Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Sakura is thirteen when she first finds the journals.

Her shishou tasked her with cleaning and reorganising the record room. Windowless and dark, the dusty archive is located deep below the Hokage tower with layers upon layers of dust suggesting that no living soul has been here for a long time. She sneezes once upon entry and tries very hard not to think about things skittering in the dark, moving shadows, creepy crawlies. The atmosphere is a little scary and downright ghostly and Sakura tells herself to get her shit together. She's Tsunade-sama's apprentice now. She's to bow to no one and giving in to her fear of insects or ghosts would be an insult to the only person in this village willing to give her a chance. So she does what she does best and makes the best out of an unfortunate situation.

Most of it is boring. There's a number of ancient treaties, long-forgotten declassified mission reports, copies of archaic laws that make Sakura shudder. Some of it is disturbing in ways that have nothing to do with blood or murder. Daughters used to belong to their fathers and she is glad that those times are long gone. She doesn't want to imagine what her own parent would have done, given a choice. He had never approved of her career choice. Her fingers slide over yellow pages and moth-infested scrolls, sort through towering stacks of abandoned files in hopes of maybe, perhaps, finding something worthwhile. Kami knows Sakura had always loved reading and surely, buried underneath all this waste, there has to be something. She fancies herself an archaeologist, a seeker, and finder of truth; as sad as it is, boredom is abundant, tasks few and far in between, missions completely absent. She thinks of Sasuke studying under a powerful, terrifying man and Naruto, gallivanting around the world and seeing all there is to see and finds herself wanting.

It is with that thought that her hands find something new. She picks up a heavy bundle of journals, bound in dark brown leather and tied together with thin frayed rope. She almost places them off to the side but then she takes a look at her watch and realises that it's close to midnight already. Her shishou is probably drunk in her office if not already passed out and nobody else has come to get her. She has tomorrow off, Sakura thinks and all that waits for her at home is darkness with no one else in sight. She bites her lip for a second before making her choice. She had lunch a few hours ago and doesn't feel hungry yet so with a single sigh she sits down on the only chair in the room and resumes cataloguing her findings.

The rope falls apart the moment she tries to unravel it and she is almost wary to properly handle the journals. They're old, the leather binding cracked and dry, the pages thin, curled on the edges. Very carefully Sakura opens the first book and takes a moment to admire the beautifully elegant, if somewhat spidery, handwriting that almost looks like calligraphy but isn't. Her fingers reverently glide over the words, almost enchanted by the practised penmanship that makes her think of long and slender fingers, so infinitely more skilled and deliberate than her own. It is a silly thing to be so hung up over someone's handwriting but Sakura finds it hard to shake the fascination. She's never seen anything quite like it before. Of course, that is when she begins looking at the words and what they say and for a single breath, she stops. She hasn't been studying medicine for long but just long enough to realise the notes for what they are. Flipping a few pages, back and forth, her eyes begin to glint, and her heart to soar. Right here in this dreary room of a prison, she has indeed stumbled upon a gold mine.

Sakura is fourteen when she has studied enough to understand them.

Most of her time is spent bending over medical texts, anatomy scrolls, and books on other related fields of study. She has duties at the hospital now and while she's elated to finally be useful and able to put all her practice to use she can't help but find it somewhat lacking. She mends scratches, fixes broken bones, and administers antidotes, she heals, helps, and aides but doesn't thrive. Something is missing, something she can't name or put a finger on and it makes her restless. Combat training helps with that. There is gratification in being smacked around a training field, pushing her body to its limits, dodging and weaving, and occasionally smashing her fists into trees, sending thin spidery webs of chakra into the trunks and watching as bark cracks, splinters, and evaporates into nothingness. It is this pure and unbridled potential for destruction that calms her racing mind, if only for a moment. Sakura is civilian, clanless, forgotten by her sensei and annoyingannoyingannoying but she can make the earth crack, level hills, and one day she will shatter mountains.

Exactly one year, two months, one week, and three days after first discovering it, she opens the journal again. She doesn't count the seconds, minutes, hoursdaysweeksmonths- She knows a lot about the human body now. Knows how to break and repair it in a variety of ways, knows how to break it down into its most basic components, knows what makes people live and die. The first time she looked at the pages felt like discovering a new road into the unknown and the second time feels like actually walking the path. Sakura reads and understands notes about anatomy that delve far beyond anything her shishou has ever taught her.
The author breaks down the genetic code into segments and fragments, translates it with a kind of combination of intellect, intuition, and sheer knowledge that seems almost unbelievable, and works their way through the origin of doujutsu and where they are anchored in the human body. They explain chakra affinities, where the information is hidden in a person's DNA and how they directly influence someone's biology, how humans can be split into archetypes, and how there is no chaotic element in chakra, how there are patterns. Sakura learns more about the nature of chakra, the fragility of humanity, and the sheer genius of someone she has never met than she ever thought she would.

Her shishou is, of course, slightly impressed and rather pleased at the depth of Sakura's progress though she would never say so out loud. Instead, she lets her observe increasingly complicated surgeries and while Sakura aces the following surprise exams she never once notices the glint in those more and more inquisitive jade eyes. If she had, maybe she would have been able to save her.

After studying and positively dissecting the first three journals, it is upon opening the fourth that Sakura finally hits a wall. In hindsight, she understands that the first three issues have merely been preparation for the rest; to build a basic understanding and imparting the required knowledge needed to make sense of what follows. The wall is not one of ignorance. The first page of journal number four presents the profile of test subject number one: Saito Kaori, age 23, blood type 0, status: alive, experiment: failed, amended status: deceased. She drops the booklet in disgust and scrambles away from where it falls on the floor. A dark and damning sense of foreboding hits her out of nothing and she doesn't want it to be true, doesn't want to face the reality of having profited from human experimentation, doesn't want to admire the man that took-

So she doesn't.

Every waking moment from then on is a nightmare. She walks on eggshells, completes her duties with shaky fingers, and struggles to look into her shishou's eyes. Her mind is running circles around her, taunting her with images of the blonde woman's disappointment, rage, and disgust, supplies her with harrowing visions of being tortured for information, exiled from the village, or havens forbid, executed. Sakura hides the journals under her bed, terribly cliche and completely unworthy of a real ninja but it is more her own disgust that she runs from than actual fear of discovery. Her paranoia controls her actions and despite still learning from the woman, she avoids her shishou more often than not. If the blonde notices, she doesn't say a word even though she feels like there's eyes following her wherever she goes. She is lost in her own thoughts more often than not, caught between shame, fury, and sadness-

Loss. What she feels, underneath everything else, is a keen sense of loss.

It is Ino who eventually shakes her from her endless cycle of feelings that threaten to suffocate her and the moment is so quintessentially Ino, that Sakura wants to cry. Without a single word, she drags her to training ground four and attacks her with a fervour that is entirely unlike her. When they are done, sweaty, bruised, and spent, Ino demands to know why she has avoided her. She has avoided everyone, is what Sakura wants to say but instead simply apologises. It's not enough and she knows but it's a start. They have dinner then and go shopping and meet up again and again between her hospital shifts and Ino's burgeoning career in T&I and once again, everything is alright with the world.
Three months later Team 10 asks her to fill in for Shikamaru for the chuunin exams. Sakura accepts and subsequently gets promoted. She gets to participate in minor surgeries now, has her own set of patients along with a fancy new title. She starts to learn about poisons from Shizune, learns to mix antidotes under shishou's guidance, and receives access to the rarest medical scrolls and texts the blonde has to offer. She reads and studies them and with a pang of disappointment, she realises that none of it is new. It's dissatisfying and wrong, like an itch under her skin, the sense of being let down dwarfing everything else. She had hoped for more. It's the end of the line and Sakura wants more. Sakura wantswantswants-

Sakura is fifteen when she picks them up again.

Naruto is back. Naruto is back and so is Kakashi-sensei and they are here and nothing is awkward and Sakura is happy. Naruto has the rasengan, Kakashi-sensei is Kakashi-sensei and Sakura can rupture the earth. They're here, they're back, they're the same, and Sakura...

...isn't.

They try too hard. She doesn't know why the sight is so jarring to her. To see Naruto eat ramen and squawk about and bother Kakashi-sensei, to see Kakashi-sensei read porn, make fun of his students, and smile with his eyes. They orbit around the blonde and Sakura tries very hard not to remember that she hadn't seen hide nor hair of her former teacher until he got back. Tries very hard not to feel left behind when even now they walk together, side by side, with her trailing behind. Everything is as it was and while once, Sakura had wished for that to become a reality again, now that it is she finds she hates it. They complete D and C-ranks because as a genin, Naruto can't do anything else so they help around the village, escort merchants, clear out bandit camps. Life and death is an everyday matter for Sakura who gives and takes lives in eternal balance. She kills and Naruto looks at her with betrayal etched into his face. Everything is as it was. Nothing is.

It's a combination of reasons that lead her to work at the hospital full-time. For one, Naruto can hardly stand being around her and in turn, Sakura cannot be around him without feeling like the worst sort of person. Kakashi-sensei has never been interested in trying to fix broken things so he doesn't try to fix this. After three disastrous missions and three blunt mission reports, shishou puts Team 7 on hold (again) and reassigns her. No matter how much Naruto's dismissal hurts, now she can breathe again. The hospital is an entirely different kind of stifling; one she can endure. She doesn't try to keep tabs on what he does because it hurtshurtshurts and dives headfirst into the never-ending duty of saving lives, shattering boulders and feeling lost and left behind and empty.
Then, she loses a man on the operating table. He's not the first. A platoon of ANBU was ambushed by Iwa nin and out of fifteen members four fell in battle, two succumbed to their injuries on the way home, one died to poison on the way in and three died during surgery. She still has their blood on her hands when there's an emergency in one of the recovery rooms. Sakura has her hands in his chest when he breathes his last. She washes her hands but the blood won't come off. It never will. Even now, she's still not enough. And she refuses to never be.

No amount of resolve can stop the feeling of phantom bugs crawling over her skin and the sickening feeling in her stomach when she takes the journals out of their hiding place. But she perseveres. She bites her lip, clenches her fingers, and then gets over herself. No matter how wrong it is, she reminds herself to be practical. Those lives were already lost, the monster created long ago and the long string of atrocities well in the past. If those people can't be saved the least she can do is honour them. Sakura spends night after night over those journals, reads about the terrible experiments this man has done, the crimes he committed, the pure vileness of his actions. She abhors him, hates him, wants to pay him back for every person he ruined but she's practical. She has to be. He's out of her reach, perhaps forever, but his research isn't. His hard-earned knowledge is at her disposal and she has the background and will to consume him in his entirety and if it saves lives, kami be her witness, she will.

