What Bloomed

Part One: Was Betrayal

"Report?"

"We lost two ballistas in the last skirmish."

"Are either worth repairing?"

"The reporting soldier called it mostly 'burning rubble'."

A sigh hissed through teeth. After a few taps, the first voice spoke again.

"Cannibalize what parts you can to repair the remaining siege equipment. And bring a report of injuries and casualties as soon as you can."

"Alright... How's your shoulder?"

"It hurts."

There was a sound almost like a chuckle. "I'll send someone to the healer to see if we can get you another salve."

"Thank you."

Sunlight spilled into the tent as the flap pulled back. And then there was a pause. Report held in one hand, he turned back to look at her. She sat on the stump someone had hacked into a makeshift chair. Her left hand rested on her shoulder, squeezing as she grimaced against the pain. He almost pitied her as her bloodshot eyes fell on him lingering there.

"What is it?" she asked.

"We can't win this war. You must know that," he warned her.

A tired smile crossed her face.

"I know. Thank you anyway," she answered.

Blood seeped through Sakura's bandages as she exited the strategy tent later. The huge war map was rolled up and clenched in one hand. Her head swiveled as she looked around the bustling camp.

Men hurried past with arms full of torn cloth. A healer shouted for someone to come apply pressure. Scavengers circled above, hovering but never coming close enough for anyone to bother shooting them down.

The smell of ash always lingered in the air after a battle. She lifted her gaze to the sky. It was hazy, but the faint orange glow toward the hills alerted her that the sun was probably beginning to set.

She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.

"Are you well enough to be walking around like this?"

Sakura opened her eyes. She turned to the voice with a wan smile. "Probably not."

Temari gave her a grim look in return. The cut on her cheek had healed over some- but it was still angry and red. It would probably scar.

"You should rest while you can," Temari urged.

"I should," Sakura agreed, looking back out at the camp again.

"Scouts in the mountain pass say that things seem quiet for now. Seems like he's retreated for now," Temari informed her.

"We did a number on them. They're probably regrouping to come up with a new strategy," mused Sakura.

Temari smirked. "You mean you did a number on them," she corrected.

Sakura didn't return the smile. Her shoulder throbbed again at the memory.

"Well, I won't be able to do that again anytime soon. We should send word to the capital that we'll need reinforcements and more supplies," she stated.

Temari's forehead wrinkled. "I said the mountain pass seems quiet. I wouldn't suggest using it."

Sakura's gaze wandered when she spotted Shikamaru and Tenten approaching. They spotted her too and quickened their pace.

Before Tenten could ask if she was well enough to be up, Sakura filled them in on their latest dilemma.

"Supplies can't go through the mountain pass. What can we do?" Sakura demanded.

Shikamaru rubbed a hand over his face. "The valley pass is the only other path of that size. And that's flooded after the rockslide last month." Dark circles of exhaustion sagged under his eyes. Even as the words left his mouth he seemed to know how pointless his answer was.

Tenten's mouth pressed into a tight line. "We could arrange for supplies to arrive at a nearby village. We could have refugees and agents posing as refugees smuggle the supplies to us on their way."

"That would put the refugees at risk. And the town," Temari protested.

"And to do nothing puts all of our soldiers at risk," Tenten shot back.

Sakura pinched the bridge of her nose. "Enough. Both of you have valid concerns."

Tenten and Temari took steps away from each other. The tension was still there, but Sakura knew the two of them would make amends later. Usually over a drink as they tried to hold on to the shrinking list of good things that still remained.

She handed the rolled map to Shikamaru.

"We'll go with Tenten's plan. Station patrols along the path to keep an eye on the refugees to make sure they have safe passage. In the meantime, we'll have some agents move to a false location. That should provide some distraction," Sakura decided.

"The spies have likely been replaced already," Tenten warned.

"We'll make the information seem as urgent and confidential as possible. Someone will pick up on it, I'm sure," Shikamaru suggested. Tenten thought that over for a while. And then she nodded in his direction.

They both looked over when Sakura winced. Temari's expression darkened.

"You've been moving around too much. I'll get a healer for you." Temari was already hurrying away before Sakura could pretend to be okay.

No one was quite sure of what had struck Sakura during the last battle. It was a spear of some sort. The barbs made sure that it did even more damage coming out than it had going in. It had caught her under her left shoulder blade, tearing through muscle and sinew. The healers said it was a miracle that she hadn't bled out during the removal alone.

"The arm will probably be usable, but you might not get the movement back in it ever again," Tsunade had warned her, hands and arms still covered in blood from the procedure.

The wound grew hot and hissed with steam as Sakura focused on it now. She could feel the edges begin to reach back toward each other. But she didn't have the energy to heal it over now. She felt a little sick. She closed her eyes to try to fight the dizziness. She didn't realize she had stumbled until she heard Tenten and Shikamaru both call her name.

