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Chapter Text

There is fire. There is light. She is bloody wounds knitting closed as an afterthought, cold, meticulous and precise sacrifices of chakra for each hit, and the jarring impact of her fist shattering against a goddess' face.

The impact destroys the ground around them for miles.

She is rage, and desperation, and there is a yawning chasm of grief in her, as wide as the world is empty, that she refuses to let consume her.

There is a battle that is a war, an endless fight with an enemy that never tires, and she is alone.

Sakura doesn't remember much of what happens. She has been awake and engaged with Kaguya or her forces for days and weeks. Sleep is rare, stolen moments; each scrap and spare bit of chakra is ruthlessly hoarded and used as efficiently as possible.

She feels stripped down to the bones, ragged with all excess parts of her shorn away. Sakura survives. She fights. She bleeds. She survives.

Another cataclysmic exchange of blows. Around them the earth tries to shake apart. Localized earthquakes and tsunamis herald their blows; what's left of the topography of the planet flattens and crumbles in their wake.

Sakura is tired, though she can't afford to be. Every cell screams in her, a razor sharp focus and intellect bent on living. The beat of her heart in her breast is a desperate thing, a furious and urgent thing, the blood in her ears the only sound she can hear.

It is amidst the usual ache of overextended muscles, the mint-burn of healing, and the push and pull of attack and retreat, bestow damage and receive it, that something changes. Sakura has been a thorn in Kaguya's side for countless hours and sunsets, a snarling wolf that disappears just far enough to lick its wounds, gather resources, and slam back into the melee with a reckless abandon.

Sakura has been trying to kill an immortal for so long that it's all her body knows, and she expects this to be no different, though each hit, each jutsu, each glancing touch of her hand or weapon does devastating damage to the world around them because she refuses to give up hope.

It is a wild thing, a snarling thing, behind the breath in her lungs and the constant drought of her chakra system begging for rest, for replenishment. Her hope is more savage than Naruto's was, the constant belief that he could change the world; her hope is more ragged than Sasuke's was, the child's certainty that if he devotes himself to his goal he can fix things.

Her hope is more enduring than Sai's was, a fragile, just-born realization that life can be marvelous, that love can exist, that there is good in the world, and laughter, and beauty.

Sakura's hope is a bonedeep, feral warsong, a thrumming that gets her through the days, and the nights, that moves her body like a puppet on a string, that lets her heal and kill and force her body past its limits. It's a bulldog's jaws clamped tight on her goal, all thoughts set aside for neverending action, deliberation, movement; it's gravity, and the smiles she won't let herself forget, the dreams and ambitions of everyone she can remember wrapped tight but never safe in the core of her, every precious memory burned one at a time to keep it alive.

Sakura's hope is all she's got left.

So while she hasn't lessened her efforts to murder the being responsible for the destruction of all she loves-- if anything, it's the opposite, eclipsing her old limitations with every encounter, every waking moment, inching millimeter by bloody millimeter closer to her goal with each breath in her body-- she is a being of observations, of rationalization, of cool and collected deductions, lightning-fast assessments and reactions half the reason she's still breathing, and nothing in the encounter has led her to believe something has changed.

Sakura jerks back her fist in surprise, not quick enough to pull the punch but able to change the angle so that it slides past her opponent. In a quarter-beat she's a mile away, still high in the sky.

A mile is nothing.

Sakura turns mid-flight, eyes on Kaguya, feeling the change as it lurches through her body. Probably someone else might not have noticed, but no one else is alive; Sakura is aware of every iota of chakra in her body, and Sakura notices the moment it alters.

There's a new pathway where there wasn't before, like a jutsu half-forgotten, and chakra wants to curl out of her tenketsu, twist in just the right way to-- Sakura doesn't know, and has to stop the quicksilver flash of thought as a wave of Kaguya's hand sends black desolation winging toward her.

Sakura dodges, nimbly, tossing a shuriken that expands outward into a swarm, a flock of thousands, uses the moment's distraction to throw herself from a surviving peak to a valley far in the distance.

Her only saving grace is that Kaguya can't sense chakra, not when it's ruthlessly surpressed with Sakura's perfect control-- though the goddess is more than willing to burn the countryside to ash, destroy any cover, and force Sakura out.

She's learned to rest while running, take solace in the comparatively less exhausting labor of crossing ground faster than the winds of a rasenshuriken.

Kaguya can't-- or hasn't, at least-- used genjutsu on her. Perhaps she senses the futility of it; Sakura can sense the intrusion of foreign chakra on her system the instant it occurs, obvious as a drop of ink on a pristine scroll.

This isn't that; this chakra is hers and hers alone.

The sweep of white is her only warning, so fast her eyes can't resolve it into a shape; she doesn't wait for them to, moving back as far as a single leap can take her on instinct. It was a swipe of Kaguya's arm, her senses tell her later, but in the intervening time Sakura has ducked and parried three blows and flipped over a lake, its water rising on on either side of them like a welcoming hug.

Sakura punches the lakebed, lets house-sized boulders rise as asteroids, dances between them for a blink's cover before Kaguya obliterates them with a thought, not even rubble remaining. The skin on Sakura's arms informs her of the heat, even from her new distance. She's behind the goddess now, though-- not that it matters to her sight.

Merely, she's opposite Kaguya's direction of attention for a single moment, and in their battles that's an opening, forcefully torn.

It's a sweeping kick, a dynamic entry that flows into a springboard flip to get away, because any hit that doesn't connect is a liability. Any second of close combat is too long already, Sakura knows, and ruthlessly stifles the frustration in her throat as the move carries her away.

Away, away, away, the endless flight from an enemy too dangerous to engage, and too dangerous not to.

A bright flare of chakra from within her, yin and yang twisting without conscious direction, and it would be terrifying, this loss of control, if it wasn't infuriating. Sakura can't afford any moment of distraction.

She usually engages Kaguya until she only has the energy left for a desperate flight, a retreat to think on what she learned about her enemy during the most recent clash, painstakingly pieced together from the smallest of tells.

She might not have a choice, this time, though each moment of combat is precious, every encounter another chance to learn and capitalize on a weakness, build a strategy up from atoms, and--

Parry, parry, dodge; Sakura slips medical ninjutsu into her enemy's flesh, feels it catch beneath the skin, but where it should absolutely wreck the seemingly human biology, Kaguya shows no reaction.

Sakura keeps her curse contained to gritted teeth, reaches deep and pulls chakra into her hands. She doesn't have the luxury of handsigns, hasn't for longer than she can remember, so each jutsu has to be utterly mastered before she dares use it.

The upside is that she doesn't have any distractions.

It's water molecules slammed into each other, a tsunami raging out, and Sakura uses it to disengage.

She has to figure out what the utter fuck is going on with her chakra before it gets her killed.

The ball of water had been easier than normal, a prison called from the displaced lake, but before she's even ten miles away Kaguya has evaporated it. A rush of seared air, so hot there's not even steam, hits Sakura's back like a shove from a giant.

It spins her and she goes with it, knowing better to have her back to her enemy even as her skin erupts in burns, a line drawn of red drawn over her and erased just as smoothly by her own chakra in a countering wave. Her armor's lost but it did little, anyway.

A blur, and there's nothing to step off of; Sakura replaces herself with a piece of rubble in the distance, replaces again with one of her weapons from before, far enough away that her chakra rips out of her, a sudden void.

The same weird lurch as before occurs, infinitely more disastrous, and Sakura uses precious seconds reaching inward, a step she doesn't have to do ever, trying to isolate the cause.

It's elusive and Sakura would snarl if she wasn't taking to the trees with as little sound as possible, shoving down her chakra with an iron fist.

The hiccuping aberration refuses to be silenced. A frisson of fear lances through her, shock and dismay as a monsoon of wind tears at the forest, ripping trees out of the ground and into pieces. She leaps from trunk to trunk in the sudden tornado, dodging limbs suddenly as fast and dangerous as arrows from Sasuke's Susano'o, really snarling this time when one comes at her at such an angle that she has no choice but to slam her fist through it, giving away her position.

She has to dodge and weave, chakra still suppressed but for that little, disobedient curl directly in the center, and when she multitasks slinging a massive oak opposite the wind-- causing it to crash into its fellows with a sound like ten-thousand exploding tags--

now there's an idea--

and racing to the top of the atmosphere to get over the wall, she pokes at it, a stab of will.

Cooperate!

Instead it comes unraveled, a flower unfurling, and Sakura has just a moment to panic before the winds kick up, slamming her back down to the ground from the seven miles up.

She leaves a crater, leaves the crater barely after it's formed, narrowly dodging the fist dropped into the center of it after her.

The crater is suddenly four times as massive, force delivered with such speed that the landscape is just changed around them, the sound barrier breaking too fast to make noise.

Reinforcing and then still having to heal her spine, in the space between breaths, had taken approximately half of her chakra reserves, but while one part of her mind is cataloging reserves grimly, most of it is still reeling from the golden glow that is sweeping through her, that refuses to be tamped down, that is out of her control.

Fear quickens her breath, and Sakura rips a spear of a stick out of her shoulder, pressing one hand to the place where it impaled her. There's a feeling rising in her that begs to be a sound, a pulsing, a quickening, and she has no idea what it is, has no time to process as she runs for her life, dodging and weaving.

Kaguya has taken the displaced trees in her windstorm and is guiding them at the ground with a single gesture, each huge as only Fire Country trees get-- had they really journeyed so far east, again? The landscapes are mostly unrecognizable, all familiar manmade landmarks destroyed.

Sakura is forced to bob and weave, dart back and channel her dead teammate, be as unpredictable as possible because Kaguya isn't throwing trees at her so much as where she guesses Sakura will be.

Where such strength should shatter the trees upon impact with the earth, they're sticking in the ground like oversized arrows instead, and Sakura has precious thought to spare deducing how-- obviously, reinforced with chakra-- and how she can turn this around, use it as an advantage--

Maybe catch and redirect one?--

Too late, Sakura realizes this too could be a distraction, just as Kaguya puts a knife-hand through her gut and smiles, beautiful and serene.

Of course she hadn't needed to be physically directing the projectiles, huge though they were.

Sakura's muscles are suffused with deadly memory, though, and hadn't required conscious thought to react; nor had the sudden pain caught her off guard. Her arm had whipped around, tan skin brought to bear in a fierce lariat--

No time to remember Bee's smile next to Naruto's, so happy and sure--

-- even as her head whipped forward, one hard-headed jinchuuriki's move against another, back when the bijuu existed, when any village stood at all.

It's unexpected enough that Kaguya takes it, a forehead to the face, and Sakura smiles grimly through blood as she throws herself off the arm through her chest.

Healing it is something she does without a thought-- or really, isn't even something she does. The healing process starts on its own, fueled by her chakra. She could stop it, it's still under her control, but no command had to be given to begin it.

Thanks to the heatwave earlier, there's not even any fabric to get stuck in the wound, or stuck in newly healed flesh.

Sakura would love to capitalize on her enemy's moment of distraction, the sheer unpredictability of the headbutt that actually worked--

Her love for Naruto rears up like a wildfire, burning her inside out, so fierce an ache that it would unmake her if she were any less used to it, if she hadn't cried out all her tears back when the nights had numbers and the days had names--

-- but so big a wound leaves her with near-dregs of chakra left, just a little more than experience has taught she needs to escape.

It grates at her to leave Kaguya injured and as vulnerable as she ever gets, but-- it grated the first dozen times, too.

Sakura pushes on, ignoring the hurts she can't waste chakra to heal, as well as the blurred quality her vision takes, lines and spots erupting. That hasn't happened in a while-- either she's lower on chakra than her body can handle, right now, or--

She's just focused on real, true escape, fleeing with all the strength and speed she has, when the singed hair on the back of her neck bristles.

It's barely a warning, but it's enough.

Pushing off hard against the ground, Sakura hits the clouds again, arrowing through them even as-- yes, Kaguya slams air in the direction, dispersing the moisture in the air to either side of the horizon.

Sakura is already falling back down, using shaky wind manipulation to speed her flight, fist cocked back and slamming hard into the goddess' face.

Too late, she realizes that in the heat of the battle, deep in the familiar motions of retreat, distract, hit and run-- she'd reached for as much chakra as she could spare. She has perfect chakra control, a precise accounting of how much chakra she has within her at any given moment.

Never before has some of her chakra been off limits.

This chakra, burning gold, had come as readily to her pull as any.

The strange mix of yin and yang, erupted into being of its own accord, rushes to her toes and through her throat and up her arm, but it's too late, she has tolive.

Sakura slams her fist forward with a manic yell, has a split second to register the expression of pure shock on Kaguya's face as the punch connects--

And keeps connecting.

Sakura punches a hole in the space-time continuum.

Or at least, that's what she registers later.

In the moment, it's just a tear in reality, a sudden feeling of give to the air itself, which her fist carries her body through.

There's blackness, a kaleidoscope of color-- dizzying, rushing.

Gravity is suddenly different, pulling her every which way and no way at all, nothing and everything turbulent around her.

The golden chakra is singing through her, warm and wild and choking her, destroying all thought.

It threatens to destroy all sense of self, and that's when Sakura gets over her fear to push back. There's a spasm in the air, in the crowded void of creation, and a surge of-- something.

Sakura struggles for breath, only to discover there's no air.

A sense of urgency overcomes her, the mindless and frenzied struggle for survival, as she claws at her throat, forces her heart rate slower to preserve air, as desperation wicks away all thought.

Sakura has been alone for days and weeks and months, the last alive in a world torn asunder, and through it all hope has sustained her.

Endless and enduring, Sakura's hope is a snarling thing, a calculated predator, a living, breathing monster in her breast that demands survival, precision in all things, self-awareness, and burns a vigil of memories of her lost loves to force her into the best version of herself that she could be.

The vortex widens, or tightens, and Sakura refuses to let this kill her when nothing and no one else has managed, when there's still air in her lungs-- even if her vision is closing in, a blackness creeping in from the edges--

Or is that the tunnel?

A lurch, sickening and final, and spinning, dizzying wind.

It stops.

Sakura breathes.

Chapter Text

The world rights itself all at once. One moment, she's weightless and hurtling through dense nothing. The next, she's jerked to stillness so suddenly her head's still spinning.

She has a body again.

Gravity exists.

She can't move.

Sakura-- doesn't scream. It's a habit born of years as a shinobi, even before silence was imperative at the world's end.

It’s a near thing.

She can move, it's just-- different. Her chakra isn't low so much as unformed. The pool itself is tiny, badly done, and there's physical energy left lazily uncombined. It takes a second, some frustration, and three false starts to get clumsy control over the flow of it.

Immediately, the fog over her senses clears a little, though things are still muggy. She hasn't moved, frantically working to restore her chakra network to something resembling sense.

It feels oddly like her central nervous system was restarted and she's having to reconnect with each part of her body-- or at least her chakra system and reconnecting her tenketsu.

Her cells and muscles are still quivering as she leashes them, imposing iron control on her weirdly recalcitrant body. She won’t settle for anything less.

Finally, everything settles in like usual with what feels like an audible snap.

One breath, then another, and her hair brushes against her shoulders, longer than it’s been in nearly a decade.

Sakura goes as still as she's able.

Instead of grass around her, a canyon or clear-cut ground or a cave, she’s indoors-- not a novelty so much as an impossibility. A room with four walls. The pastel of it is horribly familiar.

Sakura tosses off her thick duvet restlessly, numb with disbelief.

She runs a hand through her hair, only to startle and yank it in front of her face, heart beating fast as a rabbit's. It's small. And shaking.

She can still taste the ash in her mouth, but there are four walls around her.

Moonlight slants through the window, curtains pulled back, the first fingers of dawn reaching purple through the glass.

The walls are pink, three shades off from white because-- because her mother thought it was clever.

This room burned even before Konoha did, though-- destroyed and never rebuilt after Sound's invasion. Before Kaguya, before the war, before Pein, even. Different levels of impossible, tangible before her.

Four walls, and beyond it a village. It's impossible, but somehow real, no trace of foreign chakra in her system and her breath caught baldly in her throat.

She can see it, as her body moves on autopilot, soundless footsteps carrying her to the windowsill. It’s like a mirage in the desert, streetlamps and the dark silhouette of buildings, stretching into the distance, even the occasional shadowed flicker of a masked ANBU jumping from one rooftop to another. Chakra signatures break the gentle night like candles in the dark, and her senses, spreading out across the village, drink them all in.

She doesn't realize she's backing up until her knees brush against the bed again, a tiny thing to match her tiny form, all of eleven years old.

Perhaps most worrisome of all: if this is a dream, she's not sure she wants to wake up.

Finally, it's too much. Claustrophobic, she throws the window open. It doesn't want to rise. She has to force it.

Her chest is tight. The first wave of air through the window has her stumbling, a foot trying to perch on the sill and launch her into the village proper, but too short to manage.

Sakura's reach isn't what she's used to. Panic claws at her, even as she tries to reason, to shove it down. There's no room for panic, not with the emotions that swell like a high tide. Leaves and street food are scents on the wind, achingly familiar.

It smells like dew on grass, a stillness that Sakura finds horrifically precious, dry eyes burning. She hasn't cried in so long that she's forgotten how. One hand pressed over her heart and the other clenched white-knuckled over the wood of the windowsill, Sakura closes her eyes and lets her senses drift from light to light, humans like fireflies in her mind's eye.

They're everywhere, all around, easily thousands. In every direction lights blaze, fiercely alive.

She's not alone.

Chakra signatures she familiarized herself with over the course of years are smaller and relaxed, though no less recognizable, and it aches to be so near them.

Names try to form and she let's them, attaching names of the dead to their lights-- some closer than others.

It’s strange to think of her parents as alive. Stranger still to consider, on the heels of that thought, all the ghosts now breathing in the village.

That there’s a village still standing at all.

Breath escapes Sakura's tight throat, shaky and cracked.

So many people.

All of them hers.

It takes less effort than Sakura might have assumed to pull herself from the window, when the sun rises in full.

She doesn't try to reign in her chakra sense. For so long she was alone, the only light lit, and the abundance now surrounding her is a welcome warmth-- compared to the empty blackness, her chakra senses still reaching out like the phantom movement from an amputated limb, they're blinding. (A sky full of stars.)

Sakura is eleven years old.

She knows because her hair is long, her head band stretched around her forehead. She'd only worn it to bed the one time, just after receiving it, and the breathless nerves make that night one she remembers, through a haze of time and change.

As a child, she had been so naively excited.

Sakura flexes, feeling the extent of her child self's muscle tone. It is barely above a civilian's equivalent, which seems grossly irresponsible, ability to enhance them with chakra or not. Orange light shines through the glass once she reluctantly shuts the window, surprised it doesn't shatter. Her skin is pale, unscarred.

She's woefully unarmed.

Where would she--?

Sakura rolls her eyes at her own ridiculousness, turns to her closet. There, under the hung outfits, are carefully arranged shuriken, kunai and shoes.

It's been a very, very long time since Sakura has used brand new weapons. She'd scavenged where she could, looting the corpses of her fallen comrades-- because everyone alive was a comrade, at that point in the war-- of steel and armor, scrolls and rations.

There are no rations in her mother's closet.

There are civilians sleeping in the same house as her, peaceful as infants, alive as they haven't been in almost ten years, though it felt like much longer.

Half her life with them, half without, and she's mostly unnerved by their sudden return to life.

Sakura knows what day it is, though she's not letting herself think about it, and if her hands don't falter as she dresses-- shoes, honestly-- it's only because of her rigid self control. She doesn't creep so much as walk carefully through the house, shadows catching on every wall. The modest furniture seems like a relic of a time long past, an anachronism-- except she's the one out of time.

The sun rises shining and lovely over a village nestled between towering trees. There's no rubble, not one building destroyed; this is the golden age between the Kyuubi's attack and Orochimaru's.

Walking up the wall of her old house feels like shedding a skin she wasn't ready to lose, her long hair and small body a strange nakedness.

There's a small amount of resistance as she channels chakra to the bottom of her feet-- her shoes. It causes a wobble to her step that's more astonishing than waking up in her younger body.

The control is there. She knows how to move her chakra. Her pathways are just clumsy with disuse. That will have to change immediately.

Her breath catches again, sharp and sudden.

The roof under her feet seems stupidly fragile, a dwelling of mere wood. All around her is an illusion of structure. Any chunin could wreck a house with a handful of jutsu, elements brought to bear.

She's seen the village reduced to scrap wood and rubble not just once but twice now.

The illusion is that the village exists, at all, as a structure instead of a people. Konoha is Tsunade's tired smile, laughter jumping from one jonin to another after a mission, chunin complaining at the gate, nine rookies in over their heads and blowing away their predecessors.

The village is an ideal Sai sketches idly, Ino's voice drifting merrily through the streets, Shikamaru's raised in lazy complaint. It's Choji's warm laugh, Kiba's ridiculous challenges, Lee walking on his hands. It's Kakashi reading porn, Yamato relaxing in a sunbeam, Shizune humming as she files paperwork, and Naruto is its beating heart.

Standing on one rooftop, Sakura looks out at all of them, burning splendid colours with the sunrise. Her village is standing and its villagers are alive.

Looking out at it, laid out before her eyes, she tries to call up disbelief or denial and finds hard reason instead.

Something happened, some jutsu gone wrong, a mix of yin and yang chakra in just the right proportions that she's been thrown back in time. Naruto's father couldn't have done it on purpose, or the Nidaime before him, and the reality of it is so much that Sakura can't even wrap her thoughts around it properly, a concept too big to rationalize.

She's gone back in time.

Alive, alive, everyone is alive.

The song of it is fierce in her, the sound of a village waking below louder and more hopeful than anything she's heard in an age.

She has no idea how it happened, but Sakura can't dismiss what's in front of her. She's eleven years old. Her precious people are alive and well. It's seven years before the fourth shinobi war.

There's a Konoha headband across her forehead and she's got a child's reserve of chakra, tiny but full to the brim. This body has never been pushed for months on end with little sleep, squeezed every last drop of chakra out in a desperate chase. It's new, and fresh, and so is her career as a ninja.

