Chapter 15
Chapter Summary
"I'm headed straight for the castle,
They've got the kingdom locked up,
And there's an old man sitting on the throne that's saying
I should probably keep my pretty mouth shut." - Castle, Halsey
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Sakura wakes up with a kunai already pressed to her throat. "Don't move." A calm, level voice commands her.
She doesn't move.
"Open your eyes, slowly." The man continues, and she opens them - slowly - to find it isn't a man at all.
White Zetsu, her mind hisses, her fingers instinctively twitching at her sides. She blinks up at the 'man' with narrowed eyes and he looks back down at her. It's the true 'Zetsu' and his black half is missing.
His eyes, green and unnatural, peer down coldly at her. "You have a job to do. Look to your left." He commands icily.
She glares at him for a moment before she turns her head slowly to the left, the kunai scraping softly against her skin. Obito lies on a rock slab a few feet away, blood dripping down from the stone, and there's another Zetsu hovering over him with what looks more like a butcher knife than a scalpel. He's hacking away at Obito's arm-
Sakura swallows back bile, too used to gruesome sights to let this one affect her. "A job?" She asks in a mild tone as she looks into the darkness that surrounds them.
A cave, she's certain, and there's… something inside it. She can feel it even if she can't see it, and she thinks it's behind her.
"Yes. Your job is to save that one's life." The Zetsu pauses for a moment, kunai pressing down just enough to draw blood, and she winces at the sting of razor-sharp metal. He pulls it away and she turns her head to glare at him, anger intensifying at the vicious smile he wears. "Good luck." He says lightly.
Sakura slowly sits up, rising fully when no one reacts, and turns back to Obito.
There's blood everywhere. The Zetsu hovering over him - looking ropey and his face swirled in a way that reminds her of 'Tobi's mask - is holding the knife in an almost confused way.
Sakura steps forward without allowing a hint of her anxiety to show.
She isn't about to give these child butcherers the pleasure of seeing her squirm.
"Get out of my way." She tells the Zetsu, lifting a hand to draw on a chakra scalpel. The Zetsu jerks away quickly, half-dancing as he goes, and she takes his place at Obito's side.
It's a wreck, but not a terrible one. The... removal would have worked, Sakura can tell - but if Obito would have lived long enough was another question. She sets to work carefully undoing the unnecessary damage and cutting away what needed to be removed, all the while keeping her ears open and her eyes carefully wandering.
The cave is nearly - nearly pitch black. But the longer she watches, the more she can see, and there's a faint outline of something huge some ways away from her.
And between it and her, a human figure that looks small and frail compared to the massive object.
Madara, her memories supply. Obito, the Zetsus, the cave… It all connects to Madara, so it must be him.
Damn, Sakura thinks, closing her eyes for a brief moment.
How the hell am I going to get out of this?
Her work goes completely uninterrupted. The cave is eerily, and if she allows herself to admit it, terrifyingly silent aside from the hum of her chakra, the dripping of blood, and the occasional squelch.
It's not until she's putting the finishing touches on the amputation that the Zetsu approaches again. "His leg?" He asks, and Sakura looks down to the limb in question. The boy's hip had been mangled in the rockfall, and so too had the top, outer half of his thigh.
"Salvageable. It's the rest of him I'm worried about." Sakura responds curtly. "His ribs are practically dust. The only reason he's still alive right now is because I healed his lung and I'm manually encouraging it to breathe. He has no ribs. The second he wakes up and so much as breathes too deeply, there's nothing I can do for him."
"Then remove them."
Sakura stares blankly at Zetsu.
"Remove the ribs. Remove the flesh. We'll replace it."
"Replace it." Sakura repeats flatly.
"Keep him alive." Zetsu commands sharply in response, turning and walking towards the massive silhouette on the other side of the cave. Sakura watches him go with narrowed eyes, one hand on Obito's chest and the other on his shoulder. One to keep him breathing, the other to keep him from bleeding out.
She doesn't remove anything until Zetsu returns, chunks of a white, fleshy substance in his hands. She stares at it, brow furrowed and mind working through memories of dreams and a life past lived. Obito's chest had been cut in half, one half flesh and the other half made of Hashirama's DNA. Was this…?
