Chapter Text
[Prologue]
The Konoha cemetery was unpleasant enough by daylight.
It had been laid out in the time of the founding, before the village swelled outward and swallowed the land around it, and so it sat near the heart of Konoha rather than at its edge, the way graveyards in sensible places did. The neighbourhood that had grown up around it was loud and ordinary, all washing strung between balconies and children shrieking in the gutters and a bar a single block south that never seemed to close. None of it reached past the cemetery wall. Sound seemed to die at the threshold. Even on a cloudless afternoon, when the sun lay flat and white over the rest of the village, the gravestones held their shade close, and a thin breeze moved between them that belonged to no particular season.
That was by day. By night it was a good deal worse, and Sakura was beginning to understand that she had not really thought about the difference until she was standing in it.
She drew her hoodie tighter across her chest and told herself the cold was imagined. It had no business being cold. It was spring, and a warm one, the kind that came late and all at once. The cherry trees along the academy road had opened only a week ago, and the evenings had turned soft and long, warm enough that her mother had taken to leaving the kitchen window open after supper. She had walked here in that warmth and felt it on her arms the whole way, the ordinary breathing heat of a village settling toward sleep.
The moment she crossed under the cemetery gate it left her. The warmth, the noise, the bar with its drunks and its broken glass, all of it. The silence settled over her, and she understood, in a way she had not understood on the walk over, that coming here had been a mistake.
She did not turn around.
The graveyard ran further than she had expected, a wide flat field of stone laid across a chunk of the downtown that could have housed a hundred families. Konoha had been built on level ground, and so even at night she could make out most of it, row upon orderly row of markers fading into a low haze where the moonlight gave out. There was no one. She had not expected anyone. Civilians paid their respects by day and were tucked into their beds by now, and shinobi rarely came at all. Most who died in the field had no grave to visit, only a name cut into the black stone of the memorial across the village. The ones who lay here were the old founders and the rare few who had been clanless and had still managed the unlikely feat of dying in their beds.
She wanted to walk slowly. Every nerve in her body wanted to walk slowly, to make herself small and quiet, because some old instinct insisted that to move quickly was to be noticed, and to be noticed here was to be taken. But slowness meant more time in this place, more long seconds with the markers throwing their shadows toward her feet. So she did neither well and went forward in a stiff compromise of a stride, and disliked herself for it the whole way.
You are a shinobi, she told herself. Not a child afraid of the dark.
Then, because she had always been honest with herself even when honesty was unwelcome, she corrected it. Not a shinobi. Not yet.
The thought settled somewhere beneath her ribs, and she kept walking.
The four largest tombs stood at the very back, where the graveyard pressed against its rear wall and the haze lay thickest. She knew them by shape before she could read a single character, the way anyone raised in Konoha would have. They were the Hokage, the faces of the mountain brought down to earth and set in stone. She slowed as she reached the first, reached out, and laid two fingers against the cold cut letters of the name.
Hashirama Senju. Shodaime Hokage of Konohagakure.
A thread of mist hung close to the ground here, wisping between the four crypts and beading on the stone in small points of silver. It did not matter that she could barely see. She knew whose each tomb was. Tobirama beside his brother, then the Sandaime, then the Yondaime at the far end. She found herself looking at the Sandaime's mausoleum, and an idle thought surfaced through her fear, that the third Hokage was still alive somewhere across the village, awake or asleep or signing some piece of paper, and that his grave already stood here finished and waiting, slotted neatly between the dead. It was a strange thing to consider, to walk past the exact dimensions of the dark you would one day be laid into.
She made herself stop considering it.
From the pocket of her hoodie she drew the key. It was small and dull and ordinary, the sort of thing you might use on a garden shed. She rolled it across her palm. Mizuki had pressed it into her hand four hours ago with that warm, sorry smile of his, the smile of a man delivering bad news he wished he did not have to deliver, and she had taken it because she had wanted, badly, to believe him.
The memory came whether she invited it or not. She had stood in the empty classroom with her forehead protector cupped in both hands, the steel still cool, the cloth band a navy so deep it was nearly black. She had passed. She had passed, and not merely passed. Top kunoichi, Iruka had said, reading the rankings aloud, and she had felt the word settle over her like something earned. Then Mizuki had come and crouched at her desk with that gentle face and told her, so kindly, that there had been a mistake. That the headband had been given to spare her the embarrassment of failing in front of the class. That she had not earned it at all.
And she had believed him, because some small, tired part of her had always half expected to be told exactly that.
The lock on the Shodaime's tomb was a great rusted thing furred green with mold, old enough to have seized solid. She crouched before it and turned it over in her hands and thought, with something almost like hope, that it might not open at all. That she might go home and tell Mizuki the lock had rusted shut, and none of this would be her fault.
Behind her, something moved.
She came around with the key clutched in her fist, and there was nothing. Stone and mist and the long silver rows. The sound had been her own pulse, or the wind, or the simple animal certainty that an open field of the dead was no place for the living.
She turned back to the lock before she could lose her nerve.
The key slid in as though the mechanism had been oiled that morning. She felt the tumblers give, smooth and willing, and the padlock sprang open in her hand with a soft click that was somehow worse than any grinding of rust would have been. A lock sixty years old had no right to open like that. She lifted the chains away, link by careful link, laid them in the wet grass, and set her shoulder to the stone door.
