was growing SO restless to start this one, so I did-and then wrote and edited an entire chapter in one sitting. oops, I think?

the final chapter of Wandering will be finished soon, but in the meantime, here's a look at the hand Sakura's been dealt this time around. enjoy, you beautiful people, xox
-Vivi

物象化

The moment Sakura woke, she rolled onto her side and rose to her feet in a rush.

She was wobbly, but after so horrific a night that was certainly to be expected. Roughly she pushed the hair from her face, combing her fingers through it to gather it at the nape of her neck as she glanced around. The night was just beginning to lighten, patchy clouds only just visible through the trees overhead, and as she brought her free hand to pat her middle in search of the kunai she kept tucked into her sash, she frowned to find it empty. Her hair fell back over her, itchy and stifling.

More than that, the clothes she wore feel strange. Artificial, somehow. And she didn't seem to be wearing her silken sash at all, either. She blinked hard two or three times, trying to will away the sour aches all over her body and head. But that was when she spotted an inky blot of hair beneath a blanket not far from where she'd awoken; she dropped to her knees to stretch out her arm.

"Okojo," she whispered, doing her best to keep the strain from her voice. The last thing she wanted to do was worry him right upon waking, but the need to ensure his safety was overwhelming. Gently, she shook his shoulder. "Oi, are you all right?"

He shifted, mumbling in annoyance in a way that made her stomach flip. Had her angered outburst affected him so deeply that he was somehow able now to speak?! She bit at the inside of her cheek, but just as she was about to speak again she heard the rustling of leaves beneath footsteps somewhere off behind her. Shutting her eyes to find the person to which they belonged, she found her mind's eye disturbingly bare.

The unease inside her burst, dread radiating through each of her limbs. She tried to channel shizen energy to her palms, but couldn't feel the coursing flow of it in her body. Worse, she felt sick, bordering on feverish. Cursing under her breath as she stood and turned from the boy, she deduced that she must have spent the bulk of her reserves in driving Kaguya from the woods; likely it would take some time for it to replenish.

"Madara?" She sounded so diminished, afraid, and the mere idea of such a thing made her stomach twist in frustration. Sucking in a breath through her nose, she walked towards the encroaching figure she could vaguely see now, silhouetted stark black against the powdery blues and soft lavenders of the encroaching dawn.

A flash of soft silver caught in the low light, the sight of it stilling the gathering stormclouds of her mind. Her breath hitched, caught somewhere between her lungs and her throat, to see the man's lean figure and his tired eye looking straight at her—and the bottom half of his face covered by a tightly-fitted mask.

She was racing for him without conscious thought. Not only had it'd been years—years! She could hardly believe that—since she'd seen Kakashi, but in their last moments together, he'd been in rough shape: on the verge of collapse from chakra exhaustion, his borrowed eye ripped clean from his skull. As she threw her arms around his middle and buried her face in the black fabric across his ribs.

His confusion was evident in the way he'd frozen up around her, but only for a moment. Then his hands were on her shoulders and he was taking a step back from her—had he always been so much taller?—and cocked his head as she squeezed and poked at him in search of injuries.

"Are you all right?" he asked, his voice making her feel like she'd just taken her first breath after being carried away by riptide. He caught her wrists in his hands, pushing them gingerly down to her sides before stuffing his own in his pockets. The contact, so intimate and personal, was apparently unwelcome. "Having some strange dreams, or...?"

A haze was lifting from her. She blinked, taking in her surroundings. She recalled her time in the Shikkotsu Woods just as clearly as she recalled the mortal life she'd lived before it—but only then was she hit with the reality of what she'd done, the memory of sinking down into the essence of spacetime causing goosebumps to ripple across her arms.

She shrank back from Kakashi, holding her hands against her suddenly aching heart. Had she really managed to pull it off, to undo reality and rewrite it to what she'd managed to create? Erasing Kaguya's resurrection, erasing Madara's righteous hatred and all it had wrought—and completing the jutsu, too—and not that she'd doubted her own power as a sage, but she'd been scared half to death of the simple idea of failure and—

Kakashi cleared his throat with purpose, pulling her attention back to him. He was still watching her, blinking his good eye slowly as she swallowed and forced herself not to glance away. She hadn't anticipated an awakening into her twelve-year old body, supposing now that this was as far as she could make it into the new future before running dangerously low on natural energy.

