?”

“No.” To Ojiro, he says, “go get changed. The rest of your class should be finishing up.”

Ojiro scampers away gratefully, while Sakura trots over to Aizawa. He’s still watching her, that same weird look in his eye. She waits patiently while he seems to mull something over.

“Haruno—“

“Sakura,” she interjects. Aizawa shoots her a look and Sakura shuts her mouth. Jeez.

“Haruno,” he starts again, pointedly, “do you want to be a hero?”

Sakura blinks at him. “Uh, what?”

“We put you in this class for obvious reasons, but you don’t have to be here. I can get you transferred to a non-hero class if you’d prefer — or you could stay. Train to be a hero. Is that what you want?”

Sakura just looks at him, startled. Where was this coming from? Does he —? “I’m not staying,” she says, slowly. Aizawa frowns at her questioningly, so Sakura elaborates. “I need to get back to Konoha. My — someone will come get me.”

“Ok,” Aizawa says, “but from what you’ve told me, whatever sent you here isn’t commonplace in your world. What tells you they’ll even be able to?”

Sakura stares at him, uncomprehending. Of course dimensional travel wasn’t an easy thing to figure out, but when she’d fallen into that seal, Sakura had been with Kakashi. Obviously Kakashi would figure it out. It was Kakashi Hatake. Even if he wasn’t a super-genius behind that lame porn-reading exterior, he didn’t leave people behind. He wouldn’t. He’d tear the world apart for it. There was no doubt in Sakura’s mind she was getting home — there just wasn’t.

Aizawa must see something in her expression because he just raises a hand and shakes his head like he’s conceding, at least for the moment. “Fine,” he says. “Say they do. Say someone figures it out and comes and gets you. But — Haruno. You don’t have to go back. You’re welcome here. You could stay.”

Sakura swallows. She feels weird — adrift and uncertain. Why’s he saying this? “But,” she says, a little weakly, “I’ve gotta…”

“You don’t,” Aizawa says, with unwavering certainty. “You’re already making friends here — you’re smart, and strong, and a good kid. I would be — not adverse, to you staying. You don’t have to go back.”

It’s ridiculous — it’s not true. Yeah, Sakura could stay — but why would she? This isn’t her home. These aren’t her people. She could grow up here, become a hero in kitschy spandex saving puppies from burning buildings and fighting monologuing whack jobs with dumb code-names — but what would be the point? There’d be no Ino, teasing her and braiding her hair and pressing wildflowers into her dirtied palms; no Kakashi and his dogs, complaining about her breaking into his home and reading his stupid books and throwing her out windows; no Naruto loudly bemoaning his failed attempts to get Hinata to have an actual conversation with him as he dragged her out for ramen. No Konoha, tall and proud and hidden in those towering leaves.

She could grow up here, comfortable and safe and surrounded by people who thought that there was nothing in the world worse than cutting a life short, even if it meant that life was terrible and sad and shameful. But she would always be Konoha and she would always be lonely. And, worst of all — worse than the homesickness and never belonging and fear that somewhere an entire world away her precious people might be hurting — Sakura would be bored.

Sakura hates being bored. Always has. Why the hell do you think she’d become a ninja in the first place? But Sakura, at her core, has also always been the kind of girl who knows how to keep people happy. So she just says, “Alright. I’ll think about it.”

Chapter Text

Contrary to popular belief, Shouta does actually care about his job. If you ask some people, namely Hizashi, they’d tell you he even cares too much, sometimes. He cares about his students, about their future, about them not dying terribly far too young. The one thing that he does not care about, however, and wouldn’t no matter how much he was paid (which was not enough, by the way), is grading terrible essays.

Shouta’s on his third cup of coffee and two-thirds done the stack of papers about the founding of hero society (half of which he swears is just Midoriya’s, who’s essay had devolved very quickly into a rambling tangent about some ethical dilemma Shouta was not awake enough to deal with right now and was at least twice as long as the word count he’d given the kid) when Haruno appears over his shoulder.

There’s a slight change in the air, a well-tuned sixth sense itching at the back of his neck, warning him he’s being watched — it’s the only reason Shouta doesn’t jump when she speaks.

“I’m bored.”

Shouta grunts at her, not really listening as he circles one of Midoriya’s many run-on sentences with a quickly scrawled frowny face.