Her performance skyrockets. Everyone notices – how can they not – and shishou seems pleased. Sakura knows more, understands more, sees more. She has countless new jutsu on her hands and twice as many methods, all learned from a man who fears death and thus makes way for her to cheat it. She saves a man by stopping his heart so the blood stops flowing and the surgery becomes marginally easier without him bleeding out, then revives him with a minor lightning jutsu. She saves a child from choking on a rubber toy by cutting open its throat and retrieving the object while controlling blood loss, breathing, and brain activity, effectively keeping the body operating as if nothing was wrong.
She saves Kiba, goes downdowndown until she reaches his genetic code, rearranges it to alter his nature from earth to wind so the poison gets expelled from his tenketsu because now it's not compatible anymore, cleanses his system of the substance and reverts the change before anyone else can notice. He had been declared a lost cause. Sakura is hailed as a prodigy and by now she's smart enough to bullshit her shishou about her process. She's walking a very thin tightrope and there are eyes on her now. Shizune is uncomfortable with some of her methods, calls them drastic and violent but shishou is more pragmatic. Sakura wonders for how long she will continue to be.

They give her all the surgeries. She has ANBU clearance now and is no longer a backup surgeon. Other people take her rounds and patients and Sakura spends most of her time in the operating room. She no longer feeds chakra for rituals, she does them. The moment she kneels in front of a naked and dying patient with her shishou sitting in the surrounding circle, leading the energy supply with five others is an epiphany. She has better control, more options, reached the point where even years and years of experience are not enough to offset what Sakura has in terms of perspective. Her shishou is an exemplary medic. She revolutionised the field, is a veritable fountain of knowledge and sheer ability but where she is ruthless when needed, compassionate when appropriate, Sakura has no such reservations.
Shishou sees a person whose life she has to save. Sakura sees a mechanism that's failing and has to be fixed. She's detached during surgery, calm and collected because the only thing stronger than her debilitating fear of failing, is the near dominating need to prove herself. Fixing is what she's good at. She can't afford to feel inadequate anymore. That's what makes her cold and ruthless enough to resort to means her shishou would never consider. She convinces herself that she's doing it for them and not for herself. She's not that heartless.

Is she?

She reaches a point where she's completely isolated. She doesn't notice at first because when she's not busy performing surgery, she's consuming his journals and when she's not doing that, she's keeping up with her physical training regimen or studying hospital records from the (very few) surgeries she failed. It all comes to a head one sunny day when Sakura's waiting for her food order to be ready. She doesn't eat ramen anymore but found a nice little restaurant that supplies her with her daily takeout. The chances of running into anyone she knows are slim.
Unfortunately, slim doesn't mean non-existent. And she really has the worst sort of luck, she thinks when she sees them sitting around the largest table in the entire establishment. It's the entire rookie 11, sensei included and the only missing piece is her. She hopes she can get away before they spot her. She saved Kiba's life so he feels like he owes her which he shows in all the wrong ways. He calls out her name, loudly and with a wave and suddenly there are fourteen sets of eyes on her. Sakura looks at them and realises just how much time has passed since she's last seen some of them yet the only thing she can think about is how she's still wearing her scrubs underneath her lab coat and that her hair is unruly and once again long enough to reach her waist. She was on her way home after a six-hour surgery and that's what she tells them. It's true but also an excuse to skip the socialising she has no energy for.
Kiba doesn't get the message and scoots over so she can sit down next to him. Naruto looks at her for the first time in half a year and smiles, concern and apprehension flickering across his face. It is Kakashi-sensei's hard look that makes her sit down. He then smiles at her and jovially addresses her as 'Mrs. Head Surgeon'. It's recognition of a kind but no matter how happy she knows she's supposed to be, she can't quite suppress the voice inside her head that tells her it's too little, too late. For all intents and purposes, it seems like they moved on without her but she's beginning to feel like it's been the other way around all along.

It's those awful, awful training sessions with Naruto and Kakashi-sensei that bring her back down to earth in the most brutal manner possible. He absolutely wipes the floor with her. Realistically she knows that he spends much more time training than she does but the ease with which she beats her in spars, again and again, makes her furious. It doesn't matter that she's the reigning queen of medicine, surgical prodigy, med-nin mastermind. Out here, in open combat, Sakura is still twelve years old and hopelessly outclassed. Naruto's sheer endurance and his annoying ability to bounce back from anything non-lethal she throws at him is all he needs to completely bypass her (meagre) kit.
Kakashi-sensei is too fast and too resourceful to even be hit. Her strengths make her an excellent medic but that's all she has. There's no point in trying for ninjutsu with her average chakra well, genjutsu is an entire area in which she has no experience and taijutsu... well. She has taken everything her shishou could teach her and it is only now that it starts to feel wrong. It weren't her teachings that made Sakura truly great. She feels like the bells are tolling and the gates of hell are opening because it is now that she realises precisely how damned she's become. Shishou is the one who had taken her and shown her a way to rise above her station yet in the end his teachings have always suited her better.

She can kill a man in more than a hundred ways. Her anatomical and biological knowledge is rivalled by none bar one. She can destroy and rebuild an organism from the ground up, can shuffle someone's genetic code, alter a person's chakra, regrow entire organs, theoretically with the right equipment synthesise an entirely new human being. It should be enough. It's not.

Her curiosity had always been her downfall. It drove her to obsess over Sasuke, it's what made her read those cursed journals in the first place and it's what gets her started on animals. Nobody is going to miss a wild rabbit or two and Sakura thinks that the choice between being eaten and serving a higher scientific purpose is like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Chances are they are going to die either way and at least with her, they have a chance of survival. She is an excellent healer after all. Considering she basically lives in the hospital, nobody is surprised when she spends a little more time than usual down in the labs.
Clearance is a wonderful thing and so is the fact that she has her own lab, security lock, and all. She tries to rewrite their DNA first and kills three rabbits in the process. Cutting and replacing slow-twitch with fast-twitch muscles doesn't work either; something Sakura can't identify causes the body to reject them. She stops for a week and thinks about what she wants. The second she's in someone's personal space she can kill them. She has countless different ways to do that. She has no mid- or long-range capabilities but if she's fast enough, does she really need them? And that's when it hits her. There's no need to even bother with genetics in the first place. Not when chakra is so much more malleable.

Naruto doesn't trust her and that's fair but he's still her friend so when she asks for a blood sample 'for a general health checkup', he lets her near and offers her a vein. Bless his clueless, faithful heart. It's easy to get a print of his genetic code but it's noticeably harder to find a way to synthesise his chakra. Theoretically, the easiest way would be to isolate the sequences that produce chakra and implant them in someone else but that's far beyond what she's willing to do. She's not him. She will never become him. She tries it on a rabbit once and the dead animal, as a result, is entirely expected. At this point, Sakura's biggest problem is that she knows exactly how to go about it. It's convenient and laughably easy.
Hiding it and staying undetected is a much harder chore. Even if that part were as easy as the rest it's a question of morality. Thirteen-year-old Sakura would be horrified by what fifteen-year-old Sakura is doing, except all she's done so far is practically nothing in comparison to what she's considering. There's no equipment to create a clone. It's absolutely impossible. There's no other way. She closes her eyes and prays and tells herself, again and again, that she's not like him.

Sakura has never been daunted by a corpse before whereas now the hollow, empty eyes seem almost accusing. She feels judged by a dead lump of bone, flesh, and muscle. And rightfully so. The time frame during which she can work on this is terribly narrow since disappearing corpses would be quite obvious. Heavens help her, she's stealing corpses from the hospital morgue. Injecting the DNA and replacing the already existing sequences takes the better part of five hours and Sakura is thankful that she has the day off and no scheduled surgeries. Biting a soldier pill before chasing the bitter taste with a stick of dango, she gets back to work, beginning the painstaking effort of nurturing as well as energising dead cells.
Reanimating a body and keeping it in a coma is a lengthy, if perfectly possible task. For her, at least. It's all about providing enough energy to artificially revive the body, forcing all normal functions and coaxing it into latching onto the existing power, supplementing it with its own. When the organism regains a basic level of function Sakura cuts off the life support and feeds herself another soldier pill. She has a working host and a brief scan reveals to her that it's already producing chakra that is identical to Naruto's wind nature. The sense of success and pride that floods her feels like waking up from a long and terrible fever dream.

Sakura is sixteen when she starts her own.

It's a terrible folly to immortalise one's own criminal activity but she knows the worth of well-documented research (how can she not?) and she makes sure to always carry her journal with her. Somewhere along the way she gets promoted to tokujou, not that the new rank really changes anything. In theory, she can hound the jounin lounge now and has higher clearance except she has all the hospital-specific access there is so it hardly bothers her.
She's the first to advance beyond chuunin though Neji beats her to proper jounin. It should mean something. Once upon a time, it would have. Her priorities have shifted and if she finds a second to breathe, a second where she has nothing else to keep her busy, she thinks that realistically, she could be happy anywhere. She doesn't go on missions or really keep in touch with anyone, all she ever does is fix whatever they point her at. She tries very hard not to think a lot. The idea that village loyalty really is quite an arbitrary concept seems too treasonous to be comfortable with. Shishou takes her to a bar for drinks once. They don't have much to talk about and the distance between them seems so far and vast, it feels impossible to overcome. She wonders when things started being that way. Wonders when she started feeling more kinship with a traitor than her own master.

It takes her a month after creating the host to have passable results. She perfected drawing out and purifying Naruto's chakra essence and looks at the somewhat cloudy blue, raw energy contained in a simple vial and smiles. She knows for a fact that she is the first person in history to obtain pure essence of chakra. He could have done it too if his control had ever been as good as hers. It's back to rabbits after that and she wants to cry in frustration over just how many she actually goes through before finding a way to make them live.
There's no way to permanently replace someone's chakra since that would require a completely different set of DNA - a lesson she learned in the early stages of her rabbit experimentation which means she's setting herself up for something not entirely different from soldier pills. In function, at least. She doesn't think there's a way to get around the liquidity of essence of chakra so probably more like a shot. Plainly administering the essence causes chakra poisoning. What actually works is simultaneously infusing chakra via syringe and siphoning equal amounts of natural chakra from the subject. Which is impossible to do effectively in combat. She hits a bit of a snag after that and is tetchy in the operation room for days.