"Remove it." Zetsu repeats.
She stares at him for a long time before she swallows thickly and begins to cut.
Sakura's twenty-three. She's been through two wars and going through a third. She's seen life be created and she's seen death come in the blink of an eye.
She's been born twice, and she's died once.
And once you've died, there's very little have left to be afraid for.
Unfortunately, Madara's plot had stumbled on one thing she is still afraid for.
Obito's self and sanity.
The process to remove and replace a quarter of the boy's body is grueling and horrifying. The way the fleshy substance moves and transforms under Zetsu's hand, consuming the boy's organs and cradling them like muscle and skin would…
Watching it is the most disturbing thing she's ever seen.
And she's seen a lot.
"Behave and we won't kill you." Zetsu warns her when he attaches a shackle to her wrist. It's massive and designed to more than just capture shinobi - but to also cripple them in the process. It siphons away her chakra, using it to reinforce the chains, and there's little she can do to fight it. She suspects she could rip her hand free if she was desperate enough, but she'd be dead before she could escape in her state.
She's died once before - the thought of dying again doesn't frighten her at all.
But the thought of the world repeating itself does, and she has to stay alive if she wants to help keep Obito sane. She needs to stay alive for that.
So she lets the creature shackle her.
She lets him order her to check on Obito, examining him with the small amount of chakra she's allowed to keep, and that's enough to keep her busy.
But then one day becomes two, and two days become four, and four days become a week.
A week, and already Sakura can feel it picking away at her. It's not just the boredom - or rather, the absolute lack of ability to do anything but occasionally look over Obito.
It's the darkness and the silence that are getting to her. The longer it goes on, the harder it becomes for her to tell reality from an overactive imagination. Things move in the corners of her eyes and she can't tell if they're Zetsu's or nothing at all. Faint murmuring that she can't tell where it comes from, and she can never make the words out.
It's rapidly becoming a living hell.
It takes another week for Obito to be healthy enough for her to let him wake up. The fake, fleshy substance made of Hashirama's DNA has latched onto his skin, and under Sakura's guiding hand, it's taken proper root.
Obito wouldn't have to deal with it potentially falling off him, but he'd still have to be careful not to move so much the flesh changed shape on him.
It takes two weeks in total for her to release Obito from his chakra-induced coma.
But finally, he wakes up.
"I don't know how that rockfall didn't crush you. It's almost as if you were able to slip away from it…" Madara says hoarsely to the confused boy.
"Where was I?" He asks weakly and Madara hums softly.
"You were lying in my underground passage… next to the rockfall. But half of your body was crushed, indeed, though my servants treated you… with some assistance." Madara's gaze flickers briefly to hers and she shudders at the red gleam she can see even in the darkness. Obito must not notice the glance because he doesn't turn to look as well.
Good. He'd pull some serious stitches if he tried that.
"So you saved me? ...Thank you." Obito says with painful sincerity.
"It's too early to thank me. You'll have to repay me this debt. You said your motto was to help the elderly, did you not?"
"Well… Yes, that's true. But… what do you need?" Obito asks in confusion. Sakura grimaces, lips twisting against the hand over her mouth. Zetsu's hand, holding her tightly against the distant wall. Madara's silent for long enough that Obito starts up again. "I can't stay here too long. I need to go back to Konoha! There's a war going on, and I just awoke my Sharingan! I can finally protect my friends!" Obito says, so earnestly it hurts.
He has no idea the monster he's talking to, and this just drives the point of Obito's current innocence into Sakura's heart like a knife.
"Protect your friends…? With that body, you can't go back to being a shinobi." Madara says quietly and condemningly. Sakura twitches slightly. The hand around her face pulls her head back so hard her neck pops.
"What?" Obito questions, voice rising. "No, no, no! I just finally got my hands on the Sharingan! Now I'm confident that we can work together as a team! I can finally be a shinobi who can protect his-"
"Face your reality." Madara cuts him off harshly. "This world is full of things that don't go as you wish. The longer you live, the more you realize that reality is just made up of pain, suffering, and emptiness." Silence lingers after that proclamation, broken when Madara continues on. "In this world, wherever there is light where are also shadows. As long as there are 'winners' in this world, there are 'losers' as well. And from the desire to protect love, hatred is born."
