Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto
A/N: Sorry for the delay! I've been moving out of state and I've been a little busy.
Please refer to ending Author's Notes for information on pairings!
Song Inspo: Without the Lights by Elliot Moss
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ONE
"Oh, call off the dogs
We found her in the woods.
That girl never stood a chance
After that dark dance with the waves."
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Sakura doesn't remember much after waking.
All she remembered was the all-consuming hunger and rage. She couldn't remember why she was so angry; all her brain could recognize was that she was starving. There was no sense of self beyond the desperate hunger that propelled her from the ditch of foul smelling corpses and beyond.
It was like she wasn't herself, but some beast whose sole purpose in life was to fill its belly with the weight of flesh.
She wouldn't know what type until she came to her senses two days later, hunched over the bloody corpse of an unlucky bandit with his brain matter crumbling between her fingers.
She had been horrified, swiping futilely at the blood staining her face and body as she scrambled away from the mauled corpse of what once could have been a man. She'd run from him and then lunged into the nearest river to wash away the last of her humanity.
Then she had curled in on herself and cried.
What made it worse was that she was still so very hungry. Her instincts cried out for her to return to the body of the poor man and devour him completely, but the larger part of her—the human part of her—sobbed that it was wrong.
She had been eating a person—a human being like her! She had torn him apart with her bare hands and teeth to eat him.
But at that point, Sakura realized with dawning terror as her body lurched towards the abandoned corpse, her senses fading to the animalistic and zeroing in on that awful hunger, that she was now anything but human.
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Sakura doesn't like to think about what came after that—about ripping the corpse apart limb from limb and feasting on him until she felt like she could function for days without any type of sustenance.
She doesn't like to think about how, after coming back to herself, she formed the seals to make a katon and burn the evidence only to find nothing but bits of bone against blood soaked earth.
She'd burned them anyway.
Horribly ashamed and terrified of herself, Sakura had spent three days wandering about in the dense forests of Lightning Country. She didn't know who, or rather what, she was anymore.
Kabuto had done something to her, and she had no idea how—exactly—she'd survived. She did know that she had to return to Konoha; without a calendar, she had no idea of how long ago she had been supposed to check back in. But she couldn't bear to face them as she was—as a monster.
After…gorging herself on food, Sakura didn't feel the need to eat, sleep, or drink. She didn't really feel much of anything, and when she popped a wild blueberry into her mouth in an attempt to sate her hunger, she found that she couldn't taste anything either. So she had plopped herself at the base of a tree and ruminated on her predicament.
Back then, she had known two things about herself: Kabuto had injected her with a virus, and she felt a hunger for human flesh.
Aside from that, she knew nothing else. Fortunately, Sakura had always been very smart and with her eidetic memory, she could remember her notes on the White Zetsu autopsy from when she had been sixteen.
She had also been able to recall Kabuto's vague lecture on what the virus was made of and its purpose. If it was composed of true White Zetsu cells, as he had claimed, then it would explain the overwhelming desire to eat people.
She had once heard, during the War, that Zetsu ate his opponents and it was why many were afraid to face him in combat. She had always assumed that his purpose for eating humans was to get rid of evidence or as a scare tactic, not because he needed them to survive.
Or, in her case, to keep from becoming a rampaging monster.
Hashirama's cells, combined with the regenerative ability of her Byakugou, was probably the only reason why she had survived. But Sakura could not figure out why Kabuto had dumped her in a mass grave and left her to rot.
Hadn't he said that he'd kill her?
Unless, of course, he thought she had died from his experiment.
The high probability of Kabuto's belief in her death had stunned her; he was a medic-nin, so he must have verified her lack of pulse and declared a time of death for her.
After coming to the realization that she had most likely died and come back to life with a hunger for human brains, Sakura had hyperventilated until she started weeping. And then her weeping had dissolved into laughter because she was a zombie.
A zombie like in one of Ino-pig's and Naruto's cheesy movies. Like the kind she had been terrified of as a little girl, like the ones children dressed up as on Halloween and for other ridiculous reasons.
Zombies weren't supposed to exist. Which was saying something in and of itself, considering there were many undead shinobi running amok during the last war. But Sakura thought she would remember if the Shodai and Nidaime Hokage had a desire to feast on human flesh.
After seeing dead shinobi fighting at her side, and then punching a goddess in the face, then fighting on the surface of the moon to save Hinata, Sakura had thought she'd seen it all.
Until she woke up eating a person.