Inspiration strikes in the form of Hyuuga Hinata. It's extremely rare for Sakura nowadays to attend any sort of communal training exercise but shishou has been nagging her to get out more so there's that. As it happens, Team 8 and Naruto whose training is overseen by Kakashi and an unknown man with mousy brown hair are currently inhabiting Sakura's favourite training ground. She nods at Kakashi when he spots her and offers the expected pleasantries. She gets on the ground and begins to stretch while absent-mindedly observing a one on one spar between Hinata and Naruto. He's obviously holding back and part of her resents him for it. The same part finds great amusement in the blonde eating a Hyuuga jab and finding himself with a blocked left arm. He hits her with a blast of wind which is expertly deflected by some sort of Hyuuga move that forces the air to go around the heiress.
Sakura blinks and nurtures the train of thought building itself in her mind so the second the spar ends she jogs over, not giving Naruto any attention beyond a wave and a small smile, concentrating on Hinata instead. Turns out the technique is secret clan business though, after a bit of prodding, the shy girl reveals that it's basically a concentrated burst of chakra and truthfully Sakura doesn't listen to her words after that. A controlled burst of chakra, released from her tenketsu without prior shaping or forming. An instinctive reaction, a split-second action. This is exactly what she needs. This is exactly what she's been doing for years. She can't help the self-satisfied smirk that's crawling onto her lips as she turns around and walks straight back to her lab.

The first time Sakura does it, she gets sick. Violently. The procedure has gone over well and there is no surplus of chakra in her system but she has completely underestimated what a forceful intrusion of unshaped, foreign chakra would do to her body. Side effects of her body cleansing itself of Naruto's chakra, unfortunately, include vomiting, a fever, and a raging headache. Her own control makes it possible to accelerate the process and two days after she's back to fiddling with the essence. In the end, it's an accident that solves her problem. She's never careless except this once she is and Sakura pricks her finger on a needle like an intern. One of the vials with essence gets contaminated. She's about to throw it away when she realises that the two substances don't separate or destroy each other but mix instead. They mix until the cloudy blue is a pale lavender instead and she wonders if it's really that easy. So she goes again. Except this time she doesn't get sick.

Not for the first time does Sakura thank kami for her unprecedented level of chakra control. While a smidgen of DNA is enough for foreign chakra to latch onto and convert itself to be compatible (chakra, like so many things in nature, seems to strive for harmony while also possessing the inherent ability to conform – she writes that in her journal) it does not actually mix with other chakra. It's a state of co-existence and it makes Sakura wonder at the possibilities and just how many types of chakra she could theoretically store in her body but that's a question for another time.
She is skilled and finicky enough with chakra to draw upon either of the two powers flowing through her pathways. Most of it is still her own; so inherently natural and pure that she has never developed an elemental affinity but there are bits and pieces of wind-natured chakra circulating in tune with the rest. That power is what she harnesses as she falls into a light jog. From shishou she learned how to mould and expel it in her fists and legs for concentrated explosions. From a library book, she had learned the theory of the shunshin which is an incredibly fast movement achieved by circulating chakra through the entire body at a staggeringly fast pace. A jutsu that comes easiest to wind users.
But Sakura has higher ambitions than that. So she breaks into a run, takes the wind chakra and cycles, cycles, cycles until she is racing through the woods so fast she might as well be flying. Ninja can shunshin because they can cycle chakra in bursts. Prolonged use of that method is too hard for most to achieve while also using jutsu or keeping track of the fight and their chakra flow. Sakura is not most. Sakura has perfect control over her chakra. It's all she ever had. And she made it work.

After that, it's a matter of milking the host of countless vials of essence all of which she carefully infuses with a tiny bit of her own DNA and then stores in the freezer in her apartment behind a frozen slab of meat. During her more frequent training exercises she practises administering the shot and keeping her inner balance with increased speed and fluidity. Making use of the power is somewhat of a no-brainer and a tiny bit of chakra in her eyes gets rid of the motion sickness. As for actually doing it? Sakura only has four words for that.

It's fucking fantastic.

The first body was easy. Sakura had been very careful in using a well-timed henge to make sure nobody noticed the lack of corpse. Her lab can be accessed only by her specific chakra imprint so the initial body is safe. The issue is getting a second. It's a wild stroke of luck that makes her realise that she actually needs one. Hatake Kakashi, bane of doctors and nurses alike, notorious avoider of prolonged hospital stays and general medical menace comes in for a checkup. Sakura sees and first scans her eyes for damages, mumbles a kai second, and checks for a henge third. The man himself seems terribly amused by her antics.
It's much later when she's about to run the blood sample through the lab that she notices what she's actually got in her hands. It's not only about intellectual curiosity – although there is plenty of that – but something else entirely. She has no idea how to test it without people figuring out that she's doing some pretty questionable things but that's a bridge she can cross later. No, she has Hatake Kakashi's DNA. The key to his chakra. Never mind all the locks that could theoretically open, Hatake Kakashi has a summoning contract. She wants nothing more than to try and figure out if that would actually work. She has reached a point where she doesn't worry about the ethics of absconding with a second corpse anymore, just how she can pull it off. It's easy not to think about that when the thought doesn't come to her in the first place.

Three days after getting her hands on Kakashi's essence of chakra, there's an emergency call from Suna. Sakura has to go and she has to go now. Now that she is a person with secrets, she double and triple checks the lock to her lab until she's sure that there's no way anyone else can enter and goes a step further by clearing out her entire fridge. She has enough money to invest into a high-end sealing scroll which will keep all of her shots at a steady temperature and seals her journal as well as the others too, just for security purposes.
And because she's extra clever that scroll won't open without Naruto's chakra signature. She has three backup shots in her medics pouch which should be enough in case anything happens. Of course, that is when she's told that she's to save the Kazekage's brother's life and not much else. Apparently, her nigh exclusive work at the hospital made her unfit for combat missions. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth and a snarky voice whispers in her head, asking her if she couldn't get a nice lab somewhere else. She rolls her eyes at herself. It's not as much of a no-brainer as she tells herself.

Suna is hot, windy, and sandy as fuck and Sakura curses her lack of foresight. Considering she spends most of her time in scrubs her clothing choices were rather basic. Her preferred sleeveless and turtlenecked rib dress (with two front zippers for easy leg maneuverability) paired with smooth pants in either white or black and dark boots with a small heel are not desert wear. She gets a few looks as she shows up in civilian garb but the fact of the matter is that she has outgrown her combat gear a while ago and didn't need to replace it. She's really more of a lab rat/surgeon these days than a proper kunoichi. Surprisingly enough, that doesn't sting as much as she thought it would. She has an ace up her sleeve and it helps her sleep at night. Being formidable as a result of hard work and questionable genius feels more rewarding than a fancy kekkei genkei ever could.

Maybe that is her superpower, she thinks. They had always called her a paper ninja but even paper has sharp edges.

The Kazekage is abducted, apparently there's an extremely jinchuuriki murder happy mercenary group gallivanting across the desert countryside and there's a positively ancient woman standing in the way of her job. Now Sakura's aware that her lack of socialising and her almost hermit-y ways haven't helped her people skills but maybe telling the old crone to get out of her way and decompose somewhere else is a bit harsh. Kakashi certainly seems to think so if the look of censure he gives her is anything to go by but then the surprisingly agile senior vaults above her head and tries to murder him until suddenly neither are Sakura's problem anymore. Sometimes life just loves you.
The poison in the boy's system, she finds, is almost beautiful in its composition and she spends one too many minutes simply admiring the complexity of the toxin when she's interrupted by his sister who hisses at her to get a move on. Suna's a perfectly welcoming tourist place by the way. It takes her a little longer than usual to break the poison into pieces and burn away the remnants with her chakra but no time at all to repair the minor damages to his pathways. All in all, it wasn't much of an emergency and surely Shizune would have been enough, Sakura thinks just a tad too loudly and is unfortunately overheard by Kakashi who really seems to have a bone to pick with her. Or two.
It doesn't matter since only half an hour later they leave with the granny in tow and Sakura is, once again, left behind. She's not sad or disappointed anymore and even her anger burns white and cold. She's not vindictive and certainly doesn't want anyone to die but surely being knocked around a little would put them and their hubris in place.

They return with the errant Kazekage, without the grandma and a kill on their hands. Apparently, the old woman has done a fine job of killing her puppet-bodied grandson (and Sakura feels slight disappointment at not having been there and losing the chance to see how that even worked) until his partner had run off with the puppet's 'heart container'. She also gave her life to revive the now ichibi-less kage. There's a lot of medical shenanigans she missed out on and that bothers Sakura more than missing out on the combat.
It's a shame, she thinks, that the architect of the most artful poison Sakura has ever seen went out like a light. It sounds like he would have been fascinating to talk to if one ignored the missing-nin criminal bit. With everyone saved and healthy, they're on their merry way again and it's then that Sakura truly feels the glaring line that separates her from the others. They're the fighters that go out into the world to slay monsters and rescue princesses. They talk about Akatsuki and their goals, their enemies and how to save the world. Sakura runs on her own, keeping up quite easily which doesn't seem noteworthy to anyone else and all she thinks about is her second host, the possible applications of Kakashi's chakra, and how to best test the summons without them snitching on her.
Intellectually she knows that they had drifted apart gradually but looking back she's not sure when it started. When she stopped going to training exercises? When Team 7 broke apart for the second time? When she read the journals? Before that? She used to be bitter and hurt and angry at them. Now all she really wants is to be out of their way without being caught up in their schemes, growing stronger and smarter on her own. Because wasn't it on her own that she made the most progress? Years and years she worried that she slowed them down but maybe... just maybe... they were the ones slowing her down.

Everything has gone too smoothly and while part of Sakura has been waiting for something to just go wrong for a while now this isn't what she imagined. Everything has, quite literally, gone to hell in a handbasket. She got back and after taking a shower in her apartment, Sakura immediately went to her lab only to find her Hokage waiting for her. She's not sure how she got past the door except apparently there's a Hokage-level clearance that overrides personal locks and that's a bit of information Sakura honestly wishes she had come by earlier.
The woman is absolutely furious but, Sakura notes while she's being yelled at, completely alone. The usual ANBU escort is absent and for all intents and purposes, it seems as if the blonde expects Sakura to have a perfectly valid reason for the two comatose ex-corpses in her lab and sees no need to get authorities involved. She doesn't settle for the truth but she doesn't lie either. She explains that she's studying ways to perform safe chakra transfusions without kekkei genkai or complicated rituals. When the woman demands an explanation for the hosts, Sakura realises that she's forgotten that that's not actually an expected sight.
So she, first of all, assures her that they're not actually zombies and she's not capable of bringing anyone back from the dead, but that she merely forced the bodies to function until repaired cells and biology kicked in to take care of the rest. They're absolutely gone, she says, practically comatose with only minimal brain activity to regulate the necessary functions. Tsunade looks at her as if she's committed a crime of the highest natural order and while she doesn't feel apologetic for anything she's done, the raging hurt and disapproval coming from the woman who had been a mother in all but name, cuts deep.

