The alarm went off in the middle of the night.
It was one of the ones that had a broader meaning, one of the first every child learned because of how important what it was—"DANGER! NEAR!"
Sakura was out of bed and downstairs before she even registered that she was awake.
Ibiki, Juro, Himari, and Fujio—just arrived home yesterday—were right beside her, and no one else was living in the home, so all of them wasted no time staying in the house.
The ninja had already grabbed their things, were ready for battle.
Himari and Ibiki grabbed each other's hands, fled to the Yamanaka Main House, where the closest bunker was.
The signal itself hadn't bothered with any kind of safety direction, not any of the cardinal directions or major landmarks, but flares were visible on several corners of the walls, all of them pointing to the northwest.
Sakura took off, leading Juro and Sayuri and throwing out her chakra sense as she did.
They were away from the buildings in no time—there was no danger there.
The danger, it quickly became clear, was in the training grounds.
In the northeast the buildings were built right up to the walls, and in the southeast the only feature in the way was the Nara woods, but towards the west were the inner training grounds, the smaller lots usually used by genin and Researchers.
Far beyond them, along the wall, the three Yamanaka could see the wall completely full, most of the bodies on it facing inward.
A sentry stood just in their path, and they didn't hesitate, but they didn't need to—the sensor, eyes darting around as his chakra brushed over Sakura and hers brushed over him, was also signing rapidly, over and over and over again, not even hesitating between each repeat.
Kidnap. Snake. Betray. S-Level. Kidnap. Snake. Betray. S-Level…
It didn't take long for Sakura to put the dots together, the very thing she'd been worried about for so long come to pass.
Orochimaru had tried to kidnap someone.
Sakura put on a burst of speed.
The alarms changed—there'd been enough time for everyone to respond to the first.
Now they rang out 'Search Everywhere', it rang out 'Capture', it rang out 'Continued Danger'.
Sayuri glanced at Sakura, and Sakura's head swung in the direction of the former lab. It was a remote location, not one that most had reason to consider, and she gestured to it, hand flashing in a sign to give the distance.
Sayuri disappeared.
Sakura and Juro kept running.
They found a genin team surrounded by what looked to be about one hundred shinobi, a new portable radio listener blaring in front of one of the jounin.
Sakura didn't take another step closer.
She couldn't.
She was in the Hokage's office.
The Hokage didn't look up when the ANBU dropped her off.
His face was barely inches over his crystal ball, eyes darting everywhere as he tried to find any sign of Orochimaru or his snakes.
"Any suggestions?" He asked.
Sakura bit her lip, giving herself a few seconds to put her thoughts in order.
She hadn't even been awake for five minutes yet.
Orochimaru, she knew, would in one world found his own Hidden Village.
Orochimaru, she knew, would ally with Danzo.
And then there were the… Akatsuki? But she'd only picked up those first memories a week or two ago, still didn't understand them.
"He'll want allies. Have allies. In and out of the village. We need to find out who is supporting him, because someone is. Orochimaru's been disappearing for years now, and to do so so well that not even you can track him…"
The Hokage frowned, then nodded.
"Any ideas who?"
"He never interacted with many people around me. Taro… maybe, but he doesn't have any power, and seems to trust me more than he does Orochimary, so probably not.
Needs to be someone powerful, though.
Probably someones."
The Hokage pursed his lips, and then the elders entered, and Sakura was whisked away.
She was in a room.
It was, based on its design choices (whitewashed walls, stone floor) somewhere in the Administrative Building.
She blinked, and then obligingly sat at the provided desk, already stacked high with Orochimaru's journals.
"I have texts at my house." She told the emptiness. She described the locations of the relevant ones—of her notes trying to decipher the journal she already had—and a minute later it appeared before her.
And then she bent to work.
She started by organizing them by her best guess at date—a book cypher. Orochimaru's favored tool, had to use an existing book, after all.
Then she looked at the oldest.
This would take time, particularly as the newest were almost definitely the only ones that held any hints to Orochimaru's current plans, but that was the benefit of using layered book cyphers—whoever was trying to trace your path had to start at the beginning.
Had to have every relevant text.
Most likely he'd based several texts on the same journal each time, not wanted to bother having to remember a different key for every book, but there wasn't any way for Sakura to easily narrow that down.
Really, all she could do was begin.
She worked until her stomach felt like it was caving in, and then she went out and bought ramen.
The village was still, quiet.
The emergency was over, the alarms were off.
