When Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke of Team 7 unite, there are one thousand screaming birds and a shattered friendship between them. Haruno Sakura watches this meeting with an empty heart and her sensei's screams next to her, because she knows that there is no room for her in the space that separates them.
"No—" Kakashi lunges from next to her, a perpetually tragic figure with a speed that is almost-enough and eyes that cannot forget what he sees for the rest of his life. Kusanagi enters Naruto's chest almost directly through his heart, shattering his ribs and electrocuting his organs and devastating the body of a boy who has given up living for his friend.
Because, Sakura realizes numbly with the death-cry of the lightning in her mind, Naruto has pulled his rasengan just enough to leave Sasuke alive.
The Uchiha has fallen, a blue-white-red figure that is smaller than the mountains that she is learning to break, so small that she wonders how he has lived with a tragedy around every corner of his life. He is the constant that has driven Team Seven, more than Naruto and his dattebayo!s and Kakashi and his crinkling eyes and Sakura and her Sasuke-kuns and Naruto-bakas. Sasuke has dragged them straight through hell and into purgatory, which is more placid than Sakura could ever have imagined.
Because, she thinks, stepping forward quietly, Naruto's death and Sasuke's murdering occurs while both are silent, snarls on their faces and defeat in their silhouettes. Tragedies are unavoidable, says Sasuke's blood-tears and Naruto's glassy eyes. Tragedies are their turning points, their futures, and their realizations. There is no doubt in Sakura's mind that this is a pivotal moment in Konohagakure's history, that this is the action that will change Sasuke and make him a forlorn hero who will spend the rest of his life attempting to atone for the killing of his best friend.
It's fate, she knows. It is meant to be. It is destiny, it is the path to the future, and it is something that should not be undone. But then again, she is Haruno Sakura and they are Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke and she is a medic-nin.
She will not let them be tragedies.
"Fuck it," she snarls, and her arms light up in glowing-green chakra that can burn up a forest if she wished it to. She is at the the side of her teammates a second later, shoving Kakashi and his tear-stained face away from her deathbed.
He doesn't protest, just moving quietly aside and covering red-and-black eyes with trembling hands. He thinks he's failed, she thinks, a sort of savagery in her throat. He think's he has let down his students, that he has not done his duty as their sensei. That it is his fault that Naruto's heart is damaged beyond repair and Sasuke is boy who has done this.
"Watch me, sensei," she says aloud, rough voice and steady hands and pink hair with jagged ends that does not flow in the wind. "Watch me."
She doesn't turn to see whether or not he is looking at her, though, because she is a med-nin first and foremost and her duty is always first to her patients. Instead she tears apart Naruto's vest and runs her hands down his skin, mentally calculating how many seconds it has been since his heart has stopped working and how many seconds she has left before he goes brain dead.
Two minutes since being skewered by Kusanagi. One minute since his heart most likely stopped pumping blood to his brain cells. She has between another two to four minutes before his cells go dead.
She can replace it in one minute and twenty-five seconds, according to her trial runs with Tsunade-shishou.
Sakura takes in a breathe, and concentrates her own chakra down to her heart, shaping into an organ that is ready to synthetically beat blood through her own body in the place of the real thing. She has read both Sasuke and Naruto's medical files extensively since becoming the Godaime's apprentice, and has had her own blood type tested. She's an O-positive, meaning she can donate to either of them.
Twenty seconds after concentrating on her chakra flow and slowly solidifying it into an exact replica of her own heart, she places a steady hand back on Naruto's chest and pumps a single wave into his heart.
It takes her thirty seconds to memorize, with her chakra-enhanced visual, the exact size and of his own heart and the antigens that coat it. No two people in the world have the exact tissue-types, unless they are twins, but Sakura is a medic with chakra control that is as god-tier as her shishou's.
Even if few know of it.
"Yin-seal: Release," she whispers, hands blurring through the hand signs. The diamond on her forehead pulses, not yet filled completely with chakra. But Sakura doesn't have another year to wait until she reaches full power, because Naruto is dying in front of her right now. So she slams her palms together and roars "Ninja Art: Mitotic Regeneration," and finally feels Kakashi's gaze, wondrous and hopeful and looking straight at her.
