A/n: does anyone even read author's notes? thanks for your patience and incredibly kind reviews! Sorry if some things aren't totally canon compliant - as stated, I only ever read the manga and never watched the anime, so my canon might be different from yours. That's the beauty of fanfiction!
the sun goes with you, chapter five: the foundation
love, it's just a little late
for you to be seeing me this way
-ziggy alberts, runaway
On the day that Sakura left Konoha for good, Kakashi had found her standing in his office, staring out at the village from the wide window behind his desk. Her arms were crossed across her chest, fingers absentmindedly tracing circles against the fabric of her hospital uniform.
It was an early morning - too early for even the stars to have all retired; the sun was not yet risen, nor were the villagers. Kakashi had hoped to be the first one in, so that he might, for once, have some peace. No such luck.
For her to be here waiting for him this early could not bode well. Good news could always wait; bad news hardly ever had the luxury. Her hospital shift would have not yet ended, so whatever it was had to be urgent enough for her to abandon her work.
"Everything alright?" Kakashi asked cautiously, frowning as he shut the door behind him and crossed the room to his desk..
She startled slightly - lost in her own thoughts, like she was most of the time since the end of the war. But when she looked at him, wide-eyed and shaken, what was unspoken in her eyes answered his question: everything was most certainly not alright. Kakashi feared the worst - who had succumbed to their injuries in the night? Guy? Naruto? Sasuke? What had finally proven to be too much for her to heal?
She was silent as she regarded him - her mouth opened and closed like a stunned fish before she looked away, her short hair flipping over her shoulder, turning back to the window.
"Sakura," Kakashi said firmly, his patience an exposed nerve. "Tell me."
She was silent for another moment before she spoke, her voice a bare whisper. "Kakashi, they won't stop. The voices. The screaming."
Kakashi visibly deflated as he sunk into the chair behind his desk, a warm trickle of relief flooding through his veins. Maybe he should feel guilty for this - relief that her struggles were not something that he would have to share in - but he couldn't waste his guilt on this, not now. His voice was sympathetic when he spoke. "They'll go away eventually, Sakura. Trust me. They always do."
He wasn't lying. He had heard his fair share of screams in the night, had seen his fair share of death. They always left him alone in the end.
"No," she said, running a hand through her hair, turning to face him again. "They're not - I don't think it's just in my head. There's more to it than that. Not just a bad memory. Something's there, and it's not going away. It's getting worse."
"You've been through a lot recently," Kakashi said gently. "You need to give yourself more time."
"No!" she said forcefully, slapping her hand down on his desk. "Stop - stop doing that, Kakashi, god damn it. Stop treating me like a little girl. I'm telling you something is going on. Listen to me for once."
"I'm listening," he said, raising his hands in the air placatingly. And he was listening - but what he was hearing was an overworked, overtired, scared young woman who had never really been meant for this sort of life anyway.
"No you're not," she sighed, the fight going out of her. "You're looking at me like I just need some sleep, or some therapy or something."
Well, this much was true. If he could make her take a month or two off, he would. But Kakashi couldn't afford to send her on leave, not now - not when she was the only senior medic on staff since Shizune had left to run off-site operations. There were too many wounded to be taking able bodies out of the field. And besides, Kakashi trusted her; if he could have any set of eyes where he couldn't be, he wanted them to be hers.
Sakura was his only student that had been on the battlefield every day of the war - Naruto and Sasuke had shown up in the nick of time, certainly, as was their habit. And then true to form they had done some flashy world-saving with lots of collateral damage and left behind a mess for everyone else to clean up.
And true to her own form, she had worked methodically and tirelessly, without needing direction or encouragement. She'd sort of just shown up, the right place and the right time, and started doing exactly what he would have told her to do, but without being told.
But she'd just lost her parents - they'd been killed on the battlefield late in the war effort, and she was grieving the same way everyone else in Konoha was. Kakashi had forced time off on Yamanaka and Nara and Akimichi, who had all lost their fathers - but they had big families that needed tending to. The only people Sakura had left now were in the hospital and Kakashi thought the last thing she needed was forced isolation.
