A/N: I don't know. I don't know. I'm literally writing these chapters in frantic six hour bursts and then slapping them up here before face-planting into the nearest pillow. Please excuse any errors and the actual mess I'm creating.
Warning for an upsetting discussion of Rin's canon story (as I remember it, it's been a while, I may have inadvertently changed some things to suit the story), which is just an upsetting thing in general.
I do not own anything, and am making zero money off of this work.
Sakura
Sakura took a breath, and took stock of the situation.
She had to, because her boys wouldn't. Kakashi-Sensei was capable of it, she knew. Had a genius-level ability (that he hid behind eye-smiles and being late and porn) to enter a situation and wholly, totally sum it up in a matter of seconds. Had twenty-seven plans in his head within an instant of arriving on a scene, even as he faked out the participants with lazy banter and an orange book in front of his face like a fan, hiding his true expression. Unfortunately, he also had a tendency to lose that ability, totally and completely, when said situation dealt at all with his own personal trauma.
Sasuke occasionally, very occasionally, stopped to consider what was going on. But only ever in the middle of it, and only after he'd already done forty-two things to make a situation worse (which, really, explained so much about his life choices thus far).
And, of course, 'Naruto' and 'preemptive consideration' were like two continents separated by thousands of miles of ocean and maybe a mountain range. Zero contact, only a theoretical awareness of each other.
Honestly, Sai would have been Sakura's best ally here, because he was totally capable of assessing a situation, even if he oftentimes used that assessment to come to a totally wrong and usually mystifying conclusion. But Sai was currently being stubborn about both regaining consciousness and stopping the internal bleeding in his lumbar region, so.
Sakura took a breath. And considered.
To her left, halfway swallowed by trees that had been bent and blackened by jutsu attacks, surrounded by earth that had been disrupted and gouged deep by claws and a katana, stood Naruto and Sasuke. Barely visible in the radiant, ominous wash of Naruto's red chakra. But visible enough that Sakura could see the terrifying mask of the Nine Tails on Naruto's face, the way that his features were barely visible behind the crackling, stinging cowl of the fox, the way that human awareness in his eyes had drained away, leaving behind the blank consideration of a predator, his head cocked a terrifying two inches to the left as he stared at Sasuke.
Sasuke, who stood deep in the personal space of a legendary tailed beast like he didn't give a single shit about it, fist cocked back to hit him for a second time, clearly three actions deep into making this situation worse and thirty-nine left to go before even the possibility of reflecting upon his decisions.
At Sakura's knees was Sai. Battered and broken in a way that his stupid fake-smile hadn't revealed. Battered and broken from holding the line like he'd promised, giving his team the space they'd needed to get Naruto back, like Sakura couldn't read the resignation in it. The gentle, understanding way he'd offered himself up for the worst aspect of this mission because it was the one on the outside, and he still believed that that was where he belonged. Sakura felt the urge to scream at Sai until her vocal cords went numb, and also a tenderness so acute that it ached, a painful and soft-edged recognition that made her want to cradle her teammate close and assure him that he was worth more to them than cannon fodder.
To Sakura's left was Madara—except, no. To her left was Obito Uchiha, apparently. Kakashi-Sensei's former teammate, one of the deepest cracks in his heart that he'd never been able to heal, the man that Kakashi-Sensei spent hours talking to at the memorial stone when he tried to convince them he was off getting waylaid by forest robbers or mystical animals or his own wandering attention. Obito Uchiha, somehow still alive and curling his fingers deep inside the crack he'd left behind, and Kakashi-Sensei had gone totally limp in response. Passive and unresisting as his former teammate punched his hand inside his deepest hurts, like it was something Kakashi-Sensei thought he deserved.
Sakura inhaled, breathing in her own fear, her creeping desperation, the panic that wanted to cloud her eyes entirely (because she'd learned, somewhere in-between watching her teammates chase after the things that hurt them most and cracking the earth apart beneath her fists in an effort to purge her own frustrated weakness, that shoving the worry and fear away didn't work—that she had to feel it before she could turn it into fuel instead of failure).
