Prompt: Better to light a candle than curse the darkness
Title: half remembered dream/old souls - 500 words
Series: Time Travel Shenanigans, Part XVII
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"Stop, Sakura." The green light dimmed. "Stop." He coughed and blood spattered his lips.
Will alone had gotten her this far, but at his request the light disappeared. A sob escaped and she shook her head at him, tears blurring her vision.
The battle raged (burning, scorched flesh, tormented screams), but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Danzo was Hokage, and Naruto was a body wielded to make the world bow — his soul had long departed. Everyone that mattered was gone.
Except…
She laced her fingers with his. "You can't leave me. You can't leave me alone. You can't… you promised," she hissed as tears streamed down her cheeks.
"I promised," he agreed as he tugged one of his hands from hers to pull something from his pocket — a triple-bladed kunai.
(Fire closing in, nothing would matter soon. The shinobi world was burning. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.)
"Didn't want to have to…" He coughed. There wasn't much time. He swiped his blood across the newer seals carved into the hilt and the dormant chakra flared like a beacon.
He pushed it into her hand. "It can only carry one soul back to it's original master. Strike true. Right in the heart."
A sob escaped and she shook her head. "No! I can't…" She tried to push it back at him. "You can't leave me!"
"Sakura." His voice was weak, but even through the chaos around them she could hear him and watery green eyes found his. He closed his hand around hers on the hilt of the kunai. "Find me. Find Minato. Make it different. Better," he rasped, the last word barely more than a breath.
"No…" Even as she watched, his eye crinkled, an echo of an almost forgotten smile. Panic welled in her. "No!"
"See you soon," he breathed… and then the light went out in his eyes and his grip slackened on hers.
"Kakashi!" she shrieked, eyes wide. "Kakashi!"
She screamed, and the world burned.
...
He woke to her screaming his name. He was alert in an instant, ready to take on whatever had dared invade his home, his territory.
But the room was still. No one was there.
The thrashing next to him pulled his grey eye to Sakura, and it was then he realized she was sobbing. He reached out to wake her, but before he could her eyes opened and she sat up, a tiny hand clenched at her heart. "It hurts," she whimpered.
And then she was on him, holding so tight around his neck it was almost painful.
"You can't leave," she whispered brokenly. "Can't leave me, can't die, can't leave me ever again."
The physical contact stilled him, but the wracking sobs vibrating from her eased the tension from his shoulders and he allowed himself to hold her back.
"I won't leave." If that's what she needed to hear to chase away the nightmare… "I promise."
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A/N: And now we know how Sakura slipped back into the past, and why. This one was easy to write. There was an urgency to it, or at least that's how it felt... writing it was experiencing that moment for the first time, and there wasn't much time, and my fingers were racing, as if I wouldn't know what happened next until it was in black and white on the page, and I just had to go, go, go as fast as I could.
Writing is sometimes hard. It's sometimes fun. And sometimes it's necessary.