It swung inward without a whisper. No groan of hinges, no scrape of stone on stone, just that smooth silence again, the tomb opening itself to her.
She stood at the threshold and let the cold breathe out over her, and the last of her resolve went thin.
She could leave. The thought was reasonable, and gentle enough that it might have been Mizuki's own voice. Close the door, walk back into the world of the living. This was wrong, and she knew it was wrong, and no one would ever have to know she had come.
She took a step back. Her hands were shaking, and she felt the prickle of tears, and disliked them.
And then the other voice, the one that had been with her longer, the one that had marched her here in the first place. And what about Ino's face when she did not appear with a headband tomorrow? What about Sasuke's? What about every person in that classroom learning that Sakura Haruno, top of the year, the clever one, had failed. That even Naruto, who had failed twice, had passed this time, and she had not.
She thought of the steel cool in her palms. She thought of how it had felt, for a few minutes, to have earned something.
Sakura bit down on the inside of her cheek, tasted copper, and ducked her head beneath the low lintel.
Inside, the air dropped a few degrees further. Narrow steps led down into the dark, and along the walls hung iron sconces choked with moss, their torches long since rotted to nothing. She descended with one hand trailing the damp stone, and the square of grey moonlight behind her shrank with every step until it was no larger than a coin held at arm's length.
She could have lit a torch. She had matches in her bag and a few of the sconces still held something that might burn. She did not, and when she looked at the impulse she found a certainty underneath it, that light down here would be seen, and not, she felt sure, by anyone she would want to see her.
The stairs ended in a chamber barely large enough to hold her. Her hair brushed the ceiling. There was perhaps half a metre of clearance on either side of the thing in the centre of the room, and the thing in the centre of the room was a coffin.
She crouched and ran her fingertips over it. Even in the near dark she could feel that the wood was carved across every surface. Beneath her hands she traced waves, and what might have been a great spreading tree, and rows of small figures she could not make out. Each panel seemed to tell a piece of some story, and had it been daylight, had this been anywhere else, she might have stayed an hour and read them all. She had always loved a story. But it was not daylight, and she wanted nothing in the world so much as to be out of this place.
She rose, set her hands flat against the lid, and pushed.
It shifted perhaps a finger's width and held, far heavier than wood had any right to be. She set her feet, threw her whole weight into it, and the lid gave all at once with a low grinding clang that she felt in her teeth. The thought that she would have to lever it back into place afterward flickered up and was gone, drowned by the sight of what lay inside.
Hashirama Senju had not decayed. Sixty years in the ground, and the man lay as though he had lain down an hour before and chosen not to rise. No rot, no collapse, none of the small indignities of the grave. No insect had touched him. His broad face was calm, his eyes closed, his hands folded at his chest over the dark fabric of his Hokage robes. In the dark he might have been a man asleep, and the longer Sakura looked at him the more certain she became that if she made a sound, any sound, the great closed eyes would open and find her.
She shook the feeling off, or tried to, and slid her bag from her shoulder.
She found the petri dish first, then the little folding knife, both gifts from Mizuki and both suddenly grotesque in her hands. It was simple, she told herself, the way he had told her. A few cells. That was all. A few cells, and the headband was hers.
She made herself look at the corpse the way she had been taught to look at everything, coldly, the clever girl assessing a problem. He had been buried in his robes, so the sensible place to take a sample was the upper body, where missing skin would never be seen unless someone undressed a dead Hokage, which no one would ever have cause to do.
It was the smart choice. She knew it was the smart choice. And she found she could not do it. To open her knife and carve a strip of skin from his chest, to cut up the body of the man whose face she had grown up beneath, turned her stomach.
So she looked at his hands instead. The very tip of a finger. It would be more likely to be noticed than a patch hidden beneath the robes, but it was not obvious, and it did not feel like the same thing. A small thing. A fingertip. She could manage a small thing.
A breath of wind found its way down the stairwell, somehow, and stirred the fine hairs at the back of her neck. Now, she thought. Do it now and go.
She shuffled close, opened the knife, and reached down. Her fingers brushed his.
Sakura went still.
There was a sensation in her fingertips. Not pain, but something stranger, a fine tingling that began exactly where her bare skin met his. She tried to pull her hand back on reflex, and it would not come. The fingers would not answer her. Her breath quickened, and still she could not move, and the tingling was not staying in her fingertips. It was spreading. It came up through her hand and into her wrist with the slow, certain feel of something putting down roots, of something rising through her the way sap rises through wood in spring, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She dropped the knife. She heard it hit the stone far away. She grabbed her own wrist with her free hand and threw her weight backward, and felt it reach the other arm. It poured into her second hand without ever having touched the corpse, branching, threading, working its unhurried way through her, and no part of her could refuse it. Up both arms now. Into her shoulders. She was making a sound she did not recognise as her own. It reached her chest, her ribs, the cold spreading place behind them, and then she felt the exact moment her heart stopped beating. A single skipped beat, and then stillness, a stillness that should have been death and was not.
Forgetting the corpse, forgetting the headband, forgetting Mizuki and Ino and Sasuke and every reason she had ever had for coming here, Sakura screamed.
Then it reached her brain, and the world went dark.