On the exhale, she ground the worry between her teeth, swallowed the panic whole. Because here in this clearing they had Naruto about to go off like a flash tag and destroy everyone in the immediate vicinity with only Sasuke to hold him back, Kakashi two seconds and one accusatory word away from becoming an absolute storm of wordless guilt and allowing his former teammate to obliterate him, Sai bleeding out at Sakura's feet with a smile on his face because he had at least a decade's worth of Root conditioning and an entire lifetime's worth of abandonment issues under his belt, and Sakura herself, with no tragic back story to her name other than the one currently unfolding right in front of her.
So, she breathed and she allowed herself to feel afraid and then she got the fuck over it by sheer force of will, because someone had to see clearly enough to prioritize this situation.
Priority #1: Sai. Had to be Sai, because while the other boys were also drowning in tragedy at the moment, they were at least conscious enough (mostly) and uninjured enough (mostly) to paddle their arms a little and keep their heads above water. But Sai needed a medical evacuation two hours and three broken ribs ago, to a quiet place away from immediate danger where Sakura could focus on healing him properly, instead of channeling just enough chakra to stem the steady pooling of blood inside his gut and against his spine.
Priority #2: Naruto. Could have been Priority #1 because he was arguably the bigger risk at the moment, but Sakura had (somewhat, mostly despairing) faith in Sasuke's ability to at least keep Naruto's attention focused on him for the time being. Naruto's attention had been focused on Sasuke for years, and so it would be muscle memory by now, easy, an instinct that Sakura wouldn't have thought Sasuke could utilize for good. Except that something had changed inside the genjutsu this second time around, behind the barrier that had kept Naruto away from the rest of them. And Sakura didn't quite trust it yet, hadn't had the time or the breathing space to analyze it properly, but she was grateful for even the tiniest bit of progress that allowed her to put Sai definitively on top of the priority list, instead of having two screaming #1's and then Kakashi-Sensei hemorrhaging emotions as a close second.
Priority #3: Kakashi, and whatever the hell was going on inside his head right now. But Kakashi-Sensei was mostly uninjured and Sakura was a healer first. She could only fix emotions once the body was stable enough to house them. Once they escaped from this whole stupid situation, and the spirits of almost half of her team had stopped trying to either escape from their body or be swallowed deep inside of it, Sakura could drag her teacher out into the wilderness and stare down his defensive wall of bullshit until he cracked enough to talk about his feelings.
Maybe she would hate herself for it a little bit, later. That she couldn't make her beloved Sensei's visibly turbulent feelings a higher priority. She'd definitely hate herself a little bit later for how she was about to use them.
But Sakura had learned about impossible situations in the last four years (because when you were weak, when you were in the process of growing strength rather than already being strong, nearly every situation was an impossible one). She'd learned about using anything, everything, whatever you could get your hands on, as a weapon. Naruto would disagree with her, she knew. Would shout about 'a better way' and 'Sakura, you can't', and Sakura loved him for it. It was why he'd make such a great Hokage—that idealism, that belief that results could always be obtained with things that kept your hands clean (sweat, effort, trust). It was also why Sakura had been quietly aware of her own destiny for a while now, hers and maybe Kakashi-Sensei's, too—to be the needles in Naruto's sleeves, thin and unobtrusive and seemingly harmless but more than capable of delivering the results of Naruto's idealism through means he would never think to stoop to.
They had to get Obito out of this clearing. Had to get him away. They couldn't beat him like this—couldn't even fight him, really. So they had to get him to go. But to make him sacrifice the prize he'd been pursuing (Naruto, and the fox), especially when it was so close after so long…they'd need something huge. Something shattering. And Sakura…Sakura hadn't agreed to be the Hokage's apprentice just so she could learn to heal wounds and tear apart forests with her hands. If anything could be a weapon in an impossible situation if you knew how to use it, then Sakura had decided a long time ago to know everything.
Kakashi-Sensei would understand what Sakura was about to do. Would probably even be proud of her for it later, which was maybe something Sakura should have regretted, but she was far too practical to turn away any of the strength she'd cultivated across the years.
"Kakashi-Sensei," she called, working shock into her voice, onto her face, even as her head ran calculations and her hand never wavered in its near-brutal stranglehold on the blood wanting to fill Sai's lower region. "This is your teammate? Obito Uchiha? But you said-you always said—Kakashi-Sensei, he's supposed to be dead!"