Tomorrow, she could wake up in her real body, nearly a decade older with the scars to prove it, but today-- today she has somewhere to go, and someone to be.

How often has she wished she could rewrite history?

Chapter Text

The morning seems fragile, a scene of spun sugar.

It smells like dew and dawn.

When Sakura shakily takes the steps to the academy, thinking the kids, the kids, we have to keep them--

She remembers thick smoke and coughing, blood and yelling. It was early enough in the war that they were worried about non-combatants and casualties. Early enough that there was some concept of an after; the notion soon faded to 'we can rebuild' to 'we can repopulate' to Sakura alone, striving for survival.

Architecture stands around her; people swarm within.

Stepping into the building seems absurd. She does it anyway. It feels like a fever dream, like her head wants to spin though her senses are fine.

Students mill about, faces she can't name for certain but recognizes all the same, future genin and chunin she'll go on border patrols with, will heal or give routine examinations to in the hospital.

They blur into a background hum of noise as her eyes catch a familiar form, gilded hair waving like a banner as she turns. She's laughing.

Funny, Sakura thinks, as if from far away. She hadn't thought she'd be able to tune out so many people and sounds, used as she is to anything alive being food or an enemy, hyper-aware and vigilant.

Ino looks up, looks around and her gaze lands on Sakura.

Sakura stares, helplessly.

Before the other girl can so much as open her mouth, Sakura's moved, urgency at her heels, and she doesn't remember making the decision to lunge forward, barely registers anything between them.

She buries her face in soft skin and softer hair, arms thrown around her best friend, breathing as deep as she's able.

A tentative hand goes to her own hair, stops just short of touching her. It’s a long curtain of pink that she’d just left alone, tired of deciding what to do with it.

"Sakura?" Ino asks, stunned breathless.

It takes all her strength to pull away. Luckily, words slide into place; she tastes apologies and laughter, confessions and words too big for her younger mouth, swallows around them and says what she must, instead.

"It's been fun, playing pretend with you," She says, though it takes reaching through years and the haze of childhood innocence to remember the silliness of their academy days.

Fingers rub into her shoulders, Ino pushing her back a little. There's a lull as Sakura tries to memorize her features with an aching desperation that she hopes doesn't translate into her features, or her voice.

"After this, we're genin proper-- soldiers of the Leaf. You're going to be part of Ino-Shika-Cho, and likely to get C-ranks faster than whoever my team is. Don't you dare die fighting bandits of all things, do you hear me? We've got to be chunin together."

Ino looks stunned for a long second that stretches between them.

"We're not going to see each other for a while, with missions," Ino realizes out loud.

She follows that thought to it's natural conclusion with a grimace. Her father is head of the Analysis Division of Intelligence. She knows the statistics intimately, as Sakura had known only abstractly the first time around.

Sakura holds her shoulders tight.

"Don't you forget about me, clan heir."

Ino snorts, a trace of their rivalry appearing at last, though it's muted with seriousness. She smiles.

"It wasn't just a game, you know. We had fun, and it was a good distraction while we learned, but I'm going to trounce you at the chunin exams. You stay alive, too."

Sakura's knees are weak. Ino is alive.

She doesn't have it in her to play up some kiddy fight for Sasuke 's affections, of all things, no matter how deluded they had been and how real it had become the first time they were genin.

Sakura takes a deep breath and feels her own smile form, easy as anything. How can she not? It's Ino and she's breathing , not covered in dirt and blood and trying to smile anyway.

Sakura intends to keep her that way.

Ino links her arm through Sakura's, grinning.

"Maaaa," She complains, rolling her eyes. "I guess I knew I'd be on a team with Shikamaru and Choji-- we've been training for it, for like, literally forever-- but I could always hope, you know?"

Sakura smiles at her.

They walk into the classroom just in time to see--

Well, the first thing Sakura notices is Naruto's chakra, an easy weight on the room that fades into a background hum, impossible not to feel but easy enough for everyone to stop noticing, after so many years as classmates.

Walking into the wall of it, feeling it settle on her skin, is like breathing clean air instead of smoke, taking the first breath free of blood and pain after a broken rib. Naruto is alive and even more than with Ino, an important but not integral part of her soul, it feels like a ragged hole in her is filled to see him hale and whole.

The second thing, though, is Tobio turning around and inadvertently shoving Naruto into Sasuke. Naruto had been, for some heartwarmingly stupid and nostalgic reason, crouching on the desk in front of Sasuke.

When their faces collide into the kiss of the ages, Sakura barks out a laugh, shocking her own self but also unable to stop.

Beside her, Ino is outraged.

"No!" she yells, force of habit catching her up in the motions. "Damn it-- Sakura, stop laughing!"

Sakura, who has felt that her voice should have been hoarse all day, throat sore with disuse of weeks and months, hasn't laughed in longer than she can remember. To do it now is like shedding a skin, like throwing off the heavy weights of grief-- if only for a moment.

The cackling joy of her boys alive and young couples with the surreal absurdness of seeing the people who fought and died with her being so young and unblooded. The future she just stepped out of seems impossibly far away-- until now it had been the other way around, this time of her life so untouchably far away from the horror of the present.

It's a backwards reflection, jarring, and the culmination is that Sakura laughs until she can't breathe, holding her aching stomach as Sasuke and Naruto belatedly spring apart, red faced and spluttering-- both of them, even.

Naruto wipes his mouth with exaggerated disgust, like he wouldn't bleed and die for the boy in front of him, like he wouldn't traipse countries and continents or end wars-- start wars-- to be by his side.

Sakura laughs until it hurts, until tears dot the corners of her eyes.

Only then does she manage to stop, bringing a finger to the salt-water with hesitant wonder.

She'd thought she'd cried her last tear sometime after she lost her last friend, carried the corpse of Kiri shinobi in harried flight, hating and cursing that she hadn't had time to heal him and didn't still, carrying him for hours and hours of frustrated grief because-- surely-- she'd be able to stop soon, to do chest compressions, restart his heart, surely it hadn't been too long--

He'd been the last.

And then she'd been.

Sakura stares at the moisture beaded on her fingertip, touched.

Her next inhale is a touch ragged.

Tears of grief had been beyond her for so long, dried up from overuse and the chorus of the endless, uncountable dead.

Now, though--

Now she's in a room of children with her comrade's faces, innocent and unlined. Beyond them lies a village untouched, filled with warriors.

She has a miracle of a second chance and Ino beside her, loudly lamenting missed opportunities. Sasuke and Naruto sit amicably next to each other when Iruka angrily calls them to their seats.

Somehow-- somehow--

Of all the things she'd thought lost, now returned, tears of laughter seem the most impossible.

Chapter Text

The teams form without much fanfare. Sakura remembers goofing off with Ino the first time around; can’t bring herself to recreate that level of nonsense. She does, however, smile at her friend and wave after the assignments.

It’s only after, with the newly-minted genin heading into the sun-dappled courtyard for lunch, that Sakura gets an opportunity to change something. Her hair is long and ticklish against her arms, the warmth of the morning seeping into her shoulders the longer she stands in direct sun. Still, she makes no move toward the shade, walking along the path easily.

Sasuke had bolted directly after they were released. She considers going after him, oddly tetchy about one of them being out of sight. Naruto isn’t where she can see him, either, but that’s okay because--

“Hey, Sakura! Since we’re the same group, I was thinking we could have lunch and get to know each other!”

-- she could sense the ocean of his chakra a mile away.

Looking at him hurts, but Sakura turns around. How could she not? He’s alive, he’s breathing; he’s twelve.

Naruto’s eyes are closed in that dumb fox grin he favored when they were younger. He’s short, clumsy and ten times as eager to please than he will be in the future. His skin is several shades paler than she’s used to.

(Though not nearly as pale as it was last time she saw him, and she has to shake off the memory that superimposes itself over his young face: older and desperate and coughing blood around a smile.)

She remembers the day he came back from the training trip with Jiraiya, still obnoxious and blonde but seemingly unaware of how much he’d changed-- or how much he would continue to change in the coming months.

It’s almost-- easier. Seeing this pint sized version of her best friend. The loud and.. Loud.. version of him. She thinks if she were put face-to-face with the friend she’d lost, bleeding and smiling and taking all the light in the world with him when he died--

Well.

Seeing the younger version is quaint. Nostalgic.

(None of the differences matter. Her eyes are more wet than they were a moment ago, and his chakra feels more like light-rain-with-the-sun-shining than a-hurricane-and-a-star, but it’s so close she can hardly care. Behind her ribs her heart is beating faster.)

Nothing has ever been harder than not pulling him into a hug. Her fingers itch with the urge.

“Yeah, sure.” She smiles, indulgent. It’s a familiar expression. “We can go get lunches and drag Sasuke into socializing.”

It feels absurd, Sasuke being so young and generally available. She breathes through it.

“Aw, do we have to bring--”

“Don’t push your luck, Naruto.” She chides. He grumbles but acquiesces easily enough. She wonders how much of that response was habit for him, over-dramatic and bold. Notice me .

Sakura buys all three of them lunch with her meagre pocket change. On the way there and back, Naruto rattles on about how cool he is and, when she fails to stop him, how excited he is to be on her team.

When they get back to the academy grounds, he says: “Ugh, where even is Sasuke, anyway?”

It’s the work of a moment to turn her head in the direction of fire-and-ozone; she doesn’t even have to search it out. Sasuke is eating alone in an empty room, easily visible from the second-story window he’s leaning on.

“Do you want to learn something cool?” She asks, fully expecting a bit of resistance. Naruto, at this age, learning ?

“Yeah! You’re so smart, Sakura!” He pumps a fist in the air, immediately ready to go despite the non-sequitur.

She’s clearly underestimated his dedication. It’s a little uncomfortable, this hero-worship-crush; in the future it’d be based more on mutual respect and a bit of healthy fear. Even the tone of his admiration is young.

“Okay.” She laughs, focusing on the here and now. “What does Sasuke feel like, to you?”

He frowns hard at the mention of their teammate, obviously displeased. She gets the strangest urge to giggle. Irony, probably.

“Whadda’ you mean?”

“Hm.” She takes a moment. Then she grabs his hand, both of them too small. “What do I feel like?”

“Soft.” Naruto blurts instantly. His face is as red as a tomato. He’s not breathing.

Oh. Right.

His crush is stupidly endearing. She resists the urge to cry easily enough, but the feeling is still there, lodged in her throat. Sakura breathes.

She channels chakra into her hand; not letting it pool there, as the precursor to a jutsu, but pushing more into circulation than usually runs through. The skin there immediately warms.

“Reach out-- what do I feel like?”

There are barely words for this, let alone the right words to get through to Naruto, of all people. He learns by doing.

Naruto squints heavily at their hands. She channels even more chakra. It’s not wasteful, doing this-- she’s not expending it, nor breaking up the normal flow-- but it will get tiring after a while.

“Oh!” Naruto announces, surprised. He’s all wide eyes and happiness. “It’s like--” She feels his own energy shyly reach out and would have flinched from shock if it weren’t so familiar.

Well, that’s one way to do it.

At least it’s not visible. She looks to their hands, too. Though the heat of his hand in hers is evident, there’s not enough chakra to break into the visible spectrum-- which she’s seen, for the record, Naruto manage just by concentrating hard.

It doesn’t burn, either. Both of these are likely because he’s doing it completely by accident, of course. Naruto doesn’t have the chakra control to purposefully exude it like this. There are-- or will be, and when will she stop tripping over that?-- a lot of blackened tree trunks in Wave country to prove it.

“It’s like grass,” Naruto finishes a second later. His nose scrunches up, but the loud defense doesn’t come. Sakura threads her chakra through his, letting it push into his tenketsu before pulling it back-- the equivalent to having her blood do loop-de-loops above her skin before landing back in her veins and rejoining the circulatory system, she supposes.

He shuts up quick, fascinated. “That’s-- Sakura that’s so weird! ” He yells.

“Grass and what else?” She presses, keeping it up.

A very controlled push and pull, threading gently. Steadily.

It’s stupidly intimate to be doing this. Even knowing that they’ll develop incredibly close bonds as a team, someday soon, it’s-- intimate.

“I--” his face is red again. Redder? Twelve-year-old Naruto had spluttered an awful lot, so she tries not to think she’s broken him. He takes a deep breath, lets his eyes slip closed to concentrate.

The sun catches on his eyelashes, eyelids, cheeks. Gold on gold on gold.

( Alive, alive, alive. )

“Mint, maybe?” His brow furrows. “Like mint and grass and new-things.”

She realizes she hasn’t been breathing, kicks herself, and smiles winningly.

“Very good.” She praises, and if she weren’t so focused she might have missed the way his eyes shoot open, jaw falling slack.

Her heart hurts a little more.

“Okay, so what does Sasuke feel like?”

“I don’t hold hands with Sasuke!” Naruto crows, looking very much like he’d wanted to leap away theatrically, only to remember they were holding hands at the last second.

Two steps forward, three steps back.

A voice in her, wry, wants to make a joke.

(One day you’ll do more than that.)

“Well, you’ll have to at some point. Knowing your teammates chakra is important. You have to be able to find each other when you need to, and know immediately if we’re, say, an imposter.”

“I’d know if it was the real you right away, Sakura!” He assures boldly.

She finds herself smiling again, swings their joined hands.

“You will,” She agrees. “Because you know what my chakra feels like, now.”

Deciding that’s more than enough for today, Sakura gives up.

“Sasuke’s over there,” She nods to his position.

“Well, he’s already eating a rice ball so clearly --”

“Come on, Naruto,” She cuts him off, struggling not to laugh--again-- and doing a bit of balancing with the bentos.

“What do you-- oh! ”

Sakura leaps with chakra-enhanced legs, tugging Naruto with her onto a rooftop. Running toward Sasuke with him is as familiar as breathing.

Their team is new, but not fragile. Their bonds haven’t formed yet, not really, but it’s not because they don’t fit, or can’t. They’re puzzle pieces that haven’t gotten close enough to touch, and the distance is the only thing stopping them from fitting together perfectly, edges matching up into a greater whole so smoothly it’ll be hard to tell where one piece stops and another begins.

They fit , her boys and her; team seven with actual teamwork is all strengths and no weaknesses.

Sakura was a surgeon, once upon a time. She’ll cut away the distance between them with immaculate precision, break it down until they can come together with nothing between them.

This time, they’ll survive .

(If she has to burn down the whole damn world all over again, her boys will survive.)

It’s not like anything can stop them.

She takes a breath, crosses a threshold, Naruto’s blustering loud behind her, hand snug in hers.

Well.

The corner of lip tilts up, a small thing, a private thing. She can laugh inside her head, at the craziness of it all. At how complicated tenses suddenly are.

Nothing will be able to stop them.

She will make sure of it.

Baby steps.

Chapter Text

She’s carrying the lunch boxes, which leaves Naruto free to burst through the door like so much chakra under too-tight skin and shove his face into Sasuke’s space.

He barrels into it with such speed and surety that Sasuke barely has time to startle when Naruto grabs his hand with almost comedic levels of concentration drawing his brows taut.

“What do I feel like, teme?” He insists, loudly, by which time Sasuke does finally manage to bristle like a cat.

“What do you—what are you doing?” He hisses, making as if to jerk the hand back. Naruto stubbornly refuses, following the motion until they’re chest to chest and Sasuke drops his elbow as if burned to recreate some distance.

He looks so young it hurts, a punch to the gut that twists and twists. He’d looked young as he died, too, in one moment smirking and cocksure as he kept up with Naruto with laughable ease, and in another impaled.

“My chakra!” Naruto yells, as if Sasuke is being particularly dense. “What does it feel like!”

It’s not even a question and Sasuke winces at the volume, so close.

“Idiot,” Sasuke says, irritation and embarrassment coloring a bold swipe from ear to ear, “Why are you touching me, I can feel your chakra from across a room.”

It’s no question, more long-suffering dismissal.

(His jaw had loosed in surprise, unsure until he wasn’t, until fear licked the years from his face in seconds and his eyes had widened, so scared and young, in that moment, the boy she’d once wished for so fiercely returned in all the worst ways--)

“Oh.” Naruto looks at their joined hands, still raised between their faces. His nose scrunches. “No! The special way. You’ve got to know what my chakra feels like so if anyone tries to be me, you’re not fooled.”

Sasuke makes a horrified noise and, miracle of miracles, looks at Sakura over blonde hair.

“Is this somehow your fault?”

His voice is deeper, which seems absurd. As an adult—well. Cold builds behind her teeth, races down her spine.

She never saw either of them as adults.

Child soldiers til the last.

“Hey, don’t ignore me!” Naruto shakes their hands. “Here—”

Shaken out of her memory (the last times she saw either of them, the most recent time before this one), Sakura starts forward as if to stop him.

“Naruto, you really don’t have the control for—”

Too late, bright blue coronas their fingers.

Sakura pauses, notes with some detachment the way her hair keeps moving, a curtain of frailest pink. It flutters back to her shoulders and—

She lowers her hand, previously raised as if to yank Naruto back.

Well.

She can heal chakra burns.

“Dobe—!” Sasuke had started, equally alarmed, but falling quiet far sooner. Naruto obviously hadn’t headed either warning and it’s not like he wasn’t already in position.

Sasuke’s expression had fallen slack immediately, lips parting as his jaw fell a little. He failed to jerk or shout in sudden pain.

(Blood bubbled over his lips, dark and arterial, surprise morphing to fear and helplessness, a child’s fear--)

After a long moment when nobody breathes, he blinks rapidly.

“Oh.” He says, shocked soft. He doesn’t tear his eyes away.

Naruto’s eyes are shut tight.

Sakura moves to flank them, chakra sense thrown wide to encompass the building. She’ll know if anybody so much as breathes ill intent.

“What does he feel like?” She asks, careful enough. It tastes like ashes until she swallows. This is a new thing, a new start.

It’s rewriting a future where he’d looked at her, lost and confused with a long spike of prehensile hair shoved into his rib cage.

“I.” Sasuke swallows. He looks struck dumb. His lashes flutter. “I’m not.”

“Think,” Sakura cajoles, voice low. Teaching helps. Fixing helps. “Make connections. Find something recognizable.”

“There’s so much.” Sasuke breathes. “How--?”

“Pull back a little.” She instructs, rolls her eyes when he hisses. “Do it. It won’t be as overwhelming with distance.”

Probably.

Frowning, Sasuke says, “Okay. It’s—”

His eyes fall shut.

He tilts his head, concentrating.

Heartbeats pass.

(He’d listened to her. It feels like sunlight on her skin, the bright hope of dawn, like a new day where anything is possible.)

“It’s like—a storm.” Finally, Sasuke’s breath fans out, loud in the quiet room. “Once you get past the fact that it’s everywhere and all around, and warm—it’s like a stormfront. The warm air of a summer storm.”

He opens his eyes.

Sakura smiles at his immediate frown.

Sasuke nudges Naruto with his elbow.

“Hey,” He calls, no louder than usual. “Stop it, come on.”

Naruto opens his eyes slowly.

He turns to Sakura, who most have something approving on her face, because he breaks out into a huge grin.

“I did it!” He crows.

“Yes.” Sasuke says, flat. “Let me go.”

“No!” Naruto says, adamant. “It’s your turn. My turn. Whatever.”

Sasuke’s brow furrows and then his eyes widen.

“What? No!”

“What, yes!” Naruto says, voice high pitched to imitate. “We’ve got to know for missions and stuff!”

He looks to Sakura, pleadingly.

“Three-man squads have to be familiar with each other’s chakra signatures.” She recites, the words wooden on her tongue, dragging up the words from two lifetimes ago.

She pushes away thoughts of wearing Naruto-and-Kurama’s chakra like a second skin, of Sasuke and Naruto blending techniques together easier than seasoned partners without a second’s hesitation, despite three years of separation and no prior practice, or even a moment to get a feel for each other’s chakra.

They hadn’t needed it.

Sasuke huffs and his face is almost entirely red, now.

Indignant. Embarrassed. She’d feel older but with the way they’d always been so huffy and immature with each other, there’s not much difference between this Sasuke and the one she’d fought shoulder to shoulder with.

(Except there is, there is; he’s alive and he listens and he’s a blank slate of unformed opinions, a chance for change where, if she’d had time to form expectations, she would have expected anything but.)

Naruto’s freckled cheeks are dusted with pink under his tan, from the prolonged eye contact he refuses to break. He doesn’t loosen his grip at all.

(This time, he will not let go!)

Sasuke still looks uncomfortable, tense even when he forces his eyes closed and starts breathing rhythmically.

Naruto looks expectant right up until he jolts, thirty seconds later, and then stares at their joined hands with wide eyes.

“Campfires,” He blurts in a quiet, surprised voice. He blinks, briefly. Doesn’t shake his head, though it looks like he wants to. “Campfires. Um, smoke? But like. Spicy. Um, um.”

“Makes sense,” Sakura allows, taking deep breaths herself. “Uchiha are known for their fire jutsu.”

Itachi. Obito. Madara.

Sasuke twitched slightly.

Uchiha are known for their fire jutsu.

Sakura knows better, though.

“Look deeper.” She commands.

“Deeper?” Naruto asks.

A smile plays on her lips. She can have this, she can teach. Arm them for a war before its teeth ever break the horizon.

“Close your eyes, Naruto.”

“Oh!” His brow furrows, then smooths out as he complies. So trusting.

It’s barely anything, really, but Sakura will grab onto it with both hands. There’s room here, more than she’d dared hope for. She can make this work.

“Oh!” Naruto exclaims, tilting his head to the side. His eyelids are dusky in the shadows beside the window. “It’s like a knife!”

Bullshit.

Sakura blinks, then darts forward and grabs Sasuke’s free hand in both of hers.

She can’t control his chakra, of course, but he barely frowns before channeling it properly so she can feel it.

Her first thought is: Naruto’s right, because it is very warm, but Naruto’s usually right and she tucks the thought away with long practice. Now that he’s said it, she can’t get the thought of campfires out of her head, the easy-going peacetime fires that burned without much worry for enemy discovery.

It brought to mind unexpected memories of comrades laughing in a circle around one; not exactly carefree, but cutting through the dark.