Not that she could complain, not too much, anyway. To relive her girlhood with the memory of her origins intact could prove tricky to navigate, but she could hardly begrudge the opportunity to take in the chaos of Team 7 again, to fall asleep in her traveling clothes to the sound of her parents playfully bickering in the kitchen, to walk the streets of Konoha as the seasons changed as sure as the people grew.

But how much had changed? She couldn't be sure what parts of her old life had been fated and what of it had been touched by the ripples of her meddling in the past. Further still, what parts of her story were safe to divulge? How much of it would be believed? Judging from the sleeping arrangements and their relatively remote location, they were out on a mission somewhere still in Fire Country. Just to her left, she finally noticed the shock of blonde hair poking out from beneath a thin blanket—so the three-man teams led by a jounin still seemed to be intact, at least.

"Just..." She relaxed her jaw and flexed her hands free from their balled fists, trying her best not to bite at the inside of her cheek. The Kakashi she knew had been all but impossible to fool, and he still seemed sharp as ever. "A bit homesick is all, sensei."

He studied her for just a beat too long to be comfortable before giving a small hum of acknowledgment. "It's to be expected, your first mission away from home. Luckily we've a full day of travel ahead to distract you." Another pause, and she saw his eye flicker towards the boys who still lay sleeping on their bedrolls. "If you still find it hard to shake..."

He took his hands from his pockets, propping one thoughtfully against his chin before nodding once. Then he held up two of his fingers, a small, silver bell suddenly between them that he tossed to her underhanded. She caught it between her palms, her reflexes sharp in spite of her still-spinning head.

"...ring that, and I'll come running." He shut his eye, his smile unmistakable even in spite of the mask covering most of his face. "Now, pack your things while I get these two up. Any longer and we'll be behind schedule."

She lingered for another moment as he wandered over to the boys, waking them with a rather unceremonious shove of his foot to their hips. As she rolled up her small traveling futon and secured it to the pack she'd brought—the she from before her true conscience landed in her body—her heart seized up inside her to hear Naruto's groggy voice, still airy with the vibrancy of youth. He was mumbling some grievance or another about how Kaka-sensei was late only when it suited him, but to Sakura, at least for right now, it was music to her ears.

The rising sun had broken above the horizon, granting her full sight of him as he sat up and wiped dried drool from his face, his hair disheveled but shimmering. Unbothered at first, he seemed to notice the intensity of her gaze—and then those bright blue eyes widened atop the flush of his cheekbones.

He glanced away, blinking and giving a small, embarrassed smile. She would do anything, she understood immediately, to make him give her the wide grin she'd grown to love.

"You don't gotta stare, Sakura-chan. I warned you guys about the snoring last night."

She should have smiled back, said the simplest of Sorry's or Good mornings, but her eyes were glued to him. Had he really been so small, once? The last she'd seen of him he was shining bright as the sun, accented in heavy blacks, and radiating power the likes of which she'd never felt. A small part of her ached terribly, because even that hadn't been enough to save the world. But she shoved the feeling down, refusing to let that despair sour their reunion.

And then came another voice, mumbling his good-morning. Wide-eyed, she spun towards it, her twirling hair catching in the breeze. There was Sasuke, wiping the sleep from his eyes as he knelt to fold away his bedroll. He wasn't looking at Naruto or her, focusing on the task at hand with that same bored look on his face. Sakura's breath caught, the flood of memories threatening to overtake her from her splintered past, or wasn't part of it a future? She saw him in the dark through the blurry veil of her spilling tears, saw him staring down at her with a gaze full of disappointed appraisal. She heard him quietly thanking her, heard him call her annoying with acid dripping off his tongue. She could feel the twisting heartache on a foggy bridge as he stood there weakly, full of needles, feel the pent-up frustration giving way to relief when he'd appeared to turn the tide of the battle.

And there were, of course, the traces of his ancestors in him. He looked about the same age as Okojo—she tried not to think of what trials lie ahead of her to need to retrain herself in the body of a child—and held some of his gentleness there. There was Izuna's gracefulness, what little she'd seen of it, anyway, and as for Madara's influence, well...