"I'm surprised you told your new team about me," Obito murmured. "Considering how little you cared for the last one."
Asshole, Sakura wanted to say, but she held her tongue. Because—yep. There was Sasuke, ready to enact move #4 in Making This Situation Worse and say it for her.
"Asshole," he snapped, totally ignoring the way the abrupt sound of his voice made Naruto shift at his side, predator-smooth.
Sakura carefully modulated the gasp that came out of her mouth—loud enough to be heard, but soft enough to sound real. "You—of course Kakashi-Sensei cared about you! Cares about you! He—he visits the memorial stone every day! He talks to you every day! How could you think-?"
Her outrage (actually legitimate, because honestly, what was it with Uchihas and their determination to interpret any positive feeling as abject betrayal) had the intended effect of drawing Obito's eye. His singular visible eye in his knotted and gnarled mask, probably meant to represent the growing twistedness of his inner self or something, because every male that had even the faintest connection with Sakura's team was The Most Dramatic.
That Sharingan-red eye widened the tiniest amount, and then narrowed, because of what Sakura knew he was seeing. What she'd wanted him to see.
She'd heard what he'd said, after all.
You killed her.
And Sakura might not have a tragic backstory of her own, but she'd been managing them long enough to know: when a statement like that was the first thing dropped in the inevitable conversation of realization and regret between the two Tragic participants, then it was the thing that had been festering the longest, the infected wound that had started this whole poisoned path they were walking.
You killed her—and from there, it was an easy enough extrapolation to determine who 'she' was, after spending time in the Hokage's secret archives, the one passed from leader to leader like a personal history, carefully genjutsued against eyes that might have seen her, grimly reading file after file of (more often than not) Leaf Village atrocities that had been kept quiet and tucked away.
(Naruto would never know about this archive, if Sakura had anything to say about it—which was why she had to know it for him.)
Sakura could guess who 'she' was, and so she was aware of the parallels Obito was drawing inside his head as he looked at her, the ones she was careful to keep projecting in her face and her actions, even as she allowed her voice to tremble, her hands to shake, under his regard.
This, too, was a weapon. The ability to encourage underestimation. One of the deadliest in Sakura's arsenal, one that she didn't think that anyone on her team except for Sai could really understand the potential of.
"Little girl," Obito said (asshole, Sakura decided again, without allowing the thought to curl her mouth or make her deliberately widened eyes narrow). "Your Sensei has been fooling you all these years, letting you believe that he cares for you. Allowing you to care for him in return. If you really knew what he brought to his teammates, you wouldn't be so quick to defend him."
Sakura shook and shook and used it to cover the way she was slowly, carefully, knitting Sai's ribs back together. Not all the way, because she didn't have the chakra for it. But enough for what she'd need later, if this worked. "Of course Kakashi-Sensei cares about us! Just like he cared about you! Kakashi-Sensei, tell him! Tell him how much you care."
The look Kakashi-Sensei dragged her way at Sakura's call was blank, absent, unseeing.
"How completely you've managed to deceive them, Kakashi," Obito said, more than a hint of bitterness coiled inside his voice as he looked back at Sakura's teacher. "But what would your precious student say if she knew how you really treated your teammates? About how you treated your female teammate, in particular?"
Kakashi quivered a little, swaying in place. Sasuke bristled, like he was gearing up for Movement of Making It Worse #5: punching my blood relative in the face, which in turn made Naruto growl, low enough to shake the tree branches over head. Sakura felt the moment go razor-thin, as tight and deadly as ninja wire.
She had to do this perfectly. Precisely. Or else.
"Your female teammates?' Sakura furrowed her brow. "Does he…Kakashi-Sensei, he means…Rin?"
Kakashi swayed again, and later, Sakura would be sorry about it (maybe, maybe). But Obito swayed, too, and that—that was what Sakura needed.
"Do not," he snapped, the bitterness more than coiled in his voice now. Hissing, spitting, a snake fully on the defensive. "Don't speak her name in front of him. The one who killed her doesn't deserve to hear it."
