Chapter Text
Realization didn’t dawn upon her like a crashing tidal wave.
No.
It came creeping, like the dusk slowly rolling across the horizon, encompassing the sky like a thin veil of darkness.
She was back in the past.
Two decades back, to be exact.
It had taken months of absolute, painstaking discipline and caution to piece the truth together.
When she first awoke in a nameless forest—lying in her own pool of blood, the Strength of a Hundred seal pulsing erratically as it forced the ragged wound on her torso closed—she hadn’t panicked.
In truth, it was the first time she’d felt calm.
Serene, even.
Funny
She had survived.
She was alive.
And she wasn’t all too happy realizing that truth.
The next few days—-- no, weeks —- or maybe even a month — were a blur. She couldn’t remember how she got from one day to the next; her mind was just constantly on the move, because Sakura couldn't be anything else but responsible.
If she was alive, it meant she had to live. She had to survive.
She didn't know where she was, only that she had done everything her body instinctively knew how to do. She didn't even heal her remaining wounds; the life-threatening ones were already gone, and she let the dull, throbbing pain of the rest stay.
Cause it was a tether - an invisible string tying her to where she came from.
She hid her tracks, stayed off the main roads, and gathered whatever herbs she could find, both medicinal and poisonous. Not that one couldn’t be the other. After all, it was often the dosage that defined its use.
When she’d felt satisfied with her stash, she switched to mapping the terrain, grounding herself to her position because her mind couldn’t take anything else.
She was starting to understand then why her shishou had once left their village. She hadn't known that grief could make you wander just as much as it could paralyze.
At first she’d mused, questioning why she was treating this like a high stakes reconnaissance mission when, for all she knew, she could be trapped in an empty dimension void of any human life.
But the song of the creatures around her echoed familiar tunes, proving her theories wrong; everything felt the same, nothing was amiss. Only her.
She was still wearing her dirtied, tattered Jonin Shinobi Alliance gear—the exact, mud-stained uniform she had worn while battling a literal god. The fabric was shredded, caked in dried blood and the ash of a battlefield.
Seeking something—anything—to hide her identity, she had pulled out her sealing scrolls. Almost all of them had been completely incinerated or destroyed in the final crossfire, save for one. It was a worn, old scroll her father, Kizashi, had gifted her long ago, one he had used himself when he was still an active shinobi before his retirement.
With trembling fingers, she unsealed the ancient leather scroll. A small puff of smoke cleared to reveal a meager handful of items layout out on the dirt.
First came a standard, unpolished set of steel kunai, then a basic medical pouch filled with simple, coarse bandages.
Then, her breath hitched.
Tucked between the cloth was her father’s cherry blossom necklace, the silver chain dull but intact.
A sudden, violent flash of Kizashi’s loud, boisterous laughter echoed in her mind, his bad puns, the warmth of their small kitchen before the world broke apart. Her chest tightened, the agony of everything that followed threatening to paralyze her completely.
She violently slammed the lid down on the memory, refusing to let it linger.
She couldn't afford to remember the painful reality of what happened next.
Not if she wanted to survive the day.
Instead, she forced her gaze down to the last item, a simple yukata. It was old and unpretentious, cut in a style that oddly mirrored her usual qipao but was far more appropriate for her current age, rendered in muted, faded colors. The length reached well past her knees. It felt fitting. It would help her blend into her surroundings.
Except for her hair, of course, which was far too loud for a civilian. After a minute of mulling it over, she bit her thumb, gathered her focus, and cast a subtle Henge over the striking pink strands, turning them a dull, unremarkable brown.
She’d wandered since then - creating a basic routine to help her live as she searched for any evidence of life. —————- The confirmation finally came weeks later, when she felt a human presence aside from her own near the edge of the woods.
Peering through the brush, she observed a caravan of civilian merchants moving bags of rice down a dirt path. They wore clothes that were closely, similar to the civilians of her own time, which she instantly notes.
Crouched in the shadows, Sakura listened to the hushed, frantic fragments of their conversation. One of their men had collapsed, burning with a severe, sudden fever.
She mentally listed the symptoms -medical mind instantly piecing it together.
He has malaria, probably carried by a mosquito bite from the low wetlands.