She had to turn away, both from Sasuke and from her trailing thoughts. Her head was spinning, despite the easy, calm daylight breaking fully over the woods. Birds were already chirping happily overhead, and though Kakashi's annoyance at their meandering pickup was starting to become tangible, there was no indication that anything should be wrong.

But that was exactly the problem: there was, simply, no indication. The well of her power was alarmingly low, both of this mortal body's chakra and her own shizen energy. She had no way to shut her eyes and look through the trees back home, to see if Okojo still lived—and if he was still all by his lonesome.

And Madara...

"Let's be on our way," called Kakashi, who'd donned his deep green flak jacket and was waiting with his hands in his pockets. "It won't do to delay our charge. I'll leave the three of you behind if I need to."

She blinked away the beading tears in her eyes, grateful for the distraction from speculation on what likely became of her husband. Hauling her pack over her shoulder, she joined the boys as they followed Kakashi through the trees. They met up with an old man, browned by years in the sun with the tips of his shoulders just a bit burnt, and a sickening anxiety began to well up in her core. What had his name been? Tazuna? She swallowed, remembering how things had gone down the first time. And though she'd already begun (subconsciously, of course, because it felt wrong not to) to channel chakra to amass it at the center of her wide forehead, she had pathetically little to spare. Even with precognition of how things were likely to go, she doubted she could do much in the way of anything to help. She paled when she realized it could take months to expand her reserves to a level that made her feel somewhat comfortable in her ability to defend herself.

She put a great deal of attention into the small things, like the way her body felt foreign, but only because of its size. Limbs that felt gangly, her feet uncomfortable in those rubbery, standard-issue sandals. The sensation of her hair all around her was hellish, hot and heavy, even if it wasn't half as long as it sometimes would grow in her time in the forest. But it would only alarm the boys—Kakashi especially, perceptive as he was—if she reached into the holster strapped to her thigh to chop it all off. She opted instead to pile it as high on her head as she could, tying it up as neatly as she could manage.

A sigh left her, without meaning to. Even just the time spent with her arms hoisted over her head made her biceps hurt, only barely; but still reminder enough that this was a body that hadn't been trained, not extensively. She hadn't gotten terribly taller as she'd aged into adulthood, but she'd forgotten just how tiny she felt—especially in terms of power, once it'd become evident just how much she'd been outclassed by Sasuke and even Naruto in those early days. These early days. And with every step the five of them took, she stared hard into the trees, bracing for an ambush.

Those, too, became hard to look at, ever a reminder of what had once been so familiar to her. Even now that horrid sense of loneliness and desperation from her first weeks alone in Shikkotsu—long before she'd named it so—could be felt in her stomach like a heavy stone weighing it down. The trees then had been strange, like something she'd once known intimately but changed, and though now she knew why, dread of a different kind had grown in its place. She found herself piecing together the maps from both of her recalled timelines and comparing them, judging herself perhaps a day's run from the little hut she'd made in the small clearing.

But that was a day's run at her adult body's top speed; the Fire Country forests were vast and deep and dangerous, she knew. And there was a part of her, too, that almost did not want to know yet—or maybe it knew that her best course of action was to lie low and gather not only her strength, but information, as well. When last she'd seen her territory, it was surrounded on all sides by Kaguya and her minions. A witch like that, her power so seemingly endless, would surely still be working towards freedom, regardless of how much Sakura had managed to change in the interim.

The longer things went on uneventfully, the more on-edge she became. She nearly leapt out of her skin at the smallest of rustlings in the brush, which, she knew, was bothersome for everyone. Stifling a sigh—there was no use in already cementing herself as the needy straggler of the group—she tried instead to force her breathing steady. It was enough to keep her level-headed until she heard Naruto cry out in pain so suddenly that she yelped in turn, but at least now it was not only herself being glared at by the other three.

She was at his side in an instant, the medic in her unable to stand around in inaction. Kakashi, who had been mid-sentence to ask Naruto what'd happened, paused when she took the boy's hand in hers.