Once upon a time, he'd thought that most of his failings where Sakura had been concerned were more or less benign - where Naruto and Sasuke were involved, his various failings as a teacher had been dangerous, reckless, ill-afforded in a world tearing apart at the seams.
But for a while now, he had seen that maybe the damage he'd done to her had splintered her at the foundation. Maybe worse than what he'd done to Naruto and Sasuke.
"What do you mean, something is going on?" Kakashi asked, leaning back in his chair, frowning.
She sat in the chair across from his desk, looking nervous. She smoothed her hands over her lap uneasily. "I think something happened to everyone that died during the war. Everyone on our side."
"Something like what?"
She chewed on her lip for a moment before speaking again. "Remember… remember during the war and I did that thing with Katsuyu - where she split into thousands of little slugs that attached to everyone so I could use my chakra to heal them remotely?"
"Yes," Kakashi said. He didn't much like the slugs. "Slimy little things."
"I was really spread out. I was trying to cover thousands of allied forces. Tsunade didn't have much chakra left so she wasn't spread as thin. And then… things went wrong."
"I remember," Kakashi said simply, wondering where she was going with this. "Sakura, it's not your fault that-"
"Let me finish," she said. "Just let me finish. Like I said, things went wrong. While I was connected to all of these troops through my chakra. And it doesn't work like a telephone - usually. I can only tell when a slug is pulling on my chakra to heal someone."
"It doesn't usually work like a telephone? Did it work that way this time?"
"I don't know exactly what happened - I was too far away - but do you remember when we lost almost the entire Second Division?"
"Yes," Kakashi said softly. Her parents had been in the second division. Which had been lost in a large-scale ambush that had killed nearly twelve thousand out of the eighty thousand forces that made up the Alliance.
"I was covering some eight thousand of them. I felt everything," Sakura said, her voice was pained, tightly checked. "I felt what they felt as they were dying. All of that pain - limbs blown off, bleeding out, crushed bones. Everything. And the fear of dying, the anger, the longing. All of it."
Kakashi was silent, watching her as she traced patterns with her fingers on the glossy wood of his desk. He hadn't known this. He'd assumed she might have just felt a bunch of lives blink out of existence - there one moment, gone the next.
"But there was something else," she continued as her breath hitched, caught on something in her throat. "Something that I can't… I can't get it to make sense."
"Strange things happen in war. To the mind."
"Stop that. It's not a mind thing. It's not just in my head."
"I didn't say it was."
"You did. But there was something else, right before the connection broke. Everyone had this feeling of just… pure terror. That's the only way I can describe it. Worse than the fear of dying. This sort of uncontrollable panic."
"A reasonable reaction to dying."
"It wasn't that, though. Because then three things happened."
"Okay," Kakashi said slowly. It was turning out that there were quite a few things Sakura hadn't shared with him. "What are these three things?"
"First, my connection to everyone broke. All that chakra I had tied up, trying to heal who I could - it snapped."
"And then?"
"My chakra came back to me, but it had all of these… memories attached to it. Thoughts that weren't mine. Memories, Kakashi. Everyone's last memories. The last things they saw, the last things they thought of as they died."
"Did you break the connection yourself?"
"No," she said miserably. "It just… it splintered. I tried to hold onto it but I lost it. It was like someone yanked it away from me."
"It's probably for the best," Kakashi sighed, leaning back in his chair. "Who's to say what would have happened if you hadn't let go?"
"I was going to go with them," she said quietly. "My mom and dad… I felt what happened to them. I have their last memories, too."
"You don't have to tell me," Kakashi said gently, hoping that she wouldn't. He didn't need to hear it.
"My dad went first," she said numbly, and her eyes were blank. "Crushed to death. My mom bled out a few feet away from him. She watched him die and then she… she went, too. She thought of my grandmother's hands knitting my first blanket as she died."
"It's a good thing the connection broke, Sakura. Trust me."
"It's not," she said desperately. "If I could have just hung out for a few more minutes…"
"No. You could have been taken with it."
"But when the connection broke, not everyone was dead yet. Not everyone was beyond healing. I was… I was working on it, I was fixing them. I lost them when I lost the connection. They didn't have to die. If I could have held on a bit longer… I could have saved them."