She's not arrested which is a relief but Tsunade seals her lab which is... well. Saying it's like being cut off from the air she breathes is a little dramatic but Sakura feels like she's suffocating. On top of that, she's not allowed to perform surgery anymore. Suddenly her sometimes drastic methods and the things she's done are under scrutiny and her former (and doesn't that word hurt?) shishou doesn't trust her around living people anymore. Not when she apparently had no idea just what Sakura is capable of. It's like she's lost everything she's worked so hard for in the past three years and the only lifeline is that Tsunade seems to comb through and pick apart everything Sakura's done on her own. There are no odd looks, no rumours, no ANBU stalking her. It's the only courtesy she can expect and she clings onto the knowledge that she's worth at least that with all her might.
Sakura spends a lot of time in her apartment, has too much time to think, and drinks more sake than she should since she burns through alcohol at an alarmingly fast rate. Nobody comes to look for her since her being out of the picture isn't exactly news and no one misses her anyways. She doesn't eat much, sleeps less, and feels more agitated with every day that passes. Thoroughly demolishing two training grounds doesn't help and she's glad that her hospital hours paid so well that she has enough in savings to live off them for the foreseeable future.
She doesn't know what's coming and she's afraid and buries herself in the only company that's been a steady presence throughout all these years. His notes on his experiments still somewhat disgust her but he's familiar. She knows that finding his journals had been a simple coincidence but right when she's on the border between being awake and falling asleep, she can convince herself that at least he has always believed in her. She sees him in her dreams but he smells of sake, mint, and the faintest hint of vanilla.

She's called into her office two weeks later where Sakura wonders if this is the end of the line. There's nothing on the older woman's face. All the emotion she saw the last time they met is gone. In a tiny, hidden corner of Sakura's heart, something breaks. And when she speaks it's like the floor is being pulled from underneath her feet.
"I failed you," she says. "I'm sorry I failed you and I don't know how to fix it." It's not what Sakura expects. And it's not what she wants to hear. Tsunade continues and her words burn like fire, searing her skin and etching themselves in her memory.
"I made the same mistake as my teacher," she muses ruefully, eyes not looking at Sakura but into the past.
"I had a brilliant student with more potential than I could foster so ultimately, in a twisted stroke of poetic justice, you left me behind because you hungered for more." Sakura wants to argue, tell her that the woman was more than enough but holds her tongue because she knows it's a lielielie. The woman has always been enough. The teacher... not so much. Tsunade says that she told nobody and that everything that happened is between the two of them. And because of that, she asks her to be honest. Asks her how far she would have gone, asks her what her goal is, asks her if she can trust her. And Sakura is torn. Self-preservation yells at her to lie to her, to make sure she covers her bases and doesn't end up in a cell or worse. It's the lingering affection she has for her former teacher that wins out, the love she holds for her despite everything that's gone wrong, and how she can't find it within herself to even care for her former team anymore.
So she's honest. Says that all she ever wanted was to be equal to the rest of her team. To not be left behind anymore. To not be useless or annoying or dead weight. Says that her goal was to find ways to be just as good as the others and then see what she could do because she can do things nobody else can. Says that she doesn't know where she would have stopped because it's her work that's the root of her self-worth. It's where she finds her own recognition, her genius, her worth that places her above all else because powerhouses are a dime a dozen. There's Hyuuga, Uchiha, Hatake and jinchuuriki but out of all of them, she's the only one who's truly unique. Truly self-made.
She doesn't feel inadequate anymore, she explains and that she finds her purpose in pushing beyond what people believe to be possible. Sakura knows that her answer is the wrong one, knows exactly who she reminds Tsunade of, can see the pain in her eyes, and asks herself if that's really such a surprise? After all, he made her just as much as, if not more, than the woman herself. It's quiet for a long time and eventually, Sakura looks away and without much of her former conviction adds the final, damning words.

"For giving me a chance and believing in me, I will love you dearly for the rest of my life."

Everyone is surprised when suddenly Team 7 is a thing again and Sakura's part of it. She looks at Kakashi and knows that he expects a return of her genin days. Helpless little Sakura with teammates who need to protect her. Naruto is wary but tentatively elated and Sai is... huh. New and not entirely unwelcome if only because by needling Naruto and speaking badly of Sasuke he causes one commotion after another and takes most of the group's focus. He calls her Ugly once but Sakura is way past those concerns of hers and only smooths her dress, noting Naruto's eyes follow the movement and taking careful note of her curves and that's that.
She does eventually acquire a standard jounin outfit and ties her hair in a ponytail because hair that falls down all the way to her ass is terribly impractical for a frontline fighter. They're sent on easy missions so she doesn't use her boosters now that her supply line has run dry. She's only allowed in the hospital if injured and her apprenticeship has quietly and privately ended. Officially, she resigned from medical service and while that one raised more than a few eyebrows, the Hokage's word is law and she doesn't owe anyone an explanation. There's this one semi-persistent rumour about her having an affair with Tsunade with the both of them covering their asses by cutting all official ties but if the blonde heard of it or not isn't a detail Sakura's privy to.
The days pass slowly and nights even slower and she's caught in a haze where nothing moves and nothing happens, neither forward nor backward, just an infinite loop of being stuck. She knows that being deprived of everything that made her is the worst punishment she could've gotten and Tsunade knows it too. This isn't living and she doesn't want to die just yet. Purgatory seems to mark the rest of her sorry existence and Sakura can feel her sanity slipping through her fingers like tiny grains of sand.

It's not that she hates her team. She doesn't. She feels indifferent towards them most of the time, patches them up whenever they require it and other than that participates in some fights and gets sidelined for others and while it's not ideal itsfuckinghelliwanttodiediedie it's... bearable, if just so. They're a group of strong personalities, always have been and such a composition can occasionally oversaturate the bigger picture. It's Naruto who fancies himself a hero, who thinks he's invincible and that everyone can be turned into a friend and violence is wrong who gives her such shit for every missing-nin, bandit, or criminal she kills. It's like he missed the academy lectures on being a shinobi and having to take lives.
She ignores it with a grain of salt most days except when it gets too hard. Her peace is ruined, her existence crumbled and she's back to this so when he opens his mouth, glances at her with disapproval in his eyes, makes a scene one too many times she really tests the limits of his kyuubi inflicted resilience by punching him so hard he lands in an entirely different area of forest. She refuses to come along to fetch him and gets a stern lecture from Kakashi as well as a round of yelling from Tsunade for her troubles. Not once throughout the entire ordeal is she apologetic. She talks back at Kakashi but not Tsunade. Never Tsunade.

Every day is a dark, additional round of fucking unfulfilling existence, too much cheap sake and people she'd really rather silence permanently than listen to for one more second. She knows mental illness and can see depression coming from a mile away so she's entirely aware of what's happening. She's surviving but not living. Nothing's right, grey is seeping into her world and draining all the colours except for purple, yellow and a very specific shade of forest green and even that is slowly failing at keeping her above water. She goes through her days in a haze, completing missions, participating in spars, and dutifully ignoring everyone around her. It's hard to move and even harder to get up in the mornings, food is a rare necessity and she can't believe that she's allowing herself to waste away like this.
She could have been great... hell, she was great. Was. Not is. And isn't that just such a fucking tragedy, she thinks as she attempts to drown herself in a seedy bar on the outskirts of Konoha. Some drunk guy tries to feel her up and gets carried to the hospital to get his concussion looked at. Someone else slides into his abandoned seat and while Sakura knows that she should probably purge her system of alcohol right about now to either defend herself or alert the authorities, she just... doesn't. Instead, she lets Uchiha Itachi talk. And listens.

'You didn't fail me. You set me free.'

(In an otherwise empty Hokage tower, a woman rages and screams and completely devastates her office and waits two hours before notifying her ANBU that Haruno Sakura has defected from Konohagakure.)

Chapter Text

Sakura is seventeen when she loses the mentor that never was.

Being on the road is an entirely new experience and it's sad that it still isn't worse than her last few months in Konoha have been. She doesn't have much on her; just her usual clothes, three spare sets, her precious scroll, medic pouch, and some general supplies. They run fast and it's not only because Sakura knows that ANBU follow them but also because colour slowly comes back into her life and she positively sparks with nervous energy, erratic and wild after spending too much time in hibernation. Uchiha Itachi is, as far as somewhat unwelcome company goes, a very pleasant travel partner. He is quiet and keeps to himself, respectful but uncannily sharp in a way his brother never was. It's easy to be cordial with him and if the rest of his associates are anything like him she doesn't see herself regretting her decision.
Logically, Sakura is aware that she wouldn't have been punished forever. Eventually, Tsunade would have returned her to the hospital and maybe even, with some restrictions, given her back her lab. But for Sakura, every second was one second too many. She would have committed suicide, she is sure of it. And she can't help but think that Tsunade has known that too. Maybe that's why she let her go. Sakura left the note on her desk in plain view and absconded through the window just a few seconds before the blonde returned to her office. If she really, really wanted to cage her, she could have. She simply chose not to.

They cross the border into Rain soon enough and true to its name, there's rain. Plenty of it. All the time. It's dark and dreary but something in her throat feels lighter and as the water runs down her arms and soaks her to the bone she can feel her heart give a little skip. Sakura always loved rain ever since she was a child and it must be destiny (it's nothing but biology; after all, there is a genetic marker for a water affinity in her DNA, however dormant it may be.) The village itself is absolutely nothing like Konoha and maybe that's its charm. The elder Uchiha guides her into a castle of steel, through a seemingly heavy set of gates that are opened with the ring on his finger. It's imposing and grand and perhaps someone's a little too full of themselves but she knows she will either leave this city as an ally or a corpse. What waits for her on the inside is a colour contrasting partnership of stoicism and beauty, intimidation and elegance.
Sakura looks and feels like a drowned cat but the interior, the foyer she's currently standing in, is surprisingly warm. Uchiha nods at the two and then, in a move Sakura never expected, takes her coat and absconds with it, hopefully taking it somewhere to dry. It's the only one she has. What follows is part interview, part small talk, followed by an invitation she knows she can't decline. When they tell her of his old lab and how it's hers if she wants it, she finds herself oddly twitchy and doesn't know if it's anticipation or disgust. And with a clarity that's been missing from her life for months, she accepts. In the end she always thought loyalty for the sake of a village a rather silly idea.