Haruno is quiet for another few moments while Shouta works, but he can sense that she’s there. Looking at him. Shouta tries to ignore her as long as he can, but then she speaks. “I’m going out.”

Shouta puts his pen down and turns, exasperated. “You can’t do that,” he says, blinking as his eyes refocus from spending so long trying to read cramped hand-written kanji.

“But I’m bored,” Haruno professes emphatically. “There’s nothing to do.”

Shouta rubs his eyes and blows out a breath. “Play on your phone,” he says tiredly. “Watch tv or something.”

Haruno squints. “What, this?” She fishes the phone Shouta had bought her — with Nedzu’s money, of course — out of her pocket and eyes it the way someone else might a dead mouse. “It’s so confusing, though. And it hurts my eyes.”

Shouta had been so sure that the internet would end up consuming all of Haruno’s attention so that she’d finally stop with the endless barrage of questions, but the device only seemed to offend her. “I don’t know, kid — find something else to do. I’m busy.”

It might come out a little harsher than he’d meant it, because something in Haruno’s open, childish expression shutters. “Ok,” she says after a moment, face blank and voice even. “Sorry.”

Before she can turn away Shouta raises a hand, sighing and running an awkward hand through his hair as he tries not to grimace, guilt writhing in his stomach. “No,” he says, “I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to snap at you.” It was normal for her to be bored — Haruno was thirteen. She might’ve been more well-behaved than most every pre-teen Shouta had ever had the displeasure of interacting with, but that probably had more to do with the child soldier thing than anything else. Which was just a thought that made him feel worse. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told the kid he would like it if she stayed — even if he hadn’t said it in so many words. She was a good kid — despite all the cut-throat violence and propensity to be a somewhat creepy little shit who cursed like a sailor — and regardless of the short amount of time Shouta had known her, he found himself growing fond very quickly. (He knew Hizashi would have something to say about this, which was exactly why Shouta had been ignoring his friend’s attempts to invite himself over to meet his new ward.)

It is also his fault, albeit only marginally, that Haruno isn’t allowed to leave the apartment without a chaperone. It’s clear to see she’s starting to go a little stir-crazy, cooped up in here every evening — Shouta is too. He hasn’t been on patrol in over a week. Shouta shoots a look at his pile of ungraded papers before idly slapping an A on Midoriya’s and deciding to call it a night. “Alright,” he says to Haruno, who’s still eyeing him a little warily, “What do you want to do?”

“Uh, I dunno.” Distracted, Haruno attempts to peer over Shouta’s shoulder. “Is mine in there?”

Shouta flips the essays over so the marks are obscured and intercepts her hand when she reaches for them. “You’ll see it tomorrow, with everyone else.”

Haruno pouts. Her essay, admittedly, had been very good — especially for someone whose first introduction to hero society had occurred somewhat explosively less than two weeks ago. Utterly devoid of feeling, sure, but very well written. (Her and Midoriya had very opposite problems, Shouta was learning — where Midoriya wrote like a budding romance novelist, Haruno wrote like she was detailing a mission report. Meticulous, not a word wasted, very good at sending Shouta into a doze. She wrote a little sociopathically, actually, which Shouta would be more concerned with if it wasn’t for her quite evident temper and the fact she treated the Cat like it was the most precious creature to ever walk this earth.)

“So,” Shouta says, gesturing her to take a seat at the table. “What do you want to do?”

Haruno appears to think about it for a moment, before her face lights up. “Do you have shogi?”

“No,” Shouta says. What is she, his grandmother? At Sakura’s crestfallen expression, he hurriedly offers, “I have cards?”

Which is how Shouta ends up playing go-fish at his kitchen table with the prebuscent trained killer living in his house. And losing — badly.

After the first few rounds, it quickly becomes clear that Haruno’s luck is not so natural. He literally has no idea how she’s doing it, but she’s somehow managed to figure out how to cheat at go-fish. Shouta dithers over calling her out, before deciding he should probably set a good example.

“I’m not going to play with you if you keep cheating,” he tells her, rolling his eyes at her immediate expression of indignant innocence. “Seriously, cut it out.”

Haruno blinks up at him, bewildered. “Why?”

“Because…” Is Shouta actually about to try to teach a kid why cheating is wrong? Apparently. He sighs. “It causes an imbalance between the players. It’s unfair.”

