Chapter 2
Chapter Summary
"You hear them when you try to fall asleep,
They crash to the shore,
They come from the deep.
As sure as the sun will rise, the sun will set,
You taste the salt the closer you get..." - Blondefire, Waves
She's born with red hair so dark it looks black without light touching it. She's born with dark blue eyes that become lighter and lighter until they're the color of glaciers. She's born long and skinny to a civilian woman and a shinobi man who snickers as he looks down at her. "We ought to name her Tsuru." He suggests, and grins shamelessly when his wife pulls one arm from the newborn to smack him on the bicep.
"Oh, be quiet. That's hardly something to joke about - imagine the harassment the poor thing would get." Her mother huffs, looking back down at the newborn. The father does as well, eyes softening before he sits on the edge of the bed for a closer look.
"She has my hair." He notes and his wife hums absently.
They sit in silence, watching the tiny thing sleep away obliviously. "I think I like the name Sakura." The mother says quietly.
The father blinks dark blue eyes, brow furrowing slightly as he looks down at the infant with new eyes. "...That's not a very pleasant name, you know. It's beautiful," He adds quickly but quietly, "but sakura blossoms... they're fleeting. Beautiful but short lived."
The woman bites her lip, staring for a moment longer before he gaze flicks up to meet his. "You think she'll live a dangerous life? Become a shinobi like you?"
His lips quirk in amusement and a small hint of wryness. "Can you imagine a child from us not being one? She'll be the smartest, most beautiful, and most impossibly stubborn kunoichi of our time." He huffs, grinning, and even the worried woman can't help but smile a bit.
"The stubbornness comes from you."
"I'd disagree, but you'd stubbornly insist." He shifts slightly, prodding her hip with his knee, and she rolls her eyes. "I'll teach her everything I know." He says decisively. "Everything. Unless she doesn't want to learn it, or wants to learn something I can't teach - and then I'll find the best teacher in all the country for her." The man vows firmly. "You could give her the most ominous name imaginable and it wouldn't matter because she'll be the best kunoichi of our time. The absolute best."
The woman stares at him intently, searching his determined expression before she smiles tiredly again.
"Sakura it is, then." She says softly.
Heisui knew what she was getting into when she married her husband. It wouldn't be, she'd known at the time, an easy life to be a civilian married to a shinobi. To live every day never knowing if she'd see him the next. If he'd ever come home again.
She'd known when she married him, and she's always been prepared for the lifestyle.
But when her daughter turns three and Heisui walks in to find her playing with a kunai, carelessly left there by the girl's father, she almost chokes on the emotion that rushes through her.
Her husband, she'd known. But from that moment on it's obvious which parent her daughter is going to take after, and the fear that grips Heisui's heart takes her breath away.
"Sakura," She forces out roughly, and her own voice breaks her from her frozen horror. She rushes forward and snatches the kunai from her overly curious daughter, but not before the girl has cut her finger open on it. "Oh, Sakura, no- you can't play with that, girl!" Heisui gasps, tucking the kunai into the folds of her kimono and scooping the child up.
She doesn't even cry. The girl just looks down at her finger with a tight frown, brows pulled together, like it's some puzzle she doesn't understand. "It hurts." The girl announces and Heisui's heart twists at the conflicted tone in her voice. Like she doesn't know how to feel about this fact. Heisui quickly sets her daughter on the edge of the bathroom counter, scrounging through the medicine cabinet for some treatment and bandages.
Her daughter never once winces, just watches the motions with a small frown and a curious expression that unsettles Heisui.
Her husband was a renowned genius, and she's starting to realize that the girl takes after him in more way than one.
It's not long after that that Sakura's father picks her up and walks her around the village. The people greet him with smiles and cheerful hellos, and Sakura get especially spoiled by their fondness. Almost every few feet he has to pause to say hello to someone, to let them get a good look at his beautiful daughter, and he takes those moments to watch her himself.
His wife had told him about the kunai. Had cried into his robes and cursed him for his pronouncement at their daughter's birth. She'd blamed him for the girl's interests, for her inevitable future as a kunoichi. But it hadn't taken long for Heisui to pull herself together again, her familiar stubbornness rising in the face of his promises.
"She'll be trained by the best, Heisui. Myself, and all my greatest shinobi. Our daughter will become the best kunoichi - and by the time she's done with her training, she'll be so great that she'll never bleed again," he'd sworn fiercely.