Sasuke’s chakra tasted as much like fire as lightning, one coming more readily than the other due to stringent use rather than anything innate. It was usually jonin who trained a second element into conjunction with their natural one. Team seven lived to break down expectations.

Fire came to mind first, when chakra rolled through his palm and into hers. There was lightning, though—the fire crackled. It sparked, and tattered embers lifted into full stormclouds, roiling and waiting. It was impatient, but muted. Untapped.

Nowhere was the cutting knife of wind chakra.

“How is it like a knife,” Sakura mutters, eyes closed.

“It’s—you know. Sharp and spinny. Ready to move. Waiting and then it hits!”

Ready to—

“Potential energy,” Sakura realizes with a sigh. “Naruto, it’s lightning.”

“No, it’s not.” Then he backtracks. “I mean, Sakura-chan, it could be.”

Not that he’s prevaricating her, as in she could be right; but that his chakra spoke of something that could be lightning, maybe. Like it’s the thunder before.

“No, Naruto,” She says, teaching. “My chakra felt like grass, right? But chakra is only five natures—wind, water, fire, lightning, earth. So grass would be…?”

“Earth!” Naruto grins, dazzling smile audible. She nods.

“And yours?”

“Well, um. A storm, right? So that’s like, rain—”

“Wind.” Sasuke mutters, keeping his eyes closed as well. They’re all holding hands in a half-lit room, three sets of eyes closed.

A heady pulse of what could have been, what will be, rises like hysteria from her lungs.  She fights not to hold too tightly.

“But storms are water,” Naruto protests.

“Dobe,” Sasuke snorts.

“No, he’s right. You described it that way for a reason. Naruto, flare your chakra again.”

Sasuke doesn’t know enough about what’s coming to protest, or even brace himself. Naruto nods, determined, and a half second later blue light plays through her eyelids.

Both her boys gasp and she would bet the payment from all their D-ranks combined that they’re both horribly pink.

Sakura curls her free hand around Naruto’s and hears the hitch in his breath when she threads her chakra firmly through his again, letting it bleed around the edges to blend better.

Sasuke makes a noise like he’s strangled.

Sakura tunes him out.

Naruto’s chakra is everywhere. It’s impossible to walk into a room with him and not know it, the steady pressure, but now it’s in her lungs and pressing in her throat.

(Pushing chakra into someone is one thing, but them pushing back—he pushes and she pushes and their chakra mixes and slides and curls together, and it’s like raw nerves dancing and blood slipping through her fingers and emotions so intense she--)

With her eyes closed it’s a little like standing on a cliff in a windstorm and a lot like drowning with air.

That—drowning. Why drowning? Obviously because it’s pressing in so much, saturating the air she struggles breathes. Again, though—

There’s the touch of humidity, of wetness.

Blood rattling in a cut throat--

No.

It’s a hint, an afterthought to the way there’s definitely warm air, where the air around Naruto, when his chakra lights him up, just is warm, moving currents, but.

“Wind.” Naruto says, and she nods.

“But a little water too.” This time it’s Sasuke, surprised. Gruff.

The push and pull of Sasuke’s chakra to hers feels like fire licking down her esophagus, like drawing lightning to her spine.

It doesn’t hurt.

It’s—banked. Soft. The chakra itself is warm even as it crackles, warm and staticky between their palms, invisible and trapped under their skin as their fingers twine.

“You’ve got fire and lightning,” Naruto tells him, sure of himself. He must be, if he feels the same from their joined hands. “And Sakura-chan’s got earth.”

It sits for a moment, between them and on their shoulders. Chakra flows from hand to hand and the connection is—alive. It’s coiled and warm on one side, breath and rain on her other. There’s a give and a take and a blending that catches in her throat like a blade.

“Hey!” Naruto picks up on it last, of course, and shouts to the world when he does, “Between us we’ve got all five! That’s gotta be cool, right?”

“That’s… really rare, I know that much.” Sasuke mutters, and from another building a bell tolls. He untangles their hands with economic movements, easier than he could be for all that it’s the kinesthetic equivalent to a cleared throat.

Sakura opens her eyes to see Naruto doing the same. He looks down at his hands, face going through a series of emotions too fast to catch.

The sunlight slants in, the window giving a view of the courtyard where students are traipsing back into the main academy building. The classroom that Sasuke had picked was in disuse and he hadn’t bothered flicking the light on.

“We should go.” It’s decisive, though she knows its next to useless.

A handful of hours isn’t enough to change something a week or more in motion.

If Kakashi shows up before two in the afternoon, she’ll eat her forehead protector.

Chapter Text

“They’re late.” Growls the would-be boy genius. It’s hard to see anything particularly special about him, framed as he is by Sakura’s perfect chakra control, Naruto’s unflinching victories. Their whole generation burned through all expectations, so why was he treated so differently?

Sakura inhales spring air, tastes potential, lets bubbles of ironic mirth fizz on her tongue like the imported drinks Ino had thrust into her hands as a child.

“He sure is.” She stretches her arms out behind, tucks one ankle under the other. “What are we going to do about it?”

Naruto pounces immediately—helpful, even if he hasn’t had time to come up with a real solution to offer.

“Let’s set a trap!” Initiative. Drive.

“Idiot,” Sasuke scoffs, zero hesitation. “What would that do?”

“If they’re this late and can’t even dodge a genin trap, they have no business teaching the next Hokate, ‘ttebeyo!”

The tic is like losing a finger; shocking, numbing, distantly painful. Distracting. Sakura breathes through it, perfectly level.

Seven in, seven out. Seven in front of her to hold.

Both turn to her, expectant.

“How can we use this time productively?” She forces out, shaking it off. It clings and she isn’t even sure what’s painful about it, where the grief begins or ends. Mapping out the edges only makes it grow.

“Well…” Naruto puzzles slowly. His head tilts, catlike. He wets his lips. “We’re supposed to stay here and wait,” He offers.

Like an outstretched hand, Sasuke takes it.

“So either we stay here. Or.”

The ‘Or’ is like a statement of its own, punctuated heavy between them. An offer, full of possibilities.

“Don’t get caught leaving.” Part of Sakura insists that walls are life’s funniest joke; as she speaks she flexes her knuckles.

“But what would we do?” Naruto blinks at her.

“What do we need?” She counters.

“We weren’t a team, earlier.” Sasuke says, careful. “We don’t know anything about our teacher. We don’t know… how to fight together.”

He talks like the words are sour in his mouth, but not unpleasant.

“The academy curriculum focused on individual progress—student versus student.” Sakura agrees.

“But Konoha is famous for its teamwork.” Sasuke frowns into his clasped hands. “It’s unusual—almost unheard of—for Konoha nin to work alone. Two-man cells are the minimum.”

And three-man cells are the standard. It sits between them. There’s a reason genin teams are composed of three novices and a master.

“So… now’s when we learn it?” Naruto waves a hand. “All the teamwork?”

Sakura imagines them on either side of her, older and in-synch, given all the time they were robbed of. At her level, compensating for each other’s weaknesses, and complementing each other’s strengths.

Devastating.

Spirits and gods, she wants. Her hands clench hard into fists. Her throat is too tight to speak, so it’s good that Sasuke handles it.

“Yes.” He says shortly. “From a jonin.”

His face says clearly what he thinks of that. Naruto, next to them, is tense and uncomfortable at the idea of working together, too. He’s spent a long decade reaching out, trying his damndest, and having every single offered hand get slapped away. It’s a miracle he never quit reaching.

She thinks of Gaara, and lets her eyes wander back to Sasuke.

He’s thinking of power, but Sakura can hardly fault him. She is, too. But she can see it, hazy and almost-formed: shoulder-to-shoulder, the dark of the world pushed back by unstoppable light.

A murky future, not even clear in her mind’s eye. The kind of shining glimpse you kill and spill blood and fight for.

He doesn’t have the image in mind of the three of them strong together. She knows that. He is thinking of teamwork as a means to power, though, and it’s a handhold, a grip she can use.

He has no idea, but that’s okay. It’ll be more than obvious soon.

“But what if we get a sucky jonin?” Naruto’s brow furrows. “They’re already late. What if they’re always late? What if we don’t learn anything!?”

Horror creeps into his voice, and a paler version into Sakura’s skin.

What if? Then: Sasuke will leave the village, a traitor; Naruto will turn as a sunflower in the direction of his light, stunting his own growth to follow; and Sakura will fall to her knees, a beggar, before the strongest woman in the world.

Or they would have.

“Then we teach ourselves.” She doesn’t recognize her own voice.

It comes as if from underwater, muddled even to her own ears. This is a turning point, a crossroads. She still feels like a dreamer walking—dissociative, her training whispers, though hours poring over thick scrolls with advanced jargon proved useless when there was nobody left to heal.

Her body is small and her hair is long, but her mind keeps flinching. This feels more like an elaborate, dangerous distraction than anything, like she’ll wake up with her face pressed into the bark of a tree and adrenaline sharp in her veins, cursing stupid, stupid!

It’s real, though. Every time her eyes unfocus, her guard comes down, she sees walls around her, hears talking and it’s still unexpected enough to make her reflexively grab her chakra, yanking it to a standstill.

There’s no genjutsu.

Her words appeal to Sasuke, independent seeker of strength. They appeal to Naruto, who has had to claw every bit of knowledge, win every hurdle up to this point, painfully alone. Here are two who haven’t had anyone; and herself, having lost everyone, still wild-eyed and disbelieving by turn.

Naruto sucks in air and stares at her, looking between them. They know each other—have known each other—from years of shared classes and living in the same village, but this is different. This is a pact to stand strong (together) when life would let them falter, not just one hand held out but two; support, on either side, swathed in bold defiance.

This is chakra shared in the dark, softly forbidden; the promise of priorities, team-focused; loyal heretics challenging every bit of the status quo.

Sakura cleared her throat.

“Mission objective?” She challenged, and this throat never went without speech for weeks and months. Her voice should not be gruff, but her eyes sting.

Black and blonde heads bend to chaos. Naruto ruffled through his pockets until he produced an old, worn leaf of paper. On it he wrote “1.”

“What’s our main goal?” He asked openly, looking up with the pen on his lip.

(He paused for input instead of blundering through and it shouldn’t be surprising, it shouldn’t, but Sakura still kicks herself for how a single ounce of attention has led to this. Of course he would do everything himself. Why ask and wait if nobody listened?)

“Let’s prioritize recon on our teacher.” Sasuke asserted, eying either of them for objections. Naruto shrugged, jotted that down.

“And then is… we need strategy, right? For teamwork.”

Sakura nodded, taking the abstract to the realistic with ease of practice. How quaint, to have time to form a game plan like this. And without lives hanging in the balance, too.

“Safe to plan for three against one.” She opened both palms. “How can three fresh genin take on a jonin?”

“Cheat.” Naruto said, immediately.

Sasuke snorted.

“We’re already cheating.” He dropped one hand, leaving the other to prop up his chin, and started counting on his fingers. “What can we, specifically, do? What do each of us bring to the table?”

Sakura felt the wisp of chakra against her chest, sage chakra stored as a folded flower, and folded down the strength of herself to match.

“The academy three.” She licked her teeth, considering. “Shunshin.”

Well, probably, anyway.

Sasuke’s eyebrow darted up, some level of impressed. She did not bare her teeth at him.

“My aim is shit, though.” She admits instead. The rapid deaging ensured it.

“That’s okay, Sakura-chan!” Naruto assured. “We’ll help!”

“Idiot. You’re just as bad.” Sasuke said. Then: “I’ve got the basic three, above average taijutsu, and the Uchiha grand fire ball.”

“Oh!” Both turned to the blonde exclamation. “I can make clones now!”

And the universe trembled, Sakura thought, unable to help a small grin.

“You mean without them wobbling all over the place and falling apart?” Sasuke had no pity.

“No!” Naruto protested. “Like, solid clones! Real ones!”

“The shadow clone technique?” Sakura asked, just to see him nod, eager.

And then the spark of an idea, daring. She blew it into flames.

“I’ve read about it.” She has, too. “It’s supposed to be monstrously dangerous. High-level jonin rarely make more than one, because of the chakra cost.”

“Hm. How many can you make?” Sasuke asked, catching on. It wasn’t exactly a secret that Naruto had more chakra than he knew what to do with.

Naruto rubbed the back of his neck.

“I dunno. Fifty?”

Sasuke choked, tried to recover by coughing.

“And,” Naruto volunteered, “I’ve got trap stuff! Smoke bombs, exploding tags, trip wires.”

“Not enough to take down a jonin, but good for distractions,” Sasuke observed, only a little begrudging. He almost had his breath back.

Naruto beamed.

“Okay,” he laughed. “Priority one: find out everything we can about the jonin assigned to Team Seven.”

He waited, but they only nodded. A touch of red stole into his cheeks.

“Um. Priority two: combine…” He wrote as he spoke. “our talents… into a strategy… tailored… just for them.”

Sasuke leaned over, snorted.

“You wrote: ‘Kick his ass’.”

“I’m not wrong.” Naruto set his jaw stubbornly and Sakura laughed, surprising herself.

“Whatever.” Sasuke shrugged it off, donning a game face. “Where do we start?”

“Well, I figured we could just raid the academy file room.” Naruto scratched his nose.

They stared at him.

“Have you… done that before?” Sasuke looked painfully unsurprised, but still disbelieving. Sakura imagined the young troublemaker of her childhood—not hard, with his whiskered self right in front of her—with no jutsu to his name, somehow getting into heavily guarded restricted spaces.

She could see it.

She could see it disturbingly well, actually.

“Yeah, of course. I changed my ninja picture back to the sage paint one, like, three times before they gave up trying to fix it.” He laughed again, proud.

“Naruto…” Sakura began, pieces sliding into place slowly. It’s something she hasn’t thought about in years, if at all. “How did you learn the shadow clone technique? It’s only recorded in the Forbidden Scroll, the village’s record of secret techniques, written by the Second Hokage and under twenty-four-seven guard in the Hokage’s library.”

She’d always figured someone—some jonin, somehow—had taught him, though now that she thought about it, who could have? Who would have?

Disturbingly, Naruto doesn’t contradict her.

He blinks at her, nods.

“How did you ever see it? Did the Hokage show you?” She pressed. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, not really, but the lack of knowledge itched like a fully solved puzzle with one piece missing.

He’d died, bled out, and suddenly there were no more opportunities for questions. It happened often: back when there were pockets of resistance, when there was some hope for victory and rebuilding, when there was time between battle to regroup and laugh and live, because they had to-- every time she’d turned to share some observation, or joke, or idea with him, and found only empty silence, the wound of her grief ached somehow more raw.

“No, of course not.” The baby-faced Naruto of the present says, and she shakes, tries to tune back into the here and now. He laughed. “I just took it. It’s… a long story.”

He strokes the back of his hair, sheepish.

Just took it, rings through the room and Sakura’s ears. And yeah, sure, in their older years he got away with starting wars, but as a child?

From a crumbling wasteland to a thriving civilization, with social cues and rules, to the young jinchuuriki who flips everything on its head and laughs at the established order of things. It’s jarring.

“You just ‘took’ the forbidden scroll of Konoha?” Sasuke sounds strangled. At least she’s not alone.

Oblivious to either of their disbelief, Naruto scoffs.

“What, like it’s hard?”

True to his word, Naruto is in and out of the file room with none the wiser. It is two parts sneaking, one part familiarity, and three parts masterfully timed distraction. Even Sasuke is impressed.

While teachers swarm like a kicked hive, trying to get the glitter off, Naruto effortlessly maneuvers through the clear spots in the paint.

“Hey guys!” he whisper-shouts, waving the folder. He shuts the door behind him. “So get this—our teacher is some guy named Hatake Kakashi.”

But there the door doesn’t close all the way, and Sakura is tensed with the precursor to movement before she remembers anything: not the weapons at her pouch, not her size, not the past or any such animal as ‘consequences.’ Chakra floods her system because Naruto is tiny but alive and there is someone at his back—

And then she stops. They’re in the village. Not in danger. It would have come to her eventually, probably after she’d splattered an attacker’s insides against the wall, but instead it hits her all at once.

It’s Kakashi-sensei, and that stills the rage in her.

It disappears as swiftly as it’d come, but the tightness of her throat doesn’t ease. The adrenaline ebbs like a tide and leaves her shaking, just a little. Right, it’s from the adrenaline. Not the man leaning so-casually in the doorway before them.

“That’s right,” he says, teasing and playful in a mocking way. “And you three…”

His eyes sweep over them, taking in the way Sakura had been ready to move without thinking about it, the folder in Naruto’s raised hand.

“Well, I’m not impressed. Meet me on the roof in two minutes.” He disappears, three or four leaves fluttering to the ground in his wake, and Sasuke huffs.

“What a dick.”

Naruto laughs, startled. He goes to the window.

She swallows, breathes. Tries to ignore the way her eyes sting, utterly useless. A wealth of emotions had surged in her, completely involuntary. She doesn’t have time to unpack all that, and certainly not within the given time limit, so she throws the whole suitcase out.

“We didn’t get to work on teamwork.” She complains, and if her breathing is still shaky, well. It’s never stopped her before.

“Let’s just keep an eye out for opportunities to work together.” Sasuke sighs.

“Let’s find a way to gang up on this asshole and take him out.” Naruto half-agrees, half-corrects, one foot on the sill and Sasuke rolls his eyes as he pushes the blonde out of the way and out of the building. Naruto yelps but lands, like a cat, on his feet.

Sakura hops out after them, light on her feet despite the fact that her legs are at least a foot shorter than they ought to be. It means every step, every leap, takes careful thought and it’s exhausting, honestly.

She’s not used to working against her instincts, honed to a razor’s edge and often the only thing keeping her alive, keeping her going.

“Let’s kick his ass.” Sakura agrees, thinking of bells and books and shoddy, shoddy teamwork.

Her boys laugh and snarl and she thinks, then, of shoulder blades to shoulder blades and darkness flinching against strength unwavering.

They scale the building as fast as they can, skilled fingers finding hand-holds on the brick and wood. Sakura slips, once, and a tan hand darts down to grab her wrist before she can save herself with chakra by accident.

Naruto has done this before and it shows, but he’s too eager, showing off—he overestimates himself and goes for a grip just out of reach. It’s Sasuke who snatches his sleeve, restores his balance, and Naruto shoots him a quick grin of thanks.

It’s been longer than two minutes by the time they lever themselves over the roof, probably, but Kakashi is still there. He doesn’t have his book out, eyeing them with sharp disdain, and it’s uncomfortable—for Sakura, at least—to see such disinterest in a familiar, important face.

He was wrong, though. The first time around, he was wrong, and Sakura has the perfect opportunity to beat it into his pretty face.

Her Kakashi had lived with the regret of failing Team Seven, until he hadn’t.

This time he wouldn’t get the chance.

“Well, let’s introduce ourselves, shall we?”

Chapter Text

Déjà vu permeates the air of the rooftop, painted golden by the falling sun. It’s far off the horizon yet. Was it gold last time, cast with firelight in her memories?

Kakashi across them is so young. Looking at him feels like wandering around in her too young skin. God help them, he’s barely older than she is.

“You first.” Naruto challenges, loud and scoffing. Sasuke looks similarly unimpressed, both waiting to be wowed by the man supposed to take them to new heights. He won’t, though.

She doesn’t know what Kakashi’s motivations were the first time, can’t imagine foisting a team off on a Jonin that truly doesn’t want one. It’s a recipe for disaster. It’s not happiness that she feels, seeing him. Trust, yes. Fondness, yes. He’s alive and he’s hers. But she’d near worshipped the man at one point and he hadn’t lived up to it, at all.

He’s supposed to make them better. Make them strong. He won’t, though. If anything, they became strong in spite of him.

Maybe it was too much to put on one broken man. Maybe he should have done better. Maybe he will, this time, if Sakura has to drag competence out of him with both hands.

Assessing pale green eyes watched his every move from between the boys, all expression gone from her face. Watching. Wary.

It was familiar in a way Kakashi couldn’t place.

Unsettling, to see such from a pastel little girl.

“Who, me?” He gives a halfassed spiel, watching for their reactions. The dark haired one looks to the girl, radiating disbelief. She huffs, amused if anything. The blonde—the blonde so like his father, yet his mother in every word and action, so loud—complains at the top of his lungs.

Finally, he decides to do it better.

“I’m Uzumaki Naruto, ‘ttebayo! I’m going to be the next hokage! I like ramen and, and, making traps! I’m good at it, ‘ttebayo!”

Sasuke scoffs.

“Uchiha Sasuke. I’m going to become strong enough to kill…” Indecision spikes in his features. ‘My brother?’ No. ‘Itachi’, far too painful. A name he’s likely never used, preferring instead epithets that died that night. “.. someone.” He finishes, lamely.

“I don’t like much of anything. My hobby is training.”

The pink haired girl picks it up, considering for a moment with her head cocked sideways. Something in her expression raises all the hairs on the back of Kakashi’s neck.

“I… am Haruno Sakura.” She says, measured, oddly intense. “What I like… is not relevant. I’ll get to know my team as we grow together, on missions. I have perfect chakra control. My team… Team Seven… is going to become the strongest three-man frontal assault squad in history.”

Cool determination in burning crystal eyes and such a surety to her words that Kakashi frowns, caught off guard.

“Yeah!” Naruto pumps his fist into the air. “Nothing can stop us, ‘ttebayo!”

Sasuke rolls his eyes at the antics, but a smile curls up one corner of his lips. Stupid, he’s clearly thinking, but already it’s almost fond.

Kakashi is pinned in place by the familiarity, the ghosts he can see. One hyperactive knucklehead, determined to be recognized. One brunette, quiet and not shy with his disdain. The last, too calm by far, the eyes of a wolf looking out of her face—eyes no genin should have. None of them nervous, none of them worried. And unlike his team, they’re not trying to kill each other.

Prior to this meeting, he would have pegged the avenger as the little ‘Kakashi’ of this team, the little girl ‘the peace-keeping medic unfortunately bad at keeping the peace’. Their dynamics are wrong and he’s not prepared to deal with them.

