- Parabellum -
Sakura has always known war.
It has nothing to do with the enemies around her or the battlefields beyond her. The war she knows best is the one within her:
Doctor or Kunoichi.
Option 1, or option 2.
Every time Sakura puts up her firsts, she has life in one hand and death in the other. Each time she stares an enemy down, she has to choose which identity she's going to be. She knows someday she'll stare down Sasuke and be forced to make that same decision. She dreads that day with every fiber of her being, knowing it is inevitable.
Even after seven years of asking herself which fist she'll raise to him… she still doesn't know how she'll answer. Maybe she will never know. She'll just have to wait and decide in the moment.
But it's exhausting walking through the world unable to be just one thing. Her conflicting loyalties split her down the middle, rending her in two like a fissure in the earth.
Doctor, Kunoichi.
Doctor, Kunoichi.
Sakura juggles her loyalties the way she juggles everything. But juggling is…unsustainable. There always seems to be one ball too many, and eventually everything falls apart.
She counts the casualties of the war raging inside her. Enemy or friend? Life or death? The blade that kills or the scalpel that saves?
Doctor, Kunoichi.
Doctor, Kunoichi.
But right now, there is no war. There is only glacial blue water that stretches on for miles and miles. Everything around her is muted. Softer.
Everything within her is gentle. Quiet.
Sakura and Tayuya float at the bottom of a warm pool that has no bottom. It makes sense in the nonsense way that all dreams do. An aurora of light cascades down from the surface. It spins technicolor fractals across their skin. It bathes Tayuya in an incandescent glow. Together, they float weightless in the water. They drift in silence, content to just exist.
"How?" Tayuya finally begins. She looks around to find Sakura adrift with her. "Is this…a Genjutsu?"
"Yeah."
"But…Genjutsu hurt."
Sakura's eyes rove over Tayuya's inner form, looking for the Dragon she's prepared to slay. She doesn't find one. She just sees…a girl.
"Maybe they don't have to hurt. Maybe we can use them for other things."
"…Like what?"
"Just…to heal."
Despite the warm waters all around her, deeper waters churn within her. Waters of memory and oceans of war. Sakura thinks back to another time, answering an enemy who eventually became an ally.
Doctor, or Kunoichi?
As Sakura drifts in her own thoughts, Tayuya looks down, inspecting her palms. She runs her hands up and down her arms, lingering in the feel of skin on skin.
"It stopped hurting." She says, flexing her fingers.
"…do they usually?"
Tayuya doesn't look at her. She just stares at her arms with…appreciation. "Yeah…All the time."
Sakura feels like she's looking at the River General. Not the one who walked into a room full of Daimyo with head held high, demanding respect But rather, the General who hurled up her guts while Sakura patiently held her hair back. Still dangerous, but also vulnerable. Human.
But Tayuya is not the River General. These waters can't wash everything clean. It can't wash away all the pain that has been cause. The innocent lives that were slaughtered today.
"Why are you doing all of this?" Sakura asks. Her voice echoes through the floaty water. Her tone isn't accusatory, it's just…a question.
Tayuya is silent for a long time. "Because I hate him." She finally says.
"Shikamaru?"
"No."
"Then who?"
"…Orochimaru."
Here, Sakura looks away. Orochimaru's name is a branding rod spitting fire between her ribs. She looks out through the endless waters, swallowing her heart back down where it belongs.
"Yeah. I hate him too." She says.
And then…they drift. They play in the light. Sometimes Tayuya moves her limbs in swirls, sometimes in a snow angel sprawl. Sakura doesn't ask her to speak. She just sits with the war inside her chest, roiling between rage and…something else.
"You want to hear something sad?" Tayuya says. She isn't really speaking to Sakura, so Sakura doesn't need to answer. "I spent seven years planning my escape. Planning my revenge on that fucking prison…"
"…a prison did this to you?"
Tayuya looks over to her now, her face flashing with understanding. She blinks like she's slowly waking up from a dream. She remembers who they are to each other, and where their allegiances lie.
"You did this to me." She says. "Konoha. Everyone."
But Sakura says nothing, and the moment passes. Eventually, Tayuya keeps talking.
"I swore I would never be put in a cage again. But…the second I escaped that fucking cell, I went crawling right back to my first one."
Sakura feels something tug through her insides. It's like there's a rope coiled in her low belly and Tayuya is slowly pulling it out. Around them, the waters disperse. Tayuya takes control of the Genjutsu, whether she knows she's doing it or not. They stand now amid a dilapidated building, the roof caved in and the ground upturned. Sakura turns, taking in the broken walls. The broken windows. A broken door.
She…she knows this place. She's standing in one of Orochimaru's hideouts. The first hideout she and Kakashi picked apart when Sasuke first defected from Konoha. They had come here maybe a month after Orochimaru's attack, still licking their wounds and mourning Hiruzen.