Before she can properly settle in and take up residence in her new rooms she's led to a different place, down various flights of stairs into the very bowel of the fortress. The woman, Konan, explains to her that her unprecedented medical expertise was the initial reason for her recruitment, a long time before they took note of her other ventures. It is for this reason that she is here. She tells her to consider it a small entry test.
The room they enter looks half like a lab and half like a workshop. There are wooden parts strewn all over the available surfaces and at least ten variations of the same puppet with crimson hair and empty eyes. Vials filled with different substances line the walls and there's a faint hum in the air, accompanied by a raspy, irregular bubbling noise. As Sakura steps inside at Konan's behest, the source of the noise immediately becomes obvious. Attached to the left wall with heavy wiring running across the floor and into the ceiling, is a massive tank filled with green fluid and a body.
Her own interest piqued, she moves closer and gently places one hand on the glass surface while studying the person inside. He's beautiful, she says, studying his features with something akin to reverence, taking note of his soft chin, curved jaw, straight nose, his heavy-lidded eyes, the finely boned structure of his face, and the strands of crimson hair, rendered nigh colourless by the green contrasting them, as they gently float around his head. He is suspended by nothing, just quietly sleeping with his eyes closed and lips slightly parted, body resting in the fluid like a perfectly preserved corpse. His name is Sasori, Konan replies and Sakura's memory stutters and stops. She asks if he wasn't supposed to be dead, a small hum her only answer. The so-called heart container that his former partner snatched from the puppet body rests on a table next to the tank and it doesn't take a genius to figure out where this is going.
"I can fix him", Sakura says and feels her own heart soar upon hearing the words. She hasn't been able to fix anything in a long time.

It's not a terribly tricky process. It's this kind of thinking that sets her so apart from everyone else. Sakura knows this, has always known this, is fully aware that taking half a heart and seamlessly rejoining it with its other half is a feat only she can accomplish. She can't stop her fingers from caressing the organ as her chakra floods it and makes it beat even outside its host. She is completely and utterly mesmerised for a single moment as she watches the heart beat and listens to the sounds it makes, perfectly in tune with contracting and relaxing muscle. There's blood all over her fingers but it doesn't matter much.
Sakura takes another second before gently, almost lovingly, placing the heart into an open chest cavity and rests her naked fingers over the wound, closes her eyes, and works her magic. She has a small audience of two: Konan and a man in an orange mask she hasn't officially met yet. She doesn't need to open her eyes and watch to know that underneath her hand vessels connect, veins long and reach for each other, muscle builds and stretches, blood begins to flow as the heart picks up the slack, nerves fuse with each other and electric signals begin to pulse through the system, tenketsu are flooded with energy and light up in a soft blue glow, life builds, moves, finds a way.
Her chakra reaches into the deepest of depths, cycles and spins in tune with his, carries energy and rebuilds, wakes up lungs, kidneys, and other organs, finally encourages pale skin to grow and close, the only evidence of her work a bloody handprint on his softly rising chest like an artist painting a canvas. The last thing she does before letting go is sending just a single spark through his nervous system, straight to his brain. She knows exactly when it connects, watches the sudden shudder of his chest, hears the small gasp, and sees his eyelids flutter open to reveal bright amber eyes, somewhat glassy from sleep, a deliciously warm shade of molten gold.
"Hello," she says. "I'm Sakura."

She's welcomed into the fold after that, meets a man that's half human and half shark, a cannibalistic human-plant hybrid, a foul-mouthed immortal zealot, his eternally grumpy and frugal zombie partner, Tobi who seems much more clumsy and out of sorts than earlier, a teenager with a penchant for blowing things up and gets formally introduced to Itachi and Sasori. Most of them have a pleasant live and let live kind of attitude except for Hidan who she religiously avoids and Sasori who seems like he doesn't know what to make of her. These people are not her friends but she doesn't need them to be.
She has a lab and is given a generous amount of leeway in what kinds of supplies she requests and what she does with them. There are no rules as long as she doesn't harm a member of the organisation, sabotages their goals, and shares the fruits of her work with her colleagues. Sakura is cagey about sharing her notes, explains that except for her no one can actually use them anyway, and explains her reasons as concisely yet informative as possible. It works out so she can't complain. For the first time in ages her boosters go back into a proper fridge, she has the proper equipment to work with and it takes hardly any time before Kakuzu dumps a corpse in her lab, soon followed by another. Two weeks later she's exactly where she left off months ago and all it does is reinforce her belief that she never needed Konoha as much as Konoha needs her.

Their numbers are uneven which leaves Sakura without a ring or a mission partner. She's quite happy with both even though she suspects the reason for it is just general mistrust and a desire to keep her near. She doesn't know much about the other members save for Itachi but the circumstances surrounding her defection from Konoha aren't as enlightening as some people obviously wish they were. Since Tsunade never officially acknowledged Sakura's experiments and unlawful conduct with corpses there was no controversy or big outcry.
For most people, it's as if she simply woke up one day, packed her things, and left. She's not sure how Tsunade sold her departure and if she ever shared what actually happened with anyone but what it means for Sakura is that she doesn't appear to have much reason to hate her village. Lingering loyalty is suspected, perhaps even expected and while that may be true it's also incredibly misleading. She doesn't care about Konoha whether it thrives or dies is all the same to her. Be that as it may, her current situation gives her time to explore the base and after some respectful inquires with Konan even the surrounding area close to the fortress.
That bit of leeway is a godsend what with Sakura surviving off takeout and being absolutely useless as a cook. She gets a monthly stipend so as long as she doesn't go completely insane with her lab supplies and purchases there's a comfortable amount for food, a second cloak, even some makeup. She tries a few things but eventually settles on a bright red, slightly winged line on top of her lids along with the faintest amount of rosy lip stain. She gets her split ends taken care of and grooms her hair until it's silky and fanning out behind her with some of it falling into her face. Kisame takes one look at her and laughs. Sakura thinks he's making fun of her except Sasori considers her long and hard and Tobi jokingly, in his subtly deranged manner, offers her 'her senpai's ring'. She doesn't understand and decides to ignore him.

Sakura quickly realises that she's going to be left to her own devices most of the time. There are always missions which means one or multiple teams are out and about, committing crimes and capturing bijuu for a reason she doesn't know and hardly cares about. She doesn't interact with the others much outside of treating injuries except for Itachi who sees her whenever he returns from a mission. Working with him is incredibly fascinating. A large part of the journals is dedicated to doujotsu, especially the sharingan and now she has a living specimen to work with.
The man is going blind and suffers from a truly vicious case of chronic pneumonia. The latter is easy to treat with regular appointments erasing the illness bit by bit. The blindness on the other hand... Sakura spends three hours just analysing his eyes and the pathways connected to them, reads and transcribes his genetic code, spends many more hours matching sequence to function, and trying to suss out the flaw in his makeup, the reason for the eventual blindness. It takes her weeks and it drives her insane because all of that is time she could've spent on her research instead yet she can't exactly complain so she won't.
Also, she'd be a liar if she claimed that the work was unsatisfying. She asks Itachi if he has DNA samples of his family to compare with his which sends him into a long contemplative silence before finally giving the tiniest of nods. He offers her a small pouch that holds three tiny vials, strung together with a simple piece of string. In a rare show of consideration for someone else, she makes sure to take nothing but a tiny drop of blood so the makeshift necklace still looks the same. He is noticeably warmer towards her after that.

She sits at the breakfast table, sipping on her tea with her eyes comparing specific sequences of Uchiha Fugaku, Uchiha Mikoto, Uchiha Sasuke, and Uchiha Itachi. The obvious similarities show the close family relation but the sheer number of variables and dormant traits makes her want to claw her eyes out. What she seeks could literally be anywhere. Her peace is interrupted by the arrival of Deidara and Sasori, followed by Kisame and an unusually peppy Tobi. Three out of four ask her what she's looking at, her brief explanation sufficing in losing their interest.
Tobi doesn't talk anymore but makes the impression of being interested in what she's doing so she revisits an old habit. Years ago when she had just started studying under Tsunade her issues with memorisation were easily solved by her picking apart whatever she was focusing on and running it by the blonde, explaining the matter to her in detail which later often helped her finding news way of looking at any given problem. So this is what she does. She pats the chair next to her, waits for Tobi to sit down, and then starts talking. She tells him about Itachi's blindness, circles various base pairs, highlights the summaries, and draws a line over irrelevant information.
He sits still and listens until she's done, then hums loudly and muses about how Itachi's eyes can change shape to look even prettier and wonders if the others could do that too. Tobi is a fucking godsend. It isn't until much later that she realises just how incredibly convenient his comment had been.

It's a breakthrough. A conversation with Itachi later Sakura can isolate the problem within the unbelievably tiny and almost invisible pathways that form the mangekyou sharingan. Once the internal scarring and chakra blockage have been isolated she can clear and mend them even if it exhausts her chakra, causing her to pass out. A spur-of-the-moment decision makes her put effort into strengthening the pathways so the slow buildup of scar tissue doesn't impair him too much which is the final straw that sends her into unconsciousness.
Not long after she wakes up in her bed and goes to get some food because she's starving, he finds her with a takeout box from her favourite noodle place in Ame. Sakura positively devours the offering in thankful silence. He retreats soon after, leaving her with nothing to do other than wandering around the base. What she really wants is to get back to her research but her chakra is still recovering, the pool of Naruto chakra being frightfully unsuited for any sort of delicate work. She ends up taking another nap, dreaming of low raspy chuckles, the sound of clinking bottles, a faint whiff of lavender battling a hint of mint for dominance.

Her dreams are strange. She's never given them much thought but lately, there's a pattern that doesn't make much sense. What makes it even more vexing is that she's unable to find a basis in reality for any of what pops up in her dreams, obviously keeps her subconscious busy. No one in the base smell of mint or lavender, she can't match the laugh she sometimes hears to any of the members, sake is a rare treat and many of the other sensations she can recall are all completely absent from the place she inhabits. She's had a touch of insanity before and wonders if she's going down the rabbit hole again. At least she doesn't hear voices yet. Still, Sakura tries to avoid going to sleep. At least she makes rapid progress with her latest host.

