The day Sakura passed the bell test along with her new team was the happiest one she would experience for a very long time.

Still, she weighed the pros and cons, mostly as a habit from her childhood (which, at twelve, was of course entirely behind her). This was her list:

Pros:

-Fully-fledged ninja.

-On a team with Sasuke.

-Ino isn't on the team with Sasuke.

-Passed the jounin teacher's test and convinced him to keep them.

Cons:

-On a team with Naruto.

-Jounin teacher seems a bit weird.

Considering one of the pros was being on a team with Uchiha Sasuke, the cons of being on that team with Naruto (loser) and Hatake Kakashi (weirdo) hardly stood a chance.

If Sakura had known how her day was going to end, her assessment would have been very different. But as it was, she was walking on air by the time she got home from Training Ground Three. She kicked off her boots and ran to dump her kunai holster and shuriken pouch upstairs in her room before helping her mother with dinner (which already smelled like it needed rescuing). She was halfway up the stairs when she realised both felt far lighter than they had this morning.

"Crap," she muttered, realising she had forgotten to collect her weapons before leaving the training grounds. It was one of those rules that most ninjas considered so fundamental that breaking it made you look like a complete amateur, and on her first day ever as a proper ninja, the embarrassment might just kill her.

"Back in a minute!" She shouted in the general direction of the kitchen before tugging her boots back on and sprinting out the door. Her only consolation was that Sasuke had definitely left the training ground too (because she had tried to walk with him for as long as possible) so there was no chance of him witnessing her embarrassing search for her discarded weapons.

The grounds were quiet, which shouldn't have felt strange; it was getting on dark, and Team Seven had booked its exclusive use for the entire day (and everyone else knew better than to get too close to an active training area). Still, she felt strangely exposed as she retraced her steps in the forest.

First, she had thrown three shuriken at Kakashi's exposed back. They had thunked harmlessly into a log, and rolled away into…that bush! She retrieved the weapons with a relieved sigh. Discarded weapons were fair game for scavengers, and her set was basically new.

By the time she had found everything it was twilight dark and the only discernible landmark was the memorial stone where she and Sasuke had fed Naruto and prepared to face their teacher's wrath as a cohesive unit. Just thinking of Naruto's bold claim that he wanted to be added to the stone with the other heroes made her snort. What kind of ninja had never even heard of the KIA cenotaph before?

It occurred to her that Naruto probably had plenty of names he could have come to visit (even more than her), but if he'd been alone since he was a baby, he probably didn't know which ones belonged to him.

She drew closer, wondering if she could quickly find an Uzumaki on the stone before the light disappeared completely. She probably wouldn't mention it to the boy if she did find one; Naruto was too annoying to speak to voluntarily. But maybe she could tell Sasuke, and maybe he'd think it was kind of her to be looking out for their unfortunate weak link. It would be today's lunch all over again, but this time Sakura would be the one to do it first, and Sasuke could marvel at her thoughtfulness.

The entire plan went out the window almost immediately, because the second she emerged from the treeline and started circling around to the front of the stone, she saw that someone was already there. And that 'someone' was actually none other than her new jounin teacher.

"Yo," he said, raising hand in greeting. It was too dark (and his face was too covered) to be sure, but she got the sense that despite his lazy attitude, he was actually quite annoyed to be interrupted.

"Hey, Sensei." She swallowed, suddenly nervous. "Sorry, I was just-" But she couldn't mention that she had come all the way back to the training ground to pick up her weapons before they got rusted by the elements. He'd think she was a worse idiot than Naruto. It was clear he didn't think much of her; typical sexism, probably with a dash of jealousy that she was young and in love while he was just some old, one-eyed weirdo that read porn in public. But he was still her teacher, and she'd rather be on his good side than his bad side.

She decided to lie. "I was just coming to visit someone on the cenotaph. But I can come back later." She turned to go, but Kakashi raised his hand again, this time to stop her.

"Don't leave on my account; you should visit them now. We might get a mission tomorrow that takes us out of the village."

Sakura scoffed, because the likelihood of their first ever mission taking them outside the village was almost exactly zero, but Kakashi just shrugged.

"Trust me, you don't want to put such things off, or it becomes too late before you know it."

And so, Sakura was forced to kneel down in front of the stone and say a silent prayer to the fallen. She prayed to her uncle, who was probably the only KIA she had properly known, as well as her mother's cousin (whose name she couldn't remember, but she was definitely up there somewhere), a couple of Ino's relatives she remembered from the days when they were actually friends, the First, Second and Fourth Hokages, and any Uzumaki that happened to be up there, because they were her original reason for coming over. She would have prayed to Sasuke's numerous relatives too, but the Uchiha had a separate monument dedicated to them.

