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A Color of the Sky

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. ~ Tony Hoagland

"Oi! Is she...is she dead…?"

"No, she has a pulse."

"Can you hear me?"

There was a groan—a prolonged, pained sound that sounded as familiar as it did foreign.

"She's moving!"

"Shut up, idiot."

"Guys, this is really not the time."

"He started it!"

The first thing Sakura noticed when she cracked her eyes open was that the red was no more. In its place was grey for as long as her blurred vision could grasp; dim, grey skies and against it, a mop of silver hair, spiky and fried as if it had been struck by a bolt of lightning.

"Sen…sei...?" She barely croaked out.

The storm-haired boy was joined by two more curious faces. She saw blue, orange, purple, and grey again. The three figures loomed over her like dark shadows, but Sakura couldn't even muster the energy to be alarmed.

"Kaka...shi," she called to the familiar face again.

"How does she know your name?"

"Everyone knows Kakashi."

"Yeah, yeah, Hatake Kakashi—the youngest shinobi ever to be considered for a jounin promotion, the sun shines out of his ass, the moon hangs on to his every word, blah blah blah..."

Sakura's whirling vision finally settled, focus narrowing in on the storm-haired boy.

Rationally, she knew it was Kakashi she was looking up at, but something in her gut told her it wasn't the Kakashi she knew. This one's eyes were different. Even as he stared at her wearing a deep frown over his brows, he looked softer somehow. Her head started spinning again, just as she vaguely registered that he had neither his sharingan, nor the scar that went along with it.

Sakura had enough mental faculty to wonder if she was in a dream, but her eyes were getting heavy again. Darkness soon followed.

When Sakura opened her eyes next, she was facing a perforated drywall.

It took her a moment to realize that she was laying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. It was very bright, wherever this was. She blinked a few times to adjust her sight.

For a second, she wondered if this was the afterlife. The drywall was a little jarring, but otherwise, the place looked appropriately bright and airy. A sharp pain shot through her side, and she quickly dispelled the idea.

She took a couple of deep breaths to tide over the pain. When it receded to a dull ache, she tried to take stock of her surroundings again. Now that her vision was adjusted, she saw that she was in a hospital room. The room was good sized, bigger than any of the rooms they had at Konoha General. She tried to sit up, even as it almost knocked the wind out of her. Adjusting her pillow, she tried to make herself comfortable in this new position.

There was an open window to one side of the room. The curtains had been drawn, flooding the room in nauseatingly bright light. A light breeze blew in, and the edges of the drawn curtains fluttered in time with them. In her more immediate vicinity stood an IV pole, hoisting a bag of saline which was intravenously being administered via a cannula injected in the back of her hand. Next to the IV pole was a patient monitor. She heard the beeping of the patient monitor just as she set her eyes on the machine and became cognizant of the sounds in the room. She turned to the window again, and realized the gently swooshing curtains framed an unfamiliar view.

Before she could dwell too much in the oddity of that, the door slid open. A middle-aged woman—presumably, a medic—stepped into the room, scribbling something on her clipboard.

"Oh," the medic sputtered when she looked up. Her big eyes were painted in surprise, but she quickly followed up. "How are you feeling?"

"Al-right." Sakura's throat was painfully dry. She wondered how long she had been out for. "Where am I?"

"You're at Konoha General," the medic said, filling a paper cup with some water and handing it to Sakura. She perused the notes on her clipboard, with a look of confusion and continued, "Let's see what we've got here, hmm. Why don't we start with names? I'm Dr. Kato. I am filling in for Dr. Ogawa today, so this is our first meeting."

Sakura was not sure where she was, but it most definitely was not Konoha General. She knew every room in that hospital inside and out. Their private rooms were nowhere near as large as the one she was in, and the windows certainly didn't look out into a meadow. The open grasslands were situated at the edge of the village, and the hospital was smackdab in the middle; what she was seeing was not geographically possible.

"Are you," Sakura started, taking a nervous sip of the water and setting the paper cup on the side table. "Are you sure this is Konoha General?"

Dr. Kato looked a little amused, but kindly said, "Yes, dear. I've been working here my whole life."

Her whole life?

Sakura had never in the five years she had spent going in and out of Konoha General, ever laid eyes on this woman. An uneasy sense of dread started coiling in her stomach as her confusion piled on.

"You didn't have any information on your person when they brought you in. Can you tell me your name? "

"Sakura," She responded, on autopilot. "Haruno Sakura."

"Ah, that makes sense with the pink," Dr. Kato said, eyeing her hair as she jotted something down on her clipboard.

Sakura smiled nervously, afraid that asking any more questions was only going to yield answers even more unsavory.

"Your recovery has been astounding. I don't know what they feed you where you're from, Sakura, but your body has basically just been healing itself over the last few days," Dr. Kato said, still studying the charts on her clipboard.

"What—what do you mean where I'm from? I was born and raised in Konoha."

"Oh that's odd. Your charts say you are an unidentified foreign-nin."

This was a dream, Sakura thought.

Or an elaborate prank.

Or maybe she was still under a genjutsu.

How could she be admitted at Konoha General as a foreign-nin? Sakura knew everyone who worked at the hospital by name, and that went the other way around too.