"Alright. You need to lay down. We can talk strategy later," Shikamaru sighed. He pulled her good arm over his shoulders and began pulling her back in the direction of her tent.

It had been two years since the world realized that dragons weren't extinct. And it had also been two years since the remaining dragons had declared war on the rest of the world.

All the fairytales about knights slaying dragons were true. Which meant that all the stories of brave adventurers plundering nests and slaying their young were also true. Then the old stories of the kings who built their cities with forges fueled by dragon fire were also true. So then the silly rumor that the greatest temples built by man were baptized in the blood of dragons for luck was also true.

And it was found that the human empire was guilty of being bathed in the tears and suffering of dragons for centuries. Until only the survivors who had managed to hide in the quietest corners of the world were left. Seething at the injustice of it all. Weeping as they failed to recover the corpses of their loved ones to mourn properly. As they were all made into armor and weapons. Used as decorations in palaces and sat upon as thrones.

Sakura was serving as arcane advisor for the emperor of a thriving human nation when the war began. It had been a few years since she had last gone to war. Her last deployment had left her with a few battle scars. But it was for other reasons she had chosen to step off the battlefield and to serve in a different capacity.

She had been in the palace when the great dragon had swept in. So large that it had cast a shadow across the entire building. And then with a terrible shriek, it had torn through the stone defenses and ripped the emperor into pieces. She remembered running through the crumbling halls, Temari clutching blindly for her hand through the dust and fire. Temari was screaming for Shikamaru, as if her voice would carry over the shrieks of the dragons swirling above.

The palace collapsed as dragons smashed into the sides and set the parapets ablaze.

Sakura only remembered it in flashes. Stumbling down steps. Crawling in the darkness as stone dust filled her lungs. Finding Shikamaru and some other familiar faces huddled in the dungeons. Temari collapsing. Weeping. Arms thrown around his neck as they held what each thought they had lost.

The only thing she recalled perfectly was the hollowness that expanded in her stomach. Wondering. Wishing that in all this chaos that he was safe too.

Blood began to fill the grooves in the cobblestone. Cities fell first. And then it was the towns and villages. Flame rained down from above to scorch the farmlands. Humans fled from place to place, skin hanging from bone. Clutching their wailing children and what few possessions they had managed to drag with them.

It was Shikamaru who came to her first. Begging her to stay.

She refused at first. Who was qualified to bear such a burden? Certainly not her.

But Temari pleaded. And then Tenten, hobbling on her broken ankle had thrown herself at her feet to beg too.

So Sakura stayed.

They found an abandoned fortress that built down into the earth, rather than up. It was an old thing, filled with spiders and moss. But bit by bit, they cleaned the stones and reinforced the walls. Soon, they had a place they could sit and talk rather than huddling in damp caves.

Word began to spread that there was a safe place. People began to arrive, ragged and half-starved. Some took up the sword. Others were bakers, blacksmiths. Healers arrived in waves as they fled smoking battlefields. Orphans arrived carrying even younger orphans.

Other settlements began to emerge from the ruin. They found ways to trade information and food. Something resembling order began to poke its head out from the ground.

Sakura marveled, not for the first time in her life, at the resiliency of humans.

It was now two years since the world had ended.

But people continued to live. Stubbornly refusing to collapse against all the death and destruction.

Sakura lifted her head as she heard rain begin to patter against the top of her tent.

Once upon a time, she would have woken to the rain just like this. The weight of his arm over her waist comforting- not smothering. The fingers of his other hand tangling into her hair. She would shuffle closer, pressing herself to the warmth of his long breaths.

He bit her shoulder, softly. Eyes still closed as he took a deep breath.

She remembered him like that. Chose to.

Sakura threw her arm over her face now. Or at least, tried to. Searing pain ripped through her, all the way from her shoulder to the tips of her fingers. When she cried out, she heard a commotion outside.

"Is everything alright?"

She cracked her eyes open in time to see Shikamaru throwing her tent flap open. He carried a sword in one hand. There were soldiers running up behind him.

"I'm fine," she croaked, rising on her uninjured elbow. But her arm gave out and she collapsed onto her blanket.

"You look worse than you did yesterday," Shikamaru told her. He ducked under the flap. The soldiers stayed outside. She could see from their shadows that they kept their swords drawn.

"I'm fine," Sakura insisted, aware that her lie fell flat. As she pulled herself upright again, she felt her arm shaking. She glanced down. Her bed was covered in blood.

"Alright, maybe I'm not," she amended. Shikamaru was staring at her blood too.

The bleeding didn't stop. It slowed if she rested enough. But the second she was moving at more than a snail's pace, it was seeping through her bandages again. It baffled the healers, who insisted that shouldn't be the case. Stitches corroded overnight. Even the most exotic potions and bindings didn't stem the flow of blood from her shoulder.