"Yes," his wife had decided firmly, eyes burning with the fire that had captured his love for her. "She's our daughter, after all."
And now, watching Sakura take in her home and all it's people, he only feels more reassured.
Her ice blue eyes are bright and searching, and he can see the way she takes in everything and almost seems to memorize it. From the people's faces and words to the cracks in the cobble under his feet, Sakura watches it all. Her genius is clear even just from the way she observes the world, and he wonders if maybe she might surpass even him one day.
They've been out for nearly two hours when a young boy, a student, he thinks, approaches them. "Akataki-sama?" The boy asks shyly, cradling a small scroll to his chest, and the man immediately crouches down. The boy must be only six or seven, just starting his apprenticeship, and it takes Akataki a moment to place him.
"Yes, Hikaru?" He questions, settling Sakura on one knee and holding her with an arm around her tiny shoulders. The boy glances at her before offering them both a tentative smile. He holds out the scroll and Akataki takes it, shifting his grip on Sakura so he can hold her and open the scroll at the same time. It unravels and Akataki's eyebrow rise at the work painstakingly painted inside.
He spends the next hour alternating between praising Hikaru for his work and explaining every last detail of the seal to Sakura, who listens with an attentiveness that goes beyond her age.
Yes, Akataki thinks as he smiles warmly at the two children.
This girl will be great.
Sakura's two when she starts to have the dreams.
She doesn't really register it at first - she's only two, and she's smarter than she has any right to be but she's still two. She's more preoccupied with exploring every single thing she can get to than any sort of weirdness that might happen in her dreams.
But when she's three they start to sink in. The tree-surrounded village, parents who aren't like hers, bullying and misery and a blonde-haired girl who makes it better. She starts to remember those dreams. They stick.
By the time she's four, she knows a lot. She knows enough that now when something's out of her reach, she manages to get to it anyways. It's her father who catches her doing it - walking up the wall so that she can get to one of the books on the second-highest shelf.
Sakura immediately stops, dropping to the floor and catching herself clumsily - and if she'd failed to, her father's right there in a split second, his hands already grasping her shoulders as her feet touch the ground. "Where," her father asks with wide eyes and a tight jaw, "did you learn that."
I dreamt it, she wants to say, but she's four and already knows that's stupid. No one would believe it, and it sounds really dumb, so Sakura bites her tongue and blinks at him until she can think up a half-truth to offer. "I saw people doing it." She explains, and that's basically true.
She saw someone named Kakashi walking up a tree and expecting them to learn from observing - and she had.
So she really isn't lying or even misleading when she implies that she learned from seeing it.
Her father blinks at her very slowly, expression weird, before he exhales heavily.
"Right. Of course you did. You… saw people doing it. And learned from that?" He says half to himself but she nods anyways. His jaw unclenches and after a moment he offers her a genuine smile. "Gods, but you are a genius aren't you?" He murmurs, pulling her into a tight hug.
She's not entirely sure why he's hugging her, but she hugs back anyways.
She dreams about having and loving other parents, but she still loves hers, so she wraps her little arms around him and fists the back of his shirt. Sakura hesitates for a moment, uncertain about his earlier reaction, before she whispers, "I wanna learn more."
Her father pauses, then pulls away from the hug. His hands are heavy but gentle on her shoulders as he stares at her intently, eyes searching hers. "What would you like to learn, Sakura?"
It only takes her an instant to answer with a fierceness she gets from her (second) parents. "Everything." Sakura whispers.
Her father smiles.
Sakura goes to work with her father sometimes and sits in his big office, reading books he offers her to keep her entertained.
Hokage, the office makes her think, but that isn't right. She doesn't live in the leaves anymore - she lives in the sand and around the water, and the Hokage doesn't matter here. Even if he's important in her dreams.
This time, though, when her father takes her to his office, it's different. There aren't any books on the table next to the sofas, but there is a shinobi standing in front of his desk. "Sakura," Her father starts with a somewhat stern tone that has the shinobi turning with a frown. It's a kunoichi, Sakura corrects mentally, blinking at the woman. She has black hair and brown eyes, so she isn't an Uzumaki - but there's something to her posture that draws Sakura's attention.
She moves with a level of grace that Sakura's never seen before, not even in her dreams.
"This is Unabara. She's here to ask you a few things." Her father explains.