She makes a face like she’s thinking really hard about what Shouta is saying, pink eyebrows scrunched up as she mentally translates the words into a language that her child soldier brain will understand. It’s an expression Shouta has become very familiar with during the past week. “So its bad,” Haruno starts slowly, mulling over the words. “If one person is at an advantage over the other. Because of…fairness.”

Shouta nods.

“I don’t understand,” she says finally. She sounds frustrated. “Why play it?”

“The point is to have fun,” Shouta tells her.

“I thought the point was to win?”

Shouta rubs at his face and for the first time in his life longs to be grading essays. There’s a dull ache building in a low-grade headache behind his eyes, another frequent occurrence since meeting Haruno. “Do you know jankenpon?” Seeing her nod, he continues. “Well, when people play that, right, they want to win, but also mostly they just want to play it because it’s…fun.” Judging by Haruno vacant gaze, Shouta is not explaining this well. It isn’t like he plays a lot of games in his free time, ok? “You can’t cheat at jankenpon,” he tries. Haruno’s blank stare turns dubious. Shouta decides to hurry on past that, because he truly does not want to know. “Cheating…makes people feel bad,” he finishes, awkwardly stilted. It sounds rehearsed. Even Shouta wouldn’t believe himself.

There’s a long, judgemental pause. Shouta resists the urge to bury his face in his capture weapon. He’s not going to be judged by someone who should be in middle school. Haruno mumbles something under her breath that sounds like ‘civilians’.

Shouta had never thought that word could sound so derisive.

He doesn’t throw his cards down on the table, because Shouta is a grown adult. He just places them. Gently. “Look,” he says, “you’re the one who said you were bored.”

“Because I am,” Haruno complains emphatically. “Is this seriously all you do all day?” She throws her hands out, gesturing at Shouta’s apartment, at the stack of essays and himself.

Shouta is unimpressed, and a little bit offended. Is she calling him lazy? “No,” he says, defensive despite himself. “I do other stuff.” Albeit not much, right now. For reasons out of his control and very related to the pink-haired child sitting in front of him, his job has been relegated to babysitting and teaching and nothing else, for the foreseeable future.

Haruno looks unconvinced. She raises one eyebrow, like ‘really’. “Like what?”

Shouta’s on-duty radio takes that moment to crackle to life. “All units, 10-32 on Naberrie and Main — Code White, proceed with caution. Over.”

Shouta scrambles out of his chair for the radio, but Haruno’s already leapt clear across the table and grabbed it from the shelf.

“What’s this?” She asks curiously, turning it over in her hands.

“Eraser, are you receiving? Over.”

Shouta snatches the receiver from her, just as another voice on the line says, “Bloodspot here. Eraser’s 10-7 — I’m on my way. ETA 15 minutes. Bloodsport clear.”

“10-4.

Shouta glances at Haruno’s wide, curious eyes, and curses under his breath before depressing the Push-to-Talk on the walkie’s side. “Eraser here,” he says, voice clipped. “10-8.”

“Eraser.” The officer’s voice is breathy with relief. “What’s your 20?”

Shouta grabs his capture scarf where it’s draped over the back of a chair and winds it around his neck. “I’m at the school.” He pauses for a split-second, drawing up his mental map of the city. “ETA 7 minutes. Over.”

“Good luck. Suspect’s got a —” The officer cuts off abruptly, but not before a shout of pained alarm crackles through the radio speakers.

Shit. “Eraserhead clear.” Shouta stuffs the radio in his side pocket and jogs over to the door to pull on his boots.

Haruno hovers over his shoulder, brow furrowed in intrigue. “Where are we going? What’s a Code White?”

“Villain attack,” Shouta grunts, quickly tugging at his laces. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

“Why?”

Shouta pulls himself to standing and points at her, expression stern. “You’re staying right here,” he says firmly, with no room for questioning. “I’m going — I won’t be long.” Hopefully.

Of course, Haruno questions him anyways. “Why? I can help!”

Shouta doesn’t have time for this. “Haruno, I’m serious. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Haruno’s expression twists mulishly, but after a moment she nods in reluctant acceptance. Her eye’s are still bright — that same glint of intelligent calculation that never fails to send a shiver down Shouta’s spine, but it’ll have to be enough for now.

Shouta nods back at her and then he’s racing out the door, planning out the quickest route to take his motorbike through the city.