The girl, especially, is not what he expected. There's something achingly familiar about her, an air of child soldier that she shouldn't be wearing, yet. He thinks of how they discontinued the practice of early graduation after the Uchiha Massacre; thinks of what he'd have done, a child prodigy, in the wake of Itachi's disaster. Kept his head down, probably. Waited.

It's too soon to say if this is that kind of situation, though. His paranoia is getting to him. Strange eyes don't make a smart kid a genius.

He's seen a lot of kids in the Hokage's long line of attempts to saddle him with genin.

None have impressed him overmuch.

All of them had failed in the end.

Still, this bunch is... disquieting. For the first time, he'd come in with specific expectations, and they're being destroyed one by one. 

“When’s our first mission?” The Uchiha asks, straight to the point but surprisingly affable. There’s no cutting disdain, no superiority. Only calm efficiency.

“Will there be team training first?” Naruto demands, looking at either teammate before bearing down on Kakashi. The girl is silent, watching him.

He shoves the ghosts aside, longing for the memorial stone, and pulls up a dramatic air. They’re children, so he’ll humor them. Anything to get this over and done with.

“Well, first is the real test, of course. That academy nonsense? It’s the bare minimum. To see if you’re truly ready to act as a three man cell, each Jonin tests their teams personally. Fail… and you get sent right back to the academy.” He smiles through the threat, ready for explosions of denial and outrage.

Instead they look at each other, something unspoken sparking between them. Unexpectedly, it’s Naruto who grins back at him, not indignant at all. If anything, his expression is the picture of at ease. He leans back with his palms on the steps, as unworried as possible.

“Alright.” He says, somehow the mouthpiece. “What do we need to know?”

The brunette snorts, not even bothering to try to hide it.

Kakashi ignores their weirdness. Kids are weird. Sadly, this isn’t his first rodeo.

“First, the time and the place. Meet me tomorrow at the Nakano river, at zero seven hundred sharp.” He holds up another finger. “Second, make sure not to eat anything beforehand. Training this intense will have you throwing up anything in your stomach.”

Confusion caught the Uchiha’s brow; the blonde started to open his mouth but the girl shushed both of them. Curiouser and curiouser.

Kakashi smiled with his eye.

“Third, don’t forget to have fun!”

He vanishes in an obnoxious puff of smoke.

Sasuke scoffs.

“Oh we are going to have the most fun.” He mutters. “Please tell me it’s a fight. It must be, right? A combat assessment?”

“Probably.” Sakura cracks her knuckles, familiar. Grounding. Tries to not to get lost in the swirl of possibilities swimming around them.

“We’re not really going to not eat, are we?” Naruto asks, a mishmash of negatives. It takes a second to parse and by then he’s off again. “Cuz we’ve trained hard before and that’s just dumb, right? If anything we should wake up earlier to eat, so that the food’s all digested and stuff!”

“Correct.” Sakura observes dryly. Inspiration strikes. “In fact, going by today, there’s a chance he might be late again. We should bring lunch as well. If he bothered to warn us, he’s probably hoping we’ll be hungry. If he’s really late on top of that…”

“We’ll be off our game.” Sasuke allowed. “Weak, hungry, irritable…”

“I’ll bring lunch!” Naruto volunteered.

“No ramen.” The other two chorused.

“I will not bring lunch!”

“I’ve got it.” Sakura assured, and for a painful moment wondered if that’s a thing her parents would do. Maybe? She’d never asked them before. If nothing else she could buy them lunch, again.

“You shouldn’t eat ramen tonight, either.” Sasuke eyed their third teammate with something a hair warmer than disdain. Exasperation, maybe. “You’ll need all your strength tomorrow so you don’t drag us down.”

Naruto puffed up his chest. Then deflated a moment later.

“I don’t know how to make much else, and people don’t like to sell me fresh ingredients.” He admits, quiet and grimacing. He scuffs a rock with the toe of his shoe.

For a moment, rage burns across Sakura like a flash flood. She reigns it in, takes a few deep breaths in time to see surprise at home on Sasuke’s face.

“Is that because most of the village hates you?” He asks, before Sakura can think of something better to step in with.

Mutely, scowling, Naruto nods. He looks so young, clothed in a tattered jumpsuit. Sakura loves the village more than most but she’s not blind to its mistakes and this is one of the greatest. Actually, here are two of its greatest mistakes.

Across from her Sasuke and Naruto embody every wrong choice the Leaf has ever made.

“That’s so stupid.” Sakura says, unamused. “My parents run a shop. You can buy food there until you’re hokage.”

Naruto’s head snaps up, eyes wide, negative emotions wiped off his tanned face.

“Or you can henge into me,” Sasuke proposes, frowning. “The shopkeepers fall all over themselves trying to give me discounts. Just don’t talk and you can pull it off.”

Naruto’s blue eyes look close to watering and for a moment, despite her love for it, Sakura could burn the whole village down.

Sakura can’t remember if her parents got over their reflexive dislike of Naruto, but if it comes down to it, she’s not afraid to get her own place. As a genin, she’s legally an adult. Moreover, there are sparsely-furnished shinobi barracks available for a pittance she could take advantage of, small apartments for people who don’t want to maintain a house, or take long missions more often than not and can’t justify the leases.

“Eat dinner at my house.” She says, abruptly. “Both of you.”

Better to figure out now if she’ll need accommodations elsewhere. A small part of her-- some small voice that must have been in this body when she moved in, because almost all useless musings had been burned out of her during the war-- insisted that her parents should love her more than they hated anyone.

The two orphans exchange looks, something passing between them. But Sakura has been an orphan, too. She powers over both burgeoning excuses.

“Don’t make that face, it’s a good idea. We’ll never agree on somewhere to eat out and we need to come up with a few simple strategies for tomorrow. The more familiar we are with each other’s strengths, the better we can cover for each other’s weaknesses, the harder we can kick Kakashi’s ass.”

Against the speed of her strike and the logic behind it, the two can do little but grudgingly agree. They walk back through the academy building slowly. Odd. That day so long ago, this day repeated, was their last time there.

After attending daily for years, it hadn’t really occurred to her the first time around how she’d never see it again. The classroom, at least—she’d seen the mission desk often enough. The academy building and the non-classified-classified file rooms were married with the Hokage’s office, crawling with ANBU and security.

It made Naruto’s casual pilfering of the Hokage’s library that much more unreasonable. Then again, isn’t this all unreasonable? Such childish worries and thoughts, genin teams and missions and learning jutsu.

At some point the world had become so fragile. Sakura’s not sure when. The illusion of a village stretches around them as the boys follow her outside the building, follow her home. Hey, mom, dad, can I keep them?

She and Kaguya had destroyed more in moments, split seconds of clash enough to rend the earth below, to tear apart the landscape like it was built of paper instead of earth, toothpicks instead of great oaks.

Konoha would last seconds, maybe. Even now Sakura’s eyes were tracking all the movement of the people around her, smoothing down instinctive flinches. It was weird to walk instead of fly, weird to leave her chakra unmasked. It seemed downright stupid, suicidal even, to stop watching for a goddess in white to come down in her peripheral vision and try to kill her, the last iota of resistance in a broken world. The last drop of chakra unreclaimed.

This world is fragile, but real. Enough people pretend a group of buildings is invincible and it’s easy to believe it is. Even after the Kyuubi, people started to believe it again within years. Even in the future, people had forgotten Pein soon enough. The idea of the village endured, stronger than buildings.

Hell, she couldn’t even blame them.

Even years after the fall of every village, Konoha burned strong in her. The idea of it would never die as long as she breathed. And she’d fight for it.

Even now, she’d fight for it.

They walk through the streets in no particular hurry, exchanging no particular words. Each has a lot on their mind and by silent agreement, they’re waiting until they can once more bend their heads together, to discuss their plans.

Her parents, who she hasn’t seen or spoken to in so long. The house she’d woken up to this morning, dazed and still at war. Each step brings them closer.

Sakura loves her parents almost absently. Her father came from a line of shopkeepers and her mother was a genin for a handful of years before quietly retiring, unable to promote to chunin and unwilling to take the exams over and over.

There are little things about them—things that she’s forgotten since they died, constantly moving forward with no time to look back and remember-- that rush back as she takes the familiar route home. She’s still disassociating. Still too short. Moving on instinct, no time to plan. Going through motions that seem impossible and hilarious by turn.

She’s laughed so much this afternoon because everything just seemed so absurd, when it wasn’t heart wrenching. Was she really here? Was this really happening?

Glimpses of consequences darted like fireflies on the horizon, things she wanted and encouraged, but even with two dead boys walking alive behind her, she’s unable to really stop and process.

Part of her doesn’t want to. Stopping is dangerous. Moving forward is all that’s kept her alive. Another part recognizes that everything, all this-- it’ll catch up to her eventually. And then she’ll have to deal with everything.

She isn’t looking forward to it. With easy grace, she pushes her worries aside. Action only. One foot in front of the other.

Soon enough, her house comes into view and she angles her body accordingly. The boys follow her lead. From there it’s muscle memory, once again dreamlike. Dizzying in its oddness and familiarity, the ghost of doing this a thousand times.

She knocks twice on the door frame as she opens it, slipping off her shoes.

“I’m home!”

“Sakura!” Her father calls, pleased and jovial. That’s right—her mother often stayed to close up the shop, while her father went home early to cook dinner. She hated cooking. Sakura got that from her.

“I brought my team!” She announces, chin high. He pokes his head out of the kitchen to see her and them in equal measure, arms full, stirring something in a big bowl.

“How exciting!” She hasn’t managed to relax in her own skin, too war-hardened to melt under the childish notion that everything will be alright, her dad’s here, but the situation puts some of her at ease. It’s hard not to stare at a face that had long gone fuzzy in her memories.

She summons the confidence of her younger self, the unbending spine of her teen years, the unstoppable force she’d become at the end of the world.

“This is Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke.” She announces, walking into the kitchen and picking up a stirring spoon at the stove. Dinner is about half done and she stirs what needs stirring without thinking about it too hard. Then, she gathers plates from the cabinet—the step her father always forgets—and deposits them in the arms of an incredibly uncomfortable blonde.

“Naruto, you set the table. Sasuke, silverware’s in the drawer over there.” She points, and doesn’t give anyone time to be uncomfortable. If her father has any opinions about the village pariah, he says nothing. She can’t remember what she used to come home saying about either boy, but none of it was how she feels about them now.

“Dad, we’ve got a team test tomorrow,” She says as her mother walks in, when dinner is being served by their combined hands. “Do you think you could make bento lunches for us?”

“Sure thing, sweetheart. I think there’s enough rice left over from dinner. Any food allergies?” He addresses the boys themselves. Both respond in the negative, stunningly shy. Or at least quite quiet. They’d get used to it.

Something in her shoulders had relaxed at her father’s easy acceptance.

She had two whole parents—not enough for three people, not when six was the magic number, but she had two and that was more than enough to share.

“Oh, is this Sakura’s team?” Her mother exclaimed, entering the room, clearly having overheard. “I remember my team’s Jonin test.”

Instantly the complete attention of the boys is on her, despite trying to pretend they’re not interested. Despite trying to keep their heads down and avoid attention—Naruto in particular.

Sakura’s mom smiles knowingly. But first they have dinner. First they eat, and then her mom tells what she remembers—so different from the bell test, but still educational in its own way—and after dinner they gather around the low table in the living room and plan.

It's frustrating. They disagree a lot, especially at first. They throw out ideas that can't work, ideas that Sakura knows won't work, and make countermeasures within countermeasures for when their Jonin opponent inevitably outwits them at every turn. They bank on him underestimating them. They bank on him trying to trip them up, to test their resolve, to pit them against each other. They come up with everything they can think of with their meager assortment of skills and, in them, Sakura can see the drive for each to improve, because when they throw all their skills into a pile, the pile is lacking. They're going to be better, do better, impress the shit out of this Jonin and then milk him for every technique he's got.

For Sakura, who knows the moniker "Kakashi of a Thousand Jutsu", this declaration is particularly ironic and satisfying. 

At a certain point, the boys have to leave—supplies waiting at their own homes, necessary for the test awaiting them—but Sakura can see that changing. Can imagine her room spilling over with weapons and seal tags in a way she’d never imagined in the other timeline. Clothes spilling out of her closet, too many to fit properly, in different styles and themes.

Tonight they leave, tired from socializing and wracking their brains for strategy, but tomorrow they might not—soon, heads of black and yellow might fall to mattress with hers, limbs crooked and tangled, close like a real team. Close like Ino-Shika-Cho in a warcamp, collapsed in a pile before a fire; close like Hinata and Shino and Kiba cuddled around Akamaru; close like they’d never gotten a chance to be, torn apart too early.

Surprisingly she wants, despite the raw feeling spread across her skin. Despite the struggle she has to step into too-small pajamas that somehow fit anyway, despite the oddness of sleeping in a bed, of sleeping indoors. Despite the odd not-grief that soaks her heart when her mother and father give her hugs, press kisses to her forehead. Despite the oddness, the itchy wrongness of not being a woman grown and fighting tooth and nail for every inch of life, all kinds of messed up, and unable to stop for even a moment.

Somehow, despite everything, she looks forward to tomorrow. It’s a new feeling. It’s something she might have known, maybe, the last time she was this age. Something she lost without noticing.

It settles under her skin, something fluttery and strong, something thudding and not-wrong; it’s the wolf with bared teeth, the hope that burned her alive. It’s warm and it lulls her to sleep, mind still exhausted from an ongoing war that this little body has never known.

Sakura counts stars stretched out through the village, head touching down to the soft pillow, and finds easy sleep for the first time in much too long.

Chapter Text

With a whump of displaced air, her comforter hits the ceiling, and the minute throbbing of her undeveloped muscles reminds her of where—and when—she is.

She is frozen, heart beating a claxon in her chest, and still like a panicked rabbit in the soft dawned hues of her room.

Then her soul-sense slips to the forefront, always active but faded to a background hum while she slept. It’s smelling a perfume she had somehow grown nose-blind to, spread out over Konoha like the village is a meadow full of flowers.

It’s morning, dawning over a village full of homes and shops and voices.

It’s morning and Sasuke and Naruto are waiting for her.

She’s small, but it’s not like she’s a young child. Her proportions are familiar. Like an old, favored sweater she’d outgrown, she slips into it comfortably, with only mild surprise that it fits again. It’s this body she first learned how to mold chakra in—to really mold chakra, not the motions they’d gone through in the academy. It’s this body, with only a few months of changes, that took her through the chunin exams and to her knees before Tsunade. These hands that began to heal.

It had been a hectic year.

It had been a long time since she thought about it, even before the war broke out and took all her focus and attention, long before even that turned into grief and desperation, bled into instinct and reaction.

There had not been room for self-introspection amidst the tide of their battle—the battle.

(No room to grieve properly, to think. No self-actualization when she could barely find the time to breathe. No room for anything but living and killing.)

And there’s no room for it now.

Sakura breathes deep and even, leaves the little bed that’s soft like a cloud. She searches only a little before finding something suitable; a pair of fatigue pants in the standard style that her hands insist must be for a very young child, yet slide over her legs only a bit too snug. Likely something this body had deemed too “unstylish” some months ago and shoved to the back of her drawers, having only grown a little in the meantime.

The top is a little harder—for a moment she considers the qipao of her original first day— but she would rather not. It feels absurd to add shopping to her fast-growing to-do list but after a moment it settles into her undeniable need for more provisions in general.

Finally she finds something that has her hands pausing, as first confusion, then nostalgia, hit her hard. This house and everything in it had gone down during the invasion. There’re several things she’s seen that she has no memory of, and the fabric under her hands stumps her for a moment before she tracks down a distant, fuzzy memory.

Ino. Thinking of her drags out not the memory of living girl, soft and new and miraculous, but the hard grief and rage for the woman who died; even now it’s like a fist to the chest. She has to close her eyes for a moment.

At one point in their academy days Ino had indulged in her love for crop tops, wore something purple and flowery for a few months. Sakura had naturally felt the feverish need to compete and the results, a plan never actualized, rests in her hands.

Sakura grunts, considering. It actually looks like a chunin vest, though it’s a crop top. It zips up like a jacket, though it cuts off mid-rib cage, a light pink that suits the pastel of her room. She hadn’t had the courage to wear it as a child.

She thinks about slipping this pink slip over a mesh shirt, using bandages to bridge the difference.

Her midriff would be exposed. It would draw blades and give her an opening to exploit, though she probably shouldn’t take the injury at this age. It’s a good tactic for the backburner in general; most opponents write you off after a death blow, leaving a great window, and the fear and disbelief when you ignore a mortal wound is something she and Naruto can use to great success.

She sets the crop top aside. It gives her something to think on, muddling through the dusty considerations that hadn’t mattered for so long. Before she donned the one-size fatigues of war, she’d worn a red top, though it had been long enough to cover all her skin.

Sakura’s thoughts stuttered to a frustrated halt, tired of worrying about this.

She took a kunai and cut the sleeves off her red qipao, pulling it on over the black pants. Once—for most of her life, actually—she would have checked the mirror to take in the overall ‘affect’. She still should, now, to keep up appearances if nothing else.

Instead she flexes her shoulder to make sure she has full range of movement, attaches her weapons pouches under the skirt of the battle dress, and checks that the overhang of fabric doesn’t get in the way too badly.

Finally, she leaves her arms bare. Armor is more a hindrance than a help to her, at least until she can get some metal plated gloves. There came a point where the gloves damaged her hands more than they protected them, too much strength behind the hits—there was a reason Tsunade fought bare handed—but the fabric could at least hide the damage and the healing light as she knit flesh back together.

She wraps plenty of bandages everywhere, in case Kakashi feels like bleeding them and doesn’t give them time for more than basic first aid.

They can always use Naruto’s clones to buy time if he gives them any serious injuries.

Her father is once more in the kitchen when she rises. She has the vague thought that it’s earlier than he usually gets up, which she appreciates. He’s already got three bentos stacked and tied with ribbons and is halfway through breakfast. It’s a hearty spread. He may not be a ninja himself, but he was an amazing cook, and raised in a hidden village besides; understood, therefore, the calories it took for shinobi to move like they did.

Sakura helped him finish and ate, grateful for the excuse to forgo small talk as he cleaned up and prepared for work, laying out her mother’s clothes and setting out her breakfast. Unlike both Sakura and her father, Mebuki didn’t like tomagoyaki. He always remembered.

Now, Sakura would too.

She ate slowly, amazed on some level that this body didn’t protest the sheer amount. She had long grown used to the constant edge of hunger, staved off as best she could with natural energy and the rare fresh kill.

Her current stomach was small only from the ill-conceived diets that her mother had not-so-patiently allowed her. Even then she’d been stubborn. But not, yet, the indomitable she’d grow to be; that she was now.

When her mother sees, in pleasant surprise, her daughter putting rice and meat and egg into her body—protein and carbs—Sakura offers up short, confident answers regarding her medical textbooks and caloric math, growls over the way her Jonin instructor told them not to eat. Like hell!

Children were not fully formed. Mercurial in temperament, decisions and action. One of the final straws for Tsunade had been the village refusing to heed her research that children developmentally couldn’t function well as child soldiers, that the number of casualties and psychological issues would decrease dramatically if they raised the graduation age.

No one had listened. Konoha’s standard age requirement of twelve was already unheard of, Sakura slipping in just under that due to her birthday. The other villages had no such compunctions, sacrificing age restrictions for numbers with cruel utilitarianism.

Most attributed her as biased due to the death of her younger brother, ignoring verified research. Some had politely ignored it, not particularly concerned with the effects she had discovered. Even more wanted to use the research into childhood developments to figure out how to train children better, younger.

It was the last group that had driven her mentor from the village her grandfather had founded.

Sakura’s mother, well versed in the capricious nature of her daughter, and all children, approved of her fervor in devouring the food, saw the determination in Sakura’s expression and reconciled it easily with the daughter she knew. Angry proclamations weren’t out of the norm.

Sakura half-wished she had told the boys to come ‘round for breakfast. The touch of regret was the easiest thing to push aside, though. She left it lightly at the table as she stood, ready to get on with the day.

Before she left, a thought occurred. She turned.

“I’m going to need supplies.” She voiced. “For training and for missions. Our D-rank pay won’t start to come in for a while.”

“Sure.” Her father said, immediately. “Just come by the shop when you’re done for the day, we’ll give you some spending money.”

Her mother smiled in fond remembrance of her early Genin days, immediately murmuring and counting on her fingers the things she might have stored away.

A smile curved Sakura’s mouth, something soft and not-quite-surprised. How long since she had relied on anyone? How long, before that, on these two before her? Even before their deaths, she had nursed an independence streak five miles wide.

“You can even pay us back if you want,” Her dad smiled jovially, well-aware of the aforementioned tenacity. “With that hard-earned working girl money!”

“Dad!” She laughed, and it didn’t feel like an act to do so, warm and happy. It felt like a dream, a little like a movie; something nostalgic and rosy.

It felt nice, if unnerving. She blinked and the moment faded.

Nodding to them and herself, she turned to the door. Her steps took her quick and methodical to the bridge she knew better than her childhood bedroom, stretching proud and stable over the Nakano.

It’s a cold morning, despite the warm sunlight. Golden light shines through the dew on the leaves, trees following her the whole way and the wind, rustling.

There were other bridges over the same river, other training grounds—some she’d used, even—but nothing like this one. Training Ground Three, with the memorial stone in the distance past the stumps in the center.

Nothing like Sasuke waiting with his forearms crossed over the bridge, Naruto running from the opposite direction Sakura herself was approaching from, hailing them loudly as he came, one arm waving overhead.

This felt odd, this retracing of her steps. She was ready for it, eager to take the future by its throat, but the actual doing of it tripped emotions inside her that she didn’t want to look at too closely. Useless, distracting, dangerous.

She couldn’t afford to falter, refused to question herself. If they wouldn’t affect her choices they had no place. She certainly wouldn’t be overwhelmed by feelings of all things. The person she was, the force of nature she’d become—now trapped in this bottle of her younger self—refused to be tempered, although it could grudgingly accept ‘contained’. She didn’t let herself twitch, swallowed impatience.

