Haruno Sakura waits at the gates for the retrieval team to come back. Day turns to afternoon, and afternoon to night. As the moon rises in the background, she is the first to greet the heavily injured, the first to see Chouji before he is ensconced behind a near impenetrable curtain of medics and the first to watch Neji limp back. The others come back one at a time, in varying states of wellness, and her chest tightens with worry.
The guards finally send her home when the shift changes near dawn, and she collapses into her own bed for hours of fitful sleep. The sun is high in the sky when she wakes again, feeling bedraggled and groggy. Regardless, she returns to the main gate, insistent on being the first to welcome errant Sasuke-kun and Naruto back. Eventually, when the sun is setting and she's nodding off at the seat one of the watchers provided her with, she feels the hand on her shoulder.
Kakashi-sensei stands behind her; eye shadowed and with dirtied hands. He looked a little like that after Wave too, she remembers, stiffly getting to her feet. He shakes his head, and gestures for her to follow. "You're not going to like this." He says simply, never one for small talk. They walk in relative silence, though Sakura is nervous.
"They're…they didn't come through the gate." She comments, trying to probe her sensei for more information. The roiling of her stomach is a combination of fear and sheer anxiety; her hands haven't stopped shaking since the invasion.
"No." Kakashi-sensei replies, but pauses for a moment, "Naruto came back a different way." They keep walking, Sakura's mind whirring with that information, trying to make sense of it. The hospital swallows them both up, and they ford the busy torrent of nurses and teams and the exiting visitors to descend the stairs.
Four flights of stairs and a mountain of accumulated fear later, they stop in front of the morgue's doors. Kakashi-sensei stares at her, and her fingers scramble to find purchase in the fabric of her qi pao. She knows what he's going to say next, it's in the set of his shoulders and the furrow of his lone visible eyebrow.
"Don't – " she says.
"He's dead, Sakura." Kakashi-sensei says at the same time, and she knows that if she looks into the room behind those door her stupid, well-meaning teammate's blond head will be in there. Lying on some cold slab, dead and gone and that means –
"Sasuke-kun?"
"Killed him." Kakashi-sensei says bluntly, coldly. Those who abandon their teammates are worse than trash, she remembers. She feels numb, and politely excuses herself. Her night is full of nightmares, and she avoids her sensei by belatedly pitching in with the cleanup efforts.
All she knows is that Naruto is dead, and Sa – Sasuke killed him. She knows why, she remembers every word of what Orochimaru said in the Forest of Death after all. For power, Naruto had died. For power, Chouji had almost died. For power, Sasuke had become a traitor and a missing-nin.
And she had been left behind to pick up whatever pieces hadn't been shattered by the death/betrayal of two-thirds of her team.
Kakashi-sensei drops Team 7 without much pomp shortly afterward, just a note and an implied apology. Her team dissolved ignobly, a Hokage stamp of acknowledgement on papers filed away quietly. Sakura spends the rest of her original service contract in the medic corps, and takes to it like a fish to water. She guiltily consumes the information, hoping that maybe she'll be able to keep someone else's teammate alive (make up for failing hers). She thinks of how proud Naruto might have been of her for reviving that dying fish ("Wow, Sakura-chan you're so cool!"), and it makes her feel guilty, but proud as well.
She saves Shino's life with her skills, the designated team medic after an injury kept Hinata from the field. It helps her sleep at night, knowing that she can perform like that under pressure. She makes circuits, joining teams as needed, performing as support for whichever team was short-staffed in between shifts at the hospital.
With only minimal guilt, she thinks she might be able to move on.
She's just turned nineteen when she is summoned to Affairs. "Haruno Sakura?" The overworked career genin affirms, before handing her the pamphlet and notecard. Grief Counseling, the pamphlet reads. The notecard has a date and time, notating when and where Hatake Kakashi's funeral will be.
The funeral itself is sparsely attended, and Gai-san is crying in the front rows. Despite her stint as the Hatake's student, she feels like an outsider. Everyone here is her sensei's age or older. She hears from behind her, "Poor dear. Such a talented thing." The elderly kunoichi who says it looks like she could be a relic of the Second Shinobi World War.
