Chapter Text
Uchiha Izuna felt it before he saw it.
A faint shift when Senju Tobirama’s sclera darkened into a flat, unnatural grey. The change flickered, then smoothed out as quickly as it appeared. The silence that followed was deliberate and honed.
It screamed danger. Nothing was deadlier than a shinobi you couldn’t read.
Izuna tightened his grip on the chokutō. His heart kicked hard against his ribs, but his breathing stayed even. One misstep, and it would be the last mistake he ever made. His Sharingan spun quickly, tracking every twitch in Tobirama’s stance, searching even for the tiniest opening.
Metal clashed against metal. Steam hissed where water met fire. To the naked eye, their movements would have been a blur. Izuna grimaced as the hot air nicked at his skin.
His body wouldn’t last much longer at this speed. His muscles burned, lungs raw from inhaling smoke and ash.
He aimed for the small gaps between Tobirama’s armor plates, but his attacks could only graze the surface. Tobirama countered with a series of shallow cuts—none fatal, all precise. Each one showed how close the other man was getting.
The Senju suddenly vanished.
Years of war-honed battle instinct kicked in, and Izuna twisted, thrusting his blade back on pure reflex. Steel met the resistance of flesh. He twisted on the ball of his foot, dragging the blade with him to widen the cut—
—and stopped cold.
The chokutō had carved a deep gash into Tobirama’s hand. The same hand still held a kunai, poised high. There was no red welling up, nor the familiar scent of iron. It looked wrong.
Senju Tobirama did not bleed.
Their eyes met for a heartbeat. Then everything went black.
Flashback
The ink hadn’t dried properly.
Sakura could feel it under her feet as she dragged herself back toward the array—still faintly wet in places, bleeding slightly around the outer edge of the inscriptions.
Lord Second had warned them, over and over, that a single smear, a single stroke out of line, and the seal could twist itself into something unrecognizable.
But he wasn’t here anymore. None of them were—just her, and this broken, half-finished array.
Her fingers wouldn’t listen. She bent them into the right shape anyway, ignoring how her arms screamed with every motion. She couldn’t afford to be tired now.
The ring of symbols glowed faintly in the dust-choked dark, lines spinning gently, waiting to be used.
Sakura exhaled hard through her teeth as her hands moved between hand seals—another pulse of pain.
The chakra set loose from the diamond-shaped mark on her forehead. It fractured and spread outward, dark branching lines crawling across her face and body. Her pain dulled as her wounds began to knit.
She pushed herself upright.
Naruto was lying motionless in the cave's makeshift medical section. She hadn't checked on him since their previous hideout’s collapse. He might be breathing, but he wasn’t alive. The only difference between him and the ones tangled in the God Tree’s roots above was that he wasn't there with them.
The array beneath her feet still needed her.
This had been one of Naruto’s many wild ideas.
Time travel.
A seal that combined the precision of Flying Thunder God with the soul-tethering mechanics of Impure World Reincarnation. The theory alone had made Lord Second blink slowly and even dragged a quiet “huh” out of Lord Fourth.
Senju Tobirama rebuilt the array’s geometry; Namikaze Minato braided in timing windows and resonance checks. Between them, layered failsafes and redundant anchors turned Naruto’s wild idea into an actual seal.
They hadn’t had the chance to finish it.
Kaguya made sure of that. The moment the Moon Goddess slipped her hand through Orochimaru’s mind, she dismissed every last one of his Impure World Reincarnation summons in a breath. The Second and Fourth Hokage dissolved where they stood. Half the project team vanished with them.
Naruto had kept going. Of course, he had. Because that was who he was: a stubborn fool.
He finished the anchoring script, argued the spatial logic into place—out loud, as if his father were still at his shoulder—and retraced both men’s frames with a dogged desperation that didn’t care whether it would work or not.
Now, Sakura would finish what they’d started.
To function properly, the seal needed two things: a marked destination and a living sacrifice.
She fumbled a glass slide from her pouch, the kind used to preserve fragile samples. Inside, a single pale, coarse strand, flattened and still intact.
Kabuto would’ve used it to clone someone. Orochimaru probably did. But this once, and just once, she was grateful for their twisted habits.
Then the seal needed an absurd amount of chakra. Naruto-level chakra. Or a tailed beast. Maybe both.
Sakura had neither.
What she did have was Tsunade’s teaching, of the Strength of a Hundred, and she was done waiting.
She pressed the slide into the very center, then dragged herself to the activation ring. The moment her chakra touched the edge, the array began to respond—softly at first, then all at once. Rings pulsed outward, glyphs and symbols aligning like teeth in a closing jaw.
Her hands moved without thought, seal after seal, the ones Naruto made her learn “just in case.” There was no one left to double-check—just her, and the last of her chakra.
Her knees hit the stone floor hard, but it didn’t hurt one bit. The rest of her tried to follow, but she held on. She stayed awake by sheer will, forcing the last pulse of chakra into the core with teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached.
The seal drank it in—all of it. The array shone so brightly she couldn’t see the ink anymore; she could only feel the power humming through the symbols as they folded in on themselves.
When the darkness came, Haruno Sakura embraced it with open arms.
She’d beat the hell out of Naruto for leaving her behind. Kiss Sasuke like she meant it. Hug them both, along with Kakashi and Sai, and tell them they’d been her best teammates, and always had been.
And then, she’d beg for her parents’ forgiveness—and everyone else’s—for forcing someone else to carry the burden she hadn’t been brave enough to bear, once she joined them in the Pure Land.