So Sakura bound it as best as she could and let her shoulders and sleeves turn red as she went about her day. There were too many people relying on her for her to sit still for too long.

The attacks continued.

The dragons cut off their sources of food and weapons. Some of the skirmishes, the humans managed to win. But more often than not, the dragons took far more lives with ripping teeth and spouts of flame that broiled people alive in their armor. Many of the soldiers looked green when supper included roasted meat. They pushed away their plates, trying to not to retch at the horribly familiar smell.

They kept a list of the dead and held funerals for those they lost each month. More refugees arrived to fill in those gaps. And Sakura learned their names and their faces, only for their names to end up on the list too.

Loss became obvious. Sorrow became common.

But still, those stubborn little humans continued to cling to hope.

Foolish, in her opinion. But commendable all the same.

She wished she knew how to hope too. But whether she had forgotten how or whether she had never known in the first place was something she wondered when she lay awake at night.

One evening, armor smoking and her side gushing blood, Sakura stood in the middle of the battlefield.

Shikamaru hated it when she went out with the troops like this.

"You're a symbol. If you fall, everything else will too," he sometimes nagged her.

She knew that wasn't true. Humans were strong that way. Even in the midst of their deepest grieving, they had a way of picking up the pieces and trudging ahead. That was one of the things she loved about people.

The lieutenant who would have led this mission had fallen ill. And she hadn't trusted the younger, less experienced soldiers to fill his place. So she had donned her armor and led the troops herself.

She didn't know who betrayed her. Maybe it was a spy. Maybe it was an intercepted letter somewhere. But the dragons lay in wait as they snuck through one of the last safe paths. The first screams of panic as two soldiers went up in flames still lingered now as she swung her staff. She sent missiles of ice to try to pierce the thick hides or to damage their leathery wings. And when the blood ran down her arm and made her staff too slippery to grip properly, she ducked further into the forest to seek cover.

"There's too many of them. We need to retreat," one of the soldiers hissed as they took cover behind a tree.

"Have you seen the others?" she asked. Her eyes scanned the trees, but it was too dark to make out anything. She felt sick to her stomach again.

"I saw some of them head for the waterfall. There's a tunnel we might be able to take underground to the springs," he answered.

She choked down another breath. Good. There was hope then. That at least some of the soldiers would survive. At least a few names that wouldn't end up on the list tonight.

"Go after them. Head back home and let the others know that this path isn't safe anymore," she urged. There was a rustle. She held her pointer finger up to her lips when the soldier looked ready to protest.

Go, she mouthed again.

When the soldier frowned, she grabbed him by the front of his shirt with a fierce look. She shoved him, mouthing the word again.

He was a good soldier. After a moment of silent protest, he slunk off into the woods. She counted his steps.

1, 2, 3.

When she had given him enough time to move, Sakura exploded out of the trees, making as much sound as possible. It wasn't difficult to stumble and gasp. The pain in her side was enough on its own, but the wound in her back was excruciating. Her lungs constricted too much but didn't expand enough. Cackling screeches echoed all around her. She felt her foot step and miss the ground.

She was tumbling down the hill. Twigs and stones smashing into her body, her face. The world spun over and over again. By the time she was at the bottom of the hill, she couldn't tell whether she was staring up at a perfectly dark sky or down at the ground. By the time footsteps crunched toward her, she realized that she was sobbing in pain.

"Found her! Over here!"

There were more shouts that echoed through the woods. More footsteps approached.

Sakura winced when someone grabbed her by the hair and jerked her neck back. A voice hissed close to her ear.

"And here's the little human-lover. Call him over. He'll want to slit her traitor throat himself."

Someone dug their foot into the wound on her side. She screamed. There was more laughter.

The pain and exhaustion overwhelmed her. Tears running down her face, she tried to remember why she was here. The soldiers had to escape. They needed enough time to run. Just a little more. Just hang on a little more until-

"What's going on here?" A cool voice broke into the conversation. Someone had just been boasting about skinning her prize. They stopped mid-sentence.

A single set of footsteps drew closer. Sakura whimpered as the hand on her hair tightened.

"Oh, there you are, Sir. We've found her!"

The nausea returned as she heard a very familiar sigh.

"I said to capture her alive. Not to drag her like an animal."

She grunted as the hand released her and she fell face-first back into the mud. The footsteps drew even closer. There was a long moment of silence.

The fingers that touched her face felt rough. But they were exceedingly gentle as he pulled her away from the ground. A strangled cry of agony gurgled up her throat as the rest of her body moved to follow.

His voice was too close. Almost against her cheek as he murmured. "Still alive after all this? You never cease to amaze me." There was no cruelty in his tone. Only genuine admiration. It made her hate him a little more.

"Gather what supplies you can and return to the base. I'll handle this," he then barked.

