A/N: And this begins my foray into writing for the Naruto fandom! Sea Dreams is strongly, strongly influenced by black. k. kat 's Stormborn (if you haven't read it, go read it now and come back to this!) though I've tried to add my own twist to the idea of reviving Uzushio. Additionally, all credit goes to her for changing my perspective of characters who will be appearing eventually and making me look underneath the underneath with many of them.
Be warned, most of this chapter is rehash of the canon plotline up to the Sasuke pursuit arc, with additions to set the stage for the rest of the story. I'm going to try to keep a weekly updating schedule, so check back next Saturday for the next chapter.
Chapter One:
Despite having never left Konoha, Sakura dreamed of the sea.
Every night, without fail, she fell asleep to the lullaby of the waves that would fill her dreams. The mournful sound of the seagull's cry would rouse her in the morning, the sea fading away to be replaced by the brown and green of Konoha's forests.
She knew that it was abnormal to dream of the same thing over and over again. Even for shinobi, reoccurring dreams, unless there was trauma involved, were unheard of. But she couldn't bring herself to say anything, afraid that people wouldn't understand.
Her dreams were precious to her.
They showed her a village, bright and shining as it seemed to rise from the sea, its white walls gleaming under a bright summer's sun. At sunset, the fading light would catch on the roofs just so and set the entire thing ablaze in an explosion of red and gold. She had seen it all, winter and summer, storm and sun, waves turbulent and peaceful. Every night the dream was different, for all that it showed the same thing.
But there were never any people.
Because she was curious, and because a part of her whispered I belong there, she spent months trying to figure out where this village was. Thumbing through her textbooks, she leaped at the opportunity to do a report on Kiri when Iruka-sensei assigned them all reports on the other Hidden Villages. Combing through books in the library, asking questions to the Academy teachers and her parents, she presented her teacher with a thick binder, complete with rough sketches, a detailed history (the unclassified version anyway), and analysis of its social, economic, and political muscle.
It was impressive for an eight year old, and he was liberal with his praise, if a little shocked by her devotion to the topic.
Yet she walked away unsatisfied, because every bit of research she had done only served to confirm what she had feared. Kirigakure was not her village. It was inland, not directly on the coast like her village.
At home that afternoon, she sulked in her usual chair at the kitchen table as she did her homework, her grandmother working on dinner preparations in the background. As she was getting older, her parents were taking more missions, presumably because she was old enough to need less supervision. When they were away overnight, her grandmother came and stayed with her.
As she cut up vegetables at the counter, her grandmother asked: "How did your sensei like your report?"
"He said it was good," she mumbled, scratching out the place where she had made a mistake in one of her calculations and beginning to write the correction.
"I thought you'd be happier, but you're sulking like he failed you for it."
"It's just...it's not the village I wanted to do," Sakura replied listlessly, turning to the next problem.
"Which village is that?" Her grandmother had travelled a bit when she was younger, and her grandfather, a fairly prosperous merchant, was still alive. She usually was able to keep up with Sakura when they were talking about history and geography, even if she wasn't a shinobi.
Sakura sighed. "I don't know its name," she admitted. "The only thing I know about it is that it's by the sea. Since Suna's a desert, and Iwa and Kumo are north, I thought it could be Kiri. Turns out it wasn't."
"Villages by the sea, hmm?" the rhythmic sound of the knife against the cutting board continued as her grandmother hummed in thought. "Well, there's Kirigakure, but you said it wasn't that one. It could be one of the villages on the coast of Fire, but if you thought it might be Kiri, it's probably to big to be one. Wave's never really had big villages...I guess the only other option might be Uzushio."
"Uzushio?" Sakura echoed. Something about the name felt right.
"In Whirlpool," her grandmother elaborated. "It sat right at the junction where the river met the sea. For a while, it was the largest port between Lightning, Fire, and Water Countries. A lot of the seafaring trade passed through its waters, so the Uzushio shinobi were often hired to protect them from pirates and the like."
"Why don't we hear about it, if it's that important?"
"Because it's gone." The knife thudded angrily into the cutting board, but didn't break its rhythm. "Towards the end of the Second War, someone took it into their head to destroy Uzushio. They razed it to the ground, supposedly, with the only survivors being those who had been away on missions or who had run away from the village instead of barricading themselves inside it."
"Supposedly?" The grief that had begun to sweep over Sakura at hearing that her village was gone abated at the brief flash of hope.
"Nobody ever went to the ruins, after Uzushio fell. Not even a contingent to bury the dead. Mark me well, Sakura," her grandmother said sternly, turning and pointing the knife in her hand directly at the girl. "Konoha may preach teamwork and friendship, but when Uzushio called, her ally failed to respond. The survivors who straggled into Konoha weren't even allowed to go back and bury their dead."