Nobody can tell her where exactly the sample had come from but it's thoroughly fascinating. The human host rejects it, violently and completely until it's ruined, pathways burned with matching scarring all over its body. She tests the same chakra on a rabbit that just goes up in flames. Suddenly and spectacularly. She'll never admit to letting out a loud screech in surprise, drawing the attention of a nearby Deidara who promptly proceeds to lose his shit and laugh at her attempting to extinguish the rabbit corpse. What's really interesting is that the fire simply won't stop. She has to carry a burning rabbit onto the roof only to be disappointed when even in the rain, the flames still burn. She's this close to having a fit and launching the cursed mammal into the sky when Itachi joins her to shed some light on the situation. He has no idea who the sample's from either but flames that don't die out? Amaterasu. Sharingan technique. She goes back to studying his eyes and he lets her.

Amaterasu is a tricky beast. Like the goddess it's named after it's elusive and simply frustrating to grasp. The first flaming rabbit is not the last and she has to explain the inextinguishable animals to Konan. Being stuck like this is somewhat mortifying especially when everyone else thinks she's attempting some sort of demonic ritual and her offerings are being spurned. Hidan especially gets a great kick out of this.
She's supposed to be a genius, damn it. The simplest explanation is that this technique simply cannot functionally exist without a sharingan to harmlessly channel it. It is pure, volatile power that either needs some aspect of the Uchiha doujutsu to work or just the immense assistance it provides at basically free cost. When it comes down to it, the sharingan is an incredibly potent focusing iris. The powers that are unique to each mutation are all random pickings of dormant traits but what makes them all work is the way the sharingan can take an entire waterfall and funnel its sheer mass and power through the world's tiniest hole. Plenty of sleepless nights rule out her former hypothesis. There's no genetic dependency. What she needs instead is a focusing iris.

Tsunade's chakra control is in the 95^th percentile which places her in the top 0.2% of the known shinobi population. Sakura is at a natural 100%. She can do things with chakra no one else can. That makes her the best and only source for any eventual biological focusing iris. It's a highly hypothetical game that she plays, she has no reason to believe that it is indeed possible and maybe the isolation is getting to her and driving her insane. It's always a possibility. Extracting and purifying her chakra was easy, a process she's completed countless times at this point. The next step is... irritating.
Her oldest fight, curiosity against morality is a constant tug of war with morality losing a little bit of ground with each year that passed. Sakura doesn't even want to bother with this but the fact of the matter is that she cannot test this on herself, last but not least because she doesn't want to burst into flames. She's finally reached the stage where she requires live test subjects and the voice telling her that she's different and they're not the same and she'll never be him is slowly but steadily fading out of reach.

Kakuzu is the unexpected corner that helps her out. Bounty collectors usually only ask for heads. It's the same thing with the rabbits really, Sakura thinks as she stabs a syringe into the gagged man she strapped to her examination table a short while ago with her other hand resting on his forehead, carefully monitoring his chakra network. If he dies to her or to Kakuzu doesn't matter. A death is a death and like this at least she doesn't hurt innocent people.
The former Taki nin goes for high profile targets only: rapists, murderers, arsonists. Surely they can take a little bit of pain for what they put harmless civilians through. She tells the man to mould chakra in his fist and he does. His natural chakra control is only barely average, the ease with which he complies with her order making it obvious that it works. And not only that, her chakra when infused in other people, doesn't actively help with control, it's simply far easier to control. It bends to the will of its host, taking shape and form at a speed suggesting that even basic thoughts are enough to make it obey. It's the oddest thing, its structure. All fluid and malleable with a total lack of resistance yet somehow staying in shape, perfectly controlled, and without even a tiny speck breaking formation. The results are the same in every test subject. The air around her tastes like victory and she thrives in it.

The discovery that 'chakra control' is a faulty concept is what cracks the riddle surrounding Amaterasu. Chakra control is nothing but a different type of chakra nature with which everyone has varying degrees of affinity. It's what's needed to make yin release work and while the two concepts are closely tied, they're not one and the same. The second she spots the marker for chakra control and sees that the makeup is almost identical to that of elemental affinities is what confirms her theory. She returns to her experiments with new fervour, spends days trying to find the best way to mix her affinity with the black sludge that is Amaterasu. Once she discovers the most stable mixture she, sometimes quite literally, burns through a steady number of subjects. All of them are carefully selected deserving of death for one reason or another and Sakura stops worrying about what she's doing.

Injecting live subjects with the stable mixture is just step one. They stop going up in flames but can't make use of the power either. It more or less peacefully coexists within the body even though the vicious nature of Amaterasu is not meant to be contained and slowly burns through the pathways. If she ever finds a way to channel it properly, it's not a chakra she can carry for long. There's no storing it, minor damages occur after five minutes and the half an hour mark signals a complete collapse of the pathways. It's Konan who tells her that she's not allowed to coax the subjects into attempting to harness the power and Sakura understands and acquises. It's too dangerous and unless she finds a way to do it for them she's stuck.

She doesn't appreciate limitations. She really appreciates Sasori.

She learns how to use chakra strings and it takes her barely any time at all before she masters them. She'll never be as good as the puppet master who dedicated his entire life to exploring their incredible versatility but it's enough to remote control her subjects. He stays even after showing her how to make the technique work and observes her fiddling with the peculiarities and gleefully setting black fire to the forests surrounding Amegakure. He is her minder for now but he is good company. As quiet as Itachi, colder yet also less reserved, curious not unlike a cat, inquisitive and sharp.
There's something unnatural about him that transcends humanity even if his body is made of flesh and blood just like hers. It's the small things, like how still he is, the slight tilt of his head, how he rarely blinks, the deliberate carelessness of his actions painting a strange contrast to how he never acts without purpose, is precise and perfectionate in everything he does. It makes her fingers itch, a constant buzz whenever he's in her presence that makes it hard to concentrate at times. Amaterasu is a success. Sasori is an unknown.

Four months after first donning the cloak her past catches up with her. It's Tobi, panicked and flailing who tells her to get her things and get dressed, they have to go and save Hidan now. Sakura equips her pouches, forces a needle into her flesh to replace half of her chakra with Naruto's and pockets two shots of Amaterasu for good measure. The second she finishes buttoning her cloak, the orange-masked man grabs onto her and makes her world swirl and fall out of focus. She closes her eyes on instinct and when she re-opens them, she stands on the edges of a battlefield.
An explosion so loud it almost shatters her eardrums and rocks the ground she's standing on greets her and she charges forward, uses the smoke as cover to jump up and intercept Hidan's body before it can be torn apart by the following detonations. A split second later Kakuzu joins them and it's the sight of the three of them standing side by side with Sakura in the middle that makes their opponents stop and falter as the smoke clears. Kakashi is torn between fury and disbelief, Ino is just downright incredulous, Shikamaru hates. Everyone seems to wait for a grand confrontation, long declarations, or for Sakura to explain herself but truth be told she's just so over all of this. She tells her two fellow members that their orders are to fall back and mentally prepares to knock Hidan out and just carry him if his blood lust proves too strong when everything takes a turn for the worse.

She can feel him before she can see him and what used to be a rather simple task suddenly got shitloads more complicated. Sakura can outrun Kakashi. She cannot outrun the kyuubi. The whole situation is vexing and stressful as she's stared down not only by Team 10 plus Kakashi but also Team 7 plus a few extra Konoha ninja none of which look happy to see her. The red, searing energy that pours from Naruto is bad news so Sakura grabs Hidan by the collar of his cloak and unceremoniously throws him behind her, calling out for Tobi and telling him to take the two of them back to the base.
She is under no illusions that she can win a fight of proportions as epic as these but Sakura can stall them best without Hidan being his chaotic self. A single glance tells her that Kakuzu is down to three hearts so she gives an affirmative nod when he quietly asks her if she's going to manage. She doesn't honestly believe that he actually cares about her but he operates under a strict code of maximum monetary value and Sakura has always been a good investment. When it's just her and the small platoon of furious leaf nin, Naruto demands answers, his voice shaking along with tears of fury leaking from his eyes.
Sakura sighs because really, she's not one for grandiose speeches and truthfully, she has left him behind a long time ago. She pulls a single black shot from her pouch and forces the needle under the skin of her left forearm for everyone to see.
"We haven't been friends for a long time," she says, "and never were much of a team, to begin with. You were so busy looking ahead that you failed to see what was happening behind you. I may have grown up in your shadow but the one I throw can swallow you whole." She forms a single one-handed sign and whispers:

"Amaterasu."

Peace is a lost concept after that as events come thick and fast. Deidara is returned to the base by Tobi as little more than a corpse. Sakura spends three days and three nights working on him without a pause, eating soldier pills for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When he's presented to her Deidara is a heap of scrap, more a bundle of parts than a functioning organism and fixing him is not the problem. She has to keep him alive, all separate parts of him because she is not a miracle worker and actual resurrection will most likely remain out of her reach forever.
She manages, if barely. Sakura sleeps for a whole week after that and is woken by the news that Sasuke went toe to toe with him, barely survived the confrontation, and is now hunting for Itachi. Her heart breaks at the implication and she asks herself how she can mourn for a man she has never met in person. Tobi disappears which means she receives her ring at last. It bears the kanji for 'sky', shimmers in a calming slate blue, and paints her nails in a brilliant scarlet that makes her think of Tsunade.

She meets Jiraya for the first and last time a week after equipping her ring. It's not even on purpose, the old man interrupts a test run of her latest shot – Yakushi's regenerative powers perfectly supplement her own – and it is her devotion for his former teammate that makes her step aside and leave him to the mercy of Pein without attempting to engage him. That quarrel looks personal. She later returns to his corpse, takes his headband, and seals it in a scroll. Sakura hands the scroll to a messenger-nin, directs him towards Konoha, and hopes that it will be closure enough.

Itachi is in her bed and he's bleeding out. She doesn't ask questions, he doesn't answer. His necklace is missing but he seems at peace. The morning after she fixed him he's gone.

Four years have passed since their last meeting and when she meets Sasuke again, she feels nothing. He's completely thunderstruck when he spots her next to Pein and Konan with the other members milling about close by. His first reaction is, as always, anger except she lacks the patience to deal with him, turns around, and leaves him to his own devices. He doesn't mean anything to her, hasn't meant anything to her for years. His departure had left a hole in her heart but it was around the same time that she had first found the journals. The hole had been stuffed and filled by the man he had run off with, a man who seemingly taught her more than he ever taught his own student.
They're not recruiting members so he is turned away but still allowed to act as an associate. There's a number of incidents that nearly turn to violence. When he first spots her using Amaterasu he tries to attack her. Sasori is nearby, faster, and nearly strangles him. He spits curses at her which only increase in ferocity and frequency after he stumbles upon her lab. It's his temper and nigh homicidal behaviour towards her that gets him thrown out. Sakura doesn't mourn the loss.