Kakashi was silent for a few moments. That was news to him. "...What was the third thing?"
"I felt them go somewhere. Everyone. All of their… souls, I think they were. The last thing I felt before the connection disappeared. They went somewhere else and left their bodies behind."
"The… void?" Kakashi said, lacking a better word for it.
"No. Somewhere here. On Earth. And I think that place is what they were all so afraid of."
Kakashi leaned back in his chair, sucking in a breath between his teeth. "Let me get this straight. You and your slug summon - who was a million little slugs and not just one great slug - were covering the second division remotely, by channeling your chakra stores into the slugs and from them into the people. When the second division was attacked, we lost twelve thousand soldiers, and you felt eight thousand of them die, somehow acquired all of their last thoughts and experiences, felt their life forces being taken somewhere… and now you hear all of those people screaming in your ear all day long."
"Exactly," she said helplessly.
"That's fucked," Kakashi said simply.
"Tell me you believe me," she said desperately, leaning forward in her chair. "I know I sound insane-"
"I believe you," Kakashi said, and it was true. Chakra was strange and relatively poorly-understood, even as they built their civilizations on top of it - new phenomenons happened every day. This was one of the more believable ones, as much as the possibility of what she had just told him made his skin crawl. Yes, Kakashi believed her. "You said you felt their souls go somewhere? Where?"
"East," she said weakly. "Just… east. Sometimes, when I walk that way… when I stand at the eastern edge of the village, I can hear them getting louder. The further I walk… the stronger it all gets."
It didn't make sense, Kakashi thought to himself
"What do you want me to do?" he asked, sensing that this was what she came for.
"I'm tired of being weak. I mean it this time," she said. "Make me better. And then let me go find them."
..
Five years later, it was a morning much like the one on which that uncomfortable conversation had occurred. Kakashi remembered her words from his office, peering down onto the village that he had been tasked with the care and keeping of.
She'd left that very same night. He said yes to her request, and she laid out a plan that was too sound, too well-considered for it to be anything but the product of many sleepless nights. She wanted to shed Konoha like a chrysalis, learn how to really fight, and then hammer down whatever ghosts were still chasing her. And that sounded perfectly reasonable to Kakashi, more or less. So he let her go.
Of course, Kakashi was not exactly the patron saint of reasonable decisions.
If only he'd known what they were getting into at the time. He wouldn't have let her go, wouldn't have sent her out of the village and into the gaping maw of the beast. But how could he have guessed the magnitude of the issue at the time? That the girl was onto something more sinister than she thought?
When she'd told him all about the screams and the memories and the souls, he'd been new to the job. Kakashi was not Naruto; he had been perfectly fine with the amount of responsibility and acknowledgment he'd already had before all of this hokage nonsense, thank you very much. But it wasn't about that, was it? If the job needed you, it needed you, and you did it.
Kakashi leaned forward and rested his forehead against the cold glass and let his breath fog the window. It had not been a good month - news from outside of Konoha's walls had boded nothing but ill; it left a bitter, coppery taste in his mouth.
But there was something else that had settled like a rock in his stomach.
Somewhere out there, Sakura was upset with him. Probably even hated him. Sasuke was sure to have arrived to the Anbu base by now; they were sure to have come face to face again after all these years. She had made her feelings quite clear to Kakashi many times regarding this subject; absolution would not come easily.
Forgive me, Sakura.
It was ten years ago now that his three genin brats had been plunked in his lap – three raw, exposed wires sparking at each other and at the world. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together should have given Kakashi any genin. But especially not those three.
At the time, all he had been able to see in Sakura was the past. She was destined to be the collateral damage in the fallout that would result from the inevitable collision between Sasuke and Naruto. He couldn't train the girl to march out onto the battlefield and end up with Sasuke's arm through her heart like Rin had ended up with Kakashi's.
Well, that hadn't worked out as planned, had it? Not in the slightest.
She'd tried to find her power elsewhere when Kakashi failed to draw it out of her, and she walked right into Tsunade's open arms and all that potential was just thrown away, completely and utterly wasted.