They said nothing more on the subject, that day or any thereafter.
But that night, Sakura dreamed of a broken city, its gates sundered and broken on the ground, ash coating the usually pristine white walls, and smoke rising from inside them. There were no birds, only limp forms on the shore and being carried in by the waves.
When she woke, there were dried tear tracks on her face.
So she settled for Konoha, knowing that it shouldn't feel like settling, but unable to deny how it felt. She threw herself into her studies, trying to distract herself from the nagging feelings of wrongness that had only gotten worse now that she knew her village's name. Tried to interest herself in Sasuke, as if to prove to herself that she could find a place in Konoha.
Her grandmother disapproved.
"The Uchiha's loved, that's true," she said, interrupting another carefully developed rant on Sasuke's better qualities, especially when compared to Uzumaki Naruto, who wouldn't leave her alone. "But their love was the type that would burn you just as easily as it warmed you. You should prepare yourself for heartache if you're going to chase that one."
"But he's not annoying like Naruto or Kiba," Sakura retorted, scowling at her homework as if it was Naruto's face. "They can't be quiet, and Naruto's always following me around and trying to ask me out for ramen."
Surprisingly, her grandmother laughed. "That does sound like an Uzumaki. Now there's one you could fall in love with," she continued. "They love just as fiercely as an Uchiha, without the risk of being burnt by it. Your only risk with them is that they love too widely, and you could lose them to their own noble impulses."
"How do you know so much about the Uchiha and the Uzumaki? Plus, Naruto's the only Uzumaki that I've ever heard of."
With a sigh, her grandmother turned back to the stove. "The Uchiha wore their hearts on their sleeves, before the Massacre. It was easy to see how dangerous it would be to love them. And the Uzumaki belonged to Uzushio, but the Shodai's wife was an Uzumaki. Only one made it to Konoha after the fall."
"Naruto's father?" Sakura guessed, curious in spite of herself.
"His mother. Uzushio's last gift to Konohagakure. They do her no honor, squandering her last gift to them as they do."
Despite pressing for more answers, Sakura got nothing further from her grandmother, just as it always was when anything close to Uzushio came up.
So she was...less cruel to Naruto. Didn't go out of her way to harshly reject him, didn't join in when the other students picked on him for his abysmal taijutsu, or status as dead last. He was one of the last remnants of Uzushio, even if he didn't know it. For the sake of her dream village, she could be kind to him.
Eventually she graduated, and when she sat on the roof to give her introduction after Naruto's ode to ramen, her words fell flat. Never before had she been asked to give these answers, and Uzushio seemed to be deeply entwined with all of them, even if it was an impossible pipe dream. So she stumbled through an introduction that was both deeply embarrassing and Sasuke-focused, even though she wanted to blurt out that her dream was to someday go to Uzushio, maybe even rebuild it…
And then it was Sasuke's turn, and she felt the first death knell to any plans of being his bride. Her grandmother's words about the Uchiha's loving like fire rose to mind as he spoke of vengeance, and her long honed skills of watching him for the most minute clues told her that he was serious about this in a way he had never been serious before. She was not part of his vengeance, therefore, she could not be part of his life until he had achieved vengeance.
So they fell together as a team in a slipshod manner, not really achieving the teamwork that Kakashi-sensei preached, and she couldn't help but resent him a bit for that. She knew that compared to the boys she wasn't much, especially not next to Sasuke's cold prowess and Naruto's inexhaustible reserves, but he said nothing to her. Did nothing but throw them into missions and sparring and only when he couldn't properly train them, hobbling along on crutches, did he give them all an exercise. She did well, the best of the group, and she waited for his acknowledgement and the next exercise for her to learn.
And he used her success to goad the boys on before packing her off to the bridge as a "reward".
She definitely resented him at that moment.
It was worse though, because the feeling was worse. The feeling of not right, not right that she had lived with for her entire life, and it was worse because they were in Wave, next to the ocean, but it wasn't her ocean, not her village, and the waves she listened to at night were different than the ones in her dreams. More complacent. So the feeling of wrongness grew and grew, and as she looked at the hitai-ites on Zabuza and his apprentice, saw the mark that meant Kiri, she felt hatred that wasn't hers alone bubble up in her throat, almost enough to drown out the fear.
When they left Wave, with two lonely graves behind them, she couldn't help but feel relieved.