Kakashi did more than sway this time—he crumbled. Sasuke paused mid-bad decision, head cocked, confusion in the subtle fold of his face. Sakura took advantage of his momentary stillness, of Obito's total attention on Kakashi, to flash a quick hand sign in Sasuke's direction, a silent communication.
Wait.
It was an ancient thing between them, something from the days of first learning battle tactics and mission strategy as the newly formed Team 7. Coming up with a secret language of signals, known only to your team, something much more difficult for an enemy to interpret. Ancient, but Sakura knew that Sasuke would recognize it, because (between Sasuke, Naruto, and even Kakashi-Sensei himself, sometimes) it was the hand signal Sakura had used the most.
Wait.
'I know what I'm doing," Sakura tried to elaborate with her eyes. 'Calm down before you mess everything up for me.'
'What the fuck,' Sasuke's non-expression communicated back, but it wasn't 'sorry, I can't hear you over my overwhelming need for pointless vengeance' and so Sakura could work with it.
"Killed her?" Sakura repeated, voice quavering.
"With his own Chidori," Obito hissed, his eye narrowed on Kakashi's face, years and years worth of carefully concealed hatred clawing upward in the suddenly uneven jerk of his voice, his hands. "Killed her, the one person he promised me he'd protect! What was I supposed to do, Kakashi, other than this? If you couldn't protect her, then I had do something to bring her back."
Well. That was…some kind of motive, that Sakura would unpack. Later. She took a deep breath and shook her head, mouth dropped.
"But that's not—that's not right! Kakashi-Sensei!"
Kakashi-Sensei sucked in a breath that sounded like a death rattle. "Sakura. It's…fine. It's right enough. I did…I did kill her."
"No." Sakura didn't have to fake the tears that brimmed in her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. Her Sensei's voice was an ache in audible form, a hurt so deep that everyone could hear it. "It's…no, Kakashi-Sensei. That's not right. If this is why he…you can't let him think…!"
Kakashi-Sensei didn't say anything at all, because he really was so incredibly useless when it came to his own feelings, but Obito swiveled his head back in Sakura's direction and that was enough.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "What are you talking about, girl?"
Call me 'girl' one more time, Sakura's inner self invited, deadly quiet, even as she scrubbed at her running eyes with one hand (the other one siphoning Sai's blood back it where it was supposed to be, safely tucked out of sight). "He…I'm the Hokage's apprentice. I saw…I have access. To her files. And I read…well. Kakashi-Sensei never talks about what happened to his team. About how much they meant to him, but never about what happened. And I…I was curious. Sensei, I'm so sorry. But I read the reports. About you. About Lord Minato. And about Rin."
Obito made a swift, slashing movement with his hand. "Who needs a report? I know what happened. Kakashi killed her with his own jutsu."
"No!" Sakura let her voice catch, hitch around a sob. "Not on purpose! Not like that! Rin was…it was her choice!"
"That…ridiculous!"
"It's not! She…they turned her into a Jinchuriki. That wasn't her choice. But she couldn't…she wouldn't allow them to use her to hurt the Village. So, she decided…she…you must have known her better than anyone, if she meant as much to you as you say! Even in just the reports, I could tell how…good she was, how noble! Do you really think she would have let herself be used like that?"
Obito went very, very still.
"Enough," Kakashi's voice was raspy, weak, a whisper. "Sakura, enough. It's true enough. I did kill her, it was my jutsu, even if it wasn't…"
Sakura was about to push—just a little bit more, that was all they needed. But then, some kind of miracle happened.
Sasuke also went still, stopped to consider, actually consider (thirty-eight whole decisions early…Sakura was boggled), and said, "Was it my fault then, Kakashi? What Itachi did to my clan? Because I wasn't able to stop it?"
HOLY SHIT, A RATIONAL THOUGHT, Sakura's inner self bellowed, even as she continued to cry softly, piteously, on the outside. She didn't want to point it out, and spook Sasuke away from whatever logical thought process he'd managed to discover.
"You tried to recruit me to your cause because we share more than blood," Sasuke pointed out to a still un-moving Obito. He was speaking to his relative, but his eyes were far away, like his words were coming from somewhere (or someone) else. "We both know what it's like to lose everything, too. But you can't…you can't blame someone for what they didn't know enough to stop."