She didn't know her sensei like these people obviously did; she doesn't even know why she's here. She leaves after an acceptable amount of time has passed, listening to Gai-san's tears and the somber muttering of the grandmotherly ninja behind her mourning the "poor unlucky dear."
The reformed Kyuubi attacks a month later, orange tails whipping through the air in its rage, sending waves of superheated steam boiling from their surface. She's not on the evacuation details, but she knows they should be finished by the time the chakra construct breaches the walls.
The call goes out, triage needed. She and the rest of the medics scramble for cover in the wrecked city, pausing as needed by prone bodies, assessing who can be saved and who should be left behind. The walking wounded get instant treatment, healing chakra applied to their meager wounds. She's long been able to compartmentalize, so she shuts away the self that screams. She can't think that she's sending these freshly healed troops back out to face death.
She can't think that Naruto would be screaming at her to heal the Hyuuga gurgling behind her, with his lifeblood squirting out of his ruptured carotid artery. ("Sakura-chan how could you!") She can't think like that. That way laid the survivor's guilt she'd attended therapy to overcome, the never ending nights of wondering, what if?
She pushes Naruto's voice from her head, as shrill and demanding as she'd remembered, and moved on. The Hyuuga behind her no doubt still struggling to breath, the black ribbon tied snuggly to his bicep quivering with every shake of the dying nin's body.
The roar of the creature is frightening, but it's just one more thing to compartmentalize. She has a job to do, and quivering in fear is one thing she won't do, hasn't done in years. Softly whispering to one victim pinned under half of a collapsed apartment complex, gently tying a red ribbon ("Sakura-chan I know you can help him!") around the genin's wrist, she ignores the shrieking whirr of a caustic orange tail smashing into a building across the street. Keeps that compartmentalized, right up until the building's shrapnel punctures straight through her chest, slicing across her neck and arms and back, when her hard-won composure begins to fail.
She's dying, and she knows she doesn't have the chakra reserves left to heal herself. With shaking hands, she ties a black ribbon around her own arm, and gives into that niggling voice in the back of her head ("Sakura-chan!"). Pouring what chakra she could spare into the genin wouldn't save her legs, but it might save the kid's life.
She wakes up screaming, legs akimbo and clad in the red qi pao she'd long outgrown. Sakura draws in shaky breaths, trying to remember what was going on. She…she was twelve years old, she recites, knowing it for a certainty. She knows for certain that she is newly graduated, that she has never been on a single mission.
She also knows for certain that she was nineteen when she died, and her head hurts. She stumbles back to the little post by the memorial stone; one hand pressed over one eye to (hopefully) mitigate the pain. Naruto, tied to the tallest post (and isn't that so familiar?) does a full body wiggle when she passes into sight. "Sakura-chan!" He calls, and she flinches ("Sakura-chan!"). "I was about to have Teme-sensei go get you! I was worried!"
The sensei in question (two months dead?) blinks at her with his one eye, clearly unamused with Naruto's name calling. She accepts the little bento he hands her, noting only briefly that Sasuke received the second one. She waits until Kakashi-sensei is gone to survey her teammates. Twelve years old and both alive! Before she can do more than blink at them, Sasuke sourly offers some of his bento to Naruto.
Belatedly, she remembered what supposedly happened next. Shrilly, because her head aches so badly and she's certain that they're all dead except maybe for Sasuke, she offers hers to Naruto as well. And they pass.
But…She's thought…she'd thought –
She suffers through his speech on autopilot, barely taking it in. This was…was all so weird. That night at home, long after he widowed mother has gone to bed, she stands in her bathroom. Her hands clench the countertop so hard the knuckles are white, and one sharpened kunai lays innocently at the edge of the sink.
She stares into the mirror, and knows that whatever she'd experienced, was impossible. There were adverse reactions to genjutsu, and then there was whatever she remembered. So she took the kunai in hand, and began. With each stroke, she vowed that she'd do whatever it took to change.
Each patch of waist length pink hair that fell to the floor was a promise. Genjutsu or not, hallucination or not, what she saw was never going to come to pass.
I figure it's about time I revamped this. The first two versions I think suffered from sheer rustiness and inaccuracies. Hopefully (and I think it is) this one is better!
So I hope you enjoyed the first chapter of my take on a time travel fic. It's uh...not exactly time travel, but i think that's the best comparison I have.
I hope you look forward to the second chapter.