_____________________

To her credit, Sakura does actually think about staying put in Aizawa’s apartment. It might only last a couple seconds, but it’s the thought that counts! It’s only that she gets to thinking about Aizawa’s relatively unarmored body and all the ways she might’ve been able to kill him the last week, and decides that his orders were stupid. What if he needed her help? What if he died? Then Sakura would have to move all her stuff into another teacher’s house, and it would probably end up being that incredibly beautiful lady — and Sakura can’t be around beautiful women that much. Tsunade is already pushing it. It’s no good for her health. So really, the only option here is to follow Aizawa and make sure he doesn’t die horribly.

With that decision made, Sakura grabs her kunai pouch, sheathed tanto, and combat sandals from underneath her bed, quickly strapping on her weapons and tugging on her shoes. It would be best if she had time to throw her armour on, but she’s already wasting time as it is. All Sakura’s wearing right now is a muted green hoodie and the ninja pants she’d acquired from the back of Kakashi’s closet in preparation for their cold-weather mission, the ones she’d had on when she went tumbling through the seal. (They were way more comfy than any of the pants she’d got in this world, despite the fact that they clearly hadn’t been worn since Kakashi was her size — which was probably like 50 years ago.)

Sakura’s not the best tracker by any means, but the terrible smell of Aizawa’s weird motorized bike still lingers on the air and it’s easy enough to figure out which direction he’d been headed. She leaps over the school’s surrounding wall, not bothering to climb it, and scrambles up a nearby rooftop. The building’s here aren’t as fun to run across as in Konoha, not built with the express purpose of allowing shinobi to get around without having to submit themselves to using the roads like plebeians, but Sakura’s used to wider jumps between tree branches, so the struggle is minimal. She races across the roofs, enjoying the cool night air on her face and the exercise despite the way this city stinks like car exhaust and garbage.

She hears the commotion before she sees it — the crashing of buildings being demolished on the street and the screaming of panicked civilians. There’s a barricade of police cars and the huge, rectangular vehicles she knows by now belong to emergency medics blocking off the road, but she slips by them without being seen, sticking to the rooftops and enhancing her eyesight with chakra to try to spot Aizawa in the commotion.

She finally sees him a few hundred metres down the street from the barricade, leaping off of a street-lamp just as a hooded figure in a cloak sends it crumpling with a punch, an ugly screech of metal as it’s mangled by brute force.

Sakura pauses for a second on a nearby roof, tracking the fight — though it’s really more of a game of cat and mouse than a true fight, with Aizawa obviously trying to lead the other guy somewhere with less civilians. There’s something about the way the cloaked man is moving, something that niggles at the back of Sakura’s head with familiarity — but then Aizawa is ducking away from a charge that sends the man head-first into a nearby streetsign, and the feeling evaporates. No one Sakura knows would fight like that.

On the street, Aizawa has his capture weapon wrapped around the somewhat dazed figure’s wrist, before something flashes out from underneath the cloak, shining black and sharp as it strikes towards the underground hero and forces him to flip out of the way. The other man advances on him quickly, and then they’re out of sight, disappearing into a large concrete structure with a sign declaring it a ‘Parking Garage.’

Parking for what? Sakura thinks, hopping off the roof and running towards the entrance.

The answer, of course, is cars. A lot of fucking cars. Man, is Sakura ever starting to hate those things. She takes her frustration out on the first thing she sees, which just so happens to be the back of the cloaked man’s head. Her flying punch connects with a satisfying thud, sending the man flying into the wall, and Sakura lands nimbly on her feet across from Aizawa.

Aizawa double-takes. “Kid,” he shouts, irritation clear in his voice. “I told you stay home!”

“Sorry,” Sakura says, not very apologetically. “I got bored.”

Aizawa looks like he’s going to say something else, but they’re interrupted by the villain leaping to his feet and sending a car hurtling straight towards them with a flick of his — tail? ok, sure, whatever. Sakura and Aizawa leap in opposite directions, and Sakura’s already sending a barrage of shuriken before she’s landed, but they’re batted out of the air without the man even turning towards her. That gets Sakura mad enough to barrel into him full-throttle, jumping off the roof of a nearby car like a springboard and swinging her legs around his neck, planning on using the force of her momentum to toss him to the ground. But he’s fast — he grabs Sakura’s foot and slams her down with him, forcing her to fling herself to the side as the throw is followed up with that sharp tail-thing gouging into the concrete where her head had been a moment prior.