It was unnatural, for a storm to be slowed down to this level. Time was the oddest thing of all, the notion that she had to wait to fight, the notion that abstract nouns like history and politics could infringe on the battlefield of instinct and violence, the kill or be killed pace they’d set and she’d followed until she ached and adapted, and ached and adapted, again, and again.

Now her steps were slow and measured, odd and anomalous, but equally as strange were her boys waiting on her, twelve years old and alive.

She would take the bad for the good, no matter how much she wanted to snarl for having no choice. It had been an early pill to swallow, the helplessness of being trapped in a situation regardless of her own strength.

No amount of killing would bring everyone, anyone, back, though she’d tried her damndest against Kaguya anyway—but.

But some miracle of chakra had brought everything back and she’d hold onto that with both hands and all her teeth.

There came a point where she would have leveled this whole planet for the sake of one mist nin. She’d certainly tried, after his death.

The last, the last.

But the last no longer. Her vision came into focus when her feet stopped, Sasuke right before her and Naruto on his other side. Sakura, stopped for one breath by pure futile disbelief, held up her lunch-bound bounty.

She cleared her throat.

“Did you eat breakfast?” She asked, and Sasuke’s eyes trailed immediately to Naruto, question sliding off him like rain.

“Hey!” The blonde protested, posturing immediately. “I said I would.”

And that was his nindo, wasn’t it?

The idea that it wasn’t, yet, stared out at her from a deep abyss. Sakura glared it down. He was himself and the core of a person did not change so easily, Naruto least of all.

He was a certainty in this world.

(Until he hadn’t been. Until it had been her.)

“Oh, yeah?” Sasuke actually looked like he believed him, she thought with amusement, but also like he couldn’t resist. “What’d you have then?”

“Rice! And uh, some eggs. I turned into you on the way home and got those. And tomatoes, for some reason. The shop lady made me take tomatoes.”

“Hn.” Sasuke looked away, red around the ears. Naruto leapt on it with his entire being.

“I knew it was because you liked them!” He crowed, immediately shuffling around to drag his heavy backpack over his shoulder in front of him. “Look!”

He proffered several red fruit and Sasuke scowled, moving forward immediately.

“Idiot, you can’t just stack them in your bag. They bruise.”

He held them almost protectively to his chest until he realized and sighed.

“Here.” Sakura moved to offer, holding the bentos by the tie and taking the fruit between her free arm and chest with little difficulty. She maneuvered over to the famous stumps and set all of it down, untying and unfolding the bento cloth like a picnic blanket underneath.

“Dinner fit for a king.” She declared. Next to her, in her memories, Naruto had been tied up on the central post. They’d fed him then, against orders no matter how they slid through that loophole. Even Sasuke had offered his lunch; with far less protest than Sakura had, actually.

It’s like walking into a sepia photograph; like memories worn and faded from overuse. For a crazy moment tears prickle at her eyes but Sakura stands fluidly.

No time to get sentimental.

Part of her is furious that they’re writing over these memories, these precious memories—the only things she has left of her team, together—but.

It’s better than the alternative.

And it’s certainly not going to be all she has of them this time.

She’ll rip Orochimaru’s canines right out of his arrogant head, first.

Sakura bared her teeth at the thought, heart beating fast. Next to her the boys, tagging along and arguing almost absently, stiffened.

Naruto first, far more aware of her, and Sasuke after him—ever-attuned to the blonde.

I can work with that, she thought, and the promise of movement and action calmed her down. They had a fight to prepare for, one her muscles were already eager for. She could almost taste the satisfaction of moving, sore and sweaty and thrilling in it.

Being so still for so long was unnatural, ignoring the odd-dreamy overtones of yesterday.

Yesterday, walking through childlike memories.

The day before, a cataclysm, a hurricane in human form.

Sakura folded her legs underneath her, sitting with rough grace. She wasn’t used to these limbs yet and that was going to be a problem.

But also a strength, in the long run—it would look like inexperience. It would look like she had all of the theoretical knowledge and none of the practical, none of the skill.

Even that observation is too abstract to stay, shaken away by her focus on the present.

Her outright need to stretch her legs.

Sasuke and Naruto sit next to her, the warm sun rising in the sky and seeping through her clothes, and it’s arguably everything she’s ever wanted.

She leans her head against Naruto's shoulder, who startles but takes it with good grace, and hooks one ankle around Sasuke’s calf.

Grounded to them physically she can almost doze off, except for how she’s wound up and already fully rested; really she closes her eyes, tucks her face more firmly into Naruto’s shoulder, and lets her chakra sense cast wide over the village.

It’s the most calming thing she’s found so far, a gut-punch sensation every time. She can’t breathe for how her heart lights up with wonder, acutely aware of every life, every warm light.

She doesn’t see Naruto’s startled moist eyes or Sasuke’s gruff surprise; the way Naruto’s hand trembles in the air next to her hair or how Sasuke looks at them both like something he isn’t sure he’s allowed to want to have.

Just the inklings, of course; bare twigs catching fire, but already he can see the sticks turning into logs, turning into branches.

If he lets them start to matter they might burn him alive.

Naruto touches Sakura's hair like he’s afraid and she sighs, pleased. Sasuke’s hand falls onto her leg.

It doesn’t feel real; for a moment she’s not the last one standing, a shinobi that will fight until her enemy dies.

She’s sixteen and this is what she imagines when she goes to bed, in that sacred place between wakefulness and dreaming; it’s the vividness she can’t usually imagine, the quiet comradery on their training grounds, years wicked away until it’s just an unspoken wish.

The three-of-them settled on the grass, waiting for Kakashi. It had happened a hundred times; it could never happen enough times.

This time was different, her body bridging the gap. They were in the sunlight instead of the tree's shadow. Sasuke eyed Naruto’s free hand on the grass and, if not thinking of holding it, thought of how it felt to hold it in the past.

They were all thinking of the chakra that had moved between them. Could they start that again now, as some sort of meditation?

Sasuke's thumb pressed idly into Sakura's calf, rubbing in mild circles. She didn’t allow herself to think, really, relaxing instead into this familiar daydream.

Usually it was static, her mind unable to think of what they’d do here; a frozen photograph suffused with longing. Now she pulled Sasuke’s hand into her own, tracing the calluses from hours and hours of abuse.

The sun continued to rise in the east, a slow mounting warmth that sunk into their bones. It cut neatly through the chill of the spring morning.

“I wonder how many D-Ranks we’ll need to afford a decent armory.” She wonders, almost surprised to hear it out loud.

As long as she doesn’t open her eyes this is real, however unlikely.

Naruto’s smell is so familiar, so close. This could be any of their weary collapses after training, though they were never this close. This easy.

He could be alive.

“You could always go to the quartermaster.” Sasuke suggested, voice a register too high. Ah, well, she couldn’t fault her memory for doing its best.

“Yeah?” She asked, as though she didn’t already know. Naruto made a questioning sound under her cheek.

“Ranking shinobi can apply for that ranks’ basic endowment package, though it doesn’t include anything special.”

“Wha—” Naruto clears his throat. “What do Genin get?”

Sasuke hums. Sakura can’t think of the numbers right off, but he answers anyway.

“Standards set of kunai, shuriken, senbon. Nothing crazy. A beginner weapon if you’re thinking about specializing; bokken, simple axe, bo staff, that kind of thing.”

“Med kit?” She wonders, curious about the standards.

“Hm.” Sasuke’s voice, too close. “Not sure.”

He rolled over in the grass, scant inches closer to them. Her foot fell off his leg and she frowned. His hand was still in hers.

In her mind it was a Sasuke as old as she was, fluffy white pirate shirt barely holding onto his shoulders.

His face was older, slimmer. He kept the same tone of voice. Under her weight Naruto was the golden prodigy he’d grown into, a hero resplendent. The idiot who glistened and smiled after Yamato-sensei's training, somehow without a shirt and half-soaking wet every time she came by.

That Naruto had never met this Sasuke; she wasn’t entirely sure she hasn’t made him up.

She opens her mouth to ask if he’s real; if he ever had a moment’s downtime with Orochimaru to lay in a sunlit meadow, or if he stayed underground amidst the screams and plotting all the time. His handsome face lifts towards her, his free hand tracing one knuckle of the hand capturing his. Her breath catches. There's no tanline from a forehead protector he hasn’t worn for years now.

Naruto’s strong jaw clenches above her head. He exhales, breath fanning out and chest rising and falling under her cheek. When his chin moves over, his lips are almost against her hair, his own whiskered cheek catching the pink strands. Her head fits perfectly tucked under his chin.

Why hadn’t this really happened? Her boys, together in the only way that mattered. Chatting idly on a warm sunny morning.

Nowhere and no one else to be.

“I might do that.” She says belatedly, like it’s not years too late. Like the Sasuke in front of her has any reason to talk about Genin supplies. Maybe her imagination failed her, since they never promoted past Genin together.

“It’ll be nice to have something to start out with, even if it isn’t much.” Naruto said above her, voice scratchy.

He rarely used shinobi tools anyway, a true ninjutsu specialist without a sword to his name. She didn’t pop the bubble by calling him out on it.

Obviously if she wanted realism from her imagination, she wouldn’t be here in the first place.

Naruto felt so real under her; warmer than unusual from the sunlight soaked into his clothes. Sasuke’s hand between hers was ridiculously unlikely, even without the way he slowly, absently traced her fingers.

She usually couldn’t imagine what he’d do. Surely just sneer at her? He’d never looked twice at her if Naruto was just as close.

But that had no business here.

It was golden, perfect, immortal.

“I can’t believe how late he is.” Sasuke mutters, sounding annoyed somehow. Bright laughter bubbles out of Sakura.

Has she resorted to talking about Kakahsi-sensei the way other people talk about the weather? Of course he was late. He was always late. And this timeless stretch of unrealistic team cuddling was impossible if Kakashi actually showed up.

She casts about for new material for the fantasy.

“Do you think he’ll teach us something new?” She asks, for lack of anything else. Look at her, talking to herself about what might have been.

Maybe in this bizarre dreamworld where they’re still together, Kakashi had moved onto something beyond chakra control exercises.

Then again, Naruto was nearly sixteen and still cutting leaves with wind chakra.

“He’s a Jonin, right?” Naruto rumbles, tenor palpable with her proximity. “He’s got to know lots of cool jutsu.”

Yes, of course. But teaching them?

“He’d have to get off his lazy ass first.” Sakura murmured, tilting her lips to the sun. She could see it pink and purple behind her eyelids.

Would Sasuke get a tan, she wondered? Would this innocent daydream merge into something naughty later, summer wine spilling from soft laughing lips or Naruto's golden hands feeding Sasuke the purple, purple grapes that grew in late spring?

“Well, that’s an interesting way to put it.” Kakashi's mild voice slices through her daydream.

She groans, expecting the decadent heat to dissipate. It doesn’t. Did she fall asleep in the sun?

But surely the feeling of Naruto supporting her weight would resolve itself into an unforgiving but convenient Fire Country tree.

It doesn’t.

Sakura bolts upright, eyes flying open. For a moment the harsh sunlight kicks her eyes and then black dots resolve into people.

Naruto, indeed behind her, but the young boy fresh out of the academy.

And Sasuke—Sasuke.

A real person before her, harsh years pulled away to reveal the younger version. The boys she was on a team with; a real team, not a what-if fantasy; little and unbalanced but real nonetheless.

Except this wasn’t that team.

It was different. Better.

Sasuke's hand fell from her startled grasp and Sakura looked up at the silver haired Jonin leaning over them, a sardonic smile lifting the corners of his mask.

She saw him bloody and crying, Obito's last words falling from numb lips before the man could finish his sentence; kneeling before yet another body in a long line of bodies.

She saw his corpse, for a split second, an agonizing second as something like peace settled onto his expression and Sakura herself was forced to move on, to turn and flee like a coward, Naruto’s sharp hand on her wrist pulling incessantly, Sai's “Sakura run!”

Her elbow jerked, hard and fast, like the memory of Naruto's grip has followed her here; it hasn’t really. She just succeeds in elbowing the present Naruto in the ribs.

He dramatically falls over, groaning.

“Sakura-chan, how could you!?”

It’s enough like his older self that she stares; it’s so twelve year old Naruto that she can’t look away.

“Well, if that’s how you feel, Sakura-chan.”

“No!” She bites out, hard and caustic. Absolutely not. Not the endearment that his weary older self delivered, a dirty hand touching her hair. A quiet moment between battles, back towards the beginning of the war; when it was mostly Zetsus and Kaguya hasn’t killed nearly everyone.

“Sakura-chan, you shouldn’t worry so much about me. I’m an old man now. You should be shopping with friends, maybe for a date or two. Breaking hearts all across the hidden villages.”

Not embroiled in a war so devastating it had already brought those villages and most of their warriors to their knees, throats slit before their corpses fell to the ground like raindrops.

Let’s think about where you would be if our life wasn’t one horror after another, he meant.

She had closed her hands around his and kissed his temple, smiling.

Don’t be stupid. Where would those two be without me?

It was only hours between the battles, at that point. He only ever called her that when he was thinking about another life, with prettier prospects; the Sakura of a world that wasn’t on fire.

“Mah, fair enough.” Kakashi's one visible eye assesses her, silver and sharp. He has no way of discerning the truth from her mannerisms.

It’s not anything he would believe.

“Well, as I was saying,” The man who has never brushed bloody hair from her face says, who has never carried Naruto on his back, “Now that I’m off my lazy ass, it’s time to get this test on the road!”

In his hand, two silver bells gleam.

She pays more attention to Sasuke and Naruto than the explanation Kakashi gives, even as they all stand up maneuver around the fence posts.

Naruto catches her eye and nods, more serious than conspiratorial.

Sasuke touches her wrist as they pass, careful and reassuring.

Her heart thumps. A kind of tagged grin tears at her face. She must look unhinged.

It’s almost a spoken thing between them, defiant and bold: together or not at all.

She tunes them out to focus on the last of Kakashi's speech. It’s familiar; she’s heard it only once before but it’s not the kind of thing you forget.

Her lip pulls away from her teeth. It’s not a nice expression.

Only two of you can pass.

Privately Sakura thinks if they play their cards right and bank on his obvious underestimation, they can hospitalize this man.

She glares at his silver hair and tries to focus on the scenarios they came up with yesterday rather than the myriad of other things she’s learned about her Kakashi over the years.

There's nothing there she can use without suspicion. Besides: they came up with their ideas together.

That’s worth more than a victory. Although again—if they take him down they don’t have to worry about impressing him.

The only thing is: how does she take him down?

She envisions the first few strikes, trying to think of where and how they would land.

Maybe she could break it down even further.

Tactics. Tactics. Planning.

The situation: you’re up against a stronger fighter and—

Sakura’s brain errs to static. Of course she’s up against a stronger fighter, that’s the only kind there is.

Mission—

No missions. Things aren’t that complicated.

There’s an enemy and she needs to take down the enemy—

But it’s Kakashi.

Sakura squints across the clearing at him, listening to the low wind rush through the grass.

Maybe it could be a Zetsu clone of Kakashi.

No.

She shook her head.

How do I avoid murdering him?

Already her breathing was slowing, muscles relaxing so as to better go where she needed. Chakra flexed and coiled at her ankles, wrists and collar bones.

Her eyes narrowed, ready for the first dozen collisions that would establish weakness and let her work out what lightning-quick strategy she could use to capitalize on it. There was no need to plan and cloud her head with words and what-ifs.

Breath tugged loud and easy into her lungs, an even exhale taking up all the sound in her ears. Her breath, her heartbeat, the wind.

Kakashi across from her.

He presses a hand to the clock, still smiling with one visible eye, and Sakura launches hard with chakra enhanced legs cracking the ground. She has a kunai in one hand, grip biting hard into her gloveless palm. She wastes no momentum, locking her arm to drive it into his subclavian artery.

Naturally, Kakashi jerks smoothly out of the way.

She touches down with unarmed hand to redirect speed, flinging herself at his unprotected back. She doesn’t really expect to hit anywhere, mostly eyeing the back of his neck—his flak vest protects his torso too well and she’s not angled right to try to hamstring him—

Kakashi’s arm shoots out, parrying her forearm, so she snarls and drops the knife, swiftly catching it with the free hand and using that movement to plunge it downward.

His other arm blocks just as smoothly, an outward block that diverts her swing without engaging the kunai. The chambering of the block comes from all the way across his body, a wide move that involves sweeping his arm out from his opposite shoulder, and Sakura hurls herself backwards without thought.

She hits the ground thirty feet away, panting.

This body isn’t used to this level of speed. Her chakra reserves are—

They’re fine, actually. She’s used to working with so much less.

She could laugh.

Kakashi’s arm is clad in tight blue mesh, not the loose white sleeve of an impenetrable fabric. His sweeping gestures don’t have the force of a maelstrom.

“Sakura what the fuck,” Naruto says in one breath, dropping from a tree next to her.

Sasuke engages Kakashi from the opposite side of the clearing, covering their retreat with a spray of shuriken. Kakashi wasn’t expecting it but turns easily, a seasoned jonin.

“Sorry,” Sakura grunts, literally breathless. “Don’t know what came over me.”

He grabs her arm and she flies to the canopies with him.

“Sasuke now!” Naruto calls, except his voice comes from all around, ten well placed clones stationed all around the training grounds and watching for this moment.

Sasuke disengages sharply, winded from a series of parried blows—thankfully, with none of the acrobatics of her assault. Theirs was a more conventional spar, mostly front facing, and Sasuke back flipped away before flipping backwards.

Three Naruto clones filled the gap, keeping a—surely amused—Kakashi distracted.

Sakura inhaled slowly.

He’s still testing them, not dispersing the clones automatically. The clones aren’t playing to win, either, trying to stay intact long enough to cover their retreat.

Their regrouping.

Sakura and Naruto quickly circle around, meeting Sasuke in the middle of the ring around the training grounds. The trees are only to the north, south and west, the east side of the clearing taken up by the bridge and the river. They’re thirty yards out from the memorial stone.

It’s so small.

Sakura shakes herself.

Two fresh clones dive into the spar once two have popped; three is a nice round number, playing cat-and-mouse with Kakashi.

Two to fake him out at all times and one to take advantage of the distraction, weaving in and out like a braid.

Right.

Sparring. Playing.

Sakura leans her forehead against a tree trunk, willing that to sink in. Thinks briefly about beating her head against it.

“What do we have that he doesn’t?” She murmured, trying to think back to yesterday’s strategy session. She was once a paper ninja but apparently the one-woman war had distilled her down to the bare essentials; attack, regroup, attack, forever.

Even now her instincts insisted she lick her wounds—none—and come at him from another angle, over and over again until she got it right, got lucky, or had to retreat.

But this body couldn’t survive a war of attrition—it could, you know it could, all this fresh chakra and these unweary bones, it’s like a reset button—

A war of attrition wouldn’t be indulged, then. Kakashi would stop things before the first day passed, let alone weeks or months.

She couldn’t hunt him like an animal.

They only had an hour.

Right, an hour. A Goal.

She reconsidered slamming her head into the tree until her mind cooperated. It hadn’t always been a flurry of blows, hoping something worked; new technique upon new technique, hoping to inundate her enemy with strikes until something slipped past her guard.

Until something stuck.

No, at the beginning, they’d—

They’d.

Naruto’s hand finds her shoulder.

“Sakura, are you alright?”

With her boys beside her they’d worked out plan after plan, well beyond the initial engagement. It had required teamwork, timing, trust.

Sakura forced her shoulders to relax.

She would not snap and try to kill Kakashi, no matter how much this body’s limited reach protected him. It was worrisome that she could, theoretically, pull off any of the techniques she used in her last battle, (at least once, though she’d pay for it)—this body was different, these muscles were so underdeveloped, yet her chakra.

Her chakra.

Full to the brim, except for the chunk she’d bitten out in the first assault.

More than she had to work with then, percentagewise if not proportionally. She could make a little last. One hundred percent of her chakra might be a drop in the bucket compared to what she’d once had at even two percent, but—

She wasn’t exhausted down to her bones. She wasn’t a picked clean like carrion ribs, scrubbed raw and repetitive.

“I’m fine.” She huffed. One day, maybe. “What do we have that he doesn’t?”

It was their topic of choice yesterday. Play to their strengths.

Play against his weaknesses.

Playing. Sparring. Sakura unclenched her fists, slow and purposefully, as she breathed. Here was another chance, something she couldn’t waste.

She’d handle this with kid gloves. She’d fucking cherish it.

This wasn’t Kaguya, the only one left to fight.

She knew that. She knew that.

Kakashi could only ever be one of her precious people.

(And if she’d really been aiming to kill him, she would have, shorter reach or no. Tiny chakra or no. It would have destroyed her tenketsu, emptied her out and put her down to do it, but she could have put everything into one move and finished them both. She’s fine. She’s got this.

Instincts are hard to overcome but she’s got perfect control. Always has.

She breathes.)

This was the mist nin in her arms, breath ragged; this was finally having the time to stop, to stop, and save him.

Sakura was hurtling forward, forward momentum, a constant, unceasing series of blows.

Next to her Sasuke opened his mouth and started ticking off on his fingers, “Naruto’s clones, my grand fireball, Naruto’s seals and traps, my ninja wire. Your literal fearlessness, apparently.”

Sakura smiled at him, definitely not baring her teeth.

He rolled his eyes.

“We’re horribly outclassed in all the shinobi arts. Without my bloodline limit I’m no better with genjutsu than you two, and none of us have learned to break them; we know barely more than the academy three in terms of ninjutsu, against a man who is one of the top jonin in the village; and his taijutsu is so far above ours that he’s actively reading porn. So. Suggestions?”

Sakura leaned into the warmth of their bodies, not touching but close. She steadied herself on their voices.

She could slow down for her boys. If nothing else, she would slow down and focus on this right-here-right-now with them, Naruto's growing confidence and Sasuke’s continuing presence.