Later, Sakura decided that she would gift Sasuke with the biggest, bloodiest sparring match that would cause significant property damage and maybe a broken nose or two. It wasn't her preferred way of rewarding just a stunning amount of personal growth, but it was the only one Sasuke would understand.
"She's not here," Obito said. His voice wavered a little, but it was enough. It was enough, because something sparked and caught in Kakashi-Sensei's eyes, the faintest snap of awareness. "She's…she's not here."
"But that's not Kakashi-Sensei's fault!" Sakura insisted, and she didn't need to fake that, either.
"And you…can't assume that your vengeance is what the not-here person would want." Sasuke's mouth twitched—might have been a tiny bitter smile, might have been biting back something way more revealing. "It's usually not, I promise you. It's…it's for you. Just for you. And they'd probably be super pissed if they knew about it."
Seriously, Sakura was going to fight him until he had a whole broken arm and gleefully crazy eyes later, that's how proud of him she was.
"Obito," Kakashi murmured, and there it was. Finally. Thankfully. That last component Sakura needed, that hint of life in Kakashi's voice, that urgency that came with him being reminded that this was a teammate, this was one of his important people, right in front of him and needing help. Nothing for Kakashi-Sensei had ever been more motivating, in his experience with Team 7, and this was the root cause of the reaction, so motivation times a million. "It's…they're right. They're right. Whatever you think. Whatever I actually did. Rin wouldn't…she never would have wanted this."
"Shut up." Amazing, how the smoothly cultivated Uchiha exterior was melting away, now that Obito was faced with the uprooting of the foundation he'd built his purpose on. Sakura had thought it might be ingrained in him, that smooth coolness even in the face of opposition, like Itachi. But now that he was shaking apart in front of them, she saw more of Sasuke in him than his unflappable older brother.
So many of Kakashi-Sensei's complicated feelings when it came to Sakura's bitchiest teammate suddenly made sense.
"Shut up," Obito repeated. "You don't know—you can't—she was!"
"She was more than what your payback would turn her into," Sakura said, quiet now, even now, because she could be. And when Obito looked at her, and saw the carefully drawn parallels between who Sakura was now and the girl he'd been willing to wreck the world for, he couldn't avoid the truth ringing in her words, because it came from both of them. "And she deserves more than to be remembered as the reason why so many people suffered."
Obito stared at Sakura—a warrior, a healer, working to save her teammate's life even in the heat of battle, chin lifted defiantly now that she didn't have to hide it. Sakura watched entire an entire belief system begin to shake apart inside his visible eye, and took quiet satisfaction in being the one to rattle it.
He stared at her and when Kakashi-Sensei took a single, lurching step forward, with a quietly uttered, "Obito", their greatest enemy spared Kakashi-Sensei's outstretched hand a single stunned look and then turned on his heel and disappeared.
"Oh," Kakashi-Sensei murmured as his hand closed around empty air.
"Oh, fuck," Sasuke agreed, as Obito's chakra faded away like lightning after the strike.
"Shut up," Sakura snapped, 100% unwilling to revel in the silence of Obito's departure because she was apparently the only person present to understand that they weren't done. "Kakashi-Sensei, Sasuke, get over here. And bring Naruto with you."
Sasuke looked at the still seething-frothing Naruto and then back at Sakura, eyebrow not-cocked, like he hadn't just punched him a few minutes ago.
"Now," she said, in a voice that implied inordinate bodily harm to the person who dared refuse her. "Quit being a baby. I'll fix any parts of you his chakra tries to burn off."
Sasuke muttered something like 'I think I liked you better when there was hero-worship', but mostly to himself and so Sakura didn't have to throw a kunai at him for it, because that was still forward progress.
He didn't wince as he grabbed Naruto around the arm, even though Sakura could see the way his skin reddened and blistered at the direct contact. He also didn't flinch when Naruto let out another one of the wordless, unearthly howls that shook the air and earth around them. He just dragged a legendary tailed beast toward Sakura, because Sakura had demanded it, and wasn't that a wonder?