She'd been the one to break down the door. Kakashi had shattered the windows in rage.
They'd been too late. It was already empty.
"Did you…come back here?" Sakura asks.
Tayuya stares, chewing on her answer. "Even after he abandoned me, I sought him out as soon as I was free. Maybe because I was…lonely. Maybe because I had no were else to go. Fucking pathetic."
"You didn't find him." Sakura says.
"I went to our other hideouts after, but those were all abandoned too. He was probably moving while I was being transferred to Grass. While I was out in the open, he was moving on. He had Sasuke, what did he need me for?
…I still don't know where he is. He changes hideouts more often than he changes bodies…"
Sakura doesn't know why she says it, but her old words appear in her mouth. "Sometimes when people leave, it doesn't mean they're leaving us."
Tayuya looks at her like she's speaking nonsense.
"…Yes. It does."
Sakura looks away, because Tayuya is right. At least in this case, she is. They wander side by side through the rubble of the compound. She watches Tayuya kick away with the edge of her bare foot. Bending down, she lifts a weatherbeaten book between her knobbled hands.
It's a folio of handwritten sheet music. Loose leaf pages fall from the binding and she bends over to inspect them. Her breath stirs up dust as she stirs up memories.
"I use to hate myself for waiting for him. Now…I just hate him more."
Tayuya talks in stops and starts.
"Maybe it's his cursed mark on me. It feels like I'll never escape him. I thought that if I could make enough noise, maybe he'd come find me and I'd be able to kill him. I wanted him to scream that I was worthy while I ripped his throat out with my teeth. I'm the only survivor of the sound five, you know. Not Kimimaro. Me."
Tayuya stands up from the wreckage of her old life. She grinds the sheet music beneath her heel.
"I hate that I can't let him go. I hate him so fucking much-"
In another world, in another time, Sakura feels like these words could have been hers. It could have been Sakura in this rubble, talking about Sasuke and about betrayal.
She'd thought she'd been alone when team 7 broke apart. She understands now that she hadn't been. Not really, not like Tayuya. She'd had Ino. Tsunade. Shikamaru. She'd had Kakashi in their own strained way. They'd understood each others pain. They were both survivors of the same broken family.
But…Tayuya had been truly alone. No…not just alone. She'd spent years in a prison that brutalized her. She'd probably been kept in solitary…
Conditions like that could do horrible things to a person. It was inhumane. It was unacceptable…
Old Sakura steps out of the shadows, clenching her fist around Sakura's heart. She calls Sakura weak and spits on her empathy.
'She was a murder before she was imprisoned. She'd found freedom and did terrible things with it. She could have moved on. She could have started a new life.'
But New Sakura just...shakes her head. How long had she held onto her own scars, even after all this time? How long had she denied herself love because Sasuke's betrayal had wounded her so deeply? Tayuya had been a murderer, but she'd also been a child too. A teenager under the influence of a powerful man who knew how to breed loyalty from the young.
Tayuya was…as much a victim as she was a criminal. That's just how the cycle of abuse works. It only ever leads people to one place. Right back where they started.
Sakura stare at Tayuya, insides tumbling like wolves in a death match. Tayuya's rage was justified, but her actions after escaping had not been. She'd inflicted her rage onto innocents, not her abusers. She'd slaughtered children. She's nearly killed Kiko. She'd almost taken Kakashi from her. She was in pain, but she was infecting others with it.
Sakura doesn't want to give her empathy. She has barely enough energy in her for pity...
But as much as she hates the murderer Tayuya is, she feels for the child Tayuya was. That was her biggest problem in the end. She always felt too much, even when she shouldn't.
What was Tayuya if not a child soldier she'd simply been too late to save? Neither of them had chosen their wars. They'd inherited the grievances of the people who came before them. They both worked for systems that handed them weapons, praising them when they came back bloody.
Maybe Sasuke hadn't chosen to betray them. Maybe…he had inherited his pain too, unable to see another way.
Standing in the wreckage of a place they both hate, Sakura gives Tayuya the only thing she can. She gives her the dignity of space mutually occupied. She doesn't try to fix or change her pain. She stands there and lets Tayuya grieve. Maybe, she grieves a little too.
Taking a shaking breath, she says words she isn't ready to say, but hopes that Tayuya will be ready to hear.
"We…we don't have to have this fight. Maybe there's another option. One where none of us has to die."
And for a second, Tayuya looks up. She takes in Sakura's conflicted heart, eyeing the way she balls her fists. For a second, she almost…considers it.
Almost.
Sakura feels it on the back of her neck first. Something shifts in the air between them. It tugs at her like when Tayuya took hold of her Genjutsu. She takes something from Sakura and makes it her own.
It almost feels like nothing at all…until it doesn't.