"Are you alright, dear?" Dr. Kato asked. "You're looking a little pale."

"Um, this is—, this doesn't—" Sakura tried to say, but struggled to formulate the words.

"Hey now, take it easy," Dr. Kato said, concerned. "You still need a lot of rest, Sakura."

The door slid open at that moment.

"Is she finally awake?" Another woman—a much younger one this time—burst in through the door like a tornado.

Sakura's eyes immediately caught on the fiery red head of hair on this woman, then as if she'd been sucker punched, everything came back to her at once.

They had lost Naruto, and then they lost the war. Everyone had been swallowed up by the eye of the moon. Everything was in ruins, everything painted in a sinister red, too close to the shade of this woman's red hair.

She had been as good as dead. So where was she now? How did she end up here?

Sakura felt herself shaking. Dr. Kato grabbed her arms, rocking her gently. Suddenly, her ears were flooded with Dr. Kato's voice. "Sakura! Sakura! Hey, hey, it's okay. Just take a deep breath, take a deep breath with me now. You need to breathe."

She felt dizzy, but she heeded Dr. Kato's advice.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

This was real. She had no idea what was going on, but this wasn't a dream or a genjutsu or the fucking afterlife. This was real. At least in some capacity. She could unmistakably feel her own chakra coursing through her sore body with no disruptions. She could feel Dr. Kato's soothing chakra signature, as she continued to hold her arms. The petite, red-haired woman, who looked completely aghast now, was housing an absurd volume of chakra reserves, and even though she was certain she had never met this woman before, there was something about her chakra that exuded familiar warmth. But there was one more chakra signature—one more person, she could feel. She would have recognized this chakra signature anywhere.

Head spinning, she looked to the last person in the room. At the foot of her head, just a few steps behind the red-headed woman was a young boy. He wore a black mask and bore an uncanny likeness to one Hatake Kakashi.

"Kakashi," she muttered, pointing a shaking finger at the sharingan and the accompanying scar that he didn't have. "K-Kakashi sensei."

Kakashi woke up that morning like any other. His eyes opened of their own accord at the break of dawn. Minato was off the grid on a mission, but that didn't mean he was going to slack. By the time the sun had truly risen, he was already at the training grounds and had completed his first set.

These days he was working on refining a new jutsu he had created himself. After learning his nature element last year, an idea had formed in his mind. It required summoning a large amount of chakra to his hand, and he had spent months just refining the chakra he summoned. It was only recently that he'd been able to spark up something close to a lightning in the palm of his hand. It was far from perfect, but just advanced enough that he was left with burns all over his hand in the aftermath.

Rin showed up just as he was finishing up his last set of practice. Team Minato convened at Training Ground 3 at nine for their daily practice. Rin was always the second to arrive—earlier than both their sensei and Obito. Everyday, without fail, she appeared just as Kakashi would start wrapping bandages around his hands, and offer to heal his burns. He stopped bothering with the bandages entirely after the first few weeks following this routine.

Kakashi valued her kindness and reliability as a teammate. Her enthusiasm felt like validation he hadn't known he had been seeking. She was especially in awe of his new jutsu.

"That's an incredible amount of force, Kakashi," she had told him. Then, giggling, she'd added, "It kinda sounds like a thousand birds chirping though."

A thousand birds.

Somehow it felt apt, so he had taken to calling it Chidori in his mind.

Kakashi was well aware that any one of these days, war would come knocking on their door. He had long ago decided that he was not going to be caught unprepared. He trained like his life depended on it, he trained harder than anyone else he knew. Kids his age had some ways to go before they even graduated from the academy, and elite jounins—much older, and considered the strongest of the strong in the village—had already been dispatched far and wide for reconnaissance and sabotage missions. Kakashi existed in this wide berth between these two ends of the spectrum. Depending on who you asked, he would either be described as a genius shinobi and ruthless killer in making, or a child who'd erroneously been allowed to sit at the adult table.

And so, Kakashi trained like there would be no tomorrow, because there could be no question about his abilities, his raw prowess. Discipline, he knew, would never lead him astray. He was going to be the best of his generation—like his sensei, Namikaze Minato, and his sensei's sensei, the sannin Jiraiya, whose own sensei was the Sandaime Hokage. He was going to carry this legacy forward. There was nothing or no one who was going to get in his way.

Chidori was going to give him the edge he needed to truly prove his worth.

Kakashi leaned against the trunk of the large oak tree with a tired sigh. Rin had just gotten him cleaned up, and was meticulously organizing the med kit she always had on herself. Together they waited for their third teammate, sitting under the shade seeking a small reprieve from the scorching sun.

Obito was always running late. Every single day, he would arrive at least twenty minutes late, then proceed to tell some exaggerated story about how an old lady or a feral cat had held him up. Once in a while, he threw in something new, but for the most part, he was apparently always hounded by old ladies who needed their groceries to be carried, or desperate cats stuck in trees.

This day was no different.

"There was this sweet, little kitty, I swear," he said, emphatically. "Poor thing was hanging off a branch that was close to snapping. I'm telling you she was barely holding on with her claws, and had it not been for my valiant rescue, that cat would have dropped to her certain death—"

Thud.