She was undead; and at the realization Sakura had wasted no time in grabbing a kunai she'd lifted off her first meal and stabbed herself in the stomach with it because it couldn't have been true-and if it were, a life of cannibalism was not worth a second chance at life. As she gasped at the pain, she felt an influx of adrenaline as a snarl ripped through her throat. Her extremities cooled rapidly—almost feeling like oncoming frostbite, but strangely painless—and her vision sharpened considerably.
When she wrenched the blade, she also felt primal as an overwhelming need to survive flooded through her. Every shinobi had a survival instinct; it was what gave you strength to fight your way out of a difficult battle or run away from one. But what she felt that day, and many days after, was beyond that. She felt meaner, angrier, stronger.
When she removed the blade, she noticed that while painful, the wound faded quickly as if it were never there and, curiously enough, she hadn't bled. It was likely due to the Byakugou's regenerative abilities and her medical chakra, but it reinforced the fact that she was a dead woman walking.
Sakura wouldn't find out until a few months later that Kabuto's virus had worked. Her chakra had merged into her cells to give her an endless supply of power while her fine control greatly slowed the process down.
Essentially, Sakura was a super not-human who didn't age and couldn't die—which sounded great on paper, but not so much in practice as there was a catch that Kabuto hadn't accounted for.
If Sakura used too much of this new cellular chakra, she was at risk of losing herself—losing the parts that made her Sakura and not flesh eating zombie.
There was a limit, one that she was currently hesitant to find but always close to reaching.
At the disturbing discovery of her new existence, Sakura had curled up at the bottom of a tree until Konoha's tracker team—consisting of Team 8 and Kakashi—had found her two days later.
They'd been horrified at the state she was in—not that she'd noticed, in the face of an existential crisis—and, upon returning to Konoha, had to sneak her in through a secret ANBU entrance to avoid alarming the villagers.
She'd been gone for five weeks instead of the allotted three.
It was as they passed a shop window that Sakura managed to catch a glimpse of her reflection, and she had to hastily avert her eyes at the horror.
She had looked positively dead.
Her clothes—the prisoner garb Kabuto had dressed her in—were doused liberally with blood and her skin was beyond ashen. If she dyed her hair black and wore dark contacts, she was sure she'd pass as Sai's sister. Her seal stood out starkly against the pale skin of her forehead, and her hair hung matted and limp in front of her face.
Naruto, the newly instated Hokage, had looked so happy to see her and yet so concerned for her well being that she couldn't tell him the truth of what had happened. So when he asked for a debrief, she had lied.
She'd told him she'd been taken prisoner by Orochimaru and tortured for the whereabouts of the files holding the Cursed Seal's research, not once mentioning Kabuto's virus and its effects on her person. It broke her heart to be enveloped into his arms—he unmindful of her stench of dried blood and corpses—and told that he had missed her.
When he'd suggested she visit the hospital, Sakura had vehemently protested. To everyone's shock, she had proclaimed that she was fine and well—that all she needed was a bath and a good night's rest. Inside, she knew what the medics would find when they checked her vitals: no pulse, no blood pressure, no chakra activity within her pathways.
It was nothing she hadn't checked herself.
Naruto had let her off uneasily after that, trusting her judgement and she was escorted home by Kakashi—who hung around her apartment much to her annoyance and yet comfort.
The next day, Naruto had called her to a meeting where he described that, in the wake of Orochimaru's renewed interest in the Cursed Seal, his and Kabuto's capture and elimination was of utmost importance. As he informed the Council of Elders of his course of action, Sakura had devised her own plans.
She would find Kabuto, steal his research on that infernal virus, and engineer a cure.
Sakura would not stay this way forever, she would make sure of it. If there was a cure, she'd find it. Despite having her life derailed, Sakura now had purpose and she finally felt something.
After that, Sakura had to find ways to feed herself. She ate normal food in front of her peers and friends, but she always had to find ways to actually sustain her hunger. To her horror, she found that if she did not eat every few days or so, her hair would start to fade until it was bone white—not to mention the awful and mean mood swings. Luckily for her, Sakura had friends and resources in high places.
Naruto provided her with copious amounts of solo missions, either medical or combative, and in a span of seven months, Sakura had managed to become the kunoichi with the most solo missions under her belt. They weren't dangerous, or particularly challenging, but they served their purpose in giving her what she needed.
Her blonde doof of a friend had slyly joked that she was either running from or to someone. As Sakura rolled her eyes at the suggestive waggling of his eyebrows, she hated that she didn't have the heart to tell him that she had stopped replying to Sasuke's letters (who then stopped sending them altogether), much less that these missions were her source of food.