She stood back up, and Kakashi gave her a little nod. It made her feel like a total fake to be bonding with her teacher over dead people she didn't even know, let alone truly miss. But he hadn't looked at her with any amount of approval before then, despite her showing off her skills for the entire day.

She smiled back at him. "So, who are you here to visit?"

That was clearly the wrong question, because he stuffed his hands in his pockets and stepped back. "I'd better get going," he said, slouching off into the dark.

If he had known what had been lurking at the corners of the forest, watching him, Kakashi might have left earlier. If he had known that its attention had now shifted to Sakura, he might not have left at all.

But he did, and it wouldn't be until later that he realised the mistake he had made.

Sakura could have kicked the cenotaph, if she weren't still a tiny bit afraid of ghosts (and the offence they might take). She'd only wanted to understand her new teacher a little better, to know something about him that the others didn't. It's not like she'd asked to see under his mask, or hear the story of how he'd lost his eye (she'd already learned not to comment on scars from her academy days with Iruka). But in hindsight, people who lost loved ones probably couldn't talk about them easily. Perhaps that was why they stood in front of stones about it in the first place.

She loitered, wanting to race home for dinner but definitely not wanting to overtake Kakashi and make him think she was trying to make small talk again. She'd just have to try harder to impress him with her ninja skills tomorrow.

The Watcher, hidden in the trees, drew closer. He'd kept a cautious distance from Kakashi, knowing how finely tuned his senses were. But this pink-haired girl was fresh out of the academy. He might have been able to walk right up to her and tap on her shoulder before she realised she wasn't alone. Even now she blundered around the cenotaph, muttering and frowning and generally being terrible at keeping her thoughts hidden. She reminded him a bit of himself, before he had a mask to hide behind.

She would be perfect for his collection. He had wanted someone from Konoha for a while, and this girl had not only served herself up by venturing to the edge of town alone, but she was Hatake Kakashi's first ever kunoichi student. He only wished he could stick around to watch the fallout.

Sakura decided that enough time had passed and she could head back to town without encountering her teacher. In fact, seeing as it was actually properly dark by now (she had forgotten that it was a new moon) she might not encounter anyone at all. They would all be safe at home, far from dark forests and vengeful ghosts.

She took a single, careful step toward home.

And disappeared.

ⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵⴵ

At first, Sakura thought she had fallen through a trapdoor someone had hidden in the ground. She flinched protectively around her vital organs, fully expecting to be gored by spikes or drowned in quicksand. But the ground she landed on was flat, if a little hard on her joints. She sprang to her feet immediately, trying to see how far up the trapdoor was, and whether she was alone in the pit.

It quickly became apparent that there was no pit at all, but a vast, empty expanse of the same flat square stones that she had landed on, and seemingly very little else. There was also no hole above her, no forest, no breeze, no anything. Her ninja senses strained against the darkness, but the emptiness was absolute.

Her breathing became loud, her body starting to panic at the lack of information. Was there a finite amount of air in here? Hidden traps? She spun in place, and every direction seemed more or less identical. Where to even begin looking for a way out?

"Hello?" She called out, knowing it was stupid to draw attention to herself, but still desperate for this to be an earth jutsu someone had been testing at the training grounds, and any minute now they would pull her out and apologise profusely for the misunderstanding.

Her voice didn't even echo.

"Hey!" Someone was coming toward her, hopping from one stone to another like a frog. There wasn't quite enough light to see them properly (and that was another thing: there was no visible light source, but she could still see the stones and her hand in front of her face. That felt like a particularly weird detail about an already weird place) but they seemed bulky in all the wrong places. She realised the person must have been wearing several cloaks and jackets, and carrying at least two large bags on their front and back.

Frankly, they could have been pointing a sword at her and she still would have been happy to see them.

"Hey!" she called back, rushing toward them.

The cloaked figure waved their arms urgently. "Not this way!" they called, their voice high and a little scratchy, as if they didn't use it often. "They're coming!"

"What?" Sakura's relief evaporated back into apprehension. "Who's coming?"

"The rest." The figure landed on Sakura's rock, and she could finally tell it was a woman. She was wearing a hood and her face was covered from the nose down, like Kakashi's, but what she could see was gorgeous: an elegant, heart-shaped face, and big scarlet eyes framed by cracked, dirty glasses. Her hair fell down in two matching scarlet braids.

