Chapter Text
Pessimism is the only thing keeping her sane; the only thing keeping everyone else sane. Tsunade-shisho was the only one keeping her level-headed during this war. Countless people died, including her friends. Their bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. She’d gotten used to the scent of death long ago. It lingered in the cave, the putrid scent of decomposed bodies they never even had time to bury properly, between that and the fatigue.
Naruto remained the bright shining light of hope he always was. Sakura envied him. Even through it all, he held that grin on his face, kept his energy up. She could see the pain in his eyes, and she heard him crying when everybody was sleeping in rotations. And Sakura wanted nothing more than to get up and comfort him, tell him everything is going to be okay, but the words would be hollow; without meaning. There was no chance for survival, even for them, even for the strongest ninja the leaf could ever spare.
Nothing would be enough to save them, not her, definitely not her; not Sasuke, not Kakashi-sensei, not Tsunade-shisho (even with the hope she's put into her), not Naruto. The inevitability of her death, of everyone's death, has pushed her to accept fate as it is; there is no change to be made.
”That’s not true, y’know.” Sakura knows, she doesn’t voice her thoughts.
Bodies piled on bodies, her friends, people she considered family, lay left to rot in a cave. She felt worthless. She was supposed to be a medic-nin; she was supposed to surpass Tsunade-shisho and become the greatest. Sakura doesn’t feel like the greatest right now.
A plan had been formulated for ages now; During long nights, Naruto and the two sannin would retreat to a private corner and talk in hushed tones under a privacy seal. Energy began returning when the people still fighting had heard the word of a plan being set in motion.
Still, not much to be happy about in a dark, dreary cave. The firelight was barely enough to get by, rations were waning more and more, people starved, and more and more chakra was being exhausted. Tsunade-shisho had recommended that she save her chakra, despite her seal and her irrefutable urge to heal the sick and injured. Tsunade took care of it herself.
It’d begun small when Jiraiya began giving her greater leeway, advising her to meditate more and hone her chakra. Naruto had begun suggesting that Sakura should stay behind, that she should rest longer and remain protected. Pampering, they were pampering her like she was a weak child who needed to retain her strength.
In the second week, she got fed up.
“Naruto, what the hell are you planning to do?” she demands roughly. Her chakra-induced sleep was abruptly interrupted when she realized she had been placed under. For the first time in a very long time, she saw him frown. “Saa-chan…” he mutters, his sky blue eyes, now muddled by emotion, turned to the dirt ground. “Don’t you saa-chan me, Naruto!” she huffs, nearly ready to smack the boy right upside his head.
There was a distant flicker of chakra as Tsunade and Jiraiya rounded the corner together, grim looks on their faces. “Sakura, just who we wanted to see.” Tsunade intones, her voice was flat, lacking the playfully serious nature she’d always had before this. Sakura sometimes misses those three years, when she finally felt at home, like she was doing something meaningful; that one day she’d catch up and surpass her teammates. It’s a child’s wish, and she stopped being one the very day she graduated from the academy.
Now, it was getting confusing. What exactly were they in on about? Her eyes scanned the floor as Jiraiya laid out a huge scroll; the brushstrokes were a mix of neat and messy, likely his and Naruto's combined handwriting. A giant seal, big enough for a whole two people to fit on if they lie down. It was so intricate and weirdly beautiful; Fuinjutsu is an art after all.
With the question and confusion written all over her face, an explanation came. “We’ve been experimenting with seals.” Naruto comes around her left shoulder, staring down at the seal laid out on the floor. “Space-time Ninjutsu, remember it?” she felt him nudging her, making her take her eyes off the center, “yeah, the Nidaime and your father were the most notable space-time Jutsu users in history, what about it?” She had a feeling she knew where this was going.
…
Those memories flooded back to her the moment she woke up again. The seal had been completed, Naruto proofread it over and over again for hours. He was nervous, she could tell. But Sakura had to care less, or else if she cared more, she might show how scared she was, how afraid for Naruto and Sasuke she was.
And now all that was gone, her mind lingered on the fact that they might be all gone right now, that her Naruto might not exist anymore. Her expression was far too blank for a four-year-old. After crying to herself for three hours straight, she couldn’t really muster any emotion past that. Simply, it was tiring.
There was no war here, no battle, no enemies to be vigilant of, no need to have a rotational watch over the night, and there was no need to be alert at all times. And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to turn over and look at the moon shining on her back. Fear laced every single nerve of her body, and she couldn't move. She’d seen what happened when people fell victim to that Genjutsu, watching their blank and blissful stares as they gazed at that stupid rock in the sky.
But that wasn’t in this time anymore, that was a decade and a half from now. To Sakura, that is too close and too soon. She began planning the moment she stopped panicking about the fact that she was the last person from her time to exist. Maybe this is what Naruto and Sasuke felt when it came to these things, to being important.
