Chapter 16
Chapter Summary
"It's the nature of the experiment,
It's the patterns of my temperament,
It's the nature of the experiment,
They're taking me in increments." - Nature of the Experiment, Tokyo Police Club
Obito's first glimpse of the Uzu Clan Head isn't a good one. Her dark red hair is matted even in its braid, and her cheeks are starting to hollow out. Her dark green dress is filthy and wrinkled, her hands shaky, and there's a manacle tightly wrapped around one, thinning wrist. It glows faintly with chakra, and the sight of it sends his stomach sinking. A chakra chain.
With that around her wrist, she won't be able to help him escape - and the fact that they were even able to capture her…
No, his first glimpse of her isn't a good one.
His second glimpse is markedly better.
It's the next day, right after he wakes up again. One of Madara's creepy white creatures pulls her forcefully over to him. She staggers at the tugging, her messily braided hair waving, but moments later she's leaning over him. "Check on him." The creature commands her.
Uzumaki-sama bares her teeth viciously. The creature sneers back but steps away from them, and Uzumaki-sama looks down at him. His worries immediately begin to fade away, because he recognizes the look she wears.
Suddenly, Obito can really see they she's related to Kushina-chan, because she wears the same terrifyingly fierce expression he's seen Sensei's girlfriend wear.
"Hang in there." She commands him, quiet and as fierce as her expression, and he feels his wavering determination solidify. Her hands glow faintly as she holds them over his chest and shoulder, but her gaze is locked on his as his discomfort begins to fade.
"I will, Uzumaki-sama." He promises after a long minute and she nods curtly.
"Good. And call me Sakura."
Sakura worries constantly.
She worries about her usefulness to Madara wearing out before she's ready. She worries about Obito's body healing too slowly. She worries about the cave eating away at her damned sanity.
She worries about her clan, and she worries about Konoha. She worries about Kushina possibly being the one left in charge, and the mere idea of the woman standing in for her at Council meetings makes her heart twist with anxiety.
Kushina in charge would either hard-hand them into respecting her authority, or accidently bulldoze all of Sakura's hard work in building up the Clan's reputation.
If she's anything like her son, it'll somehow be the first option.
She worries constantly, and there's little else she has to even do.
Except plot.
She plots, and she plots, and she plots.
The Gedō Mazō's presence changes things. She hadn't been able to make out the giant silhouette's features before, but now she can recognize the shape of it's head, looming behind Madara's faint visage. Yes, the Gedō Mazō changes things.
She can get rid of Madara - but the statue, not so much. And if she can't get rid of the Gedō Mazō, she can't stop the Fourth War. Which means she can't stop the Fourth War, period. She'd forgotten - or never known? - that Madara was the one to summon the statue out of the moon, not Pain. If it had been Pain, she had the chance of stopping him. She'd even had a tentative plan to try and assassinate the boy in Amegakure. Hanzō was dead, which meant that he'd either already killed the boy that made Nagato become Pain, or he'd died before he could with the new timeline.
Sakura didn't know for sure if Nagato was Pain or not - but she'd planned for it. She'd planned for the damned statue.
Now that plan was out the window. Whether Nagato is Pain now or not, he still has Madara's eyes, and the Gedō Mazō's still on the planet - which means Black Zetsu has everything he needs to bring the Jūbi back again.
Everything but his perfect slave and the Jinchūriki.
Sakura's gaze darts over to where Obito lies after a long day of attempting to walk.
He's almost there.
He's almost there, and Sakura's not sure what she'll do when he can make it.
She could kill Madara, but what could she possibly do about the Gedō Mazō? The Sage of Six Paths himself couldn't destroy the damned thing, what could she possibly do to it?
What could she possibly do about…
Sakura blinks.
And then she blinks again, her brow furrowing.
Maybe… just maybe…there was a way to stop Black Zetsu once and for all.
But first…
She needs to get out of this damned cave.
She waits three more days.
Three more days of basically starving, almost all the food going to Obito and Madara.
She's allowed to approach Obito, the intention for her to do as she has been - stand him up, steady him, and help him walk slow circles around his bed.
But she doesn't reach Obito. She gets halfway there, and then she acts.
She wraps her free hand around the shackle on her wrist and pulls as hard as she can, the metal cutting into the flesh of her thumb joint. It only takes one brief, painful second, and then her hand is free and she is as well. She lunges, ducking under Zetsu's swinging arm, and charges even as her chakra wavers without the chain siphoning it away.
Madara has just enough time to stand before she's on him.
It's dark, so dark that she can barely see him - which is why she doesn't notice it in time.
The man is old, but he's not helpless.
Even as she swings at him, his scythe - since when did Madara use a scythe?! - sweeps up and sinks deep into her side.
The breath leaves her and she drops, catching herself on her knees, and the scythe is ruthlessly pulled away.
Her body feels cold and tingly.
The scythe trembles in Madara's grasp as he begins to move it again.
Sakura lunges, fist flying, and his scythe stops mid-descent when her hand goes straight through his chest.
Blood truly flies, Obito chokes, and Sakura watches Madara plummet.
She can hear things moving, so she moves herself. She jumps to her feet, staggering at the harsh sensation of wrongness in her side, and seizes Obito. "We're moving!" She snarls at the boy, gasping in breaths that should hurt a lot more than they do. Shock, she knows, and she's happy for it. It'll keep the pain away for a while longer - but not that long.