After that mission, it seemed as if everything was rushing forward at a pace too fast to follow, the sound of the waves from her dreams now echoing in her ears during the waking hours. The Chuunin exams, the man from the Forest of Death who was after Sasuke, reaching a draw with Ino…
Kakashi-sensei disappeared during the month leading into the final round of the exams, and Sakura found that she couldn't bring herself to care all that much. It was just par for the course. Instead, she checked out several scrolls from the library and with the intention of teaching herself to water walk instead, and working on her taijutsu. She had been humbled during the exams, and she wouldn't let herself fail that badly again.
It was during her water walking exercises that she met Tenten.
She vaguely remembered the brown haired girl from the preliminaries, and had heard about how she had lost to the Suna kunoichi. So she was surprised when a voice hailed her from the bridge near where she was practicing her water walking skills.
"Hey, Haruno-san, right?"
Distracted, Sakura lost her chakra control and tumbled into the river. Surfacing, she shook the water out of her hair and swam to the bank to hoist herself out. The brunette was waiting for her, and reached down to help pull her out of the water.
"Can I help you?" the pink haired girl asked politely as she wrung out her sodden dress. It wouldn't really help, given that she had fallen in several times already trying to move faster than a snail's crawl on top of the water.
"I'm Tenten, one of Lee's teammates. I just wanted to thank you for visiting Lee so often. He doesn't say much, but I can tell it makes it better."
"He helped me," Sakura said, thinking of the forest, of the crushing weight of being the last man standing, her teammates helpless behind her. "Somehow he found out I was in trouble and he helped me without a second thought."
"That's Lee for you," Tenten said with a sigh, sitting down on the edge of the bank. "Always looking out for everyone but himself. He can't use chakra," the other girl added as Sakura sat down beside her. "Gai-sensei's been teaching him taijutsu instead, but injured like this…"
Sakura swallowed hard. She had overheard the nurses talking about Lee's condition, how maybe the sannin Tsunade might be able to fix it, if anyone could ever convince her to return to Konoha. For any ninja, an injury like that would be hard to recover from, but if Lee couldn't use chakra…
Well, it was a career ending injury.
"Maybe he'll get better," she mumbled, hearing her own lack of optimism. "I mean, they keep coming up with new treatments all the time."
"If Tsunade were here," Tenten began, but shook her head. "Enough of that. You're trying to practice your water walking?"
With a grimace, Sakura said: "Trying to teach myself, actually."
The other girl looked at her in shock. "Really? Your sensei let you participate in the exams without knowing how to water walk? Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm amazed you got through the Forest of Death alive, let alone in once piece."
"I don't know how we did," Sakura admitted quietly, fidgeting with her hands. "We came across this man…"
They had never been debriefed about what had happened in the Forest, not by Kakashi-sensei or even anyone else. So Sakura felt no guilt over telling Tenten about the man Team 7 had met in the forest.
"You said snake summons, and freaky jutsus?" Tenten said quietly, looking pale. "That almost sounds like…"
"Orochimaru," Sakura echoed just loud enough to be heard. She didn't want to take the chance that he would somehow appear to finish what he had started just because she said his name. "I looked it up after the exam."
"That's bad news," Tenten swallowed hard. "Really bad news. And they didn't debrief you?"
"I told Kakashi-sensei," Sakura answered. "And he and Sasuke went into a side room after the exam and then told me not to worry about the seal on his neck. So I think he knows, but nobody's talked to me…"
"Now I'm really impressed," Tenten whistled. "Not only did you make it through the first two rounds of the Chuunin Exams with only basic skills, but you survived one of the sannin."
"I think he might go after Sasuke again," the pink haired girl said with a shiver. "He just...it wasn't about Naruto or I at all. Even though we were all fighting as hard as we could, the only one of us he was focusing on was Sasuke."
"So, we need to get you fixed up, and fast then," Tenten said with a decisive nod. "What has your sensei got you doing during this month?"
With a shrug, Sakura kicked the bank in a brief burst of frustration. "I haven't seen him since the preliminary matches," she replied. "He's probably training Sasuke."
Tenten made a disgusted noise. "That's just wrong. Who let that guy be a sensei anyway? Gai-sensei wanted to make sure we were all ready for the exams before he even thought about letting us participate, and we train daily. Admittedly, he's a little intense, but we at least had a chance that didn't rely solely on luck. From the sounds of it, all you do is missions and sparring without much instruction."
"That's why I'm trying to teach myself what I can," Sakura said, pointing to her small pack with a scroll sticking out of it, placed carefully on the bridge nearby where it wouldn't get wet. "The library has some pretty useful scrolls about chakra control and basic taijutsu forms, which is what I wanted to start with."