Sakura couldn't understand what the others said in response. Because his hand skimmed over her injured shoulder and another scream of pain burst from her. With more force than she had even thought her body capable of making.

"….What… is this." It should have been a question, but his tone stayed flat.

A sob slipped through her lips when he touched the wound again.

"This… why do you have this?" he muttered.

She didn't have the energy to answer him. She slumped forward. Her forehead landing against some part of him. She squinted her eyes shut. Willing for all of this to end quickly.

"Don't die on me yet, my love. It seems I still have some questions for you," he sighed as she felt her consciousness begin to drift.

And then, mercifully, darkness.

"….I thought I said I didn't want to be disturbed."

"Apologies, Sir. We've received word from the western armies."

"Summarize it."

"They've suffered great losses. The Commander requests to withdraw his troops to take some time to recover."

There was a long exhale. And then the sound of a quill scratching along paper.

"Permission granted. If we don't hear back from the eastern front in the next few days, send some soldiers to investigate."

"Yes, Sir."

A heavy door slammed shut. There was another sigh before footsteps tapped her way.

Sunlight fell on her cheek. She could feel the warmth. Papers rustled someone near her. When she felt the hand touch her cheek, she kept her eyes shut.

"Don't touch me," she warned.

"You're welcome for keeping you alive through the night. It was festering," he told her.

Sakura opened her eyes to glare at him.

"So now that I've done you a favor, why don't you do me one? Tell me how you got that wound in the first place," Madara commanded.

Her lip pulled back in a snarl.

He smiled back with teeth just as sharp.

It had been two years since the world ended and Madara had left her side. One day, he was matching each step, rucksack over his shoulder as he wandered ruined libraries and thumbed through crumbling books with her.

They were part of an expedition to find the lost histories of some distant ancestor for some noble with too much money. If this noble could prove his ties to this figure, it would have given him the right to usurp a sizable territory. It wasn't a cause Sakura particularly cared for. Land squabbles were pointless. But knowledge was notl.

Temari and Shikamaru had been the ones to assemble the expedition. And they had only known to ask for Sakura when Tenten had been hired as muscle and recommended a much-needed scholar for their job.

Madara was the expert the noble had insisted join them on the expedition.

He looked to be twice her age. He had a perpetual look of disdain on his face and criticized every other book he read.

Sakura had fallen head over heels for him.

For his careless smirks. The way he held a book in his hands. The way he could glance up at the stars once and know where they were.

With him, there were no bad questions. No silly suspicions. When she spoke, he soaked in her every word as if they were sacred texts from the most holy scriptures. He made her feel like he had never spoken to anyone so fascinating in his life before.

Which was why she had felt safe, curled up in his arms at night. The autumn chill just strong enough to give her an excuse to snuggle a little closer. When she peered up into his face, he was smiling. She rubbed her knuckles across his stubble. The way he closed his eyes made her feel like it would be alright if she told him.

"I'm a dragon."

"That's not a reference I understand. Is that from a poem?" he responded. The warmth in his voice made her chest ache a little.

"Madara."

His eyes opened. Searching her face for something.

"I've never told anyone this before," she added, voice barely above a whisper.

His hand emerged from the covers to cup her cheek. And then he moved his other arm to wrap it around her. Drawing her closer.

"Tell me from the start, my love. I'm listening," he assured her. The way he said that made her brave.

They spent the entire night that way. Madara asking questions here and there, but mostly listening. And her finally telling him the truth of her childhood spent frolicking in treetops. Learning to fly from her father and learning to hunt from her mother. Keeping far away from humans. Moving their nest as soon as they heard any commotion larger than the dash of a deer through the brush.

"Can you turn into one?" She remembered him asking that. Eyes glittering with excitement.

"I could. But I'd break the tent."

She remembered his laugh. Wondered how someone could laugh handsomely. But he did.

She was thrilled at how he accepted even this strange part about her. She recalled feeling so glad that she had chosen to trust him as she fell asleep in his arms.

A few months later, he was gone.

When the dragons appeared and razed the human cities, Sakura had spent every night hoping that he was somewhere safe.

That was, until reports came in of the ancient dragon who led the flying armies.

When she first learned the news, all eyes fell on Sakura in the strategy tent. In those early days, their forces were small. But that meant that everyone knew her. Knew about her missing lover. The scholar who could make her smile using an atlas.

Sakura stumbled outside the tent and vomitted at the news.

He had lied to her.

She had trusted him with her biggest secret.

And in exchange, he had lied to her. And then abandoned her.

Which was why, after all these months of war. Watching his troops destroy the humans and smash their lives to pieces, she snarled at him when he tried to touch her hair.

She dragged herself into a sitting position, even as the room spun.

"Careful, love. You'll hurt yourself," Madara was immediately fretting. When he reached for her again, she rebuked him with a snap of her teeth.