On average, she killed about two bandits per mission, and their brains (or thighs, or arms, or whatever hadn't been destroyed by her jutsu) lasted her a few weeks. She didn't need to ingest much, just a few bites here and there always held her over until she needed to go out and "restock" her supply.
When her Hokage didn't have a mission for her, she found sustenance in the morgue—in the section reserved for prisoners and interrogees. As one of the highest ranking combative medics, and Tsunade's successor, Sakura had access to every facility in the hospital. She knew for a fact that organs, in the wake of innovative medical ninjutsu, were almost always discarded. No one would miss a brain-or two-and she took great care to take only what was desperately needed.
It worked for her, it worked very well, and she was always careful.
Therefore, when the Chief Medical Examiner of Konohagakure's only morgue requested to speak to her and the Hokage about a peculiar—and alarming—case of missing or half picked organs, she was thankful—for the first time ever—for her newly pale skin.
"It's the most peculiar thing, Hokage-sama!"
Konoha's CME was a short, amiable man with a penchant for wearing a monocle and Sakura liked him well enough because of his dedication to his job; but right now, she hated him.
Not as much as she hated herself, though.
She had been naïve to think that something like that wouldn't be noticed by someone so dedicated to his craft of cataloguing dead people's unneeded body parts; and now that he had notified the Hokage, it had to be addressed.
"I don't see why someone would go through the trouble of stealing one-third of a brain," the CME—named Hoyo—exclaimed. "I have been keeping a detailed record of patients whose brain matter, or other organs, have been poached in the last four months."
Sakura struggled to keep her expression from blanching and showing any alarm. Four months!? She'd been sneaking into the morgue in the cover of darkness at least once a month, thinking she was covering all her bases and being careful, and here was this little man proving her wrong.
As Hoyo handed the records to the Hokage, who flipped through them grimly, the rosette fought the overwhelming urge to bash her head against the wall until it fell off her shoulders. She'd gotten complacent, believing that because she was who she was she'd be able to get away unscathed.
They might not know it was her, but they'd find out soon enough if she didn't fix this.
What was that phrase Genma liked to say? Ah, yes: You don't shit where you eat.
"—Sakura-chan? Sakura!"
Coming back to herself at Naruto's call, Sakura shook her head in mock confusion.
"I'm sorry, this is just so bizarre," she said quietly, picking the records up from Naruto's desk. "I've never seen anything like this."
Except she has, because she was the one who ate Matsumoto Hachiro's liver for dinner last night!
Naruto nodded along thoughtfully, brow furrowing in concern. "They're all missing-nin or prisoners. That's gotta mean something."
"It doesn't."
Naruto and Hoyo glanced at her sharply, surprised at her quick opposition. Sakura swallowed and masked her blunder with a lazy shrug of her shoulders.
"In my experience," she explained, placing the records back on Naruto's desk and moving to stand beside him, "Hunter-nin and Medic-nin take the whole brain for information gathering."
"They do?" Naruto leaned back in his seat, his hand coming up to scratch at his chin. "I didn't know that."
Of course he wouldn't. Naruto didn't handle the more shady and ghoulish business conducted by his shinobi—that fell into ROOT's jurisdiction. Sakura only knew because she was usually the one handling the brains—well, the ones she didn't eat.
Sakura nodded. "Yes. The brain, as Hoyo-san here can attest to, is a very complex organ. It takes a skilled Hunter-nin or Medic-nin to pull information from it without turning it into mush."
Naruto's nose scrunched up at the imagery, but picked up on her lead quickly. "So they wouldn't take portions of the brain, they'd take all of it."
Sakura nodded again. "Yes. They wouldn't leave anything behind."
Naruto hummed contemplatively as he flipped idly through Hoyo's detailed record keeping.
"And the other organs? Is there a purpose for those that threaten village security?"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Alright then," Naruto huffed as he closed the records with a resounding slap. "Then there's nothing to worry about!"
"But Hokage-sama," Hoyo protested, giving Sakura the urge to eat his brain. "There have been eight instances of this - this organ harvesting! Surely, you must be planning on doing something about it!"
Naruto shook his head sympathetically. "Were it a matter of village security and the safety of my people, I would be forced to look into it. But seeing as it's partial harvesting, and not for the sake of information extraction, I'm hard pressed to do anything about it."
Hoyo spluttered incredulously, his monocle shaking from the force of it. "There could be a potential cannibal breaking into the morgue and walking the streets, and you're not going to do anything about it?!"
Sakura held her breath as Naruto adopted his 'thinking face,' afraid of the possibility of an investigation. Because of this whole debacle, she wasn't so sure she'd been as meticulously careful as she thought.