The girl had more cleverness and precision than the elephantine methods that Tsunade had foisted upon her. It was a waste for a girl like that to be reduced to just punching things - or such was the opinion that Kakashi had always privately maintained.
Then five years ago, he got his wish. The war was a little more than a month gone and the bodies were still being tallied, and Sakura had come to his office and asked him to let her run away from it all. Said she wanted to become the sort of indispensable weapon that could go toe to toe with anything and always come out on the other side.
So Kakashi made a plan. All of the things he could have taught her all those years ago - he could give them to her now, make her into the force of nature that he knew she could be. But he couldn't do it himself. He was the hokage, the autocrat of a broken village - he couldn't just up and leave. So he gave the job to Ibiki.
It had taken three years for Kakashi to feel that Sakura had finally reached that potential he had always seen in her. Ibiki had dragged it out of her - Ibiki and Anbu and a training program that Kakashi created himself. It had been a genuinely unpleasant experience to implement, or so Kakashi had been told. He'd had to authorize several infrastructure repair expenditures for the Ice base and promise Ibiki a lush retirement on the coast when it was all said and done, but Ibiki had given Kakashi the exact weapon that he needed to face the coming storm.
And now… the girl was a force to be reckoned with. Not to mention, she was now his friend. More than that. They were unhealthily codependent in the worst way - Sakura needed him to enable her avoidance of everything that made her her and Kakashi depended on her right back in ways he couldn't admit to anyone. It was an insidious and sick bond, created out of the sort of shared knowledge that kept them both awake at night, but it was something that Kakashi treasured more than he should have.
Which is why he hated what he had done - sending Sasuke of all people. It was out of necessity, he knew. But she wasn't going to forgive him for it any time soon, even if they all made it out of this mess alive. And that was nearly enough for Kakashi to say damn it all and let the world go up in flames.
But things were deteriorating on Sakura's front. They had been for a while. The situation was quickly becoming far too serious for her to contain on her own, no matter how strictly Kakashi trusted her. To let her continue alone, in light of the newest information, would be risking the fate of humanity. And that would just be a bad time for everyone.
Of much less importance to the general world but of far greater consequence to Kakashi - as irresponsible and private as the sentiment was - it would be risking her.
So no, he did not send Sasuke out to the Anbu base just to hurt her. In fact, he'd exhausted all of his other options far past what would be considered responsible leadership to avoid damaging whatever it was they had.
Kakashi sent Sasuke because he was the only one who had the necessary ability to help her see this mission through to the end. He was the only one who had the kind of skills needed to put this demon to rest once and for all, and Kakashi knew that Sakura would see this eventually. It was the only way that they might keep the world from splitting at the seams and swallowing them all whole.
And if Sasuke could bring back a little of what she used to be - and he was the only one who could do that, too - well, that was just fine with Kakashi.
..
..
..
Across the continent, Sakura woke well before sunrise and dressed for her mission in silence, careful that her tired breaths were hushed, that even her footsteps across the floor were inaudible - although she was alone, she was silent with the care of the hunted. She didn't want to risk waking anything, startling another stolen memory to come and take her.
When she was dressed, she extinguished the fire and stepped outside of her cabin - immediately, the frigid wind sent a chill down the open collar of her vest, a reminder that the cold would get her eventually; she zipped the vest up to her chin with numb fingers, and pulled her soft wool gloves over her hands.
Sakura's breath escaped her lungs in opaque puffs, and for a moment, she was a dragon, breathing smoke over an ice kingdom, and she could unfurl her wings and fly away from here, on to the next gold-filled lair and the next conquest, never to return.
But only for a moment, and then she was just a girl again. No smoke, no fire, no wings, just soft and shivering vulnerable flesh and the tired beginnings of a sunrise. She stepped off the tiny porch that was attached to her cabin and out into the still-dark morning, the sky a silken blanket stitched with stars that faded to welcome the dawn.
The first thing she did was to silently slip across the camp to slide an envelope addressed to Kakashi under Yuuto's door - on a small base like this, the medic could be expected to manage the mail as well as the sick and injured. The envelope contained an invective-filled letter, the language included being of the sort that would have driven her mother to tears, if her mother were still alive. Since leaving home, she'd found she had a talent for vicious words - the kind that inflicted pain that she couldn't heal, the kind that made people wish she would just punch them instead. It wasn't something she liked about herself.