"Kakashi-Sensei," Sakura snapped, because he was still staring longingly at the place where his former teammate was no longer standing, and Sakura had learned after years of dealing with Naruto that a no-nonsense approach was really the best way to handle it.
Kakashi-Sensei shook himself, and then hurried to Sakura's side. That spark of awareness in his eyes was growing, gaining momentum, enough that there was a realization there as he crouched down on Sakura's left and met her gaze. Sakura returned his look of dawning awareness calmly, evenly, without flinching or any kind of apology.
It's what you would have done, she thought, let it bleed into her eyes for the barest moment, and saw a rueful acknowledgement in the dip of Kakashi-Sensei's chin.
"My student," he rasped, and it was something he called her often, but this time it sounded more like a title than an endearment.
Sasuke finished wrestling Naruto in their direction, even as he roared loudly enough to silence the birds, the bugs, and even the wind around them. Sakura didn't look up at him, because now more than ever, her attention needed to be on Sai.
Sakura waited patiently for a moment in between howls, and then said, as firmly as she could, "Naruto. Enough."
Sasuke, blistered all the way up to his biceps now, threw her another one of those 'what the fuck' looks. But Sakura just repeated (because no-nonsense was best), "Naruto. Enough."
The faintest stuttering of the next howl. Sakura waited it out again, sweat beading and rolling down her back from the intensity of Naruto's chakra, and then continued speaking in the silence that followed. "It's done. The threat is gone. We're not in danger anymore. Put the fox away—we don't need him to protect us, no matter what he's telling you."
She gritted her teeth as she spoke, because this was a much more difficult kind of multi-tasking than before. Her chakra supply was depleting quickly, but she still needed—just a little bit more—
"We're not in danger," she repeated, because words would have to work until her actions came through. "But we will be, if you don't stop. Look at Sasuke's hands, Naruto. Look at what you're doing."
Naruto's head swiveled abruptly, instinctively, like even the fox couldn't stop Naruto from checking on his friends. His howls tapered off even more as he studied the angry, reddened skin now climbing toward Sasuke's shoulders.
It was a low blow, maybe. Targeting Naruto's concern for his friends, the deeply seated fear that Sakura knew he carried in his heart: that he would be the one to hurt them. But this was an impossible situation, too, and anything was a weapon.
Naruto made several confused grumbling sounds, choked-off howls, as he scanned the clearing next, obviously looking for the threat the Sakura had already taken care to get rid of.
"We're safe, we're fine," she chanted, even as inside her head she breathed come on, come on, just a little more. "But we won't be, if you let the fox win. We need you, Naruto. You, not the Nine Tails. Sai needs you."
And then, right on cue (thank the powers above for Sakura's precise chakra control), Sai opened his eyes.
Just a little, and in a face still obviously drawn with blood loss and pain. But it was enough. Especially when he was able to murmur, "Sakura? Naruto? What…?"
Naruto reared back like he'd been struck. There's was a great, shuddering sound, a final roar of outraged defiance, and then the sudden and startling temperature drop as the burning red chakra receded, rolling back swiftly enough that Sakura was going to have to examine Naruto later, make sure his chakra pathways had escaped without being scorched, accelerated healing factor be damned.
"Wha…?" Naruto, their Naruto, made a weak gurgling sound. Toppled forward out of Sasuke's grip, pale as parchment and clammy with sweat, blue eyes dazed and distant. "Blargh, wha…?"
"Oh fuck," Sasuke said again, too dignified to slide down right next to him like he obviously wanted to, but having made enough forward progress to hunch forward a little.
And Sakura, shaking to bits with adrenaline crash after a sustained and violent surge of it, skin prickling with goosebumps in the absence of Naruto's burning aura, weak and watery-limbed and nauseous with chakra depletion, her head aching like a punched-out tooth after the careful deliberation of every single millisecond for the last several minutes, finally allowed herself to echo Sasuke's words, before laying her head down on Sai's somewhat stabilized side and laughing until her ribs hurt with it.
A/N: I DON'T KNOW. I'M SORRY, I REALLY DON'T. Next up, Naruto POV: Hello, nice to meet you, I am the human embodiment of an anxiety disorder hidden behind a smile. Happy Reading!