He pauses for a long minute, while Sakura takes slow and careful breaths through her painfully upturned head. "There are people who were saved because you were lost. Am I wrong?" Madara asks coldly.
"What the- That doesn't mean I need to stay here forever!" Obito snarls furiously.
"If you want to leave," Madara says icily, "then do it. If you can move, of course."
There's no smugness in his tone, but there's plenty in his words, and for once…
Sakura gets to feel a bit of smugness.
Because she's the best damned healer in the world now, and Madara had underestimated her. Obito could move if he chose to.
Perhaps not well, but well enough that if she can make an opening for them to escape…
But, no. She can't. Not yet. The timing is beyond poor, but that doesn't mean she has to wait long…
"Old man," Obito says suddenly, cutting through the tense silence that had fallen in the cave. "Are you a missing-nin? Who are you?"
She hears footsteps quietly creeping away from Obito and rustling. Someone sitting down, she thinks. "I'm… a ghost of the Uchiha." Madara says gruffly. "I am Madara Uchiha."
Silence settles again at that proclamation. The hand on her head eases a little, her neck craning a bit less tautly. Pain zings up and she knows the asshole Zetsu had done some damage.
Asshole.
"By Madara, you mean my ancestor? That's impossible! He should be long dead by now!" Obito argues.
"Perhaps. I escaped death… but if I don't keep constantly absorbing chakra from the Mazō, I'll die immediately."
Mazō? Sakura recoils slightly at that. The Gedō Mazō? She wonders, a shiver running down her spine. Just thinking about being anywhere near the shell of the Jūbi makes her feel ill.
"I'm going home!" Obito cries out, a hint of childish desperation entering his voice. She hears him move, standing up - and then she hears him fall. "Ugh! My leg…" Sakura closes her eyes at the tone of his voice.
The kid is only thirteen, and she can only imagine the horror he's about to experience. To find out you'd had a quarter of your body replaced by essentially alien matter while you were unconscious…
It was unthinkable.
Unimaginable, even.
"Give up. There are no exits here." Madara tells him coldly.
Not yet, Sakura corrects. There will be once I see an opportunity.
And she can't wait to break a hole in this hell-cave.
"Neither you or I are able to leave this place with our current bodies. If you move too much, the artificial flesh I stuck to your body will be ripped off. Do you want to die?" Madara questions.
Obito stands up. She can just barely see him moving, taking a heavily limping step towards her. She doubts he sees her - it had taken nearly a day for her eyesight to adjust enough to the darkness to see three feet away from her own face.
"There are quite a few things I want you to do for me from now on. After all, I saved your life. Don't be so eager to throw it away."
"What do you want!?" Obito half-screams. "What does an old bastard like you want with a kid?!"
"I want to change the fate of this world. A world of winners. Of peace, of love. And I'll make a world of just that."
"I don't care!" Obito snarls back at Madara. Sakura closes her eyes, tempted to roll them at Madara's words.
All Madara wanted was a lie. A ridiculous lie.
"I just want to go back to my team!"
"As I told you, things don't go as you wish." Madara informs the boy flatly. "One day you'll realize that too." Obito limps ever closer, slowly and weakly but with the kind of determination that reminds her of a blonde haired boy when he was the same age. "If you really want to die, I won't stop you." He says mildly. "But I'll take your Sharingan."
Obito hesitates.
"Why… Why do you want my eye? You already have a Sharingan!" Obito fires back fiercely, but his voice wavers.
"I left my real eyes to someone else. This one… is just a spare. And I'm missing a right eye. You need both to awaken their full potential." Madara explains calmly.
Heartless, Sakura thinks darkly. Genuinely heartless.
Obito hesitates, takes one more step, and then pauses.
He stares right at her, a little more than fifteen feet away, and blinks.
"...Uzumaki-sama?" He croaks out in a heartbroken, confused tone of voice, before his leg gives out and he falls.
With the Zetsu holding her tightly, all she can do is watch silently.
Hang in there, Obito, Sakura thinks as a second Zetsu grabs Obito and helps him back to his feet.
The boy stares at her, lost and dazed, before he gives in to the Zetsu's prodding and slowly limps back to his bed.