Sakura reaches for the tanto on her back, interested in the idea of cutting off the tail and being done with it, but the movement is stopped by something wrapping around her wrist and jerking her away. Sakura goes skidding across the floor with a surprised yelp as Aizawa tugs her clear from the villain’s reach.

“What the hell!” Sakura exclaims angrily, attempting to pry Aizawa’s scarf away. “What are you doing?”

The scarf unwinds from her wrist, but not before tugging her even closer to the exit. “Get out of here!” Aizawa turns and ducks beneath the villain’s punch, then lashes out with a kick that’s caught in two hands. Sakura feels herself make a high-pitched sound of panic when Aizawa releases a pained shout that almost manages to cover the skin-crawling sound of snapping bone, the villain wrenching his hands down like he’s cracking a crab leg before tossing the hero clear across the room. Aizawa collides against the far wall with a sickening crunch and goes still.

Sakura has a moment of all-encompasing panic — Aizawa is dead, and it’s her fault — before her training kicks into gear. She hears Kakashi’s voice in her head — when in doubt, compartmentalize, and shoves her emotion deep down. It seems like good advice, right now, as far as Kakashi’s ever goes. If Aizawa is dead, then there’s nothing Sakura can do for him. If he’s not…well then this freak with the tail is probably going to kill him anyways. Which means Sakura had better kill that guy first.

On her feet, she stands combat-ready, sizing the guy up as he appears to do the same. Why isn’t he attacking? The answer comes a moment later, as the man sheds his cloak and reveals rippling muscles and a very familiar face — alongside what looks a little like the giant tail of an actual scorpion writhing in the air over his shoulder.

“Holy crap,” Sakura breathes, wide-eyed at the ugly appendage sprouting from Iwa’s back. “Since when do you have a kekkai genkai?!”

Iwa laughs, high and manic. Drool drips from the corners of his mouth, matching the sheen of his tail. “Gotta tell ya, Konoha,” he says, grinning with that same rabid cheer. “You fell in with the wrong side on this one.”

Sakura takes a step back, unnerved. This was…not the man she’d fought in Frost. Or, he was, but — different. Not just the tail, though that was superbly fucked up. There was something else, something in his eyes — like he wasn’t all there. Not like a shinobi at all. But a shinobi wouldn’t have gone on this kind of rampage, this wanton violence and destruction. (Well, some of them would. But usually with those ones you could tell.)

Iwa’s tail lashes behind him, arcing high over his shoulder as he cackles and advances.

“Woah,” Sakura says, hands out in front of her like she’s trying to gentle a horse. “Hey, we can talk about this! Right? I mean, me and you, we’re in the same—Woah!”

Sakura scrambles away from the first strike of the tail, springing backwards off her hands and landing crouched a few feet away, fists up and ready.

Fuck, ok — great. So talk-no-jutsu was a fail. Guess Sakura was going to have to go with her preferred method of deescalation.

The next strike of the armoured tail Sakura catches in both hands as it thrust towards her throat. She pivotes, swinging Iwa over her shoulder and slamming him against the ground, before leaping over his flailing limbs and punching him soundly in the face. On a normal man, even most shinobi, the blow would’ve shattered his skull, pulverizing the soft insides and sending her fist rocketing into the earth. As it is, Sakura feels a faint crunch as her knuckles collide with his nose. The next blow knocks a tooth out of his mouth. The next —

Sakura feels something snag her by the back of the shirt and throw her across the garage, a smothered shriek leaving her mouth as she collides with the front of a parked car. Across the room, Iwa pushes himself to his feet, stumbling slightly with what is no doubt a nasty concussion. But he’s still conscious, and he’s still moving.

The car is making a horrendously ear-splitting caterwaul, and Sakura wastes a scant few seconds ripping out a bunch of parts through the busted up windshield until it stops screaming at her. She almost regrets it as she very quickly has to leap out of the way of an earth jutsu as the ground rocks like a wave and ripped up concrete slams into the car, lifting the entire thing and crushing it against the concrete wall with a screech of crumpling metal. The whole garage shakes with the impact.

“Are you insane!?” Sakura yelps, hand-springing out of the way of another wayward jutsu and worriedly eyeing the dust raining from the ceiling. “You’re gonna take the place down!”