“I have fine enough chakra control to notice any genjutsu.” Sakura starts, slowly working through this. “You’re right, Sasuke, without the sharingan you’re at a disadvantage. If you had it, you could counter any jutsu he uses. Ninjutsu-wise you’re going to be unstoppable, and the sharingan also gives you a stupid strong edge in taijutsu. But Naruto has the chakra to use those jutsu, and with the clones he’s our best physical fighter; it’s just a numbers game.”

“He just burned through clone number fifteen,” Naruto warned, scratching his cheek.

She bit off a question about clone memory transfer; now wasn’t the time to knock him over the head with that tidbit, no matter how quick on his feet he was adapting new techniques midfight.

Sasuke huffed.

“I think I’ve got the best chance for ninjutsu right now, since you both only know the academy three plus clones.”

“I can’t use the other two jutsu in a fight, probably.” Naruto interrupted, confirming.

And Sakura just hadn’t bothered for longer than she cared to admit. Not with seals, anyway. Body replacement was such a habitual thing she wasn’t sure she could quash the instinct, if it came up.

And when the hell did anyone need a henge?

She rolled the facts around in her mouth slowly.

“So…” A tentative plan sketched out in her mind’s eye; she tried not to resist, tried to sink into the strategy instead of rejecting it for action-instinct-reaction.

“I’ll take taijutsu.” Naruto nodded, sticking his hand out.

Sasuke rolled his eyes but gamely covered the fist with his open palm.

“Ninjutsu.” He confirmed.

Sakura breathed out all her tension, focusing hard on this now, on this plan.

She had a job to do as part of this team seven, the one right in front of her.

“Genjutsu.” She dipped her chin smartly, covering Sasuke’s hand with her own.

His skin was warm, dry, real.

Let Kakashi try to ensnare her! She’d faced down a rinnegan-sharingan-byakugon combo and laughed, untouched by the layers and layers of perfect genjutsu.

Team seven wasn’t all it could be, yet—Sakura, the taijutsu champion, med-nin, destroyer of genjutsu; Naruto, with more ninjutsu, senjutsu, fuinjutsu and elemental affinities than he knew what to do with, infinite chakra reserves, and to add insult to injury a bijuu; Sasuke, eyes swirling, with sword and steel and chakra to burn—they would be all those things and more—

They weren’t that, yet, but here stood the embers of potential and Sakura was more than ready to dump oil on the whole damn mix.

Sakura looked across from her at Sasuke, perched on a great tree branch; at Naruto, ready and willing to follow her lead; inward, at herself, at the way her meagre chakra stores had already recovered from her opening gambit.

They weren’t there yet, but team seven already had everything they needed to get there, one day; with or without Hatake Kakashi’s help.

“Here’s what we do.” She started, and her boys leaned forward to listen.

Their sensei was going to get schooled.

Chapter Text

There was a time when Sakura first stood side-by side with Naruto and Sasuke, separated as they had been by years and continents, as an equal. They had stood alone, eyes on the enemy, fighting for themselves and for the world.

But Sakura—Sakura had not been alone on the battlefield, even before they stood back to back.

The wind had ruffled her hair, a seal had formed on her forehead for the first time, and while Sasuke and Naruto fought with their hard-won skill, Sakura had fought with Tsunade beside her.

It wasn’t lonely, stepping into the position she’d earned. It was pivotal, yes, but Sakura could feel her by her side, strength like a raging storm, felt when everything weak inside her died.

Even then she had fought for more than just herself, not truly alone. She carried the Hokage’s presence into battle, an ambassador and a spring of hope, calling a legion of Shikkotsu slugs to heal and preserve.

There was a battlefield, friends and comrades temporarily defeated, but Sakura had wiped her sweaty hair out of her forehead and rose to the challenge, no hesitation in her.

She formed years of work into a seal, took up the strength of the strongest woman in the world, and she only barely noticed Sasuke and Naruto weaving into position at her sides.

There was something there—something poignant, something bitter at the back of her throat. These were not odds they’d ever faced—their first time fighting together since the chunin exams—and yet they did it without prompting, without discussion, filling a need that had appeared on behalf of their entire world.

We stand here or everything falls.

Now, the first time she’s had to properly think since then, Sakura realized that that was their first time fighting together. They’d never really stood together. She thought backwards in the chronology of it: a chidori and a rasengan flying towards another on a rooftop, Sakura casting doubt aside to run forwards, furious and frustrated and terrified.

The chunin exams: part three, an individual tournament; part two, a test as a team where they were scattered almost immediately; the first part, the written exam.

Before that: Wave, where she’d stood guard over the bridgeman and Sasuke’s near death had sent Naruto over the edge.

Before even that, those two mist chunin, her first live combat where she’d frozen in fear, unable to move or speak under her first taste of killing intent.

And then, lastly and firstly, a mirror of her current situation: the three of them versus Kakashi. Oh, they’d come together to break his rules, tied to three stumps, but they hadn’t fought together.

They’d fought separately.

Even in Wave, when Sasuke and Naruto had tried fighting together, she wasn’t with them.

Even against the Zetsu clones it had been the three of them fighting in the same direction, not back to back. Against Kaguya alone had they finally pooled resources to act as a team, but it was—

It was too little, too late.

Naruto and Sasuke had their soulmate magic to rely on, some skin-deep connection allowing them to read each other’s movements, and a lifetime of looking allowing her to respond a half-second behind them, but—

But.

Sakura thinks of the seamless teamwork of Ino-Shika-Cho. She thinks:

Konoha is famous for their teamwork.

She thinks, as Naruto and Sasuke look to her for guidance, that she would give a limb to learn what it’s like to move with them, purposefully, for each of them to distract with a blow so the other can slip past, the way Naruto fights with his clones, a perfect display of practiced teamwork that utilizes all of their skills.

She could always grow the limb back.

It aches behind her teeth, a perfect need. Beyond them Kakashi is dispatching the last of Naruto’s clones.

If he preaches teamwork to them this time but teaches them nothing about it, not one formation or drill or fighting style that lets them work together, Sakura will—

She doesn’t know. It won’t be pretty.

Here is how you work with another shinobi, she thinks, almost detached. First you place your life into their hands.

Easy. So, so easy, to trust these boys with all of her.

“If we see an opportunity to fight together,” She starts, half bitten-out, but not hesitant.

“We take it.” The boys speak at the same time.

Then, with no further words to be spoken, they leap in different directions.

One-two-three-break!

Sakura snorts. Break Kakashi’s bones, maybe.

She lands in the clearing, touches one hand to the dirt. It’s good, grounding.

Kakashi turns to her as he kicks his foot through Naruto’s head, moving less like something of bone and more like a ribbon of force. Naruto poofs into smoke.

Last time he’d found her alone in the woods, nervous but not afraid. Not even then, as a little girl. The trees were big and familiar and she’d trusted her own safety in her home village.

“Lesson one,” Kakashi smiles, finding her alone once more. “Genjutsu.”

Sakura curls her lip back.

She reels her chakra sense in, though its slightly disconcerting at first. The lights wink out one by one until there is only this brief stretch of Konoha: Naruto’s chakra blankets the area he’s in, a room-sized permeation that masks his exact location with warm sunlight in the moist air; Sasuke, like a very angry storm cloud hovering over the trees; and Kakashi, the White Wolf of Konoha, whose chakra is dense like hardlight, like the never-ending ‘flash’ part of lightning. No wonder his assassination technique screams like a banshee; the man is a moving flash tag explosion, a willow-the-wisp to anyone with the barest sensor abilities.

He’s like what a black hole would look like, if it was made of entirely light instead of sucking it in. A person-sized continuous, localized flare. The most interesting thing, of course, is that chakra sense is not visual. And yet still he is light.

She introduced herself as someone with perfect chakra control.

When Kakashi flashes his hands through the hell-viewing technique, the touch of his chakra to hers isn’t particularly careful. It’s obvious, the moment it tries to weave in with hers, like streams of two different colors meeting.

She feels the thread slip through and plucks it out, easy as anything. More importantly, she’d seen the signs he used.

Snake. Rat.

“Demonic Illusion: Hell Viewing Technique!” Kakashi’s eye widens, and he’s likely already flaring his chakra, so she holds the full technique back for five seconds and when Kakashi thinks it hasn’t worked, breaks apart into pink flower petals.

This is a low ranked genjutsu, incredibly obvious, but it relies on the victim for the illusion. As the caster, Sakura sees it with him, the moment where, in his surprise, the genjutsu settles over Kakashi.

Your worst fear doesn’t have to be realistic. It doesn’t have to make sense.

The jutsu isn’t subtle. It pokes at the part of your brain that keeps your nightmares and yanks them out into the world.

There’s a shimmer and then a red, furry appendage bursts into the world. It should be reassuring; Kurama is an ally. It’s not. There’s a snarl and the kind of killing intent that can bring an entire village to its knees.

The air smells like smoke and fire.

Impaled on the tail, in a perfectly straight line like dango on a skewer, are everyone Kakashi loves.

In that first second, Sakura counts six in total. A man that must be his father, Sakumo; then, back to chest with him, the fourth hokage; a red-haired woman Sakura doesn’t know; Obito Uchiha; another woman—barely older than Sakura—with her arms wrapped carefully around Naruto’s waist.

Naruto is about six years old, smiling, and the end of Kurama’s tail is sticking out of a ragged, bloody hole in his chest.

Sakura stumbles, surprised by the savagery, and Kakashi flinches so hard he loses his footing.

The boys don’t know this, though; Naruto leaps out of the trees at the moment of distraction, shouting at the top of his lungs.

Sakura drops the illusion, breaking it into a thousand pieces.

“Second lesson!” The dead boy shouts, coming in with a flying kick. “Taijutsu!”

Kakashi has trained for years to be the perfect killer; Sakura coils her muscles, prepared for a chakra-powered leap in if his reflexes prove more deadly than either of them would like. She needn’t have worried.

Kakashi brings both forearms to block, because his reflexes are two decades in the making, but his trauma is stronger; Naruto bounces hard off the cross block, kicking into a handstand, and comes back in for a flurry of blows.

Their sensei is still shell-shocked; he struggles to wipe away the scene, struggles even more to react to the violence like it’s a spar. Usually being caught off-guard with an illusion means you must respond with extreme prejudice; assassins use genjutsu.

Assassins use taijutsu, too.

Naruto’s style could never be mistaken for an assassin’s, though. Too loud, too boisterous, and he doesn’t bother to be quiet as he taunts Kakashi.

It visibly grounds the man to the here and now and Sakura can’t even be mad at giving up the tactical advantage; beyond this spar, Kakashi’s mental state is, in fact, something they need intact.

He’s still got the book in one hand, but he’s long stopped reading it.

Slowly—for a jonin—he latches onto the sound of Naruto’s shouts and distractions, goes from blocks and dodges to redirects and a punch or two of his own.

Naruto makes a clone with barely half the gesture—Sakura is stunned to realize, at this point, he’s only known the jutsu for a single day.

The clones run brute force for Kakashi’s arm and latch on, less fighting-shinobi and more a civilian child tackling, an annoying little brother, and the disparity tosses an already off-kilter man further off guard.

It’s enough for the real Naruto to rush forward while the clones hang from Kakashi’s biceps. Naruto punches him in the gut with the world’s most obvious chambering behind the hit.

Kakashi’s not a jonin, Sakura thinks, as he doubles over. The man is twenty years of trauma in a trench coat.

He’s not wearing a trench coat, though. He’s wearing the standard pouches and pockets of a Konoha jonin and from them he whips out a kunai with one hand, stores his book with the other, and stabs both of the clones.

He bonks Naruto over the head with the butt of the kunai, kicks him away while he’s still screaming and rubbing his head, drops an explosive tag and leaps up over the sudden cloud of dirt from the explosion.

Sasuke meets him in the air with a kick to the back.

“Your teammate already called Taijutsu!” The man says, voice still shaky if you know him well enough. Sakura does.

If he expects Sasuke to respond, he’s disappointed, because even as he turns to eye the last Uchiha—registering, too late, the way his cheeks had expanded comically—a massive gout of fire hits at point blank range.

It’s not as strong or concentrated as it would be if he’d called out the name—focus affects the yin aspect of the jutsu, the mental aspect whereas the yang is all in the handsigns—but Kakashi shouts “Shit!” and looses his suddenly smoking vest.

Also, if she remembers correctly, half his weapons.

Naruto had dodged her way away from the detonation.

He looks over at her, sharply, so she nods.

They leap as one to intercept, coming in with more taijutsu even as Sasuke does several backflips in mid-air to shed the momentum from the kickback of spitting fire.

Sakura has forgotten how to punch without a lattice of chakra reinforcing her muscles; she has to consciously reduce how much chakra backs up each hit, slow and calculating. It’s a far cry from the half-mad, feral strikes of earlier.

Naruto—sometimes several Narutos—weave in and out of her, letting her be the main assault, and it’s like taking a soldier pill; she feels giddy, powerful, almost enough to overwhelm the cocktail of things she brought back with her, emotions she can taste on the back of her tongue but not process, the way she sometimes leaps all the way back at the slight movement of Kakashi’s fist.

It disrupts their pattern, throws off Naruto who can’t react in time to take advantage of the clear shot, but Sasuke has been waiting for his opportunity and unleashes a fury of shuriken. It’s fast but too many; instead of trying to dodge, Kakashi replaces himself with a log that takes several of the stars.

Sakura turns without even thinking about it, Naruto following her attention with uncanny precision, and in seeing both his teammates spin around Sasuke yanks his hands back, hidden ninja wire sending the remaining shuriken flying in the new direction.

Kakashi leaps in one direction out of the way, then dives underground to dodge the second pull, but two redirects is all the skill Sasuke has at this age. They lose momentum and fall; Sasuke cuts the wire and his losses, regrouping with them.

They stand back to back, eyeing the area all around with suspicion, but Sakura already knows how this will go. She gestures as subtly as she can, then barks “Now!”

They scatter—up and away—as Kakashi’s wrists breach the ground, ready to yank one of them down by the ankles. It’s an assassination technique, because of course a former ANBU captain favors them. Bury your target to the neck, then behead them.

One head for the bounty or the client, no messy cleanup. Just a stain on the ground and the body already buried.

Sakura realizes, rather belatedly, that she’s forgotten about the damn bells entirely. The boys had made a grab or two, but mostly seemed to be following her lead. If they beat Kakashi unconscious they could take the bells.

They land across from him, a moment’s stalemate.

The wind carries his voice to her, a begrudgingly approving mutter.

“Vicious little monsters.”

She barks out a laugh, but Naruto stiffens. Sasuke huffs, rearming himself. He has more access to weapons than either of them at this point.

“Well.” Kakashi straightens, looking around as if in surprise. “Dear me. It seems your time is almost—”

A kunai impales the clock, knocking it clean off the stump. It hits the ground with barely a sound.

“Prove it.” Sasuke challenges, cold black eyes a dare.

Except they’re not really cold. Warm, amused, thrilled by the challenge, he keeps his expression neutral but his eyes give him away.

Naruto laughs out loud.

“That invalidates—” Kakashi dawns the ‘terrifying older jonin’ moue again, chakra rising in threat around him, but his threat of consequences can’t even be finished.

“Get him!” Naruto shouts, and Sakura feels herself pulled along by an invisible thread; it’s nothing physical, nothing chakra-related, merely the sheer charisma of her teammate, lifting her spirits into the kind of nonsense that always happens around him.

Even Sasuke gets caught up in it, running forward.

She yells, victorious, and throws a smoke bomb, lighting it with the barest flicker of chakra.

She drops it even as she does a sweep kick at his legs, like she really is eleven-going-on-twelve, and as he leaps above her Sasuke pumps chakra into his legs to hit the air again, flashing through hand seals.

Kakashi abandons her for the elemental threat, turning his back. That’s a mistake. She goes in through the smoke with one of her own kunai, making for a kidney just to keep things simple, and Kakashi looks over his shoulder with a scowl.

He dodges out of the way, all legs, and starts weaving handsigns even as he kicks Naruto—charging—at her. She braces for his weight but lets the impact carry her back a few feet, out of the smoke. Water surges out of the river, meets Sasuke's Hosenka with a surge of steam even as the technique divides into it’s six balls of fire.

Shuriken come out of the fire and steam, because of course they do, and Kakashi dodges easily enough. That’s fine, it was a distraction.

Sakura hauls back and launches Naruto into the air, spinning twice to get up some force, and rolls the instant his hands leave hers. It’s just in time; Kakashi has come at her with kunai in hand.

She comes up on her feet, a kunai of her own. She parries his strikes, a brilliant clash of steel, then dives out of the way; she doesn’t have to look to know what’s happening, to catch Kakashi’s brief surprise. His free eye widens just slightly, something that satisfies the young girl in her immensely, as he turns to see Naruto flying full speed at him.

In the future, that would be an infinitely more dangerous Naruto, rasengan spinning in his hand.

This Naruto is bearing a familiar cross, mouth open in a loud yell, and right before he crashes into Kakashi a dozen clones spring into existence, all flying at however-many-miles-per-hour.

They dogpile Kakashi and the man can’t escape, not even to replace himself; one hand stretches out of the pile and Sakura considers, briefly, stepping on it; breaking the delicate little bones.

Truly she doesn’t think it was a fair fight. Kakashi could easily have dodged the flying blonde; the thing was, though, that they confused and surprised him at every turn.

At this point, he just accepted defeat. Thirteen Narutos screamed and elbowed and crowded on him and Kakashi, pushed beyond endurance, just slumps under it.

Like: yeah, okay.

Sasuke lands next to her, slightly out of breath.

The real Naruto disentangles himself from his fellows and jogs over, a megawatt grin on his face.

“I think that went well!” He pants, a light dusting of sweat falling into his collar, touching his temple. Sasuke snorts, but Sakura brushes the hair back from his hitai-ite, the swirl of the leaf visible again. She still expects to see shinobi.

She wipes her hand on her pants.

“Did we get the bells?” She asks, tongue heavy in her mouth. So odd an objective. So odd that it matters.

Naruto shrugs, muscles rolling easily under his godawful jumpsuit.

“Don’t know. Figure one of the clones will get them or something. Y’all wanna eat lunch?”

Sasuke makes a sound of interest, always few of words, and Sakura looks back to the wiggling pile of gloating that makes up their sensei and his defeat.

Kakashi’s fingers twitch.

“I could eat,” She says, glibly, turning back to her team.

“Awww, the food’ll be cold!” Naruto realizes, drawing both hands behind his neck so his elbows jut out. He squints at the noon sun and, with the whiskers, a fox looks back.

It’s such a familiar expression that she smiles.

“Maybe we can start a fire.” It slips into her voice. They both turn to Sasuke.

“Don’t be an idiot,” He says to Naruto. “We don’t have any thing to cook with.”

“Stick?” Naruto scratches the sweaty hair at his nape.

“For rice?” Sasuke’s incredulous voice rises.

“Maybe you could breathe fire right onto the food!”

“The boxes will burn.”

It was like being hamstrung, the way Sasuke’s voice rose into ‘I’ll strangle you’ levels with each cheerful suggestion, the way Naruto kept going, sensing no real enmity. They’d had this so briefly, so shortly before it turned into real jealousy and antagonism, that she’d damn near forgotten.

“Maybe each bite and we can hold it out, with like, the chopsticks!”

“Nobody’s got the chakra for that!” Sasuke frowns with his whole face, more expressive than she can ever remember. “Besides, chakra fire burns too hot. It’d incinerate the food, too.”

“Maybe you can work on reducing the heat and scope.” She offers, quieter than she means to. There’s something in her throat, as they make to sit down next to the stumps and the food in front of them. “Think of it like a chakra control exercise.”

“I guess.” Sasuke kicks a stump and folds into a lotus position.

Naruto just throws himself down, with no regard for comfort, and Sakura almost—almost—joins them.

Her eyes stick on the boxes, three in total, stacked innocently in front of a few tomatoes.

Why does her chest hurt? Besides the obvious.

“Hey!” Say a multitude of overlapping voices, and the sound of a cork escaping a bottle; a plume of smoke follows. Sakura turns, slowly, to see Kakashi’s body relax as most of the weight vanishes. His shoulders slump against the ground.

“Lazy asshole,” Naruto scoffs, somewhere far away. Sakura can barely hear him.

It’s not Kakashi’s body. It’s not. She’d only ever caught a glimpse of his body. He’s alive and well. Dramatic, traumatized; but that was just his personality. A little bit of math slips into place, making her blink; and then a little more math.

“I only brought three bentos.” Her mouth says, lips shaping the words, but most of her brain is caught on something else. She knew when he was born, had seen his medical file herself.

Kakashi is twenty-six.

Twenty-six.

It shouldn’t matter, and it doesn’t—not really. He’s still their sensei, no matter how old he is or how much teamwork he didn’t teach them. He’s important to her. He will be important to all of them, again. He’s hers. Theirs.

But he’s not just their sensei, of course. He’s not just family.

Hatake Kakashi is a part of Team Seven.

Like hell she’d a teammate behind.

(Not when she just got them together again in the first place).

All of the animosity she’s been mustering towards him, all the resentment for the way things went the first time around, stirred up by her seeing them from a new and recent light—it just.

Slips away. Her shoulders lose tension.

On the ground next to her frozen position, Naruto sighs. It’s a loud, put-upon sigh.

“Fine.” He grouses, standing up.

Sasuke looks at both of them.

“Really?” A bit of whine clings to his voice.

Sakura is lost, mostly coming to grips with reality, and it takes her a second. It takes her right up until Naruto’s hands reach for the bentos, standing up with all of them, and Sasuke reaches over on his knees to gather up the tomatoes.

“We should have enough,” Sasuke says, a half-tone away from a grumble. It sounds like he’s been splitting up the portions mentally and come to a favorable conclusion.

Oh.

“Good idea.” She says, forcing the words past the world’s largest lump in her throat.

She forces her legs to move, following the boys. They wait for her to catch up, pausing a few steps in when they realize she hadn’t started walking immediately.

Both turn to her with a question in their eyes and her fest step pauses, foot hesitating before touching the ground. She takes a deep breath.

Tears prickle at the corners of her eyes.

Of course.

Of course.

There’s one stalwart clone sitting on Kakashi’s back, looking up at them as they approach. He hefts two bells in proud offering.

