Sakura's head pounded like that time that Shisho had talked her into getting drunk on sake. She sat up in bed and put her forehead on her knees. God it was really painful. She grabbed at the back of her head and what? Long hair? She scrambled out of bed and over to her mirror. She was a child, in her childhood room and oh my god she had gone back in time. Her head pounded as memories came back to her.
"Sakura, are you up?"
She had never thought that hearing her mother's voice would make her burst into tears. It was probably the fact that she hadn't been on good terms with her parents since she had passed the shinobi exam.
"Yes," she called down, trying to remember how she acted when she was this age, which was difficult because her voice was so high and was clearly impairing her ability to think correctly.
Her mother called up again and interrupted train of thought; maybe this was why they didn't have a good relationship, because her mother couldn't give a person even a second of quiet. "Your father and I are about to leave, breakfast is on the table." Sakura called down a thank you and decided that her mother's voice wouldn't move her almost to tears in the future.
She got dressed and moved down the stairs to the kitchen while contemplating how she was going to keep Danzo from starting the Uchiha massacre.
She could drag him off saying that there was a bleeding ninja and she needed to get help, but when he came and he saw no ninja there would be a problem. She could always get some blood from the hospital since she knew where they kept it and send him a wild goose chase looking for a wounded ninja. She put her dishes in the sink and groaned. She was going to have to wait five years before her and Naruto could meet up and until then she would have to act like meek, weak, fangirl Sakura to keep from altering the future too much before Naruto came back and when he did he was going to kill her.
Hours later Sakura stood behind a tree masking her chakra (which would have alerted Danzo since she still had carried back her chakra and it would seem suspicious for an eight year old to have so much chakra) waiting for the real mastermind behind the Uchiha massacre. Earlier that day she had gotten into the hospital under the pretense of seeing a family member and stolen some blood from the storeroom, then she had opened the bag in a corner and splattered it around to look like a wounded shinobi had been laying there. She had disposed of the bag in an entirely different location and had gone to wait for her target. Soon enough Shisui came out of the hokage building looking around nervously, Danzo close behind him. Once Shisui was out of sight she made her move.
"Help! Help please!" she stumbled out of her hiding place and ran straight into Danzo and grabbed his robe with her bloody hands. "Please help sir, there is a hurt man over here. He's bleeding really bad." Danzo tried to shake her off, but Sakura held on determinedly. "He's got a headband I think he's a ninja." That got Danzo's attention as well as seemed to make him collect himself.
"Show me where," he commanded looking down the road to where Shisui had gone. He obviously seemed to think that there would be enough time to get to the man before he could use his sharingan on the Uchiha clan and report back to the hokage. Sakura made more fake tears as she pulled Danzo toward her fake crime scene and silently thanked her shisho for teaching her how to fool men. "Where is he," he asked curtly. Sakura didn't answer, but pointed toward the corner where she had strategically placed the blood. Danzo removed her hand a little more gently this time and moved over to where the blood was. With a hand sign two anbu guards were summoned. Sakura continued her crying and silently calculated how much time had passed. By this point Shisui would be making his way back to the hokage, so she just needed to keep her act up a little while longer.
One of the anbu guards noticed her and seemed to as Danzo about her. "One of you take her to the hospital and get her sent home, she looks like a civilian, and one of you see if you can find any more information about our missing ninja. I'll go back to the tower and check mission reports."
Sakura internally did a happy dance as the anbu in the monkey mask picked her up and made his way to the hospital. If Danzo did what he said he would then he would totally miss his chance to start the Uchiha massacre without too many questions. Sakura just hoped that what she did wouldn't change the future too much.
Five years had passed and Sakura was getting increasingly worried that her actions hadn't changed anything or worse that her actions had prevented Naruto from coming back in time. Her new childhood was almost identical to her first the only difference was that the Uchiha clan was alive and well. They fit in like they had always been there and that there hadn't been any source of friction between them and the other communities, but she still worried that her actions had changed something too much.
The first couple of years had been fine, but she had forgotten what it was like to be so isolated form her peers and to have no friends. Not only was she ostracized for her wide forehead and her civilian lineage, but now she also felt apart from those around her because she knew that she was intellectually more developed and she knew things that they never would. If Naruto never came back then she was going to go insane pretending that she was a less than average shinobi with fangirl tendencies when in reality all she wanted to do was something way more challenging than what the academy had to offer and she really wanted to punch Sasuke through the roof with all her chakra.
Today being the day of the shinobi final exam and the day before Naruto was supposed to come back made her anxiety worse than usual. She was hidden in a corner outside the examination room since she wanted to provide some sort of silent encouragement for Naruto. She watched him come out of the room looking downtrodden and she wanted to wrap little Naruto in a hug and tell him that he was going to be one of the greatest shinobi ever, when all the sudden a smirk appeared at the corner of his mouth as he jumped out the window.
Sakura was stunned that smirk was exactly like the ones that Naruto did all the time in the past/future. Was he back too and just playing her or was her mind playing tricks on itself since she was so nervous about seeing him tomorrow. She had almost dismissed it when Iruka sensei came out of the room, "I don't understand it was like he purposefully messed up. He had the perfect mold of chakra to do it and everything, but it somehow failed I don't even understand how he managed to mess it up."
Sakura sat in silence and watched the teacher duo stroll out of the room. If Naruto was back then maybe he wouldn't be too mad at her or maybe she was going insane and imagining weird things because she couldn't cope with the thought of being forever alone in the past. Sakura watched the white haired sensei back track and jump out of the window Naruto had left out of and decided to go home early and face the wrath of her mother.
A couple of hours of her mother screaming at her would remove all traces of thoughts about Naruto from her head. Although she and her mother never had that good of a relationship in her past life, it was worse in this one. The combination of her being a shinobi and the fact that she sometimes forgot that she wasn't exactly an adult that was capable of taking care of herself which caused many arguments between her and her mother who claimed that the academy was 'changing her' and 'turning her into an adult before her time' and other such rubbish. Honestly when Naruto came back the first thing she would do was inform her parents that passing the shinobi exam made her and adult and that under the laws of the city she could live on her own, when in reality she would force Naruto to let her crash at his place until they got payed from their A rank mission.
She stopped outside the door and tied on her forehead protector, it was show time.
Naruto was wondering what the hell had happened. Last time he had stolen the scroll he hadn't seen any sort of ninja until he encountered Iruka sensei. This time, however, he had had a hard time shaking off the two anbu that had come after him. It was troubling, but made him glad that he had decided to come back a day early to 'learn' his famous shadow clone technique. He slumped down in the forest breathing hard and waited for Iruka to show up. He didn't know what had happened, but he was pretty sure that Sakura was going to blame him for coming back a day early.