The woman stares down at her for a long minute, arms folded across the ocean-blue vest she wears, and Sakura stares back up at her curiously. Then Unabara gestures to the sofa and table, and Sakura silently follows her over.
The woman does ask her things, but not just a few of them. She practically interrogates her, asking about everything. Her chakra, her personality, her weaponry preferences, which is what finally clues Sakura into what's going on.
Her deduction is confirmed when Unabara frowns at her and asks, "How much do you know about the process to becoming a shinobi here in Uzushio?"
Uzushio is small.
She doesn't have many shinobi, she doesn't have many villagers, at least not compared to other countries - but she's always, always been able to stand on her own two feet.
Uzushio is small, but Uzushio is strong, and two weeks later Sakura is starting to understand why.
Uzushio is small. They don't have enough shinobi for the full four person teams she dreams about, and they don't have an academy to teach students anything beyond world history. No, they don't have the people for that. Instead, they have partnerships. Almost every team in Uzushio is made of two people, and the others made of three. The training methods are the same way.
Unabara is her sensei, and Sakura is her only student. A genin at the age of four.
It allows for much more specialized training, Sakura realizes as she ducks under a vicious kick Unabara sends at her head. One on one, Sakura has learned more in the last two weeks than she dreams of learning in two months.
Uzushio is small, and her army is made of packs of two, but that makes it impossible for someone to get left behind. Sakura dreams about another place where the armies are packs of four, where one student had been trained the most and the other two had been left lagging behind.
"It's the Hidden Dragon style," Unabara explains to her when they take a short break from the taijutsu practice. The jōnin is a taijutsu expert - apparently the best in the village. She moves like water, Sakura learns with both a sense of amazement and a sense of fear - because she learns it while trying to avoid death at the woman's hands. Unabara moves like water, but she clashes with all the unforgiving nature of the ocean she's named for. "You're young, but I can already tell you're going to be the right fit for this style. Long, sweeping movements, but brutal blows."
"Hidden, because you look weak. You dodge, you duck, you swoop, you twist. You avoid blows like a coward, and then you strike with the ferocity of a dragon." Unabara lectures her sternly. "You're young. Too young, most would say, but I can see the look in your eyes and the speed you're learning. You'll have this down in two years at the most - and after that, I'll teach you the Tiger's Fury style for when you have to fight large groups."
Sakura nods, thinking of another world where she'd learned to destroy with the touch of a single finger, and figures she'll probably learn that style even faster than this one.
She's five when her father sits her down and sets a pile of books and blank papers in front of her.
He sits beside her, one arm wrapping around her tiny shoulders, and begins to teach her every aspect of every single seal detailed in the books - and then he watches with unnerving intensity as she struggles to use this knowledge to make her own.
She's six and it's been a year and a half when Unabara declares her 'good enough'. She sic's her on two genin, and it takes her twenty seconds to have them both on the ground.
She sic's her on two chūnin after that, and it takes her a minute.
Then Unabara sic's her own four chūnin, and Sakura gets three down before she loses. "Good enough." Unabara informs her as Sakura watches them pick themselves up off the ground.
Any other chūnin would be annoyed at being beaten by a six year old - but they grin good naturedly at her, brushing themselves off.
She wouldn't have won if they'd been fighting her earnestly. They were strictly taijutsu, and Sakura knows for a fact that that's the only reason she took any of them down.
"The Hidden Dragon style is only meant for single combat. One on one. One on two, it's still damn effective, but much more difficult. Against three, you start to lose. It's not built for large scale combat - but if you're one on one, you'll win almost every time - no matter who you're fighting." Unabara tells her firmly. "Now, the Tiger's Fury style is different." Unabara pushes away from the rock she'd been perched on, gesturing to all of Sakura's opponents.
They surround her and Sakura steps back, eyes narrowed to watch.
"All of you at once. Don't hold back anything." Unabara instructs.
The two genin and six chūnin strike as one, with impressive coordination considering the team style Uzushio uses.
It takes Unabara thirty seconds to have them all on the ground gasping, weapons and the remnants of jutsu surrounding her. There's a small knick in the shoulder of her shinobi vest. It's the only sign that anything at all had touched her during the ridiculously brief fight.
The jōnin takes her time to help each of them to their feet, looking them over for any serious injury, and Sakura watches intently.