In her defense, Kakashi deserved it. As she slipped the letter beneath the crack in the door, she frowned in the general direction of Konoha, hoping her scowl would reach Kakashi in his sleep and give him horrible indigestion for the rest of the day. She exhaled another dragon-puff his way.
I'm not a child anymore, Kakashi.
And then she left the base, flitting over the moonlit snow like a ghost, a lonely specter retreating across the horizon.
She would be back in a week.
It would be a violent mission - she didn't know it yet, but it would be a blood-soaked week for her, and one with tragic consequences - ones that would not make themselves immediately apparent, but they were there, following her from a distance, waiting for her to close her eyes.
She would be terrified, unbalanced, and coming apart at the seams by the end of this mission, crouched at the muddy bank of a river and scrubbing the blood out of the creases between her fingers and choking back sobs, pounding her open palms against her forehead to shake the violence from her skull. And then she would pull herself back together, take a deep breath and give herself a stern talking to, and head back to the base. And if she got back and Kakashi told her to turn around and do it again, she would.
A dutiful soldier until the last.
..
..
..
Sasuke didn't see Sakura for a full seven days after their strange, heated conversation after the tattooing ceremony.
This irritated him greatly. The nerve to just up and disappear for five years, show up randomly in the middle of nowhere and do all sorts of confusing shit, just to disappear again - well, that was just too much.
Especially since it appeared that he had no chance of getting off of the base without her.
Sasuke quickly learned there was a strict protocol with new recruits and their mentors. The other rookies were evaluated by their mentors within the first two days following the ceremony; generally, evaluations consisted of physical combat. The mentors then recommended their rookies for specific divisions based on the demonstrated skill-set. Sasuke watched all of these skirmishes and decided that the pairings were too well-matched to be truly random; his suspicions were confirmed when Ibiki firmly denied his request to be evaluated by a different operative while waiting for Sakura to return.
She's the only one suited to handle you, Ibiki had said shortly. You'll wait for her. He'd had no sort of answer when Sasuke asked when she might return, other than soon enough.
And it would be a cold day in hell before he believed that Haruno Sakura was the only person in Anbu who could handle him.
Yes, all of this led to a very disgruntled Uchiha.
Not to mention that he'd not expected snow to be quite so... cold. Sasuke had been many places in the world - Orochimaru had dragged him all over the continent and to other places besides - but the man had avoided the snow like the plague, snakelike and cold-blooded as he was. So now Sasuke was bored, confused, and freezing, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
Such things would turn a man to stomping about grumpily and ineffectually, they would.
It was the morning of his ninth day on the base when he was woken by a sharp rapping on his door.
When he opened it, Ibiki was standing outside, arms crossed. "What, still sleeping?"
"It's ass o'clock in the fucking morning," Sasuke groused in return.
"Early bird gets the worm."
Sasuke grumbled something inappropriate about murdering early birds. Like Kakashi, Ibiki did not mind a few snide remarks here and there; he collected his due in other ways.
Ibiki, used to this sort of behavior, waved Sasuke's irritation away like it was little more than a fly that could not even manage to be a minor annoyance despite its best efforts. "Get dressed. You and I have somewhere to be."
Sasuke's ears perked at the mention of actually having something to do. "What's that?"
"Your mentor is back," Ibiki said shortly. "She's waiting on us both for your evaluation."
A/N: Ah! I'm so sorry for the delay. It's never intentional. I took a bit of a gallivant about the EU and put all of my duties on hold for such shenanigans. For those of you going "update seek!" you are totally right and I throw myself at your feet to beg for forgiveness! I am updating it but not in the new chapter sense... I'm rewriting a lot of it. Once it's been adequately rehabbed and deemed fit for public presentation then I will begin adding new fixtures and such. It will remain up in the meantime but it's no longer representative of my best work - which is why it's getting the old one-two right now.
As always, I implore you to leave a review - I do so cherish all of your feedback. (unless they only say "update :(" in which case I do not cherish them as much).