“Come on, beat it.” Naruto says with fake reluctance, taking them. The clone exhales dramatically before poofing.

They sit down next to Kakashi, framing his head like a halo. It takes a minute to get situated, but Kakashi doesn’t rise. Maybe he’s going through a period of mourning at the idea of a genin team.

“Oy, oy, come on.” Naruto holds out an arm.

Kakashi raises his eye slowly.

He sees rice and meat suspended delicately between two chopsticks, hovering an inch in front of his face. Sasuke moves forward, blocking Sakura’s view of Kakashi’s expression.

It’s probably for the best.

She opens her mouth, probably to quote her own Kakashi’s words back at him, but Sasuke beats her to it.

“Since you can’t get up, I guess we’ll have to feed you.” He says it as if it’s some unavoidable task, a burdensome responsibility. As if there’s no other choice.

Giving Kakashi a chance to save his pride, she realizes, while also inflating Sasuke’s own ego.

“Ah.” Kakashi says, something complicated in his voice. “Yes, I see. Since I have been beaten too badly to move. By my new genin team.”

Naruto’s expression is truly pained, looking like he wants to leap for joy at the expression, but his dexterity isn’t the best and he’s focused everything on not dropping the food.

“That’s right!” He yells, at maximum volume as though to make up for the lack of his fist thrusting into the air.

“I guess we’ll have to feed you.” Sakura says, her own voice unrecognizable to her ears. She smiles and it feels watery.

So ridiculous. So crazy, stupid, impossible.

Sasuke shifts, realizing he’s blocking her view of this occasion. Kakashi meets her eyes for a long moment.

Then he does a half shrug.

“Guess so. We’re a team after all.”

He opens his mouth.

Naruto feeds him.

Deep in Sakura’s chest, something settles into place. Team Seven, together. They take turns feeding Kakashi-sensei their lunch until all the food disappears, and then Sasuke cuts the tomatoes evenly into juicy cubes for dessert.

Naruto complains that it’s not a proper dessert, Kakashi brightly talks about how going without vegetables can stunt your growth, and somewhere through the explanation—maybe because it’s about taking proper care of yourself, which would make Kakashi the world’s greatest hypocrite—laughter stirs in Sakura’s gut.

It expands and rises until it slips out of her mouth and once she starts, she can’t stop, great belly-laughs that cackle out of her like a witch.

It catches, first with a touch of incredulity, and then it spreads like wildfire.

Anybody walking by would surely think they were insane, three genin and a kage-candidate laughing on the ground like they’ve been exposed to certain nerve gasses, but—

Well.

Team Sevens of Konoha have always been a little unhinged, a little crazy, and a lot fucking ridiculous.

It’s practically tradition at this point.

Chapter Text

The night after he passed Team 7, Kakashi had the worst panic attack of his life.

It was Tenzo who caught him, hands under his leaden torso.

"Senpai!" Tenzo hiss-yelled, flying in from the window like a dark shadow. He's so proud. He also can’t breathe.

"Tenzo-kun, what am I going to do?" He managed. His mouth tasted like blood. "I can't teach!"

Tenzo huffed under him, stiff now that the danger had passed. Kakashi doesn’t know how long; minutes had passed, surely, the fading sunlight disappeared into pitch shadows. He doesn’t know how long he was on his own, unable to draw breath. Kakashi sucked air into his lungs. He's deposited on the futon in his living room.

"Don't be ridiculous, Senpai." The boy snorted, though his voice was quiet. "You taught all of us just fine."

It took Kakashi a moment to figure out what he was talking about.

"ANBU doesn't count." He protested, automatic. "Recruits aren't baby-faced genin, fresh out of the academy."

"It's a scale thing, though." Tenzo pointed out, frustratingly reasonable. "If you can do one, you can do the other."

"They're going to die." Kakashi groaned. "They're going to die and it's already all my fault."

He planted his face into the cushion.

"Leave me here to die, Kohai."

Tenzo only snorted. A rustling sound reached Kakashi's ears, the bags Tenzo had no doubt abandoned when he saw Kakashi on the floor.

"After how much I just spent at the fish market?" He asked, incredulous.

Kakashi cracked open an eye. His baby kohai had toughened up fairly quickly, developing the spine of steel and sharp tongue all jonin needed. It had taken considerably longer to get him to socialize, to relax—insomuch as any ANBU could—and play.

The martial skill was never in question.

Kakashi perked up.

"Saury?" He asked, rising from the futon.

Tenzo took in the disheveled hair and hunched shoulders.

"Of course, Senpai." And he didn't look away, even going so far as to quirk a smile. "It's not every day your pack grows by three."

Amazing that Tenzo, the only one to know him after he'd lost everyone, accepted the Hatake clan traits so completely. People who'd known him since birth grew frustrated and exasperated with his quirks, pushing and prodding him to do better, be different.

Not Tenzo.

Tenzo barged into his life and hung on with all his teeth, stubborn to a fault.

"Pack, huh?" Kakashi said to himself. He huffed. It felt like bone popping and snapping into place to reach that far back, a stretch that moved two decades of sleeping joints.

How had his father treated him as a cub?

It's like the word shook something loose; like lightning licked up his spine.

"They're not recruits." He tested out loud.

The noises of Tenzo in the kitchen filtered over.

"What's that?" Tenzo asked politely.

"They're not genin." Kakashi realized slowly, to himself. "They're cubs."

Fresh and new and vulnerable, but with teeth. And they'd grow.

Kakashi rose from the futon and padded to Tenzo, grabbing him by the shoulders. His Kohai dropped the pan he was working onto the stove.

"Tenzo." He shook him, wild eyed. "Tenzo, they're mine."

"Yes." Tenzo said slowly. "You've got to teach them."

"Tenzo." Kakashi said. "Tenzo. I've got to teach them everything."

He triggered a shunshin in his haste.

Tenzo looked around the suddenly empty kitchen. He checked the time. It was near midnight.

"You know," He addressed the dark apartment, "I don't know why I expected him to handle this like a normal human being."

It was a lie, though.

He learned a long time ago not to expect anything from Kakashi-senpai. It was why he'd come bearing only food and emotional support.

"I'm not going to let him do this alone." He told the fish. "He'll come back."

Food and support went a long way with Hatake, he'd found.

Didn't anyone else have working eyes?

--

Sweat licks down her shoulder blades, the tips of her hair drenched in it. Her armor had been destroyed, licked away, but at least the strange chakra had subsided. A bone-deep ache colors her entire reality, a tiredness that drags at her limbs, that screams of not-enough chakra or sleep or food.

She’s going to have to take armor off the dead, again.

At first her friends came at her, smiling with black corrupted eyes, but that had stopped when Zetsu’s heart had. Killing the creepy fucker had been some measure of ruthless satisfaction in this goddamn nightmare, a rush of triumph after so much continuous effort. Finally.

It does mean her pickings are slim, on the armor and weapon front. But luckily or not, she's made herself the most dangerous weapon alive, like her teachers before her, skill and wits and speed better than any mesh shirt.

Kaguya lunged from the edge of the world, faster than a lightning strike, crossing the distance from the horizon with claws outstretched. Sakura ducked under, economy of motion, trying to spare what energy she could. That long veil of white hair swept around, inhuman, unmussed—

Dirt covered Sakura’s face, her legs, sweat sticking her bangs to her cheeks. She was painfully human, painfully drained, absolutely furious. It took everything in her not to snarl, a picture of rage against the dull disinterest of Kaguya’s expression.

Sometimes Sakura painted annoyance on that porcelain face; sometimes, so sweetly, a grimace of pain or frustration. A flick of her attention upwards confirms their earlier clash had disrupted the clouds; there are none in sight, despite the heavy moisture in the air. There’ll be no rain to cover her tracks.

She’ll have to do enough damage that the goddess retreats on her own, no easy prospect. She has no other choice.

Sakura girds herself, gritting her teeth, and clenches one fist far behind her head, telegraphing. Even a goddess has learned to dodge the power behind her blows; Kaguya falters, just for a second, but it’s all Sakura needs. She switches to a double axehandle instead, clasping her hands together over her head for a brutal blow. It crashes against Kaguya’s too-late guard and the momentum sends her hurtling toward the ground.

Sakura wants to flee, to turn her back to the wind and survive to fight another day, but this is—

Different, somehow. She breathes, heavier than she’d like, and thinks this is it. Now or never. She needs to finish this now. Kaguya looks up at her, mismatched eyes zeroing in on her with a hawk’s precision, and Sakura grins reckless and bloody.

Come on, she mouths, holding herself wide open. She clenches one of her last kunai in a sweaty grasp, the grip biting into her flesh. She’s going to bury it behind ribs and rip Kaguya’s heart out of her flailing body, if it’s the last thing she does.

Kaguya gets off the ground, kimono infuriatingly spotless, and between one breath and the next she’s in Sakura’s guard, too fast and too strong, the glint of the kunai—Sakura swings, blind and wrathful, reaching out with her free hand to get a solid enough hold—

Sakura sits up with Konoha unfurling around her, one hand clenched in the sheets and the other wrapped around a kunai’s hilt. The blade threatens the pastel walls of her childhood room, ready to carve her way through an army.

She exhales shakily, but breathes in calm and easy. Her eyes gleam like spring in the dark.

--

ANBU scatter as Kakashi catches himself on the ledge of Sasuke’s windowsill. Kakashi barely notices them, as inured to their presence as any shinobi. Yet years of walking in those shadows mean he tracks masks and statures, absently filing them neatly away against a list of names he knows by heart.

Nothing stands out, of course, but you could never be too careful with blind, scrawny new-things. Kakashi has spent so long pretending to be something that he’s not; it feels now like stretching after a long, still guard shift. Muscles slide into place, burning a little from disuse, but it’s normal, natural. It feels good.

Easy.

Kakashi isn’t used to much being easy; ninjutsu, taijutsu, weapons. Killing.

But everything else about the job, his life?

Kakashi shook himself a little, staring at the boy in the massive bed. The furnishings were too adult for a second son, or even a clan heir. The furniture was big, tall, ornate. It didn’t surprise him that Sasuke slept in his parent’s bed.

He hadn’t—purposefully, hadn’t—given much thought to the last Uchiha sleeping in the empty compound with the ghosts of his dead, but now it aches in his breastbone. How many times has Sasuke cried out, alone and hurting, echoing off the dark houses for miles and miles?

It’s been nearly four years.

Four years on his own, wounded and cold, and what did it say about Kakashi that he found it intolerable? It wasn’t too long ago that Kakashi, himself, eschewed comfort and warmth, insisting on self-sufficiency, and that was normal-right-good, but this—

This.

In fairness, Kakashi still keeps himself held off from the world, from hugs and bonds and all the emotions that go along with it, but he at least lets himself be warmed by the light of the living. He’s not a kid anymore, as much as he’d denied being one, so it’s fine—

He’s grown.

His kids are not.

Kakashi catches a growl behind his teeth and eases Sasuke’s window open. The face on the pillow is unlined, soft and relaxed as it never is usually. If it were anyone else, the boy would wake—likely with a blade in hand—but Kakashi is no amateur. He also bears no ill-intent, which eases the way, even as he disables a few traps before they can go off.

--

Naruto is a surprise. Despite his reputation, there are no traps at all around his windows. Kakashi tries three in rapid succession, deeply suspicious. He can’t quite decide if it’s an exceedingly well-hidden trap, or if the lack of traps is both genuine and, in itself, a mindgame.

He doesn’t know Naruto well enough personally to guess—and oh, that hurts, of course—but he knew Minato and he knew Kushina and figures one way or another the kid’ll do what he least expects. Part of him despairs at the easy access to their village’s jinchuuriki, but it’s a false concern. If the ANBU around the Uchiha compound had been cursory, Kakashi is well aware there’s an entire rotation dedicated to Naruto’s wellbeing.

Unlike Sasuke, Naruto knows he’s not alone immediately. Also unlike Sasuke, he doesn’t tense up or even wake up fully. Naruto is well and truly used to being observed at all times, even with ANBU-level chakra masking.

“ANBU-san?” Naruto mutters, rubbing one eye, no doubt confused but not alarmed at why the masked shinobi has entered his tiny apartment.

--

It’s Sakura who’s the true surprise. He wouldn’t have expected it from her file, of course, but the last day has laid the foundation for him to almost tack on a ‘naturally,’ to the end of that sentence. None of the genin are what he had expected, more fool he, yet she’s the one who differs so completely from her paperwork.

Naruto had more depth and intelligence than anyone ever acknowledged; Sasuke had more problems that the village assumed, looking at him like they knew everything about his story and his situation; yet it was Sakura who caught him wrongfooted at every step.

Looking at her had been eerily like looking into a mirror, once or twice, which was entirely concerning even as it sent shivers up Kakashi’s spine.

She jerks awake, hypervigilant in a way he’d never expect out of his civilian-born charge. Her eyes cut through the darkness with tactical precision, taking in the shadows of the room in order of most likely to hide something.

She makes him, despite the fact that he’s not actually in her line of sight, and Kakashi immediately realizes she’s positioned the floor length mirror to give a back view of the open window from the bed.

Smart. Wary. Dangerous.

For a moment he’s very sure he’d have to block that kunai with one of his own, seeing it as vividly as a sharingan-afterimage. He recalls the unexpected violence he found in her during the bell test: tempered steel where he’d expected soft gold, blood in the place of milk, hard callouses instead of soft dainty hands.

And then her shoulders relax, lips turning up and pulling back from a genuine white smile, at home (and yet somehow oddly so) on a child’s face.

“Kakashi-sensei.” She says, voice thick with sleep despite the wide-awake eyes. He waits. No question follows.

She takes in his presence with ease. No screaming, no shrieking, no hiding herself under the covers—Naruto—or demanding to know what he was doing in her house—also Naruto—or mistrust defining the length of her spine as she coldly asked what the situation was—Sasuke, with his heart racing, the smell of adrenaline and nauseous-sick nerves permeating the room.

She notices the threat, identifies the threat, and decides he’s not a threat precisely that quickly and once more Kakashi cannot quite determine if he should be impressed or concerned. He settles somewhere in the middle, pushing the emotions out of the way—he doesn’t have to figure any of this out, just do what he came here to do.

It’s a mission.

As simple as that.

“Good morning, Sakura.” He smiles at her, expecting some comment on the earliness of the morning, but he doesn’t receive it. She favors him with an amused expression that encourages him to get to the point.

“Meet me at Training Ground Three in half an hour. It’s been reserved for Squad Seven’s use for… the foreseeable future.”

She nodded, already swinging her legs out of bed, and stripping efficiently out of her sleep clothes. Kakashi leaves as quietly as he’d arrived. The bell test aside, he has no expectations for these genin. He could—oh yes, he could, so easily fall into that trap—but they’re cubs.

New, stupid, naked, blind.

He could assume their competency and be impressed or disappointed. He could structure their entire pack around expectations they strive to meet, one goal after another, he could test them again and again to see how they faired, learning them and learning what they needed from him, what they didn’t need, and going from there.

He hadn’t planned to—he hadn’t planned anything at all, except to fail this batch like every other batch, and damn the expectations of his Kage and the War Council—but he can see how, in his insecurity, he might move forward with tests to determine the quality of these lowly genin entrusted unto him.

It would have been a mistake.

They’re cubs, he’d told Tenzo. They’re mine.

They’re cubs and they’re his and that means he doesn’t have to test them, at all. They don’t know anything. They’re fresh as fallen snow, newly born, and helpless.

It’s Kakashi’s to place steel in their hands and ensure they can use it; Kakashi’s to teach them to use the fire in their blood to warm the den; Kakashi’s to hone their instincts into fine hunters, fighters, killers.

And he expects nothing from them, save that he might have to undo where others have tried and failed to educate these struggling wolves in the matters of living life and taking it, because no one has ever taken the time and properly taught them how to survive, not really, and that’s the only lesson they need from him.

They haven’t been fed.

They need him.

Kakashi is not used to being needed. Not like this. As an extra blade, yes; as backup, as an ANBU captain, as a jonin, yes. As any other interchangeable shinobi from this village might be needed, as yet another number in the endless scrolls of paperwork that move a hidden village, yes, but not as these three need him—him, specifically—and no one else.

If Kakashi were prone to introspection, he would notice the way being needed in this way, needed utterly, somehow began soothing the ragged edges of a dark hole deep within him. Pack, something in him rasped, starving and isolated and mangy.

Wolves survive.

No grief was too deep to drown in when the pack needed you; no sorrow too great that time could not mend it, new births to replace old deaths, and on and on because food was needed, shelter was needed, the wolf was needed in his role and—

Kakashi might have signed his mother’s contract, might prefer a true death to losing the bonds he has with Pakkun, with Bisuke-- with Urushi, Shiba, Akino, Uhei, Guruku and Bull—but he’s not an Inuzuka, not a twinned soul with a satisfied hound easing out the rough human edges.

He’s a Hatake. A wolf is not a hound, nor even a ninken. There is a reason humans domesticated some of them, replaced the feral wildness with comradery and safe friendship.

Kakashi will always be wild where it counts; a little feral, a lot wolf. He’s folded himself down, in the years since he became the only one left, tried to fit something ancient and bloodthirsty into a human enough shape.

He’s twisted and folded and packed himself in, slapping books and smiles and masks over the bits of him that are too fast, too sharp, too wrong and inhuman, for years.

And now the village has given him a pack.

Worse, still: a pack of fragile, helpless new-things, when he was completely alone. He’s ill-prepared, impatient, and perhaps too old to be entrusted with something new and precious to love, let alone three of them.

He’s been on his own too long.

But Kakashi is not introspective. He thinks and he feels, on some level, but more consciously he moves, leaving the complicated things to his hindbrain, to ‘not-important, too-complicated’; and that, too, is Hatake down to the core.

He is instinct bundled in flesh and he takes to the trees like a predator, tracking the scent of not-prey-but-pack and finding the boys where they’re supposed to be, scratchy-eyed and sleepy. Sakura joins them not a minute later, well—well—within the time limit he’d given her.

She’s got a pack and he can see several sealing scrolls stashed away in various pouches; hidden knives in even more. Sasuke unfurls a scroll literally laden with standard ninja weapons, like Gai’s kid might own, and they dispense them between the three of them with military precision.

Naruto starts pulling bits of paper tags from his innumerous jumpsuit pockets, Sakura already leaning forward to help him while Sasuke watches, and Kakashi is hit—once again—viciously over the head with the dazzling fact that they’d run circles around him, for mere genin.

More importantly—more stunningly—they’d either worked out the teamwork trick or decided not to give a damn. Brats after his own, carefully buried heart. Not only had they ignored his every instruction, as near as he could tell—further necessitating this unorthodox form of training, because he had to earn their trust and allegiance, had to show them that his orders could save their lives, had to arm them to the teeth, the list was truly endless—they had also, somehow, taken the coup-de-grace—the true test, because other teams had ganged up on him before, much good it did them, but none passed the test-within-the-test, tied to the tree stumps, disobeying a direct order—and rendered it absolutely moot.

They’d come with their own lunches.

They’d fed him, entirely unprompted. Not only a squad that worked together, but one that somehow, inexplicably, included Kakashi like he was ten years old again and looking up at Minato’s outstretched hand.

Sasuke snorts hard at something one of them—even odds which one, strangely enough, though isn’t everything about this odd? Or at least highly improbable—said, Naruto is smiling, true and open, and the girl is as fierce as any kunoichi, already, a core of steel to her as she idly watches the edges of the training ground, an underlying tenseness to her muscles that says she’s prepared to end any threats to this team, no matter what corner they come from, even as she leans into the other two, nudges shoulders and offers advice as easily as a spare senbon.

He hadn’t mentioned—had intentionally failed to mention—that this training would be indefinite, days and weeks of survival training spent outside of their homes, yet they’d picked up his subtle cues anyway, looked—with skeptical distrust, which warmed him deeply—underneath the underneath and brought provisions, weapons, and medical supplies.

Sakura looked over at him, unerringly locating his position in the trees, quirking an eyebrow even as she shows the boys her open backpack, revealing the sheer amount of ration bars she’s forced into one compartment. Naruto says something about ramen, Sasuke says something disparaging-yet-slightly-fond about Naruto, and Sakura jabs him warningly in the ribs with her free hand, turning back to both of them.

Kakashi exhales, taking in the scene from on high.

He’s only had these three, officially, for eleven and a half hours.

They made a mistake, some part of him is distantly aware, but it’s growing further away by the second. Giving me something to care about, again. Giving someone, as old and broken as me, someone to love.

He loves his ninken. He loves Gai. He loves Tenzo, probably. He even loves the village, most of the time, but these are all tattered ties leftover from a different life, bonds he’s held onto raggedly as he’s died again and again, important pieces of his soul cut off and burned, held tight as he got back up—eventually—and survived, somehow, eventually opening himself up and letting in new love until it, too, tears away from him and begins the whole cycle again.

He’s a Hatake. He needs a pack. He’d given up on having one, at some point; waiting idly for the mission that would eventually kill him. He would never—could never—do it himself, not after his father, but he was tired. Ready, in so many ways, to be done with this life. That was why the council had been so insistent on this team, he knows, on some level. They’re desperate to have him pass on some of his legacy.

But looking at the three kids in front of him, arrayed in front of the memorial, in front of the trees, Kakashi knows they made a mistake.

He’s the last Hatake. He has a pack.

He’s only had this team for eleven and a half hours, but if anything happens to them—if they die, at his hand or as casualties on some faraway mission, blood on their small faces and the light leaving their young little eyes—Kakashi will kill every last shinobi in this world, and then himself.

Chapter Text

Kakashi was up to something.

It both was and wasn’t surprising. 

On some level, Kakashi was always up to something, because shenanigans kept him entertained and meandering through life. He thrived on chaos.

Like a big, deadly cat that couldn’t help but be fascinated by a string or mouse, unable to resist batting it around, Sakura found Kakashi was likewise unable to resist irritating, annoying, and generally aggravating his fellow shinobi, seemingly just for shits and giggles.

On the other hand, it was quite different to the first time around, when he’d virtually ignored them unless forced.