"I'm sorry, Hoyo-san," Naruto sighed. "Konoha's Shinobi Corps is a very clandestine, macabre, and dissolute business. I'm sure you know that."
When Hoyo opened his mouth to interrupt, Naruto held up a hand and added, "What my shinobi do on their own time is none of my business. It becomes my business only when their actions put the safety of my village in danger—and this doesn't constitute as such."
"A cannibal, Hokage-sama!" Hoyo reiterated as his face reddened considerably at Naruto's dismissal. "You would let a murderous cannibal run loose?!"
Sakura's face was stone as talk of cannibals and murder filtered through her brain. She had never considered herself a cannibal, even though that was what she was. She wasn't human anymore, so what was she…? It was such uncharted thinking territory and Sakura was sure that it'd be depressive, so she'd rather not.
"I am inclined to remind you that you are standing in a room with four murderers and reside in a village of hundreds." Naruto intoned icily as Hoyo paled.
"As I said, Hoyo-san, if whoever is doing this feels the need to steal bits and pieces of organs from the morgue, I doubt it's because they're eating them. Whatever the case, it's none of my business. I advise that you reconsider what is yours.
Tanuki-san, please escort Hoyo-san out the building."
Recognizing an order when he heard one, the ANBU posted at the door saluted the blond before glowering at the Chief Medical Examiner until the smaller man all but scampered out the door, leaving silence in his wake.
"Is it an inappropriate time to say, 'mic drop,' Hokage-sama?"
Sakura rolled her eyes at Genma's immaturity as Naruto guffawed. Of course Naruto would assign Kakashi's friend to his personal ANBU detail—those two probably spent the day joking around and talking about women.
Naruto shook his head, traces of his grin fading from his face as he reopened Hoyo's records.
"Something about this isn't right," he said quietly, not noticing the way Sakura stiffened. "What do you think, Sakura-chan?"
Crap.
She couldn't dismiss it now that they were alone! Naruto, after assuming the title of Hokage, always had some weird tactic flip-flopping in his head and she was sure that he deflected Hoyo's concern for a reason.
Sakura didn't have much of a choice, and decided to cut her losses. She'd have to think of an alternative to the morgue, and quick—her hair was already a washed-out shade of its former self.
"I think that," she replied slowly, as if churning the thought over in her head, "if it worries you, you should post surveillance at the entrance to the morgue. No one goes in or out without supervision. If it really is a big deal, like Hoyo-san thinks, then we should investigate. If not, organs from the morgue are destroyed anyway."
Naruto's brow furrowed as he looked up at her. "You're not worried about a cannibal? Those guys are scary."
Swallowing the painful lump in her throat and ignoring the brief hurt that pulsed in her chest, Sakura shook her head.
"We've really seen everything when it comes to the depraved; and most of our shinobi have been through a lot. The way I see it, if this person is going through the trouble of doing all this, then they must really need it. And even then, I doubt it's something as crazy as cannibalism."
Genma piped in from his vantage point by the window, "I agree with Sakura. I doubt someone's eating those organs. They're probably using them for science or something."
"But if they're using them for science," Naruto rubbed at his chin. "Then they would be using our labs, right?"
"Not necessarily…" Genma winced slightly. "Orochimaru had been conducting illegal experiments, way back when, in hidden labs without anyone knowing. Could we perhaps be facing another Orochimaru on our hands?"
Naruto groaned, scrubbing his hands down his cheeks. "This is giving me such a headache. This is not what I signed up for when I swore in."
"Actually, yes, it is," Sakura corrected with a small smile. She gently took her beloved teammate's hand in her own. "Don't worry too much about it, Naruto. I'm sure that with the added surveillance the culprit won't return."
And she most definitely would not go back to the morgue in search of food. Now that it's been placed on the radar, her chances of success were slim to none.
Naruto smiled at her and patted her own hand in return, only to yowl dramatically, "Sakura-chan! Your hands are so cold! Do you live in a freezer?!"
Sakura rolled her eyes at her friend's theatrics. "Naruto, we go through this every time I touch you."
"You need to get some sun!" Naruto exclaimed with a flourish as he stood, grasping her shoulders in his broad palms. "Look at you! You're paler than Sai-teme!"
She sniffed, a sly grin playing on her lips. "If that's the case, then you should send me out to Suna for some nice tanning and relaxation."
Laughing at her not so subtle request, Naruto scrounged around in his desk for a mission scroll to Suna. Sakura tried not to think about how Suna was the best place to 'hunt' because of stray bandits' habits of getting lost and dying in the desert. Often, she'd found fresh corpses that helped her a substantial amount.
