A/N: Hi! Let's get right to business and not waste any time. I strongly urge you to read the detailed description of this work on my profile before beginning to read any chapters. Reasoning being that a 2 to 3 sentence summary does not prepare you, the reader, adequately enough to read any works that are over 10k words long. Therefore, reading the extended description is really in your best interest. I also have a few ready-made responses for a few common complaints; before leaving a review explaining why something bothered you, check the extended description to see whether it was already addressed or not. Again, before you read, check the extended description in my profile. This will prevent you from expecting one thing and receiving another.

For instance, this story WILL have LGBT characters as the protagonists. That is non-negotiable, because this is a creative work and not an essay where content is up for debate. That being said, if you have constructive criticism on the technical skills, I'm happy to hear them!

Forewarning, this work is predominantly Sakura-centric. But! The Sakura I'm referencing is the Sakura who isn't around Sasuke; i.e., the Sakura who is brash and assertive and intelligent but not street-wise. That's the Sakura I find relatable and compelling, rather than the Sakura who fills in as "the girl one". Keep this in mind as you read: since Sakura does not have a crush on Sasuke (or any other boy for that matter), she will be the character I described above.

As a side-note, I attempted to format the work to be adhd reader friendly, using my own experiences. Paragraphs are short, some sentences are spaced outside of others, and the content inside of the parentheses serves two purposes: to give the reader Sakura's private thoughts and insecurities, as well as involve some events that are essential to the story but cannot be written in accordance to the limited POV narration.

If you have constructive criticism on how to make the story even more adhd friendly, PLEASE leave a review or pm!

I think that's it for housekeeping. Let me put in one last reminder for anyone who hasn't done it yet. Read the extended description.

Dying, she thought, was sort of liberating.

When Haruno Sakura died, she felt the guilt lift off her shoulders. Her vision hadn't faded, no she wasn't that lucky. She was stuck, laying on her back, vision arrested upward at a leafy canopy. Moonlight trickled between the blue leaves.

Somewhere, out of her line of sight, someone shouted. There was an orange burst of light cast upon the trees and their boughs. Sakura smelled smoke, though she had to concentrate to smell it past the iron-rich blood.

It hurt. Everything did. Every rise of her chest, each stutter of her lungs, each contraction of her diaphragm. Wetness spread from the punctures on the left side of her body. Blisters tore on the right side. Her skin was raw, and the dewy blades of grass tugged and scratched at it. Sakura couldn't look down, it would use too many muscles and pull too much skin and irritate already fatal wounds, but she knew intimately that there was a knife in her chest.

It wasn't a wound that people came back from. Not when there wasn't a medic, and especially not when the village walls were a kilometer away with the hospital being even further. Sakura didn't feel a twinge of guilt.

She'd done all she could with what she'd been given.

(Hadn't she? She'd always been a child that needed direction.)

Maybe this was how people died. Maybe their emotions went first, paving the way for the rest of the spirit. Maybe, had she been properly together, she would feel guilt. At the present moment, did such things matter? Was she still sworn to the village? Was she still bound by duty?

Did she have to begin the arduous process of dragging herself home so that she may die closer to the gates, making the lives of the body recovery team easier? Should she feel relief that a body recovery team probably wouldn't be sent out to collect the body of a fresh genin born to civilian parents?

There was silence. Was it hers, or was it that of the immediate environment?

Why was the moonlight getting brighter?

Sakura grasped at her sluggish thoughts, finally, arranging them in an approximation of order. Oh, she was dying.

She thought it with the same significance that one gave to un-forecasted weather. Oh, look, it's raining. Or, oh, the meteorologists hadn't mentioned it would be so overcast today. Oh, there's a sale on tomatoes. Oh, that office is closed for the weekend.

Oh. She was dying.

The grass didn't scrape her raw skin anymore. The wet blood wasn't dampening her dress anymore. Her chest wasn't throbbing. Her throat wasn't clogged. Her eyes weren't itchy and dry. And, hey, she couldn't taste iron on her tongue.

It was over, Sakura thought. All she felt was warm. All she smelled was roses and apple orchards. She tasted honey. She was weightless. Not too thin, and not too wide.