Her mind instantly forms a plan, she’d seen a chincona tree, remember the use of it’s bark.
Fitting
So, she staged an encounter, stepping out from the tree line further down the path exactly where they would meet her, presenting herself as a wandering, simple herbalist who could treat their dying man.
She then spent the next week traveling with them, quietly curing the fever with the remedies she’d carefully cataloged from the woods.
When they finally parted ways at the gates of the first border town, Sakura did what she did best: she observed.
It was an unfamiliar place — tense
She instantly notes the people within the town. She sees the tension on their muscles, eyes listless and tired.
It didn’t take long before something clicked.
Between the hushed and terrified whispers of the locals, one word echoed.
War
Her mind pieces everything together - the fauna, the landscape, the people — everything was familiar, everything eerily the same.
But there wasn’t any signs of her battlefield. The one under a red sky- people in cocoons- tattered, broken.———
She continued to list it all. The town names that the civilian caravan had dropped, villages hidden in the leaves.
But it was the tavern gossip that anchored the timeline like a kunai to the chest. The rumors spoke of three exceptional leaf shinobi making a legendary name for themselves on the front lines.
The Sannin.
Her master, Tsunade, was barely halfway of her twenties.
Sakura found it poetic; the inkling itch of a laugh threatened to leave her throat.
Now, back to the present—-
Small drops of water fell around her, on her, like soft petals as the dew from the trees scattered in the gentle breeze. The strong smell of wet grass filled her senses as the scent of the earth rose after the heavy rain earlier.
The sky was dimming all around her, but Sakura felt as if a new morning had just been given to her.
Tears brimmed the edges of her eyes until finally, finally, she let out the chuckle she had been holding back. Anyone else would have succumbed to the sheer impossibility of it, but Sakura had fought gods.
She had crossed dimensions.
The frantic, giddy laugh now burst in the humor of it all—the sheer absurdity that the universe had actually given her a second chance.
But within a heartbeat, the giddy laughter fractured.
The sound twisted, shifting from a manic giggle into a guttural, raspy howl.
It was a silent, suffocating weeping that trapped the air in her lungs, filled with a raw, heart-wrenching grief so heavy it forced her legs to give out beneath her.
The memories of the past—no, the future—rolled through her mind like a series of pages in one of Sai’s picture books.
Naruto and Sasuke—
There was blood, blood everywhere as Kaguya’s arm penetrated through three bodies.
The physical memory of it was a phantom ache in her sternum.
Kaguya’s ash-gray arm had driven straight through Naruto and Sasuke, the momentum carrying the lethal strike right into Sakura’s torso, just below her heart.
For a split second, there was a terrible, numbing cold as her lung punctured. Then, her Byakugou seal—already active and roaring—flooded her system. The diamond on her forehead burned white-hot as cells violently forced themselves to regenerate, knitting her flesh back together around the intrusion even as she gasped for air.
But the physical agony was nothing compared to the nightmare unfolding before her.
Naruto’s chakra, mixed with Kurama’s boiling, orange energy, was wrapped around both her and Sasuke like a protective shroud.
But it was flickering. Dwindling.
The life was bleeding out of him, yet Naruto was taunting their enemy before him. She could just imagine the feral grin on his face, his blue eyes still sparkling despite the light slowly leaving them.
His arms were gripped around the moon goddess—no, the monster—in a mock embrace as black ink seals slipped from his skin onto hers, activating the final, desperate trap they had engineered to end her.
To his back was Sasuke, pinned between her and Naruto with his Sharingan and Rinnegan blazing with the same desperate life.
His hand, seemingly in slow motion, gently pushed her own frame away from their tight embrace.
Even as his dojutsu bled from the strain, his only instinct was to clear her from the blast radius.
She should’ve known.
Sakura should’ve known.
The agreement was that she would be the sole bait—she wasn’t the strongest, nor the fastest—
But the fight had run longer.
And they had lost one of the only remaining people they had left.
Grey hair dropping to the floor as Kakashi fell to the ground.
Because Sakura shouldn’t have even lasted this long—no, she was never meant to be standing there among god-like figures.
Her only redeeming quality was that she could heal—Sakura could mend herself, piece herself back together.
But of course, she should’ve known. She should’ve known that the two of them would never follow her plan.