Iwa doesn’t appear to hear her, sending another wave of earth rushing towards her. He’s still grinning, that wild, ugly grin in spite of the blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Ok, so he probably is insane. Maybe he’d cracked from the stress of being flung into a dimension where everyone had totally whack priorities and worshipped weirdo’s in spandex bodysuits? Or maybe it had something to do with his new shiny butt-limb — holy shit! Were quirks like, an infectious disease or something? Was Sakura going to grow a tail?!

She’s so busy being thoroughly freaked out by that horrifying thought that she almost lets herself get taken out by a chunk of rebar flung like a spear at her skull. Sakura snags it out of the air, sticking her feet to the ground to keep from being pulled after it, and grits her teeth at the strain of her muscles. She twirls the make-shift weapon experimentally in her hands — should Sakura get a staff? — before leaping up high to avoid Iwa’s lunge for her.

The man’s clearly not thinking like a shinobi — a shinobi wouldn’t turn their back so easily. Sakura takes the opportunity for what it is, and swings the chunk of rebar at Iwa’s skull with all her might. The metal cracks across his skull and Iwa goes down, hard. His face collides with the concrete, the tail-end of Sakura’s swing collides with the the bumper of a car, and then — in a moment very reminiscent of that fight less than two weeks ago — her heel collides with nothing as Iwa’s body is swallowed up by a swirling purple mist and disapears.

Sakura stops short. “Dammit,” she says aloud, fuming. The car she’d somewhat accidentally smashed screams at her. Sakura smashes it more, until it lets out one last pitiful shriek and goes silent. Sakura blows out a breath and drops the rebar with a clang. Shit. That was like, the first rule of being a shinobi. Always confirm your kill. How the hell was she supposed to do that if they kept mysteriously disappearing?

A chunk of rubble falling to the ground in front of her interrupts her self-recriminating spiral, the entire structure of the building around her groaning like one wrong move would send it all crashing down. Right. Sakura should…probably leave now.

A voice calls out behind her very suddenly. “We need to get out.”

Sakura jumps about a foot in the air, whirling around with her fists raised and prepared to fight. But it’s only Aizawa, sitting up with his injured leg out in front of him. His jaw is clenched, face screwed up in pain.

“Shodaime’s ball sack!” Sakura drops her fist and lets out a breath of relief. “I totally thought you were dead, man.”

Aizawa groans and attempts to lever himself to stand, wincing all the while. “Thanks,” he gasps roughly, “for…the vote…of confidence.”

Sakura hurries over and inserts herself under his arm, bearing his weight to stand. He’s pretty light — probably needs to eat more. Sakura starts drafting a mental meal plan to bulk him up. Iwa had threw him around like he was nothing. It was kind of embarrassing.

Aizawa grits his teeth around a sound of pain, but keeps himself upright as they hobble towards the exit of the parking garage, Sakura being sure to keep his weight off the injured leg. Which, she realizes, glancing down at it and gulping around a wave of bile, is really not looking great. She rips her gaze away. Gross. It would help if she had something to splint it with, but all that’s around them is concrete walls and the mangled corpses of smashed cars.

It takes her a moment to realize Aizawa’s wheeze is him attempting to speak. “Do you need water?” Sakura asks worriedly.

“I’m fine,” Aizawa manages to cough out, which is somewhat of a relief considering Sakura’s got no clue where the hell she’d get water in the first place. She knows exactly one water jutsu, and she’s never used it for anything except spraying down Kakashi’s dogs. Aizawa continues, sounding a little less like he’s on the verge of death — more just like someone with a brutally broken leg. “I thought people didn’t have quirks in your world?”

“Yeah,” Sakura says. “That guy did not have that shit before.” Whatever — prioritize. Sakura shoves her thoughts about spontaneous scorpion-tail growth into a mental box labelled ‘For Later Consideration: When Building Not in Imminent Risk of Collapse,’ and tries to urge Aizawa into hobbling faster.

When they’re finally out of the ominously groaning garage, Sakura hurries him across the street and out of the radius of any possible debris, before lowering him to sit on the curb of the road. Aizawa makes a questioning noise when Sakura begins to peel away his tattered pant leg, but it’s not a noise of pain and he seems a little out of it so Sakura judiciously ignores him.