Orochimaru hadn't been caught, but it had been hours—there was no point in keeping everyone packed up anymore.
Still, no one seemed particularly eager to take advantage of the crisp morning.
Stores were open, and restaurants, but most had few if any customers.
People talked in soft voices, if at all.
Years ago Tsunade, another of the Sannin, had kidnapped a child and run off, but she'd kidnapped her niece, and her reasons were known, understood—she'd been falling apart for years before, since the death of all her close family and then of Kato Dan—and no one had questions about why.
Orochimaru…
He'd had a wonderful reputation.
He was a Researcher, a career held in increasingly higher esteem every year.
He was a good Sannin, who wasn't known to have breakdowns or be lecherous.
He was considered a good boss, relatively easy to talk to given his power (both physical and otherwise.)
Some knew about his issues, about his disappearing, about his lab and how he was currently under investigation—
But everything had been kept hush-hush.
So now the people of Konoha were confused, felt betrayed, couldn't understand how it had happened.
Sakura went back to work.
On the third day Shin reappeared, talked to the Hokage, then went to the Capital the next day.
It was time to start damage control.
Shisui had been the child who was almost kidnapped, and Sakura was quick to point out Orochimaru's obsession with bloodlines—the diagrams and drawings across all the journals made it very clear that the fascination had only grown over time.
Minato asked about Obito, and everyone froze.
Or so Sakura was told.
She was still in the room with the journals.
Minato and Obito then appeared in front of her, and a Hyuuga, and the Hyuuga created representations of Obito's face, orbital sockets, and Sakura looked through every single drawing and diagram to see if any were obviously Obito.
None were, but Orochimaru had taken some journals with him.
She did say, though, that Orochimaru had removed several prisoner's eyes, and used the exact same method the Hyuuga believed was used on Obito's—she'd seen the man go through the surgery long enough to memorize the appearance of the technique.
Obito trembled all over, and Sakura said she'd watch him—Minato had so many things to do he hadn't slept in at least two days, and he was being called to the Capital himself and had to go put on make-up so it wasn't so obvious that he was running on pure anger and nothing else.
Obito sat, trembling, until Rin could come and got him.
Kakashi couldn't come, Obito explained. "He doesn't… feel right, yet. Still can't go inside Konoha."
Sakura hummed. "Have you ever met Shisui?"
Obito snorted. "I'm Uchiha. Of course I have."
Sakura hummed, flipping to a page which had holes cut out so it acted as an overlay for the next page.
"You don't have to answer this, but do you know if there are variations in the Uchiha sharingan?" The designs seemed to imply Orochimaru thought so.
Obito rolled his shoulders. "Um, I'd have to ask, I think, to answer any questions about the sharingan. But I will! Ask, I mean."
Sakura nodded, and thanked him, and then Rin was there.
Sakura went back to work.
She'd brought up the missing children fairly early on—so far the investigations had mostly assumed foreign interference, but Sakura was well aware of how important Orochiamru thought live subjects were, and many of his recent notes seemed to be about children (though it was hard to tell—the focus was usually on the internal organs. Still, based on the way he sketched the ribs, the ilia… children seemed most likely.)
She'd brought up how she, her clan head, and Danzo had been investigating, too, how she had misgivings about Danzo's aid.
The Hokage had frowned, and Minato had frowned, and then Sakura had gone back to work.
That had been before Obito.
Now, on day five, she heard reports—a graveyard found.
Children.
Mutilated.
Sakura…
Wasn't doing well.
She had the memories, she knew what Orochimaru was capable of, but he'd seemed so nice at first, so reasonable.
That had changed over time.
She'd noticed it, pursued it with the Hokage, pursued it herself, she'd pushed—
But she hadn't stopped him.
Hadn't even gotten close.
Jiraiya showed up after a little less than a week, and he took one look at her and sent her home with sleeping pills. "I'll work off your notes today. Don't come back until tomorrow—I have fresh eyes, and I want time alone."
Sakura doubted that was actually true.
Still, she knew how she looked.
She could use the break.
She downed the pills and slept, and slept, and slept.
She woke up to Ibiki beside her. "Why aren't you in school?" She murmured.
"It's the evening," Ibiki said. "Do you know every classroom has two teachers in it now? The Sensei, and an assistant. That's a lot."
Sakura rubbed her eyes. "Well, there's danger, and the war's over anyway—we have the manpower."
Ibiki shrugged. "It's annoying. We're not allowed to go anywhere alone anymore."