"You can't learn taijustu from a scroll," Tenten said bluntly. "How 'bout I help you? Neji's training with his family, and Gai-sensei's really trying to be there for Lee because he doesn't have anyone else, so I'm not doing missions, just daily training. You help me by being a training partner, and I'll help bring you up to the level you should be at."
"It's going to be a lot of work," Sakura warned. "I'm nowhere near where I probably should be. You don't have to go that far for me."
With a laugh, Tenten rose in a fluid movement. "Call it my thanks for visiting Lee. But we kunoichis need to stick together too, and helping you live longer is in my best interest. Right now I have exactly zero female friends to talk to, and sometimes the testosterone on my team is suffocating."
Laughing, Sakura stood up as well. "So," she asked, giving the brunette her full attention. "Where do we start?"
The grin on Tenten's face was slightly evil. "Water walking."
From that point on, the rest of the month passed quickly. Tenten certainly followed through on her promise, showing up at Sakura's window just after sunrise to drag her out on long circuits of Konoha before several hours of taijutsu practice. Gai-sensei usually showed up at some point during the morning and coached them both on their taijutsu forms, which was a novel experience for Sakura. At the Academy, there had been too many people for Iruka-sensei to pay individual attention to, and Kakashi-sensei didn't bother with instruction at all, but Gai-sensei patiently walked her through kata after kata, showing her the best stances for her body type and making sure her foundations were solid.
Oh, she suffered through a number of insane rants about the power of youth and several ridiculous challenges, but Tenten was right there rolling her eyes next to her and failing almost as badly, which made it better, somehow.
After a break for lunch, they went to visit Lee, who was usually trying to push himself too hard, but their visits seemed to cheer him up. When they left the hospital, they went to Tenten's favorite training ground, where Tenten improved Sakura's weapons skills and had her practice water and tree walking by using her as target practice. Sakura lost often, but she felt herself getting better, if only slightly.
On the day of the exams, she met up with Ino and Tenten, filing into seats with the rest of the crowd. After a little bit, they budged up for Hinata and her sensei, and then slid even further down the row to make room for Lee and Gai. Sakura wondered if it wasn't a little cruel, allowing Lee to watch something he may never be allowed to participate in again,
But Lee seemed excited, so she kept her mouth shut, although she caught Tenten shooting worried glances at the boy as Naruto's match started.
The rest of the matches blurred together when Sakura tried to remember them, the genjutsu and what followed after it clearest in her memory.
She dispelled it easily on herself, and immediately dropped to the narrow foot aisle, pulling Tenten and Ino down with her, both caught under the genjustsu's thrall. Carefully, she woke first the brunette, then the blonde, and looked for instruction from the two jounin who had been sitting with them.
Three, Sakura remembered belatedly as Kakashi-sensei cut down a Suna-nin aiming for Lee. He had arrived at the start of Sasuke's match.
"Sakura," he said firmly. "Take Naruto and Shikamaru and go after Sasuke. He'll need help. Yamanaka, you, get Hyuuga and your teammate to safety and guard the shelters with the other genin. Don't stop to fight unless you have no other choice."
Unable to disobey, Sakura kicked Shikamaru in the ribs and took off after Sasuke, stopping only to collect Naruto on the way.
The fight against Gaara was quite possibly the most terrifying of her life, and she had fought against both Momochi Zabuza and Orochimaru in the short period of time since her graduation from the Academy. When it was over, and the reconstruction of Konoha began, she had thought that everything would go back to normal now, and her team would start doing missions and their half-hearted training again.
Or not.
Because Naruto disappeared, and then Kakashi-sensei was sick, and Sasuke was in the hospital…
Team 9 took her in, Tenten with a smile, Gai with a speech about a youthful duty to the youth of Konoha, and Neji with a cool politeness that started to slowly wear off right about the time that Naruto returned, the sannins Tsunade and Jiraya in tow, and her teammates tried to kill each other on the hospital roof.
Tenten sat with her in their favorite teashop and listened to her rant about the whole situation with a sympathetic look on her face. And after Sakura had gotten it out of her system, they talked about what having Tsunade back might mean for Lee, and how they planned to adjust their training schedule for whatever Kakashi-sensei might do with Team 7 now that everyone was back in the village and out of the hospital.
But the sick feeling in her stomach, the one that had been growing since Sasuke woke up in the hospital and wanted to fight Naruto, wouldn't go away. She wandered Konoha as night fell, unable to leave the most direct path from the Uchiha compound to the gate.
Her instincts were correct, and the words thank you were the last thing she heard before it all went dark.
And when she woke to two concerned tokujo leaning over her, she realized two things.
One, Sasuke was gone.
But the second, surprisingly enough, was more troubling.
She hadn't dreamed of the sea.