Her parents were still alive, probably asleep in their room; they died when she was sixteen during the invasion of the village. They were just civilians; they weren’t made to survive like ninjas were. She was more upset about the fact that she wasn’t as upset as she thought she’d be at discovering their bodies in the rubble.
It’d been two years since then, and more pressing matters had taken over her mind, like fighting a war. A war that was no longer raging, a war she was sent back to prevent. Naruto's last words to her were held close to her heart. The memory of his face is the only thing that brought her out of her panic attack upon arrival, her head still hurt from the overload of memories from both her four-year-old self and her seventeen-year-old self.
Apparently, she needed to help her parents with the shop tomorrow.
Right, the shop. A cozy knick-knack store, generally it was clothes and fabrics imported from other lands, her father is a traveling trader, usually he picks things up from his travels for their small shop. It was one of the few things she remembered during the war, wishing for a very long time that she could one day go back to her parents' shop to help out again.
And now she was here, and she couldn’t help but feel empty. War changed people; she didn’t believe it until now.
She didn’t need to spend time reminiscing, though; she needed to think up a plan and fast.
From what Sasuke and Sai told her about Danzo and ROOT, it wasn’t meant to exist. It was an organization that kidnaps and steals away the talented children, child prodigies, clan children, and kekkei genkai users. Conditioned from a young age to forget all feeling and to obey and bend to Danzo's every whim, sealed into silence with the seal on their tongue. Sai told her about his days in ROOT, about the bonds he was forced to create and then break.
The entire organization was simply psychological torture 101; it played on making the members suffer enough to struggle to form bonds, so they could never revolt against Danzo. Well, that never worked, she mused to herself in the dark of night. But Danzo was a problem; he was the one who ordered the slaughter of the Uchiha.
That was step one: to prevent the downfall of the entire Uchiha clan, to keep Sasuke from becoming as traumatized as he was, to protect Itachi from Danzo.
For that, she needed an in. Either a spy or to insert herself into the ranks. But ROOT doesn’t have an application. If they see potential in you, they will not ask; they will take you. She's sorry to say it, but she was ready to abandon her parents once more; she let them go a very long time ago. Sakura was not about to allow herself the ability to settle down and rest until all was set right. She made a promise to Naruto, and she intends to keep it.
Her eyes slip closed as she remembers the moments she shared with him; not many of them were very good, most were spent with her neglecting him or sucking up to him. But there were times when there wasn't a worry in the world, when every word was funny, when she could laugh and play. She remembers the day she returned to the village after three whole years, meeting back up with Naruto, retaking the bell test. Nostalgia settled in along with the flurry of emotions in her head; somehow, she managed to smile this time.
The past eased in her mind as her thoughts swirled around Danzo. She needed an effective way to get rid of him, be it persecuting him or just killing him; she needed him gone. And before Itachi turned thirteen, she had four years to achieve her goal. Sakura decided she would take this whole year in stride; she would train the signature strength she learned from Tsunade-shisho.
But it simply wasn’t enough, she needed something over–the-top. To her knowledge, her ‘clan’ is barely a clan, the very beginnings of one at best. Neither of her parents has any Kekkei Genkai to pass to her, so there has to be something she can practice that will draw the attention of onlookers. Something prominent and extreme. A secret that can kill, that's all she needed. But surely one cannot just simply wish a kekkei genkai into existence, that was a large glaring issue that caused a frown to tug on her face; her chubby four-year-old face, she reminds herself.
Yes, she's four; she barely has any chakra at the moment. The first step was to develop and widen her chakra reserves. If she’s going to rely on her strength for now, she needs her control back. Being a civilian child, she doesn’t have that much in the way of chakra; she doesn’t even know how she’d managed to pass the academy with this awful amount of chakra.
Reaching into herself, there was just about as much chakra as a squirrel had. Lovely. Her coils were taught inside of her, unmovable; she needed to push them along to open further. Muscle memory only seems to come in the way of her mind at this point; she's much too slow and weak at this moment, which will be the pressing issue at hand. Taijutsu training was in order; maybe she should pick up kenjutsu, as Sasuke did.
A schedule began forming in her head; she couldn’t wallow in her own sadness for long now. The moon was high in the sky; it must be midnight by now. But sleep never came, never once did it come easily for her. The moment the war started, the moment she watched people fall, she began sleeping lightly or meditating to recharge. Insomnia was rooted deeply within her mind; she wasn’t too pleased to find her mind did not go back to being sound and sane after the transfer.
Sakura exhaled slowly, her frown easing up as she pressed her ever-so-small hands into her sheets. Bright pink blankets covered her; she’d been tucked in when she arrived at this present. They were comfortable and warm, much unlike the cold and dry environments the fourth war put her in. She wouldn’t have it much longer, so she decided to appreciate it while it lasts at least.