Looking at the wound again, it’s — well, it’s still not great. There’s a lot of blood — though not spurting, thank kami — and Sakura can spy bone peaking out from flesh and skin. It’s not the worst injury Sakura has ever seen — not even the worst one she’s ever given someone — but it is the worst she’s ever tried to treat. She shakes out her fists, swallows her nausea and grits her teeth. It’s fine. It’s fine. Sakura is a medic. Well — medic in training. But still — what’s the worst she can do?

Sakura takes a deep breath, centreing herself as she calls healing chakra to her palms, the cool green glow a comfort even here.

Aizawa’s eyes go wide and he bats away her reaching hands. “What the fuck?” He says incredulously. “What the hell is that?”

“Stop it,” Sakura snaps at him distractedly, muscling past his defences. “I’m healing you.” Actually, she’s running a diagnostic jutsu, but he doesn’t need to know that. Sakura’s not really got any clue how the hell she’s supposed to fix this — she’s only mended bone on cadavers, not living humans, and Tsunade won’t even let her treat smaller stuff on anyone except civilians yet.

She ignores Aizawa’s continued, panicked questioning and maps out the problem with chakra. Alright, alright — focus. Broken femur, ok, yeah, thanks, she’d got that. No nicked arteries, which Sakura had figured but was nice to get confirmation of. A few torn ligaments and muscles — a lot of superficial damage. The important thing, right now, was to stop the bleeding. Maybe splint the leg — but she doesn’t have a fucking splint!

Sakura slaps herself in the face, hard, and keeps herself from spiralling into panic through sheer force of will and the knowledge that it would be super embarassing. “Ok,” she says aloud. “Ok. I need — bandages.” Her eyes alight on the dumb scarf piled around Aizawa’s neck, and she immediately goes at it with a kunai. She continues to ignore Aizawa as he pushes at her, trying harder and harder to saw through the thing — seriously, what was it made of? Fucking lead? — until finally he snatches the knife from her hands and flashes his quirk at her.

Sakura instinctively flinches away from red, red eyes before she remembers herself and glares at him. Aizawa glares back. “It’s carbon-fibre alloy,” he snaps, holding the knife out of her reach, “you can’t cut through it.”

Whatever the fuck that means, Sakura thinks, before switching gears and immediately ripping off her hoodie sleeve to tie it tight around his thigh. She tugs at it, checking the fit. “Does that hurt?”

“No,” Aizawa says. Sakura ties the makeshift tourniquet tighter. Aizawa jerks back, yelping in pain. “Fucking—ow!”

Good. Sakura nods to herself and sits back on her heels, wiping sweat away from her brow. Her heart is hammering, and she can’t tell if she’s having some delayed adrenal reaction to the fight from before, or if she’s just lowkey wigging out right now. Probably the former — shinobi don’t wig. “You need a hospital,” she says, through the pounding in her ears and the high, screaming sound ringing through the back of her skull.

“First responders are almost here,” Aizawa says in a low voice. He raises an eyebrow when Sakura stares at him blankly, raising a finger and tilting his head like he’s listening to something. “Hear the sirens?”

Oh. So that sound isn’t only happening in Sakura’s head. That was good to know. Now that she’s aware of it, the sound seems to be getting louder, and she can just spot flashing red and blue lights appearing from down the straight. She nods and exhales shakily. “Ok,” she says. “Ok.”

“Let’s sit down,” Aizawa says, in a weirdly gentle tone of voice, like she’s the one with shards of bone spearing through her skin.

Sakura almost tells him that he’s already sitting, before she realizes she’s still kneeling over him awkwardly and also that her entire body is shaking. “Ok,” she says again, and her voice feels weird — distant and weak, like someone else is talking through her voice box. Sakura forces herself next to him on the curb and tries to still her trembling hands. She’s almost not conscious of it when one reaches out and snags onto the back of Aizawa’s uniform. Sakura tells herself it’s so she can keep monitoring his vitals, so he won’t try to stand up again and hobble away.

Aizawa doesn’t say anything about it. But after a second, he speaks up, his voice weary. “I’m still mad you followed me.”

“Sure,” Sakura says agreeably, like she hadn’t probably just saved his life. “Can I call you Shouta now?”

Aizawa sighs. “You know what? Sure.”

Sakura leans against him, the still night air broken by the scream of approaching sirens, and waits.