She needs to move, and fast. Obito stumbles at her side as she searches out the cave, looking for the entrance.
It's a massive boulder, reminding her of the one that had blocked the cave Gaara had died in once. She dives for it, Obito grunting in pain at their speed, and crashes her fist into it.
One excellent thing about Tsunade's strength technique is that it only requires a small bit of chakra. Just a flicker of it, carefully timed, and the boulder explodes under her touch. She hefts Obito up and throws him over her shoulder, ignoring his pained and startled grunt as she does. She hurries into the tunnel, moving as fast as her feet can carry her.
Yin Seal: Release! She makes the quick sign for it.
A faint trickle leaks through her body, her chakra redirecting to the wound in her side. It's deeper than she thought, and bleeding badly enough that the blood's already soaked down nearly to her ankle. "Behind us!" Obito screams out and Sakura twists, side protesting as she does, and roundhouse kicks a swirl-faced Zetsu.
She doesn't expect the way the swirls unfurl, fleshy spikes cutting like razors. "Ahg!" Sakura chokes out, pulling her foot back with five deep gouges in the skin. Fuck this, she pumps her chakra into her legs and focuses on running like hell.
"KATON! GŌKYAKŪ NO JUTSU!" Obito bellows, and heat bursts against her back. The creature cries out, sounding more like a sobbing child than a shrieking monster, and the noise makes her stomach twist sickeningly.
There was simply too much wrong with the pets of Madara.
No, the pets of Kaguya.
Sakura leaps over a chunk of rock, both her and Obito grunting when she lands again. She stumbles briefly, head rushing at the jump, before she shoves herself forward again. "You're bleeding." Obito says in a tone of realization. "Really bad."
She can feel the blood under her heel now, making her bare foot slippery.
"Well, you're not wrong." She huffs out, ignoring the blood - and ignoring the steadily growing amount of pain she feels from her side. Her Yin Seal is pathetically empty. Chakra still trickles from it, knitting together some of the damage, but the wound is bad. She can tell that much without having to see it.
It's bad, and so is their situation.
Sakura takes slow and steady breaths.
She keeps going.
Sakura can honestly say that the last place she expected the tunnel to dump them out in would be on the north-eastern border of Takigakure.
It's a day's run to the Land of Fire, three days to reach Konoha - and Sakura's already almost done with running.
Her left ankle wavers with every step and her right side burns like both fire and ice at once. Every breath feels like it's sucking away her life force, and it might as well be.
She's starved, chakra deprived, and missing a whole lot of blood.
"Obito." Sakura begins tiredly, the boy limping at her side now. What a pair they make, really. His right arm - or, rather, the flesh that replaced his right arm - is bound tightly to his side, wrapped up so thickly she can barely even tell it's there. "You might have to leave me behind."
"No." He instantly shoots down that idea. "No way. We're in this together, senpai."
"I'd really rather we weren't." Sakura protests weakly.
"Too bad." Obito fires back without hesitation, eyes blazing. "We're going together. We gotta keep moving. Just… keep healing, alright?" He says, wavering just a little as he looks at her blood-soaked side.
The gash slicing into her skin is still alarmingly huge, but at least the blood is finally slowing down. There's nothing left in her Yin Seal to heal herself, but she nods at Obito anyways. "I will." She lies - and he believes it.
If she starts to lean on him after a few more minutes of half-running, half-limping, he doesn't seem to notice.
By the time they reach the border, Sakura's being half-carried and half-dragged by a half-cripple.
It would be funny if it weren't so disturbingly ludicrous.
It's a group of five shinobi that find them - a skirmish team - and they make noises of shock when Obito introduces themselves.
It takes a second to confirm herself as an Uzumaki (her red hair and Uzushio hitai-ate, once she can lift her head enough to show it sitting on her forehead) and him as an Uchiha (his remaining Sharingan eye), and then they move so fast she's lost in a blur.
They're immediately picked up and carted back to the closest border posting.
Once there, the nearest medic-nin takes one look at her and knocks her unconscious while Obito makes a noise of alarm from her side.
The last thing Sakura remembers is thinking that the medic-nin is competent, at least.
She wakes up in Konoha, with Obito curled up on the bed next to hers. Sakura blinks at him through groggy eyes, half-turning towards him before she stops and leans back with a small groan.
Her side aches viciously, and after a moment of intense throbbing, she recognizes the sensation of stitches.
I haven't needed those in a long time, Sakura thinks, her mood darkening at that.
She's become too reliant on her Yin Seal. On her ability to heal herself on a second's notice. She's forgotten what it's like to not have the chakra or strength to just heal herself out of every situation.
She's gotten careless, and the thought makes her stomach twist sickeningly.
Naruto would be ashamed of me. Sasuke and Kakashi would be ashamed of me. Sakura thinks unhappily, and she lifts her good hand to cover her closed eyes. The three of them never stopped trying to improve, never. And she had, to a deep cost. Shit, I really fucked this one up.
But…
She lowers her hand and looks up at the ceiling, brow furrowing in concentrated thought.
But that doesn't mean it has to stay fucked up.
There's a thought, a beginning fraction of an idea, stirring in her mind. She's carried it since the cave, but now that she feels halfway alive again, she can really start considering it.
And it might not be the worst idea ever.