Green-eyes lit up with chakra and teenage hands that do not falter, she caves in her own chest and wraps her fingers around her heart, tearing it out while it still pumps blood and feeling her chakra take its place. She doesn't have enough to regrow one, but it is enough to keep her alive for another thirty seconds.
Sakura deconstructs her still-beating heart and builds it into an pseudo-version of Naruto's, reconstructing tissue and turning DNA upside down and using chakra as a scalpel that both shapes and nurtures it.
Her shishou would be proud.
As it is, she can only know that Kakashi is watching her, something dawning on him and crushing the hope of a bright future within him.
"Sakura," he says, voice hoarse and filled with dread. "You don't have to do this."
But yes, she thinks. She does have to do it. She can let Naruto die, let him drown in his own blood and his mistake of trusting Sasuke and caring for his teammate and believing in friendship and watch the Uchiha become the epitome of a changed man, but she won't. Because she is Haruno Sakura, she is a med-nin, and med-nin let no one die but themselves.
(Did you know, Sakura, her shishou had told her once. That medics have a higher death rate than field-shinobi during wartimes? Sakura had stared back. No, shishou, she had shaken her head, mystified. She asked why, and Tsunade told her about healer-hearts that were weary of seeing patients die but were too young to master jutsus that they couldn't handle, healer-hearts that wore themselves out with chakra exhaustion and failed organ transplants that involved martyric donors. Sakura didn't understand how that could be possible; at the time, she had still been Sakura-chan who stayed behind her teammates and watched them run headlong into danger with their deaths straight in front of them and her life safe at their backs. But now, she knew. Now she knew what it meant to be a healer.)
So Sakura does not reply to her sensei, instead plunging her hand into Naruto's chest with a cry and so much care that she minimizes the damage to the surrounding bones and organs and pulls it out as fast as Sasuke had lunged towards her with his chidori lighting up his arm. The chakra from her seal rushes into the wound and repairs the tissue-tears and lightning-burns, extracting fluids and causing new cells to bloom in their place. His marrow begins to work overtime, producing blood fast enough to replace the gallons that he has lost.
Her heart goes into his chest next, and she seals up loose nerve endings and blood vessels and connects tubes and builds him a new body. A wave of dizziness almost overcomes her, and she realizes that she has only 10 seconds of time and chakra left to fix up a boy who needs her to open his royal-blue eyes.
Her seal pulses for the last time, giving her enough chakra to have her fake-heart last long enough for her to pound her hands one last time on his chest.
"Live," is the single word she says when the almost the last of her chakra fades into his body and his spinal cord is recreated, with three seconds of her record time left to spare.
Her hands go to Sasuke-kun next, who lies close enough to Naruto that she needs to only turn and reach to touch his bruise-covered skin. One touch, one pulse of chakra, and she restores him halfway to his pre-battle condition.
Sasuke-kun, she thinks, a bit of grief in her mind because she finds scars on his skin that she does not know and yet erases before her vision blackens and her heart is gone. She wants, for a second, to see him wake and see his teammates around his body with tears in their eyes and arms ready to embrace him. She wants to see him grow, she thinks, into someone who is no longer torn apart by grief or turned into a being that will only hate themself once they heal. And Sakura is terrified in this moment, in this point of no-return that has her facing a void called death and an end that she is too young for.
But then arms are around her shoulders, a please—on Kakashi's lips and a dawning horror in both his eyes, and she knows she has to be strong for Team Seven. So when she reaches a trembling arm up and touches his mask, she does it with a quirk of her lips and dry-eyes that scream in silence.
Let them smile again, she thinks to her sensei. Let them free themselves from grief.
Sharingan tears, a nod, and the feel of warm lips on her forehead are the last things that Sakura knows of this world.
A/N Part 2 coming soon. (ง'̀-'́)ง Review & like please to motivate my lazy ass into gear (or to mention typos, because my vision blurs after writing for hours and then reading through these things)
Edited 11/19/15 for spelling errors and etc.
UPDATE TIME: I'm aiming for in 4 days (by the start of this coming Monday) because then I'll have a weekend to rev myself up with cool sad electronic music (^,: