Chapter Text
The war has created so many tales, not many are happy ones.
Many of her comrades are gone, many because of exposure and tragedy, others were collateral damage. Some were buried and others were in pieces, scattered all across the forest that she was running into.
Her ninja shoes are tainted with blood and dirt, caked up with things that she won’t ever look at again, she has one goal and meanwhile she doesn’t look around, she’ll be fine .
She’s bleeding a lot, her head is pounding, her chakra drained. Her friends are dead .
She needs to reach Naruto and Sasuke, they will know what to do. The village is gone .
Kakashi might still be out there, fighting against Kaguya. Everything is done .
She arrives at the place where the ones who are still standing are, her retinas burning with the images of Ino’s blonde hair flushed against the floor, red and dark. Her legs are burning every time she jumps across the land to reach the others, they’re a little far away and Sakura is almost out, she’s breathing irregularly and her chest feels on fire.
Her fingers and feet are jittery, every step is unstable. She has to push herself more, she has to tell them. She has to find some hope in those bright blue eyes she adores so much, in that dark state that has always filled her with the word “safe”.
The plan failed, everyone is gone .
She feels herself start to wail while running, the exhaustion is so severe her ankles roll and she loses balance, falling down on some rocks while her knees get cut. She panics when she cannot get up again.
For fucks sake.
Dragging herself towards the others who are still too far away she starts to yell to hopefully catch their attention.
“Naruto?! Sasuke-kun!” her throat is raw, her hands grip the grass around with so much force her fingernails stab her hand “Kakashi-sensei!”
She can see them turn around, she believes that they listened and she’s got their attention so she keeps yelling.
“The plan failed! Everything is gone!” Curling against herself she keeps on crying, everything she hears are her wails, desperate and pained. “Guys! Konoha… is gone!” she yells again.
She keeps crying, she cannot undo anything. There’s nothing she can do, nothing she can fix. Everything they fought for is gone forever, all their friends, their village, their history, gone.
When a few minutes have passed and she hasn’t heard of her teammates she lifts her head.
Huh?
They’re still in their places. They’re still looking back at her, she can barely look at their facial expressions since her vision is blurry because of her tears, she suddenly feels weird. They would have shown some action after her words or after seeing her again… but they’re frozen…
As if…
They’re just…
An image…
She gasps and quickly as she thinks of it her hands are up in a ninja sign, one that will end the genjutsu.
Sakura has a dreadful feeling running down her spine, and she fears what she will encounter after the genjutsu is gone. But she needs to do it, she has to know what happened, even if it destroys her.
“Kai!” she yells, her voice a broken sound, shaky and terrified.
But when the genjutsu comes undone, she knows everything is truly gone.
The image of her teammates broke as if it was a mirror and the genjutsu came undone. The earth is broken, around here is just a dead man zone. She squints and far from her her eyes capture some blonde laying around, eyes open, arms ripped away from the torso, lots of blood and near him, another ripped body, this one had dark hair and pale skin.
She couldn’t even react anymore, her eyes looked around to just find another body. Gray hair on a pale body, torso separated from its waist.
She was shaking, feeling a kind of numbness she never reached before, the pain she felt on her heart was unbearable. She knew she could die right there, she wanted to.
Tears fell down her face while that scene of her family, her brothers got tattooed in her brain, in her memories. A brutal end to her fairy tail.
Out of her perspective, someone started to laugh and it started to get closer but she couldn’t dwell on it. She couldn’t even turn around to see who it was.
She knew the moment her brothers died, she died with them. Sakura Haruno died with them, what was left in the field, crying and mourning was just a carcass, an empty vessel for a soul that had been so beaten it gave up. The pink haired kunoichi knew she couldn’t live without them.
A pair of eyes covered the image of her nightmares, eyes so evil she found herself shivering again. Kaguya was in front of her and with a mocking smile she lifted herself towards Sakura, setting herself above her.
“You see now, my child? fate knows its way and purpose.” She says, smiling at Sakura as if she could truly comprehend what the goddess is saying, sakura’s brain has turned itself off a while ago. “Power and control are two things that cannot go hand in hand, one must persevere.”
Her hand reaches and touches Sakura’s hair, placing a few of her strands out of her face, touching it slightly. Her holy hand burns deeply into Sakura's forehead when she touches it. “Everything has its course, just like theirs was losing this battle.” She sighs, sitting back again just to stare at the broken girl with the most empty eyes she has ever seen.
“Just like yours, getting here to actually see it all is not a coincidence.” She lifts herself and with it, her hands towards the sky. With a jutsu and a hand flicker a hole appears under Sakura's body, the pink haired one barely notices it when she feels herself falling into it rapidly. “Be born again, but never forget. That’s your fate”
And she falls, with a last glimpse of her life, grass still on her hands, a goodbye on her lips and blood all over her body.
“I won’t ever forget.” She promises while the hole drowns her into a space with no oxygen. “I won’t let anybody else die.”
With a succumbing rage, she lifts her first towards Kaguya who just stares at her from above. “I swear.”
Kaguya smirks, and she’s gone.
“What a fun time.”
—
Sakura is born again, she realizes it when she is one year and a half old.
She remembers a bright light and boom, she’s playing with some fox plushie. She understands that Kaguya didn’t lie, she has been reborn into a new world.
And just like that, a million memories rush into her head. Her academy moments where she met Ino, her team, the genin days, the chunnin exam, Sasuke… Naruto… and then, they’re gone.
Memories of her friends, ripped apart, blood everywhere, oh god, she can even… she can even smell it, she cannot get that fucking smell away from her, she needs to.. she needs to get it away!
As a baby she does what a baby can do in those situations and just bawls. She cries and yells and screams and has the worst day ever because no matter what she does, those images do not disappear from her mind, her young brain does not understand that internally she’s not a baby, she understands and remembers, she remembers it all. So her brain panics obviously, not knowing how to regulate those strong and powerful emotions of anguish and mourn, terror and so much pain that she can only stop crying when she tired herself enough to just pass out. She kept this cycle going for months, her new parents staying scared that their daughter had something else on her, maybe some sickness or some sort of injury they couldn’t notice. But no, doctors assured them otherwise, she was a perfectly healthy baby that couldn't stop crying.
Those memories would never stop haunting her everytime she would try to close her eyes, that smell would always burn out her nose and make her try to stop breathing through it, the feeling of dry grass will always be felt against her fingertips like a type of cramp, a shiver that would make her remember. That was the first time in this life she felt like that, like pain and suffering was all she would ever know and feel.
And she thought, this was worse than death itself. Dying was assuring her that the worst had ended, the bad guys are gone at least from harming her again. She could rest as the older generation used to say, rest under proud heavens that opened their gates for brave shinobi who gave their lives for the greater good. At least, if she tried to believe the tales her mom used to tell her, she would (probably, maybe, who knows) reunite with those she lost, she would see her parents again.
Naruto, Kakashi, Sasuke, Ino, Shikamaru… She would see them, hug them, be with them ‘till the end of times.
This was pure torture, to be back to the times she was a baby with full memory of who she was meant to be, not even a baby brain but one of an adult who knew and remembered.
Beyond cruel.
The pain had no comparison, it only built more anguish. Desperation painted her soul when she accepted defeat, she would never be back there. She was meant to do it all again after knowing her failures.
She was meant to roam this earth with the weight of her friend's death onto her shoulders until the day she died.