"Just a wasp sting," she said, holding his wrist evenly as she brought the small, girlish fingers of her other hand to pull out the stinger. His skin had already gone red and angry, and the offending insect already flown far away. And though it winded her, she couldn't stop herself from pouring some of her cool chakra to the site of the tiny wound to block off the venom and ease some of the pain down to merely an itch.

It was Kakashi's mild hum, one she'd come to know over the years to be a cover for not-so-mild thoughts, that brought her back to herself.

"Maa, Sakura-kun"—she stiffened, turning to attention and smiling sheepishly in hopes that her quickly mounting panic would be taken as a kind of shame, an anticipation of a scolding—"I didn't realize you had an interest in healing."

"I—Well, I..." She took in a breath and folded her hands innocently behind her back. Gods only knew how long she could last, playing the part of a twelve-year old genin when the true self of her had been alive for millennia. But, she supposed, it wouldn't be so hard, not at first: already sweat had beaded at her temples from the minuscule effort she'd exerted, her cheeks splotched red.

There was also the fact that, though she remembered all of how she'd gotten here this time, she still recalled next to nothing about her life as the Great Slug Sage. Perhaps some measure of humility, then, were in order.

"I stayed up all night working on it before we left," she offered. "Isn't it dangerous to leave the village without a medic?"

His one-eyed regard was as intense as she remembered it, but not once in her original time as Haruno Sakura had he any reason to fix it upon her. She stood there as innocently as she could manage, blinking at him in quick intervals, damn near batting her lashes.

He turned and gave a jerk of his head to the others to indicate that they'd wasted enough time. As they pressed on along the path, he said casually, "It's true, yes, though only to an extent. There's little chance of running into a hostile party in Fire Country territory or the Land of Waves."

It was Sasuke who spoke up next. "Surely it's not a bad thing to be prepared."

"No," Kakashi returned, "but you're still learning the basics. It won't be until you're seasoned chuunin that you'll go anywhere—or deal with anyone—dangerous enough to need a dedicated medic. I was planning to cover low-level healing techniques along with water-walking and tree-climbing, upon our return to the Leaf."

It was a sound enough plan, as they required the same delicacies in chakra control, but it was enough of a change from the original era that it gave Sakura pause. Now that she really thought about it, why wasn't healing minor cuts and bruises something they'd learned then?

"Yeah, yeah," Naruto was in the middle of saying, "all that boring stuff. It's Lord Second's fault we're relegated to these low-level missions in the first place."

Kakashi looked tired, suppressing a sigh. He never did like when the three of them ganged up on him too much, and Sakura gave a small smile to see it. "No need to be so hasty. A- and S-ranks aren't for the faint of heart."

It went without saying that was precisely why they were so enticing in the first place.

"What Kakashi means is," Sasuke interjected, "not for scaredy-cats like you, Naruto."

Sakura stopped in the road, her little hands gripping the straps of her hot-pink backpack so hard that she thought they might snap. Her palms began to sweat as she stood there watching their backs, the boys bickering and trying their hardest to smack at each other while Kakashi held them as far apart as he could, his hands on each of their heads.

In the time before, Naruto's first injury had come from two devilish Mist nin who'd come from seemingly nowhere. She remembered then that their blades had been poisoned, remembered the sickening roll of her gut when Naruto whipped a kunai from his pouch and stabbed his still-bleeding wound in a proud show of his resolve. The cut had sizzled and stitched itself back together, and though she hadn't known then, she'd seen more than her fair share of the Nine-Tails' influence in her teammate's body afterwards.

For the rest of the day's journey, she sent glances down at his hand. They were careful ones at first, sneaky, stolen only when he'd reach up to scratch at his golden-blond head or adjust the straps of his pack; but by the time the sun was hanging low in the sky, she found herself almost hunched over as she walked in an attempt to look at it, and as they branched off the main road to make camp, he was thoroughly creeped out.

"Just let me see it," she said with a pout, halfway to exasperation. It felt like an age and a half since anyone had doubted her, and the pang of it was wholly unwelcome. Their cots had been rolled out, and he was trying not to scarf down his rations too fast as they sat in an uneven semi-circle, the two adults camped a bit further towards the path.