The style reminds her of her dreams. Of the blonde haired woman she'd called 'shishou' who had fought with sheer, relentless strength instead of the absurd grace that Unabara favors. It makes her feel strangely wistful - tugging at her heart - to compare the new style to that woman's.
They're similar, to an extent, and when Unabara finally turns to her and says, "This one will take you three years," Sakura considers for a moment before shaking her head.
"One year." Sakura says decisively.
Unabara opens her mouth, looking briefly annoyed, before she pauses. She searches Sakura's expression, distracted now as the girl thinks back on all the dreams she'd had of her training with that blonde madwoman. "...One year, then. I'll hold you to it." Unabara warns.
Sakura blinks from her thoughts and then flashes the woman a toothy grin. "One year." She repeats.
And as the battered shinobi make their way out of the training yard, Sakura can't help but recall the other things that blonde woman had taught her.
She dreams.
It's something Sakura's starting to find stranger and stranger as the years go on, but also more and more comfortable. She's always dreamt, as long as she can remember, but she hadn't understood them then. She hadn't paid attention, not like she should have, and now Sakura does.
She dreams every night of the sprawling village, easily twenty times the size of little Uzushiogakure, where their vests were green and their symbols were of swirling leaves. They carry Uzushio's symbol on the back of their vests, and that unnerves her for reasons she can't quite remember.
She dreams of her parents - old parents, not her parents - who had loved her but never quite understood her the way hers do. She dreams of a black haired boy with red eyes and a blonde haired boy with eyes as bright a blue as her mother's. She dreams of being ridiculous to them, sweet to one and cruel to the other.
She dreams of mourning one and learning to cherish the remaining, with hair like sunshine and eyes like the ocean on bright, clear days.
She's seven when she dreams of him dying. Of her hand wrapped around his heart, squeezing it just to keep his body intact long enough to revive him.
And then she wakes up, sits up in bed, and frowns down at her hands. She thinks about her dreams, about the lessons she'd dreamt of in the past, and tries to draw the chakra to her palms - but it won't quite work.
Her chakra had been meager in her dreams, she remembers.
Her chakra's far from meager now.
She's seven, she's almost mastered the Tiger's Fury style, and she corners her father in his office one day. "Can I help you?" He asks her uncertainly, blinking at the determined expression she wears.
Sometimes she wonders if she looks ridiculous like this, being all of seven years old with dreams of being seventeen. "Dad," She starts firmly, "I need to learn everything." She insists.
He stares at her, blinking several times, and remembers a time when she'd said the same thing. Except then she'd said 'want' and not 'need', and that has him frowning deeply as he stares at her. Sakura stares back, ice blue eyes blazing in a way that makes him think of her mother, and his frown deepens with severity.
"Where do we start next, then?"
He gives her a scroll that she recognizes from her dreams. It's almost identical to the one her dream-mentor had taught her with, the same instructions for the same jutsu tucked inside, but written with a different hand.
In her dreams, it took her a month to learn the Mystical Palm Jutsu. In her waking life, it takes three weeks - mostly because her chakra is a pain in the ass.
"This was easier once." Sakura mutters without thinking. The phrasing should feel wrong - it had been easier in her dreams, not in her past - but it doesn't.
She's too distracted to dwell on that.
Her chakra pools are bigger now - much, much bigger - and that makes it harder for her to grasp the delicacies of the jutsu. It makes her gnaw on her lip, anxiously recalling a certain jutsu that left a certain mark on her forehead, and wonders if that's something she'll even be able to do again. That had taken so much control in her dreams, and that control was so much more difficult.
But she learns the jutsu in three weeks in spite of that struggle, so perhaps…
Perhaps it isn't as far of a stretch as she thinks.
"Dad," Sakura questions with a small frown one day after training with Unabara-sensei, when she's sitting in his office and studying medical text on in depth human anatomy. She already knows it all, but it's in the back of her head, and reading about it again is like relearning it all, bringing that knowledge back to the forefront.
"Hm?" Her father questions from his desk, scribbling away at some mission assignment.
She thinks of the black haired and yellow haired boys, thinks of how badly she'd wanted to protect them in her dreams, and frowns down at her book. "Can I learn more?" She asks, her voice one of contemplative longing.
He pauses, pen freezing for a moment before he looks up at her. She looks over and meets his gaze, frowning softly, and he frowns back.
"...What do you want to learn next?"
Sakura grins eagerly at him.
This time, she thinks, I'll be able to protect everyone I love.