Once, Sakura Haruno was known as the hopeless optimist. She was as bright and as cheerful as her eye-popping pink hair and vibrant viridian eyes, as mesmerizing as the cherry blossoms in spring. Her heart was light and naïve, her world simple. It revolved around petty things like her fights with Ino and her devotion to a certain dark-haired boy.

Barely five years later, she is a changed person. Her hair is just as pink, and her eyes just as green; but Sakura Haruno is no longer the hopeless optimist that cried at things as silly as short hair. No. Sakura Haruno has seen more death than perhaps any person in the world. She has seen it on the battlefield, seen it in her home, seen it in the hospital. She has seen ninja and civilian die; has seen strangers and friends and enemies bleed out before her. She has seen it all, and she is broken.

Her home—beaten to dust, drenched in blood. Empty, silent.

Her friends—dead.

Her one love—the cause of all the destruction around her.

Sakura. Sakura—will you kill me? I've killed everything you hold dear.

Of course you can't. You're too weak. Pathetic.

Welcome to the end.

With a start, Sakura leapt out of her futon. Her shirt was drenched in sweat, her breaths labored and sharp in her chest. She began to cough blood onto her palms and wondered what was wrong now. She'd been taking a myriad of antidepressants, painkillers, and chakra enhancers for the past year in order to deal with her job as an on-field medic and as the head of the hospital—or, what was left of it.

The sudden realization that she was in an unfamiliar room hit her, and she tensed immediately, snapping into a standing position. A small fire crackled beside her, but the fire seemed to float mid-air; cautiously, she swept her hand through it. It did not burn—rather, the flames circled her and she found herself falling.

Sakura—

She gasped. How long had it been since she'd heard this voice? "Tsunade—"

There's no time. Sakura, listen—you must change what has happened in the past. Change it, or we will see the same path of destruction. Beware of—

The darkness receded, and she found herself alone. She was not in an unfamiliar room, she realized then, but in the room of her younger days—back when she'd come home to her family every night and slept without a kunai between her fingertips. The situation overwhelmed her, and she found blackness once again.

Sakura awoke before dawn the next morning—a habit from her previous life as a medic. Quietly, she rose and assessed her body. She was shorter now, and with a frown, she noted to train a bit alone to get accustomed to her body's new proportions; thankfully, though, her chakra control and all of the other skills she'd learned from Tsunade had survived her travel through time, and save for her new, lower vantage point, she was just as bit the skilled, respected Sakura Haruno as she had been yesterday.

Respected? Yeah right, Sakura thought bitterly. She reminded herself that now, she was but a frivolous, pink-haired girl.

With a sigh, Sakura opened her window and silently leapt out and into the darkness. It was almost healing to her body to see the town in its quiet, undestroyed state; she walked by the old ramen stand, the academy, the Hokage's tower, and the townhouses in a state of mesmirization. All of it was gone in her time: ripped to boards and nails, scraps, and unrecognizable dust.

Unconsciously, her feet took her to the graveyard. Even with her busy schedule as a medic, she'd visited it often, just as Kakashi had in his day. Now, as she stared at the place, she could still imagine the other tombstones—the ones that bore her mother's, father's, friends' names. And for the first time in months, Sakura began to weep. She didn't cry obnoxiously, but quietly, with the full force of her body. Her shoulders shook, and her pain was almost tangible in the cold air. She didn't know how long she knelt on grass that was unmarked—at least, for the time being—tracing her fingers over the place where she'd usually be outlining her surname.

Before long, she felt something in her chest again, and she found herself coughing blood onto the grass. It would seem that, just as her previous powers had followed her to this era, so too had her health conditions.

She was so absorbed in her pain that she failed to notice a pair of crimson eyes following her movements from the graveyard's front gate.