Naruto, finally doing as instructed, grumbled something about how uncool it was for his first injury on their first mission abroad to be something as dumb as a wasp sting. But Sakura stared at it, the little puncture wound, the skin around it still slightly swollen and warm to the touch. And, well, what was she to do about it? She couldn't well just come out and ask him if there was a demonic presence sealed away inside of him, and she wasn't willing to expend more of her chakra in healing something that wasn't fatal, not when she could store it away instead.

Gently she returned his hand to him, allowing the both of them to return to their food.

"It's just a bit itchy," he said with an unceremonious mouthful of noodles, his face slightly flushed in the rusty glow of the fire. He swallowed. "You fixed it up just fine. But..."

She looked at him from the corners of her eyes, her brows raised as she slurped down her own noodles.

"You're acting awful weird today, Sakura-chan."

It was likely she was blushing harder than he was. "What? No. How?"

Smooth, she groaned inwardly. And worse, Sasuke had looked up from his dinner, interested. Mortifying! She'd forgotten how it felt to be in the regard of her peers—in the regard of boys, as a young girl.

"Well, you know," Naruto continued. "Usually you're smacking me for the dumb things I say. I thought for sure I had one coming when I screamed and you marched on over like the world's maddest mom."

She narrowed her eyes in mock-defense, relief flooding her that he hadn't noticed anything else. "So you're mad that I helped you out instead? Noted for the future!"

Sasuke smirked, suppressing a laugh at that.

"No! 'Course not!" Naruto tried, distressed. "I'm just saying I wasn't prepared, is all!"

"Well," she said, giving her best show of raising her chin in false superiority, "maybe I just woke up feeling nice."

He gave a low whine, then pawed at the air around her in a little fit of desperation. "I didn't wanna make you mad! Now you and Sasuke have both done something nice for me— and know cool jutsu. It just...!"

She leveled her head again, tilting it to look into his eyes and softening her gaze. "No—Look, I'm—"

But he shook his head to stop her apology, stuffing more of his noodles into his mouth to buy him some time. She and Sasuke—who had given them his full attention now from where he sat propped against a tree—waited patiently, taking far more civilized bites than their third.

It was stirring something at the core of her, to be back here in her adolescent body eating horrible instant ramen, half of her sweating and half of her too cold as she sat around a crackling fire, the boys at her side, and Kakashi not far, never too far. He'd come around soon and kick dirt over the embers, only after giving them hell for talking and arguing and laughing so loudly, of course. She shut her eyes and drew in a slow breath, then set down her cup and wiped the pad of one of her thumbs across her mouth. The exhale came just as slowly through her nostrils, the scent of dry dirt, lush leaves, fresh, budding branches and shivering grass, the soft rustling of evening animals foraging for their last meals of the day.

When she leaned her hands back onto the moss, she swore she could feel the pulse of the earth beat through her, heard the wind through the leaves like the whispering of something she could almost comprehend.

"It just means," Naruto went on, coaxing her attention back, "that I have to keep working harder, y'know? Can't keep everyone safe if I'm not good enough."

Though Sasuke scoffed, he did join in. "That your ninja way, or whatever it was you're calling it?"

"Tch! You're talking to the future Fifth Hokage, y'know!"

"Oh, now you've done it," Sakura teased with a smile as Naruto puffed up his chest and began to bicker with the other boy until, as predicted, Kakashi stalked up with his hands in his pockets and kicked not only dirt onto the fire, but—with all of the gentleness his barely-contained annoyance could muster—kicked over all three of them onto their respective bedrolls, telling them to stay quiet and get some sleep, lest they be miserable come morning.

Sakura had been lulled, perhaps, by the day of well-paced travel, the ambushes she recalled from the era before never having come to pass. Lulled, surely, by a Kakashi who promised to teach some manner of medical ninjutsu; a Kakashi who was confident that low-level missions stayed low-level missions and didn't become surprise A-ranks.

She was lulled, definitely, by the once-familiar voices arguing and name-calling, and the thrill of being out on the road, far from home, traveling someplace they'd never been. She missed Madara, and gods she missed Okojo—but this, here and now, was a trade she would accept.

That was why, when she woke in the dark to the jagged grin of a White Zetsu staring down at her, her blood went cold.