The woman looked her up and down in dismay. "You're tiny. They're gonna eat you alive."

"Who is?" Sakura was close to her tolerance level for craziness, and the older woman seemed to realise it. She grabbed her hand and tugged her along. "No time to explain, so for now just run and stay quiet until we lose them. Then we can swap notes."

"I fell through some sort of trapdoor…?" Sakura began, but the hand tightened around hers. Sakura could feel every callous.

"Not yet. I know this is weird, but the older ones aren't nearly as nice as me, so count yourself very lucky I was closest when you arrived, and hurry up."

They ran, and after a few seconds Sakura could hear what they were running from: shouting voices, stamping feet, and even the occasional explosion. It sounded like a large, rowdy group, and according to this woman they were coming for Sakura.

She ran faster.

After a while of the woman dragging her through the endless plain of nothingness, stopping and changing their direction seemingly at random, she suddenly stopped and dragged Sakura down into the crevice between two stones. The whooping and crashing noises continued to get closer, and Sakura tried desperately to subdue her presence. Her chakra was already low from her first day of training as a genin, and fear was making it even harder to control. But eventually her breathing lengthened and her heart settled. When she had enough self-discipline, she realised that the woman (whose hands were clamped over Sakura's shoulders, as if afraid she would suddenly spring up and try to introduce herself to the rabid mob above them) was using some kind of jutsu on them both. It felt like a waxy bubble was surrounding them, making Sakura's senses feel hazy. She looked at the woman, whose striking eyes met hers with a warning look.

The rabble quieted, harsh voices calling to one another for signs of the trail.

"Gone to ground," one male voice speculated.

"The red witch found her first," a female voice grumbled.

"She won't be able to keep her to herself for long. The Watcher wants us all to get along, after all." This was met with dark laughter.

The hands on her shoulder tightened momentarily, but Sakura had no delusions that she would be any safer with those men and women than she would with the 'red witch'.

Eventually the rabble moved on, and after a few more minutes of the weird waxy jutsu, the feeling subsided. But the redhead kept Sakura still for a second longer before nodding and releasing her hold.

"They're all gone, at least a click out by now."

"How can you tell?" Sakura figured the ban on talking was over.

The woman just winked, and Sakura scowled.

"You have to tell me something at some point," she complained. "Start with who you are and what the hell is going on here, please."

"I'm the welcome wagon." The woman removed her mask, unslung the bags, and removed the hood of her outermost jacket. Sakura could see her forehead protector was badly scratched and rusty, but had the unmistakable zigzag mark of Kusagakure, the Hidden Grass Village.

"You're Kusa?" Sakura blurted out.

"That a problem, Konoha?" The woman eyed her, silently daring Sakura to make it a problem. "If you're wondering whether anyone else out there is on your side, the answer is a definite 'no,' There's no other Hidden Leaf ninja here, and even if they were, it wouldn't mean jack to them anymore. Nobody's seen their village in years."

"Years?" Sakura screeched, before clamping her hands over her mouth in case the others weren't as far off as the Grass ninja said.

"...Which leads us smoothly into 'what the hell is going on here?' Short answer: you've been trapped in some sort of endless Nothing Dimension."

"And the long answer?" Sakura whispered.

The woman shrugged off a few more jackets. "You've been trapped in some sort of endless Nothing Dimension with no way out, other than The Watcher withdrawing you. The Watcher is the one who put us all in here, and as you can imagine from the name, they're watching us at all times. You got any food on you?"

Sakura, who was still processing the horror of the first two sentences, blinked. "Um, no. Sorry."

"Damn. I haven't eaten in months."

"What?" That was definitely the word Sakura had used the most since she'd dropped into this place. "That's impossible. You'd be dead."

"No death here. The Watcher doesn't like 'dead.' That's one of the rules, actually: don't kill each other."

"That seems like a good rule," Sakura admitted reluctantly. "But that doesn't explain how you haven't starved to death if your last meal was months ago."

"Actually, speaking of months: what's today's date?"

The constant topic-changing was giving Sakura whiplash, but she told the woman.

"Not even a month since I was taken." She nodded. "That lines up with what the others said, but urgh, that's so weird."

"Is that when you last ate? The day they took you?"

