Chapter Text
She didn’t understand how she knew it – it was more intuition than anything. She didn’t need to be told that their fates were interwoven. It was something written in her soul. Something written in all of their souls.
She could feel it, when Kakashi took the kunai to his chest, when Sasuke faded from exhaustion, when Naruto stopped breathing. They had gone on ahead. She knew that. She didn’t need to be told. But she also knew they were waiting for her there, before they reached their next destination. They were bound together as they had been for so very long.
Their souls were ancient. It was a fact, even if she could only recall the memories from her life as Sakura. For she had been born of water and earth, just as Kakashi had been born of lightning and storm, Naruto of wind and sea salt, and Sasuke of fire and ash. Different, but always with one thing in common between them. They had all been shinobi that time around, a different breed to ordinary civilians.
So when she burnt, she vaguely knew what was coming. Her skin was crumbling and flaking, cracks forming up her torso from the plain ashen grey rod embedded in her stomach. She was dying, and her family was waiting for her. She was dying, and she was going to move on. Again.
A smile cracked at her bleeding lips even as they turned to ash, body collapsing inwards as the process sped up and she fell to pieces. She was free from her constraints then, once more, and she greeted the three other presences she soon found glued to her side.
There was barely a moment to revel in the silence and contentment though, and Sakura felt the tug on their tethered souls, pulling them forwards – away from that place of healing and rest. Away from the memories and consequences of all the actions of their last life.
But that strange, intangible bond between them and their last life didn’t snap for reasons unbeknownst to Sakura. It remained, as did their memories of their last life.
Even as the hammer struck down, and they were forged anew.