Obito was interrupted by a heavy thud that resounded over the tail end of his account. "What was that?" He spun around dramatically, like an enemy-nin would just be waiting there to challenge him.

"Yeah, it sounded like something fell," Rin said, worriedly looking up at the sky. "Did you hear that, Kakashi?"

Kakashi nodded, just as the sun was suddenly shrouded by a sea of dark clouds.

"What?! There was no rain in the forecast today!" Obito huffed, petulantly.

Kakashi pushed past Obito and moved towards the clearing behind their makeshift privacy fence of shrubberies. Under normal circumstances, he would chalk it up to Gai doing something ridiculous again. Just last week, he had hurled a sack of potatoes across the field because he wanted to see who could throw the farthest. But something about the timing of the sound was off. He leaped across the fence, just as Rin yelled, "Wait, Kakashi!"

"Can you believe this guy? Always trying to steal my thunder?" He heard Obito complaining, but didn't respond. "Hey, you stop right there, Kakashi! I heard it first, you know."

There was no Gai in the clearing, no mishandled sack of potatoes either.

Only a crumpled figure, right in the middle.

Obito and Rin landed next to him. Kakashi heard Rin gasp when she saw what had caused that ominous thud.

"Is that—is that a person?" Obito asked, moving his visor up his forehead to rub his eyes.

"You guys stay here." Kakashi said, taking a step forward. Whoever it was, they were clearly injured, but Minato had always taught him to not readily accept the most obvious conclusion.

You have to look underneath the underneath, Kakashi.

So, he treaded carefully. His nose picked up the scent of blood—a lot of blood, fresh and old—as he moved closer. A little farther in, and he could make out the forest green of the jounin vest. He could sense heavily depleted chakra reserves. This wasn't some trap, he realized. Maybe it was an injured jounin, who'd barely made their way back to the village. A botched teleportation jutsu could have completely jumbled the destination they had in mind. It would also explain the sudden change in the atmosphere.

Kakashi broke into a sprint.

The first thing that occurred to him when he was finally standing in front of the prone figure was: Who uses a pink wig for disguise?!

Warily, he turned the person so they were—she was—laying on her back. The girl was not much older than him from the looks of it. She looked the part of someone who was on the very brink of complete chakra depletion. He crouched over her to get a closer look, reached a tentative hand out to gently shake her shoulders, even though he knew that wouldn't wake her.

"Oi! Is she...is she dead…?" Obito shouted across the clearing.

"No, she has a pulse."

Kakashi heard his teammates running over. He was thinking Rin could maybe better assess her condition, when he eyed the smallest pinch in her brows.

"Can you hear me?" He tried, gently. Her eyebrows further furrowed, and she let out a groan. Then, there was movement behind her eyelids. She squinted her eyes open, just the slightest bit.

"She's moving!" Obito exclaimed.

"Shut up, idiot." Kakashi snipped.

"Guys, this is really not the time." Rin pleaded.

"He started it!"

"Sen.. sei..." The girl called, hoarsely. That shut Obito right up.

She had clear, green eyes, which had finally come into focus—and landed on him. There was a flash of surprise in her eyes as she held his gaze. It had been almost imperceptible, but Kakashi caught it all the same.

"Kaka… shi," She said, voice barely a whisper. Kakashi felt the hair at the back of his neck stand.

"How does she know your name?" Obito asked, voice dripping with suspicion.

"Everyone knows Kakashi." Rin patiently reasoned.

Obito started on another tirade, but Kakashi wasn't listening anymore. He could tell that it was taking considerable effort for her to just keep her eyes open.

"Rin!" He called, as the green of the girl's eyes started closing shut again. "Can you see if she has any internal bleeding?"

Hang on for just a little bit longer.

When he had decided to tag along with Uzumaki Kushina to visit the pink-haired and green-eyed girl, this wasn't quite what he thought he would encounter.

First, all the color had faded from her already pale face when she saw them step into her room. Then, her shocked eyes floated down onto the floor, and slowly, it was like all the breath in her lungs and blood had abandoned her as well. She was hyperventilating, eyes still fixed on the same spot on the floor.

"Sakura! Sakura!" The doctor called, jerking her by the arms.

Sakura, that was her name.

Sakura started inhaling and exhaling in sync with the doctor's instructions. She slowly calmed down. Kakashi had no idea who this girl was, or how she had ended up in Konoha, but he knew the chaos of emotions that had just passed over her eyes.

It was grief—an unfortunate condition he was intimately acquainted with himself.

He only had a moment to ponder on this. In the next, she was looking at him. She raised a wobbly hand and pointed at him.

"Kakashi?"

Kakashi exchanged anxious looks with the two older women in the room.

"K-Kakashi sensei," Sakura said again, calling his attention. Kakashi didn't think he had imagined the relief he heard in her voice. This was most puzzling. He may have been a child prodigy, but he didn't think he had anything to teach anyone. Suffice to say, he hadn't taken anyone under his tutelage, especially not a strange girl with hair and eyes like the spring that was almost upon them. He would have remembered something like that.

tbc