"Nah, like I said, it's been several months since any of us saw food, and all I got then was a melon rind and a black eye for my troubles. The last real meal I ate before I got taken was okonomiyaki." She sighed wistfully. "It was delicious. Sensei treated us after our first ever B-rank mission. But that was years ago."

"You said you've been in here less than a month."

"It was less than a month out there. In here, it's been years." She shucked her last jacket and stood up. "I was twelve when I was taken, and now I'm…well, I actually don't know because there's no sun, or hunger, or sleep to pass the time in here, but suffice to say I'm not twelve anymore."

No, Sakura thought, she definitely wasn't twelve. The Grass ninja was a woman in her early twenties at least.

"You're saying that while a month passed outside this place, whole years passed in here?" She'd been in here for what felt like hours now, but possibly she wasn't even late for dinner yet. How long until someone even noticed she was missing?

The woman nodded. "Smart cookie. Ugh, cookies…" The wistful expression returned.

"And nobody has to eat or sleep in the meantime?"

"That's right, Konoha. You won't even get hungry or sleepy, and there's no need for toilets or showers here, either. Which is good, because there aren't any. Just these rocks, in every single direction. Without end." She kicked one half-heartedly. "The only things we have are the ones we brought with us, or the ones left behind by previous generations."

Previous generations? "You said nobody died here."

"Oh, they don't; but everyone grows up eventually. The Watcher withdraws people before they're too far over the hill, and they don't ever come back."

For some reason, that was Sakura's breaking point. She hunched in on herself and cried into her hands, big fat tears that ninjas weren't meant to cry behind enemy lines. "I don't want to get old here! I want to go home!" She sobbed so violently that she was close to throwing up. Her mother was burning dinner right now, waiting for Sakura to come fix it before dad got home.

The woman let her cry, sitting and rummaging through her bags. Sakura looked up from her wet hands to watch as she pulled an assortment of clothes, belt buckles, and other knick knacks she had clearly salvaged or stolen from the others. There were even a few forehead protectors, though none of them bore the same leaf symbol as Sakura's.

"What are you looking for?" she asked, and the woman only stopped rummaging long enough to run finger along Sakura's cheek and pop it into her mouth. "Mm, salty."

"Gross," Sakura complained, but she didn't feel like crying as much anymore. She didn't feel much like anything, now that she had the emotional space to assess her feelings. No hunger, no tiredness, except for a little muscle fatigue. Even her bladder was quiet, like her entire digestive tract had just disappeared from inside her.

"So weird," she murmured, running her hands over her belly. "I really don't feel anything."

"Right?" the woman agreed cheerfully.

"So how come you want food, if you don't even get hungry?"

"You'll learn eventually that just because your body doesn't need food, you'll still miss the taste. Same with all your bodily functions. The lack of sleep gets especially weird, even if it doesn't actually kill you." She leaned in. "My theory is that The Watcher's body is connected to this world somehow, so as long as they're eating and sleeping, we get all the fuel and rest we need."

Sakura didn't have the energy to engage with that. Instead she nodded at the pile of trinkets. "How much of that was yours, originally?"

The woman tapped her forehead protector and pulled out a threadbare tan shirt with a darker brown stripe running across it. It looked tiny as she held it against her chest. "This and this. The rest either got taken or destroyed at some point."

"By the others?"

"Yep. They'll take whatever you've got too if you let them, so try to be careful. In fact, put this on, will you?" She threw Sakura the brown shirt. "It's about your size, and brown is better camouflage than red in this place."

"Isn't it…important to you?" She held the shirt carefully, in case it fell apart in her hands.

"It's only important if it's useful. Just humour me and put it on, Konoha. Between the red dress and the pink hair, you're gonna give our location away the second we're on the surface."

Sakura obediently tugged the shirt over her dress. "Why are you being so nice to me?" she asked quietly. "The others wanted to kill me."

"No killing, remember? But yeah, they would have robbed and beaten you pretty badly." The woman said this in the same tone that someone might say 'it looks like rain tomorrow.' "But I'm the youngest, or I was before you arrived. I'm not as cynical as the oldies yet. And you could be a good ally, if we teamed up."

"I'm not particularly experienced," Sakura admitted, even though it might cause the woman to turn on her. "I only just made genin."

"Everyone started out young and inexperienced, Konoha. You'll learn the ropes of this place faster than you think."

"Sakura."

"What's that?"

"My name isn't Konoha, it's Sakura. Haruno Sakura."

"Oh, right, names." The ninja from Grass smiled, like Sakura had introduced her to a new and charming concept. "I'm Karin."