Tayuya's eyes turn cold, then thin. She walks away with slow, dangerous steps. She elongates her spine and pulls back her shoulders, the peaceful fluidity leaving her body.
A shadow descends over the compound, blocking out a sun that isn't there. Sakura takes a nervous step back, but knows there's nowhere for her to run.
"This is a Genjutsu." Tayuya repeats.
"Yes." She says, voice quiet. There's nowhere to run, but she's still scared. Her heart kicks up into second gear, pounding its warning against the cushion of her lungs. The monster in Tayuya hadn't been slain. It had merely been asleep.
More shadows stretch across the compound. They boils with anger and chitters with unseen mouths. They reach long, sinister hands out to where Tayuya stands. "I'm good with Genjutsu." Is all she says.
Then, she does something that drives the fear into Sakura's bones. It makes every hair on her body stand up on end. Tayuya tiles her head back and whistles a low flutter of reverberated breath. It's a pitter patter testing of the world around her. It's the song that Tayuya will play as she picks Sakura's bones from her dismembered limbs.
Cold. Cold-
Sakura feels the shift like it's inside her body. Freezing fingers worm between her ribs. She watches the light bend around her in odd places. Shadows twin around her legs, telling Sakura she can not run. The ground beneath her buckles and growls. A leviathan trembles beneath her trapped feet.
"I'll never be put in a cage again." Tayuya says, face still turned away from her. Even as she speaks, the whistles multiply as if she has many mouths. They layer a harmony of dissonant notes, each voice crying over the other. The pitch starts low, then reverberates higher.
The walls around them fracture into splinters. The resonance is falling apart. With every second, Tayuya's willpower shreds their shared world to shadowy ribbons.
Doctor or Kunoichi. It was time to decide.
On the brink of war, Sakura has her epiphany. She doesn't have to choose which one she's going to be. Tayuya will make the decision for her.
"Let me find a way to help you!" Sakura yells, straining against the storm clouds that sink teeth into her legs. They howl and gnaw at her calves and arms. They wrap tendrils of smoke around her middle.
"What do you want me to do, forgive?" Tayuya rounds on her, baring her fangs. Her eyes are all pupils and no whites. The darkness is around her, but it lives inside her. "If I forgive now, then I suffered for nothing. For seven years, they took…EVERYTHING from me! I won't let you take my rage from me too-"
The whistles amplify, raising in pitch. Tayuya pushes them higher and higher. She's going to shatter this genjutsu like opera singer shatters glass. She'll use her music to turn Sakura's brain to liquid. She descends on Sakura, shoving their foreheads together. She walks them backwards, spitting as she screams. She yells her words against Sakura's face, every inch the monster Sakura knew her to be.
"You think i'm something you can fix?! You have no idea who I am! You have no idea what I have endured!"
"We didn't know! He didn't know!"
Tayuya stares into Sakura's soul, promising death with her pitch black eyes.
"It doesn't matter. He will."
Tayuya has made her choice for the both of them.
Sakura presses their heads together. They are Generals carving out terms of battle. They are rams locking horns before going to war. "I won't let you kill either of them." She yells.
"And I won't let you take me alive. If it's the last thing I do, I'll take their lives with me. Then you can be the one to suffer alone."
But Sakura has already been alone. She is a citadel built on a bulletproof foundation. She isn't afraid of Tayuya's rage, and she won't blink now in the face of death.
She knows exactly what she has to do, even if she doesn't know how to do it.
The walls around them crumble inwards. Spindles of smoke pierce the barrier of her Genjutsu. It's Tayuya's demons coming home to roost. Everywhere Sakura looks, more smoke seeps in. It's manifested rage, predatory and hungry. It casts cold where there once was warmth. It consumes where Sakura's spell once could give.
Smoke invades her sinuses and crawling into her ears. Needle teeth rip the flesh from at her shoulders. The whistling hits an untenable pitch. Tayuya echos through her very bones. Sakura listens for the thing underneath the underneath, and then does the unthinkable.
She lifts a hand to Tayuya's face. She speaks through the monster to the girl inside.
"I'm going to make sure what happened to you never happens, ever again."
And Tayuya… says nothing. She stops struggling, the air suddenly silent and still. She disappears as the world goes black, the smoke finally consuming them both. But she stares at Sakura until the last possible second, looking for the double cross.
People can endure the most brutal of cruelties, but the smallest offer of love can so easily unstitch us.
They drift together in inky black nothing. No light, no sound, no hope.
But Tayuya's face is still in her palm. She doesn't pull away, and she doesn't attack. Grain by grain, they are un-becoming. Sakura hears one last whisper pierce the dark before they are both undone.
"…Get out of my fucking head." Her voice breaks. Tayuya's voice breaks with…pain.
And then…they are gone.
Alone in the dark, Sakura cries out. She grieves for what she knows she will have to do next.