Because Naruto and Sasuke, like her, would rather see themselves die than see her fall. Of course they would choose to be impaled rather than deal with the heartache.
Red eyes—corners crinkling as an arm rose to gently tap her forehead.
Her emotions roared, the Byakugou seal flaring in a manner she had never seen before—escaping her skin, reaching, reaching toward the two people she loved most dearly.
Sasuke’s eyes gleamed brighter.
No.
No.
You guys can’t be doing this to me.
Through the haze of blood and smoke, she had felt the familiar, terrifying pull of his Rinnegan—not seeking to place a seal, but aiming to cast her away.
Sasuke didn’t have to speak.
Her mind translating the echoes between the two of them - as if reading between the lines.
Oh how Kakashi would’ve been proud.
He was trying to force open a gateway, trying to fling her through the fabric of reality into some far-off, untouched dimension where the Otsutsuki could never hunt her down.
She hates it.
He wanted her safe.
Naruto wanted her safe.
They wanted her to live, even if it meant she lived without them.
But Sakura had fought back.
Willing in every way or form, please, just something, within her to be with them.
And in that final, chaotic breath, with the golden, sticky residue of the crushed Chakra Fruit still tingling and pulsing against her palms like a stolen heartbeat, her Byakugou seal had amplified. It had surged into something terrifyingly vast.
She had pushed back against the weight of Sasuke’s dojutsu, refusing to be cast out alone, pouring her raw will into the air to shatter the illusion of his control.
But what Sakura didn’t know at that time was that the gravity of what she faced wasn’t just technique, it was the absolute, desperate summit of an Uchiha’s devotion —---- a force so violent, heavy, and twisted by grief that it could warp the laws of nature themselves.
They’re all just a bunch of child warriors, desperate to protect one another.
When her amplified energy collided with the sheer, crushing weight of that feeling, the gateway didn't break. It twisted. She felt the spatial tear buckle under the pressure of their clashing intentions, collapsing inward and dragging her backward through the canvas of time itself instead of across space.
Pain ripped through the memory as she drove the kunai she had procured into her leg.
She needed to ground herself. The sharp, physical bite of steel against her thigh pulled her out of the blood-red sky of the future and back into the damp, rainy earth of the past.
The past-future—what ever it is
It had been three months since she was transferred to this dimension.
No, the past. She corrected.
Sakura slowly let go of the kunai’s hilt, her breathing rattling in her chest as she forced her eyes open to look at the quiet, dimming horizon.
And then came the real elephant in the room. The quiet, sickening bitterness that had been seeping into her bones every single second since she had woken up in this era.
She felt her surroundings entirely differently now. It was an overwhelming, suffocating sensory overload that she hadn't asked for. Every blade of grass beneath her boots didn't just smell like rain—
it vibrated in her mind.
She could feel the sluggish, deep heartbeat of the ancient trees surrounding the village. She could feel the moisture in the soil, the roots stretching beneath the dirt, the subtle, quiet hum of the earth's natural energy as if it were a radio station turned up just a little too loud in her ears.
A slow, bitter grimace pulled at her lips.
Of all things. Of all the powers in the world, she had awakened as a Mokuton user.
It was such an art -
A sick, poetic joke.
The universe had taken a girl who had spent her entire life breaking her bones and tearing her muscles apart just to keep up with the god-like figures beside her, and it had handed her the legendary power of the First Hokage—not through birthright, and not through destiny, but as a phantom scar left behind by a crushed cosmic fruit and a twisted space-time anomaly.
She closed her fingers into a tight fist, but she couldn't wash away the sensation.
Deep within the meat of her palms, the tingling ghost of that celestial fruit still thrummed, a steady, rhythmic pulse that reminded her every day of what she had lost. Of what she had failed to save.
They had given her a second chance, but they had left her entirely alone in a world that wasn't ready for her.
Sakura wiped the blood from her thigh, her eyes hardening into something entirely detached, entirely cold.
If she had to carry the weight of a dying world's roots in her veins, she would use them. She would play the part wonderdully.
She would watch the timeline bleed exactly the way she wants it to.
Because if a monster was what it took to ensure Naruto and Sasuke made it back to her, she would gladly let the roots swallow her whole.