Her life falls apart after that. Pein attacks Konoha, eradicates the village, Naruto talks him into resurrecting everyone at the cost of his own life. Akatsuki is without leadership with Konan in mourning and their ulterior purpose shatters into countless tiny pieces. They are nothing but a glorified mercenary group and as such, they slowly drift apart. Some of the forcibly conscripted leave immediately:
Hidan and Kakuzu stay together in a move that surprises everyone, Deidara packs his things and flies away on a clay bird, Kisame decides to travel the world, Zetsu disappears much like Tobi. Konan stays behind in her city and turns to trying to run it as well as she can. Sasori leaves last. He stands opposite of her, cloak discarded and dressed in his Suna garb and hands her a thin, elongated box. It's a soft red ribbon made from high-quality silk with two tiny golden bells dangling from each end. It slithers through her fingers like water, the colour the exact same shade as his own blood which used to coat her hands.
He leaves without saying a word and hours later, Sakura admires how the red contrasts the pale white of her skin as she ties it around her neck.

It's time to leave for her as well and she hates that she lost another home to the whims and power plays of men who think they can change the world. The last of her savings are spent on four body scrolls as well as another, smaller sealing scroll. She cannot bring her lab with her but at least she will keep her hosts, shots, notes, and journals. Sakura finds herself oddly reluctant to lose the cloak because despite everything she thinks she quite liked being part of something bigger. One in a group of misfits.
However, it also paints a massive target on one's back so the decision is easy even if she still keeps it and seals it away. Back out in the wild Sakura feels lost and adrift with no direction and nothing to look forward to. She's having strange dreams that disorient her when she wakes up and most days she doesn't know if she just imagines the flashes she occasionally sees in front of her eyes or the smells in her nose. It's like she catches a whiff of people she can't name even though she's all on her own. She wonders if she will ever feel the sound of mind again. She wonders if she ever was.

She's in a small town somewhere in Grass to replenish her supplies when she hears the news. The Godaime Hokage is in a coma, Shimura Danzo succeeded her and everyone is preparing for war. It's amazing how little one learns about the politics and happenings of the world when stuck travelling from one place to another like a pitiful nomad. She doesn't know what happened to the bijuu but apparently, nobody ever bothered to return them so a kage summit is imminent.
None of that interests her. Sakura pays for a bag of takoyaki, jams a needle into the flesh of her thigh, and starts racing across the countryside. It takes her less than a day to get where she wants to be and once she slows down, she greedily bites into her food while allowing her chakra to settle. From then on it's a matter of stealth which has never been her strongest suit so she waits until the sun goes down and recalls everything she knows about her former village. There are more patrols than she remembers which makes her task noticeably harder. She slips in between cracks and sticks to the shadows, takes the fastest route to the hospital, and almost cackles in delight when she realises that nobody ever bothered to remove her clearance. That cannot possibly be an accident, Sakura thinks as she slinks through a window, hides in a closet, and expands her senses.
She is no sensor by any means but there's a small handful of signatures she would recognise anywhere. With dismay, she spots her objective in the highest security wing, despairs over how she could possibly get past all the ANBU until she notices that something about the entire situation is off. Getting closer makes it obvious enough. There are no guards. No guards whatsoever. It's so far beyond suspicious that Sakura wants to turn around and leave. With a quiet curse and increased paranoia, she closes in on her target. She makes it to the room without incident, opens the door, slips inside... illuminated by the moonlight, pale, wan, and old is the woman who rests in bed and yet she still holds an ethereal beauty beyond compare.

Biting her lip, Sakura walks closer and settles down on the right side of her bed, facing the door before placing her flat palm on her forehead, right on top of the purple byakugou and feels. It's more than mere chakra exhaustion, she realises. The body has to have gone into shock at some point judging from the damage to the pathways, likely a result of a sudden and forceful expulsion of all of her chakra save for a tiny reserve to keep her alive. Not many actions could have caused this but Sakura is willing to bet that the woman sacrificed herself for her village and her people. It's a kind of devotion and altruism that's completely foreign to Sakura yet she is no stranger to devotion in general. It's why she's here after all.
With a sense of care and gentleness she rarely displays, she sends her chakra into the blonde's system, taking in the pleasant tingle she feels once her essence makes contact with the fresh and soothingly cool, minty chakra that's entirely Tsunade and gets to work. She weaves strands of chakra around the damages to her pathways, patches them up and sends bursts of energy to various areas of her body, repairs liver damage that's so old and established it must have been irreparable for the older woman, revitalises her inner workings, repairs her skin, does that and more, so much more than anyone else could have.
Before her eyes wrinkles smooth out, deep furrows and old lines fade, grey turns to blonde, age reverts to youth. When she is done, Sakura carefully removes her scratched headband from her head and ties it around Tsunade's wrist. Then, she gets off the bed to lean over her. As pink strands tickle newly rejuvenated skin, her lips gently meet the purple diamond, and every single machine she is connected to starts beeping wildly.

(When she wakes it is with a memory of tinkling bells, soft lips on her forehead, and a crisp, sharp smell that reminds her of the days between winter and spring. When she opens her eyes, no one is there but the memory remains.)

Chapter Text

Sakura is eighteen when she finally accepts what she has become.

There's dog in her nose before she can sense him so she stops in a clearing, waiting for him to make his move. Just two minutes later he steps out from between two trees, arms loosely hanging from his body in a feigned show of nonchalance. She doesn't speak up and waits for him to say his piece. Kakashi looks her over before he does anything else, taking note of the lack of cloak, seems to focus on the ribbon for a second until his gaze gets stuck on the ring. He asks her if she's still with them and Sakura answers honestly, explains that they disbanded and that she's wandering the elemental nations now.
Truth be told she's more of a meanderer with no goals in sight which, while mildly distressing, comes with the advantage of at least being on her own. The occasional bounty is enough to feed her until she figures out where to go and what to do. He seems doubtful but doesn't argue with her, gives a sharp nod, and lingers. She's known him long enough to recognise the signs of an emotionally stunted man working his way up to asking the really important questions and decided to humour him. A few breaths later he makes his enquiry, oddly apprehensive and taut like a piece of string.
He wants to know why she came back for 'Hokage-sama'. Sakura clicks her tongue in annoyance and corrects him by saying that she didn't come back for the Hokage. She came back for Tsunade. Kakashi is as confused as she's ever seen him and out of curiosity she asks him if the blonde ever told him why Sakura left. If she knows one thing about this man it's that he's loyal to a fault and Tsunade is a good leader. He would die for her so she gives him something to think about.

He offers her to come back. Tells her she's been pardoned, that Sasuke returned, that there's no need for her to run anymore. She straight-up asks him why he thinks that she's running. Sakura doesn't owe this man anything, the man that forgot about her, the man that never even looked at her, and that's what she tells him. She tells him that she doesn't care for his village or its people, all of which were happy to leave her to fend for herself.
She tells him that she wasn't chased out but left of her own volition. That she came back for the only person she's loyal to, the only person she loves. The only person that loves her back, loved her enough to let her go.
She tells him not to follow her since he can't keep up with her any longer and that he should really know this by now. He seems pained, lost, and defeated but she has no sympathy for him.
"Let go of the past, Kakashi. You can't be happy until you forget about me." It's her last piece of advice for him and this time when she leaves he doesn't move.

The summit happens and Sakura is near but not too near. Near enough to learn that Tobi is back and looking for war, that Sasuke killed Shimura and left with the former Akatsuki. She's walking on the border between Sound and Fire when a tiny origami bird flies towards her from the sky and settles into her open palm. Konan calls and the promise of her old lab and a new sample is motivation enough.
Sakura arrives three days later, moderately surprised that she seems to be the only one that's been recalled. The blue-haired female explains that Akatsuki hasn't been reinstated and her request is of a more personal nature. She realises what that means soon enough. There's a man, more dead than alive, suspended in a giant apparatus. The sight is almost harrowing. His name is Nagato and he has the eyes of a god. Tobi will come soon and take them from him and if he does he will raze the world to the ground and that cannot happen. Sakura does what they ask of her, takes both eyes, sends Nagato into peaceful and eternal rest, and runs. 

She finds temporary respite in one of his old abandoned labs. Time is of the essence and she is under no illusion that she can hide from Tobi forever. Tobi who can teleport, be everywhere and anywhere at once, who always hides under his mask. She has a sample of Nagato's blood and starts on getting a read of his Senju/Uzumaki heritage while carefully studying the eyes. The first thing she notices is that, while compatible, their DNA is completely different. Whoever those eyes belonged to, it wasn't Nagato. If Tobi wants them he must know. Unfortunately, Sakura has never obtained a sample of the walking and talking split personality which really quite frustrates her until she stumbles over a very specific section that she swears she's seen before. She gathers all her notes and skims them as fast as she can, searching for that specific sequence- Well. Shit.

Only one of two living Uchiha is easily available and she hates that it's not her favourite. What she hates even more, is that the one she can reach is holed up in fucking Konohagakure. Just a few weeks after her talk with Kakashi and she already has to go back on her words, Sakura thinks morosely as she gathers her things, preparing for a two-day journey she doesn't want to undertake. Heavens help her, she curses, racing through the woods at high speed because she doesn't care for this bloody village yet she keeps coming back for reasons not under her control. She doesn't want a war. It's mostly self-interest but she also thinks of Tsunade, Sasori, even Itachi. All three bled and fought in wars and all three are sick of it, she knows. And unfortunately, as fate will have it, Sakura holds the key to making sure it never happens in the first place.

She cares little for village protocol or silly things like security procedures so she sprints through the gates and ignores the guards, loses the ANBU, and enters her office through the window. There's a second where nothing happens and then, pandemonium.
Sakura, visibly unimpressed, has three tanto at her neck, her hands restrained but really draws the line at being pushed to her knees and privately delights in being far stronger than any of the elite soldiers currently trying to force her to the ground. Tsunade looks good, she thinks. Young, healthy, also enraged. Sakura speaks up and says that she's in possession of classified information concerning the war and that she requests a private audience with the Hokage. As she moves her throat some of her skin slices against the blades causing her to bleed for a single moment before the wounds close again. She's way past the point where she needs hand signs to control and mend her own body.
Tsunade's fury is quiet, seething, and cold but Sakura knows she has her. This woman would never sabotage the war effort in favour of holding onto old grievances. It doesn't take long for the ANBU to be dismissed, the office sealed, the metaphorical blinds drawn. Without making a single sound Sakura reaches into her pouch and places a sealed vial onto Tsunade's desk. When her fingers move and reveal the contents, the blonde's breath stills.

