Hello everyone!
IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Good to see all of you who are still with us. Thank you to all who reviewed, and I'm hoping that that was the last hiatus I'm going to have to go on for this story. I was a little thrown off by the manga's ending (god I hated it), which is partially why it took me so long to update. I had some stuff ready and then scrapped it, which caused me to have to rewrite things and edit things and good lord, it was tiring. However, at six am my time, I have finished the interlude. Many of you have been wondering how Sakura's time in the past changed things and this is the chapter that explains everything.
If I missed anything important, please point it out to me. I have literally been up all night and it would be uncannily easy for me to have left something out!
Sorry for the short chapter. This kind of had to happen because there just wasn't content to make a full-length chapter. :(
Interlude
The Changing of Time
While the past had been changed, somehow, the future had not.
Sakura was able to get a few of her answers as the months passed, as it seemed that only she was the one who knew what the original storyline of her village's past had been. Many of her questions were answered, but still some remained. It was decided that she would probably never know the truth of what had happened all those decades ago, but Madara certainly did.
After his inability to find his beloved for the next six months but equal inability to believe she had died, Madara broke down in grief. He had lost more than one person the day that Sakura disappeared. Completely immersed in his despair, he had agreed to the village that Hashirama proposed, if only for the fact that being the first Hokage would distract him from his loss. He named the village Konoha—he still remembered the name of the village Sakura had spoken of when she first arrived and thought it fitting that he name his and Hashirama's village after her, in a way.
However, his grief turned into cold, bitter rage and he became isolated from the rest of his clan. This was further compounded when, with the distraction of Sakura's disappearance, he realized he had not exacted revenge upon the Hyuuga and now they were joining the village. Betrayed by Hashirama's willingness to allow the clan into the village, as well as the many reasons already known to history, the bitterness between them eventually came to fruition at the Valley of the End.
Madara was similarly defeated here, and history progressed as it would have normally. Tobirama had become hardened and bitter at Sakura's disappearance. He turned into the cold man that was known to Konoha's history books, so unlike the caring and almost gentle man he had been with Sakua. He wholeheartedly blamed the Uchiha clan in its entirety for his loss of her, torn by the grief in such a way that he could not distinguish the clan from their previous clan head. In this way, the Uchiha were treated with prejudice by the Nidaime Hokage and furthered the rift between the Uchiha and Konoha as a whole.
Lost in his hate for the Senju, who Madara had never stopped believing had played a part in Sakura's disappearance, and Konoha as a whole, Madara created the Eye of the Moon plan. Sakura had disappeared without a trace and the only way to be with her again was the Infinite Tsukuyomi, even if it would only be an illusion. An illusory Sakura was better than none, and who knew? Maybe he would start to believe it was the real her one day. The Infinite Tsukuyomi was a way for world peace, yes, but it was also the only way to bring Sakura back.
And, after all, that was the most important part to him.
For Sakura, four years passed. Her life was changed in a way she had never expected and one year later, she left the village with an infant in her arms. She settled down in a small town on the border of Fire Country and Wind Country. Left in peace to raise her child, while protected from afar by Konoha and her friends, Sakura attempted to build a new life as a single parent, working as the small town's doctor and housing friendly Konoha shinobi who passed through. She thought her ordeal was over with and that she would live out the rest of her life quietly and in peace.
She thought wrong.
Well isn't that just a terrible little teaser? I said last time that we have a long way to go. I'm not so sure about that anymore, but we'll see. As I said in the author's note, the ending of Naruto really threw me off my game. It's only been watching the recent anime episodes that's brought me back to this fic and I'm hoping I can finish it this time around. Rest assured, it WILL be finished, one way or another. :)
That said, please review! I know I don't deserve it for being a horrible author about updates and whatnot, but please be kind to me?