"Why were you in my bed?"
"You went away."
"Sorry."
"You're going away again."
"Yeah." Sakura said, and then she forced herself out of bed.
It was evening. She'd slept for over twenty-four hours.
Jiraiya looked like he'd been hard at work every minute she'd been gone, and between the two of them they finally worked out enough of Orochimaru's earliest cyphers to start deciphering more recent text. Jiraiya stayed with the early stuff—he'd been there when Orochimaru had written it, knew his teammate far better than she—and Sakura moved to the recent text—she was the one with the Research background, with the understanding of human anatomy and physiology.
Sometime in the second week, or it might have been the third, the investigators tied the cemetery to Danzo.
How was kept a secret, probably known only to the four members of the MPLE who had (while under orders not to, because "ANBU was handling it") figured it out, the Hokage, and his personal force.
Danzo was an old man, but he'd been one of the strongest jounin in the village, S-rank without doubt, for decades.
Twelve died taking him down, most of them Uchiha.
The Uchiha were apparently very, very eager to lend a hand.
A day or two after that, maybe, Uchiha Fugaku appeared at the door.
The man looked weary, angry, tired. He carried sealing scrolls, a stack of them, and gestured to an elder who followed behind him.
"Honored Uchiha Asahi knows our sharingan. I will take an oath that you do not reveal what he or I tell you, or what is in these seals, and then I will give you our knowledge."
Jiraiya and Sakura swore the oath, and learned about the levels, the drawbacks, the training methods, the strain.
They flipped madly through the books with the diagrams of eyes, talked over each other and Asahi—who got just as into it as them—as they realized how much Orochimaru had figured out.
The latest books had obfuscated designs of Mangekyo sharingan in them.
"Has Obito experienced loss?" Sakura asked.
The Uchiha elder shrugged. "Not at the time he was kidnapped, not harsh enough to trigger the transformation. We have, before, tested using genjutsu or even other Mangekyo sharingan to force the transformation, but it never seemed to work."
"Have you tried it with someone other than an Uchiha creating the unreality?" Jiraiya asked. "I know some scholars think we can sense familial relation with our chakra, even when we aren't sensors."
"We… have not, no." Asahi said.
"Moreover," Sakura said, "Obito was deeply traumatized at the time he was taken. He might not have triggered the transformation yet—"
"But he could have been primed."
Sakura hummed in agreement.
"So Orochimaru has Mangekyo eyes." Asahi said. It was halfway between a statement and a question.
Sakura hesitated, then nodded, rummaging until she found the journal that seemed to detail the possibility of putting eyes somewhere else on the body, not the face.
The two of them were bent over the Mangekyo description, trying to parse enough to figure out what it could do, when Jiraiya made a sound.
The sound wasn't necessarily human.
"This—this is him." Jiraiya said, and Sakura stared at him.
"What?"
Jiraiya flipped around the page.
It was pure text, written a little under seven years ago based on the ink.
Jiraiya had started translating that morning, while Sakura kept on matching the Uchiha's sharingan description to Orochimaru's diagrams, but he hadn't mentioned anything about what he'd decoded.
Now he laid his notes over the page, and Sakura's eyes went wide.
Orochimaru had grown upset over the Hokage's continued refusal to allow him live subjects, and he'd decided to begin experimenting on himself.
He'd done something to his legs, likely described earlier in the text, and to his stomach, only briefly referenced, but the page focused on what was at that time his latest experiment: seals attached to his brain, to make himself smarter.
Asahi was white.
Jiraiya was sweating.
Sakura—
Why would he have chosen to modify his mind so quickly? Your mind—it was what made you you. Far too many sealing experiments, every experiment on record in fact, that focused on the mind went wrong.
So many people driven mad.
So many immediately killed off, dead from their own hubris.
And Orochimaru—
He'd fallen into the same trap.
Except he thought he'd succeeded, managed it with no downsides.
The snakes he'd practiced on dealt with it well, and after 'some modifications' he'd been sure he could use it on people.
"He wanted to make an example of himself," Jiraiya murmured. "Prove to sensei that he was worried for nothing."
Asahi cleared his throat once, twice. "Will this help us find him?"
"Yes," said Sakura, thinking of another journal, how it seemed to focus on the Inuzuka senses and how attentive they were. "I bet he can change his scent."
Jiraiya sat up. "Chakra too. I need—I need to talk to sensei." And then he was gone.
Asahi and Sakura looked at each other, then at the pile of journals, and then they got back to work.