Sasuke is in a right snit and any other day it would be hilarious. He throws a fit, then another and his lack of manners as well as the insulting way he talks to Tsunade makes her own hackles rise. Eventually, he is forced to sit still on the examination table as Sakura works and Tsunade watches. The DNA profiles of Itachi, Mikoto, Fugaku are laid out on a nearby table next to Sasuke's own and the unknown origin of her Amaterasu strain. She compares all of them with the Rinnegan and talks to Tsunade, trying to be as open as possible while also keeping the specifics of her research to herself. Even with all the things Sakura doesn't say, the blonde regards her calmly and she can almost hear her thinking.
"You've really come far", she comments and watches Sakura inject the eye's sample into a dead body that was so graciously provided for her before adjusting the existing genetic makeup.
"Not even he would be capable of this", she adds, and in her own way that's probably meant as a compliment. Sakura nods in agreement. Once they have a working host she begins the time-consuming process of refining its essence. 

She has results three days later but Tsunade is not exactly happy with them. The easiest way to deal with the eyes is to implant them into someone who can deal with Tobi. Considering that most people can't it's best to choose someone who can run, hide but still has ties they can use to call upon aid when needed. The choice is obvious. Tsunade disagrees. It makes Sakura remember why she ever left in the first place. So she tells her the names of all possible hosts. Sasuke. Itachi (he's alive?!) Sakura. She stops for a moment.
Tsunade. That forces her to reveal Nagato's heritage and the glaring similarities between his DNA and the blonde's. Apparently, none of the names is an option so Sakura is back to square one and ever so slightly resentful. When all this is over and done with she'll go back to that abandoned lab in Sound so she can do what she damn well wants for the rest of her days. 

Sasuke confronts her two days later. In the middle of a restaurant. With all their year mates and some other chuunin and jounin in attendance. He's doing this on purpose, Sakura realises as she bites her teeth and narrows her eyes. It's a standoff between the two traitors except one is hated more than the other, has no intentions of redeeming themselves, and has changed much much more than the other ever has.
It's ugly and heated and nobody steps in. He demands to know what atrocities she has committed, how far she has gone to obtain the ability to use sharingan exclusive doujutsu, what kind of monster she has turned into. With the last shreds of composure, she hisses back and asks him to look into the mirror for if she is a monster, so is he. At least she never surrendered to a master, played his little pet snake, and crawled in the dirt for a man infinitely more worthy of admiration than Sasuke would ever be.
She says these words and pushes him over the edge. He roars, activiates his sharingan and draws chakra from his seal and Sakura sneers and surges forwards, faster than anyone can react, digs her fingers into the skin surrounding his cursed seal, forces her chakra beneath his skin, and wraps it around the sickly tendrils of the mark and tears. Sasuke falls to his knees and howls in pain, hand clutching his neck, searching for something that's not there anymore, something Sakura has taken from him, taken and crushed with her dainty little fingers.
"I can unmake you Uchiha," she growls, grabs his chin, and tilts it upwards to force him to look into her eyes and see her. "I know he scared you. I know he still does. Don't waste your nightmares on a dead man when it's me you should be terrified of."
When she dreams later that night, for the first time in her life, she hears the laugh, smells lavender, and sees his face.

The Rinnegan is a thing of fairytales and horror stories. Sakura used to think that the sharingan was the ultimate focusing iris yet it pales in comparison to this doujutsu. Records on the byakugan are sparse but what little information is available, suggests that the Rinnegan contains aspects of both kekkei genkai and then some. She's far from being a saint and calling her morals skewed would be kind yet in the end she finds herself in front of Tsunade's desk, telling her that those eyes need to be destroyed.
She has to present her case, tells the blonde of everything the eyes can do, everything they could theoretically be engineered to do, and that no man, woman, or child should ever possess that kind of power. Tsunade respects her decision. When they make their way to the lab to burn the eyes, they're gone. 

Madara is back. Also, Yakushi is still alive and kicking. She's not sure which of the two is the bigger disappointment. There are front lines now, skirmishes, battlefields. Sakura has made it a point to stick with Tsunade wherever she goes and neither Kumo nor the other nations are happy to see her but thankfully she is ignored in favour of concentrating on the war effort. Well. Ignored by most. The Mizukage brings a tall and blue half-shark man who seems genuinely happy to see Sakura, claps her on the back, and greets her with the air of an old friend. It is surprisingly easy to be in his company. Kisame is not the biggest surprise.

"Sakura," is what he says. In the middle of the room, completely disregarding the presence of the kage, their bodyguards, the entire war council. He looks at her out of amber eyes, face still and unchanged as if frozen in time, forever eternal. His eyes move to the ribbon that's tied around her neck and his lips curl upwards around the edges, self-satisfied and smug. The look suits him. Somewhere in the back of her mind she's aware that time passes but the longer she looks at him, the more she feels like everything around her has stopped.
He's her most favourite canvas, she thinks, vividly recalling her bloody handprint on his bare chest. She remembers the beat of his heart, his blood coating her fingers and sticking underneath her nails, the way his body was stitching itself back together. Her face feels hot and with pure horror, she realises that she's blushing as her fingers twitch and her breath runs short. He looks like he knows exactly what she's thinking. He looks like he doesn't even mind.

It's under his fingers that she comes undone, hands slippery and red, the stench of copper in the air, the taste of blood on her lips. 

The moment is short and etches itself into her memory. They part without words like they are strangers but Sakura carries his bloody mark around her neck just like she has left hers on him. Time resumes and she's glued to Tsunade's sight, won't leave her for any reason, and follows her into battle. Madara's face when she sends Amaterasu at him is priceless and takes some of his focus off the other kage which honestly? Is fine. Sakura burns through Naruto's chakra, has packed an entire sealing scroll full of shots, and soon empties her first pouch. She's never used so much over such a short period of time but it makes her virtually invincible. Nothing can get a hit on her, she can dodge precision attacks and large area of effect ninjutsu, sprint from one end of the battlefield to the other within moments, and burns through entire stretches of Zetsu clones with her black fires of death. This is her mistake, she realises. She leaves her for a second. That's all Madara needs.

Sakura is eighteen and a half and bowed over Tsunade's bisected body when she finally meets him.

There are other bodies, other kage all around her and Sakura's in the middle of the circle with Tsunade's two halves right in front of her, hastily drawn lines forming a ritual seal anchored with her own blood. She's the heart and the mind, the lung and the brain, she's blood and chakra, bones and muscle, she's life and death and master of both. Sakura closes her eyes and lets her head fall back, one hand on the woman's forehead, the other on her waist, senses guiding her chakra through the lines drawn in blood into four other bodies. Her mind is split and her focus intense and she's losing her sense of self as she's breathing with six lungs, working with twelve hands, has to regulate all of their heartbeats.
When her own chakra is gone she uses what's left of Naruto's and violently hammers it in shape, pushes through the pain, and drains herself as brain activity resumes, heartbeats stabilise, wounds close. It's when Tsunade's eyes flutter open that she finally lets herself stop, cuts the connection, draws what meagre chakra is left back into her own body. Her hands shake as she fumbles with the latch of her pouch and reaches for her last shot, jams the needle into her thigh, and pushes down on the plunger.
"They were dead," a voice says from behind her and she is too tired to recognise it.
"Yes," she replies with a pained gasp and carefully unfolds her legs from beneath her body, hissing in pain.
"Who are you?" the voice now asks and Sakura uses the last of her energy to turn around. Her world spins and then stops.

Sakura is eighteen and a half when the war ends.

When she wakes, she's alone. She feels like she's drowning and slowly coming up for air as the dull noise all around her sharpens and takes shape. She smells blood and wonders if by now the smell just sticks, if it'll follow her wherever she goes. Sakura opens her eyes, is met by the open sky, a pleasant tingle in her limbs. There are three different kinds of chakra in her system and it confuses her. There's Naruto's, her own, and Tsunade's. It's the latter that gives her pause. There's a glaring gap in her memory that leaves her uneasy, causes her to shift ever so slightly but it's enough to alert people to her waking presence.
They're blonde and black, honey and yellow, Tsunade and Orochimaru. Sakura doesn't know where to look first, caught between the two giants in her life even if one of them isn't quite aware of it. It's ironic, she thinks that it takes war and death for them to come together like this, or perhaps it's not ironic at all. Blood stains their hands, all three of them breathe and deal in lives, one gives, another takes and the third is the balance that ties them together.

"You cannot tell anyone," is the first thing Tsunade says in the seclusion of her tent and Sakura isn't sure who exactly she's talking to. She never shares more than strictly needed, hoards her knowledge like other ninja hoard ninjutsu. Orochimaru doesn't say much, prefers to watch and study her instead. He seems more than just a little amused by the cut of her hair and the ring on her left pinky. Tsunade takes a moment to inform Sakura that she basically slept through the conclusion of the war, missed the birth and subsequent destruction of the juubi but none of that sounds interesting. She lives, they both live and that's all she has to know.
Apparently, someone wanted to resurrect a deity but failed and this is where Orochimaru decides to be witty and says that maybe they should have asked Sakura to do the job instead. Which reminds her. It's both a surprise and not. She's been partially resurrecting people for the better part of three years. The unexpected part is that all it took was a bit of fear, trauma and sheer panic to get rid of the last mental blocks in her head.
"I crossed the final barrier," she says and Tsunade looks at her with dread in her eyes. 

She sleeps and dreams and her world is two spheres of night and day, circling each other in something closely resembling a dance. She looks at her feet and stands on a red line that separates the black expanse on her left from the white fields on her right. The red moves and slithers, reaches for her, paints her hands, and embraces her like a lover would, holds her tight, and fills her up. There's chaos and order, death and life and the red that bathes her world in blood.

The war is over. Peace reigns.

Orochimaru is asleep when she begins the procedure and young and healthy when he wakes up.

Tsunade looks like she's in her mid-twenties and nobody knows that she doesn't use her henge anymore.

Sasori is thirty-six when he dies in the war and twenty when she brings him back.

Sakura is eighteen years, ten months, three weeks, and two days old when she dies.

Sakura is eighteen years, ten months, three weeks, and three days old when she wakes up.

(They are spring and winter, two sides of the same coin and tied together by her who is both and neither, their ultimate creation, their greatest achievement. They sit beside her as the sun sets on the place that gave birth to all three of them and watch as their world moves, changes while they forever stay the same.)