She floated, above the grass, above the canopy. Above the scorched earth, above the clouds, above the moon, above the stars.

Wait. She could feel something.

Sakura, had she the body for it, would frown.

She could feel something. Why could she feel something?

It cut through the warmth, batted away the apples and the honey and the roses. It swept her up, cupping her in the palms of boney hands. It swept back her layers of life, of insecurity, of safety, of betrayal, of obligation. It took two long, ephemeral, and rotting fingers, and jabbed them into her eyes.

It was worse than the knife in her chest. It was worse than the white flame that had licked up her side and evaporated her skin's moisture. It was worse, it was worse, it was worse.

And Sakura knew that it was worse because her emotions had returned. Her emotions had sunk below the stars, below the moon, below the clouds, below the canopy, and sunk right back into her body. And so sunk Sakura, chasing her empathy, her compassion, her personhood.

Those hands, those hands came with her, gentle now. Gently the hands plucked her spirit into forming limbs. Gently the fingers prodded her spirit to overlap her vacant corpse. First clicked her arms, by the fingertips then the wrists then the elbows and shoulders. Second clicked her legs, by the toes then the ankles then the knees then the hips. Third clicked her body, by the collar then the ribs then the fragile abdomen then the pelvis. Last clicked her head.

Exhausted, Sakura's last thought was disbelieving.

She'd been rejected. Rejected from death.

Had she the functionality, she would have laughed.

Warmth. Chirping of birds. Freshly brewed tea, followed by coffee. Muffled conversation. Something soft, under her…

Under her fingers.

Seconds after having the slow hands of the Shinigami tuck her back into her corpse, Sakura opened her eyes to a plain white ceiling.

She was alive.

(She shouldn't be.)

She was in a peculiar room. There was a floor-length mirror. There were shoji walls. There was a vanity, a dresser, and a bookshelf, all in dark wood.

Sakura lifted her hands and nearly smacked herself in the face.

What…?

Oh.

Her hands were miniscule. Smaller than they had been seconds ago when she'd been dying. They were unmarred. Without callouses.

Sakura stretched her arms out above her. If she didn't restore some of her dexterity and hand-eye coordination now, it spelled disaster for whatever came next.

What would come next, anyhow?

Sakura made spear shapes with her hands. She moved her left hand to trace a figure-eight shape in the air, tracking the tips of her fingers with her eyes. After twenty drawings, she repeated the process with her right hand. Then she did the same with her individual fingers.

Sakura swung her legs over the side of the bed.

Now that she was on her feet, all of the frenzied thoughts she'd held at bay returned in full force.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, I'm still alive. I'm still alive. I need to report to sensei. Would he recognize me? Am I still in my own body or am I possessing someone else? Am I even in Konoha for that matter? Bigger issue, time. What day is it? What year? What happened when the Shinigami rejected me? Am I still human? Mortal? Immortal? Why was I rejected? Was it before my time? If I've traveled back in time, somehow, what then? If I'm in the future, what are my duties? Could I still be a shinobi? What if I landed in war times?

Sakura took a deep breath. No point in rushing to answer those questions. At least, not when they were out of order. Okay, she could organize them. First step.

Everything in steps.

Who am I currently?

Sakura carefully crossed the room over to the mirror. And froze. That wasn't her. That wasn't her body. Where was the pink hair? Where were the green eyes? Where was her father's nose, her mother's lips, and her grandmother's jaw? This, the person in the mirror, was a stranger.

Dark, dark hair. It was wavy, just slightly. Her eyes were citrine yellow. Yellow? Her nose was more prominent than it had been. Her lips fuller. Her jaw was wider, as was her face shape. She appeared hardier than her past self.

"Sakura! Breakfast!" A voice hollered from below.

She startled. Her heart leapt to her throat. Her name. Her name was the same. Her instinctive reaction was to race down the stairs to see who had called her. Was it her mother? Was her mother the same? But Sakura held back. She reigned in the urge. If her parents were the same as before, then…

A foot stomped up two stairs. "Haruno Sakura! Get your little butt down here and eat your breakfast! Don't make me come up there!"