Their sensei was the epitome of “sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come.”

He’d show up to training four hours late and leave early, spending barely any time with them at all-- and of that begrudging little, he’d spend a few minutes giving them a short directive, usually one or two sentences at bes, and occupy the rest of their time ‘together’ reading off in the distance as they struggled to figure it out.

Their original ‘instruction’ in how to climb trees with chakra came to mind, as just one example.

D-ranks were even worse. It was hazy and long-ago, but Sakura distinctly remembered uncounted summer afternoons pulling weeds while Kakashi lounged on a roof somewhere, offered cool beverages by flustered civilians.

Teacher? Ha, no. Reluctant babysitter at best.

Then again, she’d landed in the past like an avalanche over a cliff-- less ‘casting ripples in the lake’ than ‘a meteoric, tsunami-generating impact with the lakebed ’.

After the bell test, it shouldn’t have surprised her that she’d-- they’d -- shaken up his paradigm, and yet. Kakashi had shown up to her house when the sky was still dark, night casting a calm stillness over the village.

She’d actually gone over the window sill and out into the inviting night before remembering she probably ought to leave a note for her parents, who hadn’t yet accustomed themselves to having a no-longer-civilian charge leaving for missions at odd hours, and doubling back to scrawl one out, left on her desk to reassure them, had taken extra time.

Sakura landed in the training grounds a full minute after Kakashi, swallowing a huff of irritation. Luckily, she’d packed for bear . A frugal little thing, her younger self had been saving her allowance for months to buy-- something or another.

... She had no idea what she’d been doing with her money before mission income and shinobi provisions had taken over her financial concerns.

Her ten-year-old self would have been horrified to know Sakura spent every ryo of it at the market after the bell test, treating Naruto to ramen, buying a pitiful starting arsenal of actually sharp weapons, and getting most of the bare minimum actual ‘supplies.’

She’d splurged on an expensive medical kit, which took nearly a third of her funds. A full fourth of her savings was dedicated to ration bars, and rudimentary spices for what they’d kill on the road.

Sasuke had been persuaded to arm them both with his excess stock of weapons, and had even brought Naruto a surpluss of fuinjutsu supplies when the blonde admitted he’d used all of his supply of seals and lamented the cost of buying more paper and ink.

In the calm stillness of the morning-- for certain definitions of ‘morning’; if it was any later than four, Sakura would eat her sandal-- Naruto passed them a few of his creations. With minimal discussion, they split supplies between them so that losing one pack wouldn’t result in losing all of a crucial supply, like the bandages or rations.

Kakashi was a silver-eyed hawk in the trees. Sakura rose an eyebrow in his general direction.

Apparently he felt like being helpful today, on top of being the early bird. Would wonders never cease?

“Good thought.” He eyed their bags. “Bit light on the field equipment, mm?”

Naruto glared at him.

“We don’t have the money to get completely outfitted right away. Get us some nice-paying missions and we’ll buy, what, bedrolls?”

“I’ve got my eyes on a cooking kit.” Sakura said. “We can make do with foraged spits for now, but if you can seal it up, a scroll can hold pots, pans, water containers, or more.”

“Why would we waste money on that?” Sasuke asked. “We should have better things to do on a mission than stop to cook.”

Sakura’s eyes flashed, but it was Naruto who answered. She took a deep breath and merely listened.

“Shit happens.” The blonde said. “If we’re stuck waiting for something, or rained out and stuck in a cave, or someone’s injured and we need to hole up somewhere for days-- then we’ll want to have enough water, for sure, but if we have to make food last then a good soup is more filling than roasted meat. If it’s even the right season for game.”

He scratched his nose.

“‘Course, ramen is the cheapest, most filling and high-calorie soup, but I imagine we’d run out of that first. Plus, it comes in a cup! So no pans needed.”

Kakashi watched him like a particularly interesting bug under a microscope.

“Huh.” Sasuke said. “Well, I’m not eating ramen for any extended period of time, and we’ve got a lot of ration bars. Shouldn’t come up. If it does, a simple camping kit would work.”

“The kits that come with civilian firestarters ? They're useless and full of random crap like that. Any of us can use katon to start a campfire.” Sakura pointed out. “That jutsu’s not even an e-rank. Naruto could do it when we were actually kids.”

“You weren’t there the first time I tried that jutsu.” Naruto muttered. “I eventually figured out you just need the barest brush of chakra, like-- a hair’s breadth. The smallest possible amount, like what you need to activate a seal. First time, though, I um...”

“Wait, I heard about that.” Kakashi said, wry smile beneath the mask. “Training Ground Thirteen is still barren and smoldering, as far as I know.”

“I’ll take care of any and all fires we need.” Sasuke said firmly.

“Hey!” Naruto shouted, but he couldn’t keep from snickering. “I’m fine with it now .”

“You can handle the fires unless you’ve got chakra exhaustion and or a bad case of being knocked unconscious.” Sakura said, amused, and then at Kakashi’s look, “What? That’s, like, the number one injury report for a shinobi returning from the field. Chakra exhaustion first, head injuries second, and I think third was hypovolemic shock from blood loss.”

Two types of shinobi ended up in the hospital with chakra exhaustion; normal shinobi who had small pools of chakra and used it all up with a handful of jutsu, and jonin like Kakashi who had massive amounts of chakra and used it all up with a handful of jutsu .

Kakashi blinked at her, and then started pulling scrolls off his body. Some from pockets she didn’t even know he had.

He unsealed a far more robust amount of medical supplies than she’d been able to afford-- Hatake ‘I’d rather bleed out on my apartment floor through my ANBU fatigues than go to the hospital’ Kakashi, everyone-- and walked them through how to use each piece, from the wound-clotting gauze to the tourniquets.

It was a rote review for Sakura, and a cursory review from the academy for the boys, but Kakashi was more thorough than their academy instructors had likely been.

He also had extras, and loaded them up with them.

“If I choke, don’t bother using that on me.” Naruto eyed the tracheotomy ‘straw’ with trepidation. “Just let me turn blue and die.”

Sakura couldn’t help a grin.

“If we trach you , you’d probably heal around the damn tube.” She poked him in the ribs. “It’d be a permanent attachment and you’d make noises through it for the rest of your life.”

Sasuke snorted badly.

“Like a harmonica.” He deadpanned, gesturing a foot away from his neck. “Or I guess technically a flute?”

Naruto made a noise of inarticulate rage, but before he could tackle Sasuke, Sakura pointedly handed him another bundle of bandages.

“Did you expect us to spend our first mission pay on chunin-grade field kits?” She asked Kakashi. To the boys: “It’ll have some standard survival equipment, bedrolls, canteens, that kind of thing.”

“Absolutely not.” Kakashi glared at her a bit. The boys shrunk back, and Sakura rose a brow. “I’d take you to the quartermaster, just to show you how it’s done, but I think Sasuke’s made an entire district’s worth of equipment available to you?”

Sasuke grunted in the affirmative.

“The standard issue is inadequate, anyway. I’ll get you some of my spare kits or buy new ones for you.” He rose a hand to forestall their outbursts. “Consider also: you won’t be getting paid for a while.”

“What? It can’t take that long for them to process a completed mission and pay us.” Naruto whined.

Sakura narrowed her eyes at their sensei, sensing a classic Kakashi ass-pull.

“It would be processed within the day for D-ranks.” Kakashi agreed jovially. He paused. “... If you were doing D-ranks.”

Sasuke’s eyes lit up with challenge.

“Or any mission.”

Confusion took the boys. Sakura chewed the inside of her cheek to stop whatever expression wanted to make a home on her face. She couldn’t repress the quirk of lips into a smile.

“You’re going to do something unexpected and unprecedented.” She accused.

He put a hand over his heart, lashes fluttering.

“Who, me? And how could you possibly know that?”

They all scoffed.

Kakashi dropped the innocent act and rolled his shoulders in a shrug.

“Fair enough. Yes, I’m afraid we’re leaving the ‘manual’ a bit behind us. Not that I’ve read it, really. You see, I’ve never had a team of genin students. I never thought I’d have one, either.”

“You failed like, a million teams before us, right?” Naruto asked, biting his lip. “What makes us so special?”

“Well, you passed, for one.” Kakashi said wryly. “Don’t ask--”

He paused. Reigned himself in.

“Ask all the stupid questions, actually. See, I never expected to have a team, but now that I do have one, I’m going to first make sure you un-learn all the bullshit other people have taught you.”

Even Sakura’s eyes widened.

Kakashi nodded seriously at their expressions.

“We’re going to start from scratch in all the basics. I know you can throw a punch. You know you can throw a punch. Knowing how to throw a punch is not good enough . We’re going to make sure all the foundational aspects of your education are not just solid, but perfect. ”

Sasuke in particular went through a quick cycle of outraged, indignant, insulted, considering, and finally landed on hungry .

“You don’t want us to be mediocre.” Sakura said out loud. She could picture it easily: correct the foundational stance, eliminate all mistakes, and build on it. Insist on learning each skill to its theoretical maximum of efficiency for expended effort, technical precision, and then develop fighting styles around it.

Sakura had perfect chakra control. She could put precisely the right amount of chakra into a jutsu as needed to activate it, wasting nothing in the process. Not a single drop.

Naruto in Sage Mode had once perfected the frog kata, a masterwork of redirection and movement, not a single iota of energy expended that didn’t have to be.

Sasuke had trained to be a precision striker, going for weak points with sword and with raiton, using speed and blind skill to catch his enemies off guard, fast and precise enough to already have them down before they even knew he was coming at them.

Kakashi’s fights were poetry in motion; he often appeared almost lazy in combat, dodging at only hair’s breadths, and somehow only using a half-measure more skill than his opponents. Against a genin, he used chunin skill. Against Zabuza of the Mist, he was ANBU level. 

And against the Akatsuki, he’d demonstrated why he was considered a once-in-a-generation legend, on the short list for Hokage.

Efficient. Measured. Practiced .

Sakura groaned, feeling like the tween she’d been the first time she had to start ‘learning’ under Kakashi. This time was going to be so much better, but so much worse .

He eye-smiled at them, then clapped his hands.

“You’ll have the opportunity to refresh supplies on occasion. Until then, get ready. We’re going to go from training ground to training ground, using the village itself as a practice field enviroment. We’ll stop for meals and rest as if we’re on an out-of-village mission.”

It was sometimes easy to remember the man’s best friend had the philosophy of ‘train until you literally drop. Then, train some more.’

-

They started with the basic academy taijutsu stances. Sakura had honestly worried about remembering it. Fortunately, there was something to be said for muscle memory, and these muscles remembered what they’d done last week with some alacrity.

Then again, she’d never really learned a proper taijutsu style. Tsunade had taught her more “find target, hit target” type punching than any formal Senju or slug-related taijutsu. She knew how to strike, and strike hard, and had picked up how to parry, dodge, and throw people much like Naruto had: by fighting, adapting on the fly, and through painful trial and error.

If you left an opening for Tsunade of the Sanin ? Well, you didn’t do it again. Once you woke up.

If you woke up.

She’d patched any holes in her defense quickly .

Under Kakashi's careful tutoring, they went through the academy style and Sakura's modified “personal style” before moving onto the boys. Even if they didn't have a “style”, they still had to demonstrate each strike they normally used in a fight-- which Naruto quickly found out and complained about.

Half of his complaints were for show. He was routinely taken by surprise and caught of guard by Kakashi's continued attention. 

(Had he ever had personalized instruction? Had he ever had positive interactions with a teacher? It made Sakura want to head back to the academy and put the fear of the gods into a number of instructors. They only thought they were afraid of Kurama and his brothers.) 

Sasuke, of course, had learned one of the Uchiha taijutsu styles, of which there were some dozen. She was surprised to learn there were so many, and that some were designed for Uchiha who hadn’t awoken the sharingan yet. Sasuke knew one of those; one designed for easy adaptation right into a sharingan-active style that had only minor adjustments.

He was not unused to a teacher's direct attention. However, it had been yea rs since they'd done more than stand in awe at his advanced skills in every discipline, heaping on indiscriminate praise. What Kakashi offered was not that. Instead, Sasuke bristled under the constant corrections, until the changes-- implemented instantly-- proved fruitful. Then, he was just as eager as Kakashi to go through every one of his moves, happily cutting away at imperfections, once he was actually and visibly improving.

Sasuke wanted above all else to get stronger, and Kakashi was making serious headway on the teaching point: “better yourself and you'll get better.” 

To Sasuke, who had long thought himself superior, the idea of self-criticism did not come easily, but under Kakashi's merciless eye, it did come. As the day progressed, he started noticing his own mistakes as he made them; by the end of it, he was not resisting any corrections, even from Naruto and Sakura, whose eyes had gradually picked up the trick of noticing errors. He didn't even protest when Kakashi pounced on the opportunity to have them learn to correct each other, and why would he? In the course of a single afternoon, Sasuke’s already professional taijutsu was polished, refined and perfected.

Naruto, of course, had more of a street-brawl type of ‘style’ that was disarmingly effective. The lack of formal style was its own strength, unpredictability in motion.

She wondered if Kushina had fought like that. What little she knew of Naruto’s mother suggested she’d been more of a hurricane in human form, so it was possible he’d inherited more than just a chained demon-god from her.

Kakashi treated their training like a mission. It was the damnedest thing. She’d rarely seen such unerring focus from him. Even on actual missions, he’d visibly barely wanted to be there, and found what distractions he could in the covers of his raunchy books.

Having his undivided focus was strange.

Not bad, however. For a moment, out of breath in this younger body and spread eagle between Sasuke and Naruto , relatively young and unbloodied, her eyes stung with it.

No, not bad.

Kakashi did not only correct their forms on an individual level. He also had them mock-spar against each other, doing things like critiquing the angle of foot placement to give them stronger stances, or lighter stances-- more fluid, more able to easily move into another position. The stances flowed together.

In high-level battles, like the war-- like Kaguya, after the war-- there was no time for thought. Every single fight was one of instinct. It was largely too late to change what you’d learned. If you spent four years dodging left when a fist flew at you, you’d dodge left in the fight, and your body wouldn’t even register the decision.

Therefore, the time a shinobi spent training was like programing all those responses, all those instincts, into their bodies. Beating the lessons into muscle and bone, until they were a well-honed killing machine.

The better you were at striking, dodging, kicking, throws-- the better you’d be when push violently chrysalized to shove .

This was training nobody went through; nobody, except, perhaps, Might Gai’s team. It was probably where Kakashi picked it up. Many shinobi worked on their weaknesses. No shinobi tore apart each step, each breath , of their technique, and put it back together under the watchful eye of a harsh teacher.

“I’ve... seen this before.” Sasuke said, haltingly, when they stopped for water and to stretch in a very specific way that Kakashi taught them. Even their stretching techniques were being remade, optimized for the best min/max effort reward ratio. The hesitation was enough to have both teammates giving him their undivided attention.

Even Kakashi cocked his head.

Sasuke swallowed.

“I... I’ve seen someone doing similar. He-- they-- practiced over and over, until they could throw shuriken and hit every target, even the ones in the blindspots. Hours and days on the same drill until it was literally perfect.”

Kakashi was quiet for a moment.

“Your brother was on one of my teams once, in ANBU.” Kakashi said, striking the hot coals of several tripwire-rigged furnaces. Sasuke tensed all the way up and snarled .

Naruto’s eyes went wide and guarded, a gauntlet of emotions crossing his face.

Sakura very carefully did not go still, keeping to her motions of refilling her water skin at the river and bringing it up to her mouth to drink, as if nothing were amiss.

Uchiha Itachi had been on one of Kakashi’s teams ?

Well, it explained the deadliness. Also, why wouldn’t the village place an operative, whose age numbered in the single-digits, on the team of someone who had first-hand experience with exactly that?

She kept her breathing normal as memories slid to the forefront of her focus, the river beneath them and trees nearby suddenly older, her legs and torso taller with age.

“Kohai ,” Kakashi’d say to Itachi, cheerfully-- as cheerful as any of them could be, at this point, with ashes in the air and willful spite keeping them going-- just as he spoke to. Well, Yamato-sensei.

Who had also been on an ANBU team with him.

And, come to think of it, who had the same ‘long-suffering but resigned to it’ look that Itachi wore under his layers of masked indifference, as the man sat next to his brother.

( That reconciliation was a long and bloody one. The relationship now moved forward mostly out of necessity, yet was still characterized by the jerky fits and starts of so much trauma for so long between them. Sasuke had told her and Naruto-- mostly Naruto-- the story in bitten-out moments of anger, and they’d pieced together most of it.

A betrayal. A secret deal in the dark. The word of a traitor. Obito’s hand in things, behind the scenes.)

Obito himself was much more candid about the crimes he’d committed as a prisoner of war; when he wasn’t trying to die for them. (Die for the atrocities, to attone them. Die for the shinobi gathered around the fire.)

Kakashi had been exasperated and exhausted by turn as he metaphorically grabbed the man by the scruff and kept him from any and all heroic last stands.

Of course, they’d all had one, in the end. The grand moment of sacrifice, of vengeance, of trying to take down an uncaring goddess with the last breath in their body.

Well, most of them. Sometimes she’d just kill them quietly, unexpectly, perfunctorily. Sometimes they weren’t fast enough, and had no time for a martyr’s goodbye.

Sasuke’s shocked expression, eyes widened, lashes wet-- a horrifically wet squelch-- Kaguya’s face, unchanged, uncaring, her hand knifed through the other side of his chest.

A ringing beat of silence, of horror, of her mind refusing to believe what her eyes were telling her, automatically cycling chakra to shatter the torturous vision, again and again when it didn't work .

And then.

Naruto had shattered the continent they were on. 

She’d only figured that out later. It had required picking up the pieces, the clues left behind. A landscape scorched of all life; the new coastline. 

His was not a heroic last stand, nor a sacrifice.

She’d woken with blood pooled around her, healed of most injuries by time but her jaw painfully broken, under a literal mountain of-- not so much ‘debris’ as ‘the remains of the landscape .’ 

The new ocean was nearby, cracking in from the coast. A new coast, as well. Some land was just gone . She couldn’t recognize what country they were meant to be in, all distinguishing features-- all landmarks -- just... devastated.

Her last glimpse of Naruto was a white-bone mask of rage that was hard to look at directly, a chakra with visible weight distorting the atmosphere, and a warbling, inhuman scream that had destroyed everything.

Though he’d been partners with Kurama, this was none of the carefully controlled sage-beast form. Naruto, who usually mixed four distinct energy sources into a perfectly balanced chakra with a terrifying ease, instead assumed some nightmare escalation of the form he’d used against Pain.

Nine tails, but no rational thought. A void of energy and rage, a body that burned air around it for meters in every direction, gravity itself torn asunder.

Some sage chakra had probably been mixed in as well, if he had any left, but he’d been well beyond the point of being capable to make any more. Only instinct remained. Instinct and rage.

She’d seen only seconds of the fight, Naruto doing more damage in his unleashed, screaming fury than any of them had managed at that point in time. Most of everyone had been alive.

Over half died when he lost it.

When she tried to intervene, to get him away, to get him back --

Sakura had been backhanded into and through a mountain. She’d woken up under it.

Naruto had died in pain, and he’d died screaming.

Kakashi was talking. Saying something. Sakura’s precise control of her body and her body’s reactions had not faltered, though inside the inner garden of her mind’s eye, a storm raged.

Her inner self fought against the waves, kicking and screaming as she remembered being-- 

--just-- 

--impotent with grief--

Cool water rushed against her tongue, another drink of the canteen. Sound filtered in; birdsong, from living birds, in trees that stood in an undevestated landscape. Naruto, alive beside her, looking thoughtful; Sasuke, sounding grumpy and adolescent as Kakashi calmly described the training routine of ANBU, which he’d apparently admitted more candidly to being a part of.

He lowered his sleeve, hiding the mark from view. Sakura hadn’t actually got a glimpse, which was fine. She’d literally seen every inch of the man naked, any curiosity there long since dead.

Kakashi deftly avoided the conversational bomb of just who they were talking about, instead focusing on the training aspect, and Sasuke gradually relaxed his stiff shoulders.

He started designing training plans for each of them, routines they could use to strengthen their foundations without overworking themselves.

He looked pointedly at the boys and Sakura's brow furrowed--

Ah, right. Naruto and Sasuke had done that thing where they didn’t talk to each other but worked themselves into actual exhaustion multiple nights a week at the academy.

She’d done similar, but to training posts in her backyard, which may or may not have had a picture of Ino’s face on them for a good six months. 

Kunoichi did not fall unconscious in public.

Though any number of other kunoichi would have woken her up, the resulting lecture wouldn’t have been pleasant .

Those were leasons they learned in the greenhouses next to the academy. Beautiful poisons, a language of flowers.

If someone puts their hand on you, cut it off .

Sexual crimes were rare in a ninja village. If the offender wasn’t killed outright, they’d wish they were. It was less vigilante justice and more ‘public service’, and even the Hokage had little choice but to say ‘good riddance.’

She wondered if Kakashi would refine and perfect those skills, the ones she’d rarely had cause to practice, and thought that perhaps he would.

He seemed to want to remake them utterly , re-forge them into the perfect versions of themselves. Or at least, a version of themselves with their current skills mastered perfectly.

And then?

Sakura could see the writing on the wall, the plan he was laying out one step at a time.

And then, he’d actually teach them, new skills and jutsu that he’d make sure they learned properly or not at all, up to and beyond the level of his exacting standards.

They moved from one training ground to another, from river to stream, learning different terrain and what dangers and bounty the forests had to offer them. They went through every lesson taught in the academy, burning silver eyes ready to spot any theoretical or practical hole or mistake. 

They learned the logical progression of skills like trail-marking to actual tracking. They learned to hide in the leaves.

And with Kakashi of ten thousand jutsu? Kakashi, kage candidate? Kakashi with more skills forgotten than she had ever learned, even through the crucible of her one-woman war? 

With a Kakashi who cared , and with Team 7 reborn, alive and new alongside her--

It was more than unbelievable. More than impossible. More than beautiful, more than anything she'd ever thought to imagine.

It was everything.

And it was just the beginning.