Placing a B-Rank courier mission scroll to Suna in her hand, Naruto's lips twisted uncomfortably and a pit formed in her belly. She knew that look—those were Naruto's 'I'm about to ask you something very uncomfortable' eyebrows.
"Sakura-chan," he started and Sakura braced herself. "Why do you request so many missions. Why don't you talk to Sasuke?"
Sakura tried not to wince at the mention of her love interest's name, but the twitch of her eyebrow belied her discomfort. "You can always deny my mission requests, and I just don't have anything to say to him anymore, Naruto. I've told you this."
"Well, yes, I know." Naruto scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. "But I thought you were taking all these missions to see him, and when I found out that Karin was pregnant…with his baby…I…"
And there it was, that familiar feeling of distress that curled around her chest and squeezed, forcing Sakura to remind herself that she was already dead and couldn't die from it—or anything else, really.
What a hollow comfort.
"I just don't know what to think," Naruto continued quietly. "Are you not happy here? Are you seeing someone outside village walls? After that one mission eight months ago, you haven't been the same and I'm worried about you, Sakura-chan."
Sakura tried not to flinch. How could anyone who knew her story ever think that she was happy living the life she lived now? She was forced to watch all her friends move on and start families while she had to let go of the only man she had ever loved. Every day she watched as her friends became happier and happier while she fell into the same loop of hunting for brains and a cure.
The day she found out Sasuke had moved on had been the worst day of her life—barring the one where she had died, of course. She'd been hoping that once she found a cure she'd be able to rekindle whatever relationship she'd once had with him. They hadn't had much, just a few letters here and there in the time since he'd been away, but it had been worthwhile and meant the world to her.
But four months after accepting her new life and purpose, Sakura learned that what she and Sasuke had must have been very miniscule in comparison to what he had with the girl from Taka. Naruto had announced his own and Sasuke's impending children in the same night, and while everyone celebrated, she had gone home and drank until she could feel anything else but heartache—which hadn't happened.
To everyone else, Sakura had been the one to stop pursuing Sasuke. She had been the one to let go and move on. What everyone else didn't know was that she couldn't bear to lure him into a relationship and subsequent marriage with a girl who could never give him what he wanted—what he needed.
Karin could, and Sakura would live with her decision for the rest of her undead life.
But her friends didn't know her story, at least not all of it, and she'd rather slit her own throat than tell them.
"I just don't feel like I've experience much beyond these walls, Naruto." Sakura brushed a hand through her meticulously maintained hair. "I'm twenty-three and I don't feel like I've done much."
Naruto's eyes widened incredulously. "You don't feel like you've done much?! Sakura-chan! We've been through a whole war! You punched a crazy goddess in the face! We fought aliens!"
Chuckling humorlessly, Sakura placed a hand on her hip with a shake of her head. "No offense, Naruto, but you and everyone else settled down pretty quickly. I still feel like I have things I need to do."
"Like what?!"
She waved a hand in the air dismissively. "You know: cure a plague, invent a jutsu, adopt a chinchilla…Things like that."
Things like finding a cure for her zombie-dom, that was an important one. Oh, and ripping out Kabuto's entrails and dancing on them—that too.
Naruto shuffled his feet in that telltale way again, and Sakura sighed discreetly.
"Speaking of things to do," Naruto started slowly. "In our last letter, Sasuke expressed his wishes to have you deliver his daughter when it's time. He says you're the only one he trusts to do it. Do you think you can do that?"
Sakura's mind came to a freezing halt, her synapses frying at Sasuke's message. On the one hand, she was overjoyed that he trusted her implicitly and finally recognized her skills. On the other, she was appalled at the notion of seeing the personification of the turn her life had taken and her life choices.
Was it petty to stick that connotation to an unborn child? Yes, yes it was. But if things had gone her way, then that little girl would have been theirs and she didn't think she'd be over that for a while.
"Well," she huffed, suppressing all of her sadness and anger. "I haven't seen Sasuke in almost seven years. If he wants to ask me to deliver his child, then he has to do it himself."
With that, Sakura briskly turned and walked out the door, uncaring of Naruto's resounding groan.
She had some brains to flambé.
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Ending Notes: I'm not a huge fan of SasuSaku or SasuKarin, but pairings, to me, are used for the sake of plot. Sakura will not end up with Sasuke, so no sordid love affair here, lol. The other Canon pairings and children will exist for lack of originality. I'm not sure if I want Sakura to have a romantic relationship, though...we'll see!
Let me know if you guys like this chapter!
XO