Sakura breathed. Her name was the same. She could work with this. She would. She had to.

Sakura combed her hair into order using her fingers. She raced down the stairs. The stairs led into a short hallway with a broom closet and beyond the hallway was a dining room. A man sat at the dining room table, forcing his eyes open every few seconds. This had to be her father.

Her noisy entrance drew his attention. "Well? What are you waiting for, girl?" he grumbled. He clicked his chopsticks together in irritation. "Go help your kaa-san."

She called her mother kaa-san in this life. Not so different. Sakura nodded quickly, but her father's attention was already back on his bowl of sticky rice.

The noise of clanking metal and popping oil came from the kitchen, so Sakura's mother must have been cooking. Sakura wandered into the danger zone.

"Is there anything I can do, kaa-san?"

Sakura's mother snorted. Her elbow jerked in the direction of the stacked dishes in the sink. "You're too small to be near the hot oil. Wash n' dry the dishes. Your tou-san will put them away."

Sakura's father leaned back in his chair. Wood squeaked under the shifting weight. "Mebuki…" he groaned pitifully.

Her mother's name was the same as her last life. That was strange. Wasn't it?

Mebuki brandished one of the cleaner steel pans in her husband's direction. "Kizashi, if you don't shut your trap, I'll leap over this counter right now and beat you senseless!"

Kizashi corrected his balance and hurriedly smiled at his wife. "Yes! O-of course, dear!"

"I'm not that small," Sakura mumbled. Her mind was whirring. Come on, come on, she thought, give me a hint.

Mebuki stared at Sakura, unimpressed. Her arms folded over her chest. "Oh? And I supposed it was some other kid's fourth birthday last week?"

Sakura slumped over to the sink. Satisfied that her daughter was acting appropriately cowed, Mebuki turned back to the fish she was cooking.

Sakura sat at the table, lowering her breakfast tray. She picked up her chopsticks, stylized with tiny cherry blossoms, and picked at her bowl of rice. Her eyes flicked up to observe her parents.

Kizashi didn't have the spiky magenta hair from Before. Instead, Kizashi had a mop of brown hair. His eyes were brown as well, not blue. Mebuki, by comparison, hadn't strayed as far. The only exception was that her clan markings around her eyes were missing.

These differences would be negligible. Had it not been for the fact that Kizashi and Mebuki did not have the developed chakra pathways of shinobi.

Sakura's new parents were civilians.

From Mebuki and Kizashi's conversation at breakfast, Sakura deduced that today was Sunday. Tomorrow, she would be attending the Shinobi Academy. She'd passed the exam two days after her birthday, which had just barely scraped her by the minimum age requirement.

Sakura set to washing the family's dishes after everyone had finished eating. She scrubbed, leaning over the edge of the sink, stood on top of a stepstool. In the living room, Kizashi turned on a box television.

Sakura ran the faucet, clearing the suds from a frying pan.

Kizashi's voice rose from the murmur he'd adopted. "…don't know what we're going to do. The last war…"

Sakura turned on the faucet again. If she'd paused in washing, her parents would know that she was eavesdropping. At least, her parents Before would have. A mother's intuition was a powerful thing, regardless, and Sakura doubted that Mebuki wanted her to know about any financial hardships they could be facing.

"…clogging up the roads. You know what Yuuto said to me yesterday? The road from Tanzaku to Kawa no Kuni has been shut down by patrols. Something's brewing."

Fuck, she was right, wasn't she? She'd been tossed into war times.

A/N: Alright! That's chapter one. If you got to this point, congrats! Now go to the ext. description and read the bolded lines just under the tags and right before the section "Explanations for AToIT".

Because it's kind of embarrassing for someone to get all fired up in the reviews about something that was already addressed.

In this chapter we see an AU Sakura getting reborn into another AU. AToIT does not have anything to do with canon. It comes close, but it is ultimately a different reality. More of this will become apparent in the later chapters.

By the way, if you want to read ahead of any chapters posted here, try AO3! I have about twenty chapters uploaded there at the time of writing this.

That's all for now!